By Ron Unz
June 24, 2025
Ten days ago a sudden surprise Israeli attack inflicted a terrible, decapitating blow upon the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, successfully assassinating the country's top military commanders, its chief nuclear weapons negotiator, and nearly all of its most prominent nuclear scientists. Many of these victims were killed in their own homes together with their family members by explosive drones or missile strikes that sometimes destroyed entire apartment buildings, causing many collateral civilian deaths.
No such sudden massive wave of public assassinations against the top leadership of a major nation had ever previously happened, and the resulting war with its salvos of retaliatory Iranian missiles against Israel has now also brought America into the conflict.
Among other things, these events conclusively demonstrated the near-total control that Israel and its political partisans have achieved over the entire Western global media. Iran was in the midst of ongoing negotiations with the Trump Administration over its nuclear program, so Israel's sudden strike was obviously an unprovoked attack, totally violating all international laws. Similarly, the assassination of so many of Iran's military leaders and civilian scientists also broke every existing rule of international warfare. If any other country in the world had committed even a small fraction of these crimes, it would have been universally condemned in the strongest possible terms by every international body and subjected to the harshest international sanctions, quite possibility including coordinated military action to remove its regime and bring its political leadership to trial.
But since Israel's fervent supporters completely dominate the global media, they can easily transform black into white and up into down. Thus, the bizarre result of this illegal, unprovoked Israeli attack upon Iran was a wave of public statements strongly sympathetic to Israel made by European and American political leaders from President Donald Trump on down, thereby demonstrating that all these powerful, once independent nations had merely become subservient vassals to the Jewish State.
Last year, I noted that more than a half-century ago something similar had happened in the aftermath of the 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty:
I've often suggested that our media functions as a powerful tool of mind-control, not too dissimilar from what might be found in the plotlines of classic science fiction. After spending weeks or months immersed in such a controlling narrative, thinking independent thoughts let alone completely breaking free becomes a very difficult undertaking. For most individuals, the whisper in the back of their skulls overwhelms their logical reasoning, while their emotional reactions are turned on or off as if by a switch.
A perfect example of this came in the infamous U.S.S. Liberty incident of 1967. While peacefully sailing in international waters, our naval vessel was attacked by the Israelis, whose air and sea forces killed or wounded more than 200 American servicemen, and only by chance failed in their effort to sink the ship with no survivors. This constituted America's worst naval loss of life at enemy hands since the huge sea battles of World War II, and surely if any other nation in the world had been responsible, our swift and overwhelming military retaliation would have bombed its major cities to rubble and killed many thousands of its citizens, while perhaps also hunting down and executing all the enemy leaders who had ordered that unprovoked attack.
But instead our government completely covered up that incident at the time it occurred, and the only consequence was that the annual financial tribute we paid to the Jewish State steadily increased in size. Even when the facts finally came out a dozen years later, any outrage was confined to just a small sliver of our population, while the majority who heard the story vaguely assumed that since the media told them "nothing to see here" they should move on and pay no attention. Something that under normal circumstances might have been expected to provoke a major punitive war merely produced a few uncomfortable shrugs.
Given its large size and advanced weaponry, America stood as a physical colossus on the world stage of the 1960s, with no other country able to directly challenge our might. But we were still helpless before the nation that had attacked us because the small pro-Israel Jewish minority deployed its tools of media mind-control to transform us into powerless marionettes, jerked about by invisible strings.
Another important conclusion to be drawn from these recent developments is that the Jewish State has certainly now established itself as history's most prolific and skillful practitioner of assassinations as a technique of statecraft, having easily surpassed the notorious exploits of that small band of heretical Muslims who terrorized Middle Eastern leaders a thousand years ago and gave their name to that lethal tactic. Any introductory history books that describe the famed Order of Assassins as the foremost employers of that craft should therefore be revised.
Although political assassinations have hardly been uncommon throughout recorded history, during the last several centuries major Western nations had almost entirely abandoned such methods, rejecting them as immoral and illegal.
For example, historian David Irving revealed that when one of Adolf Hitler's aides suggested to him that an attempt be made to assassinate the Soviet military leadership during the bitter combat on the Eastern Front of World War II, the German Fuhrer immediately forbade any such practices as obvious violations of the laws of civilized warfare.
In a long January 2020 article, I described this traditional Western attitude, and then explained that over the last couple of decades the combination of our "War on Terror" and growing Neocon influence had dramatically changed that policy.
The 1914 terrorist assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly organized by fanatical elements of Serbian Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely denied its own complicity, and no major European power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of World War I, and although many millions died in the trenches over the next few years, it would have been completely unthinkable for one of the major belligerents to consider assassinating the leadership of another.
A century earlier, the Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I don't recall reading of any governmental assassination plots during that era, let alone in the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa disputed ownership of the wealthy province of Silesia by military means...
During our Revolutionary War, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and our other Founding Fathers fully recognized that if their effort failed, they would all be hanged as rebels by the British. However, I have never heard that they feared falling to an assassin's blade, nor that King George III ever considered using such an underhanded means of attack. During the first century and more of our nation's history, nearly all our presidents and other top political leaders traced their ancestry back to the British Isles, and political assassinations were exceptionally rare, with Abraham Lincoln's death being one of the very few that comes to mind.
At the height of the Cold War, our CIA did involve itself in various secret assassination plots against Cuba's Communist dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders considered hostile to US interests. But when these facts later came out in the 1970s, they evoked such enormous outrage from the public and the media, that three consecutive American presidents- Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan-all issued successive Executive Orders absolutely prohibiting assassinations by the CIA or any other agent of the US government.
Although some cynics might claim that these public declarations represented mere window-dressing, a March 2018 book review in the New York Times strongly suggests otherwise. Kenneth M. Pollack spent years as a CIA analyst and National Security Council staffer, then went on to publish a number of influential books on foreign policy and military strategy over the last two decades. He had originally joined the CIA in 1988, and opens his review by declaring:
One of the very first things I was taught when I joined the CIA was that we do not conduct assassinations. It was drilled into new recruits over and over again.
Yet Pollack notes with dismay that over the last quarter-century, these once solid prohibitions have been steadily eaten away, with the process rapidly accelerating after the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The laws on our books may not have changed, but
Today, it seems that all that is left of this policy is a euphemism.
We don't call them assassinations anymore. Now, they are "targeted killings," most often performed by drone strike, and they have become America's go-to weapon in the war on terror.
My article quoting Pollock primarily focused on the long history of Israeli Mossad operations, and although I drew my material from some seventeen different books, the centerpiece of my discussion was Ronen Bergman's magisterial 2018 volume on that subject. I would strongly recommend that work as the single best starting point for gaining an understanding of Israel's policy of assassinations and other lethal covert activity.
The book reviewed by Pollack was Rise and Kill First by New York Times reporter Ronen Bergman, a weighty study of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service, together with its sister agencies. The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to an enormous number of official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel's long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.
That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman's volume carried glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praised the book as "hands down" the best he had ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory...
The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn't be surprised if Israel's body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman's extremely long book.
As I emphasized last week, over the past seven years I have published a long list of articles presenting the overwhelming evidence pointing to Israel and its Mossad as playing the central role in both the assassinations of the Kennedys and the 9/11 terrorist attacks against our country. All my major factual claims in those articles have been carefully analyzed by Deep Research, the most powerful AI available, and they have been judged completely accurate. Those interested in the matter should read some of those articles and the corresponding AI fact-checking reports and decide for themselves:
- How Israel Killed the Kennedys
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • March 24, 2025 • 11,500 Words
- Fact-Checking "How Israel Killed the Kennedys"• 15,300 Words
- American Pravda
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 11, 2023 • 9,800 Words
- Fact-Checking "American Pravda • 21,700 Words
However, even if none of this accumulated evidence implicating Israel existed, I think that anyone carefully reading the Bergman book with an open mind would quickly come to a rather similar conclusion. Bergman's text provides not the slightest hint of any Mossad role in those infamous attacks against our own country and its national leadership, but he does describe some strikingly parallel incidents.
For example, 9/11 skeptics have sometimes argued that it would have been extremely difficult for any plotters to have placed the necessary explosives inside the WTC towers. But in my article I summarized Bergman's account of how Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon launched a huge wave of false-flag terrorist bombings in Lebanon during the early 1980s, culminating in what he intended would be the total destruction of a crowded sports stadium.
Under Israeli direction, large car bombs began exploding in the Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities, killing or injuring enormous numbers of civilians. A single attack in October inflicted nearly 400 casualties, and by December, there were eighteen bombings per month, with their effectiveness greatly enhanced by the use of innovative new Israeli drone technology. Official responsibility for all the attacks was claimed by a previously unknown Lebanese organization, but the intent was to provoke the PLO into military retaliation against Israel, thereby justifying Sharon's planned invasion of the neighboring country.Since the PLO stubbornly refused to take the bait, plans were put into motion for the huge bombing of an entire Beirut sports stadium using tons of explosives during a January 1st political ceremony, with the death and destruction expected to be "of unprecedented proportions, even in terms of Lebanon." But Sharon's political enemies learned of the plot and emphasized that many foreign diplomats including the Soviet ambassador were expected to be present and probably would be killed, so after a bitter debate, Prime Minister Begin ordered the attack aborted. A future Mossad chief mentions the major headaches they then faced in removing the large quantity of explosives that they had already planted within the structure.
If the Israelis could successfully plant tons of explosives in the sports stadium of a hostile Arab country, they could certainly have done the same in the WTC towers, which were owned and controlled by Larry Silverstein, a fervently committed Zionist, whom they could have easily manipulated into enabling that operation.
Although Bergman's book was extremely long and detailed, in reading it I quickly recognized that it was far from comprehensive, almost certainly excluding a great deal of important material probably known to the author. Indeed, at one point Bergman himself emphasized that his book was written under strict Israeli censorship, so that even if he knew the truth about certain important matters, he wouldn't have been able to publish it.
In that regard, I noticed that virtually all of the major Mossad operations that Bergman recounted were already familiar to me from the decades I had spent closely reading the New York Times every morning. I found it quite implausible that six years of exhaustive research and so many personal interviews would have uncovered so few additional incidents that had not already become known and been widely reported in the international media. Instead, it seemed far more likely that either the author or his Israeli censors chose to avoid reporting those important Mossad actions that had not already long since come to light.
Indeed, some notable omissions in Bergman's coverage were quite apparent to anyone who has even somewhat investigated the topic, and these began in the early chapters of his volume, which included coverage of the Zionist prehistory in Palestine prior to the establishment of the Jewish state.
Bergman would have severely damaged his credibility if he had failed to include the infamous 1940s Zionist assassinations of Britain's Lord Moyne or U.N. Peace Negotiator Count Folke Bernadotte. But he unaccountably failed to mention that in 1937 the more right-wing Zionist faction whose political heirs have dominated Israel for the last half-century assassinated Chaim Arlosoroff, the highest-ranking Zionist figure in Palestine. Moreover, he omitted a number of similar incidents, including those targeting top Western leaders. As I wrote last year:
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel's future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin's larger and more "moderate" Zionist faction did much the same.
The early Zionists seem to have had a record of political terrorism almost unmatched in history, and in 1974 Prime Minister Menachem Begin even boasted in a television interview that he had been the founding father of worldwide terrorism.
With Iran still recovering from the devastating surprise attack inflicted by Israel and now facing what might become an even greater American bombing offensive, many observers have been surprised that neither Russia nor China have publicly offered any military assistance to that beleaguered country. The blogger Simplicius highlighted the likely reasons behind this reluctance, and I found these quite surprising.
According to Russian President Vladimir Putin, earlier this year his country had wanted to conclude a defensive military partnership with Iran much like the agreements with North Korea or Belarus, but Iran's government had rejected that proposal, instead preferring to remain self-reliant and fully independent of Moscow's influence.
PUTIN EXPLAINS SITUATION WITH IRAN:- Iran agreement does not have a defense clause
- Iran does not ask Russia for help
- Iran did not want to cooperate with Russia on air defense previouslyIran fights the fight alone, they're proud and want to be self reliant.
So according to Putin, it was Iran that deliberately scaled back the scope of the proposed agreement by refusing to include a full mutual defense clause. As reported by TASS in January, Iran's ambassador to Moscow Kazem Jalali stated that:
Iran "is not interested in joining any defence blocs" and prefers to maintain its independence and self-reliance.As a result, this pact does not mirror the mutual defense provisions found in Russia's agreements with Belarus or North Korea. "The nature of this agreement is different. They (Belarus and North Korea) established partnership relations (with Moscow) in a number of areas that we did not particularly touch upon. Our country's independence and security, as well as self-reliance, are extremely important. We are not interested in joining any bloc."
Similarly, Chinese columnist Bin Hua noted that Iran had recently tilted towards India and away from China.
These apparent shifts in Iranian foreign policy may have now proven disastrous for the country and seem likely to have been propelled by a crucial change at the top of Iran's government.
Following his 2021 election, hardline Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had enjoyed close relations with Russia and China, but in May 2024 he had died in a highly-suspicious helicopter crash along with his foreign minister, and given subsequent events, it now seems quite likely that Mossad had been responsible. Raisi's successor Masoud Pezeshkian was a far more moderate political figure eager to restore good relations with America and the rest of the West and he deliberately avoided drawing closer to Russia or China lest such steps alienate Western leaders.
Thus, it seems quite possible that a Mossad assassination had successfully diverted Iranian foreign policy in a direction that ultimately had dire strategic consequences for the country.
Although both Russia and China have been reluctant to publicly offer military support to Iran during its current conflict with Israel, many have been surprised that Pakistan has done exactly that. This support came despite the simmering hostility between those neighboring countries, hostility that had erupted last year into border exchanges of missiles and drones. Moreover, the two countries represent the rival Sunni and Shia branches of Islam, frequently at odds.
The obvious reason for Pakistan's surprising stance is that leading Israelis have argued that after destroying Iran, their next project might be the similar elimination of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
It might seem outlandish for the Pakistanis to be concerned about such Israeli threats. Pakistan is a huge country of 250 million possessing a powerful military, and it is located some 2,000 miles distant from the borders of the small Jewish State. But the Pakistanis are well aware that in the late 1980s the Israelis had probably assassinated Pakistan's entire government in hopes of derailing its nuclear weapons development program, an attack that also accidently claimed the lives of the U.S. ambassador and an accompanying American general.
I suspect that this important historical event is completely unknown to even one educated American in one hundred, but the details—and the frantic ensuing cover-up by the American government and media—are well worth reviewing at length. The facts clearly demonstrate that as far back as the 1980s, the Israel Lobby had already amassed awesome power within the American government. I discussed this story in that same long January 2020 article.
In 1991 renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published The Samson Option, describing Israel's secret nuclear weapons development program of the early 1960s, which was regarded as an absolute national priority by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. There are widespread claims that it was the threatened use of that arsenal that later blackmailed the Nixon Administration into its all-out effort to rescue Israel from the brink of military defeat during the 1973 war, a decision that provoked the Arab Oil Embargo and led to many years of economic hardship for the West.The Islamic world quickly recognized the strategic imbalance produced by their lack of nuclear deterrent capability, and various efforts were made to redress that balance, which Tel Aviv did its utmost to frustrate. Bergman covers in great detail the widespread campaigns of espionage, sabotage, and assassination by which the Israelis successfully forestalled the Iraqi nuclear program of Saddam Hussein, finally culminating in the long-distance 1981 air raid that destroyed his Osirik reactor complex. The author also covers the destruction of a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 and Mossad's assassination campaign that claimed the lives of several leading Iranian physicists a few years later. But all these events were reported at the time in our major newspapers, so no new ground is being broken. Meanwhile, an important story not widely known is entirely missing.
About seven months ago, my morning New York Times carried a glowing 1,500 word tribute to former U.S. ambassador John Gunther Dean, dead at age 93, giving that eminent diplomat the sort of lengthy obituary usually reserved these days for a rap-star slain in a gun-battle with his drug-dealer. Dean's father had been a leader of his local Jewish community in Germany, and after the family left for America on the eve of World War II, Dean became a naturalized citizen in 1944. He went on to have a very distinguished diplomatic career, notably serving during the Fall of Cambodia, and under normal circumstances, the piece would have meant no more to me than it did to nearly all its other readers. But I had spent much of the first decade of the 2000s digitizing the complete archives of hundreds of our leading periodicals, and every now and then a particularly intriguing title led me to read the article in question. Such was the case with "Who Killed Zia?" which appeared in 2005.
Throughout the 1980s, Pakistan had been the lynchpin of America's opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, with its military dictator Zia ul-Haq being one of our most important regional allies. Then in 1988, he and most of his top leadership died in a mysterious plane crash, which also claimed the lives of the U.S. ambassador and an American general.
Although the deaths might have been accidental, Zia's wide assortment of bitter enemies led most observers to assume foul play, and there was some evidence that a nerve gas agent, possibly released from a crate of mangos, had been used to incapacitate the crew and thereby cause the crash.
At the time, Dean had reached the pinnacle of his career, serving as our ambassador in neighboring India, while the U.S. ambassador killed in the crash, Arnold Raphel, had been his closest personal friend, also Jewish. By 2005, Dean was elderly and long-retired, and he finally decided to break his seventeen years of silence and reveal the strange circumstances surrounding the event, saying that he was convinced that the Israeli Mossad had been responsible.
A few years before his death, Zia had boldly declared that the production of an "Islamic atomic bomb" was a top Pakistani priority. Although his primary motive was the need to balance India's small nuclear arsenal, he promised to share such powerful weapons with other Muslim countries, including those in the Middle East. Dean describes the tremendous alarm Israel expressed at this possibility, and how pro-Israel members of Congress began a fierce lobbying campaign to stop Zia's efforts. According to journalist Eric Margolis, a leading expert on South Asia, Israel repeatedly tried to enlist India in launching a joint all-out attack against Pakistan's nuclear facilities, but after carefully considering the possibility, the Indian government declined.
This left Israel in a quandary. Zia was a proud and powerful military dictator and his very close ties with the U.S. greatly strengthened his diplomatic leverage. Moreover, Pakistan was 2,000 miles from Israel and possessed a strong military, so that any sort of long-distance bombing raid similar to the one used against the Iraqi nuclear program was impossible. That left assassination as the remaining option.
Given Dean's awareness of the diplomatic atmosphere prior to Zia's death, he immediately suspected an Israeli hand, and his past personal experiences supported that possibility. Eight years earlier, while posted in Lebanon, the Israelis had sought to enlist his personal support in their local projects, drawing upon his sympathy as a fellow Jew. But when he rejected those overtures and declared that his primary loyalty was to America, an attempt was made to assassinate him, with the munitions used being eventually traced back to Israel.
Although Dean was tempted to immediately disclose his strong suspicions regarding the annihilation of the Pakistani government to the international media, he decided instead to pursue proper diplomatic channels, and immediately departed for Washington to share his views with his State Department superiors and other top Administration officials. But upon reaching DC, he was quickly declared mentally incompetent, prevented from returning to his India posting, and soon forced to resign. His four decade long career in government service ended summarily at that point. Meanwhile, the US government refused to assist Pakistan's efforts to properly investigate the fatal crash and instead tried to convince a skeptical world that Pakistan's entire top leadership had died because of a simple mechanical failure in their American aircraft.
This remarkable account would surely seem like the plot of an implausible Hollywood movie, but the sources were extremely reputable. The author of the 5,000 word article was Barbara Crossette, the former New York Times bureau chief for South Asia, who had held that post at the time of Zia's death, while the piece appeared in World Policy Journal, the prestigious quarterly of The New School in New York City. The publisher was academic Stephen Schlesinger, son of famed historian Arthur J. Schlesinger, Jr.
One might naturally expect that such explosive charges from so solid a source would provoke considerable press attention, but Margolis noted that the story was instead totally ignored and boycotted by the entire North American media. Schlesinger had spent a decade at the helm of his periodical, but a couple of issues later his name had vanished from the masthead and his employment at the New School had come to an end. The article is no longer available on the World Policy Journal website, but the text can still be accessed via Archive.org, allowing those so interested to read it and decide for themselves.
The complete historical blackout of that incident has continued down to the present day. Dean's detailed Times obituary portrayed his long and distinguished career in highly flattering terms, yet failed to devote even a single sentence to the bizarre circumstances under which it ended.
At the time I originally read that article a dozen or so years ago, I had mixed feelings about the likelihood of Dean's provocative hypothesis. Top national leaders in South Asia do die by assassination rather regularly, but the means employed are almost always quite crude, usually involving one or more gunmen firing at close range or perhaps a suicide-bomber. By contrast, the highly sophisticated methods apparently used to eliminate the Pakistani government seemed to suggest a very different sort of state actor. Bergman's book catalogs the enormous number and variety of Mossad's assassination technologies.
Given the important nature of Dean's accusations and the highly reputable venue in which they had appeared, Bergman must certainly have been aware of the story, so I wondered what arguments his Mossad sources might provide to rebut or debunk them. Instead, I discovered that the incident appears nowhere in Bergman's exhaustive volume, perhaps reflecting the author's reluctance to assist in deceiving his readers.
I also noticed that Bergman made absolutely no mention of the earlier assassination attempt against Dean when he was serving as our ambassador in Lebanon, even though the serial numbers of the anti-tank rockets fired at his armored limousine were traced to a batch sold to Israel. However, sharp-eyed journalist Philip Weiss did notice that the shadowy organization which officially claimed credit for the attack was revealed by Bergman to have been a Israel-created front group used for numerous car-bombings and other terrorist attacks. This seems to confirm Israel's responsibility in the assassination plot.
Let us assume that this analysis is correct and that there is a good likelihood that Mossad was indeed behind Zia's death. The broader implications are considerable.
Pakistan was one of the world's largest countries in 1988, having a population that was already over 100 million and growing rapidly, while also possessing a powerful military. One of America's main Cold War projects had been to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, and Pakistan had played the central role in that effort, ranking its leadership as one of our most important global allies. The sudden assassination of President Zia and most of his pro-American government, along with our own ambassador, thus represented a huge potential blow to U.S. interests. Yet when one of our top diplomats reported Mossad as the likely culprit, the whistleblower was immediately purged and a major cover-up begun, with no whisper of the story ever reaching our media or our citizenry, even after he repeated the charges years later in a prestigious publication. Bergman's comprehensive book contains no hint of the story, and none of the knowledgeable reviewers seem to have noted this lapse.
If an event of such magnitude could be totally ignored by our entire media and omitted from Bergman's book, many other important incidents may also have escaped notice.
My conclusion regarding the omissions in Bergman's work was further reinforced when I checked his volume for its discussion of the previous books that had provided our greatest insight into the inner workings of Mossad.
Thirty years ago, a disaffected Mossad officer named Victor Ostrovsky left that organization and wrote By Way of Deception, a highly critical book recounting numerous alleged operations known to him, especially those contrary to American and Western interests. The Israeli government and its pro-Israel advocates launched an unprecedented legal campaign to block publication, but this produced a major backlash and media uproar, with the heavy publicity landing the book as #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. I finally got around to reading his book about a decade ago and was shocked by many of the remarkable claims, while being reliably informed that CIA personnel had judged his material as probably accurate when they reviewed it.Although much of Ostrovsky's information was impossible to independently confirm, for more than a quarter-century his international bestseller and its 1994 sequel The Other Side of Deception have heavily shaped our understanding of Mossad and its activities, so I naturally expected to see a detailed discussion, whether supportive or critical, in Bergman's exhaustive parallel work. Instead, there was only a single reference to Ostrovsky buried in a footnote on p. 684. We are told of Mossad's utter horror at the numerous deep secrets that Ostrovsky was preparing to reveal, which led its top leadership to formulate a plan to assassinate him. Ostrovsky only survived because Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who had formerly spent decades as the Mossad assassination chief, vetoed the proposal on the grounds that "We don't kill Jews." Although this reference is brief and almost hidden, I regard it as providing considerable support for Ostrovsky's general credibility.
My January 2020 article devoted well over 5,000 words to discussing the remarkable claims made in Ostrovsky's two books, and I can only briefly summarize a few of them here.
One of the most notorious assassinations on American soil occurred in 1976, when a car-bomb explosion in the heart of Washington D.C. took the lives of exiled former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his young American assistant. The Chilean secret service were soon found responsible, and a major international scandal erupted, especially since the Chileans had already begun liquidating numerous other perceived opponents throughout Latin America. Ostrovsky explains how Mossad had trained the Chileans in such assassination techniques as part of a complex arms sale agreement, but Bergman makes no mention of this history.
Ostrovsky also claimed that Mossad was regularly roiled by bitter internal power struggles, often between more moderate and harder-line elements. Given the favored methods of that organization, these conflicts sometimes resulted in numerous assassinations, even targeting Mossad's own agents or other senior Israeli officials.
Apparently, the director of Mossad had traditionally been an outsider appointed by the prime minister, and that policy had long rankled many of its senior figures, who preferred to see one of their own put in charge. In 1982, their furious lobbying for such an internal promotion had once again been ignored, and instead a celebrated Israeli general had been named, who soon made plans to clean house in support of different policies. But instead of accepting this situation, some disgruntled Mossad elements arranged his assassination in Lebanon just before he was scheduled to officially take office...And Wikipedia does indeed confirm that Gen. Yekutiel Adam, Israel's Deputy Chief of Staff, was named Mossad Director in mid-1982 but then killed in Lebanon just a couple of weeks before he was scheduled to take office, thereby becoming the highest-ranking Israeli ever to die on the battlefield...Early in 1982, some of the more moderate Mossad elements backed by the outgoing director had tasked one of their officers in Paris to open diplomatic channels with the Palestinians, and he did so via an American attache whom he enlisted in the effort. But when the harder-line faction discovered this plan, they frustrated the project by assassinating both the Mossad agent and his unlucky American collaborator, while throwing the blame upon some extremist Palestinian group. I obviously can't verify the truth of this remarkable story, but the New York Times archive does confirm Ostrovsky's account of the mysterious 1982 killings of Yakov Barsimantov and Charles Robert Ray, puzzling incidents that left experts searching for a motive.
Ostrovsky allocated some 4,000 words in his second book to the remarkable story of Mossad's elimination of Uwe Barschel, a prominent German elected official and close personal friend of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, someone who might have eventually risen very high in the German political system. Instead, when the Israelis found him uncooperative, they fabricated a scandal to remove him from office and after he later raised a fuss and attempted to clear his name, killed him, disguising his death as suicide.
When I originally read Ostrovsky's account, I was deeply skeptical of this story, doubting that the Israelis would have assassinated such a high-ranking and well-connected German elected official. But after I later revisited this incident, I discovered that seven months after the book appeared, the Washington Post reported that the Barschel case had been reopened, with German, Spanish, and Swiss police investigations finding strong indications of a murder committed exactly along the lines previously suggested by Ostrovsky. Once again, the surprising claims of the Mossad defector had apparently checked out, and I now became much more willing to believe that at least most of his subsequent revelations were probably correct.
The most dramatic of these came in late 1991 and filled one of Ostrovsky's last short chapters.
In the aftermath of America's great military victory over Iraq in the Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush decided to invest some of his considerable political capital in finally forcing peace in the Middle East between Arabs and Israelis. Right-wing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was bitterly opposed to any of the proposed concessions, so Bush began placing financial pressure upon the Jewish state, blocking loan guarantees despite the efforts of America's powerful Israel Lobby. Within certain circles, he was soon vilified as a diabolical enemy of the Jews.
As a result, Mossad planned to assassinate our president, but dissenting elements leaked the plot to Ostrovsky, hoping that he would somehow manage to alert the Bush Administration to the looming threat. He successfully did so via former Congressman Pete McCloskey, an old friend of the president, who flew to Ottawa to meet with Ostrovsky, and having been convinced of the latter's credibility used his DC connections to approach the Secret Service, persuading them to contact the Mossad defector. The story was soon leaked to the media, generating extensive coverage by influential columnist Jack Anderson and others, and the resulting publicity caused the assassination plot to be abandoned.
Once again I was quite skeptical after reading this account, so I decided to contact a few people I knew, and they informed me that the Bush Administration had indeed taken Ostrovsky's warnings about the alleged Mossad assassination plot very seriously at the time, thus seemingly confirming much of the author's story.
President Bush obviously escaped death at Mossad's hands, but over the years various other prominent American figures within our national security community may have been much less fortunate, both before and after the creation of Israel.
My long article devoted a couple of thousand words to the extremely suspicious death of James Forrestal, America's first Secretary of Defense and the leading political opponent of the establishment of the State of Israel. All our standard history books spend a sentence or two on the story of how Forrestal had suddenly become delusional, was confined for observation, and had then abruptly taken his own life just before he was scheduled to be released. But the important investigative research of David Martin came to entirely different conclusions as I explained in that same January 2020 article:
Suffering political defeat regarding Middle East policy and facing ceaseless media attacks, Forrestal resigned his Cabinet post under pressure. Almost immediately afterwards, he was checked into the Bethesda Naval Hospital for observation, supposedly suffering from severe fatigue and exhaustion, and he remained there for seven weeks, with his access to visitors sharply restricted. He was finally scheduled to be released on May 22, 1949, but just hours before his brother Henry came to pick him up, his body was found below the window of his 18th floor room, with a knotted cord wound tightly around his neck. Based upon an official press release, the newspapers all reported his unfortunate suicide, suggesting that he had first tried to hang himself, but failing that approach, had leapt out his window instead. A half page of copied Greek verse was found in his room, and in the heydey of Freudian psychoanalyical thinking, this was regarded as the subconscious trigger for his sudden death impulse, being treated as almost the equivalent of an actual suicide note. My own history textbooks simplified this complex story to merely say "suicide," which is what I read and never questioned.Martin raises numerous very serious doubts with this official verdict. Among other things, published interviews with Forrestal's surviving brother and friends reveal that none of them believed Forrestal had taken his own life, and that they had all been prevented from seeing him until near the very end of his entire period of confinement. Indeed, the brother recounted that just the day before, Forrestal had been in fine spirits, saying that upon his release, he planned to use some of his very considerable personal wealth to buy a newspaper and begin revealing to the American people many of the suppressed facts concerning America's entry into World War II, of which he had direct knowledge, supplemented by the extremely extensive personal diary that he had kept for many years. Upon Forrestal's confinement, that diary, running thousands of pages, had been seized by the government, and after his death was apparently published only in heavily edited and expurgated form, though it nonetheless still became a historical sensation.
The government documents unearthed by Martin raise additional doubts about the story presented in all the standard history books. Forrestal's medical files seem to lack any official autopsy report, there is visible evidence of broken glass in his room, suggesting a violent struggle, and most remarkably, the page of copied Greek verse—always cited as the main indication of Forrestal's final suicidal intent—was actually not written in Forrestal's own hand.
Forrestal was a wealthy and pugnacious Irish Catholic, and I think there is strong evidence that his death was the result of factors quite similar to those that probably claimed the life of an even more prominent Irish Catholic in Dallas 14 years later.
More than thirty years ago, renowned conspiracy-researcher Michael Collins Piper published his seminal work implicating the Israeli Mossad in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but over half the 650 pages of a later edition of his book were given over to a long series of appendices dealing with somewhat related topics. I noted that one of these discussed the strange deaths of a couple of former high-ranking CIA officials, suggesting they might have involved foul play.
Former CIA Director William Colby had apparently long been regarded as highly skeptical of the nature of America's relationship with Israel, and therefore was characterized by pro-Israel members of the media as a notorious "Arabist." Indeed, while serving as director in 1974, he had finally ended the career of longtime CIA counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, whose extreme affinity with Israel and its Mossad had sometimes raised serious doubts about his true loyalties. Piper says that by 1996 Colby had grown sufficiently concerned about Israel's infiltration and manipulation of the US government and its intelligence community that he arranged a meeting with high-level Arab officials in DC, suggesting that they all work together to counter this disturbing situation. A few weeks later, Colby disappeared and his drowned body was eventually found, with the official verdict being that he supposedly perished near his home in a canoeing accident, although his former Arab interlocutors alleged foul play.
Piper goes on to also describe the earlier death of John Paisley, the former longtime deputy director of the CIA's Office of Strategic Research, and another strong critic of the influence of Israel and its close Neocon allies in American national security policy. In late 1978, Paisley's body was found floating in the Chesapeake Bay with a bullet in the head, and although the death was officially ruled a suicide, Piper claims that few believed the story. According to him, Richard Clement, who had headed the Interagency Committee on Counterterrorism during the Reagan Administration, explained in 1996:
The Israelis had no compunction about "terminating" key American intelligence officials who threatened to blow the whistle on them. Those of us familiar with the case of Paisley know that he was killed by Mossad. But no one, not even in Congress, wants to stand up and say so publicly.
Piper notes the bitter political battles that other Washington national security experts, such as former CIA Deputy Director Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, had experienced over the years with elements of the Israel Lobby in Congress and the media. After Inman was nominated by President Clinton to lead the Defense Department, a firestorm of criticism by pro-Israel partisans forced his withdrawal.
Although Piper suggested that both Colby and Paisley were killed by Mossad, there is no solid evidence that either case actually involved murder, and even if that had happened, numerous other motives and culprits might have been responsible. But based upon Piper's high credibility, his theories should at least be given some consideration.
For those interested in a far more complete and exhaustive discussion of all this material, I would recommend my very lengthy article from January 2020:
- American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words
Political assassinations and terrorist attacks are closely connected operations, and they sometimes blend into each other, as may be seen in the case of the thousands of Lebanese killed or maimed last year by Mossad's booby-trapped pagers. Just after Israel's successful September 2024 decapitation of Hezbollah, I published an article summarizing the unmatched record of Zionist and Israeli forces in that regard, also highlighting another book that usefully supplemented the material in Bergman's magisterial volume.
A few days later, Israeli warplanes extended their operations by bombarding an area of south Beirut with some 80 bombs, many of them huge bunker-busters, in a successful attempt to kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. This attack on Lebanon's capital totally destroyed an entire city block containing numerous large residential towers, producing images of utter devastation that Max Blumenthal noted closely resembled the ruins of the World Trade Center towers after 9/11. As far as I know, in recent decades no country other than Israel has ever employed or even contemplated the use of such extremely heavy ordnance against a densely-populated urban center, and I assume that the civilian death-toll will prove to have been enormous.Although massive aerial bombardment of undefended cities in neighboring countries is not usually considered terrorism, it certainly constitutes an enormous war-crime, and killing such large numbers of civilians obviously serves to terrorize the entire surviving population. No other developed country in today's world seems to demonstrate Israel's total disregard for civilian human life, leveling an entire city block with bunker-buster bombs in hopes of assassinating a single enemy target.
Control of the media can easily transform black into white and up into down. The evidence that Hezbollah has had any substantial history of international terrorism seems very thin. But in sharp contrast, the state that recently launched that massive terrorist attack targeting Lebanese civilians associated with Hezbollah and transformed an entire city block of Beirut into 9/11-style ruins falls into a very different category. Israel and its Zionist predecessor organizations have a totally unrivaled record of assassinations and international terrorism, often undertaken as false-flag operations...
One of history's largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq's thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew.
The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.
I'd already mentioned Prime Minister Menachem Begin's casual boast in a 1974 television interview of his formative role in modern terrorism.
Years ago, when I'd first come across that boastful claim by the Israeli prime minister that he had been the "founding father" of world terrorism, I'd regarded it as probably exaggerated. But after carefully reading State of Terror, published in 2016 by Thomas Suarez, I decided that he may have had a reasonable point.
Suarez's book focused on the activities of Zionist groups in Palestine during the years leading up to the 1948 creation of the State of Israel while also providing some coverage of the period that followed. Much of the author's material was based upon declassified British government documents as well as the major newspapers of that era, and the sheer number and variety of Zionist terrorist attacks presented was absolutely enormous, almost staggering. For decades, our pro-Israel media has eagerly highlighted every incident of Palestinian terrorism, leading me to wonder whether the Zionists committed more such terror attacks in one year than the Palestinians did in the next fifty years that followed.
Besides pioneering the use of car-bombs, Zionist militants also did the same with deadly letter-bombs, which they ruthlessly laced with cyanide, employing these in their attempts to assassinate a very long list of their perceived enemies. Those targets included all of Britain's senior political leaders and America's president, although those latter efforts proved unsuccessful. The Zionists repeatedly sought to contaminate water supplies with deadly toxins or dangerous diseases, and their operatives traveled to Britain and other parts of Europe in order to launch major terrorist bombing campaigns in those countries.
Certain British policies provoked intense hostility. Zionists unsuccessfully demanded strict separation of postwar Jewish survivors so that they could more easily be funneled into Palestine. But in his correspondence with President Truman, Churchill argued that since the Nazi concentration camps had always treated Jews and Gentiles in very similar fashion, such segregation of the newly freed inmates was morally wrong.
Some of the stories that Suarez recounts were quite striking. In late 1946, a fiery Zionist rabbi from America denounced Britain's "concentration camps" for Jews as being "even worse" than those of Nazi Germany, and he accused the British government of the ongoing "torture, suffering and murder of 6,000,000 Jewish men, women and children." He organized a campaign of revenge the following year, preparing an aerial attack against London with high-explosive bombs, but was arrested just before his plane could take off.
A couple of years ago I'd read Memoirs of an Assassin, a short but dramatic 1959 account of the alleged activities of one such Zionist militant of that era, but I hadn't been too sure how seriously I should take its numerous detailed claims. Among his other exploits, the author described how he'd successfully managed to smuggle a large quantity of explosives into Britain's House of Commons and then only narrowly failed in his attempt to kill the entire British government. However, after digesting the massive documentation unearthed by Suarez, I now think that those stories seem much more likely to have been true.
Although Begin's more right-wing Zionist faction was usually blamed for such terrorist operations, Suarez makes a strong case that the mainstream Zionist movement of David Ben-Gurion was equally involved, but successfully managed to shift the onus of such terrible crimes to its smaller rival, while at the very least always supporting those operations with a wink and a nod and ensuring that no one was ever seriously punished. For example, the assassins of UN Peace Negotiator Folke Bernadotte merely received a slap on the wrist and were soon lauded as Zionist heroes.
Although Suarez's coverage mostly ended in the early 1950s, the Zionist leaders who had been so eagerly involved in those terrorist activities continued governing their country during the decades that followed, even into the 1990s. And in many respects, their eventual successors have been just as extreme if not more so. There seems very strong evidence that the Israelis played a central role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mossad defector Victor Ostrovsky revealed that Israeli leaders plotted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush, and Max Blumenthal flat-out stated that Barack Obama was very fearful that the Israelis would assassinate him....
Suarez's book is long out of print and used copies on Amazon start at an outrageous $4,291, but it is also available on Archive.org, including in PDF and
formats, and I think that those interested in the Middle East conflict would find it very enlightening.
- Israel and International Terrorism During the Month of September
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 30, 2024 • 7,700 Words
Many disdainful Americans reading the news stories of the last week or two have ridiculed Iran for having allowed so much of its top leadership to be so easily decapitated by a bold Israeli strike.
But if these accounts and memoirs can be credited, the entire British government came very close to being similarly decapitated by Zionist militants just a couple of years after Britain had won the Second World War, which surely would have been a far more remarkable historical event if it had occurred.
By most reports, the Israelis are currently having a difficult time with the Iranian war that they illegally initiated with their decapitating surprise attack. Even fiercely pro-Israel mainstream media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal have indicated that the country's supply of anti-missile munitions is quickly being exhausted while the Iranians have continued their steady bombardment of Israel's airport, ports, refineries, and other major national infrastructure. Iran's population is more than an order-of-magnitude larger and its land area some 75 times greater, so it seems far better placed to win any long war of attrition.
The Israelis, however, seemed confident that they would soon succeed in using their muscle-bound but brain-zombified American golem to rectify this situation by destroying Iran, and they might be correct in that belief, with Trump having begun his bombing campaign over the weekend.
Indeed, many prominent Israeli experts and media outlets seem so sure about such an outcome that they are already arguing that after destroying Iran, the military forces of their American vassal-state should be similarly employed to destroy Qatar, Pakistan, and Turkey, thereby eliminating any possible rivals and fully establishing Israeli hegemony throughout the entire broader region:
Meanwhile, powerful political elements within the country are determined to press for the creation of a Greater Israel, incorporating much of the current territory of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
There is an even more remarkable example of Israeli arrogance and extreme recklessness. Enraged by what he regarded as insufficient Russian support after the Hamas attack, a top political figure named Amir Weitmann went on RT in late 2023 to declare that after Israel destroyed Hamas, it would then target Russia for severe retribution, an astonishing threat to make against the country possessing the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
At the time that Weitmann issued that outrageous threat against Russia, it struck me as a perfect example of Israeli arrogance and irrationality rather than anything to be taken seriously. But I may have been mistaken in that appraisal.
At the beginning of this month, the world was shocked at the sudden attack by explosive drones against Russia's strategic bomber fleet, one of the legs of its vital nuclear deterrent triad. The Ukrainians took credit for the operation, in which containers were delivered by trucks to the Russian interior, then automatically released swarms of advanced drones, simultaneously targeting five different Russian airfields, all located deep within the huge country.
The initial claims were that a large fraction of Russia's entire nuclear bomber fleet had been destroyed on the ground, and although that seems to have been greatly exaggerated, Russia was certainly dealt a severe, humiliating blow.
This was the first time in history that the nuclear arsenal of a major power had been directly attacked in such a manner, and this extremely destabilizing development might easily have brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. According to official Russian doctrine, any conventional attack mounted against Russian nuclear forces would fully warrant a nuclear response.
Furthermore, just a week earlier the Russians had reported that when President Vladimir Putin traveled to Kursk on an inspection tour, his helicopter had been attacked by a swarm of drones in an apparent assassination attempt.
So within less than two weeks, advanced drones were used in an assassination attempt against Russia's president and also in an attack aimed at destroying much of Russia's strategic nuclear forces. It seems very unlikely that the Ukrainians alone could have managed such sophisticated operations, and indeed the Russians have claimed they have hard evidence that British forces assisted in the attack. But I consider it equally unlikely that Britain by itself would undertaken such an extremely reckless operation, and there is another obvious factor to consider.
The methods employed in the attack against Russia's strategic nuclear forces—advanced drones automatically launched from a nearby location—seemed remarkably similar to what the Israelis used less than two weeks later in their highly successful initial strike against Iran, and no previous operation along these lines had ever been attempted by any country.
The close match in both methods and timing of the two attacks hardly seems likely to have been purely coincidental, strongly suggesting that the Israelis had been heavily involved in the attack against Russia. Indeed, according to Dr. Gilbert Doctorow , Russian media is currently filled with talk of such a likely Israeli role.
But consider another question of timing. According to the Ukrainians, what they called "Operation Spiderweb" had required more than eighteen months of planning. That indicates that the project probably began shortly after Weitmann's RT interview, in which he had vowed severe Israeli retribution against Russia. So the combination of all these factors certainly points to a major Israeli role in the attack against Russia's president and its strategic nuclear arsenal.
And as I noted in an article last year, there is actually an apparent historical precedent for such extreme Israeli recklessness:
This doctrine under which a collapsing Israel would use its nuclear arsenal to destroy most of the world is called "the Samson Option," and was widely publicized in a 1991 bestseller of that title by renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. But although that book received a great deal of attention both at the time it was published and in the decades since then, when I read it a few years ago I discovered that one of its most surprising elements had never been discussed in any of the various reviews and summaries I had read in the media.
Like most observers, I had always assumed that Israel had developed its nuclear arsenal as a trump card that it could play against the neighboring Arab states if the latter ever seemed on the verge of gaining the upper hand in conventional military terms. Indeed, during the severe military setbacks of the 1973 war, Israel did exactly that, and its threatened nuclear annihilation of Cairo and Damascus helped coerce the Nixon Administration into providing the unprecedented flow of military equipment that allowed Tel Aviv to turn the tide of battle and emerge victorious.
But Hersh's book devoted nearly twenty pages to the remarkable fact that during the 1980s the primary target of Israel's nuclear and thermonuclear arsenal was actually the Soviet Union. He explained that the Israelis surreptitiously gained access to the American reconnaissance information that allowed them to effectively target Moscow, Leningrad, and the other most important Soviet cities for annihilation. This nuclear strike capability was intended to powerfully deter the USSR from providing too much support to its Arab allies that were Israel's immediate adversaries. During those years, the Soviets were at the peak of their military power, possessing the world's biggest nuclear arsenal, and given that Israel is so small geographically I found it quite shocking that it would have developed a serious battle plan to attack and destroy the largest country in the world.
Furthermore, according to Hersh the Israelis were also making great efforts to develop miniaturized nuclear weapons that could be packed into an ordinary suitcase, which Mossad could then easily smuggle into the USSR or any other country deemed potentially hostile, with no possible means of defense against such an unobtrusive method of delivery.
- The Total Madness of the State of Israel
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 14, 2024 • 5,600 Words
Let us step back and carefully consider this long list of Israel's astonishingly bold or reckless assassination plots and terrorist attacks, most of which targeted the top leadership and population of far larger and more powerful countries.
The evidence behind each of these individual examples naturally varies quite considerably in its strength, but I would argue that taken as a whole all these cases tend to greatly reinforce each other. I can think of no other country in the modern world that has ever attempted even a single attack along these lines, but we have one small state that has seemingly been responsible for a whole multitude of such operations, perhaps also including many others that have never come to light.
Over the past several years, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has drawn an enormous amount of harsh criticism for the numerous Middle Eastern wars he has fomented during his long career, with his sudden surprise attack against Iran being merely the latest of these. I agree that he is certainly deserving of such blame.
But Netanyahu had not even been born when James Forrestal was murdered nor when Zionist militants apparently planned to decapitate Britain's entire government. He had barely reached his teens when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he lacked any major decision-making role when Pakistan's entire government was killed, and he held no official position when the Mossad plotted to assassinate President George H.W. Bush. Despite widespread accusations, I'm also extremely skeptical that he had anything to do with the 9/11 Attacks since he was out of office during that period and the Israeli government was instead run by his bitter political rival Ariel Sharon.
So I feel that this current, overwhelming focus upon a single, much-demonized individual is greatly mistaken. Instead, I think that a far better explanation might be found in the religious and ideological roots of the country's population, as I have discussed at length in my articles.
If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel's top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.
- American Pravda: Oddities of the Jewish Religion
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 16, 2018 • 7,800 Words
These same ideological factors have certainly manifested themselves in the horrific atrocities that the Israelis have regularly committed against innocent Gazan civilians during the last couple of years. Many of these have been documented on social media by the Israelis themselves, eager to emphasize the terrible punishment they were successfully inflicting upon their hated Palestinian foes. As I wrote last year:
Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the "Flour Massacre" and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but "cartoonishly evil," with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.
- The State of Israel as "Cartoonishly Evil"?
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 5, 2024 • 5,500 Words
But from the perspective of the rest of the world, the exact factor responsible for this pattern of egregious Israeli behavior is probably less important than its reality. For many decades, a single, small country has been the cause of so much death and devastation, visited not merely upon its own neighbors but also upon other countries throughout the entire world, with its actions at times even greatly raising the risk of global nuclear war.
I think that most of Israel's power and total impunity are based upon the money and media mind-control exercised by that country and especially by its fervent partisans over our own American society and its elites, with these primary tools also supplemented by blackmail and occasionally by murder. Along with such American global influence, these same methods are then employed to similarly dominate the major countries of Europe and the rest of the West. So although such Israeli control is certainly powerful, it is also highly-leveraged and perhaps ultimately fragile.
Given Israel's remarkably long history of extremely serious international misbehavior, if such control did not exist, I think that the country would have long since been attacked and destroyed by a broad coalition of its outraged victims, with that destruction quite possibly accompanied by the near-total extermination of its Jewish population, man, woman, and child alike. Furthermore, this same result might still eventually occur if and when that highly-leveraged control sufficiently slips.
One interesting pattern throughout history has been that countries sometimes radically shift their ideologies from one extreme pole to the other. For example, during the eighteenth century France was governed by one of Europe's most absolute monarchies, but the French Revolution suddenly transformed it into the homeland of the continent's most radical regime. Similarly, Czarist Russia had been notorious as an absolutist autocracy, but after the Bolshevik Revolution it became the worldwide center of radicalism. Iran under the Shah had been America's strongest regional ally, but the Islamic Revolution converted it into our fiercest regional adversary.
In similar terms, for the last two or three generations, Israel's strong and growing control over America and its government has made our country the central lynchpin of Israeli global power. As recent UN votes have demonstrated, no other nation in today's world has become so closely aligned with Israel and its government.
But sometimes when a band is stretched too far for too long, it may eventually snap. So it wouldn't entirely surprise me if at some point in the near future, America and its government might suddenly become transformed into Israel's most bitter and deadly enemy, perhaps with very serious consequences for the Jewish State and its population.