The Great Zionist Coverup - Edwin M. Wright

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A guest, Sophie, posted a link to this study by Edwin M. Wright a member of the US Department of State (1946 - 1966). It is an excellent look into why Zionist aspirations have had such influence on US government policies. I found the entire 141 page study posted at Sribd which gives you a code for embedding books on blogs so I have added it below. You can also read it in HTML format at Sophie's link.

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The Great Zionist Coverup by Edwin M. Wright 1975 (Originally prepared for and by request of The Harry S. ...

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I haven't read much, but it

I haven't read much, but it seems very exciting.

McJ's picture

It is very good...

It is very good and ties in nicely with what we have been reading. It fills in a lot of the details and history. You are getting it from the horse's mouth, so to speak, as Mr. Wright was present during many of the defining moments in this story of the quest for zion.

"I set it down,
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain..." -- Shakespeare, Hamlet, I, v

What Zionism is

As usual I'd like to copy and paste those parts I find pretty good.

One of the excellent studies from the anti-Zionist point of view is that of Moshe Menuhin. Originally a Zionist in Palestine, he became thoroughly disillusioned by his studies in the Gymnasia Herzlia and in his book The Decadence of Judaism in our Times, he vividly described the process of "conditioning" through which young people went to make fervent Zionists of them. His book is the result of personal experience, meticulous scholarship and mature analysis. His description begins on page 21. He distinguished between Judaism as a moral system and Zionism which he terms "Jewish" political nationalism. The latter, being a drive for power, ignores morality. [pp. 15-16]

What bothers Wright - quoting an authority while ignoring it

What has bothered me is meeting Jews who insist they are Jews - but eat ham, violate the Sabbath, prefer to live among Gentiles, and totally ignore the Hallakah - the Shulman Aruch and all the other 613 rules which have traditionally been the lifestyle of Judaism. When Moshe Sharett was asked at the U.N. in 1947 to define a Jew, he replied, "Anyone who thinks he is a Jew is a Jew - but he need not practice its rules.” Yet these same non-religious or non-observant Jews at once quote the Bible for justification of a Jewish State. In my book of rules, I cannot quote as authority that which I ignore in life. But that does not apply to Zionists. When I escorted General Patrick Hurley to meet Moshe Shertok (later Sharett) in Jerusalem, Shertok said Hurley, as a Christian, had to believe in the Biblical promises about a Restoration of the Jewish State. After we came away, General Hurley asked me what promises Shertok was mentioning? I wrote him a several page memo to try to clear up the fog in General Hurley's Biblical memory. page 42

[Problems]

Let me list a few problems I've had with what was said.

1) Zionism's "birth"

That President Truman believed he was negotiating with responsible Zionists appears in his letter to Henry Morgenthau, Jr., dated December 2, 1947. It is quoted in Margaret Truman’s book about her father:
“Dear Henry, I appreciate very much your telegram of November 29
the last but I wish you could caution all your friends who are interested in the welfare of the Jews of Palestine That now is the time for restraint and caution – The vote in the United Nations is only the beginning, and the Jews must now display tolerance and consideration for the other people in Palestine with whom they will necessarily have to be neighbors.”

Twenty-six years later, Israeli cabinet members were to confess that Israel had not adopted the attitudes President Truman had advised; that if Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had even passed on Truman’s advice, it had been ignored and that the characteristics which marked Israel’s first 26 years were “false assumptions, extreme self-esteem, and contemptuous scorn for the Arabs.” Those later characterizations did not develop after 1948 – they are the attitudes expressed by Theodore Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, and those leaders. They are the characteristics that mark the Zionist movement from its birth in 1897. pp 46-47

This is, I suppose, referring to Herzl's book. But Zionism wasn't born then, and Herzl is not its true founder. His book certainly focused the movement and gave it form. But, for instance, the first Zionist colonies were implemented in the 1880s, and their model was the colonial one. Buying up land and using Arab labor. The above remark seems a little easy and I would not trust it, even if I like the idea.

2) Antisemitism and Zionism were strong in France

Anti-Semitism has had the result of strengthening Zionism. This was true in France in the Dreyfus scandal, true of Russia in 1882, and again true of Hitler after 1932.

Actually I do not think that Zionism was strengthened by the Dreyfus scandal. This is an extract from Lenni Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators:

His universal pessimism caused him to misjudge totally the political environment of late-nineteenth-century Western Europe. In particular, Herzl misunderstood the Dreyfus case. The secrecy of the trial, and Dreyfus’s soldierly insistence on his innocence, convinced many that an injustice was done. The case aroused a huge surge of Gentile support. Kings discussed it and feared for the sanity of France; Jews in remote hamlets in the Pripet Marches prayed for Emile Zola. The intellectuals of France rallied to Dreyfus’s side. The socialist movement brought over the working people. The right wing of French society was discredited, the army stained, the Church disestablished. Anti-Semitism in France was driven into isolation lasting until Hitler’s conquest. Yet Herzl, the most famous journalist in Vienna, did nothing to mobilise even one demonstration on behalf of Dreyfus. When he discussed the matter, it was always as a horrible example and never as a rallying cause. In 1899 the outcry compelled a retrial. A court martial affirmed the captain’s guilt, 5 to 2, but found extenuating circumstances and reduced his sentence to ten years. But Herzl saw only defeat and depreciated the significance of the vast Gentile sympathy for the Jewish victim.

"If a dumb beast were tortured in public, would not the crowd send up a cry of indignation? This is the meaning of the pro-Dreyfus sentiment in non-French countries, if indeed it is as widespread as many Jews estimate ... To put it in a nutshell, we might say that the injustice committed against Dreyfus is so great that we forget that we are dealing with a Jew ... is anyone presumptuous enough to claim that of any seven people two, or even one, favor the Jews? ... Dreyfus represents a bastion that has been and still is a point of struggle. Unless we are deceived, that bastion is lost!"

The French government understood realities better than Herzl and acted to head off further agitation by reducing the balance of the sentence. Given the success of the struggle for Dreyfus, French Jewry – right and left – saw Zionism as irrelevant. Herzl savaged them in his Diary: “They seek protection from the Socialists and the destroyers of the present civil order ... Truly they are not Jews any more. To be sure, they are no Frenchmen either. They will probably become the leaders of European anarchism.”

That was a small mistake from Wright, in the premise: the Dreyfus affair was a victory for Jews, because half the population went to his defense and the sentence was diminished. I also am not sure that Zionism was that strong in Russia. Again, see Brenner's book. I believe more Jews joined the revolutionaries than the Zionists.

An elite of priests changed the bible

Those who returned were led by a small elite of priests. Having seen the allure that foreign society had for Hebrews, it became the task of these priests, such as Ezra, to create a series of taboos and rules so that Jews could resist any temptation to integrate with other peoples. Under this Priestly cult, the small Jewish community in Palestine generated a whole series of taboos and regulations intended to separate them forever from all others. This period saw the development of what Biblical scholars call the Priestly Code. To reinforce the authority of these rules, they were retroactively credited to the myth of YHWH, the tribal god, speaking to Moses. Thus these priests, as they made up new forms for a Jewish lifestyle, prefaced their additions by the phrase, “And God said unto Moses.” This was of course a fraud, but justified as necessary so as to create a wall of separation between Jews and all non-Jews which would in the future assure the continuation of a purely Jewish cult forever. It was thus a “pious fraud” inasmuch as it was done for a “Holy” purpose. It was so successful that
ever since then, Jews have believed God actually spoke to Moses and hereby endowed the “Jewish nation” with divine favor making them a special people with a theocratic form of government that must resist all foreign temptations. Thus the concept of a “pure” people in a Holy Land in a divine dispensation was drilled into the minds of Jewish children with a whole series of legends, rituals, and taboos that “conditioned” them against contact with or assimilation to all other nations. All other people were followers of False Gods who had an unclean and defiling nature. (Hebrew “TAME” or “TUMAH” meaning “unclean”)
The two most prominent factors which set apart Jews from all other people were the rite of ritual circumcision as a physical sign – and birth from a Jewish mother. So the phrase “circumcision” came to denote the pure, the holy, the eternal, and the unchangeable, while the term “uncircumcised” came to be identified with all that was inferior, evil, impure, and degenerate. The idea of a Jewish mother then was written into the legend of Abraham and his wife Sarah (who presumably was a Hebrew), while his Egyptian concubine Hagar was a slave girl. Through this mythlegend the Jews were able to look down upon the other Semitic peoples of the area and think of them with contemptuous scorn. These concepts, rituals and legends served well to surround the Jewish nation with a protecting shell so resistant to surrounding cultures that they have acted so as to perpetuate “Jewishness” as a tribal entity. They have a tribal ancestry (Abraham), a tribal God who selected the Twelve Tribes as God’s Kingdom on Earth, tribal rituals retroactively assigned to Abraham (Genesis 17:9-27), and every Jewish child from the day of its birth is taught these tribal values as the sign of a separate Jewish “identity.” Any Jew who violates these rules develops a strong sense of guilt and is punished by the community as a traitor and expelled. (cherem) Modern scholarship, much of it Jewish, has been able to penetrate the myths created by these priests of the Fifth Century B.C. (See William Albright’s From Stone Age to Christianity or the many volumes of the Anchor Bible, especially the Book of Genesis by Professor Ephraim Speiser.) This creates a new peril for the survival of Judaism. It is essential for the perpetuation of a Jewish “cult” for these myths and legends to be repeated to each generation so as to keep the Jewish community separate from its surrounding Gentile environment.

I finished the book just today. I must say I particularly appreciated these insights in biblical theory.

Zionists were trying to use the colonial model

I had taught Bible History at a summer course in Columbia University in 1940. I could see the parallels between Hebrew history described in theocratic terms in the Bible – and European 19th Century Colonial Imperialism. Also I had witnessed the high tide of such Imperialism, for I was in Iraq in 1921-23 when Lord Curzon was trying to extend British influence in Turkestan, Iran, Anatolia, and Greece. In 1923, the reaction came with the victory of the Labor Party. The British began the retreat from Empire as the rising tide of local nationalism began to appear. I lived through most of the age of Riza Shah Pahlavi in Iran and visited Turkey under Ataturk. The same phenomenon emerged under Zaglul and Nahas Pasha in Egypt, the “Golden Square” in Iraq, the Syrian Nationalists in Syria. Furthermore, I had been in Palestine in 1921, again in 1929, and spent months at a time in Palestine in 1942-46. Though the British had killed or exiled most of the Palestinian leaders in the Arab revolt of 1936-39, a blind man could feel the powerful emotional appeal of Palestinian self-determination growing. As U.S. Army intelligence officer in 1942-46, I met most of the “experts” in the field and found my ideas were similar to theirs. The Arabs were not a “backward people” like the Hottentots, the Africans or American Indians. They were the inheritors of a great and brilliant civilization which had, under Ottoman rule, suffered neglect and demoralization. But is was inherently capable of revival – and that was coming fast. I was convinced the Biblical models – which were taught as eternal truth in the synagogues – would not work in 1946 or years following. The age when Hebrews could kill off the Canaanites or force conversions as occurred in the Hasmonean Dynasty of John Hyrcanus and Alexander Janneus (135-80 B.C.) – or the age of European Colonial Imperialism was forever dead. Yet Zionists were trying to use both models for a Jewish State in the latter half of the 20th Century.

I.F. Stone telling it like it is

The following quotations from an article entitled “Jews Hear Argument For Palestinian State” was written by Jay Mathews, Washington Post Staff writer, in the November 11, 1974, Washington Post.

“In light of the fact that the Arab world is arming itself to the teeth,” a middle-aged woman at the Sinai Temple Social Hall said to I. F. Stone, “are you suggesting that all of the Jews march into the Mediterranean Sea?”

Stone, the venerable journalist speaking at an afternoon forum in favor of a separate state for Palestinians, folded his arms. “No…I’m not even suggesting an international fund to teach us all to swim…I am suggesting the Arab world is reconciling itself to the existence of a Jewish state.”

Stone received long applause at the end of his talk and many members of the audience stood while clapping. But most of the questions from the audience, particularly those directed at Stone, were bitter and critical. Stone told the audience that unless Jews took actions to ease the plight of Palestinian refugees confined to camps throughout the Mid-East, “everything we’re proud of, and everything the best side of the Bible and prophets stand for, we will have defamed.”

One man rose immediately after Stone’s talk to retell the biblical story of “the Jews who were told to go into Canaan and wipe out all the people in Canaan.” The man said “the Jews survived that spiritually and physically, and we’re here today and we’re still a moral light in this world.”

“I really ought to make my answer in German,” Stone replied. “The Germans would say we had to wipe out the Jews and Slavs to make a lebensraum for our people.” “Don’t call me a Nazi!” Stone’s questioner shouted back at him from the audience.

At another point, in the middle of his talk, Stone told the audience:
“If the situation were reversed, Jewish boys would be doing just what Arab boys are doing today.”
“Never! Never!” Some people shouted from the back of the room.
“They did it in 1946, don’t kid yourself,” Stone shouted back, referring to Jewish terrorists’ activities against British army units that were then controlling the Palestinian area.

Damn, 1974 was a kickass epoch. This kind of guts is difficult to imagine now.

Funded Crazies

But not all have yet learned the message. Some are now demanding the U.S.A. send troops to capture the Arab oil fields – or send troops to rescue Israel because it must “win” every war against the Arabs. (William Saffire in his New York Times column of November 1, 1974). In the U.S.A. we do not put lunatics into asylums – frequently they are paid to publish their ideas in the leading newspapers in the U.S.A. On the one hand, a few intelligent senators are “discovering” the Arab world.

Senator James A. McClure of Idaho addressed Arab-American University graduates in Cleveland on October 26, 1974. He had recently returned from a trip to the Middle East and spoke on “The Arabs – an American Awakening.” Because his recent speeches have deviated from the accepted Zionist dogma, he has been accused of being anti-Israeli but “I believe that my position concerning the Middle East is best not only for the United States but for the Arabs.” He then punctured several of the propaganda balloons filling the air. “Misconceptions (about the Arabs) have abounded within the American population – They will have to be dragged out into the open.”

Again, same remark as above. This is difficult to believe.

The neurotic quality of Zionism

The neurotic quality of Zionism, with its hyper-Messianic visions of grandeur and glory at one moment, is well illustrated by the experiences of Fouzi el Asmar as described in his book (pages 118-188) when the Israeli’s became aware of the “miraculous” victory over the Arabs on June 5, 1967. At the same time, the Police began wide scale use of Gestapo methods against Palestinian Arabs who did not share in the hypnotic delusions that seized the great majority of Israeli Jews – as well as the American Jewish community. Fortunately a small minority saw the danger involved in such flights from reality. Some left Israel, finding it impossible to share in the rejoicing over the dehumanization of the Arabs that followed. Others stayed in Israel, hoping to bring an element of sanity into the picture. Among the latter was Dr. Israel Shahak, Professor of Biochemistry at Hebrew University. A survivor, as a boy, of the Belsen extermination camps in Nazi Germany, he migrated to Israel and spent some time outside Israel getting his Doctoral degree, then he returned and won a position on the faculty of Hebrew University. In 1967 he witnessed in Israel much the same kind of hysterical racism and appeal to violence he had seen in Germany. To try to introduce a degree of sanity, with a few friends, he organized the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights – there being no Civil Rights laws in Israel. I had the good fortune to spend three days with Dr. Shahak in April, 1973. I had only recently debated at the Cleveland City Club with I. L. Kenan who has frequently stigmatized me as a dangerous “Arabist” and a strident anti-Semitic spokesman. But the attack against Dr. Shahak was a hundred fold more vituperative than against me. Dr. Shahak was a Traitor, would be fired from the University and efforts to expel him became a “Cause.” I discovered in him a man of prodigious memory, dedicated to seeing all people as human beings trapped in their cultural spider webs and unable to see any point of view but their own.

One of Shahak's article was appended at the end of the book. I might post it later on in the forum, because it sounds like it was written just yesterday.

Also, mcj, you're gonna have to add Fouzi el Asmar's book (To be an Arab in Israel) to the list of 'books to look out for.'