Britain and America would like everyone to believe that hostilities with Iran began with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But you have to go back over 70 years to find the root cause in America’s case, while Iranians have endured more than a century of British exploitation and bullying. The US-UK Axis don’t want this important slice of history resurrected to become part of public discourse. Here’s why.

William Knox D’Arcy, having obtained a 60-year oil concession to three-quarters of Persia and with financial support from Glasgow-based Burmah Oil, eventually found oil in commercial quantities in 1908.  The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed and in 1911 and completed a pipeline from the oilfield to its new refinery at Abadan.

Just before the outbreak of World War 1 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to convert the British fleet from coal. To secure a reliable oil source the British Government took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the company profited hugely from paying the Persians a miserly 16% and refusing to renegotiate terms. An angry Persia eventually cancelled the D’Arcy agreement and took the matter to the Court of International Justice in The Hague. A new agreement in 1933 provided Anglo-Persian with a fresh 60-year concession but on a smaller area. The terms were slightly improved but still didn’t amount to a square deal.

In 1935 Persia became known internationally by its other name, Iran, and the company was re-named Anglo-Iranian Oil. By 1950 Abadan was the biggest oil refinery in the world and the British government, with its 51% holding, had affectively colonized part of southern Iran.

Iran’s tiny share of the profits had long soured relations and so did the company’s treatment of its oil workers. 6,000 went on strike in 1946 and the dispute was brutally put down with 200 dead or injured. In 1951 while Aramco shared profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis Anglo-Iranian handed Iran a miserable 17.5%.

Hardly surprising, then, that Iran wanted economic and political independence. Calls to nationalise its oil could no longer be ignored. In March of that year the Majlis and Senate voted to nationalize Anglo-Iranian, which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms frankly unfavourable to the host country.

Social reformer Dr Mohammad Mossadeq was named prime minister by a 79 to 12 majority and promptly carried out his government’s wishes, cancelling Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession and expropriating its assets. His explanation was perfectly reasonable:

Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results thus far. With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.

Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced…. Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence. (M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525)

Britain, determined to bring about regime change, orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, froze Iran’s sterling assets and threatened legal action against anyone purchasing oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refineries. The Iranian economy was soon in ruins… All sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?

Churchill (prime minister at the time) let it be known that Mossadeq was turning communist and pushing Iran into the arms of Russia just when Cold War anxiety was high. That was enough to bring America’s new president, Eisenhower, onboard and plotting with Britain to bring Mossadeq down.

So began a nasty game of provocation, mayhem and deception. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in exile, signed two decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other nominating the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees were written as dictated by the CIA. The coup by MI6 and the CIA was successful and in August 1953, when it was judged safe for him to do so, the Shah returned to take over.

For his impudence Mossadeq was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. He was imprisoned for 3 years then put under house arrest until his death. He remarked: “My greatest sin is that I nationalized Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.”

His supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. Zahedi’s new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, awarding the US and Great Britain the lion’s share, with 40% going to Anglo-Iranian.

The consortium agreed to split profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board.

The US massively funded the Shah’s government, including his army and his hated secret police force, SAVAK. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Mossadeq died in 1967.

Smouldering resentment for more than 70 years

The British-American conspiracy that toppled Mossadeq, reinstated the Shah and let the American oil companies in, was the final straw for the Iranians. It all backfired 25 years later with the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9, the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis in the American embassy and a tragically botched rescue mission.

If Britain and America had played fair and allowed the Iranians to determine their own future instead of using economic terrorism to bring the country to its knees Iran might today be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, a title falsely claimed by Israel which is actually a repulsive ethnocracy. So never mention the M-word MOSSADEQ – the Iranian who dared to break the chains of slavery and servitude to Western colonial interests.

Is Britain incapable of playing fair? During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the US, and eventually Britain, leaned strongly towards Saddam and the alliance enabled Saddam to more easily acquire or develop forbidden chemical and biological weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim to them.

This is how John King, writing in 2003, summed it up. “The United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The US supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens.

“The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked the UN censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France, and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.”

The company I worked for at that time supplied the Iranian government with electronic components for military equipment and we were mulling an invitation to set up a factory in Tehran when the UK Government announced it was revoking all export licences to Iran. They had decided to back Saddam. Hundreds of British companies were forced to abandon the Iranians at a critical moment.

Betraying Iran and throwing our weight behind Saddam went well, didn’t it?

Saddam was overthrown in April 2003 following the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq, and hanged in messy circumstances after a dodgy trial in 2006. The dirty work was left to the Provisional Iraqi Government. At the end of the day, we couldn’t even ensure that Saddam was dealt with fairly. “The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein were tragically missed opportunities to demonstrate that justice can be done, even in the case of one of the greatest crooks of our time”, said the UN Human Rights Council’s expert on extrajudicial executions.

Philip Alston, a law professor at New York University, pointed to three major flaws leading to Saddam’s execution. “The first was that his trial was marred by serious irregularities denying him a fair hearing and these have been documented very clearly. Second, the Iraqi Government engaged in an unseemly and evidently politically motivated effort to expedite the execution by denying time for a meaningful appeal and by closing off every avenue to review the punishment. Finally, the humiliating manner in which the execution was carried out clearly violated human rights law.”

In 2022 when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian, was freed after five years in a Tehran prison it transpired that the UK had owed around £400m to the Iranian government arising from the non-delivery of Chieftain battle tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran before his overthrow in 1979. Iran had been pursuing the debt for over four decades. In 2009 an international court in the Netherlands ordered Britain to repay the money. Iranian authorities said Nazanin would be released when the UK did so, but she suffered those years of incarceration, missing her children and husband in the UK, while the British government took its own sweet time before finally paying up.

Now we’re playing dirty yet again, supporting an undemocratic state, Israel, which is run by genocidal maniacs and has for 77 years defied international law and waged a war of massacre, terror and dispossession against the native Palestinians. And we’re even protecting it in its lethal quarrel with Iran.

It took President Truman only 11 minutes to accept and extend full diplomatic relations to Israel when the Zionist entity declared statehood in 1948 despite the fact that it was still committing massacres and other terrorist atrocities. Israel’s evil ambitions and horrendous tactics were well known and documented right from the start but eagerly backed and facilitated by the US and UK. In the UK’s case betrayal of the Palestinians began in 1915 thanks to Zionist influence. Even Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British Cabinet at that time, described Zionism as “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”.

Sadly, the Zionist regime’s unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity against unarmed women and children in Gaza and the West Bank — bad enough in the decades before October 2023 but now showing the Israelis as the repulsive criminals they’ve always been — still isn’t enough to end US-UK adoration and support. UK prime minister Starmer much prefers to talk about “the malign influence of Iran”

The excuse this time is that Iran’s nuclear programme might be about to produce weapons-grade material which is bad news for Israel. There’s a blanket ‘hush’ over Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nukes. The US and UK and allies think it’s OK for mad-dog Israel to have nuclear weapons but not Iran which has to live under this horrific Israeli threat. Then there’s America’s QME doctrine which guarantees Israel a ‘Qualitative Military Edge’ over its Middle East neighbours.

Then consider that Israel is the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention. Yes, it’s quite evident that the Zionist entity, not Iran, is the ultimate “malign influence” in the Middle East.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

That is the Introduction.

*****

The most pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian countries — America and its European colonies — are so blind to the evilness of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing and genocide against the residents of Gaza, and of its ongoing and accelerating land-thefts from the Palestinians in the West Bank, as to present the serious question of why these massive ongoing evils, which are of historic magnitude, are absent from their Governments’ official condemnations and (until recently) almost completely absent from these countries’ news-reports, even as-if these horrors weren’t being perpetrated by Israel with America’s weapons and satellite guidance and targeting, or weren’t even happening at all. There is a real blindness about the blindness, as if this tolerance of Israel’s (and America’s) genocide and land-theft against Palestinians simply were not so. But it is. What explains the blindness and the blindness about the blindness — the utter refusal — to acknowledge the evilness of Israel (and of the U.S. Government ever since Harry Truman created the state of Israel in 1948, even when the genocidal intent of Israel’s founders was already known both privately and publicly)?

Stupidity — believing the Israeli Government’s lies — is part of the answer. Especially the lie that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew is obvious to everyone but idiots, because many Jews are anti-Israel — even some rabbis, both in America and in Israel, are against Israel — and this means that the equation between “Jew” and “Zionist” (supporter of Israel) is false. Only stupid people would believe it. Nonetheless, the Trump Administration and many throughout the world spout Israel’s lie that to be anti-Israel is to be anti-Jew (an “anti-Semite”); and, for example, prestigious American universities have expelled students for speaking publicly against Israel’s slaughter of Gazans — and the U.S. Government, despite the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (which prohibits the Government’s suppressing public expressions of political opinions), has halted federal funds to universities that DON’T expel such students.

However, even the opponents of that lie falsify, by alleging that the Jewish religion does not support this ethnic cleansing and genocide. Here are a few examples from the Jewish religion’s alleged ‘holy texts’ or Scriptures, specifically referring to what their ‘God’ wants:

Genesis 15:18-21

“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham and said, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt [the Nile] to the great river, the Euphrates, including the lands of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amoriotes, the Caananites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’”

Deuteronomy 7:1-2

“You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance: the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. You must put them all to death.”

Deuteronomy 7:16

“Destroy every nation that the Lord your God places in your power, and do not show them any mercy.”

Deuteronomy 20:16-18

“When you capture cities in the land the Lord your God is giving you, kill everyone. Completely destroy all the people: the Hittites, the Amorites, the Caananites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has ordered you to do. Kill them so that they will not make you sin against the Lord by teaching you to do all the disgusting things they do in the worship of their gods.”

Israel’s Government takes such passages as ‘justifying’ what they do to Palestinians. And the vast majority of Israelis agree with that viewpoint. America’s Government says it doesn’t like what Israel is doing, but nonetheless continues to provide almost all of the weaponry and satellite intelligence in order to do it, and is therefore co-equal with Israel in doing this genocide, but (since America pretends not to be a theocratic nation [and our Constitution is entirely secular, so anything at all theocratic in the U.S. Government would actually be traitorous], and not even an aristocratic nation, but instead a democratic nation — though it now IS actually an aristocratic nation, a nation ruled by billionaires instead of by mere voters) alleges that it isn’t participating in the genocide. That allegation by the U.S. Government is clearly a lie.

Israel, therefore, does represent Judaism’s mythological god by doing to the Gazans what it is doing to them, and also doing to Palestinians in the West Bank what it is doing to them. Self-alleged Jews — including some rabbis — who say otherwise (that Judaism isn’t intrinsically racist and even genocidally so), are clearly lying about the Jewish religion, by saying that being a follower of the Jewish religion does NOT necessarily entail being a Zionist. Though Zionism, as a political movement, started only with Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet The Jewish Nation in 1896, Zionism had been an intrinsic part of the Jewish faith ever since that faith’s Scripture, the Torah, which includes those passages, which Israel is now trying to finalize in both Gaza and the West Bank (and a bit beyond), which Scripture became Judaism’s Torah, or ultimate holy Scripture, at some time during the 6th-5th Century BC. Since that time, every Jewish assembly place or synagogue has had a Torah. It is the basis of the Jewish religion, and before that, Jews were simply tribes.

Judaism’s hatred of, and desire to destroy, the Palestinians is as old as the faith itself. For this reason, as I headlined on 14 August 2017, “Netanyahu’s Pro-Nazi Lie: ‘Hitler Wanted To Expel The Jews’“: Netanyahu blamed Palestinians — NOT Christians — for the Holocaust. Despite Hitler himself having been a Catholic, and that Church having held a solemn private (but attended by Bormann and Goebbels) Memorial Mass for him, on 6 May 1945, a week after his suicide. Hitler was born, lived, and died, as a Catholic.

However, there is nothing unique about Judaism’s racism. Consider, for example, the Christians, not just Hitler but all of the Nazi leaders, and the 94% of Germans in that time who called themselves “Christian”:

The Catholic-raised Hitler took very seriously such anti-Semitic New-Testament statements as, from ‘Jesus,’ John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and Luke 19:27; and from Paul, 1 Thes. 2:14-16. (Hitler even said to his followers on 18 December 1926, “The teachings of Christ have laid the foundations for the battle against the Jews as the enemy of Mankind; the work that Christ began, I shall finish.” Then, on 26 April 1933, he told the Pope’s representative, “I am doing what the Church has done for 1,500 years. I am simply finishing the job.”) All of that was Christian racism against Jews. Furthermore, virtually all of Germany’s Nazis were Christians — committed to the New Testament — and, in fact, that (an applicant’s purebred Christianity) was a requirement in order to join the Party, and ESPECIALLY in order to join the SS, as is documented in a 13,000-word masterpiece of an article by Coel Hellier, on “Nazi racial ideology was religious, creationist and opposed to Darwinism,” which can leave no intelligent reader to doubt that the Nazi Party was itself a Christian movement, which historical fact is covered-up by ‘journalists’ and ‘historians’ (but exposed and documented by the primary sources cited in that article — they’re all authentic).

In addition to this: On 21 October 1941, Hitler, in the privacy of his bunker, concluded a long tirade against Jews (as transcribed in his Table-Talk) by saying: “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.” Hitler’s buddy, Himmler, stated, in a speech to top SS leaders, two years later, when the Holocaust was in full swing, on 4 October 1943, that this extermination was necessary for them to carry out, in order to have “exterminated a bacterium because we do not want in the end to be infected by the bacterium and die of it.” Hitler had stated, on various occasions, that the “Jewish infection” or “Jewish bacterium” or “blood-poisoning by Jews,” was transmitted to non-Jews in their “blood,” and so Jews must be entirely eradicated like plague-carrying rats — not only in Germany, but beyond. Hitler said, on 24 February 1943: “This fight will not end with the planned annihilation of the Aryan [which to him meant the descendants of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 — and the snake was, according to the NT, the father of the Jews] but with the extermination of the Jew [which to him meant the descendants of the snake in Genesis 3] in Europe. Beyond this, thanks to this fight, our movement’s world of thought will become the common heritage of all people.” (Yet,still, there are Holocaust-deniers who say that it is just ‘a Jewish hoax’, or that if it happened, Hitler didn’t know about it.) Or, as Hitler stated it in his last official words, his “Political Testament” right before his suicide: “Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.” (His phrase “international Jewry” referred to Jews in all nations. He didn’t make any explicit reference here to exterminating them, because this statement from him was intended to be public — not merely private.)

Furthermore, that 24 February 1943 quotation ISN’T from the flawed Trevor-Roper publication of the Table-Talk but instead from an authentic speech that Hitler gave on that date, and the varying translations of which were discussed in an 8 March 1943 OSS Memorandum  by Walter Langer to William Donovan. The 1941 quotation from Hitler isn’t only in the original German version of the Table-Talk but was quoted in a book by Winston Churchill in 1948, four years before any translated version of the Table-Talks (Tischgesprache) (and this includes the one issued by Trevor-Roper) was published. The Himmler quotation is likewise accepted as authentic by historians.

Moreover, Horst von Maltitz perceptively observed in this regard in his excellent 1973 The Evolution of Hitler’s Germany (p. 171), that “railroad transport trains carrying Jews from the West to extermination camps in Poland were given priority over trains for urgently needed troops and war supplies. Moreover, skilled Jewish laborers, desperately needed in the munitions plants in occupied Poland, were carted off to extermination centers, in spite of strong objections by plant managers.” And, according to the Polish Ambassador, Jan Ciechanowski, in his 1947 Defeat in Victory (p. 179), he had personally handed U.S. President Roosevelt in the White House on 28 July 1943 a memo that, “The unprecedented destruction of the entire Jewish population is not motivated by Germany’s military requirements. Hitler and his subordinates aim at the total destruction of the Jews before the war ends and regardless of its outcome.”

And, as I pointed out in my 2000 WHY the Holocaust Happened: Its Religious Cause & Scholarly Cover-Up (see summary of it here), Hitler said that “Aryans” have remained unchanged since the time God first created Man (Adam and Eve). Thus, Mein Kampf asserted that the objective was “to give the Almighty Creator beings as He Himself created them.” Though during his later years Hitler was trying to adopt a scientific view, he failed, and Hitler even in his war bunker on the night of 25 January 1942, confided that Darwinian evolution does not apply to Man, who “has always been as he is now.” This was NOT an atheistic type of racism; it was SPECIFICALLY Biblical, a religious type of racism, despite all of the propaganda to the contrary (which has fooled almost all of the Hitler ‘experts’ ever since — though the evidence proves the contrary to be true).

Consequently, it will be good here to quote the most important New Testament origins of Hitler’s — and other Christians’ — Holocaust:

John 8:44

“You are the children of your father, the Devil, and you want to follow your father’s desires. From the very beginning, he was a murderer, and has never been on the side of truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he is only doing what is natural to him, because he is a liar and the father of all lies.”

Matthew 23:31-38

“So, you actually admit that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets! Go on, then, and finish up what your ancestors started. You snakes and sons of snakes! How do you expect to escape being condemned to hell? And so I will tell you that I will send you prophets and wise men and teachers; you will kill some of them, crucify others, and whip others in the synagogues and chase them from town too town. As a result, the punishment for the murder of all innocent men will fall on you. … The punishment for all of these murders will fall on the people of this day!”

Luke: 19:27

“Now, as for all those enemies of mine who did not want me to be their king, bring them here, and kill them in my presence!” (This is told as the closing line of a parable.)

Paul 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16

“You suffered the same persecutions from your own countrymen that they suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us. How displeasing they are to God! How hostile they are to everyone! They even tried to stop us from preaching to the Gentiles the message that would bring them salvation. In this way, they have completed the full total of the sins they have always committed. And now God’s anger has at last come down on them!”

To put those passages into their true historical context: Paul never met nor heard the living Jesus but wrote the earliest of all documents that came to be canonized in the year 393 by the Roman Catholic Church and later by all other Christian churches; and his followers wrote the four canonical Gospel-accounts of ‘the words of Jesus’ but even in their time Jesus’s having been a rabbi who preached Judaism (NOT Christianity) was so well known so that 3 out of the 4 canonized Gospel accounts of ‘Jesus’ mentioned specifically that his disciples sometimes addressed him simply as “rebbi” rabbi: Matthew 23:7, 23:8, 26:25, 26:49; Mark 9:5, 11:21, 14:45; and John 1:38, 1:49, 3:2, 3:26, 4:31, 6:25, 9:2, and 11:8. They could not deny it, because to have tried would have been too obviously false and thus Paul’s new religion would have been recognized for what it actually was, not as they wanted it to become — they were evangelists for Paul’s religion, which they believed to be true because Paul told them that it was.

As I documented in my 2012 Christs’s Ventriloquists, Paul created Christianity in the year 49 0r 50 in order to get back at Jesus’s brother James who then headed the former Jesus-created sect of Jews and finally decided that the by-then thousands of uncircumcised men in Paul’s congregations would either be circumcised in accord with Genesis 17:14 or else be expelled from the sect. That is the reason why Christianity is anti-Jewish (anti-Semitic): James finally decided to enforce Genesis 17:14 (in that age when no such things as anesthetics nor antibiotics existed — and circumcision was therefore almost always perpetrated upon only infants, who didn’t volunteer for it and whose screams adults didn’t take seriously).

As regards the Christian clergy, they very predominantly supported Hitler’s anti-Semitism, and they even provided to his Government the documentation as to whom was and therefore also whom was NOT a Christian — the basic data from which the Holocaust’s “Jews” would be selected for extermination:

Eberhard Bethge, who had been a liberal Protestant cleric during the Third Reich, was interviewed in the last chapter of Augustin Hedberg’s 1992 Faith under Fire and was asked what those years had been like. Bethge commented, “‘Bad blood’ was the great term. You had to have Aryan blood.” Hitler, in only his private statements, had defined “Aryan,” as pureblooded Christian. Bethge’s interviewer inquired, “So we know this Jewish poison [Jewish blood] had to be cleansed. How did they propose to do that?” Bethge replied, tellingly: “For instance, everybody in an office, in a village, in a city, in a province, in Berlin, had to prove that he had [only] Aryan ancestors. How could he do that? He could do it only if he wrote to church officers in the villages or in the cities and asked them to look in the old books of the church in which baptisms were recorded. So many pastors and church secretaries had to work for hours and hours, weeks and months to answer all these requests. ‘Please give me an excerpt out of the church files that proves my ancestors had been Christians.’ The church officers and the ministers, they didn’t care. They did that. They said, ‘How important we are now.’ I was an assistant curator in the winter of ’33. I had to sit all morning and look through the books and answer these letters.” It was therefore the Christian clergy themselves — people indoctrinated with John 8:44, and Matthew 27:25, and Matthew 23:31-36, and Luke 19:27, etc. — who were the proud implementers of the indispensable first step in the Nazis’ 12-year-long “racist” war against the Jews, by supplying the crucial raw data for segregating-out Jews. Bethge was even honest enough to admit, “We were anti-Semitic, and we thought this was Christian.” (Of course, they did, because it was, and they had absorbed this from Christianity’s Scripture.) The essential first step in the “final solution” was this identification of who was NOT an “Aryan,” who WAS “a Jew.” Hitler commanded this first step in the year he came into power, 1933, and the Christian clergy executed it with pride. And yet even today, so-called “historians” say that Hitler didn’t have execution of the Jews in mind from the very start, and that Hitler was no Christian, and so forth.

“Historians” have not been doing their job, for the truth. That’s why the general public cannot separate propaganda from history —the latter is just an extension of the former.

Compare this account of the origin off how the Nazis managed to identify who was “a Jew” and who was not, that was given in a traditional history book on that topic, Edwin Black’s 2001 IBM and the Holocaust. Christianity’s role is ignored.

So: Zionists such as Netanyahu can’t blame Christianity for the Holocaust; they need Christian believers to blame Palestinians instead — people who had nothing to do with it — this was instead a Christian operation. The historical truth and context behind 7 October 2023 needs to be, and has effectively been, hidden from the publics in America, and in its European colonies.

There is a Big Lie, and, this time, it comes not from Germany’s racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist (or ideologically Nazi) Nazi Party and all the rest of Christendom, but instead from Judaism’s own racist-fascist-imperialist-supremacist Zionists and all the rest of Judaism.

And what about Islam’s equivalent? That is the jihadists, the fundamentalist Arab Sunni (U.S. propaganda lies that it’s instead fundamentalist Iranian Shiite) movement that includes both al-Qaeda and ISIS and whose former leader in Iraq and Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, Donald Trump made a deal with on May 14 for Syria to become a U.S. colony. Now this former al-Qaeda and then ISIS leader — whom both Obama and Biden, and also Trump, had protected ever since 2012 — has finally succeeded (with U.S.-supplied weapons and training) at overthrowing Syria’s secular President Bashar al-Assad, and started the ethnic cleansing in Syria against Shiite Muslims and Christians there (that isn’t being reported in the U.S. empire).

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

Orientation
This article is about the differences between the micro psychology of liberals and the macro psychology of communists. Differences include: how society and the individual is configured; the impact of capitalism on personal life; how the mind-body relationship is conceived; how the objective and subjective worlds are integrated; how politics impacts personal life and how research should be conducted. These differences are not self-evident or easy for liberals to understand. In order to attempt a breakthrough, I describe the story of Flatland, Edwin Abbot’s great 1884 science fiction book of why two dimensional beings on Flatland fail to understand the Spaceland dimension of some of its creatures. I’ve included a link to a video of the story. This will conclude Part I.

In Part II we will discover that even when liberals find out about the Russian activity theory led by Lev Vygotsky, they interpret him in a bourgeois fashion. By this I mean they focus on educational reform and play, rather than work, while ignoring social class, exploitation, alienations as well as what an anti-capitalist individual might look like. To explore both parts of this article will referring to a great book by Carl Ratner: Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind. In my opinion more than any other individual in the United States Carl has remained the most uncompromising in presenting the communist psychology of Vygotsky to the Yankee public.

Hard Facts About Political Economy in Mordor
The US has the highest percentage of children living in poverty in the industrial world – 23% and climbing. We have the second highest infant mortality rate among wealthy countries. Mordor has the highest incarceration rate in the world (spending is three times the amount that is spent on education). We are something like 125th in the world of 200 countries in literacy. American Association for the Advancement of Science discovered that one third of American’s population believes that human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning of time. In absolute numbers we easily have the highest obesity rate in the world. We have a political party, a party that imagines itself as liberal, complicit in the production of genocide in Palestine while propping up dictators the world over. The highest paid individual in John McCain’s presidential campaign during the first half of October 2008 was Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist. Her salary was higher than McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser. The so-called program “War on drugs” program does nothing to stem the use of drugs in the US. The 400 wealthiest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest 400 million.

Sixteen years after the near collapse of the global financial system, the US Congress still has adopted no new rules to re-regulate financial institutions. The financiers and politicians who created the financial implosion of the early 21^st century have foisted greater harm on the US than all the country’s enemies. Why aren’t these problems fixed? We have no mass political party that might address these problems in a systematic way. We have political debates that are sponsored by a private organization, Commission on Presidential Debates. No other political parties are allowed to participate unless the two major parties agree.

In a Degenerating Society the Need for Propaganda is Essential
The ruling powers try to rationalize and legitimize their power by inventing ideologies that paint them as more capable and harder working than they really are. One part of their ideology is that there is no ruling class as a social formation. Class is simply the position that separate individuals occupy as a result of their individual competencies and effort. The “free market” is infinitely flexible, open to all comers. In this capitalist ideology there is no relationship between social classes. Capitalists appear to acquire their wealth as a completely separate process from what workers do or don’t do. What is really going on is that upper class wealth is dependent on their exploitation of the working class in the form of surplus value.

The ruling class does not invent its ideology by itself. The upper middle class perpetuates the ideology not only in economics, but in philosophical, artistic and scientific fields. Presidents of community colleges work for capitalists to dampen the expectations for working class students. Their commission institutes are specifically charged with developing ideological tools for legitimizing capitalist practices such as the RAND Foundation. Also on the ground floor is the Hoover Institution and American Enterprise Institute. All three hire intellectuals to do their bidding by giving talks and writing papers and books. These institutions play hard ball. For example, the RAND corporation installed its academic agendas through the leadership of RAND intellectuals who were by then in powerful university administrative positions. Thomas Schilling was one of the key figures in established rational choice theory, probably the most direct enemy of communist psychology.

Propaganda supporting individualism such as social contract theory has kept social scientists from solving complex social problems by refusing to understand these problems as structural and due to capitalism. Instead, the psyches of individuals are blamed. It enlists a massive social apparatus to block the truth and reality of exploitation as the real source of most psychological problems today.

Being mystified by this propaganda does not mean people are blind to every aspect of society. It only means they do not fundamentally understand how their society works. They are ignorant of the following deep issues of how power is distributed: the infrastructural relationships between the Deep State and particular political regimes; how capitalism operates and why it gets into crises roughly every seven years. The Mordor public, whether liberal or conservative, may know about lobbying, corruption, lying and cheating. They may be aware of inequality, poverty and discrimination. However, propaganda keeps them from not understanding the basis of these, or how these problems are interrelated and macro cultural in both form and content. Propagandists do not have to directly intervene in an institution in order to bend it to its will as Stephen Lukes points out in his third dimension of power. Furthermore, these propagandists can commit evil and be agents of oppression without themselves being perverted, sadistic or psychotic.

Consumer Psychology
Ratner writes that  consumer spending accounts for 70% of Mordor’s GDP. For capitalists, it is vitally important for the population to not only consume a great deal but to do so quickly. He writes that for capitalists, the natural cycles of growth of animals  are too slow for the profit motive so cows are fed hormones to speed up that growth. Fish  are also farmed in conditions that speed their growth. The same is true for people.  Capitalists do not want people to eat according to when they are hungry. This takes hours to peak. Instead, the act of eating has to be decoupled from hunger and coupled with fun because no other consumer activity can be performed as continuously as eating. We cannot wear new shoes all the time, but one can eat food every hour when watching TV, going to the movies or attending ball games because they require the rapid turnover to generate profit. It includes getting to work faster, working faster and spending money faster when these same workers consume.

Wholesome food takes a long time to digest, and afterword the person is sated and has no desire for more. Added to the headaches of capitalists, some wholesome food can be cheap to buy and generates low profit. On the other hand, junk food is digested quickly and its fat, sugar and salt provide instant gratification without real satiation while stimulating new cravings.  Ratner refers to Jules Henry’s book Culture Against Man who uses the adjective “pecuniary” to describe various aspects of consumer psychology. Pecuniary is synonymous with commodified. Furthermore, enjoyment and desire have to be shifted from use to acquisition. For many consumers the process of shopping becomes more enjoyable than using the product. Many compulsive consumers never use the products they buy. We can go window shopping and browse catalogues and ads without any particular object in mind. Obsessive shopping can become a pathology. One researcher, H. Dittmar found that compulsive shoppers have a larger discrepancy between their present self and their ideal self than others.

Sensationalism is rampant in modern culture, in popular music, in entertainment with car crashes, special technical effects and plenty of sexual suggestion. There is minimal, trivial content with little character development or substantive plot. Sensationalism offers no continuity between people and product. Throw-away products are deliberately designed for the short term and wear out quickly. They are unrepairable and replaced by new purchases. Capitalist intervention into the emotional life of the consumer with advertising campaigns is fueled by mass market psychologists. Capitalists can’t admit what they are doing to anyone else, let alone to themselves so they invent a theory that is the opposite of what they are doing.

A rational choice theory of economics ignores the emotional and sexual appeal of the advertising industry that posits the consumer as having a natural rationality where you know what you need, you gather information and weigh the pros and cons of purchasing. Rational choice theory was developed at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 60s. Rational choice theory is a mainstay of bourgeois ideology because it construes society as an outcome of interpersonal negotiations. It is the mother of contemporary individualistic social theory, one of whose forms is micro-cultural psychology

Why Can’t We See Through The Hard Facts of Political Economy, Propaganda and Consumer Psychology?
In order to penetrate below the surface of capitalist society and analyze what is going on, we need a communist psychology which requires more than a liberal or conservative understanding of what is what is happening in the political economy. Understanding communist psychology requires:

• understanding infrastructural and structural dynamics of capitalism that are invisible to the naked eye;
• understanding that these factors may contradict common sense. Because reality is complex and expanding we cannot experience its totality through sense impressions. We must use sense impressions to infer and deduce unobservable properties of reality on which science is based;
• understanding society as a kind of verb in motion, not a noun, an unchanging thing.

Carl Ratner gives three examples from the sciences which show that they have to move beyond their senses and beyond common sense in order to make new discoveries.

Astronomy is concerned with the immense, broad system of factors beyond the earth that bear on earth and bring it into being. Just as the characteristics of earth are unintelligible if one doesn’t understand the astrophysics of the sun, other planets, distant galaxies and the big bang, so characteristics of psychology are unintelligible without first understanding macro-cultural factors.

Secondly, Darwin could have never discovered how species evolved from changing environmental circumstances if all he had to go on was the plant and animal life in Britain in the 19th century. He had to travel half-way around the world to discover fossils of plant and animal life thousands of years old. He needed the geological work of Lyell in order to familiarize himself with ages much larger than human history to begin to understand the gradualness of bio-evolutionary change. He had to refuse the easy and infantile explanations of theologians who could not imagine that matter was self-organizing and not a passive lump molded by the will of God.

Lastly, in the atomic structure of steel beams:

Cultural factors in psychology may be analogized to atoms in steel: they are constituents which areinvisible to the naked eye, are difficult to accept from the perspective of common sense. Looking at a steel beam it seems inconceivable that it is composed of atomic particles which are in motion…. Macro cultural psychology is analogous to atomic science in revealing constituents that are invisible to the naked eye, …macro cultural psychology changes our way of understanding psychology just as fundamentally as atomic theory changes our way of understanding steel beams.

Macro cultural psychology is also like unseen distal sun in Plato’s cave. Everyday life in capitalist society with its villains and heroes in the movies, sports, music and politics are like the shadows cast by the sun’s light on the back of the cave. When we get involved in the puppet show of the shadows on the wall we ignore the capitalist sun that is responsible for the whole show. People act on the basis of their needs, interests, aims, passions and thoughts based on the shadows on the wall in the hopes of achieving satisfaction. However, behind these subjective experiences lies a macro cultural, political economic logic of the sun that structurally patterns them unconsciously in particular ways to remain focused on the puppet show rather than the light behind them.

From Flatland to Spaceland
Another way to capture the difference between liberal psychology and communist psychology is to imagine that each inhabits different dimensions of reality. In his mathematical science fiction book Flatland Edwin Abbot tells a story of life in the two-dimensional plane of Flatland. The people on Flatland take their world as self-evident. The higher functioning ones get around quite well just as working or middle-class people get along in capitalist society. What they don’t understand is that there is a third dimension of height. By accident, one of the Flatland inhabitants is visited  by someone from the third dimension which is called Spaceland. The third dimensional being can get along in the two-dimensional world, just as communists can get along in a capitalist world but their full life is more complex, living in the third dimension.

When the three dimensional being tells the Flatlander (a square) about the existence of Spaceland, the Flatlander is cynical. Finally the Spacelander challenges the square to ride with him into the dimension of height. The Flatlander is both frightened and delighted to find the real existence of Spaceland. In our time, the Flatlander being drawn into Spaceland would be like a Flatlander living through a socialist revolution. The square returns to Flatland to proselytize about the existence of Spaceland but he finds their resistance to the existence of Spaceland remains entrenched. Below is the link to a 30-minute video about the story.

What is Macro Cultural Psychology?
From the political to the economic to the psychological
Infrastructural macro cultural psychology posits that psychology is rooted in political and economic institutions that are neglected by neoliberal psychology. They include the state, the army, the stock market, the Catholic Church, corporate farms, banks, pharmaceutical companies, the healthcare industries, capitalist media and their impact on psychology. From this flow capitalist relations like commodification, alienation, surplus value, consumerism, class structure and possessive individualism. Lastly, these influence the familiar psychological expression such as emotion, perception, motivation, reasoning, self, sexuality and the senses. Interpersonal relations must be congruent with these macro factors if they are to function effectively. Whenever people express themselves psychologically, they mostly express and promulgate macro cultural factors embodied within it. Vygotsky writes that mental structures are inseparable from a social structure and that there is a social structure designed just for psychology.

Invisible levels in deep time beyond the senses
For macro cultural psychology nature is both outside and inside us. Culture mediates both outside and inside. Macro culture mediates our external interactions with nature (earthquakes, food sources, trees, animals, air, water, oil) and it mediates our internal relation to our own biology (our hormones, sense organs, motor organs, and cortical processes). This structure is invisible, yet implicit and outlasts the lives of the individuals who shape it. Macro culture imposes constraints as more than a mere sum of individual acts as claimed in liberal micro psychology.

Macro cultural factors cannot be known or managed by sensory impressions by themselves. One cannot see or hear the full dynamics of the stock market or a transportation system over time and around the world. Culture and communication are the most immediate bases for mental and psychological life. Without the symbolic duplication of objects over deep social space and time there would be little freedom to imagine variations in our choices. The freedom to imagine new things is a cultural product. Far from stifling imagination and freedom, macro culture provides the mechanism for making anything in culture psychologically possible. In Ratner’s conical model, every phenomenon is a complex of three qualities:

• its own distinct quality (family as a distinct institution);
• the qualities that are imparted from structural forces such as the state, laws, educational practices;
• the political economy – the stability of the stock market, as work opportunities and the cost of goods and services.

All layers of macro culture are not equal. The economics of manufacturing are more influential in society than painting or sculpture. For example, automobile production employs hundreds of thousands of workers. In its success or failure, it affects the steel, oil and transportation industries.

Beyond mind-body problems
Ratner argues that the so-called the mind-body problem of how the physical body-brain produces mental life is the wrong way to frame the origin of consciousness. It is culture that produces the mind, not brain circuitry. If nature is world one and culture is world two, consciousness/psychology is world three. Culture does not influence some primordial consciousness and then adds certain extrinsic elements to it. Rather, culture forms consciousness. A major difference between human and animal cognition it’s that animals perceive relations of observable features of immediately present entities (first order relations). With the exception of chimps dolphins, ravens and crows, for humans, the socio-cultural world mediates their relations. For the rest of the animal kingdom, present sensuous relations are all there is.

Interpersonal micro relations vs interpenetrating macro relations
Neoliberal micro psychology finds it roots in the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. It assumes that individual relations with society are associative, contractual and voluntary. Furthermore, society is confined to sensual relations between people in Everyday life.  Macro cultural psychology is grounded in the interpenetrating, interdependent relations of Hegel and Marx. It assumes individual relations with society are organic, necessary and involuntary. Society includes not just personal relations in everyday life, but structures and networks beyond sensuous interpersonal relations that impact an individual whether we like it or not.

For neoliberal capitalist psychology, psychological functions evolve on the individual level in order to realize individual agency or expression. For neoliberal psychology agency is usually touted as independent of macro culture – as expressing the individual resisting culture or recasting culture in more fulfilling personal terms. But this championing of individual agency breaks down. A good example of why this doesn’t make sense is early advertising campaigns to get women to smoke. Women’s “agency” did not create the demand to smoke out of personal choice. It was the macro culture of advertising agencies that began and sustained the process. Micro cultural society ignores macro cultural socialization such as various types of propaganda which are necessary to spread common cultural psychological signification throughout the population. Interpersonal socialization would be too fragmented and idiosyncratic to accomplish this massive, common socialization.

Overcoming Conventional Methodology
From idealism and mechanism to political practice
It is important not to restrict macro cultural psychology to conventional methodology. We should not conceptualize macro principles to terms that are amenable to simple, superficial, fragmental statements on a questionnaire or fragmented behavioral observations. But how are the objective and the subjective integrated? Because in liberal micro psychology the objective and the subjective are kept separate, their studies always are either overstressing the objective, resulting in mechanism or reification, such as behaviorism. The other possibility is they overstate the subjective which results in idealism, like humanistic psychology. In macro cultural psychology, the ultimate integration of the objective and the subjective is collective political practice of a party, union, or social movement in which individuals engage in attempting to change the world. This practice enriches and changes the objective world while transforming subjective experience. This collective political practice avoids the twin dangers of mechanism and idealism, reification and subjectivism.

Individualism in liberal micro psychology research methods
Individualism in research methods  are designed to validate subjects by:

• allowing them to speak freely;
• accepting their point of view uncritically;
• renouncing systematic interview and analytical methods that constrain the spontaneous subjectivity;
• ignoring cultural pressures that constrain the spontaneous subjectivity.

A central political issue in capitalist society as in all class societies is exploitation. Micro liberal psychology avoids the reality of exploitation marginalizing by:

• reducing it to personal meanings;
• interpersonal negotiations;
• discourse symbols;
• fragmenting it into variables.

Macro Cultural Psychology Qualitative Research

A phenomenon’s function is revealed when it answer at least these four questions:

• why it exists in the sense of why it is necessary for that particular constellation of elements;
• what role the element plays in the capitalist or socialist system;
• what it reciprocally contributes to the system;
• why the system needs it.

Ratner identifies primary questions for research which include:

• How can it conceptualize these elements as parts of a system?
• Which system are they part of?
• What are the other elements of this system?
• How do they depend upon and support one another?
• What features do each element acquire through its role in the system?
• How are the elemental features distinctive to or particular to this system?
• How might the features of the elements change if they played different roles

in this system or if they were transposed to a different system?

• What kinds of methods must be used to elicit answers to these questions?
• What kinds of probing questions must we ask to extract these answers?

Please see Table 1 at the end of Part I for a summary of the differences between micro and macro cultural psychology.

Let us close out Part I of this article with a discussion of the emotions.

Macro Origin of Emotions
The starting point of human emotions is not internal private experiences based the individual’s private history. These emotions are already always housed in macro cultural emotions. Ratner names love of country, anger at capitalists or racial minorities, hatred of socialism, national shame, dejection about political trends, fear of economic depressions, fierce loyalty to professional baseball, football, basketball or hockey teams or devotion to certain kinds of music or dance. Anger that culminates in violence exists on the macro cultural level in the form of a working-class person who fought in wars has PTSD and is homeless. Other working-class people are competing for jobs and whose union is not treating them well. Others face low wages and lack of medical benefits. These macro cultural emotional states are environmental, not outside private emotions. The macro-cultural environment is already inside of psychological private states.

Personal and interpersonal behaviors do not exist on their own. What appears to be individual behavior is only the immediate, apparent appearance that masks a deeper macro culture of emotions as a window into it. The same is true of memory. Personal memories are embedded in collective memories that involve systematically remembering favorable aspects of political life while forgetting other events as a result of political propaganda. These unify people whether they are based on reality or illusions. Whether individuals are conscious or not of having been internalized, these collective memories are the soil for private in which memories to grow or die.

It used to be thought in the 50s and 60s that advertising propaganda influenced people in a very heavy-handed way, implying the public was passive (Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders).  Then it was found by Michael Schudson in his book Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion that people were less snowed by advertisers than researchers thought. What I want to bring to your attention is the way advertisers directly impact the public emotions by fragmenting emotional experience during a television program.

Advertisements are strategically placed immediately before or after an intense emotional scene. This emotional fragmentation is built into the formatting of television scenes. One must wait for the ad to pass in order to complete the emotion. It does not permit long, continuous development and resolution of our emotions (168-169)

Ratner says this emotional format is recapitulated by people in their personal relationships. Individuals get used to experiencing fragmented emotions because cell phones, text messages, Twitter and Instagram break up a full emotional expression. Ratner says that individuals get so used to this that grow uncomfortable with extended continuous emotional responses.

Coming Attractions
“But” you might say, “I’ve heard of this Vygotsky you speak of. He worked in the field of cooperative learning and developed something called the zone of proximal development. So Vygotsky’s communist ideas are here in the United States.” The problem is this assumes that the communist ideas of a theorist can be directly translated into a capitalist society with no distortion, exaggeration or even censorship. In part two of this article, I will show 11 differences in how Vygotsky is interpreted by those whom Ratner calls “neoliberal” Vygotskyan psychologists.

Differences Between Micro and Macro Cultural Psychology

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

… while Lord Sydenham warned: “What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

It extends all the way to this horror-show 106 years later.

What the latest phase of the Palestine-Israel struggle teaches us is that UK and other Western media are determined to bully anyone with pro-Palestine views into condemning Hamas as terrorists.

Even the Palestinian ambassador to Britain, Husam Zomlot, was cruelly treated in this way by a BBC interviewer only hours after several of the poor man’s family had been indiscriminately killed in an Israeli revenge attack.

And political leaders, acting like the Zionist Inquisition, are threatening anyone who voices criticism of Israel with expulsion from their party.

Even the BBC has been pressured by the Government’s culture secretary, Lucy Frazer, to call Hamas “terrorists” instead of “militants”. The BBC (so far) has resisted her silliness. Ms Frazer is Jewish and served an internship with the Israeli Ministry of Justice.

And while our Government was projecting an image of the Israeli flag onto the front of 10 Downing Street to emphasise solidarity with the apartheid regime our home secretary, Suella Braverman, was threatening Palestinian flag wavers with prosecution.

Our monarch King Charles III has graciously favoured us with a royal opinion. “His Majesty is appalled by and condemns the barbaric acts of terrorism in Israel,” a palace spokesperson said. And a spokes for Prince William and his wife, Kate, said they were “profoundly distressed by the devastating events that have unfolded in the past days. The horrors inflicted by Hamas’ terrorist attack upon Israel are appalling; they utterly condemn them. As Israel exercises its right of self-defence, all Israelis and Palestinians will continue to be stalked by grief, fear and anger in the time to come.” No mention of the “barbaric” day-to-day terror tactics by Israel which led up to the present crisis. Or the Palestinians’ right of self-defence.

A response to these attempts to humiliate and punish could simply be: “and when did you last condemn Israel for its 75 years of atrocities?” Or “if Hamas committed war crimes why is Israel responding with even bigger war crimes?”

The crisis has brought from the US an unforgettably half-witted speech which conjured up the priceless image of Biden supergluing himself to Netanyahu’s backside in a pathetic show of undying unity.

And after all the nonsense uttered in high places sincere thanks go to Moeen Ali, the England cricket vice-captain, who posted on social media a quote from Malcolm X: “If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Sadly it has already happened.

So what exactly is driving our Establishment élite to defend and revere a criminal regime whose inhumane policies disgust ordinary folk?

Who started it all?

Should we go back 106 years and pin it on Balfour? Or 75 years when Zionist militias rampaged through Palestine massacring, pillaging and driving local residents from their homes as they pursued ‘Plan Dalet’, their ethnic cleansing blueprint for a violent and bloody takeover of the Holy Land? Or 2006 when Israel (backed by US and UK) began the siege of Gaza after Hamas won the 2006 elections fair and square according to international observers.

It helps to understand a little of the earlier history too. There was a Jewish state in the Holy Land some 3,000 years ago, but the Canaanites and Philistines were there first. The Jews, one of several invading groups, left and returned several times, and were expelled by the Roman occupation in 70AD and again in 135AD. Since the 7th century Palestine has been mainly Arabic, coming under Ottoman rule in 1516.

During the First World War the country was ‘liberated’ from the Turkish Ottomans after the Allied Powers, in correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon and Sharif Hussein ibn Ali of Mecca in 1915, promised independence to Arab leaders in return for their help in defeating Germany’s ally, Turkey. However, a new Jewish political movement called Zionism was finding favour among the ruling élite in London, and the British Government was persuaded by the Zionists’ chief spokesman, Chaim Weizman, to surrender Palestine for their new Jewish homeland. Hardly a thought, it seems, was given to the earlier pledge to the Arabs, who had occupied and owned the land for 1,500 years – longer than the Jews ever did.

The Zionists, fuelled by the notion that an ancient Biblical prophecy gave them the title deeds, aimed to push the Arabs out by populating the area with millions of Eastern European Jews. They had already set up farm communities and founded a new city, Tel Aviv, but by 1914 Jews still numbered only 85,000 to the Arabs’ 615,000.

The infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 – actually a letter from the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, to the most senior Jew in England, Lord Rothschild – pledged assistance for the Zionist cause with no regard for the consequences to the native majority.

Calling itself a “declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations”, it said:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing and non-Jewish communities…

Balfour, a Zionist convert and arrogant with it, wrote: “In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now occupy that land.”

There was opposition, of course. Lord Sydenham warned: “The harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country may never be remedied. What we have done, by concessions not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, is to start a running sore in the East, and no-one can tell how far that sore will extend.”

And Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the Cabinet, was strongly opposed to the whole idea and to Zionism itself, which he called “a mischievous political creed”. He wrote to his Cabinet colleagues:

…I assume that it means that Mahommedans [Muslims] and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.

Nevertheless his Zionist cousin Herbert Samuel was appointed the first High Commissioner of the British Mandate of Palestine, a choice that showed impartiality was never a priority.

The American King-Crane Commission of 1919 thought it a gross violation of principle. “No British officers consulted by the Commissioners believed that the Zionist programme could be carried out except by force of arms. That, of itself, is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist programme.”

There were other reasons why the British were courting disaster. A secret deal, called the Sykes-Picot Agreement, had been concluded in 1916 between France and Britain, in consultation with Russia, to re-draw the map of the Middle Eastern territories won from Turkey. Britain was to take Jordan, Iraq and Haifa. The area now referred to as Palestine was declared an international zone.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration and the promises made earlier in the McMahon-Hussein letters all cut across each other. It seems to have been a case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing in the confusion of war.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 Lenin released a copy of the confidential Sykes-Picot Agreement into the public domain, sowing seeds of distrust among the Arabs. Thus the unfolding story had all the makings of a major tragedy.

And now another spanner has been tossed into the works. Law expert Dr Ralph Wilde argues that Article 22 of the 1923 League of Nations ‘Mandate Agreement’ for Palestine required provisional independence to be conferred on Palestine and that this could not be lawfully bypassed. Britain’s failure, as the Mandated power, to comply was a violation of international law then with ongoing consequences now, and is therefore a basis for action today.

Article 22 says that those colonies and territories which, as a consequence of World War 1, ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and are not yet able to stand by themselves should come under the tutelage of “advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League…. Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognizedsubject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatoryuntil such time as they are able to stand alone.”

So Britain’s underhandedness is exposed again.

And who started the Palestine-Israel war that inevitably broke out 25 years later? Read the history – it’s all documented. And no, they don’t teach it in schools, it’s far too embarrassing for this ‘great power’.

The slaughter has been horrific

Today, propaganda would have us believe that Israelis have continuously suffered at the hands of Palestinian terrorists. But it’s actually the other way around. Don’t take my word for it, just look at the figures supplied by Israeli NGO B’Tselem which was established in 1989 by a group of Israeli lawyers, doctors and academics to document human rights violations in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and combat any denial that such violations happened. The previous year had seen the First Intifada (uprising) in which Israeli forces killed 311 Palestinians, 53 of whom were under the age of 17.

The figures compiled by B’Tselem run from 29 September 2000 (the start of the Second Intifada) to 27 September 2023.

• Palestinians killed by Israeli forces 10,555
• Palestinians killed by Israeli civilians 96
• Palestinians Killed by unknowns 16
• Total 10,667
• Israeli forces killed by Palestinians 449
• Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians 881
• Total 1,330

So Israelis are far more proficient at killing fellow humans and they’ve been killing Palestinians at the rate of 8:1. Worse still is the butchery of children. The figures show 2,270 Palestinian children killed versus 145 Israeli children, a ratio of nearly 16:1. And when it comes to women it’s 656 Palestinians to 261 Israelis, about 2.5:1.

These statistics are available to everyone. What’s extraordinary is the large number of senior politicians who, with one voice it seems, condemn Hamas and sympathise with Israel. Why would they rush to protect the feelings of an apartheid state that has been brutally oppressing, murdering, dispossessing and generally making life unbearable for Palestinian in their own homeland?

That said, nobody is approving Hamas’s methods (if they have been reported accurately) which may have alienated a lot of otherwise sympathetic supporters and damaged the Palestinian cause. But the facts show that what they did a few days ago was nothing compared to the Israelis’ 75 years of terror and oppression.

Israel is notorious for its disinformation, or ‘hasbara’, and Hamas say their fighters have been targeting Israeli military and security posts and bases – all of which are legitimate targets – and seeking to avoid hurting civilians. They call on Western mainstream media “to seek both truth and accuracy in reporting on the ongoing Israeli aggression against the besieged Gaza Strip”.

But this is an era of false flags, deception and plain bad journalism, as we’ve seen from Ukraine, so mainstream media cannot be trusted. I’ve watched the media eagerly interviewing Israeli families who live close to the Gaza border and commiserating their loss. But, on reflection, what do you think of people who have spent years nextdoor to a security fence on the other side of which their government has cruelly incarcerated another people for 17 years, denying them essential power supplies, water, food, medicines, goods, and freedom of movement, while bombing them regularly in a diabolical policy called “mowing the grass”, and even limiting access to their own coastal waters and blocking access to their marine gasfield…. and don’t seem in the least concerned that such hideous crimes are perpetrated in their name? How innocent are they?

Self-defence?

Then there’s the endlessly repeated claim the Israel has a right to defend itself. But Israel is illegally occupying the Palestinians’ homeland and using military force to maintain its grip and to tightly control every aspect of the Palestinians’ increasingly miserable lives. As for Israel’s armed squatters, they have been implanted outside their own territory and are classified as war criminals. Like Israel’s army of ongoing occupation they are the aggressors and have no right of self-defence. The Palestinians on the other hand, being subjected to an illegal military occupation, are the ones with the right under international law to defend themselves.

What gives them that right is United Nations Resolution 37/43 of 3 December 1982 which is concerned with “the universal realization of the right of peoples to self-determination and of the speedy granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples for the effective guarantee and observance of human rights…. Considering that the denial of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, sovereignty, independence and return to Palestine and the repeated acts of aggression by Israel against the people of the region constitute a serious threat to international peace and security, [the Resolution]

1. Calls upon all States to implement fully and faithfully all the resolutions of the United Nations regarding the exercise of the right to self-determination and independence by peoples under colonial and foreign domination;

2. Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for their independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”

It goes on to strongly condemn “the constant and deliberate violations of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, as well as the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East, which constitute an obstacle to the achievement of self-determination and independence by the Palestinian people and a threat to peace and stability in the region.”

That we are still waiting after 40+ years for these fine principles to be implemented shows how useless the UN really is and how little the major powers value international law unless it happens to suit their own often questionable purposes.

Jewish voices

JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace) has sent me their latest statement:

We wholeheartedly agree with leading Palestinian rights groups: the massacres committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians are horrific war crimes. There is no justification in international law for the indiscriminate killing of civilians or the holding of civilian hostages.

And now, horrifyingly, the Israeli and American governments are weaponizing these deaths to fuel a genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, pledging to “open the gates of hell.” This war is a continuation of the Nakba, when in 1948, tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing violence sought refuge in Gaza. It’s a continuation of 75 years of Israeli occupation and apartheid.

Already this week, over 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed. The Israeli government has wrought complete and total devastation on Palestinians across Gaza, attacking hospitals, schools, mosques, marketplaces, and apartment buildings.

As we write, the Israeli government has shut off all electricity to Gaza. Hospitals cannot save lives, the internet will collapse, people will have no phones to communicate with the outside world, and drinking water for two million people will run out. Gaza will be plunged into darkness as Israel turns its neighborhoods to rubble. Still worse, Israel has openly stated an intention to commit mass atrocities and even genocide, with Prime Minister Netanyahu saying the Israeli response will “reverberate for generations.

And right now, the U.S. government is enabling the Israeli government’s atrocities, sending weapons, moving U.S. warships into proximity and sending U.S.-made munitions, and pledging blanket support and international cover for any actions taken by the Israeli government. Furthermore, the U.S. government officials are spreading racist, hateful, and incendiary rhetoric that will fuel mass atrocities and genocide.

The loss of Israeli lives is being used by our government to justify the rush to genocide, to provide moral cover for the immoral push for more weapons and more death. Palestinians are being dehumanized by our own government, by the media, by far too many U.S. Jewish institutions. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said that Israel is “fighting human animals” and should “act accordingly,” As Jews, we know what happens when people are called animals.

We can and we must stop this. Never again means never again — for anyone. [bold added]

Thank you JVP. Amen to that.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stuart Littlewood.

At least 28 members of the press were obstructed, harassed, or attacked while covering gubernatorial and state assembly elections across Nigeria on March 18 and 19, according to news reports and journalists who spoke with CPJ.

“Nigerian authorities should swiftly identify and hold accountable those responsible for the recent attacks, harassment, and intimidation of journalists covering state elections and ensure that members of the press feel safe to report on political issues,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “Freedom of the press during elections, which of course includes journalists’ safety to do their work, is fundamental to the democratic process.”

On March 18, at least 10 unidentified men punched and used sticks to hit a TV crew with the privately owned broadcaster Arise TV after they used a drone to film voting stations in southwestern Lagos state, according to a report by their outlet, a statement by the International Press Centre, a local media group, and one of the crew members, correspondent Oba Adeoye, who spoke with CPJ by phone.

Nearby security officers did not intervene while the men attacked Adeoye, camera operator Opeyemi Adenihun, and driver Yusuf Hassan, but seized the drone following the incident. Adenihun said he received medical treatment the next day for a cut to his face.

Lagos police spokesperson Benjamin Hundeyin told CPJ by phone that police were investigating and that Adenihun was invited for questioning on March 20 but said he did not appear. Adenihun told CPJ by phone that he had not heard from police since he reported the incident on March 18.

In Ikeja, the capital of Lagos state, Ima Elijah, a reporter with the privately owned news website Pulse.ng and her camera operator were harassed and forced out of a polling unit by unidentified individuals who insisted that the elections at that polling unit should not be reported by the media, according to a report and Instagram video by the outlet.

Also in Lagos state, two officials from Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission prevented Chibuike Chukwu, a reporter with the privately owned news website Independent, from taking pictures or videos at a polling place, according to a report by the outlet and a person familiar with the case who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

In the northern city of Lafia, the Nasarawa State capital, three state security officers slapped, punched, and used sticks to hit Edwin Philip, a reporter with private broadcaster Breeze 99.9 FM, on orders from a palace official at a polling unit, according to news reports and Philip, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

Philip had been inquiring about reports that the palace official had instructed some men to beat up a voter when the officers briefly seized his phone and began beating him. Philip received stitches at a hospital for a deep cut to his head and reported the incident to the police the same day. Nigeria’s Security and Civil Defence Corps condemned the attack and apologized on March 20. Rahman Namsel, a spokesperson of the Nasarawa State Police, told CPJ by phone that he was unaware that the case was reported to the police and said he would investigate the matter.

In the city of Lagos, at least 10 unidentified individuals punched Amarachi Amushie, a reporter with the privately-owned broadcaster Africa Independent Television, on the back, punched AIT camera operator Aliu Adeshina all over his body, and chased them out of a polling place, according to the IPC statement as well as Adeshina and Amushie, who spoke to CPJ by phone. Neither journalist sustained a significant injury. 

Also in Lagos, unidentified people chased AIT correspondent Henrietta Oke out of a polling place, and others confiscated AIT correspondent Nkiru Nwokedi’s phone at another polling place, returning it 20 minutes later following intervention from community leaders, according to that IPC statement and Nwokedi, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

In northern Kano state, dozens of unidentified men accused Ashiru Umar, editor and senior correspondent with the privately owned broadcaster Premier Radio, of filming them, grabbed his phone, and stomped on it at a polling place in Daladanchi, a town in northern Kano state, according to a report by the privately owned website Premium Times and Umar, who spoke to CPJ by phone.

The men beat Umar with their hands, sticks, and stones and attempted to stab him in the back with a knife. Umar was treated at a hospital for a swollen jaw, bruises, and minor cuts to his knee and hands and filed a report with the police, he told CPJ. CPJ’s calls and text messages to Kano police spokesperson Haruna Abdullahi did not receive any response.

In the city of Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, at least five unidentified individuals, including a masked man with an axe, chased at least 10 journalists after noticing them filming a voting station, according to the IPC statement, a report, and two of those reporters, Adejoke Adeleye, a reporter with the privately owned outlet PM News, and Yusuf Adeleke, a reporter and editor with the privately owned news website Newsflagship, who spoke to CPJ by phone. CPJ’s calls and text messages to Abimbola Oyeyemi, the state’s police spokesperson, did not receive a reply.

On March 19, an official from the Independent National Electoral Commission ordered four security officers to prevent Ayo Adenaiye, an Arise TV news correspondent, James Akpa Oche, a campus reporter at Bayero University Kano, Stephen Enoch, a reporter with Plus TV Africa, and at least three other journalists from various outlets from accessing a vote collation center in the city of Kano, according to a report by Premium Times, Adenaiye, Oche, Enoch, and another reporter who was there and spoke to CPJ by phone, requesting anonymity citing fear of reprisal. The officials had a list that excluded many journalists from entering the collation center, Adenaiye said. 

CPJ called INEC national spokesperson Festus Okoye for comment but did not receive any response.

Hundeyin, the Lagos police spokesperson, responded to CPJ’s request for comment sent by messaging app requesting evidence that the attacks in Lagos state were reported to his office.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In the morning of October 10, unidentified individuals dressed in police uniforms kidnapped Andino from his home in Comayagüela, northwest of the capital of Tegucigalpa, and later shot and killed him, according to a report by the Honduran free expression group C-Libre and news reports. Andino’s body was found on the street near his home, with his mouth taped shut and gunshot wounds to his face.

The journalist’s father, Edwin Emilio Andino, whom assailants took from the same home hours before, was found shot and killed in a different neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, according to those reports.

Andino, 23, graduated from journalism school in 2021 and worked as a producer for afternoon shows on the national La Tribuna TV (LTV) station, according to news reports and a statement from the outlet. LTV director Raúl Morazán told AFP that Andino had worked for the channel for two years and was unaware of any threats against the journalist.

“Honduran authorities should thoroughly investigate the killing of Edwin Josué Andino and his father and determine if it was related to his work as a journalist,” said Natalie Southwick, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator, in New York. “The Honduran government must end the impunity that has prevailed in the killings of journalists for so many years by conducting a swift and credible investigation that identifies all of those responsible and brings them to justice.”

On October 12, police said two cars used by the shooters, which were found in a warehouse with plastic handcuffs, tape, and traces of blood, were taken to the forensic examiners, according to news reports.

On October 15 and 18, police arrested several people with alleged ties to the Barrio 18 gang, including four who are allegedly connected to the killing of Andino and his father, according to multiple news reports. 

Police chief Gustavo Sánchez told media outlets that mobile devices confiscated from the suspects included “technical and scientific” evidence that at least three of the individuals were involved in killing the pair, according to those reports.

Security Minister Ramon Sabillon told CPJ via messaging app that police investigations were still ongoing.

Since 1992, at least eight journalists in Honduras have been murdered in connection with their work, according to CPJ research. CPJ is investigating the killings of 28 other journalists to determine if they were work-related.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.