General

There’s a 0.00002% Chance You’ve Got the Wrong Man

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 There’s a 0.00002% Chance You’ve Got the Wrong Man

The use of DNA to arrest Bryan Kohberger for the murder of four college students in Idaho reminds me that it’s time to bring the death penalty back in a big way.

Notwithstanding the absence of a single example, the possibility of executing the “wrong man” has been the left’s main line against the death penalty for decades. It’s the only argument that has ever lessened Americans’ support for capital punishment.

Well, guess what? Thanks to the miracle of DNA, now there’s no risk! The murderer can usually be identified with greater than 99.99% accuracy.

Good news, right? Nope! As we now know (also with 99.99% accuracy), liberals never cared about executing the innocent. They just want to spring killers.

Until fairly recently, DNA was a one-way ratchet, used to free criminals, but rarely to catch and convict them.

Recall that DNA fingerprinting was only invented in 1984. The first time DNA was ever used as evidence in a U.S. court was in 1987. Courts weren’t sure what to make of this “novel” technology, and of course, it was treated like witchcraft by the O.J. jury in 1995.

Back then, genetic evidence was used primarily to overturn jury verdicts from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s by poking holes in the prosecution’s theory of the crime.

The media whooped about every overturned conviction, falsely claiming the prisoner had been PROVED INNOCENT.

Hardly.

Suppose a child molester/murderer was convicted in 1998 based on the following evidence:

— Witnesses saw him abduct the child;

— Tire tracks by the body matched those on the defendant’s truck;

— His knife blade corresponded to the victim’s wounds;

— The child’s teddy bear was found in the defendant’s truck bed;

— When arrested, the accused had a written suicide note in his pocket, confessing to the crime;

— A strand of hair found on the defendant’s shoe was “consistent with” the victim’s hair.

If DNA testing later proved that the hair was not, in fact, the child’s, the conviction could be overturned. Who knows? The jury might have put a lot of stock in that strand of hair! Throw in allegations of “prosecutorial misconduct” or “ineffective assistance of counsel,” and stand back for the celebrities and nuns holding candlelight vigils!

The DNA didn’t prove “innocence”: It proved a strand of hair “consistent with” the victim’s did not belong to the victim after all. An overturned conviction may be “legal innocence” — like a Bronx jury refusing to convict — but it’s not “factual innocence.” Least of all did it warrant the words “proved innocent.”

The party ended when DNA began being used against criminals.

In 2018, investigators finally caught the Golden State Killer, who’d terrorized women across California in the 1970s and ’80s, murdering at least 13 people and raping dozens of women. Law enforcement ID’ed him by putting his DNA into two genealogy databases, GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA. It turned out to be Joseph James DeAngelo Jr., a former cop.

Normal people: Hurray! We got him!

Liberals: WE MUST PREVENT THE POLICE FROM USING DNA TO CATCH MURDERERS!

Wait a second! Weren’t you the ones worrying yourselves sick about the possibility of executing the innocent?

Until very recently, The New York Times op-ed page fairly bristled with columns insisting — in defiance of the evidence — that there were innocents on death row.

GUESS WHAT, NEW YORK TIMES? You can relax! There’s no danger of an innocent person being “strapped into an electric chair, or walked into a gas chamber, or injected with poison,” as Bob Herbert put it in 1994.

Forget human fallibility: We’ve got scientific infallibility. Trust the science, liberals!

Of course, as soon as DNA started being used to catch criminals rather than release them, the ACLU threw a fit, demanding that genealogy websites like Ancestry.com cease cooperating with law enforcement. No fair locking up killers!

As the Times explained: “Privacy advocates … have been worried about genetic genealogy since 2018.” Since 2018 … hmmm, why … oh, I see. That’s the year DNA was used to catch the Golden State Killer. Yeah, that sucked.

Google and Facebook know when we’re menstruating, we’re forced to undergo proctological exams at the airport, self-driving cars are careening onto sidewalks and killing pedestrians, but WE MUST PROTECT THE SERIAL KILLER’S PRIVACY!

This is the left’s specialty: Coming up with new ways to make life worse without enriching it. So now law enforcement has to face another pointless hurdle to solve heinous murders.

What possible explanation is there for this mentality other than that liberals want murderers on the streets? (Just not their streets.)

Genealogical websites merely allow forensic scientists to identify distant relatives of the person who left DNA at a crime scene — such as on the knife sheath lying next to one of the four murdered students in Idaho — in order to put some people in the ballpark and take others out. There’s no danger of getting the wrong man. To the contrary, DNA steers investigators away from the wrong man.

True, it will make life much harder for rapists, child molesters and murderers. It will put an end to “serial killers,” who will now get caught after their first kill. I’m trying to fathom who else would have a problem with it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Democratic Party.

COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER

Excerpts from David Irving’s “Churchill’s War”

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Someone who calls himself True Discipline has put out an extensive Twitter thread with excerpts from Churchill’s War, Vol. 1, including material on Jews financing Churchill, etc.

Jews and the media in pre-war Britain:

World Economic Forum Meeting Convenes on MLK Day: Be Prepared to Participate in This Year’s WEF Conference By Studying the Agenda

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The World Economic Forum is convening its annual Meeting in Davos Switzerland starting tomorrow, January 16, Martin Luther King Day in the US, through January 20th. This year’s theme is Cooperation in a Fragmented World. The WEF is keen to exploit perceived and engineered “critical inflection points,” “triggers,” a “brittle global system,” “precarious disequilibrium,” “heightened geo-economic fragmentation, financial sector vulnerabilities, including stretched asset prices and high debt levels, and a climate crisis spiralling out of control,” “systemic and interconnected risks,” and “uncertainty and fragility.”

This all appears in the first introductory paragraph. At this year’s WEF Meeting, the world is in crisis! Fear not however, the WEF and its wealthy and powerful partners are working on the solutions. Never let a good crisis go to waste, and never consider that the WEF and its partners helped engineer and impose the crises they now seek to exploit.

The WEF will ”reaffirm the value and imperative of dialogue and public-private cooperation, not only to navigate the current cascading crises but, more importantly, to drive tangible, system-positive change for the long term.” Fundamentally changing the world on the opportunity of crises will take time, but WEF will get us there. This tremendous effort is done “in the spirit of improving the state of the world.”

…to turn defensive measures into proactive, vision-driven policies and business strategies will be at the heart of the meeting.”

Business is always at the heart. Count on more future crises though. The magnitude of current crises and the potential of future ones demands no less.

Next we come to The Programme (does it look more stylish in British?).
This meeting occurs “in the context of the meta trends of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and climate change.” We are to understand both are inevitable, and so we must impose a technocratic tyranny on the pretext of global catastrophic warming which shows no scientific basis. A paradox: science will save us in the 4IR, but science is failing us in justifying climate change.

The programme will have the dual focus of looking at levers to address the current challenges while at the same time setting them against the backdrop of attendant system transformation imperatives.” Translation: money and power will impose their will on the world, changing it in every way imaginable and some that are not, to further centralize money and power.

The WEF Meeting has 5 areas of focus:
1. Addressing the Current Energy and Food Crises in the context of a New System for Energy, Climate and Nature
The Davos crowd flies in on their hydro-carbon-fueled private jets from all over the world because “further action is needed to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change.”
”Decoupling economic growth from energy consumption, particularly in emerging economies” means ensuring Europeans starve and freeze for a lack of Russian natural gas and oil, Africa remains in the Stone Age while its resources are plundered, and China can build more coal plants and pollute the air. “Renewables” which appear “green” can be deployed, though they are woefully inadequate and highly expensive to meet the current desperate need. Good for investors though. Don’t anyone hope to rely on existing, lower-cost, abundant and effective energy systems though. “this moment should be utilized to develop more ambitious, comprehensive, and sustainable infrastructure investment plans that helps the world to meet the 2030 targets.” Die today, but invest in the future.

  1. Addressing the Current High Inflation, Low Growth, High Debt Economy in the context of a New System for Investment, Trade and Infrastructure
    ”Tighter monetary policies are also having knock on effects on emerging markets, with many now struggling to service their debts.” Yeah, because WEF partner investors made loans on poor nations they could not afford, while stealing their resources through “privatization” schemes.
    ”Protectionist measures also threaten the global trade agenda which was at the centre of economic prosperity of the last 30 years.” Any nation-state responding to economic crises that uses tariffs, trade arrangements, currency stabilization and other measures to protect its workers’ wages, national GDP and tax base is Bad. If the “global trade agenda” was so great for the last 30 years, why are we now at a crisis?
    ”This comes following the COVID-19 pandemic…” Yes, the best thing that ever happened to the globalists like you but pushed (as you say) 120 million (surely many more) into extreme poverty.
    ”Rebuilding trust in the international system will take careful collaboration between all stakeholders and a new vision for economic prosperity and development.” The problem is that “rebuilding trust” can only be achieved with more censorship, surveillance, mass propaganda and lockdown control measures, and you know it. “All stakeholders” will avidly collaborate in that, though.
  2. Addressing the Current Industry Headwinds in the context of a New System for Harnessing Frontier Technologies for Private Sector Innovation and Resilience
    ”Companies will need to foster emerging technologies of 4IR…” All solutions are technocratic. This will include tech which can reach directly into our brains.
    ”Core businesses” will “shape the future socio-enviroeconomic prosperity.” Does that include us? I don’t see any way that We the People of the world are “stakeholders” in this. WEF has already said by 2030 we will own nothing and we will be happy.
  3. Addressing the Current Social Vulnerabilities in the context of a New System for Work, Skills and Care
    ”Real wages are also declining across many job categories in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis”— another crisis the WEF and its partners are elated about—they’re not “workers” in any meaningful sense. We know the Hegellian Dialectic of manufactured crisis, directed reaction and imposed solution. In this case, the WEF solution is a “new social contract that supports strong investment in education, skills and healthcare that fills unmet demand, lays the ground for social mobility and ultimately future-proofs economies.” Translation: brainwash and robotize the workforce for the new dystopia, force toxic vaccine-based and technological medicine on the survivors, push wages down to the lowest subsistence levels world-wide and make it impossible for any resistance to this Technocrat’s dream.
  4. Addressing the Current Geopolitical Risks in the context of a New System for Dialogue and Cooperation in a Multipolar World
    Dialogue and Cooperation sound swell, but this: “Systems that brought common benefit, such as trade, have been used as weapons to punish rivals…” Trade is now bad if it is done outside the WEF’s “new system for a multi-polar world.” How multi-polar is it if all are cooperating and benefiting at the exclusive invite-only private club of the WEF?
    ”Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the latest move away from what was, for the first quarter century after the end of the Cold War, a largely cooperative global order.”
    Well then maybe NATO and Jews such as Victorian Nuland should not have pushed NATO membership on Ukraine and engineered the Maidan Revolution that brought gay pride parades to Orthodox Ukrainian cities and towns. And the Jewish President Zelensky should not have threatened to install missiles pointed at Russia and called Putin another Hitler. Besides, tell the Palestinians, Libyans, Syrians, Lebanese, Iranians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Bolivians, Chinese and many others, even US and Israeli citizens, about the “largely cooperative global order.”

The Meeting “will revolve around the following 3 archetypes:”

  • Dialogues to forgeunderstanding and alignment and exchange insights
  • Gatherings of communities of purpose to drive tangible action on key global issues
  • Opportunities for foresight and discoveryto scale society critical innovations

Alignment on what? Global technocratic tyranny and suppression of dissent? Yes.
None of these people are elected, we are not included in their “communities of purpose,” and their purpose is not ours.
”Society critical innovations” means their Panopticon surveillance and control technologies such as facial recognition cameras, social credit scores, digital ID and vax passports, and AI monitoring and implementation using advanced drone and robotic “law enforcement” and crowd control.

“Geo-economic and geopolitical deliberations” at the Meeting will feature Country Strategy Dialogues, Diplomacy Dialogues and the Informal Gathering of World Economic Leaders as well as the International Business Council, the Community of Chairpersons and the Industry Governors. A more grotesque Cabal of plutocrats could not be assembled.

This is Invitation only, and here’s the guest list:
Chief executives and chairs of the Forum 1,000 Partner companies,; public figures from across the world and heads of International Organizations; leaders from the foremost civil society, labour, media organizations as well as top thinkers and academics, and Members of the Global Innovators and Technology Pioneers community, the Community of Global Shapers, the Forum of Young Global Leaders and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

These are the World Power Elite, the in-club movers and shapers, the .01%, and the enemies of the rest of humanity. We the People are not invited—

But wait! WEF says “Many sessions will be livestreamed publicly on the Forum’s website and social media channels, as well as its state-of-the-art digital app, TopLink, providing an opportunity for the Forum’s Digital Members community and the public to engage in deliberations.” The Public? That’s us!

“Timely expert briefings will help participants and the public gain insights on the latest developments in current affairs at the time of the meeting.” The timely briefings will influence our perception to view the WEF meeting as benign and beneficial to humanity and the Earth, to accept their technocratic world control vision, and not to be impolite in denouncing them during our public participation.

I’ve had enough of the WEF and its mad scheme for world domination based on manufactured and imaginary crises. I hope you all join me in “engaging in deliberations” over the next 5 days. It’s time the WEF got a piece of our minds after all. The 4IR would literally take a piece of our minds to control us, so let’s give the WEF a piece that we control. The real crisis the WEF faces is a crisis of trust, and it knows it. Do join me over the next 5 days in expressing to the WEF meeting participants that we don’t trust them as far as we can throw the Earth.

One last matter. The WEF closes its Meeting announcement with a terse statement under Safety and Security: “The World Economic Forum attaches the highest priority to protecting the safety and well-being of participants, staff and the local community. For our Annual Meeting, we are working closely with public authorities to develop policies and protocols covering every aspect of the meeting, including health, safety and security.”
Sure, the highest priority goes to protecting the participants, while they don’t give a damn about our “safety and security.” In fact, they are actively working to depopulate us. News reports say the WEF has hired 5000 troops from the Swiss army to defend the Meeting from— who? This level of security does not build trust and foster participation and cooperation. A small army is being deployed to repel our participation.

We still have an opportunity for “the public to engage in deliberations.” We’ll see what kind of censorship and suppression we will encounter as we submit our denunciations and criticisms of the WEF “stakeholder” participants over the next 5 days. Share your experiences with others as the meeting goes along and do encourage everyone you know who is aware enough to submit their input too. The WEF needs to know now.

A Tenth White American Voice

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Recently (it’s now January, 2023) I wrote a couple of articles that provide the backdrop for what’s here: “The American Political System and White Discourse”; and “Nine American White Voices.”  The thrust of the two was the suggestion that a possible underpinning for American White racial advocacy is this country’s political and cultural heritage, with the emphasis on “possible.”  I’m not contending that this frame of reference should be the way American White advocates look at racial concerns; rather, that it is a way.   It happens to be my outlook, but it needn’t be anyone else’s.  Personally, I’ve found White advocacy to be too strident, alpha-male-dominated, European-referenced, collectivist, authoritarian, and fringy-right-wing.   I’ve gone so far as to argue for gay and lesbian involvement in the movement (“The White Racial Movement and Gays.”)

In the week following the “American Political System and White Discourse” posts, I identified nine people I believe deserve consideration in this country’s racial dialogue and debate: philosopher, essayist, and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson; novelist and short story writer Ernest Hemingway; Civil War combatant William T. Anderson; film director Sam Peckinpah; poet Emily Dickinson; artist and art educator Robert Henri; U.S. Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin; comic book illustrator Steve Ditko; and country singer Hank Williams.  The “Nine White American Voices” article was given over to brief references—quotes, descriptions, accounts, lyrics in Williams’ case—to the nine.

What I didn’t note in that article and should have, and I’m doing it here, is to point out that I didn’t just pick the nine names out of a hat, as it were.  At some point in the last decade, these nine individuals jumped out at me.  I gave them time and attention.  They had an impact on my thinking and, really, my total being—and that includes Hank Williams’ lyrics to “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”  I decided that each of them was a White American voice: I couldn’t envision their expressions coming from a Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Jewish person, or from a European.  All nine were inside me, part of the physically-felt internal referent I drew upon, when I produced the 59 articles I have written for this publication over the last few years.  To understand me and what I have written is to take into account, or at least sense, that someone like comics illustrator Steve Ditko has had a major impact on me and someone like Anthony Ludovici hasn’t.

With that as the context, I’ll cite a “tenth White American voice” here: Samuel Francis Smith.  Just now I had to look up Smith’s name; I didn’t know it before.  In 1831 while a student at the Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts, he wrote the lyrics to “America” (“My Country ‘Tis of Thee”) to the melody of “God Save the Queen.”  Doing so, he contrasted the British monarchy with the young American republic.   I remember singing the song in elementary school, and I took its words to heart.  I still take them to heart, including, and I’m not religious, the references to God:

My country ’tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee I sing
Land where my fathers died
Land of the pilgrim’s pride
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring

My native country, thee
Land of the noble free
Thy name I love
I love thy rocks and rills
Thy woods and templed hills
My heart with rapture fills
Like that above

Let music swell the breeze
And ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom’s song
Let mortal tongues awake
Let all that breathe partake
Let rocks their silence break
The sound prolong

Our Father God to Thee
Author of liberty
To Thee I sing
My country ’tis of Thee
Sweet land of liberty
For all eternity
Let freedom ring

All to say, White nationalism and Alain de Benoist don’t have the favorable ring for me that they do for others.  I identify with and care about all White people, but I am first and foremost a White American who loves my country and what it stands for.

 

Dead End for Serial Killers

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Dead End for Serial Killers

DNA evidence has now shown with greater than 99.9998% probability that Bryan Kohberger was the man who murdered four University of Idaho students in the early morning of Nov. 13, 2022, beautifully illustrating why there will be no more serial killers. As the world gets worse in so many ways, here’s one way it’s better. (Unless the ACLU gets its way.)

Between the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and DNA, any budding Ted Bundy can commit one hideous murder, but then he’ll get caught. No more victims cut down in the prime of their lives, destroyed families or terrified communities. Monsters like Kohberger get one shocking crime, not a series.

It’s nearly impossible not to leave your DNA on something, particularly in the middle of a frenzied attack. It seems that Kohberger, a Ph.D. student in criminology, left his DNA on the button of a knife sheath, found next to one of the dead bodies. By following Kohberger and examining his trash, forensic scientists were able to establish that his father was 99.9998% likely to be the father of the person who committed the murders.

      Good luck poking a hole in that, ACLU!

      There were loads of other clues, but those would have gone unnoticed without the DNA pointing to Kohberger in the first place. Moreover, the other evidence might be enough to convince any non-O.J. juror, but would have led to decades of law professors, nuns, chubby coeds, New York Times reporters and other murder activists howling that Kohberger was “innocent.”

      E.g.:

      — Kohberger’s white Hyundai Elantra was seen on camera speeding away from the crime scene on a quiet residential street shortly after 4:20 a.m. on the night of the murders.

      Thousands of people in Idaho drive white Hyundai Elantras!

      — Cellphone data showed Kohberger going past the murder house a dozen times in the three months before the crime and, most suspiciously, again at 9 a.m. the next morning, before the police had even arrived.

      So? He’s a driving enthusiast.

      — Kohberger started wearing surgical gloves after the murders.

      Duh! Heard of the pandemic? He’s just a dutiful citizen.

      — Police observed him fanatically cleaning his car after the murders — he didn’t “miss an inch.”

      He’s tidy. 

      — He put his family’s garbage in the neighbor’s bin.

      Anyone could get confused about garbage bins late at night. That doesn’t make him a murderer.

      But with science proving beyond doubt that Kohberger’s DNA was on the knife sheaf found next to the corpses, the fantastical excuses of the murder lobby are so much hot air.

      So why aren’t the police and FBI bragging their heads off about the forensic genealogy that got them to focus on Kohberger?

      Sure, they were looking for a guy with a white Hyundai Elantra, but there are 22,000 white Hyundai Elantras registered in Idaho alone — and Kohberger’s wasn’t one of them. He lived 10 miles away, across state lines in Washington. Why were the police looking at his cellphone data, his behavior and his trash, and not that of the other 22,000 Elantra owners?

      As Heather Tal Murphy writes in Slate: “Though multiple news outlets, including CNN and ABC News, reported that forensic genealogy helped with the case, none have explained exactly how it was used or why it did not appear in the affidavit.” (Emphasis mine.)

      I think I know why they haven’t explained! Law enforcement doesn’t want to sic the murder lobby on whichever genealogy service helped catch an infamous murderer.

      In a sane world, these genealogists would be taking a bow, accepting the eternal gratitude of the victims’ parents and everyone living in Moscow, Idaho, as well as the dozens of future victims this butcher will never be able to kill now.

      Instead, they’re about to have the murderer lobby screaming at them for violating a psycho killer’s “privacy.” The pro-murder crowd has already intimidated the largest DNA database, Ancestry.com (owned by Blackstone Group), into refusing to help law enforcement solve murders. 23andMe also refuses to cooperate with murder investigations.

      All this so that some jackass on a law faculty can say, Hey, congratulate me! I just hamstrung the police in their ability to catch the provably guilty!

      Just know that, while you are sleeping peacefully tonight, secure in the knowledge that a thrill killer has been taken off the streets, liberals are hard at work to make sure the next one gets away.

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER

Ruthless People: “New history challenges Israel’s hold on Western imagination”

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This review, from Mondoweiss, is worth reading in full, but what strikes me is the absolutely ruthlessness of the Zionists. We need people like that.

Notice re the British:

The British never speak out plainly, although their private comments are insightful, drawing on the prodigious intelligence they possess about almost everything that is happening (intelligence Suarez taps extensively). They never dare to really crack down on the Zionists, even as terrorists attack and kill their soldiers, police, bureaucrats, and high officials, and deploy hundreds of highly sophisticated bombs to wreak havoc. They fear to provoke the outrage of a pro-Zionist American political establishment and media that will attack U.S. loans crucial to Britain’s economic survival. Mandate officials realize that a crackdown will trigger a mass uprising by the entire Yishuv.

And they went after anti-Zionist Jews:

Most victims of Zionist targeted killings in that period were Jews, Suarez writes, such as Dr. Ya’cov Israel de Hahn, a prominent critic of Zionism, who was shot down in Tel Aviv in 1924 (after five earlier murder attempts). Many other Jews were murdered, attacked, or had their businesses torched for failing to support Zionism (often just for employing non-Jews or refusing to pay extortion to Zionist terror groups). The fear and intimidation kept Jews in line, even if they disliked Zionism. …

The Zionists were eager to highlight the desperate plight of the Jews of Europe but not to alleviate it (except by immigration to Palestine).

*   *   *

BY   
PALESTINE HIJACKED

How Zionism Forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea
by Thomas Suarez
470 pp. Interlink Publishing, $25.00

One of the greatest triumphs of Zionism is to have neutralized reaction to its genocidal expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, the Nakba. Even after Israel’s own “New Historians” exposed the irrefutable facts, in the 1980s, the Western world’s fixation on “Israel’s right to exist” scarcely budged. Backed by such mantras, Zionists only had to ease back on their beloved version of Israel’s “War of Independence” (David versus Goliath, etc.) and make a few concessions to the grim realities of war. They correctly calculated that peoples’ hearts were still with the Holocaust survivors, struggling in the fog and fear of a hard-fought war to create a safe haven for the Jewish people. Sensitive souls might shed a few tears over the tragic excesses (“on both sides”) but they could cling to Israel’s basic goodness and necessity – and still trust it to find a solution to the “plight of the Palestinians.” …

This wall of favoritism, prejudice and willful ignorance faces two new challenges, however. First, Israel’s tougher-than-ever, newly-elected government is casting doubt on the basic character of the Jewish state. Second, a seminal new study has rolled out direct, contemporaneous evidence of the largely hidden, hugely successful pre-1948 Zionist campaign of double-dealing, disinformation, intimidation, and assassination, crowned by a torrent of terrorism that set the stage for the whirlwind expulsion of 80 percent of the Palestinian population in 1948.

The outcome was locked in before the UN partition resolution of November 1947 had even been proposed. Suarez quotes senior officials and observers at the time, including Zionists, to show that the UN partition plan was merely intended to serve as a fig leaf to give Britain cover to cut and run from Palestine. No one in the know really believed the Zionists would adhere to the partition resolution they signed on to — and they didn’t. They forcibly took as much of Palestine as they could without even waiting for the British to decamp. The great powers merely blinked and moved on, with no desire to remember, much less discuss, events that reflected badly on them. Palestinians’ and other Arabs’ vehement protests were ignored, while comforting myths of innocence were embraced by Jews and non-Jews. …

The effect is dramatic, a devastating narrative of relentless Zionist aggression against any who stood in the way. In their own words, Zionist perpetrators express their impatience and fury, the British their rising frustration and dismay, and the victims their anguish and despair — including numerous non-Zionist Jews among the countless Palestinians. We listen in on police, spies, terrorists, bystanders, reporters, diplomats, political chiefs, et al.

It is overwhelming to take in the spectacular violence, the lies and tricks, the exuberant intimidation, and the absolute dedication of the Zionists over decades. But we should be overwhelmed if we are to get a sense of the bewilderment of the Palestinians, the British, the many non-Zionist Jews, and eventually much of the world, at the birth of Israel. The book pulls us along through wave after wave of deceptions, bombings, shootings, clever escapes, daring infiltrations, denials, accusations, obfuscations, demands, mad propaganda, and intimidation that break over the land. We see the Palestinians provoked into the doomed, desperate 1936-1939 revolt against the British and their Zionist clients. Next, the British are beaten down and terrorized until they give up the mandate. All this before the Nakba erupted.

At the outset of Suarez’s narrative, the British assume that the Zionists will be useful pawns in their war against the Kaiser and their post-World War I competition with other world powers. They are gung-ho to support the “public lie” that the Balfour Declaration’s “Jewish National Home” will not disadvantage the Arabs of Palestine or lead to a Zionist state in Palestine. As it turns out, the British serve as the pawns of the Zionists. They roll out a red carpet for Zionist immigration and grant to the “Yishuv,” the Jewish community in Palestine, many rights and privileges — and to the Palestinians none. They crush Palestinian political and military resistance during the Arab Revolt.

In 1939, however, when they try to put some brakes on the Zionists with the White Paper, things get nasty. Britain finds itself trapped by its own lies. It can hardly make an abrupt about-face to tell the world — especially with the Holocaust in the background — that the Zionists actually are rough customers, who have always sought Jewish supremacy in Palestine, and are proving impossible to control.

The British never speak out plainly, although their private comments are insightful, drawing on the prodigious intelligence they possess about almost everything that is happening (intelligence Suarez taps extensively). They never dare to really crack down on the Zionists, even as terrorists attack and kill their soldiers, police, bureaucrats, and high officials, and deploy hundreds of highly sophisticated bombs to wreak havoc. They fear to provoke the outrage of a pro-Zionist American political establishment and media that will attack U.S. loans crucial to Britain’s economic survival. Mandate officials realize that a crackdown will trigger a mass uprising by the entire Yishuv.

In a final comeuppance the British are cast as loathsome villains standing in the way of the Jewish liberation struggle, accused by self-appointed Jewish leaders of “waging a war of extermination on the Jewish people, . . . successors of Hitler’s extermination campaign.” Claiming to be underdog freedom fighters, the Zionists publicly boast of their terror attacks and constant robberies as acts of heroic resistance. They raise funds in the West for their noble struggle. Their pose as underdog fighters also allows them to justify the buildup of a large and heavily armed fighting force that by 1948 is ready to sweep away the poorly armed and trained Palestinians, whom the British savagely keep down to the very end. …

The debunking of myths about the British, the UN, and the Palestinians is essential to understand the character of the Zionists but will never suffice, as long as people (Jews and non-Jews) maintain the assumption that Zionists were and are primarily dedicated to the safety and welfare of the Jewish people and religion. Suarez acknowledges that, “For the victims of pogroms in Europe and Russia, the attraction to Zionism was unquestionably sincere.” He adds, however, that “history makes plain . . . that the driving motivation of the Zionist movement itself was not Jewish safety and dignity, but an ethnically-predicated settler state.” Avoiding thorny questions of Jewish identity, religious faith, and history, Suarez simply documents Zionist mistreatment and manipulation of Jews in Palestine and the Diaspora to make sure that they served the cause of Zionism, and that cause only.

The contempt for non-Zionist Jews was deep. In Britain, prominent Jewish scholars, cabinet members, military veterans, and the like, who attempted to block or soften the Balfour Declaration because they believed it was bad for Jews, were dismissed by the Zionists as out-of-touch, “assimilated Cosmopolitan Jews.” And the contempt was hard: Most victims of Zionist targeted killings in that period were Jews, Suarez writes, such as Dr. Ya’cov Israel de Hahn, a prominent critic of Zionism, who was shot down in Tel Aviv in 1924 (after five earlier murder attempts). Many other Jews were murdered, attacked, or had their businesses torched for failing to support Zionism (often just for employing non-Jews or refusing to pay extortion to Zionist terror groups). The fear and intimidation kept Jews in line, even if they disliked Zionism.

Zionist leaders’ animus toward the Diaspora was most chilling in the case of the Nazis. Early on they rejected the Jewish anti-Nazi boycott and even helped Germany to circumvent it through the Haavara agreement of 1933. Privately they welcomed the boost Nazi persecution gave to Jewish immigration to Palestine (and later warmly hosted Adolph Eichmann with that in mind). After 1939, the main goal was to weaken Britain in Palestine, even though that hindered the fight against Hitler. The Jewish Agency, the institutional leader of Zionists in Palestine, discouraged Jews from joining the British army, unless by way of a segregated Jewish corps. Churchill authorized a Jewish Brigade in mid-1944, but the soldiers used their training mostly to fight the British. At the height of the Holocaust in 1942, a memo of the Jewish Agency tagged “non-Zionist Jews” as the “foremost enemy” of the movement.

The Zionists were eager to highlight the desperate plight of the Jews of Europe but not to alleviate it (except by immigration to Palestine). So, the (Zionist) Board of Deputies of British Jews, aided by Stephen Wise, the American president of the (Zionist) World Jewish Congress, torpedoed a 1943 effort in Parliament, led by Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, to get Jews out of Axis territory and over to England. The next year, Zionist leaders blocked a vast plan blessed by President Franklin Roosevelt and the British government to resettle hundreds of thousands of mostly Jewish refugees. “The dominant vocal Jewish [Zionist] leadership of America won’t stand for it,” Roosevelt told an incredulous adviser, Morris Ernst. When Ernst still tried to lobby influential Zionist friends, he was called a traitor. The problem, of course, was that the refugees’ destination would not be Palestine. Similarly, the Zionists fought to block Jewish orphans from being adopted by European families (Jewish families in many cases). After the war, they even engineered the forcible removal of many Jewish orphans from adoptive homes in which they wished to remain.

A huge campaign concerned Jewish survivors in post-war displaced persons (DP) camps. The first step was to get them segregated from non-Jewish DPs, Suarez explains. Then Jewish Agency and Irgun personnel indoctrinated, intimidated, and if necessary, beat up DPs, until they agreed to insist they be sent only to Palestine. DPs also underwent military training in the camps; many took part in the widespread, though now forgotten, Zionist terror campaign to intimidate European, as well as British leaders. Shiploads of DPs were shunted around to dramatize the storyline that Palestine was the only acceptable solution to Jewish trauma. The tragic denouement of the highly stage-managed affair of the refugee ship “Exodus,” in which desperate but determined Holocaust survivors were literally dragged kicking and screaming back to Germany, resulted from Zionist pressure that prevented them from disembarking in Southern France. Given such thuggish actions against fellow Jews, as well as against their British sponsors, and above all the violence against all Palestinians, it is no wonder that Suarez quotes many sources who saw similarities with the Nazis. …

Jews prominent defenders of Drag Story Hour

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From New York Jewish Week.

As right-wing protestors descend upon Drag Story Hour events across New York, they have frequently been met by a loosely connected movement of counter protestors that includes many progressive Jewish groups.

Since September, right-wing activists have routinely protested Drag Story Hour events, where a person dressed in drag reads to children. The aim of these story times, according to the founder of the Drag Story Hour New York chapter, is to promote literacy while giving children positive queer role models.

At the Queens Public Library in Jackson Heights on Dec. 29, at least five members of the Proud Boys, a far-right extremist group, showed up to harass people attending a story session. Those protestors were met by hundreds of activists from the other side, many of whom are Jewish. They included members of Jews For Racial and Economic Justice, Outlive Them, United Against Racism and Fascism and other other organizations.  …

Farber told the New York Jewish Week that last Thursday there were at least 300 people defending Drag Story Hour at the Queens library branch, from all ages and backgrounds. Farber added that “there are a lot of Jews” doing the behind-the-scenes work, the organizing and the outreach that goes into “pulling these defenses off.”

“Jews are so heavily represented in the left,” Farber said. “There’s been a reinfusion of energy on what people call the Jewish Left. There are people getting self organized into small groups that do take political action into what they believe is needed to create a better world.”

Sophie Ellman-Golan, communications director for Jews for Racial & Economic Justice, another prominent activist group that’s defending Drag Story Hour, told the New York Jewish Week that it’s important “to drown out fascists and neo-Nazis” by showing up in solidarity.