Israel and Anti-Gentile Traditions

What follows is a fairly honest article from the website My Jewish Learning. In the article he refers to Israel Shahak and his books. To watch videos with interviews and talks with Israel Shakak, go here. Go here to view his books on Amazon. Some of his books are available online for free.

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Israel Shahak's theory that anti-Gentile traditions have influenced Israeli policy is well known in both Arab and anti-Semitic circles, but Jews have yet to properly confront it.

Despite its title, Israel Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion(1994) is not your average intro-to-Judaism book. It is more likely to be found in a Muslim day school in Damascus than a Jewish day school in New York, more likely to be cited on a neo-Nazi website, than your local synagogue’s.

Shahak’s book is an overview of Judaism and Zionism, which focuses on Jewish anti-Gentile traditions. Though he recognizes that many of these teachings are no longer authoritative, Shahak believes that they have, nonetheless, had a profound influence on the development of Jewish identity over the centuries. Most importantly, he believes that they have seeped into Zionist ideology and have affected the way Israel interacts with its non-Jewish citizens and neighbors.

Shahak, a Holocaust survivor who died in 2001, was for many years a professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He also led the Israeli Civil Rights League from the mid-1970s until 1990. In Israel, he was a controversial figure, but he was revered by the international left as a tireless advocate for human rights.

Are Jewish Lives Worth More?

In Jewish History, Jewish Religion Shahak brings numerous texts and legal rulings to demonstrate Jewish antipathy to non-Jews. He mentions a passage from the Talmud that says that Jesus will be punished in hell by being immersed in boiling excrement. He relates that Jewish tradition teaches pious Jews to burn copies of the New Testament and curse the mothers of the dead when passing non-Jewish cemeteries. Shahak highlights the famous passage from Leviticus commanding Jews to "love thy neighbor as thyself" and mentions that, according to rabbinic interpretation, "thy neighbor" refers only to Jews.

Shahak further suggests that the Jewish tradition values Jewish life more than Gentile life. He cites Maimonides’ assertion that whereas one who murders a Jew is subject to the death penalty, one who murders a non-Jew is not (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Murder 2:11). According to another leading commentator, indirectly causing the death of a non-Jew is no sin at all (Rabbi Yoel Sirkis, Bayit Hadash, commentary on Bet Yosef, Yoreh Deah 158).

Shahak reiterates the well-known Jewish teaching that the duty to save a life supersedes all other obligations and notes that the rabbis interpreted this to apply to Jews only. According to the Talmud, "Gentiles are neither to be lifted [out of a well] nor hauled down [into it]" (Tractate Avodah Zarah, 26b). Maimonides writes: "As for Gentiles with whom we are not at war…their death must not be caused, but it is forbidden to save them if they are at the point of death; if, for example, one of them is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued, for it is written: ‘neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy fellow’–but [a Gentile] is not thy fellow" (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Murder 4:11).

Indeed, Maimonides is the focus of much of Shahak’s analysis. Shahak believes that the 12th-century philosopher and talmudist was a Gentile-hater and racist. He quotes Maimonides’ statement that, "their [the Turks and the blacks] nature is like the nature of mute animals, and according to my opinion they are not on the level of human beings" (Guide For the Perplexed, Book III, Chapter 51).

Practical Ramifications

Shahak recognizes that many of these traditions are not followed in practice, but he believes that, in general, they have been covered up, instead of confronted. In support of this claim, he refers to another a violent passage from Maimonides that is not translated in the bilingual addition of the Guide published in Jerusalem in 1962. He sees this as a deliberate deception on the part of the editors to soften classical Jewish militancy. His own English translation of the passage, which discusses the command to kill Jewish infidels reads: "It is a duty to exterminate them with one’s own hands. Such as Jesus of Nazareth and his pupils, and Tzadoq and Baitos [the founders of the Sadducees] and their pupils, may the name of the wicked rot."

According to Shahak, Jewish "traditions of contempt" infiltrated Zionism and have affected Israeli policy towards its Arab citizens and the Palestinians. He cites three main areas where he believes this has occurred: residency rights, employment rights, and equality before the law.

As an example, he mentions that 92% of Israel’s land is legally restricted to Jews. While in other countries it would be labeled anti-Semitic if a policy excluded Jews from living on or owning land, in the Israeli context Jews tolerate it. He adds that based on the distinction in classical Judaism between reverence for Jewish cemeteries and not for non-Jewish ones, the state of Israel has destroyed hundreds of Muslim cemeteries, including one in order to build the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv.

Perhaps most disturbingly, Shahak cites a booklet published by the Central Regional Command of the Israeli Army which states that it is permissible, and even encouraged, to kill civilians encountered in war. "In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good." In a footnote, Shahak mentions that this booklet was withdrawn from circulation on the command of the Chief of Staff, but he nonetheless, believes that even the brief appearance of such a text can only be explained by an accurate assessment of the inequality in Jewish tradition between the lives of Jews and non-Jews.

Jews Have Ignored Shahak’s Work, Others Haven’t

Whatever your opinion of Shahak and his arguments, Jewish History, Jewish Religion should be taken seriously for a number of reasons.

For one, the texts that Shahak cites are real (though Shahak’s sporadic use of footnotes makes it difficult to check all of them). Oftentimes, the interpretation of these texts is debatable and their prominence in Judaism negligible, but nonetheless, they are part of Jewish tradition and, therefore, cannot be ignored. And, indeed, they are not ignored. As alluded to above, Shahak’s work is very popular in both Arab and Muslim circles (Radio Islam contains the full text of Shahak’s work) as well as groups that are often openly anti-Semitic (David Duke and Bradley Smith include Shahak’s book on their websites).

Others use Shahak’s work in their presentation of Judaism, and that fact alone should make it relevant to contemporary Jews.

Shahak was an ardent secularist and anti-Zionist, but he wrote his book as a challenge to Jews to engage the chauvinist, dehumanizing elements of Jewish tradition and to help create a self-critical and sensitive modern Judaism. It’s true that he combed the rabbinic tradition in search of hateful passages, often–though by no means always–misinterpreting them and taking them out of context, but this may be beside the point.

Jewish texts exist that can be–and are–understood to be vehemently xenophobic. These texts must be openly and honestly grappled with, explained, and if necessary, repudiated.

Ari Alexander is the co-founder and co-Executive Director of Children of Abraham, an international organization dedicated to the promotion of dialogue between Jewish and Muslim teenagers around the world. In January 2008, he relocated to Paris, where he co-founded Génération Dialogue, with Ambassador Jacques Huntzinger, in order to build a web platform that creates a space for intercultural dialogue between young people in predominantly immigrant suburbs and their peers in Paris. Ari has spoken at numerous international conferences about Children of Abraham in South Korea, Spain, Senegal, Belgium, Morocco, Tunisia and Qatar. He completed two Master's degrees in the United Kingdom as a Marshall Scholar: an MA in Comparative Ethnic Conflict from the Queen's University of Belfast, and an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Oxford. His research led Ari to spend time living in Jerusalem, Beirut and Damascus. Ari graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in History. He has also served as a counselor and facilitator at Seeds of Peace International Camp and Face to Face/Faith to Faith, in addition to working with Jewish teenagers in United Synagogue Youth and at the Lauder Camp in Hungary.

Jews Face Special Risks, Former Head of Homeland Security Says...

The article below is from 2012 and was in the Jewish Forward, but that's only 4 years ago. (See here and here for articles that are similar and more recent.) The reality is, the Jews do not face any more special risks than any other group of people. They really don't. Their greatest risk comes from people like me exposing how full of crap some of them are. 

See here for the origins of Homeland Security.  See here for the strong connections between Israel, Canada, and the United States. See here for the Canada-Israel “Public Security” Agreement for Counter-Terrorism & Homeland security. See here for how the Canadian government is cracking down on criticism of Israel. See here for how the FBI memo labels patriots, Truth-seekers as potential 'terrorists.' See here for the 72 types of Americans that are considered “potential terrorists” in official government documents.  See here for Israel campaigns against global free speech.

See here for the corruption of the RCMP and how they work with organized crime, see here for a video of the former head of Homeland Security at the ADL "Leadership" Conference. See here for the high technology they are using and here and here for the techniques they are using. See here, here and here for more about data mining and its connections to fusion centers.

Once they find you, they have you under surveillance all of the time, it is called Remote Neural Monitoring. Once you see the connections between organized crime, the media, corporate conglomerates, intelligence agencies, and the police, you'll see what is really happening in our countries.

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By Nathan Gutman- Jewish Forward

Jews face special risks that require vigilance, though there is no “specific, credible threat” against Jewish targets, Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, told the Forward during a visit to the newspaper’s New York offices.

In a June 4 meeting with the paper’s editorial staff, Napolitano cited the particular exposure she said Jews face in explanation of a DHS security grant program that mostly benefits Jewish groups.

“Unfortunately there are risks attendant on the Jewish community that are not attendant on all other communities,” she said.

A Forward report found that the program for DHS security grants for not-for-profit organizations was tailored to the Jewish community and that almost three-quarters of its funds went to Jewish institutions.

“The fact that it ends up going to many Jewish organizations doesn’t in itself bother me,” Napolitano said. She added that she had seen no evidence that the money was misspent, and that she believes the grant program has been successful.

Tension levels within the Jewish community, Napolitano said, hit a peak this past winter, following intensified rhetoric between Israel and Iran, and the indictment of an Iranian American in Texas for his role in an alleged plot by an Iranian official to bomb the Washington embassies of Israel and Saudi Arabia. These concerns prompted Napolitano to hold a conference call with 200 Jewish communal leaders last February, in which she discussed the threats and the actions taken to ensure the community’s safety.

During her tenure at DHS, Napolitano added, threats to the Jewish community came from foreign entities, from homegrown extremists and from “hate crime type of activity.”

On another topic, Napolitano said that the DHS has decided to allow Israeli citizens to enter the United States via a special fast-track program despite Israel’s decision not to grant Americans reciprocal consideration, as the United States usually requires.

Israel’s inclusion in the Global Entry program allows frequent visitors to the United States to complete a questionnaire about their backgrounds and thereafter enter the country by simply scanning their passports. Napolitano announced the decision to include Israeli citizens in the program during a May 20 visit to Israel. A reciprocity requirement that has been applied to all other countries seeking to join the program was waived in the case of Israel.

“We have a special friendship with Israel,” Napolitano explained. “President Obama is very committed to that relationship, and we are looking for ways to express that commitment within the portfolio of tasks that the Department of Homeland Security performs.”

At the same time, Napolitano was noncommittal when asked about a push by some members of Congress and the Israeli government to allow Israeli citizens to enter the United States without tourist visas at all, as is currently permitted for citizens of some European countries. The administration, she noted, has not yet expressed its view on this proposal.

During her recent visit to Israel, Napolitano discussed with Israeli officials the issue of securing borders while preserving the rights of refugees entering the country. Israel has been dealing recently with a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment aimed at African migrants seeking refuge in Israel. Napolitano did not, however, provide Israel with advice on the issue and would not comment on the Israeli government’s treatment of the Africans trying to enter the country.

On the issue of screening procedures in airports, however, the DHS secretary did make clear that the United States would not follow Israel’s model. Israel is known for employing screening techniques that profile air travelers based on their origin, ethnicity or faith. Security checks conducted at Ben Gurion International Airport routinely require one-to-one interviews. Napolitano said that the huge difference in scale makes screening via personal interviews impractical in the United States, with its scores of international entry points. “It’s against the law here to profile,” Napolitano added.

“Israel has perfected a system that works very well there,” Napolitano said. “They do a terrific job. But it’s not a system we can just transport 100% to the U.S. It won’t fit.”

Napolitano also pointedly declined to criticize New York City’s controversial program of surveillance of Muslim organizations and individuals with no known or suspected ties to terrorism. She said New York remains a potential terror target and that she was not going to “second-guess” any local police department or the program, which civil liberties groups believe amounts to illegal domestic spying.

War on Arabs, War on Africans

For other videos and articles displaying the racism and ethnocentrism of some Jews and Zionists that is completely covered up by your media, please see here.

Examples of Counter Intelligence Infiltration - This is Still Going on Today on the Left and the Right

For previous articles on Counter Intelligence see here and here. See here for Noam Chomsky talking about COINTELPRO. See here for more about Counter Intelligence 101, and the sabotage of legitimate dissent. See here, here and here for more about Judas goats, or phony websites that are actually counter-intelligence fronts that are similar to this and this. For more on the ADL (Anti-Defamation League,) go here, here, here, and here.

See here for 72 types of Americans that are considered “potential terrorists” in official government documents. See here to learn how an FBI memo labels patriots, truth-seekers as potential 'terrorists.'

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What follows are a handful of capsule descriptions of some more notable instances of the COINTELPRO-style tactics of the FBI and its longtime ally, the Anti-Defamation League.

I’ve also thown in an intriguing case of one FBI snitch who also did some work for the CIA—and there are more than a few of those type characters operating today. This list is by no means complete, but these are good examples that demonstrate how insidious The Judas Goats—who are the enemy within... truly are.

JAMES MITCHELL ROSENBERG:

The ADL’s Favorite Jewish “Nazi”

One of the most outspoken and outrageous American “right wing extremists” of the late 1970s and early 1980s was a ubiquitous figure once known as “Jimmy Anderson.” Garbed in Nazi uniforms and Klan regalia, “Anderson” became a familiar figure in racial hotspots in the New York and New Jersey area, popularly known as an official of the Queens, New York chapter of the Christian Defense League. “Anderson” was continually attempting to stir up violence in one form or another and, on one occasion,was calling for the bombing of a New Jersey office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

On Dec. 7, 1981 Anderson was featured in a television documentary broadcast over WCCO TV in Minneapolis, entitled “Armies of the Right.”And, as per usual,“Anderson”was the most provocative of the “right wing extremists” featured, making violent, racist remarks. Quite a character indeed.

However, the truth is that “Anderson” was really a New York Jewish boy named James Mitchell Rosenberg who had spent some time in Israel as a member of the Israeli Defense Forces and who—upon his return from Israel—went to work as an undercover informant for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith.

Ultimately, of course, his “cover” was exposed and the ADL’s “Nazi” was unmasked. Although Rosenberg seems to have faded from the scene, so far as anyone knows, he did cut quite a figure “on the right” during his years as an ADL undercover informant.

But the fact remains that there are—to this day—many Americans who recall “Jimmy Anderson” as a “violent neo-Nazi working to stir up racial turmoil in America.”What they don’t know is that he was a Judas Goat—an Enemy Within—working for the ADL.

MORDECHAI LEVY:

Another of the ADL’s Jewish “Nazis”

But don’t think that Jimmy Rosenberg was the only “nice Jewish boy” posing as a “hater” and causing trouble. In 1979 young Mordechai Levy, an ADL informant who was also a member of the terroristic Jewish Defense League (JDL), adopted the moniker “James Guttman” and applied for a permit to organize a “white power”demonstration in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia that would feature American Nazi and Ku Klux Klan members.

Levy announced that he was a “coordinator” for a neo-Nazi organization and made strenuous efforts to invite Philadelphia and New Jersey branches of the Ku Klux Klan to participate. (In the meantime, the aforementioned ADL informant, Jimmy Rosenberg, just happened to be a key ADL operative inside the New Jersey KKK affiliate!)

To make matters all the more interesting, Mordechai Levy’s pals at the JDL were planning a “counter rally” against the “white power” rally organized by their own man Levy. So while the major media in the Philadelphia area and the Anti-Defamation League were raising a hue and cry about “the rise of Nazism in America,” in news reports about the affair, the whole business was actually the work of two longtime ADL operatives. And to make it even more interesting is the fact that, for years, the ADL had officially and publicly “condemned” the JDL, even as the JDL was effectively functioning as the ADL’s terrorist arm, attacking—even wounding and killing—targets of the ADL’s wrath. But, of course, the ADL was officially “non-violent” and always went to great lengths to denounce the violent activities of its secret operatives.

Labor Snitch Turned CIA Informant:

A Cog in the Scheme to “Get” Lyndon LaRouche

Love him or hate him, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. has been one of the most controversial and widely publicized so-called “fringe” political figures in America. The founder of the National Caucus of Labor Committees and a bevy of other organizations and publications that have been widely circulated in American dissident circles, LaRouche, not surprisingly,emerged as a major target of the ADL due to his overt opposition to many of the intrigues of the Israeli lobby in America.

After a concerted campaign by the ADL—in league with the CIA and the FBI and a host of other agencies and individuals—LaRouche ultimately ended up spending time in prison on what many, including former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, believe were trumped-up “corruption” charges.

In any event, as part of his defense, LaRouche and his attorneys, not to mention his hard-working associates, began investigating the “deep cover” nature of the “Get LaRouche” campaign and found that, indeed, there were many undercover informants acting COINTELPRO-style against LaRouche. 

One instance, in particular, is quite illustrative. For ten years, it seems,one Ronald Fino,the former president of the Buffalo Laborers Union Local 210, had spied on LaRouche while pretending

to support LaRouche’s efforts. 

It turns out that Fino had been working for years as a government informant on his fellow laborers,

ostensibly reporting back organized crime links to the FBI. However, when the CIA needed a man to get close to the LaRouche organization as an informant, they turned to Fino.

Apparently, Fino started out as a government informant going back to the 1960s when as a student at the State University of New York at Buffalo he worked for the CIA spying on the anti-war movement there.

In any case, as LaRouche and his associates have documented time and time again in numerous books and magazine articles, the fine hands of the CIA and the FBI—not to mention the ADL—have played a major part in the campaign against LaRouche as well as many other political dissidents in America. The Fino case is just one example uncovered by LaRouche.

The FBI’s Man Inside the Skinhead Movement

In the late 1980s, one “Rev.” Joe Allen popped up in Southern California and began to ingratiate himself with so-called “white supremacist” and “skinhead” groups that were becoming prominent

there. He said he was a minister with the Church of the Creator and was quick to start spreading around cash and favors among young white racialist political dissidents. However, one white racialist leader, Tom Metzger, of the White Aryan Resistance,was suspicious of Allen from the beginning and spread the word among his compatriots that Allen was one to be watched. 

Nonetheless, Allen continued his efforts to make himself a prominent force in the white racialist movement. According to a report in The Los Angeles Times: Allen rented a three-bedroom Newport Beach apartment just a few paces off the beach. He also settled into office space in a nearby light industrial area, converting it into what he called a “training center,” installing a whirlpool bath, weightlifting equipment and video cameras. 

Flashing rolls of money and gold jewelry, Allen invited local skinheads to work out for free at his training center, which skinheads say he decorated with Nazi paraphernalia and guns. They say Allen offered hospitality—thick steaks and beer for barbeques—as well as money, including $500 used to bail out two or three young white supremacists in Canada.

Meanwhile, although many did heed Metzger’s warnings about Allen, more than a few young people were snared in Allen’s insidious web. But Metzger and his associates continued to investigate Allen

and—just before they were about to go public and formally blow the whistle and expose Allen—the FBI moved in and moved Allen out, admitting that, yes, in fact,Allen was an informant.

A handful of young men were taken in on trumped-up charges of plotting to incite a race war by attacking a black church and plotting to kill Rodney King, the famed “black motorist” whose beating by police officers had sparked a major national outrage, thanks to the efforts by the “mainstream” media to inflame the black community in Los Angeles, causing riots and all manner of public unrest.Although the young men were convicted,having been railroaded by Allen’s intrigues,the case was clearly another instance of a Judas Goat of the first order causing problems and instigating a so-called “conspiracy” that would have never occurred in the first place had he not been on the scene.

GARY THOMAS ROWE: COINTELPRO “Man in the Klan”

Although we often hear about “KKK violence” what is not so well known is that during the stormy years of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, some of the worst perpetrators of violence in the name of the Ku Klux Klan were FBI informers inside the Klan. For a brief overview of one of the most notorious FBI informants in the Klan—Gary Thomas Rowe—let us turn to no less than Howell Raines, famed journalist for The New York Times, who reported in the Times, on July 17, 1978:

Inquiries Link Informer for FBI To Major Klan Terrorism in 1960s 

Renewed investigations into the activities of Gary Thomas Rowe, Jr., the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s chief paid informer in the Ku Klux Klan, have produced a portrait of Mr. Rowe as a man who “loved violence” and who could be linked to most major incidents of Klan terrorism that occurred in Alabama while he was on the bureau’s payroll.

While receiving FBI money, Mr. Rowe, by his own account, was directly involved in racial violence beginning with the assault on the Freedom Riders in Birmingham,Ala., in 1961 and extending to the shooting of Viola G. Liuzzo, a participant in the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. Federal pay records introduced in a trial at which Mr. Rowe testified 13 years ago showed that the bureau paid him over $12,000 from 1960 to 1965 for undercover activities that are now the subject of a Justice Department inquiry.

He has also said that the FBI gave him $10,000 more to finance his relocation under a new name.
The New York Times report went on at some length describing other outrages to which Rowe either admitted directly or was otherwise suspected of having been involved in. But four years after the Times report, on October 30, 1982, The San Diego Tribune carried an interesting Associated Press report which added further details to the story.

The report stated: Files Show FBI ‘Covered” For Key Klan Informant The Justice Department has revealed that FBI agents covered up the violent activities of Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., its key informant who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama in the early 1960s. In a report made public late yesterday, department investigators said the agents protected Rowe because “he was simply too valuable to abandon.”

Alabama authorities later accused Rowe of murder in the 1965 killing of a civil rights worker [Viola Liuzzo], but a federal appeals court barred him from being brought to trial . The report also said; “When agents learned that Rowe had taken part in Klan beatings, they apparently never reported him to local authorities or terminated him as an informant.”

Rowe himself wrote a book entitled My Undercover Years with the Ku Klux Klan and in 2005 the Yale University Press published Professor Gary May’s book on the Rowe affair entitled: The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo.

DELMAR DENNIS

The John Birch Society’s Beloved Judas Goat in the KKK Delmar Dennis was a Methodist minister in Meridian, Mississippi in the early 1960s who was hailed as a loyal member of the state Ku Klux

Klan. In truth he was an informant for the FBI as part of COINTELPRO, apparently paid some $15,000 over a period of time for his services. At the same time, Dennis was highly active in the John Birch Society, but there was never any evidence (or suggestion) Dennis was informing on

the Birchers as he was on the KKK.

After Dennis was ultimately exposed in 1967 as an FBI “snitch” in the KKK, Dennis nonetheless went on to become a popular speaker on behalf of the John Birch Society which utilized Dennis and his rhetoric to popularize, among some naïve American patriots, the theory that the Ku Klux Klan and its “anti-Semitic” point of view was actually a “communist plot” to stir up racial turmoil in America.

Later, Dr. Edward Fields of The Thunderbolt newspaper, based in Marietta, Georgia,wrote of Dennis and his ties to the John Birch Society and its founder, Robert Welch, who had been an enthusiastic supporter of Dennis. Fields wrote:

This, of course, puts the loyalty of Robert Welch in doubt because his organization seems to have been turned into a refuge for former FBI undercover agents.We must also remember that the organization was named after a CIA agent, John Birch, who was killed while trying to get the

Chinese communists to work with the Nationalists to form a coalition government. Such governments always end up going communist as we [saw] in Czechoslovakia and Laos.

Some time afterward, a “conservative” writer wrote a laudatory book about Dennis entitled Klandestine repeating the claim that the KKK was a Soviet “front.” Perhaps not surprisingly, this book was published by a firm with long-standing ties to “former” CIA officer William F.

Buckley, Jr., who, as we shall see, played a major role in working to destroy grass-roots nationalist movements in America. Despite Dennis’ record as a Judas Goat, he rose in the ranks of the “conservative” American Party and in 1984 and 1988 was its presidential candidate! It

is thus no surprise the American Party is long gone from the scene.

BILL WILKINSON

Klan Leader Exposed as FBI Informant

In 1974, one of the lieutenants inside the Klan, Bill Wilkinson, was suspected of being suspicious and a potential future “trouble” maker. In fact, precisely as was suspected, for the final eight months of his membership in the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,Wilkinson was acting as a paid informant for the FBI.

And although some warned people Wilkinson was suspicious and not to be trusted, Wilkinson went on to found his own Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan after splitting with the Klan. And for eight years that followed, Wilkinson managed to dupe many innocent folks in the “Empire” who had no idea that Wilkinson was actually working for the FBI.

This was at a time when the Klan was supposedly attempting to “reform” the KKK movement, so to speak, and “clean up its image” and to counter the media stereotype that KKK members were violent haters. However, once Wilkinson was ensconced as leader of his own (FBI-sponsored) Klan group,Wilkinson worked assiduously to build up a public profile as a KKK leader spouting angry rhetoric and hinting of violence through such slogans as “Guns, Guts, and Bullets,” thereby stirring up increased racial tension. Wilkinson’s antics thus assisted fundraising efforts by the ADL which pointed to Wilkinson as a growing “threat,” when, in fact, he was under the thumb of the ADL’s allies at the FBI.

Writing in The Thunderbolt, Dr.Edward Fields described one thing about Wilkinson’s FBI-sponsored Klan which demonstrates precisely how Wilkinson was also working on behalf of the ADL:

Another interesting item is that the FBI urges all of is informers to do their best to protect Jews by urging patriots not to criticize them. When Bill Wilkinson sought to hire the professional right-wing writer Bill Grimstad, he first insisted that Grimstad promise to stay off the Jewish issue. Grimstad refused and said in that case, he didn’t want the job as editor of Wilkinson’s paper. At the same time, Wilkinson has time and again urged guest speakers at his rallies not to criticize Jews.

So although the FBI tolerated anti-Black rhetoric, anti-Jewish rhetoric was “off limits.” In any event, in 1981 Wilkinson’s role as an FBI informer while “leading” his own KKK was publicly revealed, effectively ending Wilkinson’s career in the “right wing,” but the revelations finally convinced many that there were indeed Judas Goats within the ranks of American political groups, a bitter pill for many to swallow, but a warning that many still seem to have failed to properly heed.

The ADL-FBI Murder of Schoolteacher Kathy
 Ainsworth: COINTELPRO at its Worst

Perhaps the most infamous example of FBI-ADL collaboration in a COINTELPRO operation—one which resulted in the murder of an innocent young woman—is the Kathy Ainsworth affair.

Lest any reader think that this is some sort of “conspiracy theory” cooked up by an "anti-Semitic hate-monger,” we will allow the story to be told by the distinguished, albeit now-defunct, Washington Star newspaper in a story dated February 13,1970, reprinting an Associated Press report describing a report from the even more distinguished Los Angeles Times.

Paper Claims FBI Payoff In Fatal Trap for Klan

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The FBI and Meridian, Miss., police paid two Ku Klux Klan informants $36,500 to set a trap for Klan terrorists in which one person was killed and three wounded, the Los Angeles Times reported today [February 13, 1970]. Meridian’s Jewish community provided funds for the trap at the attempted bombing of a Jewish businessman’s home, the Times reported.The action came after a series of 17 unsolved bombings and burnings in Jewish and Black communities in the Jackson and Meridian areas of Mississippi, the paper stated.The FBI and police declined
official comment.

The newspaper published a new account of circumstances about the incident, in which Klanswoman Kathy Ainsworth, a 26-year-old schoolteacher, was killed on June 30, 1968, in a gun battle with law officers.“Evidence strongly indicates that the Klansmen who made the bombing attempt, Thomas Albert Tarrants III, 21 at the time, and his companion, Mrs. Kathy Ainsworth, 26, a schoolteacher,were lured into the bombing attempt by two other Klansmen who were paid a total of $36,500,” the Times said. “A former FBI agent who acted as an intermediary was paid $2,000.”

“Policemen who sprang the trap say they expected a gun battle and never thought either Klan member would be taken alive,” the Times said.“They had expected two men to attempt the bombing and did not know a woman would be involved until 45 minutes before it was carried out.”
Gunfire at the home of the businessman, Meyer Davidson, killed Mrs.Ainsworth and wounded a policeman, a bystander and Tarrants, who later was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

The Times said A. I. Botnick, director of the Anti-Defamation League regional office in New Orleans, acknowledged helping execute the trap. But in a second interview with him, the Times said, Botnik termed his recorded statements of the first interview “incorrect.” The Times said it “has documented the arrangements for the trap through police records and statements by some
of the police officers involved.”

The paper reported that Meridian detective L L. Scarbrough helped it uncover the information, but that he later said only the FBI or his police chief should release the information. The Times quoted its sources of information as saying they would deny telling the names of the two Klan informants
[the Roberts brothers] if the two informants ever sued for libel because their names were made public.

The two informants received $36,500 and “demanded and got written assurance that they would be given immunity from prosecution in several cases of church bombings,” the Times said.

But there was much more to this ugly story. Jack Nelson of The Los Angeles Times reported in his shocking exposé that Detective Scarbrough had told him that the ADL’s man, Botnick, had also told the informants, the Roberts brothers, that he (Botnick) could raise an additional $150,000 more from the Jewish community for what he described as more “assistance” if the Roberts brothers would provide testimony linking another KKK leader, Sam Bowers of Tupelo, Mississippi to the so-called terrorist attacks.

In other words, Botnick was essentially asking the Roberts brothers to lie under oath to provide any form of evidence that could be used to send Bowers to jail. In another instance, Nelson reported that Kenneth Dean, a Mississippi-based civil rights activist, had said that Botnick had also talked of making out a contract to have two Klansmen in a northern state “liquidated,” and promised that he could arrange for this and be assured that there would be no investigation.

One can only imagine the howl of international outrage if it were revealed that someone had arranged to have a Jewish leader such as Botnick “liquidated.”Yet, Botnick was never charged for any of his criminal behavior, although he should have certainly been marched off to be gassed, shot, or hanged,which was conventionally the treatment accorded murderers in the United States.

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Thus, as we have seen—in just these few brief examples— there is a very real and very sordid history of infiltration and disruption of American dissident groups by agents of governments, both foreign and domestic, not to mention the unseemly and a frequent alliance between our own FBI and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is, obviously, an agent of a foreign government: Israel.

In any event, in light of the similar role that both the FBI and the ADL (together and individually) have played in infiltrating and disrupting dissident groups, the formal link-up between the FBI and the ADL is particularly disconcerting, since much of the growing emphasis on “combatting terrorism” may lead to a new wave of FBI-ADL orchestrated acts of provocation designed to create public demand for a crackdown on freedom of speech and assembly.

In fact, according to Edward S. Herman of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, writing in his book: The “Terrorism” Industry:The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror:“In the United States, the FBI has long engaged in agents
provocateurs actions, urging violence on penetrated dissident organizations and carrying out direct acts of violence, then attributed to the individuals and organizations under attack.”

While this may come as a shock to the average American, it is a fact not subject to debate. 

Hanukkah Hypocrisy

Most people have no idea what Hanukkah is really about. It is time for you to learn. Put this is in the context of the information here. I am sure you will see some strong correlations. For more about Chabad, see here and here.

Jews Mostly Supported Slavery — Or Kept Silent — During Civil War

By Ken Yellis

Whenever I told someone that I was working on an exhibition called “Passages Through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War,” I typically got two responses. Both reflect the need for the exhibit (now on display at Yeshiva University Museum in New York), which presents the widely forgotten story of the full participation of Jews in the nation’s great existential crisis.

My sister’s reaction was typical: There were Jews in the Civil War? Who knew?

The second most common response was in some ways more interesting: The Jews who fought in the Civil War were against slavery, right? The discomfiting answer: not so much.

As Jewish historian Dale Rosengarten expresses it, quoting a Talmudic precept: “The law of the land is the law of the Jews.” From a modern perspective, it seems anomalous that a people whose history hinged on an epic escape from servitude would not have been deeply troubled by America’s “peculiar institution” — but few were.

Some Jews owned slaves, a few traded them, and the livelihoods of many, North and South, were inextricably bound to the slave system. Most southern Jews defended slavery, and some went further, advocating its expansion.

Notable among these was Judah P. Benjamin, labeled by the abolitionist Ben Wade, who served with Benjamin in the U.S. Senate, as “an Israelite with Egyptian principles.” Even in the North, many sympathized with the South and only a very few were abolitionists. Almost all Jews sought peace above all else. Until the war was at hand, they remained silent on the subject.

For me, that silence is problematic.

As Arnie, in Nathan Englander’s short story “Camp Sundown,” puts it: “The turning away of the head is the same as turning the knife.” Yet the majority of American Jews were mute on the subject, perhaps because they dreaded its tremendous corrosive power. Prior to 1861, there are virtually no instances of rabbinical sermons on slavery, probably due to fear that the controversy would trigger a sectional conflict in which Jewish families would be arrayed on opposite sides. And that is exactly what happened.

Ironically, the silence was breached by an attempt to forestall the conflict. With Lincoln’s election and the gathering momentum of the secession movement, the celebrated New York Rabbi Morris Raphall attempted to make a case for reconciliation by defending slavery on biblical grounds. The speech had the opposite effect, triggering furious rebuttals from Rabbi David Einhorn and biblical scholar Michael Heilprin, among others, and widening the growing divide. Jews had at last engaged in numbers with the great issue of the age.

When the war broke out, Jews did by and large attach themselves to their sections and to the causes of their sections, even at the risk of great suffering, painful separation from loved ones, grievous injury, horrific death, and as foretold, dividing families and pitting brothers against each other.

“Passages Through the Fire” is filled with such stories. What emerges from them is the heartfelt, touching, personal language in which they are told, often by people whose English is newly learned.

Their words reveal the pride, pain, and ardor of these remarkable people, who were willing to put so much on the line. Whether in combat, in other forms of service to the war effort, on the home front or in a host of other roles, their passion is unmistakable. And, of course, the war transformed them, their place in America, and, in ways we are still struggling to understand, America itself.

Although few Jews, like other Americans, opposed slavery at the war’s outset, many came to feel that the suffering of the war needed to be about something important: the end of slavery and the creation of a different America. The experience of Jews in New York City is indicative of this process in some ways. By far America’s largest Jewish community, New York’s Jews were overwhelmingly pro-southern, pro-slavery, and anti-Lincoln in the early years of the war. Increasingly, however, as both the toll of the war and the North’s military victories mounted, feelings began to shift toward “Father Abraham,” his party, the Union and eventually, emancipation. Close to 2,000 Jews from New York State joined the Union forces.

As historian Howard Rock sums up, “The war was a transformative moment for Jews’ understanding of American democracy.” The decision by Jews’ Hospital — later Mt. Sinai — to care for all sick and wounded soldiers and sailors was emblematic of the Jewish community’s expanded civic commitment. By war’s end, a number of Jews became leaders in advancing the cause of civil liberties. “Father Abraham” became a hero to most Jews. The Jewish Cult of Lincoln, which had many Old Testament overtones — Lincoln died on the first night of Passover, for instance, and the first eulogies were delivered from synagogue pulpits — would persist for decades.

The outcome of the nation’s great existential crisis made possible the open and most welcoming society Jews had ever encountered, what one of my cousins (in a not-uncommon Yiddish phrase) called “Golden America.”

The Jews caught up in that crisis were transformed by it and, in turn, helped transform the America that emerged from it. Yet relatively few Jews are aware of this, an amnesia that constitutes a deep loss. The history of the Civil War has long been bitterly contested. Perhaps as with the contest over slavery itself, it would be helpful if more Jews were engaged in it. American Jews have a stake in this history, and their experience over the last 150 years makes a lot more sense if viewed through its lens.

Ken Yellis, principal of Project Development Services, served as guest curator for “Passages through the Fire: Jews and the Civil War.” A historian with four decades in the museum field, Yellis has been involved in over 100 history, science and art exhibitions.

Mining, Barrick Gold, Peter Munk and Their Influence on Canadian Politics

See here and here for more on this topic.

By Anthony J. Hall

Canadian Council of Chief Executives head John Manley, former prime minister and current Barrick international advisory board chair Brian Mulroney, Barrick chairman Peter Munk, and former foreign minister and current Barrick international advisory board member John Baird, pictured in 2012 at an exclusive dinner at The Museum of Nature where Bill Clinton’s former Secretary of Defense William Cohen was keynote speaker. Now, who is shaking hands, and what is the deal? photo by Jake Wright

• Nigel Wright has been much in the news for the $90,172 cheque he signed over to Mike Duffy. Much less attention has been devoted to the scandalous implications of the $9 million payment from former Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird to Peter Munk’s School at the University of Toronto. The anatomy of both deals sheds light on the abundant conflicts of interest linking the Barrick Gold Company with Conservative Party governments led by Brian Mulroney and now Stephen Harper.

The origins of Barrick Gold

After terminating his tenure as the most undiplomatic Minister of Foreign Affairs in Canada’s history, John Baird has been extended a place on Barrick Gold Corporation’s International Advisory Board. Its founding Chair was former US President George H.W. Bush. The international panel’s current Chair is former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. A close student of the relationship between Bush Sr. and Mulroney, in 1997 Anton Chaitkin came up with the phrase “Barrick’s Barracudas.” Baird is a recent recruit among this school of fishy predators inhabiting those murky zones of lucrative interaction between business and politics. This pattern goes back at least to 1984 when Adnan Khashoggi visited Ontario’s capital to establish a Toronto headquarters for the Barrick complex of companies.

In the period when he was laying out the political, legal and economic groundwork for what would become Barrick Gold, the flamboyant playboy Khashoggi was reputed to be one of the world’s richest men. This CIA asset and arms merchant also served as a front man for a group of Saudi Arabian investors that included Kamal Adham, the oil-rich country’s head of intelligence operations. This strategic link to Saudi wealth was crucial in the financial life of western capitals during an era when much depended on Saudi Arabia’s backing for the shift of the US dollar from a gold-backed to an oil-based currency.

Barrick Gold’s connection through Peter Munk to Canada’s Bronfman family dynasty formed a vital dimension of the Israeli-Saudi axis, an important factor in maintaining the Anglo-American empire. Edgar Bronfman’s activities, as the influential head of the World Jewish Congress between 1979 and 2007, provide us with a glimpse into the politico-economic juggernaut that included the Barrick complex of companies.

Khashoggi met with Ontario Premier Bill Davis in 1984 during a heavily hyped media event meant to promote the listing of what was then known as American Barrick or Barrick Resources in the Toronto Stock Exchange. Flash forward to 2015 when Newt Gingrich became John Baird’s co-appointee on Barrick’s international advisory panel.

In 2008, Gingrich became a candidate for the US Republican Party’s nomination in the presidential election. Multi-billionaire gambling czar Sheldon Adelson famously funded Gingrich’s neoconservative candidacy. Adelson’s political priorities include putting in place a US president that will agree to nuke Iran, the number one national nemesis of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Munk School’s role in promoting the hawkish policies of the Harper Government towards Iran

Several weeks before joining Barrick’s well-rewarded international advisory panel, Foreign Affairs Minister Baird conducted a press conference in Toronto along with Professor Janice Stein, then Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs. The Munk School originated in its present form in 2011. It began with a large donation to the University of Toronto from Peter Munk.

Munk became the most public face of Barrick Gold Corporation after Adnan Khashoggi was exposed in the Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s. Khashoggi and some of his fellow Saudi investors in Barrick businesses were exposed as key operatives in a complex web of illegal financial transactions on behalf of the National Security apparatus of the Reagan-Bush White House.

During and after his term as US President from 1989 to 1993, Bush Sr. took firm charge of Barrick’s most rapid phase of international expansion. To help him with this enterprise he recruited his peer, Brian Mulroney, with whom Bush had worked particularly closely in putting together the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. NAFTA was instituted in 1992 shortly before both men left elected public office under clouds of infamy.

On January 6 of this year, Stein and Baird announced that the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper was directing a grant of $9 million to the Digital Public Square Project. In this scheme of internet manipulation, the U of T’s Munk School was enlisted in a federal operation reminiscent of old Cold War initiatives to encourage dissidents within communist countries to join forces and rise up in order to topple their Soviet-backed oppressors.

This Harper U of T initiative is being pressed forward in a context defined by Ottawa’s severance in 2012 of diplomatic ties with Tehran. The federal government’s unilateral decision to terminate formal relations was introduced with Baird’s inflammatory allegation that “Canada views the Government of Iran as the most significant threat to global peace and security in the world today.”

Baird added to this saga of vituperation in 2013 by asserting, “The [Iranian] regime is hollow. It does not have the depth, the intellect, the humanity or the humility to bring about a better future for its people.” This most undiplomatic of characterizations was delivered notwithstanding the diplomatic transformations brought by the election in 2013 of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

The Digital Public Square initiative is a thinly disguised instigation of hostile regime change directed at Iran and also several other countries on the Harper government’s Enemies List. Professor Stein attempted to soft-peddle U of T’s role in this scheme. “It’s about making space for different narratives. It’s about making space for different voices,” she declared.

I was struck with a sense of irony when I first saw these words attributed to Professor Stein, who apparently coached John Baird regularly in how he should articulate Canada’s international positions. When it comes to issues like Canada’s relationships with the Islamic Republic of Iran, or, for that matter, the Jewish state of Israel, I do not hear a multiplicity voices in Parliament or in mainstream media coming from a wide variety of perspectives. What I have heard instead – especially on the airwaves of Canada’s public broadcaster – is a very narrow spectrum of blinkered, one-sided international commentary.

Indeed, I can report from my experience as a delegate in October 2014 at an international conference in Tehran that I participated in a much more free-ranging and broad discussion of global affairs than would be possible these days in the heavily censored CBC. The same comparison might be applied to the gate-kept academic environment at the U of T and certainly to the cloistered confines of its Munk School.

In 2013, the Munk School Director, Janice Stein, and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird were accused of stifling such free-ranging academic debate by a coalition of Canadian-Iranian community groups. They accused the organizers of an allegedly closed and secretive academic gathering at the U of T of making “a calculated attempt to sideline critics and censor opponents of the Conservative government’s policy on Iran.” Those invited to make presentations were said to display uniformly “hawkish views” unreflective of “the Iranian diaspora’s outlook.”

Barrick Gold, the political agenda and constraints on academic freedom

Peter Munk’s donation to the University of Toronto was negotiated in secret with the U of T’s former President, David Naylor. Dr. Naylor was recently appointed to Barrick’s Board. The Naylor-Munk deal of 2011 breaks new ground in terms of tying strings to the future flow of funding to an important academic unit at a Canadian university.

The Munk School Director must satisfy Peter Munk – and, after his death, the trustees of Munk’s estate – that he or she is meeting predetermined academic and “branding” guidelines. The U of T’s adoption of these conditions sets very unfortunate precedents for the corporate sponsoring of other academic institutions.

This constraint on academic freedom only begins the litany of negative implications permeating the Munk School’s positioning in the academy. As emphasized on the website of a campus-wide coalition entitled Peter Munk Out of U of T, “students have cause for concern that their school is so closely associated with this company… that is accused of human rights violations, labour violations, environmental devastation and/or corruption where they operate.”

This corruption begins in Canada and extends to many countries where Barrick operates including Peru, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea and Australia. Barrick’s horrendous record has been highlighted by many organizations and NGOs including Mining Watch and Protest Barrick as well as by many authors including Alan Denault, Sakura Saunders, Greg Palast, Alex Constantine and E. P. Heidner.

Especially serious from the perspective of the growing assaults on academic freedom at the University of Toronto and other centers of higher learning is Barrick Gold’s history of trying to intimidate, shut up and destroy altogether its critics through a variety of coercive techniques. These include financially debilitating SLAPP suits, strategic lawsuits against public participation.

Barrick’s precedent-setting litigious assault in Ontario on the Internet postings of Chilean-Canadian miner, Jorge Lopehandia, became especially aggressive in the early 2000s. With his Vancouver-based associates Lopehandia has achieved considerable traction with the Chilean judiciary in demonstrating that he, not Barrick Gold, is the primary holder of title to the massive deposits of gold, silver and copper at the Pascau Lama Mine.

Barrick Gold’s main man on the ground in Latin America is heir to the financial empire of Andronico Luksic Sr.. Luksic Sr. was one of the primary beneficiaries of the radical privatization of public property imposed on Chile after the US-backed coup in 1973. Banker Andronico Luksic Jr. has taken over his father’s hostility to Lopehandia’s unrelenting assertion of title to one of the world’s richest mineral deposits. Through the public exposure attending his politically-motivated efforts to extend improper loans to the family of Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, Luksic has botched his overzealous power play. His attempt to cozy up to Chile’s first family is generating much negative domestic publicity in ways that are engulfing Barrick’s Chilean outpost in the hot glare of scandal.

Lopehandia’s tenacious defense of his rights and interests is part of a tsunami of problems overwhelming Barrick in what was once advertised as its prime Latin American bastion. In 2013 in Canada’s Financial Post, Peter Koven accused Barrick of “screwing up the Pascua Lama project about as badly as any mining company has ever screwed up a major project.”

Mining the public interest for corporate and private gain

As Canada’s recent Minister of Foreign Affairs, John Baird has played a key role in Barrick Gold’s litigious interactions with, for instance, Jorge Lopehandia. Lopehandia has had much company in bringing forward serious indigenous grievances in those many countries where Barrick’s Barracudas are active.

Barrick has emerged as a core polity in a structure of international affairs wherein fully 75 percent of the world’s mining companies are headquartered in Canada. It seems that very lax oversight of the Toronto and Vancouver stock exchanges, as well as the lack of any serious regulation by our federal government, has made Canada a laissez-faire magnet for extractive enterprises of many sorts.

There is an unmistakable stench of conflict of interest surrounding John Baird in his work inside and now outside Stephen Harper’s cabinet. The most obvious indicator of this malfeasance began the moment he handed over a federal cheque for $9 million dollars to the Munk School of Global Affairs. The purpose of the grant was to advance the U of T’s transformation into a partisan partner in the Canadian government’s decidedly “hawkish” interactions with Iran.

Only weeks after this delivery of public funds to the Munk School, the Barrick Gold Corporation reciprocated. In his very first days as a private citizen, Baird joined the International Advisory Board of Peter Munk’s main medium of golden endowment to the University of Toronto.

John Baird thus followed a path laid out by former US President George H.W. Bush and by Brian Mulroney. Mulroney joined Barrick’s Barracudas after receiving cash from Karlheinz Schreiber for services rendered when he was the Canadian Prime Minister that cleared the way for neocon Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

As Foreign Affairs Minister, Baird had intervened in 2012 to fend off allegations that Harper’s former Chief of Staff, Nigel Wright, was guilty of conflict of interest in advancing Barrick Gold’s interests with his boss. Wright was then being investigated by Mary Dawson, Parliament’s Ethics Watchdog, on the suspicion that he had played a role on three separate occasions as an advocate of Barrick’s preferred positioning of Canada vis-à-vis mining in Latin America.

The National Post paraphrased the former Minister’s characterizations of Wright’s interactions with the Gold Company as follows, “Wright did nothing wrong; he merely listened to Barrick’s concerns, said nothing, passed the matter over to others responsible for the file and was not involved in any decision relating to the company.”

What credibility do these words now possess given Baird’s own subsequent induction along with David Naylor into Barrick Gold’s inner sanctum through the medium of the company’s deep infiltration of the U of T’s academic life? Here is yet another indication that the Harper government’s ethics initiative is a scam as epitomized by Baird’s bringing his very recent access to state secrets to the service of Barrick Gold.

With an accompanying email assurance as Stephen Harper’s Chief of Staff that the deal was “good to go,” Nigel Wright delivered the now-notorious $90,172 cheque to suspended Senator Mike Duffy. This payment is seen by many as a smoking gun in the high-profile criminal trial now underway in Ottawa.

Wright’s close friend is Anthony Munk, his former colleague in the giant private equity firm, Onex Corporation. Wright’s intimacy with the Munk family is marked in his role as godfather to the grandson of Peter Munk. “I have complete trust” in Nigel Wright, declared Munk Sr. in 2011. Munk’s trust in his grandson’s godfather was reflected in Wright’s appointment along with Andrew Coyne and Ken Whyte to the Board of the Aurea Foundation.

With its annual debates at the Munk School of Global Affairs, the Aurea Foundation constitutes another example of how neoconservatives operate to engineer the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the mainstream media and in the academy. This discourse most valorizes the deregulation of business and maximum latitude for the expansionary policies of Likudnik Israel, both political priorities for the newest of Barrick’s Barracudas, John Baird and Newt Gingrich.

An academic alternative to the Munk School of Global Affairs?

After two decades of intense engagement in the courts of both Chile and Canada with representatives of our country’s chief mining leviathan, Jorge Lopehandia’s survival speaks volumes. Not only has he retained his legal ground, but he is gaining strategic turf. From this adversarial experience, Lopehandia has developed his own personal perspective on what he sees as Barrick Gold’s ruthless and unethical way of conducting business.

Lopehandia is especially critical of the effects of Barrick’s accounting machinations on the declining value of the many pension funds invested heavily in what was once widely viewed as a blue chip company. The revolt of pensioners is being felt once again in 2015 as many managers of retirement funds repeat the main themes of their protest in 2013.

A common thread of grievance in their votes of non-confidence is Barrick’s very high rate of executive compensation. This penchant for huge payoffs to those at the top goes back to the days when George H. W. Bush was handsomely rewarded for engineering the transactions that catapulted Barrick Gold from obscurity to the world’s number one marketer of gold and gold derivatives.

As Lopehandia sees it, the high rates of reward to executives and their political advisors reflect the reality that Barrick’s most important asset is privileged access to the inner citadels of political, juridical and media influence. A common theme running throughout this process of infiltration involves the corruption of the state in order to harness its coercive force for the displacement of indigenous peoples from valuable natural resources.

The consistency of this expansionary pattern in the growth of Barrick Gold Corporation flows naturally from the history of the heavy trade in mining shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Toronto’s rise to commercial prominence has depended on dispossessing and displacing First Nations in the development of one mining frontier after the next in northern Ontario.

This same general trajectory of expansion through Aboriginal dispossession is continuing through venues such as Barrick Gold into the wider international realm. It is a process that is making Canada synonymous with the most dirty and exploitative networks of extractive industry.

A father of college-aged young men, Lopenhandia speaks eloquently of the tragic subordination of one of Canada’s oldest and most prestigious universities to the imperatives of corporatist subversion. He asks rhetorically, “Why pay homage to those who have benefited most from the kind of outrageous incursions that are giving the Canadian mining industry a bad name among many decent folks throughout Latin America and Africa? What messages are we sending to our young people by treating the likes of Peter Munk, Brian Mulroney, John Baird and Newt Gingrich as role models for the country’s future leaders?”

As Lopenhandia sees it, some of the funds poured into the Munk School of Global Affairs are in fact stolen from him and individuals like him in Barrick Gold’s global rush for spoils. He speaks eloquently of the kind of alternative to the Munk School that he would like to endow if he succeeds in his quest to put in place a more just model for mining sustainably the riches of the vast Pascua-Lama repository of precious metals.

Lopehandia underlines that any alternative to the Munk School in which he might become involved would have to promote rather than constrain academic freedom. The kind of institute Lopehandia has in mind would be an arena of academic meritocracy affording respect, recognition and security especially to those voices of dissent emanating from outside the charmed inner circle of privilege and power.

Such a centre of excellence would eschew rather than cultivate conditions of exclusion such as those that provoked the Iranian Canadian community groups in 2013 to accuse the Munk School of organizing a closed event to promote the hawkish policies of the ruling party. Rather than responding appropriately to this significant criticism, the anti-Iranian partnership of the University of Toronto and the Harper government was solidified in 2015 with John Baird’s and professor Stein’s announcement of substantial federal largesse for the Munk School.

A Lopehandia School of Globalization Studies would embrace, rather than spurn, those academics willing to speak truth to power, even when that power takes the form of a corporate leviathan like Barrick Gold with its still largely hidden history of serial dealings with the most dubious variety of former public official.

Anthony Hall is professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge. He has written for the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Canadian Dimension and many other periodicals. His most recent books are Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism and The American Empire and the Fourth World. Both volumes are published by McGill-University Press.