Operation Gladio: CIA Network of “Stay Behind” Secret Armies

See another post on this topic here.

Through NATO, working with various Western European intelligence agencies, the CIA set up a network of stay behind “secret armies” which were responsible for dozens of terrorist atrocities across Western Europe over decades. This report will focus on the stay behind army in Italy, as it is the most documented. Its codename was Operation Gladio, the ‘Sword’.

An Overview

The Purpose of the ‘Stay Behind’ Armies

In the early 1950s, the United States began training networks of “stay behind” volunteers in Western Europe, so that in the event of a Soviet invasion, they would “gather intelligence, open escape routes and form resistance movements.” The CIA financed and advised these groups, later working in tandem with western European military intelligence units under the coordination of a NATO committee. In 1990, Italian and Belgian investigators started researching the links between these “stay behind armies” and the occurrence of terrorism in Western Europe for a period of 20 years.[1]

‘Secret Armies’ or Terrorist Groups?

These “stay behind” armies colluded with, funded and often even directed terrorist organizations throughout Europe in what was termed a “strategy of tension” with the aim of preventing a rise of the left in Western European politics. NATO’s “secret armies” engaged in subversive and criminal activities in several countries. In Turkey in 1960, the stay behind army, working with the army, staged a coup d’état and killed Prime Minister Adnan Menderes; in Algeria in 1961, the French stay-behind army staged a coup with the CIA against the French government of Algiers, which ultimately failed; in 1967, the Greek stay-behind army staged a coup and imposed a military dictatorship; in 1971 in Turkey, after a military coup, the stay-behind army engaged in “domestic terror” and killed hundreds; in 1977 in Spain, the stay behind army carried out a massacre in Madrid; in 1980 in Turkey, the head of the stay behind army staged a coup and took power; in 1985 in Belgium, the stay behind attacked and shot shoppers randomly in supermarkets, killing 28; in Switzerland in 1990, the former head of the Swiss stay behind wrote the US Defense Department he would reveal “the whole truth,” and was found the next day stabbed to death with his own bayonet; and in 1995, England revealed that the MI6 and SAS helped set up stay behind armies across Western Europe.[2]

The Birth of Operation Gladio

A ‘Strategy of Tension’

In 1990, the Italian Prime Minister had confirmed that Italy’s “stay behind” army, termed “Gladio” (Sword), existed since 1958, with the approval of the Italian government. In the early 1970s, Italy’s Communist support was growing, so the government turned to a “Strategy of Tension” using the Gladio network. At a top secret 1972 Gladio meeting, one official referred to making a “pre-emptive attack” on the Communists. As the Guardian reported, links between Gladio in Italy, all three Italian secret services and Italy’s P2 Masonic Lodge were well documented, as the head of each intelligence unit was a member of the P2 Lodge.[3]

Setting up the Network

In 1949, the CIA helped set up the Italian secret armed forces intelligence unit, named SIFAR, staffed in part with former members of Mussolini’s secret police. It later changed its name to SID. At the end of World War 2, a former Nazi collaborator, Licio Gelli, was facing execution for his activities during the war, but managed to escape by joining the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps. In the 1950s, Gelli was recruited by SIFAR. Gelli was also head of the P2 Masonic Lodge in Italy, and in 1969, he developed close ties with General Alexander Haig, who was then Assistant to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Through this network, Gelli became chief intermediary between the CIA and General De Lorenzo, Chief of the SID.[4]

Gladio Creates ‘Tension’

Gladio was involved in a silent coup d’état in Italy, when General Giovanni de Lorenzo forced the Italian Socialist Ministers to leave the government.[5] On December 12, 1969, a bomb exploded at the National Agrarian Bank, which killed 17 people and wounded 88 others. That afternoon, three more bombs exploded in Rome and Milan. US intelligence was informed ahead of time of the bombing, but did not inform the Italian authorities.[6] In 2000, a former Italian Secret Service General stated that the CIA “gave its tacit approval to a series of bomb attacks in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s.”[7] The bombing was linked to two neo-fascists and to an SID agent.[8]

Testifying in a court case trying four men accused of involvement in the 1969 bank bombing in Milan, General Gianadelio Maletti, former head of military counter-intelligence from 1971 to 1975, stated that his unit discovered evidence that explosives were supplied to a right wing Italian terrorist group from Germany, and that US intelligence may have aided in the transfer of explosives. He was quoted as saying that the CIA, “following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of rightwing terrorism,” and that, “I believe this is what happened in other countries as well.”[9]

The Report

The Italian government released a 300-page report on Gladio operations in Italy in 2000, documenting connections with the United States. It declared that the US was responsible for inspiring a “strategy of tension.” In examining why those who committed the bombings in Italy were rarely caught, the report said, “those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organized or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence.”[10]

The Red Brigades

The Red Brigades were a leftist Italian terrorist organization that was formed in 1970. In 1974, Red Brigade founders Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini were arrested. Alberto Franceschini later accused a top member of the Red Brigades, Mario Moretti, of turning them in, and that both Moretti and another leading Red Brigade member, Giovanni Senzani, were spies for the Italian and US secret services.[11] Moretti rose up through the ranks of the Red Brigades as a result of the arrest of the two founders.

The Red Brigades and the CIA

The Red Brigades worked closely with the Hyperion Language School in Paris, which was founded by Corrado Simioni, Duccio Berio, and Mario Moretti. Corrado Simoni had worked for the CIA at Radio Free Europe, Duccio Berio had been supplying the Italian SID with information of leftist groups and Mario Moretti, apart from being accused by the Red Brigades founders as being an intelligence asset, also happened to be the mastermind and murderer of former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro. An Italian police report referred to the Hyperion Language School as “the most important CIA office in Europe.”[12]

The Murder of Aldo Moro

Moro Makes Powerful Enemies

Aldo Moro, who served as Italy’s Prime Minister from 1963 until 1968 and later, from 1973 until 1976, was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades in 1978, while still a prominent politician in the Christian Democrat Party. When he was kidnapped, Moro was on his way to Parliament to vote on inaugurating a new government, of which he negotiated, for the first time since 1947, to be backed by the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Moro’s policy of working with and bringing the Communists into the government was denounced by both the USSR and the United States.

Kissinger’s Threat

Moro was held for 55 days before his eventual murder. The reasoning was for his plan to bring the Communist Party into the government. Four years prior to his death, in 1974, Moro was on a visit as Italian Prime Minister, to the United States. While there, he met with US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who told Moro, “`You must abandon your policy of bringing all the political forces in your country into direct collaboration… or you will pay dearly for it.”[13]

Moro was “Sacrificed”

Steve Pieczenik, a former State Department hostage negotiator and international crisis manager, “claimed that he played a critical role in the fate of Aldo Moro.” Pieczenik “said that Moro had been “sacrificed” for the “stability” of Italy.” He had been sent to Italy by President Jimmy Carter on the day of Moro’s kidnapping to be part of a crisis committee, of which he said was “jolted into action by the fear that Moro would reveal state secrets in an attempt to free himself.” The action the committee took was to leak a memo saying that Moro was dead, and to have the memo attributed to the Red Brigades. The purpose of this was to “prepare the Italian public for the worst and to let the Red Brigades know that the state would not negotiate for Moro, and considered him already dead.”[14] In a documentary on the subject, Pieczenik stated that, “The decision was made in the fourth week of the kidnapping, when Moro’s letters became desperate and he was about to reveal state secrets,” and that, “It was an extremely difficult decision, but the one who made it, in the end, was interior minister Francesco Cossiga, and, apparently, also prime minister Giulio Andreotti.”[15]

Moro’s Letters

Among Moro’s released letters, which he was writing while in captivity, he stated that he feared that a shadow organization, with “other secret services of the West … might be implicated in the destabilization of our country.”[16] During his interrogation while in captivity, Moro even referred to “Nato’s anti-guerrilla activities.” However, the Red Brigades did not use this information,[17] perhaps because, according to the founders of the Red Brigades, the leader of the organization at the time of Moro’s kidnapping, Mario Moretti, was working for the Italian or US intelligence services.[18]

Maverick Journalist Killed by President?

Shortly after Moro’s death, an Italian journalist, Mino Pecorelli, a man with “excellent secret service contacts,” voiced his suspicion in a 1978 article that Moro’s death was linked to Gladio, which was not officially acknowledged until 1990. A year after Moro’s death, Pecorelli was shot dead in Rome. He claimed that the kidnapping of Moro was committed by a “lucid superpower.” In 2002, former seven-term Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, was convicted of “ordering” Pecorelli’s murder.[19] Pecorelli was about to publish a book “containing damaging criticisms of [Prime Minister Giulio] Andreotti by murdered Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro.”[20]

The Bologna Bombing

On the morning of August 2, 1980, Italy experienced its worst-ever terrorist attack at Bologna train station, which killed 85 people, and wounded more than 200 others. A long and complicated investigation was undertaken, and eventually, a trial began. In 1988, four right-wing terrorists were sentenced to life in prison. Two other defendants were convicted of slandering the investigation, “Francesco Pazienza, a former financier linked to several criminal cases in Italy, and Licio Gelli, the former grandmaster of the so-called P-2 Masonic lodge.”[21] This is the very same Licio Gelli who happened to be a CIA intermediary for the head of Italian intelligence for the Gladio network. Although later on, Gelli was acquitted of the charges. 

Notes

[1]    Bruce W. Nelan, Europe Nato’s Secret Armies. Time Magazine: November 26, 1990:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,971772,00.html

2]    PHP, Secret Warfare: Operation Gladio and NATO’s Stay-Behind Armies. ISN:
 http://translate.google.ca/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.ethz.ch/&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3DETH%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG

[3]    Ed Vulliamy, Secret agents, freemasons, fascists… and a top-level campaign of political ‘destabilisation’. The Guardian: December 5, 1990:
 http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/vinciguerra.p2.etc_graun_5dec1990.html

4]    Arthur E. Rowse, GLADIO: THE SECRET U.S. WAR TO SUBVERT ITALIAN DEMOCRACY. Covert Action Quarterly: December 1994

[5]    PHP, Secret Warfare: Operation Gladio and NATO’s Stay-Behind Armies. ISN:
 http://translate.google.ca/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.ethz.ch/&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3DETH%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG

[6]    Philip Willan, US ‘supported anti-left terror in Italy’. The Guardian: June 24, 2000:
http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/us.terrorism_graun_24jun2000.html

[7]    CBC, CIA knew, but didn’t stop bombings in Italy – report. CBC News: August 5, 2000:
 http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2000/08/05/cia000805.html

[8]    Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. University of California Press, 2007: page 181

[9]    Philip Willan, Terrorists ‘helped by CIA’ to stop rise of left in Italy. The Guardian: March 26, 2001: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/mar/26/terrorism

[10]    Philip Willan, US ‘supported anti-left terror in Italy’. The Guardian: June 24, 2000:
http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/us.terrorism_graun_24jun2000.html

[11]    Philip Willan, Infiltrators blamed for murder of Italian PM. The Guardian: April 10, 1999:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3852325,00.html

[12 – 13]    Arthur E. Rowse, GLADIO: THE SECRET U.S. WAR TO SUBVERT ITALIAN DEMOCRACY. Covert Action Quarterly: December 1994

[14]    Malcolm Moore, US envoy admits role in Aldo Moro killing. The Telegraph: March 16, 2008:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1581425/US-envoy-admits-role-in-Aldo-Moro-killing.html

[15]    Saviona Mane, A murder still fresh. Haaretz: May 9, 2008:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/981929.html

[16]    Ed Vulliamy, Secret agents, freemasons, fascists… and a top-level campaign of political ‘destabilisation’. The Guardian: December 5, 1990:
 http://www.cambridgeclarion.org/press_cuttings/vinciguerra.p2.etc_graun_5dec1990.html

[17]    Philip Willan, Moro’s ghost haunts political life. The Guardian: May 9, 2003:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4665179-105806,00.html

[18]    Philip Willan, Infiltrators blamed for murder of Italian PM. The Guardian: April 10, 1999:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3852325,00.html

[19]    Philip Willan, Moro’s ghost haunts political life. The Guardian: May 9, 2003:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,4665179-105806,00.html

[20]    BBC News, Giulio Andreotti: Mr Italy. BBC: October 23, 1999:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/483295.stm

[21]    AP, Four Get Life in Prison In Bombing in Bologna. The New York Times: July 12, 1988:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE0D61131F931A25754C0A96E948260

Andrew G. Marshall contributed to breaking the Climate Change consensus in a celebrated 2006 article entitled Global Warming A Convenient Lie, in which he challenged the findings underlying Al Gore’s documentary.  According to Marshall, ‘as soon as people start to state that “the debate is over”, beware, because the fundamental basis of all sciences is that debate is never over’. Andrew Marshall has also written on the militarization of Central Africa, national security issues and the process of integration of North America. He is also a contributor to  GeopoliticalMonitor.com He is currently a researcher at the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal and is studying political science and history at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia.

The Israel Taboo-Money And Sex Aren't The Only Things Canadians Don't Talk About

For more about the Holocaust, see here.  See here for what Norman Finkelstein has to say about the Holocaust. 

BY JOSEPH ROSEN

LAST SUMMER, I went on a canoe trip down the Petawawa River, paddling the same rapids Pierre Trudeau once traveled. In the middle of this iconic Canadian scene, a friend and I started chatting about Israel. As our voices slowly rose, two other canoes approached, and we all put down our paddles for an impromptu summit. Surrounded by and oblivious to the peace and tranquility of Algonquin Provincial Park in central Ontario, we started arguing. Is a corrupt occupation ruining Zionism? Is boycotting Israel anti-Semitic? Are Israelis guilty of human rights violations? How much responsibility should Palestinians take for their situation? Our token WASP kept quiet, unable to get a word in, until finally, he asked, “How will they ever figure out how to get along in the Middle East? Even the Montreal Jews can’t agree.”

No matter what you say about Israel, someone will get angry. Venturing to question the Jewish state gets you labelled an anti-Semite by right-wing Zionists, but left-wing activists can be just as vicious. Admit that you want Israel to remain a safe haven for Jews, and you’ll be told your Zionism is racist. My Jewish friends are scared of lefties, and my lefty friends are scared of Zionists. As a lefty Jew, I’m scared of both.

A few years ago, I gave a talk in Los Angeles at the University of California’s Center for Near Eastern Studies, where I spent a semester during a post-doctoral fellowship. I was making the case that Israelis in the occupied territories misuse Holocaust memory when they argue that settling Palestinian land is necessary to guard against a second Holocaust. A representative of a Zionist watchdog organization showed up, ostensibly to guard against anti-Semitism in Middle Eastern studies departments. When he posted his misunderstanding of my lecture online, I received a series of standard threats from strangers. One expressed a hope that I would “show [my] sincerity by leading the way to the gas chambers,” while another stated, somewhat ungrammatically, that I was “carrying a death wish for himself.” Within twenty-four hours, my post-doctoral supervisor in Montreal got an email saying I was a “turd” who would “shit his pants” if I was put “on the front lines.” This entirely accurate insult highlighted an unacknowledged truth: talking about Israel does put you on the front lines. When emotions explode into anger and accusations start flying, you are no longer discussing the conflict. You are a part of it.

My media activist friends have a traditional Marxist theory about why it’s so tough to talk about Israel. For them, it boils down to power, which means money. Zionist money funds lobby groups and media watchdogs that attack the pro-Palestinian media. My friends argue that this creates a climate of antagonism, and that many media outlets systematically avoid the question of Israel because it’s too much hassle to deal with the backlash.

Wait a second. Are my lefty friends saying Jews control the media?

The left has a long tradition of such anti-Semitic clichés. You may recall the scandal in 2004 when the Vancouver magazine Adbusters published an article titled “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?,” which infamously listed “the 50 most influential neocons in the US,” with black dots beside the Jewish names. But keep in mind the watchdog organization that targeted me at UCLA. There certainly are well-funded Zionist groups that pressure and attack anyone perceived to be critical of Israel. It is intimidating; one has to think twice before talking publicly or writing about the conflict.

This is because the weapons of this war are not only bullets, stones, tanks, and explosive jackets. The extremists attack and defend with words or, more specifically, with invocations of the Holocaust and accusations of genocide—to the point of absurdity. Today, almost twenty years after Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, comparisons with Nazi Germany have become cynical clichés. Palestinians put swastikas on Israeli flags, Israelis compare Arab leaders to Hitler, and Zionist settlers accuse those proposing to withdraw settlements of being complicit in the final solution. Given the number of so-called Nazis out there, you would think Germany had won the damn war.

Debates rage over whether anti-Zionism can be defined as the new anti-Semitism. The Palestinian-driven campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions attempts to link Zionism and Israel to apartheid-era racism in South Africa. Since the 1980s, members of Israel’s hasbara programs have used academic, religious, and government resources to teach Zionists rhetorical tactics and ideological strategies to defend Israel against criticism in social media and elsewhere (if you are reading this online, you may hear from them in the comments below). While hasbara translates as “explanation,” this Internet-era “public diplomacy” more often resembles old-school propaganda.

The problem with this linguistic warfare is that it re-entrenches existing positions. Everyone wants to convince, and no one wants to listen.

IN HIGHLIGHTING the role of money in shutting down the conversation about Israel, my Marxist friends miss an essential point: extremist ideological positions would not be so effective, or appealing, if they didn’t tap into real emotions and fears. You can’t understand the way many Canadian Jews are deeply attached to Zionism, to the point of being unable to consider another point of view, without addressing Holocaust survivors and the history of anti-Semitism in Canada, and in Montreal in particular.

Canadian Jews, while liberal in many ways, are surprisingly right-wing when it comes to Zionism. According to a census analysis done in 2006, 25 percent of American Jews identify as Zionist, while 42 percent of Canadian Jews do. Toronto and Montreal have some of the highest rates of visitation to Israel of any Jewish community in North America, at 75 percent. This gives the impression of a seemingly univocal, unconditional support for the Israeli state in Canada, at least within the Jewish community.

Toronto and Montreal are quite different from Tel Aviv, where I went in early 2012 to interview Jews who had become pro-Palestinian activists. We sat in the cafés, and while these Israelis criticized their government, raged against the power of the settlers, and testified to Palestinian suffering under the occupation, I kept looking nervously over my shoulder. “Relax,” one refusenik told me. “This is Israel. You say what you want here.”

Back in Canada, I visited the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre to ask Jacqueline Celemencki, the education coordinator, why Canadian Jews are more conservative in their Zionism. Her answer is simple—and difficult. After World War II, Montreal received the third-largest group of Holocaust survivors in the world. “The Holocaust plays a critical role,” she says. “It dismantled and destroyed generations and generations of Jewish life that will never be re-established in many countries, so the only hope for the future is a collective identity based on this controversial and contested piece of land.”

She points out that among Montreal Jews, as in many victimized groups concerned with survival, a mistrustful attitude persists. Unity and solidarity within the community are valued more than debate and dissent. This resonates with the experience of many young Montreal Jews I know, who are more comfortable talking critically about Israel in Tel Aviv or New York.

Yet New York and Israel took in even more Holocaust survivors than Montreal after the war. So why are New York Jews more liberal, and why is it easier to trash-talk Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv? I met Stephanie Schwartz to discuss these questions over coffee in Mile End, one of Montreal’s historical Jewish neighbourhoods, where I live and where my father went to Talmud Torah. She does research for an online museum of Montreal’s Jewish community, has a Ph.D. in religious studies (specializing in Canadian studies), and researches multicultural Canadian Jewish identity.

She explains that in Montreal, the centre of Canadian Jewish life up until the 1980s, most Jews never felt fully accepted. Caught between the two solitudes and victimized by European-imported anti-Semitism, Jews were excluded not once but twice over, from both French and English institutions, which made it difficult to get hospital jobs and university spots. While the city harboured pockets of British and French brands of nationalism, neither appealed to eastern European immigrants. American republicanism encouraged Jews to hop into the melting pot, but Canada’s bicultural, and subsequently multicultural, structure encouraged more segregated ethnic identifications. Unlike their American cousins, who helped define fast-talking, neurotic New York, Montreal Jews rarely felt included or welcome in Canada’s national project. Hence the appeal of Zionism, and the distant utopia of Israel, a place that is controlled by the Jews.

Trauma also plays a role in shutting down the conversation. Too often, the word gets used as a synonym for violence. More properly, the Greek word for “wound” refers to how past violence can haunt victims by seeming to reappear in the present. This obfuscates our perception of the present and impedes our capacity to respond appropriately to contemporary situations. Trauma can also refer to the impact or effects of violence that we are unaware of, and that we may not have directly experienced. Scholars define this as second-generational trauma, endured by parents and transmitted to children, but it is not only passed on through families. Stories about historical violence circulate in the media, the news, movies, and oral histories. What scholars refer to as traumatic discourses can affect people in subtle ways, even if they or their parents were not victimized personally.

Jews have lived within traumatic narratives for a long time. The technical name for this is Judaism. For thousands of years, people have been kicking the shit out of Jews. Long before the Holocaust, our history was already a litany of disasters and ritual commemorations of victimization. As my relatives often joke on Passover, “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!”

I DIDN’T EXACTLY GROW UP on the mean streets of Babylonia. In the Vancouver suburb of White Rock, I was the only Jewish kid any of my friends knew, and I don’t think they had any opinions about Jews either way. Mostly, I was the same as any white suburban kid, easily accepted by Canadian society. No one would have even known I was Jewish if I hadn’t kept talking about it.

In 1978, when I was seven, my father decided it was time for my Jewish education, which commenced with NBC’s Holocaust miniseries. It was the first time he had spoken to me as if I were an adult. I was wide eyed with amazement, and excited to stay up past my bedtime. For the first time, I saw the images from the concentration camps, emaciated corpses piled up on top of one another, a jumble of bones. Those scenes were burned onto my retinas, and they have remained imprinted on my mind ever since. Just as important was the story that went with them. My dad looked me straight in the eye and told me this has been happening to our people for thousands of years, and who knows where, who knows when—but it could happen again.

What does a kid do with that kind of information? I never experienced this eternal Jew hatred, but it became a permanent theme in the fantasy world of my suburban backyard. I didn’t play cowboys and Indians. It was always me against Hitler. That bastard. But this childhood fantasy was not just a game. In a deep sense, I was convinced that I wasn’t really Canadian. From an early age, I figured that if push came to shove Canadians would turn against me.

One day, I snuck out to buy licorice from a convenience store a few blocks away. I looked up at the man behind the counter and wondered if he would ever put me and my little sister into a concentration camp. Now, that’s a pretty messed-up thing for a ten-year-old to think. What’s even crazier is that years later when I remembered his face, I realized that the man must have been Pakistani.

During the ’70s and ’80s, my formative years, British Columbia was rife with overt racism. I only heard seven or eight anti-Semitic jokes in high school, mostly rugby players at high school dances singing, “She’s got the nose that kills,” to the tune of Mötley Crüe. But I must have heard thousands of anti-Pakistani, anti-Chinese, and anti-Aboriginal “jokes” that were part of a process of real discrimination. Like many white Canadian teenagers searching for approval from their peers back then, I repeated those jokes. Convinced I was a victim, I was oblivious to the victimization of others around me and, to my shame, even participated in it. This is what traumatic narratives can do: blind us to the victimization of others, whether Pakistani or Palestinian.

It is hard to conceive of Jews as an oppressed minority when our prime minister fully supports Israel, has established the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism, and works overtime to court the Jewish vote. But does that mean anti-Semitism is a relic, part of Canada’s ugly history of discrimination, or is it a lingering potential that could re-emerge at any time?

If I am honest with myself, and with you, I have to admit that I’m still not sure. On the very day I write this, Pauline Marois’s PQ is presenting the Charter of Quebec Values, which proposes forbidding Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, and others from wearing religious symbols if they work in publicly funded institutions. Many, including me, see this as primarily a white francophone response to Muslims in Quebec, but many of my Jewish friends are freaking out. Saying Jews can’t wear yarmulkes, or telling Montreal Holocaust survivors to take Hebrew off their storefronts, is guaranteed to trigger traumatic associations, conjuring up the 1935 Nuremberg laws in Germany, which were designed to restrict the Jewish presence in public life.

Now, hold on: I am not calling Marois a Nazi, but this threat has triggered a long-standing sense of exclusion and a fear of non-belonging among Jews as well as many Muslims, immigrants, and people of colour. I am certainly not immune to it. My battles with Hitler were imaginary, but my father grew up Orthodox in Quebec and was called maudit juif (“cursed Jew”), regularly harassed, attacked a few times, and even beaten up for being Jewish. It is easy to entertain the paranoia that the Québécois have remained anti-Semitic, and to imagine that anti-Semitism is secretly, silently lurking beneath the surface—an eternal conspiracy, as in Le péril juif.

This is what makes the fear of anti-Semitism so difficult to get over. When you are raised to think your people always have been and always will be persecuted, it becomes hard to know if there is actual, immediate danger. This is how trauma works: historical violence haunts you so much that you can’t tell if a threat has actually reappeared or whether it is only an apparition. Traumatic violence isn’t just something that happened to you or your parents or even your grandparents. It is an abstract, intangible threat that hangs over your head, and makes it tough to figure out who the victims are, right now. Religious Jews and Muslims in Montreal? Indigenous peoples across Canada? Palestinians in the West Bank? Traumatic narratives blur our perceptions of victimhood past and present. Perhaps this affects Marois’s PQ as much as it does Montreal Jews.

When historical trauma—such as Canadian anti-Semitism, or the English oppression of the French in Quebec—haunts the present, it disables change, reigniting ancient fears and making us feel vulnerable, shutting down any possibility for real dialogue. A few years ago, I saw this in action. In a large auditorium at McGill University, a Palestinian doctor from Toronto, Izzeldin Abuelaish, was invited to discuss his book, I Shall Not Hate. His story is tragic and moving: three of his daughters were killed in Israel’s 2008–09 bombing of Gaza. As he shared his story, demonstrating his refusal to hate or demonize Jews, I looked around the audience and saw a wide variety of Jewish faces that were open, listening. They were not peaceniks or Zionists, just regular people. Abuelaish had found a way to talk to these Canadian Jews, to truly communicate with them, enabling them to witness the depth and tragedy of Palestinian suffering. It was extraordinary. In that moment, you could feel the possibility of a less violent future.

After he finished, a voice spoke out. The man started respectfully but grew more strident, trumpeting the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. When he compared Israel with South Africa, a sad thing happened. The room divided in two. One side clapped in support, while the tentative but open faces on the other side closed and turned angry. The bridge Abuelaish had been building collapsed. The comparison to South Africa returned the conversation to the battlefield. After years of watching such exchanges, I realized this: when anger erupts and people start attacking each other, we re-enact the violent antagonism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The war itself explodes into the middle of our conversations.

TWENTY YEARS AGO, I lived briefly in Safed, in northern Israel. This blue-painted artists’ colony became the centre of Jewish mysticism in the sixteenth century, when prominent Sephardic rabbis, expelled from Spain, moved to Palestine and popularized the Kabbalah. I ended up there because I was bored with school, so I dropped out of my second year at the University of British Columbia and took a construction job to pay for a ticket to Israel. After five months living in the Old City of Jerusalem, I travelled to quiet Safed to explore my spirituality and meditate at the graves of kabbalistic rabbis. It was a wonderful and profound experience, and I felt I was connecting to my history.

Ten years later, I found myself sitting on a couch in Toronto, chatting past midnight with a Palestinian Canadian friend, Hanadi Loubani. One story led to another, and finally she told me about her father. He had grown up just outside of Sa’sa’, a Palestinian village near Safed. In 1948, the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah Jewish Paramilitary, attacked the village as part of Operation Hiram and expelled all of the Palestinians who had not already fled. Nostalgic for his birthplace and unable to return home, Hanadi’s father would tell her bedtime stories about his childhood in Palestine. The story she remembered best was the one about his long, lonely walk to school. For company, he would tie a tin can to his shoe and kick it all the way to class.

The story of that tin can jolted me. While I was connecting to a mystical history in Safed, someone else was unable to return to his home a few villages over. Blam! In that moment, it hit me. I felt this other person’s suffering. Something tight and defensive inside me softened and relaxed a little. Israel was no longer just my story.

As a Jew raised on a traumatic narrative, I will always be sensitive to the history of anti-Semitism. I can’t, and won’t, forget certain things. But as a Canadian, I also feel implicated in the injustices of others. Sometimes, I will take a break from feeling Jewish guilt about the plight of Palestinians, and take a turn feeling guilty about the suffering of Indigenous peoples right here in Canada. For Jews, or anyone raised on a traumatic narrative, addressing and acknowledging the stories of other victims will help us to move on and to foster among all Canadians a greater sense of belonging.

There is a reason the phrase “cycle of violence” has become a cliché for describing intractable conflicts: it highlights how violence imprisons us in a repetitive loop of victimization, fear, anger, and retaliation. Acts of aggression, by Israelis or Palestinians, are invariably justified as counterattacks. Whether defensive, retributive, or even pre-emptive, one side’s violence is perpetually explained as a response to the other’s. Like children in a playground, everyone yells, “He started it!”

But anger is not power; it is impotence. When we yell, we throw away our agency, and the power to stop the cycle of violence. Defensive walls protect us from the enemy, but they also block our capacity for change and growth.

The voice of Jewish suffering in Canada and elsewhere is important, and well established, but the realities of Palestinian suffering have yet to transform the Canadian conversation. The future of Israel will not be created by fighting the ghost of Hitler in our backyard. All of us must calmly, consciously refuse to engage in the war of words, whether genuinely traumatic or deliberately funded, that silences debate.

As home to both Jewish and Palestinian diasporas, Canada is a place to let down defensive barriers and have a real conversation, one that will open the door to a new becoming. This is, after all, the dream of a dynamic, multicultural country: to reinvent ourselves and our communities, and to loosen the grip of traumatic pasts. This has nothing to do with guilt or righteousness. Refusing anger and starting a genuine dialogue about Israel is the only way to meet the future.

Psychopaths and Judaism

Does the belief system of Judaism have psychopathic tendencies?  See here for more about Israel the psychopathic nation. See here for more about the Talmud. (Be sure to scroll down and go through all of the articles.) One idea that you have to understand is that Judaism is  a group evolutionary strategy. 
See here for more info from a Jewish lady about her experience with Jewish psychopathology. 

One of the documentaries below is called "I Am Fish Head." Which they are associating a rotting fish. The fish rots from the head down. That is one way of putting the metaphor for how most corruption starts at the top and filters down into the rest of society. 

The other documentary below is called "Defense Against the Psychopath" it is below the "I Am Fish Head" documentary. 

Psychotronic Weapons Letter To Senate Committee

See here for a video with President Clinton talking about human experimentation.


The following letter is alarming and vital to the understanding of how far the issue of psychotronic weapons and projects aimed at controlling American citizens and people everywhere has progressed. This letter is dated February 9, 1994. The organization involved is no longer available at this address below. 

Association of National Security Alumni Electronic
Surveillance Project P. O. Box 13625
Silver Spring, MD 20911-3625

February 9, 1994

Chairman John Glenn
Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs
340 Dirkson Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Attention: Mr. Chris Kline

Subject: Involuntary Human Experimentation with Non-Ionizing Radiation

Dear Mr. Kline:

Senator Glenn's publicly-expressed outrage that this government has (once again) been found to be engaging in brutal forms of involuntary human experimentation, and his demand, in effect, that any and all forms of this type of experimentation be exposed was heartening.

A large and growing number of people in this country hope that the Senator's expressed outrage was sincere, and that your Committee's investigations are not simply a means of diverting attention from complaints centering on this government's long-term role in involuntary human experiments with non-ionizing forms of radiation.

Now that the Departments of Defense, Energy and Justice have openly admitted that directed-energy weapons systems do indeed exist, complaints of experimentation with these systems can no longer be ignored.

As stated to you during our telephone conversation last week, this Project is focused on complaints concerning experiments with non-ionizing, so-called "non-lethal," directed-energy weapons, surveillance and psychotronics systems. In bringing this to your attention, I am representing the interests, currently, of some 100 U.S. citizens, who are the subjects of both vicious forms of overt harassment and concurrent directed-energy harassment.

The enclosed copy of Microwave Harassment and Mind-Control Experimentation is a preliminary investigative finding, only. The accompanying Supplement furnishes an update on the current status of this Project.

I am also enclosing copies of letters exchanged with, and directed to the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and the Food & Drug Administration, which are self-explanatory. I am also enclosing copies of two articles concerning John Alexander, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nonlethal Weapons Division, which I will address below. Also enclosed is a letter to a woman in contact with this Project which addresses some of the effects of long-term exposure to these so-called "non-lethal" systems. Just as a matter of interest--DoD-sponsored "hy'e" in the media to the contrary notwithstanding--non-lethal weapons systems can be incredibly lethal.

They are not gentle systems, as this government would like for the public to believe. Questions which need to be asked by the Committee on Government Affairs, as a preliminary, are as follows:

1. By what formal means are U.S. Government agencies, to include the Department of Defense, prevented from testing "non-lethal", directed-energy weapons, surveillance and psychotronics systems on U.S. citizens under involuntary circumstances?

2. By what formal means are U.S. Government contractors and sub-contractors prevented from testing "non-lethal", directed-energy weapons, surveillance and psychotronics systems on U.S. citizens under involuntary circumstances?

3. Why does the Energy Policy Act of 1992 fail to prohibit involuntary human experimentation with non-ionizing forms of radiation?

4. How many members of Congress and of the Administration have investments in firms which are engaged in the development and testing of directed-energy systems?

5. Why is Los Alamos National Laboratory, a Department of Energy agency, engaged in the development of "non-lethal", directed-energy systems?

6. Why is John Alexander--a 30-year US Army Special Forces veteran with a long-term interest in the "psychotronics" (mind-control) aspects of directed-energy systems--regarded as being particularly qualified to direct the Non-Lethal Systems Division of Los Alamos National Laboratory?

7. Why is the Department of Energy (and John Alexander in particular) in the business of promoting "non-lethal" systems as tools for law enforcement, and as weapons systems for the military?

8. Why are these "non-lethal" systems being kept classified?

9. Where is the test data on the efficacy of these directed-energy weapons, surveillance and psychotronics systems being obtained, and who in Congress, specifically, is overseeing those experiments?

10. Why is the Department of Defense pushing for an increase in the numbers of Ground Wave Emergency Network (GWEN) towers in this country?

11. How many satellites launched under the auspices of DoD, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the Central Intelligence Agency are engaged in the surveillance of U.S. citizens" And how many of those satellites qualify as directed-energy emitters; i.e., as "amplified communications" satellites?

12. What federal constraints have been placed on the construction of microwave towers and other antennae arrays in this country; and what assurances do U.S. citizens have that emissions from those towers and antennae arrays are not being used for involuntary human experimental purposes?

14. Who in Congress is overseeing the construction and use of microwave towers and antennae arrays in this country?

15. Why is it that complaints by U.S. citizens concerning directed-energy harassment and experimentation are being ignored?

16. Since Ms. Susan Patrick Ford, of the Department of Defense, appears to be unable to answer the questions posed in my letter to her dated November 18, 1993, can you answer these questions?
In sum, Mr. Kline, this is a problem which Congress can ill afford to ignore. There are many angry people in this country who are fed up with these experiments. (Not all experimentees are kept effectively isolated.) A number of experimentees recognize the rapidly burgeoning numbers of microwave towers and antennae arrays in this country are a part of the problem--a level of recognition which, indeed, may have prompted the destruction of two major "communications towers" in Chiapas, Mexico, shortly prior to that government's decision to close the borders to that state.

A lawless government spawns a lawlessness, generally. It is apparent to me that this country is merely "testing its wings", so to speak, where lawlessness and chaos, at this stage, is concerned. Creating more prisons and hiring more police is not the solution.

The U.S. Congress--and Senator Glenn's Committee, in particular,--is in a position to ensure that no government agency, surrogate or otherwise, has a license to run rampant over the human and civil rights of citizens of this country, and that this government, once again, learns to adhere to the principles which were the basis for this country's creation.

Please do let me hear from you concerning the foregoing.

Sincerely,

JULIANNE MCKINNEY

Director, Electronic Surveillance Project

Psychotronic Weapons- They Exist and Your Governments Know About Them

See here for Former U.S. Representative From Ohio and Candidate for the President of the United States Dennis Kucinich's Attempted Ban of Space-Based Weapons

MICHIGAN LAW AGAINST ELECTROMAGNETIC DEVICES

House Bill 4513 would amend the penal code (MCL 750.200h) to define “harmful electronic or electromagnetic device” as a device designed to emit or radiate an electronic or electromagnetic pulse or signal or microwave intended to cause harm to others or cause damage to, destroy, or disrupt any electronic or telecommunications system or device including a computer or computer network. The bill would also include a harmful electronic or electromagnetic device in the definition of “imitation harmful substance or device.”

The Nuremberg Code opposes all forms of human experiments

The state of Missouri has a law against involuntary chipping or implanting of a human. Many countries have laws against human experimentation and the use of electromagnetic devices to control a person either their mind or their bodies.

SENATOR JOHN GLENN

Senator Glenn's publicly-expressed outrage that this government has been found to be engaging in brutal forms of involuntary human experimentation, and that any and all forms of this type of experimentation be exposed. He stated that there are experiments with non-ionizing, so-called "non-lethal," directed-energy weapons, surveillance and psychotronic systems. He opposes Microwave Harassment and Mind-Control Experimentation especially connected to Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, CIA, and the National Reconnaissance Office. He stated the DOD has increased in the numbers of Ground Wave Emergency Network (GWEN) towers and satellites that qualify as directed- energy emitters, microwave towers, and antennae arrays. John Glenn was also member of the Electronic Surveillance Project that tried to stop these forms of harassment and human experimentation.

The Farce of the Mental Health Profession - If They Don't Care About This, They Don't Care About Your Mental Health

My headline is the truth. The reality is, the mental health profession must become more evidence based and less speculative. How can they properly diagnose mental illness when technology exists that can influence individuals in ways that very few people know? One of the reasons why they don't want to deal with this, is because it benefits the "powers that be" to have someone committed that is a problem to them. This is what they used to do in the former Soviet Union, and in East Germany with the Stasi. In East Germany, it was called Zersetzung. See here, here and here for more about the Stasi and its techniques.They are now doing this in Canada and the United States under Homeand Security and Bill C-51.

See here, here and here for more about using directional sound to create the hearing of an inner voice. Also see here and here for more about the microwave hearing effect. See here for more about a Canadian Psychiatrist who concerned about remote influencing weaponry affecting mental and physical health. 

See here and here for more about psychotronic and electromagnetic weapons. Also, see here and here. CNN briefly talked about this technology way back in the 80's, see here. (See in the CNN clip how he says they can make people do stuff they normally wouldn't. That was in the 80's. Similar to this.) See here for the attempted ban on this technology by former U.S. Representative from Ohio and candidate for the president of the United States Dennis Kucinich. Even Wikipedia talks about electromagnetic warfare here. 

Gamer: Some Interesting Information About Classified Technology From Hollywood

Watch Videos Below!

Has anyone seen the movie Gamer? If you haven't read the Wikipedia of the Plot. Check out the video clip below. What you see in that movie is very similar to what they can do with this classified technology, you see him talking about nanotechnology and sending messages to others, he is actually referring to synthetic telepathy. 

As Michael Persinger mentions in this video, light can be measured, minds can be read, thoughts can be sent. If you can think it, you can send it. Just like writing an email with your mind. Zuckerberg is saying it here, he is just not telling you the whole story. Also see here for another article with Mark Zuckerberg referring to synthetic telepathy and here for more about typing with your thoughts from Facebook.  See here for a Cisco ad that talks about this technology. See here for connecting brains: merging two brains to become one --- or the ethical implications of when "I" becomes "We." 

See this collection of links about using thought to influence something. See this old clip of a scientist looking out of a cat's eyes. What they have now is even more advanced. See here for more about nanotechnology, see here for more about full spectrum dominance. See my previous post about DARPA guinea pigs. See here for more about linking processors with light. See here and here about how they can engineer a virus or a bacteria that you "catch" so "THEY" can do this to you. They can also do it by injection, as the top video shows at the link here.

This is bio-warfare being practiced right out in the open in Canada and the United States, (really all over the world,) and of course, no one does anything because we live in Banana Republic dumps. This should be all over the news, it is an epidemic. 

But who has the strongest influence over the news? Take a wild guess. You don't think this isn't relevant? What do we do about it? 

We must demand transparency in the media and the governments. We must not tolerate this. The sad part is we pay for a lot of this with our tax dollars! This is being used by politically connected individuals, mostly organized crime and intelligence. This is what the CSE in Canada hide from us. (They are the Canadian version of the NSA. See here and here for more about the CSE.) THEY WORK FOR US! 

Bruce Willis Surrogates: Another Example of Classified Technology

Watch the video clip below. Think of the surrogates as real human beings, once they get nanotechnology inside of you, this is what they can do. See here for more about DARPA guinea pigs. (See here for more about full spectrum dominance and reality TV torture.) See here for more about controlling someone. See here, here and here about bio-warfare. See here and here for more about nanotechnology and biowarfare. See here for more about brain-computer interfaces.  See this collection of links about using thought to influence something.

If you can think a thought, you can send it. Just like writing an email with your mind. Zuckerberg is saying it here, he's just not telling you the whole story. Also see here for another article with Mark Zuckerberg referring to synthetic telepathy. See here for a Cisco ad that talks about this technology. See this old clip of a scientist looking out of a cat's eyes. What they have now is even more advanced.

Minority Rule: The Rise of Political Correctness

Another excellent video showing how pathetic some Jewish intellectuals are. For other interesting posts on political correctness, see here, here and here. Also be sure to see here for more about Jewish slavery with blacks and whites. (Be sure to scroll down and see all of the articles.)

To receive value from the video below, you do not have to be a supporter of Christianity or the Catholic church. It is just important for you to see where some of the crazy ideas of political correctness had their origins.

Most people do not know much about Judaism--- how are you supposed to be a judge of something you do not understand? First off, everyone should read the Old Testament and realize Jews are a people of the Old Testament --- but that is far from being the whole picture, read here to learn more. Also, see here for more about the Jewish Talmud.

Jews need to own up for their major role in slavery. They were involved more than any other group of people. Jewish director Stephen Spielberg will not talk about it in his movie Amistad. Why not Mr. Spielberg? I used to have so much respect for Jewish people, unfortunately, I have seen the truth of what some Jews really are.... absolutely privileged pathetic liars.