The article "Propaganda and Social Control" is from a booklet entitled *The Fourth Reich in America*, available from Flatland Books. This is an excerpt:
JOHN JUDGE: The battle, I believe, in the current period, since the time I was born, 1947, or even a little earlier, is for the last frontier that's being explored; it's the one where we have to *do* battle in order to survive; it's for what George Orwell called "the space between our ears." It's that little space, and what's in it, that the government finds the most valuable.
Believe me, the Defense Department does not sit around in fear of the Soviet Union, who are technologically and militarily well behind us on every critical point. If they plan anything in relation to the Soviet Union, it's full-scale nuclear, biological and chemical warfare attack in the year 2000. They don't sit and quake over the people in Nicaragua, in Central America, in Africa, in the Middle East. They do genocide against them with impunity. The only people that they're afraid of is us. Because if *we* figure out what's happening in this society, if *we* figure out the real politics, if *we* call the lie and open it up, then the gig is up. That's why Oliver North was so careful to shred everything. It didn't matter, as the Committee pointed out, that the Cubans already knew, that the Nicaraguans already knew, and that even the Soviets already knew. The problem was if the American public should get hold of the information on the secret government and its activities. *That's* the danger.
The history of the establishment of privilege in societies probably goes back as far as there was history. Back at least to multiple groups of people trying to cooperate, or live together. In the earliest part, those privileges were established at various points by religious beliefs that were asserted, or held sway, by outright lies, by force and the threat of force, and from time to time by the discovery of new technologies, which allowed a particular group an advantage or privilege over another group. The maintaining of that privilege, once it was held in a few hands, by a particular class, race or sex, was maintained then, by deception; by a distortion of earlier history; and by a method that became more and more effective as history progressed: the implementation of force, the threat of force, and implied violence.
This continued until all of those things became part of the State apparatus. They became centralized as huge functions that didn't rely on a particular fiefdom or how many thugs you could hire to fence off your land, protect it and call it your own, or how many soldiers you could get together under your leadership to die, so that you could take over some other property. The accumulation of wealth and control became centralized not only in a few hands in this country, but by a few societies, a few empires, over time.
We live in one of them. We live in the most advanced one. We live in the most dangerous one, in terms of the future existence of the planet. {1}. Current military and intelligence machinery of this society make the Nazi/Hohenzollern machine look like a rubber band affair.
We're 40 or 50 years down that technological pike from whatever it was that frightened us in the 1940s. And as Thomas Merton said in 1936: "If *we* fight the Nazis, we will become the Nazis."
Under current theory, rather than distorting history it has become the practice, I believe, to destroy history altogether. History, especially after the year 1945, no longer exists. It's not taught in school. When I was in school I was lucky to get up to the end of the Civil War. The furthest you could get in school was, maybe, the *beginnings* of World War II. Then there was something called Current Events that started in 1960. Now the kids in high school have history as an *optional* topic. You know, it's either that or I don't know what... typing... or something else. But even if they go into the history, I don't know if you've picked up an historical text from high schools {2} that mentions at all the 1940s on... It's just so distorted as to be unrecognizable. It's down what Orwell called the "memory hole." So it's more than just changing or distorting the history; it's the destruction of history itself so that history no longer exists.
In World War II, techniques were developed for the deception of the enemy, for the control of the human mind, and for war stress. They did an analysis of soldiers. It was that period, and the period directly following, that marked the massive growth of psychiatry as an industry. And of prisons. And of the whole centralized institutional response to political and social problems, that handed them over to experts in the society and to institutions. And that touted those people who stood up in any way, or fought back against their oppression, into these institutions, under definitions that blamed the victims themselves.
Blaming the victim is what mass psychiatry, militarism, and many of these other forces do. "You end up," as Malcolm X said once, "by reading the newspapers for long enough, loving the people doing the oppressing and hating the people that are being oppressed."
And then add to that, and those factors and those tendencies, the technology of television. As I often say, Goebbels probably would have given his saluting arm for that one. Because that's the ticket, see? We're no longer going to read. We no longer have to do anything except turn on that electronic machine. And as early as 1948, according to my investigation and research, that television was exactly the instrument described in 1939 in Orwell's book *1948*, which was changed here in the U.S. to *1984* in the first Harcourt and Brace edition. But '48 is the year it's talking about. All the technology that Winston faces in Orwell's society was in place, and in the hands of, and functional for, the intelligence agencies; the averrant conditioning, the telescreen that watched him...
By 1948 we had Operation Octopus (in secret), which allowed machinery in a particular neighborhood to cover a 25 mile radius, and any television that had its tubes hot could be listened through and *seen* through by this technology. This is what Hale Boggs' staff was investigating at the time of his disappearance in the middle of Watergate. He was also one of the Warren
Commission members.
Beyond watching us, the television also controls us. Not only with constant subliminal messages, and the message of the commoditization of all human experience, and the message that cops are our friends, no matter what they do. You know, the overt and the covert propaganda. But just the fact that we spend so much of our time absorbed that we, in a sense, leave the driving
to them... on the brain circuit.
With the brain itself, the procedures were: drugging, cutting, implanting, microwaving and perfecting control. Whether it was end of memory, lapse of memory temporarily, creation of second personality, training of assassins... whatever control they wanted, first on the individual, and then on the mass level.
Other programs that the CIA, Navy and Army Intelligence called MK/ULTRA, MK/DELTA, and MK/NAOMI, ARTICHOKE, BLUEBIRD, they had a lot of names, Project Often; they were done on prisoners, on veterans... who are *still* being experimented on in those institutions *right* *now*, in ways that won't be seen in the civilian world for several years.
But they took it, obviously, from that individual level to a mass level. As early as 1956, Allen Dulles bought 50 million tabs of LSD from the Sandoz Corporation. Now that's not *experimental* level. They were going to *do* something with it.
And what they did with it, to just give you one example from an article that I found at the time of... you remember the mass murders that were attributed to the Son of Sam (Mae Brussell calls him the "Son of Uncle Sam"), this fellow up there in New York, David Berkowitz. Berkowitz was an army clerk in Korea. I have an article about his military background from his best friend in the unit. He decided he didn't want to be there any more and he applied as a conscientious objector, the friend says. And then he says, interestingly enough, "the brass gave him acid." Does the *brass* give you acid? No, the brass gives you MK/ULTRA.
This fellow Gary Heidens, who was just convicted of the mass murders and torture of the women in the basement in Philadelphia. Did you read about that? He had been part of the MK/ULTRA experimentation in the army. He had 100% medical disability from the V.A. [Veterans Administration]. He had V.A. records so sensitive that the computers sent out a warning beep whenever anybody tried to access the file. His brother was also on 100 disability from the V.A. And when Perutto, his lawyer, tried to introduce any of that, it was quashed by the judge.
These so-called mass murderers not only don't commit all the murders (it's easy for the government to commit a lot of murders and then blame them all on one person), but the murders that they *do* commit are under the influence, not of some purported mental disease, but of *programming* of the mind, and distortion by the government itself.
The print and other media in this country, especially since the period of the Depression, have been in the hands of fewer and fewer people. All you need, really, is the assignment editor and the final copy editor in your pocket. And then you can have as many honest reporters as you want, as long as you've got 2 or 3 CIA reporters and intelligence reporters to cover the right story. And to make sure that nobody else slips into the wrong one.
The wire services are certainly easy enough to control. And now the ownership, which had been secretly held, through interlocking directorates, by the Rockefeller family, for all four major television networks since the 1940s, has passed openly into the hands of General Electric(remember, "what's good for GE is good for the country") for NBC, and to Capital Cities, Bill Casey's stock investment company, ABC is under their auspices. So now we're going to be *open* about the fact that we live in a
corporate world.
The future envisioned by the people that are paying hundreds of millions of dollars of money (NASA and Navy Intelligence) was outlined by Dr. Jose Delgado. A Fascist from Spain, an expert in brain implantation on animals and humans, Delgado suggested to the Congress in 1972 that we could have a society of electronic remote control of workers and laborers in the field, and soldiers out on the front lines. A society run from behind by a group of technocrats at the top, with almost all of us implanted {3} with
electronic devices to control our brains and human responses. And he told Congress that he didn't see why anyone would feel adverse to having an implant that would make them both happy and productive. He said: "After all, they take their Swine Flu shots, don't they?"
I didn't.
Disinformation is an art developed by us and now blamed on the KGB. To give you just one example of how it works, it distorts history so much from the beginning, that the common left-wing response to the propaganda merely maintains the lie.
KAL 007, for instance, was *not* blown out of the sky by the Russians. Was *not* within 300 nautical *miles* of the stealth plane that actually invaded Soviet air space and escaped that air space because it deflected the radar information to the missile fired by the Soviet pilot. KAL 007 was blown up over the Kurile trench by the U.S. Intelligence agencies simultaneous with
hearing the Soviet pilot say, "The target is destroyed."
Not only are we not privy to that information, but the KGB and the Soviet Union are blamed for shooting it down. According to the *New York Times*, in those days there was no excuse, under any circumstances at any time, for a sophisticated and developed nation to shoot down a civilian airliner.
Now, we've suddenly changed all that to a situation where there's "nothing else the pilot could do. After all, it was 9 miles away." And it was "ascending," or "descending," or doing something... And so, "we had to knock it out of the sky." [CN -- Here Judge is referring to a different incident, where a U.S. Navy Missile Cruiser shot down a civilian Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf.]
But if our only criticism rests on the idea that the Soviets blew up the plane, then we can only counter with the fact that we shouldn't have done the same. If we get to [the] *bottom* of history, we're in a different situation.
I used to wear a button that said, "Where's Lee Harvey Oswald when we really need him?" You see, I wanted him to testify... because he could tell the truth to the American public. He was innocent of the crime. He didn't fire a gun that day. But whenever I'd wear it, people thought I wanted to kill the
President. If I'd wanted to say that, I would have had to wear a button that said, "Where's Jack Ruby when we really need him?" He took the guns up the back of the grassy knoll. But if I wore that button, they'd think I wanted to kill Sirhan Sirhan. So you see, once you distort it, there's almost no way back unless you get to the core of the information and revise it toward truth.
One of the most interesting articles in the last year was in the Boston Globe, outlining five stories supposedly planted in the international press for distribution by KGB disinformation agents. Those stories included the exact research conclusions of Dave Emory, Mae Brussell and myself, and other key researchers in this country. These "KGB disinformation stories": that Jonestown was a CIA mass murder, that the AIDS disease is a chemical/biological warfare weapon, that the deaths in Cameroon resulted from a test of the neutron bomb... were stories that almost no one except the independent American researchers were putting out. So, if anything, the Soviets are *our* dupes. But I doubt it. I suggest that probably the Soviets didn't plant the "disinformation" but that *that* *article* [i.e. in the *Boston Globe*] was the real disinformation.
[...]
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Saturday, September 29, 2007
State Dept. IG Retaliates Against Whistleblowers, Threatens ‘Their Jobs And Careers’
thinkprogress.org
Approximately 10 days ago, House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote to State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard to report allegations from seven IG employees that he “has repeatedly interfered with on-going investigations to protect the State Department and the White House from political embarrassment.”
Krongard has thwarted investigations into waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq. He has also “refused to cooperate with an investigation into alleged weapons smuggling by a large, unidentified State Department contractor.”
Today, Waxman sent Krongard another disturbing letter that reveals the State Department Inspector General has been retaliating against the whistleblowers. Waxman writes:
This week, several current employees in your office — including two who have agreed to go on the record — informed the Committee that your senior staff attempted to coerce them not to cooperate with the committee’s inquiry and threatened their jobs and careers.
In the letter, Waxman explains that one week after he informed Krongard of the accusations being made by employees within his department, the whistleblowers were accosted by one of Krongard’s subordinates: a congressional affairs liaison who works for the State IG’s office. Here’s what one whistleblower reports that he was told:
[T]he congressional liaison told him: “You have no protection against reprisal. You have no whistleblower protections. Howard could retaliate and you would have no recourse.”
If there was any doubt about whether the Inspector General has been improperly carrying out the duties of his office, he’s confirmed it with his attempts to retaliate against his own employees, at least one of whom he had previously lauded as “one of my best investigators.”
Waxman directed Krongard “to suspend all communications (other than those necessary to collect responsive documents) with employees the Committee is planning to interview.”
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/28/krongard-retaliates/
Approximately 10 days ago, House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote to State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard to report allegations from seven IG employees that he “has repeatedly interfered with on-going investigations to protect the State Department and the White House from political embarrassment.”
Krongard has thwarted investigations into waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq. He has also “refused to cooperate with an investigation into alleged weapons smuggling by a large, unidentified State Department contractor.”
Today, Waxman sent Krongard another disturbing letter that reveals the State Department Inspector General has been retaliating against the whistleblowers. Waxman writes:
This week, several current employees in your office — including two who have agreed to go on the record — informed the Committee that your senior staff attempted to coerce them not to cooperate with the committee’s inquiry and threatened their jobs and careers.
In the letter, Waxman explains that one week after he informed Krongard of the accusations being made by employees within his department, the whistleblowers were accosted by one of Krongard’s subordinates: a congressional affairs liaison who works for the State IG’s office. Here’s what one whistleblower reports that he was told:
[T]he congressional liaison told him: “You have no protection against reprisal. You have no whistleblower protections. Howard could retaliate and you would have no recourse.”
If there was any doubt about whether the Inspector General has been improperly carrying out the duties of his office, he’s confirmed it with his attempts to retaliate against his own employees, at least one of whom he had previously lauded as “one of my best investigators.”
Waxman directed Krongard “to suspend all communications (other than those necessary to collect responsive documents) with employees the Committee is planning to interview.”
http://thinkprogress.org/2007/09/28/krongard-retaliates/
"Islamo-Fascism?" - Forging a Common Front Against the Totalitarian Mind: A Case Study in Religious Demonization
Sep 17, 2007
www.theamericanmuslim.org
by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane
Part One: Causes
Compulsive Fear: The Common Denominator
The entire world seems to be caught up in a frenzy of triumphalist arrogance by extremists who want to conquer the world. The decades-long Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan, in his new tell-all book released on September 16, 2007, The Age of Turbulence, writes, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” On the other side of the divide, some CIA analysts write that Osama bin Laden wants to conquer the world in order to get back the wealth that has been stolen by America and its allies. Both of these observations are superficial. They do not explain the increasing violence in the world that soon may reach the level of a Fourth World War.
As a lifelong student of extremism over the centuries, I have been convinced that the primary motivating cause of militant extremism is not the simple drive for power, but rather its opposite in the form of compulsive fear. The defense mechanism is first to demonize what one fears and only then to destroy it.
... Fear is what motivated American NeoCons to wage terroristic counter-terrorism by bombing Baghdad four years ago in a frenzy of shock and awe that killed 3,000 Iraqi civilians.
The full truth of 9/11 may never be known, but the origin and result of the initial attack on Baghdad has now been exposed, despite official denial of substantial “collateral damage.” I was in Saudi Arabia during the attack watching the bombing on TV together with a senior Saudi general, the right-hand man of the Defense Minister. The American TV commentator assured us that the impressive fireworks were caused by surgical strikes that harmed no-one. The rest of the world knew better.
Much has been written about the origin, nature, and goals of the Neo-Cons, but none of these commentaries identified the real dynamic of this intellectual movement, which was based on compulsive fear of imminent global chaos. Certainly such chaos would threaten access by oil consumers to countries that “sit on oceans of oil.” But, the fear goes beyond material greed. It is existential.
The real motivations for the origin of what appears to be simple NeoCon imperialism go back to the real origin of the Neo-Conservative phenomenon exactly half a century ago in the writings of the original Neo-Conservative godfather, Robert Strausz-Hupe, who once told me that he wanted me to succeed him as Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. We were fighting the totalitarianism of world Communism, which threatened to destroy the Free World. His conclusion was that Communism would disappear within two or three decades but that the aftermath would create a far greater threat to global civilization in the form of inchoate chaos. This mortal threat of chaos, he concluded, could be contained and defeated only if America was willing to grasp its historic opportunity and obligation to impose a world federal government through its overwhelming superiority in both moral force and military conquest.
During the next few decades, the moral force argument somehow got lost in the shuffle, so all that remained was military conquest with public deference to what Muwahid Shah calls the hijab or cover of freedom and democracy. The clearly stated motivating force was not expansionist imperialism, as most would contend, but rather abject mortal fear of population explosion worldwide by peoples who did not share American values and would eventually gain access to nuclear weapons.
The Politics of Fear
In politics the two most powerful motivators are fear and religion. This is especially true in places like America and the Muslim world where religion is a powerful force and therefore can be harnessed in the pursuit of power for whatever purpose.
We are now in the middle of an almost unique example of this truism. Muslims are not the only ones who exploit religion for political ends. American extremists, both political and religious, are exploiting religion by demonizing Islam as a necessary first and decisive step in a perceived war of self-defense against universal evil.
A week ago, on September 1, 2007, presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, sent out a letter to his supporters pegging his new campaign on a single theme that he hopes will be a sure-fire road to electoral victory in a time of great national peril. This theme is simple. He declared, “The transcendent issue of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism.”
Another presidential hopeful, not yet declared but with even better chances of success, is Newt Gingrich, who engineered the so-called Gingrich Revolution in 1994 by taking over both houses of Congress for the Republicans. Shortly thereafter he laid the groundwork for a new war against evil by calling for a war against Islamic totalitarianism. In the American lexicon developed in the war against Communist global conquest, the world is full of harmless tyrants who seek only their own power at home and therefore can be co-opted to serve American purposes. Such tyranny is different from totalitarianism, which by definition seeks total control of the human mind not only as a means to consolidate its own power but primarily as the ultimate end of its own destiny.
Fortunately, Gingrich, who is a past master at mind control, overplayed his hand and flamed out. Since 9/11, however, the demonization of Islam and of Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, as its living example has been gathering supporters non-stop with the infused strength provided by an alliance with sixty million radical Christian extremists. Senator McCain has concluded that exploiting existential fears now promises to gain decisive political traction. The fear of Islam as it has been presented by this alliance is more than mere political make-believe, which is why it is so powerful.
McCain is taking a page right out of the playbook of the other of the two godfathers of Neo-Conservatism, Leo Strausz, who escaped from Nazi Germany in order to fight the new totalitarian menace. He was an atheist but he advocated appealing to religion as a useful tool in the search for power to counter Nazism, Communism, or any other form of totalitarianism. In other words, his life experience taught him that the most effective weapon against a totalitarian attack is a counter-attack that is more effective in using the same techniques.
The shift to a global war on Islam as the root of all evil, rather than merely on terrorism as a modern means of warfare, is bad news because it seems to suggest a retrogression from previous governmental policy. Two years ago, the hard-charging Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, let slip some of his carefully hidden sophistication by dropping the term “Global War on Terrorism,” called GWOT for short, and introduced a new acronym in Washington, GSAVE, which stands for “Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism.” A struggle, however, does not necessarily require military victory, and extremism is politically too generic, so within days President Bush as Commander in Chief vetoed this innovation and demanded that everyone go back to GWOT, the Global War on Terrorism.
Note that both of these paradigms or frameworks for policy were generic and avoided demonizing a religion. Now in a bold stroke McCain is leading a charge backwards from both of them by zeroing in on a popularly more demonizable target, “radical Islamic extremism.”
Two weeks ago, the professional lobbying group, Jihad Watch, which last year produced Robert Spencer’s sophisticated book, The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, called for a new level of high intensity warfare to be inaugurated next month. In FrontpageMag.com, which is one of David Horowitz’s many front groups including Jihad Watch, he declared, “This October 22-26th, I am declaring Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. I will hold demonstrations and protests, teach-ins, and sit-ins on more than 100 college campuses. Our theme will be the oppression of women in Islam and the threat posed by the Islamic crusade against the West.” Front and center as high-power ammunition will be the new book by Robert Spencer, which represents the final product of his two decades devoted to the professional demonizing of Islam.
As a follow-up to the original announcement, Horowitz explained during the commemoration of 9/11, “During the week of October 22-26, 2007, the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever – Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses.” As a leader of this new national movement, together with Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey, and Rick Santorum, Horowitz warned the American voters that, “Islamo-Fascism constitutes the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted.”
A straw in the wind was the political summit held exactly two months ago, on July 16, 2007, by Christians United for Israel. This is the organization founded by the doyon of the new Christian megachurch phenomenon, John Hagee. Max Blumenthal of the Washington Post interviewed a dozen of the thousands of participants in this rally. He expressed his amazement at, as he put it, “how excited they are at the prospect of Armageddon coming tomorrow.”
Hagee has close ties with Republican McCain and Democrat Joseph Lieberman and others in both Congress and the White House. This most extreme of all extremist groups in the world is calling for a unilateral military attack on Iran and the expansion of Israel as the final steps in the Battle of Armageddon to destroy the world in order to cleanse the earth of evil and bring about the return of Jesus to Jerusalem.
It is hard to top this one, but another presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo, made a good try. Last month, he demanded that America bomb Iran back to the stone-age and suggested that the U.S. Air Force should consider launching the mother of all “shock and awe” by bombing Mecca into oblivion.
This manipulation of the politics of fear may be the most radical and dangerous in the world today, because it revels in its own fears. It reminds one of the person with acrophobia or fear of heights who is terrified by standing at the brink of a cliff and cannot resist the temptation to jump off.
Part Two: Effects
Identifying the Principal Perversions
It may seem ironic that there is much overlap between the accusations levied by the professional Muslim bashers against the clear message of divine revelation in the Qur’an and those promoted by Muslim extremists themselves. Therefore, a concerted and coordinated campaign to counter the perversions of the Muslim bashers also serves to counter the perversions by Al Qa’ida and its legions. And the reverse is also true. To counter the lies spread by the Wahhabi religion serves equally to counter those spread by professional Islam bashers in America.
There are two distinct approaches to exposing the lies about Islam and its principal exemplar, the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam. The first is to explain positively or proactively the teachings of the Qur’an and its expression in the sayings of Prophet Muhammad and the sirah of his life. The second is to explain reactively what they are not.
The second approach is to identify the leading distortions of the Qur’an and of the sayings and life of the Prophet Muhammad and then expose the questionable and fraudulent sources of these errors through scholarly analysis. The leading dozen of these principal distortions are illustrated clearly in the recent book by Robert Spencer, The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.
These dirty dozen, as well as many more, are found in all the major attacks on Islam and on the Prophet Muhammad, but Spencer alleges that his latest book is the most scholarly because he bases all his claims on statements over the centuries by Muslims themselves. These dirty dozen range from the accusation that the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, was a pedophile, to the bizarre contention, shared by many Muslims, that Islamic law requires women to be stoned to death. This article highlights perhaps the most spectacular one of these dirty dozen to illustrate the bias that mars the scholarship of Robert Spencer’s use of sources. This one concerns the Prophet Muhammad’s alleged massacre of Jews in Medina.
Bias in Selecting Sources
The underlying problem in most of what Robert Spencer writes to demonize Islam and the Prophet Muhammad is his bias in the selection of sources. He claims that his scholarship is impeccable because he relies entirely on Muslim sources. Unfortunately, he relies heavily on sources that are either bogus or biased and reflect the strain of extremism that is found in every religion.
From the very beginning, there has never been a shortage of extremist Muslims to provide ammunition for those with a biased agenda. The first Wahhabis were the Mukharijun who condemned Ali bin Abi Talib, ‘alayhi as-salam, in the earliest period of the Muslim community for offering to compromise with the tyrant Mu’awiya. They declared that all who disagreed with themselves are infidels who should be executed, and eventually in the year 661 they succeeded in murdering Ali whom they had once supported. One could quote Kharijites (Mukharijun), who survived in one form or another for centuries, but no scholar, not even Spencer, has ever quoted them to prove anything about Islam.
The most extreme example of Robert Spencer’s bias, and one shared by many ignorant Muslims over the centuries, is the apocryphal story about the massacre led by The Prophet Muhammad against an entire Jewish tribe in Medina, the Banu Qurayzah. They were one of the three Jewish tribes that together with the resident Arab tribes had originally invited the Prophet Muhammad to Medina in order to bring peace among the warring parties in the city. All of these tribes signed the Medina Covenant, which was the first known constitution of any city or country. In it, each tribe promised to support the others in the common defense and to work together for their common good. When an alliance of the Quraish and surrounding warlike tribes was threatening to annihilate the Muslims in Medina, the Banu Qurayza committed treason by allying with these tribes.
This much is a known fact, but the story of the Prophet massacring all male members of the tribe, some 700 men, is pure fabrication. Spencer gets this story from the supposedly reliable account by the first historian of Islamdom, Abu Ishaq (704-773). Unfortunately, the original history by Abu Ishaq disappeared without a trace sometime after it was written 150 years after the death of the Prophet. The only extant version of this first biography of the Prophet Muhammad was written half a century later by Ibn Hisham, who admitted that he had condensed and revised the original to fit his own agenda. Malik ibn Anas (715-801), founder of one of the four surviving schools of law in the Sunni world, called Ibn Ishaq a “Dajjal” or anti-Christ for including ahadith that were invented by Jews to glorify their ancestors. Spencer admits on page 28 that the accuracy of Ibn Ishaq’s life of Muhammad is questionable, yet he says on page 30 that Ibn Ishaq’s biography of the Prophet Muhammad is his principal source for much of his book. Many good scholars even today rely on Ibn Ishaq or what remains of his rewritten writings, but not as the sole source of stories that almost certainly were forgeries.
Spencer devotes an entire chapter to the Prophet’s alleged fondness for shock and awe. This chapter in his book, The Truth about Muhammad, is entitled “Casting Terror into Their Hearts.” According to Ibn Ishaq and several ahadith that derive from his account, the Prophet Muhammad laid siege to the Banu Qurayza’s stronghold in the city. When they surrendered, The Prophet announced that Allah had ordered all the male members of the Qurayzah tribe to be executed for disloyalty. Spencer quotes Ibn Ishaq’s account on page 130 as follows: “The apostle went out to the market of Medina and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for the men of the Qurayzah and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought to him in batches.”
This is a great story. The only problem is that subsequent scholarship shows that it was almost certainly a total fabrication from the very beginning. The most detailed expose of this story was published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society thirty years ago in 1976 on pages 100-107 under the title, “New Light on the Story of Banu Qurayza and the Jews of Medina”.
This scholarly analysis quotes contemporary and later scholars who described the rewritten biography of the Prophet, known as Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, as a collection of “odd tales” similar to the mythology popular among ignorant desert tribes. Scholars have always been skeptical of the popular Sirah or histories of early Islam because in this genre of writing the evidentiary rules of the muhadithin or collectors of ahadith, and especially of sources deemed valid as sources for jurisprudence, did not have to be followed. It was not necessary to give any chain of authorities or even to give any authorities at all. As a result, the first mention of this massacre occurred a hundred and fifty years after the event.
Ibn Ishaq himself admitted that his account of the so-called massacre of the Banu Qurayzah was pieced together from fragmentary accounts, including the tribal memories of the Banu Qurayzah themselves, who like all tribes in the world are known to embellish their ancestral histories to mythical proportions. Even Tabari, who is one of the earliest and most reliable historians of early Islam, cites Ibn Ishaq’s story about the alleged slaughter with skepticism and provides no supporting evidence as he does for the rest of his historical research.
The only authentic account is in the chapter of the Qur’an entitled “The Confederates,” Surah al Ahzab 33:26, which relates the siege of Medina by the Quraish and their confederates and the treacherous assistance given the besiegers by some of the Banu Qurayzah. These traitors were killed during battle. “He [Allah] caused those of the People of the Book [the Banu Qurayzah] who helped them [i.e., helped the Quraish] to come out of their forts and cast terror into their hearts, so that some you killed, and some you took prisoner.” This is a statement about the battle, and no figures of casualties are given.
Only later were Jewish tribal accounts embellished with statements that all the men of the Banu Quraysh, as many as 900 men, were personally murdered by the Prophet Muhammad, salah Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, who publicly and enthusiastically chopped off their heads one by one in the main square of Medina.
Modern scholars point out the great resemblance of the above Jewish tale to the early history of the Jews that has survived throughout the ages, according to which the predecessor of Herod the Great hung upon crosses 800 Jewish captives and slaughtered their wives and children before their eyes. At Masada, the number of those who died at the end was 900. The inside story was that the leader of the Banu Qurayzah suggested that all the Banu Qurayzah kill their women and children and then commit suicide, which is the same story told about the last holdout at Masada. A giveaway is that even the same names were given in accounts of these two heroic last stands. It is interesting that modern historians now question the authenticity of the Masada account that 960 Jews committed suicide, which would mean that the Banu Qurayza account of their own refusal to commit suicide might unknowingly have been a more accurate rendition of the original prototype.
Robert Spencer accepts this bogus history as proof for his insistence that the Prophet Muhammad is the perfect model for Al Qa’ida and those who get a thrill from personally beheading captives.
The real significance of Spencer’s reliance on this Jewish tribal history to make his point is found in his reasons for rejecting the Muslim scholars’ skepticism, because this reveals strikingly the bias that poisons everything else in his book.
The scholars argue that this story has to be apocryphal because the strict rule in Islamic law is to punish only those who are responsible for the sedition. The large number of those allegedly beheaded contradicts the Qur’anic prohibition of collective guilt ordained in Surah Fatir 35:18: “No soul shall bear another’s burden.” The leaders of the Banu Qurayzah even in the apocryphal story were well known and even named.
Equally important is the strict rule, never violated at the time of the Prophet, that prisoners of war must be either freed or allowed to be ransomed by their families. This was the rule applied to the other Jewish tribes.
The classical Islamic scholars have another clinching argument. If such a slaughter had actually occurred, it would have been used as a precedent for legal rulings, whereas, in fact, there have never been any such rulings.
Spencer’s argument against the classical Islamic scholars, including the modern scholar, W. N. Arafat, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, is Spencer’s charge on page 132 that they rejected the very possibility of such a slaughter “chiefly for the anachronistic reason that it would have violated Islamic law.”
This is an all-time classic case of biased and circular reasoning. His careful reversal of everything in the Qur’an related to the universal human rights to life and dignity are demonstrated in Part Four of my article, “Marginalizing Extremists by Revealing the Real Truth About Muhammad,” which was published in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, June 25th, 2007. Throughout his book Spencer relies on extremist Muslim sources to prove that human rights have never existed in Islam, and then he cites this biased conclusion to justify his acceptance of events that never occurred.
This bias is strikingly evidenced in the contrast between Spencer’s unquestioning acceptance of falsehood and his rejection of truths that are beyond question. He accepts the Banu Qurayzah massacre, because doing so serves to prove the points he is trying to make throughout his book, but he is skeptical about the very existence of the Medina Covenant which granted equal rights to Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
This whole episode is perhaps the most dramatic of the falsehoods perpetrated by Robert Spencer in his superficially very scholarly book, The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, but it is merely the first of the dirty dozen.
Part Three: Facing a Common Enemy
Muslims and most of the people of the world are dumbfounded by such hateful and primitive sentiments of collective guilt, especially because they are coming from America, which used to be the most respected and beloved country in the world. How did all this demonic hatred of an entire religion come about? Equally important, what can anyone do about it without copying the grave crime of collective guilt by blaming America, Christians, and Jews.
Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of the Muslims in the world and the overwhelming majority of Christians and now also of Jews recognize that the demonization of an entire religion is a threat to everyone. They all recognize that there is a growing movement of Muslim extremism, which can result in Muslim terrorism. But they fear that demonizing Islam as the source of Muslim extremism is helping to provoke it. Furthermore, citing the same bogus sources that Muslim extremists use to justify their crimes serves to reinforce the legitimacy of Muslim extremists.
How do we persuade policy makers to use the term “radical Muslim extremism” in order to distinguish between a religion and those who carry out crimes against humanity in its name? There is no such thing as Islamic extremism, any more than there is Christian or Jewish extremism, unless one wants to reduce all religion to the level of tribalism. These are oxymorons or contradictions in terms. Unfortunately, extremists in every religion have always been with us and always will be, so what do we do about it?
The first requirement is to recognize that the traditionalist peoples in all religions face a common enemy. One half of the threat to global civilization is the post-modern phenomenon of the totalitarian mind in the West fixated on fighting fire with fire at the risk of a global conflagration. The other half is the equally post-modernist phenomenon of Al Qa’ida and its evil minions, who play into the hands of those who are willing to destroy civilization in a war against so-called Islamic fascism. There clearly is such a thing as Muslim fascism, but this is a threat primarily to Muslims, both directly as in Iraq and indirectly to Muslims throughout America.
All my life I have been a professional global strategist and long-range global forecaster in advising government and industry on the art of what I call paradigm management. This is the art of both managing and resolving apparently irresolvable conflicts by addressing differing assumptions and views of reality. My conclusion is that the major threat to the world today comes from the Muslim extremists who are trying to pervert the classical wisdom of their own religion and hijack it in their own frenzy of hatred for everyone who disagrees with them. A secondary but still important threat comes from those who demonize Islam by interpreting it the same way that Muslim extremists do and thereby give them cooperation and support.
The demonizers have a valid point in their insistence that action speaks louder than words and that Islam as a religion is fair game unless Muslims take the lead in countering their own demons. The Islam-bashers are right that Muslims must take the lead because only Muslims can effectively wage a war against Muslim fascism. If we cannot mount an effective war against this evil phenomenon, then the professional Muslim bashers will claim legitimacy in blaming Islam as a religion for all the evil in the world. The problem may be viewed as the old saw about the chicken and the egg. Which came first? My answer is that before the chicken and before the egg came the rooster.
The rooster, who has done more than anything else in begetting the apparently insoluble dilemma of two religions and two civilizations fighting for survival, is the demonic hatred among the extremists bred inevitably by the heresy known as Wahhabism. This is officially promoted in the world’s most unjust and un-Islamic society, known as Saudi Arabia. The present Saudi leader, Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, is struggling mightily to overcome this bizarre culture in the symbolic heartland of Islam. He can succeed, however, only if he is supported by the world body of Muslims, the umma, including Muslims in America. American Muslims will be the principal victims of failure to unite in boldly and firmly exposing the heretical nature of the Wahhabi declaration of war against every human right and against even the very concept of human dignity. American Muslims must overcome their defensive stance of “Don’t blame me” and join the critics of Muslim extremism in condemning religious totalitarianism and working to root it out from mosques and Islamic schools.
Exposing the Al Qa’ida Heresies
How can Muslims expose the heresies against Islam that extremist Muslims are advancing to justify what amounts to their war against civilization? The first step is to recognize and denounce the justifications they use for their actions. They and their actions should be denounced in terms they understand, namely, by words used in the Qur’an that apply expressly to them and their crimes.
Their use of the term jihad for what they say is holy war but in fact is terrorism should be called by its proper name in classical Islamic terminology, which is hiraba or unholy and demonic war to destroy society. They call themselves mujahidun or holy warriors destined for jannah or heaven. In fact, they are mufsidun headed for jahannam, evil-doers headed for hell. They claim that they are fighting for ihtiram or human respect, whereas in fact they are committing istihlal, which is the cardinal sin of playing God. Their murderous assault on every human right should be exposed for what it is, namely, a monumental act of rida al shaytaniya or diabolical apostasy.
The last words of the terrorist who crashed the first plane into the World Trade Center, according to plans found later in his personal effects, were from the Qur’an: “Say, my prayers, my actions, my life, and my death I dedicate to Allah, Lord of the Worlds.” He chose to dedicate his death to ending the lives of thousands of innocent people. The context of this verse in Surah al An’am 6:162 called him instead to dedicate his life after the model of Prophet Abraham, ‘alayhi al salam, who lived for Allah out of love in order to bring compassionate justice to all of God’s creation.
Suicide bombing requires blind fanaticism not courage. True submission to God requires the dedication of one’s life to a much more difficult and daunting task. This is to transform one’s own life, which was given as a gift created in the image of God, in order better to transform the world in which one lives out of love, rather than to destroy it out of hatred.
This message applies to everyone in every religion who demonizes whole communities and entire religions out of hatred. Professional Christian demonizers of Islam who recruit naïve young people to their cause are no different from the masters of terror in the proverbial caves of Afghanistan who recruit equally naïve young people to their cause, because the end result is the same.
The challenge for committed members of every world
http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/forging_a_common_front_against_the_totalitarian_mind_a_case_study_in_religi/0014632religion is to forge a common front against the totalitarian mind.
www.theamericanmuslim.org
by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane
Part One: Causes
Compulsive Fear: The Common DenominatorThe entire world seems to be caught up in a frenzy of triumphalist arrogance by extremists who want to conquer the world. The decades-long Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, Alan Greenspan, in his new tell-all book released on September 16, 2007, The Age of Turbulence, writes, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” On the other side of the divide, some CIA analysts write that Osama bin Laden wants to conquer the world in order to get back the wealth that has been stolen by America and its allies. Both of these observations are superficial. They do not explain the increasing violence in the world that soon may reach the level of a Fourth World War.
As a lifelong student of extremism over the centuries, I have been convinced that the primary motivating cause of militant extremism is not the simple drive for power, but rather its opposite in the form of compulsive fear. The defense mechanism is first to demonize what one fears and only then to destroy it.
... Fear is what motivated American NeoCons to wage terroristic counter-terrorism by bombing Baghdad four years ago in a frenzy of shock and awe that killed 3,000 Iraqi civilians.
The full truth of 9/11 may never be known, but the origin and result of the initial attack on Baghdad has now been exposed, despite official denial of substantial “collateral damage.” I was in Saudi Arabia during the attack watching the bombing on TV together with a senior Saudi general, the right-hand man of the Defense Minister. The American TV commentator assured us that the impressive fireworks were caused by surgical strikes that harmed no-one. The rest of the world knew better.
Much has been written about the origin, nature, and goals of the Neo-Cons, but none of these commentaries identified the real dynamic of this intellectual movement, which was based on compulsive fear of imminent global chaos. Certainly such chaos would threaten access by oil consumers to countries that “sit on oceans of oil.” But, the fear goes beyond material greed. It is existential.
The real motivations for the origin of what appears to be simple NeoCon imperialism go back to the real origin of the Neo-Conservative phenomenon exactly half a century ago in the writings of the original Neo-Conservative godfather, Robert Strausz-Hupe, who once told me that he wanted me to succeed him as Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. We were fighting the totalitarianism of world Communism, which threatened to destroy the Free World. His conclusion was that Communism would disappear within two or three decades but that the aftermath would create a far greater threat to global civilization in the form of inchoate chaos. This mortal threat of chaos, he concluded, could be contained and defeated only if America was willing to grasp its historic opportunity and obligation to impose a world federal government through its overwhelming superiority in both moral force and military conquest.
During the next few decades, the moral force argument somehow got lost in the shuffle, so all that remained was military conquest with public deference to what Muwahid Shah calls the hijab or cover of freedom and democracy. The clearly stated motivating force was not expansionist imperialism, as most would contend, but rather abject mortal fear of population explosion worldwide by peoples who did not share American values and would eventually gain access to nuclear weapons.
The Politics of Fear
In politics the two most powerful motivators are fear and religion. This is especially true in places like America and the Muslim world where religion is a powerful force and therefore can be harnessed in the pursuit of power for whatever purpose.
We are now in the middle of an almost unique example of this truism. Muslims are not the only ones who exploit religion for political ends. American extremists, both political and religious, are exploiting religion by demonizing Islam as a necessary first and decisive step in a perceived war of self-defense against universal evil.
A week ago, on September 1, 2007, presidential candidate, Senator John McCain, sent out a letter to his supporters pegging his new campaign on a single theme that he hopes will be a sure-fire road to electoral victory in a time of great national peril. This theme is simple. He declared, “The transcendent issue of the 21st century is the struggle against radical Islamic extremism.”
Another presidential hopeful, not yet declared but with even better chances of success, is Newt Gingrich, who engineered the so-called Gingrich Revolution in 1994 by taking over both houses of Congress for the Republicans. Shortly thereafter he laid the groundwork for a new war against evil by calling for a war against Islamic totalitarianism. In the American lexicon developed in the war against Communist global conquest, the world is full of harmless tyrants who seek only their own power at home and therefore can be co-opted to serve American purposes. Such tyranny is different from totalitarianism, which by definition seeks total control of the human mind not only as a means to consolidate its own power but primarily as the ultimate end of its own destiny.
Fortunately, Gingrich, who is a past master at mind control, overplayed his hand and flamed out. Since 9/11, however, the demonization of Islam and of Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, as its living example has been gathering supporters non-stop with the infused strength provided by an alliance with sixty million radical Christian extremists. Senator McCain has concluded that exploiting existential fears now promises to gain decisive political traction. The fear of Islam as it has been presented by this alliance is more than mere political make-believe, which is why it is so powerful.
McCain is taking a page right out of the playbook of the other of the two godfathers of Neo-Conservatism, Leo Strausz, who escaped from Nazi Germany in order to fight the new totalitarian menace. He was an atheist but he advocated appealing to religion as a useful tool in the search for power to counter Nazism, Communism, or any other form of totalitarianism. In other words, his life experience taught him that the most effective weapon against a totalitarian attack is a counter-attack that is more effective in using the same techniques.
The shift to a global war on Islam as the root of all evil, rather than merely on terrorism as a modern means of warfare, is bad news because it seems to suggest a retrogression from previous governmental policy. Two years ago, the hard-charging Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, let slip some of his carefully hidden sophistication by dropping the term “Global War on Terrorism,” called GWOT for short, and introduced a new acronym in Washington, GSAVE, which stands for “Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism.” A struggle, however, does not necessarily require military victory, and extremism is politically too generic, so within days President Bush as Commander in Chief vetoed this innovation and demanded that everyone go back to GWOT, the Global War on Terrorism.
Note that both of these paradigms or frameworks for policy were generic and avoided demonizing a religion. Now in a bold stroke McCain is leading a charge backwards from both of them by zeroing in on a popularly more demonizable target, “radical Islamic extremism.”
Two weeks ago, the professional lobbying group, Jihad Watch, which last year produced Robert Spencer’s sophisticated book, The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, called for a new level of high intensity warfare to be inaugurated next month. In FrontpageMag.com, which is one of David Horowitz’s many front groups including Jihad Watch, he declared, “This October 22-26th, I am declaring Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. I will hold demonstrations and protests, teach-ins, and sit-ins on more than 100 college campuses. Our theme will be the oppression of women in Islam and the threat posed by the Islamic crusade against the West.” Front and center as high-power ammunition will be the new book by Robert Spencer, which represents the final product of his two decades devoted to the professional demonizing of Islam.
As a follow-up to the original announcement, Horowitz explained during the commemoration of 9/11, “During the week of October 22-26, 2007, the nation will be rocked by the biggest conservative campus protest ever – Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses.” As a leader of this new national movement, together with Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey, and Rick Santorum, Horowitz warned the American voters that, “Islamo-Fascism constitutes the greatest danger Americans have ever confronted.”
A straw in the wind was the political summit held exactly two months ago, on July 16, 2007, by Christians United for Israel. This is the organization founded by the doyon of the new Christian megachurch phenomenon, John Hagee. Max Blumenthal of the Washington Post interviewed a dozen of the thousands of participants in this rally. He expressed his amazement at, as he put it, “how excited they are at the prospect of Armageddon coming tomorrow.”
Hagee has close ties with Republican McCain and Democrat Joseph Lieberman and others in both Congress and the White House. This most extreme of all extremist groups in the world is calling for a unilateral military attack on Iran and the expansion of Israel as the final steps in the Battle of Armageddon to destroy the world in order to cleanse the earth of evil and bring about the return of Jesus to Jerusalem.
It is hard to top this one, but another presidential candidate, Tom Tancredo, made a good try. Last month, he demanded that America bomb Iran back to the stone-age and suggested that the U.S. Air Force should consider launching the mother of all “shock and awe” by bombing Mecca into oblivion.
This manipulation of the politics of fear may be the most radical and dangerous in the world today, because it revels in its own fears. It reminds one of the person with acrophobia or fear of heights who is terrified by standing at the brink of a cliff and cannot resist the temptation to jump off.
Part Two: Effects
Identifying the Principal Perversions
It may seem ironic that there is much overlap between the accusations levied by the professional Muslim bashers against the clear message of divine revelation in the Qur’an and those promoted by Muslim extremists themselves. Therefore, a concerted and coordinated campaign to counter the perversions of the Muslim bashers also serves to counter the perversions by Al Qa’ida and its legions. And the reverse is also true. To counter the lies spread by the Wahhabi religion serves equally to counter those spread by professional Islam bashers in America.
There are two distinct approaches to exposing the lies about Islam and its principal exemplar, the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam. The first is to explain positively or proactively the teachings of the Qur’an and its expression in the sayings of Prophet Muhammad and the sirah of his life. The second is to explain reactively what they are not.
The second approach is to identify the leading distortions of the Qur’an and of the sayings and life of the Prophet Muhammad and then expose the questionable and fraudulent sources of these errors through scholarly analysis. The leading dozen of these principal distortions are illustrated clearly in the recent book by Robert Spencer, The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.
These dirty dozen, as well as many more, are found in all the major attacks on Islam and on the Prophet Muhammad, but Spencer alleges that his latest book is the most scholarly because he bases all his claims on statements over the centuries by Muslims themselves. These dirty dozen range from the accusation that the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, was a pedophile, to the bizarre contention, shared by many Muslims, that Islamic law requires women to be stoned to death. This article highlights perhaps the most spectacular one of these dirty dozen to illustrate the bias that mars the scholarship of Robert Spencer’s use of sources. This one concerns the Prophet Muhammad’s alleged massacre of Jews in Medina.
Bias in Selecting Sources
The underlying problem in most of what Robert Spencer writes to demonize Islam and the Prophet Muhammad is his bias in the selection of sources. He claims that his scholarship is impeccable because he relies entirely on Muslim sources. Unfortunately, he relies heavily on sources that are either bogus or biased and reflect the strain of extremism that is found in every religion.
From the very beginning, there has never been a shortage of extremist Muslims to provide ammunition for those with a biased agenda. The first Wahhabis were the Mukharijun who condemned Ali bin Abi Talib, ‘alayhi as-salam, in the earliest period of the Muslim community for offering to compromise with the tyrant Mu’awiya. They declared that all who disagreed with themselves are infidels who should be executed, and eventually in the year 661 they succeeded in murdering Ali whom they had once supported. One could quote Kharijites (Mukharijun), who survived in one form or another for centuries, but no scholar, not even Spencer, has ever quoted them to prove anything about Islam.
The most extreme example of Robert Spencer’s bias, and one shared by many ignorant Muslims over the centuries, is the apocryphal story about the massacre led by The Prophet Muhammad against an entire Jewish tribe in Medina, the Banu Qurayzah. They were one of the three Jewish tribes that together with the resident Arab tribes had originally invited the Prophet Muhammad to Medina in order to bring peace among the warring parties in the city. All of these tribes signed the Medina Covenant, which was the first known constitution of any city or country. In it, each tribe promised to support the others in the common defense and to work together for their common good. When an alliance of the Quraish and surrounding warlike tribes was threatening to annihilate the Muslims in Medina, the Banu Qurayza committed treason by allying with these tribes.
This much is a known fact, but the story of the Prophet massacring all male members of the tribe, some 700 men, is pure fabrication. Spencer gets this story from the supposedly reliable account by the first historian of Islamdom, Abu Ishaq (704-773). Unfortunately, the original history by Abu Ishaq disappeared without a trace sometime after it was written 150 years after the death of the Prophet. The only extant version of this first biography of the Prophet Muhammad was written half a century later by Ibn Hisham, who admitted that he had condensed and revised the original to fit his own agenda. Malik ibn Anas (715-801), founder of one of the four surviving schools of law in the Sunni world, called Ibn Ishaq a “Dajjal” or anti-Christ for including ahadith that were invented by Jews to glorify their ancestors. Spencer admits on page 28 that the accuracy of Ibn Ishaq’s life of Muhammad is questionable, yet he says on page 30 that Ibn Ishaq’s biography of the Prophet Muhammad is his principal source for much of his book. Many good scholars even today rely on Ibn Ishaq or what remains of his rewritten writings, but not as the sole source of stories that almost certainly were forgeries.
Spencer devotes an entire chapter to the Prophet’s alleged fondness for shock and awe. This chapter in his book, The Truth about Muhammad, is entitled “Casting Terror into Their Hearts.” According to Ibn Ishaq and several ahadith that derive from his account, the Prophet Muhammad laid siege to the Banu Qurayza’s stronghold in the city. When they surrendered, The Prophet announced that Allah had ordered all the male members of the Qurayzah tribe to be executed for disloyalty. Spencer quotes Ibn Ishaq’s account on page 130 as follows: “The apostle went out to the market of Medina and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for the men of the Qurayzah and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought to him in batches.”
This is a great story. The only problem is that subsequent scholarship shows that it was almost certainly a total fabrication from the very beginning. The most detailed expose of this story was published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society thirty years ago in 1976 on pages 100-107 under the title, “New Light on the Story of Banu Qurayza and the Jews of Medina”.
This scholarly analysis quotes contemporary and later scholars who described the rewritten biography of the Prophet, known as Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, as a collection of “odd tales” similar to the mythology popular among ignorant desert tribes. Scholars have always been skeptical of the popular Sirah or histories of early Islam because in this genre of writing the evidentiary rules of the muhadithin or collectors of ahadith, and especially of sources deemed valid as sources for jurisprudence, did not have to be followed. It was not necessary to give any chain of authorities or even to give any authorities at all. As a result, the first mention of this massacre occurred a hundred and fifty years after the event.
Ibn Ishaq himself admitted that his account of the so-called massacre of the Banu Qurayzah was pieced together from fragmentary accounts, including the tribal memories of the Banu Qurayzah themselves, who like all tribes in the world are known to embellish their ancestral histories to mythical proportions. Even Tabari, who is one of the earliest and most reliable historians of early Islam, cites Ibn Ishaq’s story about the alleged slaughter with skepticism and provides no supporting evidence as he does for the rest of his historical research.
The only authentic account is in the chapter of the Qur’an entitled “The Confederates,” Surah al Ahzab 33:26, which relates the siege of Medina by the Quraish and their confederates and the treacherous assistance given the besiegers by some of the Banu Qurayzah. These traitors were killed during battle. “He [Allah] caused those of the People of the Book [the Banu Qurayzah] who helped them [i.e., helped the Quraish] to come out of their forts and cast terror into their hearts, so that some you killed, and some you took prisoner.” This is a statement about the battle, and no figures of casualties are given.
Only later were Jewish tribal accounts embellished with statements that all the men of the Banu Quraysh, as many as 900 men, were personally murdered by the Prophet Muhammad, salah Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, who publicly and enthusiastically chopped off their heads one by one in the main square of Medina.
Modern scholars point out the great resemblance of the above Jewish tale to the early history of the Jews that has survived throughout the ages, according to which the predecessor of Herod the Great hung upon crosses 800 Jewish captives and slaughtered their wives and children before their eyes. At Masada, the number of those who died at the end was 900. The inside story was that the leader of the Banu Qurayzah suggested that all the Banu Qurayzah kill their women and children and then commit suicide, which is the same story told about the last holdout at Masada. A giveaway is that even the same names were given in accounts of these two heroic last stands. It is interesting that modern historians now question the authenticity of the Masada account that 960 Jews committed suicide, which would mean that the Banu Qurayza account of their own refusal to commit suicide might unknowingly have been a more accurate rendition of the original prototype.
Robert Spencer accepts this bogus history as proof for his insistence that the Prophet Muhammad is the perfect model for Al Qa’ida and those who get a thrill from personally beheading captives.
The real significance of Spencer’s reliance on this Jewish tribal history to make his point is found in his reasons for rejecting the Muslim scholars’ skepticism, because this reveals strikingly the bias that poisons everything else in his book.
The scholars argue that this story has to be apocryphal because the strict rule in Islamic law is to punish only those who are responsible for the sedition. The large number of those allegedly beheaded contradicts the Qur’anic prohibition of collective guilt ordained in Surah Fatir 35:18: “No soul shall bear another’s burden.” The leaders of the Banu Qurayzah even in the apocryphal story were well known and even named.
Equally important is the strict rule, never violated at the time of the Prophet, that prisoners of war must be either freed or allowed to be ransomed by their families. This was the rule applied to the other Jewish tribes.
The classical Islamic scholars have another clinching argument. If such a slaughter had actually occurred, it would have been used as a precedent for legal rulings, whereas, in fact, there have never been any such rulings.
Spencer’s argument against the classical Islamic scholars, including the modern scholar, W. N. Arafat, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, is Spencer’s charge on page 132 that they rejected the very possibility of such a slaughter “chiefly for the anachronistic reason that it would have violated Islamic law.”
This is an all-time classic case of biased and circular reasoning. His careful reversal of everything in the Qur’an related to the universal human rights to life and dignity are demonstrated in Part Four of my article, “Marginalizing Extremists by Revealing the Real Truth About Muhammad,” which was published in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, June 25th, 2007. Throughout his book Spencer relies on extremist Muslim sources to prove that human rights have never existed in Islam, and then he cites this biased conclusion to justify his acceptance of events that never occurred.
This bias is strikingly evidenced in the contrast between Spencer’s unquestioning acceptance of falsehood and his rejection of truths that are beyond question. He accepts the Banu Qurayzah massacre, because doing so serves to prove the points he is trying to make throughout his book, but he is skeptical about the very existence of the Medina Covenant which granted equal rights to Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
This whole episode is perhaps the most dramatic of the falsehoods perpetrated by Robert Spencer in his superficially very scholarly book, The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion, but it is merely the first of the dirty dozen.
Part Three: Facing a Common Enemy
Muslims and most of the people of the world are dumbfounded by such hateful and primitive sentiments of collective guilt, especially because they are coming from America, which used to be the most respected and beloved country in the world. How did all this demonic hatred of an entire religion come about? Equally important, what can anyone do about it without copying the grave crime of collective guilt by blaming America, Christians, and Jews.
Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of the Muslims in the world and the overwhelming majority of Christians and now also of Jews recognize that the demonization of an entire religion is a threat to everyone. They all recognize that there is a growing movement of Muslim extremism, which can result in Muslim terrorism. But they fear that demonizing Islam as the source of Muslim extremism is helping to provoke it. Furthermore, citing the same bogus sources that Muslim extremists use to justify their crimes serves to reinforce the legitimacy of Muslim extremists.
How do we persuade policy makers to use the term “radical Muslim extremism” in order to distinguish between a religion and those who carry out crimes against humanity in its name? There is no such thing as Islamic extremism, any more than there is Christian or Jewish extremism, unless one wants to reduce all religion to the level of tribalism. These are oxymorons or contradictions in terms. Unfortunately, extremists in every religion have always been with us and always will be, so what do we do about it?
The first requirement is to recognize that the traditionalist peoples in all religions face a common enemy. One half of the threat to global civilization is the post-modern phenomenon of the totalitarian mind in the West fixated on fighting fire with fire at the risk of a global conflagration. The other half is the equally post-modernist phenomenon of Al Qa’ida and its evil minions, who play into the hands of those who are willing to destroy civilization in a war against so-called Islamic fascism. There clearly is such a thing as Muslim fascism, but this is a threat primarily to Muslims, both directly as in Iraq and indirectly to Muslims throughout America.
All my life I have been a professional global strategist and long-range global forecaster in advising government and industry on the art of what I call paradigm management. This is the art of both managing and resolving apparently irresolvable conflicts by addressing differing assumptions and views of reality. My conclusion is that the major threat to the world today comes from the Muslim extremists who are trying to pervert the classical wisdom of their own religion and hijack it in their own frenzy of hatred for everyone who disagrees with them. A secondary but still important threat comes from those who demonize Islam by interpreting it the same way that Muslim extremists do and thereby give them cooperation and support.
The demonizers have a valid point in their insistence that action speaks louder than words and that Islam as a religion is fair game unless Muslims take the lead in countering their own demons. The Islam-bashers are right that Muslims must take the lead because only Muslims can effectively wage a war against Muslim fascism. If we cannot mount an effective war against this evil phenomenon, then the professional Muslim bashers will claim legitimacy in blaming Islam as a religion for all the evil in the world. The problem may be viewed as the old saw about the chicken and the egg. Which came first? My answer is that before the chicken and before the egg came the rooster.
The rooster, who has done more than anything else in begetting the apparently insoluble dilemma of two religions and two civilizations fighting for survival, is the demonic hatred among the extremists bred inevitably by the heresy known as Wahhabism. This is officially promoted in the world’s most unjust and un-Islamic society, known as Saudi Arabia. The present Saudi leader, Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, is struggling mightily to overcome this bizarre culture in the symbolic heartland of Islam. He can succeed, however, only if he is supported by the world body of Muslims, the umma, including Muslims in America. American Muslims will be the principal victims of failure to unite in boldly and firmly exposing the heretical nature of the Wahhabi declaration of war against every human right and against even the very concept of human dignity. American Muslims must overcome their defensive stance of “Don’t blame me” and join the critics of Muslim extremism in condemning religious totalitarianism and working to root it out from mosques and Islamic schools.
Exposing the Al Qa’ida Heresies
How can Muslims expose the heresies against Islam that extremist Muslims are advancing to justify what amounts to their war against civilization? The first step is to recognize and denounce the justifications they use for their actions. They and their actions should be denounced in terms they understand, namely, by words used in the Qur’an that apply expressly to them and their crimes.
Their use of the term jihad for what they say is holy war but in fact is terrorism should be called by its proper name in classical Islamic terminology, which is hiraba or unholy and demonic war to destroy society. They call themselves mujahidun or holy warriors destined for jannah or heaven. In fact, they are mufsidun headed for jahannam, evil-doers headed for hell. They claim that they are fighting for ihtiram or human respect, whereas in fact they are committing istihlal, which is the cardinal sin of playing God. Their murderous assault on every human right should be exposed for what it is, namely, a monumental act of rida al shaytaniya or diabolical apostasy.
The last words of the terrorist who crashed the first plane into the World Trade Center, according to plans found later in his personal effects, were from the Qur’an: “Say, my prayers, my actions, my life, and my death I dedicate to Allah, Lord of the Worlds.” He chose to dedicate his death to ending the lives of thousands of innocent people. The context of this verse in Surah al An’am 6:162 called him instead to dedicate his life after the model of Prophet Abraham, ‘alayhi al salam, who lived for Allah out of love in order to bring compassionate justice to all of God’s creation.
Suicide bombing requires blind fanaticism not courage. True submission to God requires the dedication of one’s life to a much more difficult and daunting task. This is to transform one’s own life, which was given as a gift created in the image of God, in order better to transform the world in which one lives out of love, rather than to destroy it out of hatred.
This message applies to everyone in every religion who demonizes whole communities and entire religions out of hatred. Professional Christian demonizers of Islam who recruit naïve young people to their cause are no different from the masters of terror in the proverbial caves of Afghanistan who recruit equally naïve young people to their cause, because the end result is the same.
The challenge for committed members of every world
http://www.theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/forging_a_common_front_against_the_totalitarian_mind_a_case_study_in_religi/0014632religion is to forge a common front against the totalitarian mind.
Afghan President Seeks Peace with Taliban after Suicide Bomb
JASON STRAZIUSO
AP
SEPTEMBER 29, 2007
KABUL, Afghanistan — A Taliban suicide bomber wearing an Afghan army uniform set off a huge explosion Saturday while trying to board a military bus in the capital, killing 30 people, most of them soldiers, officials said.
Hours later, the Afghan president offered to meet personally with the Taliban leader for peace talks and give the militants a position in government.
Strengthening a call for negotiations he has made with increasing frequency the last several weeks, President Hamid Karzai said he was willing to meet with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister and factional warlord leader.
“If I find their address, there is no need for them to come to me, I'll personally go there and get in touch with them,” Mr. Karzai said. “Esteemed Mullah, sir, and esteemed Hekmatyar, sir, why are you destroying the country?”
Mr. Karzai said he has contacts with Taliban militants through tribal elders but that there are no direct and open government communication channels with the fighters. ...
Continued: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070929.wafghankarzai0929/BNStory/International/home
AP
SEPTEMBER 29, 2007
KABUL, Afghanistan — A Taliban suicide bomber wearing an Afghan army uniform set off a huge explosion Saturday while trying to board a military bus in the capital, killing 30 people, most of them soldiers, officials said.
Hours later, the Afghan president offered to meet personally with the Taliban leader for peace talks and give the militants a position in government.
Strengthening a call for negotiations he has made with increasing frequency the last several weeks, President Hamid Karzai said he was willing to meet with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former prime minister and factional warlord leader.
“If I find their address, there is no need for them to come to me, I'll personally go there and get in touch with them,” Mr. Karzai said. “Esteemed Mullah, sir, and esteemed Hekmatyar, sir, why are you destroying the country?”
Mr. Karzai said he has contacts with Taliban militants through tribal elders but that there are no direct and open government communication channels with the fighters. ...
Continued: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070929.wafghankarzai0929/BNStory/International/home
Media Mafia Supplemental: Former Safety Board Official Joins Call to Stop CNN 'Propaganda'
Petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-cnn-from-airing-its-misleading-show-on-the-twa-800-crash#signatures
Former National Transportation Safety Board member Dr. Vernon Grose joined an independent group's call to stop CNN from airing its controversial show on the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. Dr. Grose called the CNN Presents show "a travesty for objective truth" when signing a petition sponsored by the Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization (FIRO).
FIRO's petition calls on CNN to stop re-airing the show due to the group's claim that it contains serious factual errors to support government conclusions. Dr. Grose, who appeared on CNN regularly in the days and months following the crash initially backed the government investigation. But that changed when he was briefed by military personnel, including an Air National Guard helicopter pilot in the air at the time of the crash.
Major Fred Meyer, a decorated Vietnam veteran who flew overland rescues during his tour told Grose he is certain a missile brought down Flight 800. Meyer saw missiles flying in Vietnam and says he saw one hit Flight 800.
CNN didn't interview Major Meyer, but did interview eyewitness Naneen Levine. Although not a rescue pilot, Levine agrees with Major Meyer and thinks she saw a missile take out Flight 800. But CNN let an FBI official assert that she must have seen Flight 800 climbing sharply in the air after it exploded, and that the climbing aircraft looked like a missile. But Levine said that the missile traveled from the surface up to Flight 800, and arcing west. Flight 800 was already 2.6 miles up and heading east when it exploded, according to federal investigators.
And according to FIRO, this and other discrepancies spurred them to launch the petition. The most irresponsible segment in the show, according to FIRO and aerodynamics experts, was CNN's animation of Flight 800 climbing sharply after exploding. The government's own documents apparently refute this climb.
FIRO references the Safety Board's "Main Wreckage Flight Path Study," which compares FAA radar data of Flight 800 crashing to government simulations of Flight 800 climbing. If Flight 800 climbed sharply, it would have slowed down quickly due to the law of conservation of energy, like a bicyclist climbing a steep hill according to FIRO.
And if Flight 800, in reality, didn't climb, the simulation data from a climbing aircraft would have quickly dropped behind the radar data of Flight 800 maintaining altitude or descending. And this is what the Flight Path Study shows: the simulations fall behind Flight 800's true, radar-tracked course by a quarter mile in about eight seconds.
CNN has defended its decision to include an animation of the plane climbing sharply, saying that it cited the government as the source of the data used to create it. But CNN has not explained why the show did not discuss their animation's conflict with Flight 800's radar-tracked course or the implications to the government's explanation of the eyewitness accounts if, as the radar record apparently shows, Flight 800 did not climb at all.
FIRO's petition can be viewed or signed here: http://tinyurl.com/39e5gb
http://cnnexposed.com/story.php?story=37
Former National Transportation Safety Board member Dr. Vernon Grose joined an independent group's call to stop CNN from airing its controversial show on the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. Dr. Grose called the CNN Presents show "a travesty for objective truth" when signing a petition sponsored by the Flight 800 Independent Researchers Organization (FIRO). FIRO's petition calls on CNN to stop re-airing the show due to the group's claim that it contains serious factual errors to support government conclusions. Dr. Grose, who appeared on CNN regularly in the days and months following the crash initially backed the government investigation. But that changed when he was briefed by military personnel, including an Air National Guard helicopter pilot in the air at the time of the crash.
Major Fred Meyer, a decorated Vietnam veteran who flew overland rescues during his tour told Grose he is certain a missile brought down Flight 800. Meyer saw missiles flying in Vietnam and says he saw one hit Flight 800.
CNN didn't interview Major Meyer, but did interview eyewitness Naneen Levine. Although not a rescue pilot, Levine agrees with Major Meyer and thinks she saw a missile take out Flight 800. But CNN let an FBI official assert that she must have seen Flight 800 climbing sharply in the air after it exploded, and that the climbing aircraft looked like a missile. But Levine said that the missile traveled from the surface up to Flight 800, and arcing west. Flight 800 was already 2.6 miles up and heading east when it exploded, according to federal investigators.
And according to FIRO, this and other discrepancies spurred them to launch the petition. The most irresponsible segment in the show, according to FIRO and aerodynamics experts, was CNN's animation of Flight 800 climbing sharply after exploding. The government's own documents apparently refute this climb.
FIRO references the Safety Board's "Main Wreckage Flight Path Study," which compares FAA radar data of Flight 800 crashing to government simulations of Flight 800 climbing. If Flight 800 climbed sharply, it would have slowed down quickly due to the law of conservation of energy, like a bicyclist climbing a steep hill according to FIRO.
And if Flight 800, in reality, didn't climb, the simulation data from a climbing aircraft would have quickly dropped behind the radar data of Flight 800 maintaining altitude or descending. And this is what the Flight Path Study shows: the simulations fall behind Flight 800's true, radar-tracked course by a quarter mile in about eight seconds.
CNN has defended its decision to include an animation of the plane climbing sharply, saying that it cited the government as the source of the data used to create it. But CNN has not explained why the show did not discuss their animation's conflict with Flight 800's radar-tracked course or the implications to the government's explanation of the eyewitness accounts if, as the radar record apparently shows, Flight 800 did not climb at all.
FIRO's petition can be viewed or signed here: http://tinyurl.com/39e5gb
http://cnnexposed.com/story.php?story=37
Friday, September 28, 2007
A Stolen Painting, the Murder of Martin Luther King, the FBI .... and Steven Spielberg
" ... after two suspects connected to the art theft ring were murdered 1978 and another refused to testify, prosecutors dropped the case ... "By Richard Salit
www.projo.com
Norman Rockwell’s stolen 1967 painting, Russian Schoolroom, now valued at $700,000, is the subject of a legal dispute in U.S. District Court in Nevada.
NEWPORT — It has all the makings of a Hollywood film: a powerful movie mogul and his society art dealer inadvertently get tangled up in an art heist, an FBI investigation, a political assassination and a courtroom drama.
Unfortunately for Judy Goffman Cutler, it’s a true story. The FBI recently discovered that in 1989 the Newport art dealer profited from the sale of a Norman Rockwell painting that had been stolen from a gallery in Missouri 16 years earlier. The buyer? Steven Spielberg. Yes, that one.
So why has it taken so long for the FBI to crack the case and how come no one was ever arrested for the theft?
One explanation given is that the suspected art thief enjoyed federal protection because he had vital information about a major U.S. assassination — the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Instead of appearing on the big screen, this drama is being played out on location — in U.S. District Court in Nevada. Jack Solomon, whose gallery lost Rockwell’s Russian Schoolroom to thieves nearly 35 years ago when it was worth $25,000, is suing Spielberg for the return of the painting, now valued at $700,000. Russian Schoolroom is in Los Angeles, where the Academy Award-winning director and producer lives.
Goffman Cutler, meanwhile, is also fighting for the painting. She says that after the FBI announced it was stolen, she offered to extricate Spielberg from the controversy by giving him another Rockwell in exchange for Russian Schoolroom. She is also suing Solomon for $25 million for sullying her reputation and jeopardizing her business relationship with Spielberg. Solomon told the media she should have known the painting was stolen when she sold it to Spielberg.
“The clear implication of the statement made to the press was that Goffman Cutler was trafficking in stolen art and should have known she was doing so,” her lawsuit reads.
ON A RECENT DAY, the gates to a white, chateau-style mansion in Newport slowly swing open. Behind the wrought-iron fencing is Vernon Court, a Beaux Arts adaptation of a French estate, which occupies a full block of Bellevue Avenue, Newport’s famed Gilded Age promenade. The sprawling grounds feature a pool, manicured tiered gardens, and a park created by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York City’s Central Park.
This is the home of the National Museum of American Illustration, which Goffman Cutler and her husband, Laurence, founded in 2000 to honor what they call the “Golden Age of Illustration,” art specifically created for reproduction.
The swiveling gates open onto a short gravel driveway, which leads to the museum entrance, framed by tall white columns and a second-story veranda. Through the doorway is the Great Marble Hall, where Laurence Cutler greets a visitor and guides him past one of Rockwell’s most famous World War II works, Miss Liberty, portraying a star-spangled American woman wielding an array of tools in service of her country.
In the library, Cutler takes a seat and reflects on the worldwide publicity the case has generated — from newspapers and magazines that cover Clayton, Mo., where the painting was stolen in 1973, across the Atlantic to England, where both Spielberg and Rockwell are well known. Over the last several months, as a result of the tantalizing details surrounding Russian Schoolroom, it’s been all too common for the Cutlers to receive interview requests from the media. Fielding reporters’ questions comes naturally for the talkative Cutler, the museum’s chairman, and it’s a role that falls to him in between his frequent business trips across the U.S. and abroad.
“Friends have asked about it, art dealers have asked about it, and people in the art world have asked about it. We got lots of e-mail about it from all over the world,” he says. “It got a tremendous amount of attention because you have Spielberg, who is the most famous guy in movies, and you have Norman Rockwell, whose name is synonymous with apple pie and ice cream and baseball. And you have the word ‘theft.’ ”
IT’S SOMEWHAT IRONIC that a Rockwell has been caught up in such a maelstrom of controversy and conspiracy. The American illustrator is best known for his nostalgic scenes of simpler times, hundreds of which appeared on the folksy covers of the Saturday Evening Post.
Russian Schoolroom, painted in 1967, just six years before its theft, was inspired by Rockwell’s visit to the Soviet Union in the 1960s. It depicts students seated at their desks, looking in the direction of a bust of Lenin, except for one student gazing out a window.
Judy Goffman Cutler had an eye for Rockwell and the works of other accomplished American illustrators, such as N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in fine arts, she began collecting the works of American illustrators, which weren’t greatly valued at the time. Soon she had so many works that friends would say her home looked like a museum, her husband says. In 1966, she opened the American Illustrators Gallery in New York City.
“She turned around one day and realized she made that end of the market,” Laurence Cutler says. “She became the art dealer to the stars and celebrities.… She built collections for Malcolm Forbes, George Lucas and Ross Perot and many museums.”
The Newport museum she would later establish with her husband lists Lucas, comedian/actress Whoopi Goldberg, TV celebrity Matt Lauer and editorial cartoonist Paul Szep among its board of directors, as well as the developer of the Carnegie Abbey Club in Portsmouth, Peter de Savary, and the man who has taken over and expanded the development of the town’s western shore, Brian O’Neill.
Spielberg began avidly collecting Rockwells as his movies, including E.T., Back to the Future and the Indiana Jones series, became box office blockbusters, making him a rich man. He also contributed to a new home for the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.
Spielberg met the Cutlers through his passion for Rockwell. They enjoyed not only a business relationship, but a friendship, too, Laurence Cutler says. He recalls traveling to California in the early 1990s to see Spielberg and Whoopi Goldberg, the director’s Pacific Palisades neighbor and another collector of American illustration. Cutler and Goffman, whose first marriages had ended, were continuing on to Las Vegas, and Cutler told Spielberg he was considering marrying Goffman there. Spielberg didn’t think it romantic enough.
“I had wanted to do a quick wedding and he talked me out of it,” says Laurence Cutler.
Years later, after marrying, the Cutlers moved to Newport and opened their nonprofit illustration museum. Then, 18 years after selling Spielberg Russian Schoolroom, an agency not known for its artistic appreciation contacted Goffman Cutler: It was the FBI.
EARLY ON THE morning of June 25, 1973, a man broke through the glass front door of Arts International Gallery, in Clayton, Mo., part of the greater St. Louis area, according to a police report. A witness saw the thief emerge with a painting seconds later and jump into a car.
When gallery staff arrived, they quickly realized what was missing: Rockwell’s Russian Schoolroom, an original, 16-by-37-inch oil-on-canvas. With the crime unsolved, Solomon, the gallery’s owner, collected $25,000 in insurance, according to court records.
In 1988, the painting surfaced at an auction in New Orleans. But there was no mention of its checkered past. Goffman bid $70,400 and took Russian Schoolroom back to her American Illustrators Gallery, in New York City. A year later, after advertising the painting for sale for $200,000, she sold it to Spielberg.
It wasn’t until 2004 that agents with the FBI’s Art Crime Team (ACT) learned from a tipster about the 1988 auction and the sale of the painting a year later. The agency posted a description and photograph of the painting on its Web site. Spielberg’s staff saw it and alerted him that the FBI considered his painting stolen and missing.
“Mr. Spielberg’s staff immediately used art market channels to bring the painting’s current location to the FBI’s attention,” the FBI announced in a news release earlier this year that would spark the international media coverage. “Mr. Spielberg purchased the painting in 1989 from a legitimate dealer and did not become aware it was stolen until last week.”
WHAT HAPPENED 34 years ago, however, was apparently a great deal more complicated than a simple smash-and-grab.
The break-in at Arts International joined a rash of similar crimes. A thief or thieves were targeting art owners in the St. Louis area. The thieves snatched silver statues of Charles Lindbergh from the St. Louis Museum of History and returned to strike Arts International again, stealing seven Rockwell lithographs.
The case led the police to focus on “a known police character … who had a reputation for stealing and fencing valuable art and antiques,” according to the FBI. A search warrant executed in 1976 at the St. Louis home of suspect Russell Byers recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in art and other valuables, including the seven Rockwell lithographs, according to police reports. But missing from the loot was Russian Schoolroom.
The police brought charges against Byers. But after two suspects connected to the art theft ring were murdered 1978 and another refused to testify, prosecutors dropped the case, according to the St. Louis Riverfront Times. And curiously, around the same time, Byers had become remarkably useful to powerful federal officials, the alternative newsweekly reported.
The reason? He had been offered $50,000 to kill King, the civil-rights leader.
Byers’ tale intrigued officials in Washington, even 10 years after King’s assassination in 1968. But Byers wouldn’t talk for fear of incriminating himself. So in 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations granted him immunity. In exchange, Byers testified about a meeting he attended that was arranged by a hotel owner who stashed stolen goods for Byers.
Byers’ accomplice introduced him to a lawyer and business associate, John Sutherland, who belonged to the American Independent Party of segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace and who was a leader of the White Citizens Council of St. Louis.
“The three men met in a study that Byers described as decorated with Confederate flags and Civil War memorabilia… ,” reads a report of the House committee, according to the Riverfront Times. “Sutherland was wearing what appeared to Byers to be a Confederate colonel’s hat. After some social conversation, Byers asked Sutherland what he would have to do for the $50,000. Sutherland said he would have to kill, or arrange to have killed, Dr. Martin Luther King. Sutherland told him he belonged to a secret southern organization that had plenty of money.
Byers testified that he declined the offer from the two men. But, according to a New York Times article from 1978, the committee found enough circumstantial evidence to believe that the same bounty offered to Byers in St. Louis could possibly have motivated James Earl Ray, who was a prisoner in a nearby Missouri penitentiary (and whose brother, John Ray, led local efforts to elect Wallace president).
Ray escaped from the prison a year before King’s death and confessed to killing the minister. Despite recanting later, Ray was convicted at trial.
Ten years later, in 1988, a tip about the stolen Rockwell surfaced as the painting was being auctioned off in New Orleans. But an FBI investigation into the matter was stymied when agents were told that the original theft report was missing, according to the Riverfront Times. It wasn’t until last year that the FBI, treating the theft as a cold case, was able to get a copy of the report from the Clayton, Mo., police. Soon the investigation would lead federal agents to Hollywood.
JACK SOLOMON, who owned the now-defunct Arts International gallery and was Rockwell’s dealer until the artist’s death in 1978, wants Russian Schoolroom back. He is suing Spielberg in U.S. District Court in Nevada for the return of the painting and unspecified damages. The FBI, which was initially named in the lawsuit, has been dropped from the case.
Solomon is none too pleased with Goffman Cutler. He doesn’t believe she adequately researched whether Russian Schoolroom might have been stolen, especially since the FBI had reported it to the for-profit Art Loss Register, which maintains a database of purloined artwork.
“She should have known better,” he told the Riverfront Times. “She could have checked that — there’s been a record of this ever since the day it was stolen.”
He also told the newsweekly about his desire to reacquire the painting.
“I’m sure in two calls I could turn it over for X million dollars before the sun goes down,” he said.
Goffman Cutler, who has sold more than 300 Rockwells, defends her handling of the painting. Before acquiring it, according to her lawsuit, she contacted the Norman Rockwell museum, which had just completed a definitive catalog of the artist’s work. The catalog identified Russian Schoolroom’s location as “whereabouts unknown,” unlike other works listed as “stolen.”
She also sold the painting in a highly public manner, according to court papers. She put it in a traveling exhibition, showed it in New York City and featured it in a magazine advertisement. She even sent a notice to a parent gallery of Arts International, in New York, announcing that Russian Schoolroom was for sale.
Her lawsuit cites Solomon’s published remarks, noting that “the clear implication of the statement made to the press was that Goffman was trafficking in stolen art.”
“We are really angry about Solomon, who was sitting on his thumbs for 33 odd years,” says Laurence Cutler.
Goffman Cutler is also suing the Art Loss Register. The business, her lawyer contends, illegally sought to coerce her into settling with Solomon, by threatening to tarnish her reputation and have her investigated by the FBI. Goffman Cutler is seeking damages of $5 million in profits from business she says she stood to do with Spielberg in the future, $10 million for damage to her reputation and $10 million for defamation.
Goffman Cutler wants the court to affirm that her New York City business, The American Illustrators Gallery, has legally acquired the painting from Spielberg.
“We have exchanged one of our paintings, not from our museum collection, a painting of comparable or higher value, approximately the same size, painted in the same year, and both were published in Look magazine. He is very happy with that. And we are very happy to take him out of this circus,” says Laurence Cutler. Since the FBI “doesn’t want [Russian Schoolroom] to cross state lines, Steven is holding it.”
If Goffman Cutler’s private gallery succeeds in acquiring Russian Schoolroom, it will probably be loaned to the National Museum of American Illustration, in Newport, says Laurence Cutler. The painting would travel to China for a temporary exposition at the Shanghai Art Museum, he says, and then it would probably find a home at the Bellevue Avenue museum.
“There is now interest in seeing this painting ‘in the flesh’ so to speak, the world over,” he says.
rsalit@projo.com
http://www.projo.com/news/content/STOLEN_ROCKWELL_09-23-07_BR6G7AB.2afd52a.html
Rupert Murdoch: The Joke is on US
" ... Liar, warmonger, cancerous tumor. ... Perhaps Murdoch's embrace of his depiction as a cartoon figure of evil and low scruples akin to Charles Foster Kane isn't a joke on Murdoch. Perhaps the joke is on us. ... "http://www.slate.com/id/2174801/
•••••••••••
The Rupert Murdoch Film Festival (Transcript)
Hollywood's view of the global media baron.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007, at 5:29 PM ET
Note: This is a transcript of the narration for "The Rupert Murdoch Film Festival," a Slate V production. To view the video, click here, or click the media player embedded in this page.
Liar, warmonger, cancerous tumor. Rupert Murdoch has been called this and worse on the way to building his $62 billion global media empire. Over the past two decades, Murdoch and the Murdoch persona have become cinematic shorthand for filmmakers in a hurry to depict opportunism, greed, vulgarity, and nastiness.
Although Murdoch broke into pictures in 1985 by purchasing 20th Century Fox, the Murdoch character didn't rate major screen treatment until six years later, debuting in a British docudrama about the forged Hitler diaries.
Actor Barry Humphries—best known as Dame Edna—plays Murdoch as an Australian hyena, delighted by his own avarice and power. The real Murdoch bid handsomely for the rights to publish the Hitler diaries, but after they were exposed as forgeries, he shrugged, "After all, we are in the entertainment business."
Murdoch hatred has always run deepest in Britain, where they know him well. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie skewer the tycoon in this British TV sketch that imagines Murdoch as George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life.The birth of his Fox television network and Fox News Channel cemented Murdoch's status as an American media tycoon. Ever since, filmmakers have been exploiting the exploiter. A TV biopic about Jay Leno and Dave Letterman has Murdoch making a bid for Letterman's talents. In a John Cleese film, a Murdoch-esque character owns a media conglomerate called Octopus Inc. An HBO comedy from the same period gives Murdochian dimension to two unscrupulous media moguls played by Ben Kingsley and Gabriel Byrne. The latest rip on Murdoch is an episode of Law & Order—Criminal Intent, which mines the controversies of his family life.
Murdoch was born to play the right-wing villain. But a recent Australian docudrama captures a moment from the young newsman's life in which he battled the establishment to rescue a convicted man from the gallows. Murdoch is no bleeding-heart liberal in this story, mind you. His primary goal is to sell papers.
Hollywood's full vilification of Murdoch comes in 1997 with Tomorrow Never Dies, an awful James Bond film. Jonathan Pryce plays a mad media tycoon who tries to provoke China and Britain into starting World War III so he can extend his empire into China. The plot makes no sense, but Pryce brings Murdoch's legendary competitiveness to full boil.
Murdoch's royal jesters at the Fox-owned sitcom The Simpsons ridicule him in this episode. He battles to regain control of his Super Bowl skybox after Homer and friends commandeer it. Murdoch voices his animated self, declaring himself a "billionaire tyrant."
Is this proof that Murdoch has a good sense of humor about his public image, or is there a better explanation? Perhaps Murdoch's embrace of his depiction as a cartoon figure of evil and low scruples akin to Charles Foster Kane isn't a joke on Murdoch. Perhaps the joke is on us.
Rupert Murdoch Superstar does have a knack of getting the last laugh.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Ghosts in the Wind (File #8): A Reprise of Duncan and Blake
'Pirate Master' Contestant Dies of Apparent Suicide - Cheryl Kosewicz was depressed after her boyfriend's recent suicide
July 31, 2007
Cheryl Kosewicz, 'Pirate Master' contestant
Mark Burnett's disappointing reality show "Pirate Master" has suffered another blow.
On the heels of the news of having its remaining five episodes yanked from CBS to go to streaming purgatory, it appears that one of its former contestants, Cheryl Kosewicz, was found dead in her home from an apparent suicide on Friday, July 27, reports Reno's KOLO-TV.
Kosewicz, a 35-year-old deputy district attorney, had spent more than six years prosecuting sexual abuse cases in Las Vegas.
Her death is still under investigation, but follows less than two months after the suicide of her boyfriend, Ryan O'Neil, who died on June 12. His death had hit the reality show contestant hard.
"Truthfully, I've lost the strong Cheryl and I'm just floating around lost," Kosewicz wrote in a June 28 comment posted on the MySpace webpage of fellow 'Pirate Master' contestant Nessa Nemir. "And this frik'n show doesn't help because it was such a contention between Ryan and I and plus its [sic] not getting good reviews."
Kosewicz was actually able to use her attorney skills to advantage the first time she was up for elimination on the show. Unfortunately, this didn't work the second time, and she became the fourth person to walk the plank.
Kosewicz is survived by her parents, brother, grandmother and additional extended family.
Source: http://www.zap2it.com/tv/news/zap-piratemastercherylkosewiczsuicide,0,423773.story?coll=zap-tv-headlines
July 31, 2007
Cheryl Kosewicz, 'Pirate Master' contestant
Mark Burnett's disappointing reality show "Pirate Master" has suffered another blow.
On the heels of the news of having its remaining five episodes yanked from CBS to go to streaming purgatory, it appears that one of its former contestants, Cheryl Kosewicz, was found dead in her home from an apparent suicide on Friday, July 27, reports Reno's KOLO-TV.
Kosewicz, a 35-year-old deputy district attorney, had spent more than six years prosecuting sexual abuse cases in Las Vegas.
Her death is still under investigation, but follows less than two months after the suicide of her boyfriend, Ryan O'Neil, who died on June 12. His death had hit the reality show contestant hard.
"Truthfully, I've lost the strong Cheryl and I'm just floating around lost," Kosewicz wrote in a June 28 comment posted on the MySpace webpage of fellow 'Pirate Master' contestant Nessa Nemir. "And this frik'n show doesn't help because it was such a contention between Ryan and I and plus its [sic] not getting good reviews."
Kosewicz was actually able to use her attorney skills to advantage the first time she was up for elimination on the show. Unfortunately, this didn't work the second time, and she became the fourth person to walk the plank.
Kosewicz is survived by her parents, brother, grandmother and additional extended family.
Source: http://www.zap2it.com/tv/news/zap-piratemastercherylkosewiczsuicide,0,423773.story?coll=zap-tv-headlines
James Randi, CIA, Mind Control, FMSF, Selective Human Breeding, Rockey & Pellwinkle and the Pariahs Behind the Ritual Abuse of Children
James RandiThe following letter is over ten years old, from my old research partner Richard "Cloudrider" Farley, a humble country reporter who investigated CIA mind control activity for years and hounded the perps constantly with brilliant, rambling, labyrinthine, sarcastic e-mails to let them know that he was on to them. Every letter was a data trove and a joy to read if you happened to be researching mind control and ritual abuse. This note was written in 1996. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation to which he refers is a CIA mind control front.
Peas,
- AC
FALSE MEMORY SPINDROME
Here's the list forwarded to me the other day of the FMSF's advisory board, from their most recent online version of their False Memory Syndrome Foundation newsletter. I've simply been "watching" these folks for a while. Some of these names are VERY interesting given their research histories. Well known, many are.
So...here's what's happening:
UCLA identifications: Louis Jolyon West; John Hochman; Rochel Gelman.
Others at Berkeley (Singer; Crews; Ofshe). Stanford & Harvard, of course. (Odd, yes, that being John Mack's baliwick, too?
The "Amazing" James Randi (of CSICOP and CIA" consultant on magic and debunk/disinform fame). His presence sort of gives away who and what this FMSF scam is about.
Odd also, yes, that Randi got into a "pi**ing" contest with former Navy signals scientist Eldon Byrd recently (1992-1993) and the two fought it out in a slander suit Byrd filed against Randi? Something to do with Byrd's alleged plea bargain to some kind of mail-porn charge, which Randi allegedly had hyped up publicly to be more than that. Byrd won, but Randi pleaded "destitution" and Eldon got an award of $1.00. (It was tried in Baltimore, back in 1993. Baltimore Sun reported it, and Byrd told me about it over dinner at C. B. "Scott" Jones home one evening of several we spent together back in '92 and '93 there.)
Byrd said that Uri Geller put up $10,000 for his legal costs. Byrd and Geller are good friends, from back in the '70s, and Geller and Randi's bitter adversarial relationship is well known and goes way back, too. (You might want to read Andrijah Puharich's "URI" if you've not yet.)
Byrd says he had been "set-up" by postal inspectors, part of some initiative to discredit him because he was too public with his personal interests in "psi," etc. He'd allegedly had some Navy security clearance issues dog him, which contributed to his early retirement as one of their senior most civilian scientists.
Of course, he could have been "living his cover," much as Jones allegedly was doing when he retired from active Navy Intelligence duty in the mid-1970s to create his "new" identity as fatherly "Professor Jones," of the Psi-Institute for Hot Oil Massages.
Even more bizarre: When he was still with the Navy, Dr. Byrd was the contract manager for some of the research Michael Persinger did (see FMSF list below), on "neuro-impacts" of various EMFs and ELFs. Something about wave-propagation and influences on submariners if somebody "beeped" them with mind-influencing EMF signals, etc., that kind of thing. Pretty small club, these folks. "Mind-benders" all.
The Orne's are now at Penn, of course. Most government "mind-influencers" we (the taxpayers) funded have now turned their mis-shapen medical ethics to work for the Dark Side. You've seen them in your Psych-Lit data base searches I suggested? Their work is funded by the big foundations (Hughes, etc.) and is buried so arcanely in technomedbabble as to be difficult...but
not impossible...to excavate.
Not to omit the aforementioned Michael Persinger, up at Laurentian University, in Canada, where MUCH of this kind of work has been undertaken ... (no pun intended) ... because of Canada absence of a Bill of Rights and First Amendment, not to mention a more restrictive National Security apparatus regarding disclosures. He was previously funded by Navy, and is/was a big buddy of C. B. Jones (Jones says) and other gov't signal propagation experts...for whom Persinger does/did work on "receptivity" and neuro-effects of external signals. See Psych-Lit and other refs.
The "web" of slime balls who have diddled with the knobs on the planetary consciousness is laid out here. But: Sunlight is the best disinfectant! There it is.
Best,
Dick (cloudrider@aol.com)
P.S. - Did you see the tantalizing "blurb" on Rather Dan's CBS News last night? It was a "read only" story with a graphic, about "researchers have mapped auditory hallucinations in the brain." Dan showed a computerized brain-scan "of a normal person," and then one of the distributed activity of "a schizophrenic while hearing voices." That was it. Hmmm. Do you have a citation for what that may have been drawn from?
Due to the Powell Colin-ectomy from the Newt-onian Presidential Campaign, Rather Dan apparently truncated the brain piece. My guess is it came from a journal "press release," but he didn't say which one. No other info given.
Interestingly, immediately following that little tid-byte, Rather had a story about "subliminals" in computer games (and other "retail" places). A new CD-game entitled "EdorFUN" was featured, and a benign history of the field was presented. ("Oh, 'Brave New World' that has such people in it.")
The "Eye on America" segment reported in some depth about (it said) "alleged" subliminals. I was amused to see a couple of identifiable "experts," saying the stuff doesn't work, etc., etc. We were left by CBS "not to worry" about yet one more scientific uncertainty with "unlimited market potential."
No surprises there.
But lingering out in the "aethers," there WAS that BBC news report back in April 1993, which was shot when we (Human Potential Foundation...the Pell/Jones thing fueled by Larry Rockeybucks) had a couple of visiting Russians over to demonstrate their "Psychocorrection" software for a bunch of intell types.
Included at that private but unclassified symposium we threw (in Tyson's Corners, at offices of Systems Integration Research, who were competing to get the Russians' "brokers" to set up a U.S. defense-intell deal to exploit this technology), were guys like Dr. Richard Nakamura (sp?), the head neuro-guy (there's another pun) from the NIH/NIMH. Also some CIA guys (Pandolfi & Green, who's ex-agency); some "Star Wars" office types; and of course your usual smattering of blue-suiters from USAF & DOD.
(Both Newt and Al Gore, not to mention the White House, are very aware of all of this. Given that it was a Rockey and Pell-Winkle Adventure, what might that tell you? Right! Especially given the Rockey-funded "UFO" Initiative trying to set up the Clintonistas, and Larry's funding and advocacy for "alien
abductions" guru John E. Mack up at Hahvahd Yahd. Not to worry.
It's still America because WE say it's still America. By the way, anybody SEEN Alien Ambassador Steve Greer lately?)
The BBC came and shot a separate segment of the Russians' "subliminal attitude adjuster" for their 12-minute segment on "Non-Lethal Weapons" and doctrine, (a la John Alexander, Janet & Chris Morris, etc.) which was all the rage during the earlier Clintonista period as "dueling defense budgets" evolved. Les Aspin died for our sins, so that debate is VERY black now, with
Deutch of MIT and Sheila Widnall, also of MIT, carrying CIA and USAF. (Funny, that Bosnian-Serb party going on over at Wright-Patterson AFB, in Dayton. Maybe old "Hangar 18" is going to be the new Geneva, and the "Gray/EBEs" invited the Serbs in for some strawberry ice cream?)
The Russians said "it works." And "our side" was quietly amazed that the Russky doctors had apparently "figured out the algorithm" we've spent gazillions working on. And these ex-Soviet scientists had it working on an IBM-386 platform (at least the version they showed us). The later stuff was "at home" on another board.
Of course, the Russians said THEY had refused KGB funding, and their work was aimed at helping bend the minds of alcoholics and drug addicts back to the sanity of service to the state. But OTHER scientists, former colleagues of these guys, had NOT been so "ethical," the Russkies said, and had indeed gone ahead and helped the KGB guys with their nefarious experiments. Right.
That's why Rockefeller was funding Cdr. C. B. Jones to showcase this little bit of what they called "subliminal negotiation" technology to the intell community. Just think...millions and millions of little school kids, watching "Channel One" and having their plastic mind "Newt-ralized." Voila! No more pesky consumers with consciousness, let alone citizens with conscience.
A marketer's (and corporate labor negotiator's) dream? Truth is what is believed, right? And people will fight and die...and even kill...for what they can be made to believe. Just ask the Rabins.
Did you ever see that BBC segment? It ran all around the world but here in the US of A. That's a tad odd, isn't it? That the whole world was watching us think about "non-lethal" doctrine except ourselves? Ah, yes. The most effective kind of "mind control" is simply to control the flow of information. Then, while the people believe they are making "choices," it is the "gatekeepers" who are setting the agenda and presenting the alternatives, guided by their "enlightened self interest."
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[brace yourself for FM-SPINdrome Foundation spammage -d4]
(From the FMSF newsletter...last few pages...as forwarded to me. Can't vouch authenticity.)
The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a qualified 501(c)3 corporation with its principal offices in Philadelphia and governed by its Board of Directors. While it encourages participation by its members in its activities, it must be understood that the Foundation has no affiliates and that no other organization or person is authorized to speak for the Foundation without the prior written approval of the Executive Director. All membership dues and contributions to the Foundation must be forwarded to the Foundation for its disposition.WHAT IF?
WHAT IF, parents who are facing lawsuits and want legal information about FMS cases, had to be told, "I'm sorry, there isn't any such thing available?"
WHAT IF, your son or daughter began to doubt his or her memories and called FMSF only to get a recording, "This number is no longer in operation?"
WHAT IF, a journalist asks you where to get information about the FMS phenomenon, and you had to answer, "Sorry, I don't know?"
WHAT IF, you want to ask a question that only an expert, familiar with FMS can answer, and find out that FMSF can no longer provide that information? Where would you turn?
WHAT IF the False Memory Syndrome Foundation did not exist? A frightening thought, isn't it? Please support our Foundation. We cannot survive without your support!
Reprinted from the August 1994 PFA (MI) Newsletter
YEARLY FMSF MEMBERSHIP INFORMATION
Pamela Freyd, Ph.D., Executive Director
[and of course, the cocktail-party list]
FMSF Scientific and Professional Advisory Board,
November 1, 1995:
o AARON T. BECK, M.D., D.M.S., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
o TERENCE W. CAMPBELL, Ph.D., Clinical and Forensic Psychology, Sterling Heights, MI
o ROSALIND CARTWRIGHT, Rush Presbyterian St. Lukes Medical Center, Chicago, IL
o JEAN CHAPMAN, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
o LOREN CHAPMAN, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
o FREDERICK C. CREWS, Ph.D., University of California,
Berkeley, CA
o ROBYN M. DAWES, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
o DAVID F. DINGES, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, The
Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, PA
o HENRY C. ELLIS, Ph.D., University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
o FRED FRANKEL, M.B.Ch.B., D.P.M., Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard
Medical School, Boston, MA
o GEORGE K. GANAWAY, M.D., Emory University of Medicine, Atlanta, GA
o MARTIN GARDNER, Author, Hendersonville, NC
o ROCHEL GELMAN, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles, CA
o HENRY GLEITMAN, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
o LILA GLEITMAN, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
o RICHARD GREEN, M.D., J.D., Charing Cross Hospital, London
o DAVID A. HALPERIN, M.D., Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York,
NY
o ERNEST HILGARD, Ph.D., Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
o JOHN HOCHMAN, M.D., UCLA Medical School, Los Angeles, CA
o DAVID S. HOLMES, Ph.D., University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
o PHILIP S. HOLZMAN, Ph.D., Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
o JOHN KIHLSTROM, Ph.D., Yale University, New Haven, CT
o HAROLD LIEF, M.D., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
o ELIZABETH LOFTUS, Ph.D., University of Washington, Seattle, WA
o PAUL McHUGH, M.D., Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
o HAROLD MERSKEY, D.M., University of Western Ontario, London,
Canada
o ULRIC NEISSER, Ph.D., Emory University, Atlanta, GA
o RICHARD OFSHE, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, CA
o EMILY K ORNE, B.A., University of Pennsyllvania, The Institute
of Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, PA
o MARTIN ORNE, M.D., Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, The
Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, PA
o LOREN PANKRATZ, Ph.D., Oregon Health Sciences University,
Portland, OR
o CAMPBELL PERRY, Ph.D., Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
o MICHAEL A. PERSINGER, Ph.D., Laurentian University, Ontario,
Canada
o AUGUST T. PIPER, Jr., M.D., Seattle, WA
o HARRISON POPE, Jr., M.D., Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA
o JAMES RANDI, Author and Magician, Plantation, FL
o HENRY L. ROEDIGER, III, Ph.D., Rice University, Houston, TX
o CAROLYN SAARI, Ph.D., Loyola University, Chicago, IL
o THEODORE SARBIN, Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz, CA
o THOMAS A. SEBEOK, Ph.D., Indiana Univeristy, Bloomington, IN
o LOUISE SHOEMAKER, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA
o MARGARET SINGER, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, CA
o RALPH SLOVENKO, J.D., Ph.D., Wayne State University Law School,
Detroit, MI
o DONALD SPENCE, Ph.D., Robert Wood Johnson Medical Center,
Piscataway, NJ
o JEFFREY VICTOR, Ph.D., Jamestown Community College, Jamestown, NY
o HOLLIDA WAKEFIELD, M.A., Institute of Psychological Therapies,
Northfield, MN
o LOUIS JOLYON WEST, M.D., UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA.
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Date: October 24, 1995
To: Frontline (frontline@wgbh.org)
From: Dick Farley (cloudrider@aol.com)
Re: "In Search of Satan" / Satanic Ritualistic Abuse, etc.
Air Date: Tuesday, October 24, 1995, at 9 p.m. EDT.
As a journalist who has spent several years examining the various threads which make up the very bizarre tapestry of "SRA" and "alien abuctions," as well as alleged MPD and "induced multiples/alters-as-secret agents for _____", I was saddened that you folks apparently were so easily led astray. Unless, of course, Washington "intelligence personality" Dan Smith is
correct and some of your contractual producers and on-board staffers are what he has called "company men," i.e., having CIA or other intelligence community connections. I'll leave all that for Dan and his Capitol Hill friends to sort out.
By way of brief background in this field, I am a journalist and public policy professional, having a varied background in non-profits doing environmental and science policy work. I won the Associated Press "Mark Twain" Award for Investigative Reporting
in our Mid-Atlantic region, in 1990. I worked for several years with an organization called the "Human Potential Foundation," chartered in Washington, DC and based in Falls Church, Virginia. It was founded by U. S. Senator Claiborne Pell and funded primarily by Laurance S. Rockefeller as one of his several current philanthropic initiatives seeming to promote alternative religious and psychiatric/psychological paradigms, including so-called "UFOs" and "abductions," having "Global Mind Change" potentials. Rockefeller put more than $700,000 through the "HPF" from 1991 to 1994, as Common Cause Magazine recently reported (Fall, 1995. Page 7). The network of allied scientists and medical experimenters runs throughout
academic, military/intell and government-related specialists in mind-influencing, psychobiology, "political psychiatry" and "exceptional human performance," and makes efforts at reaching into the highest echelons of our elected government...with dubious intentions and reprehensible ethics.
You will see my name (listed as C. Richard Farley, Jr.) in the acknowledgements of the 1993 book about purported "alien abductions" by John E. Mack, M.D., of Harvard. Although I have been portrayed variously by some of the principals of the "HPF" and Rockefeller minions as a "disgruntled ex-employee," that is not the case. I was working for the organization, after being recruited, as Director of Project Development, addressing the various scientific and educational paradigm-shifting foci the organization's principals espoused in their IRS filing and their brochure and internal documentation. I took myself "off" the so-called Rockefeller "UFO Initiative" to the White Houes (on which I worked from Oct. 1992 through April, 1994).
Later, the HPF reduced its staff and laid all paid employees off, moving
operations to the Falls Church basement in the home of Jones. Incidental to your program of tonight, and my purpose for writing this, is that I worked from August, 1991 through at May, 1994, the HPF and its President, who is retired naval intelligence officer Cdr. C.B. "Scott" Jones, Ph.D. Jones also was a contractual consultant (KamanTEMPO, Inc.) to the Defense Nuclear Agency (1981-1985) before next working for Senator Pell as Special Assistant (1985-1991), ostensibly looking after Pell's "paranormal" interests. (Jones is also listed in Mack's book, as is L.S. Rockefeller.)
During part of that period and after I'd left the organization (Oct. 1992 through May, 1995), Cdr. Jones and what was left of the HPF (after he got rid of his only two full-time staffers, and with Pell eventually resigning as we have "closed in" on these guys), focused almost all of his public energy on Mr. Rockefeller's purported fascination with so-called "UFOs" and purported "alien abductions." Rockefeller is alleged, based on credible online data and published information, to have made a contribution of prestige and perhaps money to help Harvard's Dr. Mack resist efforts there to censure him for his "alien abduction" beliefs, as he claims is his "diagnosis" of the experiences of his "exceptional experiencers." But that's not all of it, and this certainly isn't about a doddering billionaire with a fascination for the bizarre. It's about power and abuse.
Basically, what tickled me about your program this evening was your reference to Ms. Gloria Steinem, whose magazine published an early and influential report about purported SRA, as your film revealed. What was fascinating is that you did not pursue this high-profile person's involvements further, back to her funding sources and political linkages, which lead to the same sources that have funded "alien abduction research, and the promotion of such scenarios by what "UFO" critic (and top space and reconnaissance technical writer) Philip Klass has repeatedly said is a "highly placed UFO cult."
What you also missed, and what I do know from my personal contacts with some of your "consultants" like Mr. Gus Rousseau in the Washington area, and others, is that Frontline has a deep understanding and much primary information about the range of phenomena and cross-linkages often termed "UFOs," as well as "recalled memories," etc. Your recent repeat of your earlier "debunking" of recalled memories and MPD, in which you had featured a well-known CIA-related psychiatrist purporting to "plant" MPD identities in the Hillside Strangler, I believe, was fairly transparent, especially if one knows the actual history of that psychiatrist. One would almost be led to conclude that your intention was "creative deflection" of mainstream public scrutiny of these phenomena...not as "metaphysicalities," but rather as techniques and applications of technologies in human hands. Hopefully you have thought all of these choices through?
Gloria Steinem's "friendship" with the afore-mentioned Cdr. C.B. Jones, who demonstrably is and has been one of the higher placed "connections" among so-called paranormal researchers and "street-level" uses of what is termed in tradecraft as "applied anomalous phenomena," would have borne examination, especially given the reported "timing" of the appearance of SRA on the psychiatric scene. Whether "agents" or "assets," all of these folks are very closely connected and "inter-locking." Funding for the work of Dr. Braun at Rush-Presbyterian also would have been of more than passing interest to Frontline's viewers, as would have been a more circumspect examination of the so-called "Greenbaum" lectures and Cory Hayward's
allegations. There is independent corroboration of some of what he asserts, some of it from government publications or "gray literature" that is low-profile, but certainly not secret. Although I'm certain you have known of it and have decided to pursue "other threads," I must also call your attention to the reports of legal cases emanating from CIA's admitted abuses of
psychiatric patients at Allen Memorial Institute, in Canada, by CIA-sponsored (and Rockefeller-funded) practitioner, the late Dr. Ewen Cameron...who once was president of the World Psychiatric Association. Who funds Dr. Braun? Let me guess.
See: Thomas, Gordon. "Journey Into Madness." Bantam. 1989 (hardback) and 1990 (paper). Page 200-201 in the latter, will get you started just fine. Basically, other literature alleges that some of the "cult-like" contexts of so-called memory induction (allegedly to stimulate MPD's and "coded access" to
these so-called personality fragments by hypnotic suggestion) has been routinely used to protect couriers and operatives who are destined for insertion behind enemy lines, or who have had exposures to highly (dangerously) classified information which is so sensitive that extreme psychological protection measure such as that alleged is, at least theoretically, justifiable.
Also, the film's dismissive references to pre-WWII funding of "Nazi" (more accurately, Nazi-influencing) psychiatry and mental-health related "eugenics" practices, in Germany and in the U. S. before and after the war, can readily be traced to the Rockefeller funding. This is consistent with that family's long- standing interest in "selective breeding" of the human race,
supposedly to eliminate the "useless eaters" and other rif-raff among us, who apparently don't measure up to their econometric standards of "citizenry." Often, according to some published accounts, justifications for these kinds of beliefs have come from one or another of "occult doctrines" or trendy belief-systems frequently dabbled in by self-styled "elites."
Suffice it to say that some of us who have been analyzing the apparent Frontline strategies of related topics getting your "treatment" were not disappointed, at least insofar as our analyses are concerned. Journalistically, that's another story.
But "if you bring the football, you can make the rules," and your wealthy patrons, who funded the films you have packaged on these topics to the exclusion of a serious and balanced inquiry into human victimizations, and the intentions of whoever it is allegedly victimizing these folks, do get what they've paid for.
That you seemed to paint the alleged SRA excesses reported on tonight's program as motivated by financial greed was also a most clever disinformational strategy. To those of us who have seen the primary documentation, and interviewed many of these victims of some of these alleged mind-influencing experimental programs...and who also have documentation that links prominent people and their minions to such abuses, your reluctance to probe more deeply remains sadly frustrating.
It's understandable, considering your money sources and your vulnerabilities to political manipulation, particularly there in Boston where Harvard has been so desperate to keep its sordid complicities under wraps. But it's disappointing, nonetheless.
While I wish that the phenomena you "exposed" in tonight's program were indeed as ephemeral as you (and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, "CIA" and various psychiatric perpetrators) wish it might be, the actuality is even more sad.
Various techniques of hypnosis, personality reformulation and technological / pharmacological enhancements, which are not supposed to exist, have been used...and abused...in the name of science and "national security." That our enemies certainly did the same...and prompted at least some of our national response... is also clear. But for Frontline to maintain the cover-up in the disguise of an "expose'," is a very slippery slope for us all.
We'll hope that more information and additional courage will come your way. Until then, some of us just wanted you to know we're "out here" as X-Files alludes, wrestling with "the truth."
For you, it appears that, "Truth is what is believed." That is an unfortunate and cynical world-view. May it not come to haunt.
Best regards,
Dick Farley