- Friends and Colleagues,
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- Please confirm receipt of his message and publicize widely
for saftey reasons.
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- After Reuven Schossen, the Israeli dissident, returned
to Bolivia, we maintained an email relationship and I continued to edit
his book. I secured permission from the publisher of the newspaper I edit
to publish his manuscript. We began editing the latest version of his excellent
book, Holygarchy, after Publish America decided to terminate their contract
with him on spurious grounds.
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- He had recently sent me a new chapter about a high level
Mossad agent who was also coincidentally an "art student."
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- He never gave me the real name of this gentleman, always
calling him Arik, but he told me one very important detail about the man,
namely that he was the son of the man who put the bombs in the Hotel King
David.
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- He told me about the "fighting families" (Lehi,
Etzel, Irgun) of Israel and the way in which they still control the intelligence
services and plum business positions given as gifts to core warriors.
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- Recently, Reuven was growing more and more desperate
back in Bolivia and mentioned to me that he was again under heavy surveillance
and that someone had recently broken into his room in search of "documents."
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- Then, all of a sudden, this morning, I go to edit the
newest version of Straw Skyscrapers, a chapter from the book, when I find
that absolutely every single email to and from Reuven has been deleted
from my gmail account. Even his entry in my Contacts file was gone.
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- It has been widely reported that google has CIA connections,
and quite frankly, I feel deeply violated and very concerned, both for
Reuven and myself, hence this public letter.
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- http://www.google-watch.org/jobad.html http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2006/061206seedmoney.htm
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- Tonight, I checked on a hunch and found that Reuven's
entire website has disappeared. The domain has not expired, and was hosted
at a free site on geocities.com (Yahoo). Once again, I suspect active sabotage.
Google schossen.com and you can see the cached version. An old version
is still up at http://progressiveconvergence.com/schossen
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- Attached, please find the most recent chapter entitled
Arik in the midst of the editing process as well as the complete manuscript
as I have it. I also include below the chapter entitled Straw Skyscrapers,
a touching account of the vagueness of the Israeli State's "Law of
Return," underscoring the vast myth of Judaism as race and religion.
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- Please pray for Reuven if you are so inclined. Although
some of my friends, you know who you are, were disinclined to work with
Reuven, I developed a close relationship with him. As such, my emotions
are telling me that something very bad has happened and I am concerned
for my friend's safety. As he used to say to me, it could happen to you
too.
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- Leland Lehrman (505) 982-3609
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- Chapter 4. The Straw Skyscraper
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- I had arrived in Israel many years earlier, after finishing
primary school in Buenos Aires, and went to live on a kibbutz in the Jordan
Valley until my enrollment in the army. My four grandparents ran away from
the violent Europe of the early twentieth century to South America. World
War Two was a taboo subject in our home, and the dead were never mentioned.
The only contact I had with the issue was through a survivor, the mother
of my maternal grandmother. She never said a word about the events, a tattoo
on her hand was the only giveaway. One day my parents decided to make their
way to the Middle East and for no good reason, I found myself in Israel.
No child can understand why he should have to travel to a war zone.
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- The kibbutz was a socialist settlement form designed
in the beginning of the twentieth century, at the peak of the efforts to
create a New Jew in his own state. The children grew up in separate houses,
away from their parents. Socialist protocol required that everyone experience
the same conditions and to the horror of socialist leaders, every family
was different and hence created a supposedly inadequate background for
children.
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- Soon, I felt a growing physical distance from my family,
a remoteness that reflected my unhappiness with the move to Israel and
the kibbutz. Each age group had around a dozen children living in a dedicated
building with two adults watching over them. A woman did the housekeeping,
woke us every morning and prepared our breakfast, while a man, who was
called "the coach," met with the whole group once a week and
instructed us in how to interpret reality.
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- Despite all their talk about equality, the two adult
roles were defined according to gender. The discipline was harsh but it
was implemented in subtle ways. The most obvious was the social pressure
of friends, but the coach could threaten as well; his best line was: "This
will be written in your personal file." I never found where the personal
file was kept, but years later, I wasn't surprised to hear my expressed
critiques about their system alluded to by government officials.
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- Their ideology was false. The place was supposed to be
a secular-socialist paradise, but the reality was different and a small
group of functionaries or politruks as we called them using pseudo-soviet
terminology rotated through administrative jobs while the proletariat
milked the cows and took care of the fields. Beyond their practical experience
in administration, the politruks had no specific education that prepared
them for their jobs and made them more appropriate for leadership than
the milking hordes. My point of view regarding the system got me pushed
out, but it was proven correct a decade later when, following a series
of monetary scandals the kibbutzim collapsed.
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- They couldn't pay the old loans given by other governments,
and despite the loans' unprecedented generosity and partial forgiveness
by later governments, the kibbutzim just couldn't recover. Citizens living
in the small towns next to them, most of them populated by Oriental Jews
as compared to a majority of Western Jews in the kibbutzim, had for years
complained about the money received by the kibbutzim.
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- Shiny swimming pools built on cheap loans were considered
a provocation by the small town dwellers who called themselves the "Second
Israel;" meaning that they felt like second class citizens. In the
end, the kibbutzim were forced to recognize the right to private possessions
and adapted themselves to the lifestyle of the rest of the country.
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- During my years on the kibbutz, no evidence of their
overblown ideologies could be identified in their daily life, yet none
of the proletariat ever pointed at that obvious delusion, maybe since we
were afraid. Social pressure was the way they dealt with any questioning
of their social practices. To admit that their founders had made ideological
mistakes was their deepest fear and sarcasm was the universal medicine
prescribed for those with the so called wrong attitude. I was caged among
sarcastic savages, who cared just for the profitability of their cows and
the weight of their wheat.
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- Supposed aspirations to equality were pointed downwards
and instead of improving themselves, administrators aimed to limit the
self-development of other members. They acidly referred to this process
as keeping the height of the grass even. They perceived my knowledge of
foreign languages, of alien cities and cultures as a drawback; my accent
was hilarious in their eyes, and my constant reading was seen as a kind
of mental sickness. Cultural activities were regarded as a superfluous
addition to life; language itself was looked upon as a suspicious invention.
The local leaders carefully cultivated these weird points of view, as the
ignorance of the masses was imperative to their survival in power.
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- Secondary school was a very confusing experience. The
school belonged to the socialist branch of education and held that flag
high, an ensign that in Israel was connected to the one of secularism.
However, we were required to study the Old Testament in order to graduate
from high school and enter university. Unable to resolve the apparent ideological
contradiction, our teachers adopted several weird tricks.
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- We were taught that the pharisaic-rabbinical interpretation
of the Bible was wrong, that it was not Humanistic and that it was done
in the spirit of convenience. The political situation which still exists
in Israel today - where a rabbinical minority decides which of the two
big parties holds power and uses this power to milk money from the government
- made it very easy to accept this claim of our teachers. The problem was
that they didn't offer a coherent, alternative interpretation of the text.
They showed us the bad without pointing towards the good; the socialist
flag had no pole.
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- Proud socialists, we didn't need to buy materials for
the school, we got everything from a system that worked hard to lower costs.
One such effort resulted in a batch of Hebrew Bibles printed in Sweden
that included the New Testament, an oddity in Israel. They were given free
of charge. Years later, when I was searching for such a book, I couldn't
find one. Yet in the six years of secondary school, none of the teachers
mentioned the second part of the book even once. Being the new kid on the
block, I could allow myself to ask the questions no one else would ask.
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- Once I asked my teacher why we don't read the second
part of the Book. "We don't read that," she reproached me without
further explanation. The most intriguing part in the very expected answer
was "we." Did she mean "we, the socialists" or "we,
the Israelis" or "we, the Jews?" I don't think she knew.
The same confused attitude appeared whenever I asked identity questions.
The country seemed to me like a straw skyscraper built on a sour-cream
foundation.
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- This foamy foundation was the first law legislated by
the State of Israel, the Law of Return, which said that every Jew had the
right to return to Israel and to get immediate citizenship upon arrival.
How could such a law be legislated? Lacking a constitution defending the
rights of all citizens, the Israeli Parliament could legislate anything.
The Law of Return explicitly discriminates on an ethnic and religious basis
and does not even state who in fact is a Jew. The pharisaic rabbis claim
that they are the only judges of that.
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- "We" is pronounced in Hebrew with a violent
collision between two consonants; always insinuating that it is not safe
to ask the next logical question, who are we? "We" was our transparent
Berlin Wall. There was no "we" really, all I could hear was the
wee-wee of professional victims. After two thousand years of Diaspora,
it was obvious that "we" weren't a defined ethnic group. A Rosenbaum
looked like a German, while a Medina looked like an Arab. Was religion
the glue? No again. Most Israelis ignored the scriptures and left the issue
in an unidentified Limbo. Or was it Hades?
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- The year was 1983, but at school we were already studying
Orwell's 1984, a book which frightened us by its similarity to life in
Israel. The Lebanon War, which had begun a year earlier, was still called
by the government "the War for the Peace of Galilee." The Hebrew
possessive contraction brought together the two words sounding exactly
like "War-Peace," creating thus a perfect Orwellian oxymoron.
We all skipped the obvious contemporaneous context of the book in our commentaries;
such semantic tactics could belong only to the enemy and we lived in an
enlightened society.
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- A little voice in our head told a different story, one
that had to be kept to ourselves. The glitch allowing such a subversive
book to be on our reading list could be interpreted as some inconsistency
of the system. However, a frightening alternative explanation was that
1984 had been placed on the Education Ministry's official list of books
intentionally, so that we would forever fear authority and behave.
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- Orwellian semantics predated the man for whom they are
named by more than two thousand years. Rabbis are its long-established
experts. The history teachers always gave us interesting points of view.
They had the most questioning minds in the school and taught us about the
pharisaic strategies for holding religious authority over the people; how
they strategically change the names of important religious figures and
create and modify the meanings of organizations and symbols. The word "Pharisees",
the religious political party of the traditional scribes, means "the
separated;" and relates to the political origin of this group.
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- When they began campaigning for the role of the accepted
religious authority of the people, they couldn't keep the old "separated"
name. In a maverick marketing exercise, they created a new title, rabbi
from the word for "much" and related to the word "majority",
and assigned it to Moses. Even nowadays in Israel, he is more often than
not called "Moshe Rabenu", or "Moses our Rabbi." When
the Sadducees, the traditional priest class, weakened, the Pharisees usurped
the title of Rabbi, now prestigious by association with Moses, for themselves
and became the recognized religious authority of the Jewish people.
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- Along with immoral foreign doctrines brought from Babylon,
the Pharisees adopted the old Hindu symbol for spiritual strength as their
own. To ingratiate it in the eyes of the people they called it the Star
of David or in a direct translation from Hebrew, "David's Shield."
To justify their foreign beliefs, they claimed they were given orally to
Moses in Sinai, a false claim which is not mentioned in the Bible. Without
understanding this oral tradition, they asserted, you cannot interpret
the Bible correctly. Thus, they stole the Bible from the people.
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- Jesus tried to explain that the correct interpretation
is the one arising from faith and love, not the monstrous apparatus based
on personal convenience created by the rabbis. I was shocked to learn about
the meaning of the change of the name of Jesus in Hebrew, a change that
I realized was a vital clue as to the nature of the problems in Israeli
society. The real name of the historical Jesus was "Yeshua" which
means salvation in Hebrew. Worried about the implications, the pharisaic
rabbis changed his name to "Yeshu," an acronym meaning "be
his name and memories forgotten." Even nowadays, that's the most popular
way to refer to him in Israel.
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- During high-school studies, farm work was still compulsory.
Despite the pressure, I was the only one in my class who bothered to take
the exams needed to enter University and pass them. I did much more than
the minimum necessary, almost twice as much in fact, since I didn't want
some sudden and arbitrary change in the regulations to delay me from entering
higher studies after the army. However, in a practice that became second
nature to me, I still didn't do my best; calling too much attention to
myself didn't seem to be a good practice in Israeli society.
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- www.thesun-news.com www.mothermedia.org h: 505.982.3609
o: 505.473.4458
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