Die Lektüre des folgenden Buches wird dringend jedem(auch den selbsternannten Nahost-Experten, die bei jeder Gelegenheit und ganz besonders bezüglich Russland die westlichen Medien kritisieren, aber im Falle Israels ihnen sich blind hingeben wie darauf abgerichtete Hunde) empfohlen;-):
Walking Into The Flames
Sie haben keine Berechtigung Anhänge anzusehen. Anhänge sind ausgeblendet.
Inhaltsangabe:
Edwin Black's latest book,
Financing the Flames: How Tax-Exempt and Public Money Fuel a Culture of Confrontation and Terrorism in Israel, pulls the cover off the robust use of tax-exempt, tax-subsidized, and public monies to foment agitation, systematically destabilize the Israel Defense Forces, and finance terrorists in Israel. In a far-flung investigation in the United States, Israel and the West Bank, human-rights investigative reporter Edwin Black documents that it is actually the highly politicized human rights organizations and NGOs themselves—all taxpayer supported—which are financing the flames that make peace in Israel difficult if not impossible.
Black spotlights key charitable organizations such as the Ford Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the New Israel Fund, and many others, as well as American taxpayers as a group. Instead of promoting peace and reconciliation between Arabs and Israelis, a variety of taxpayer-subsidized organizations have funded a culture where peace does not pay, but warfare and confrontation do. Ironically, several Jewish organizations, scooping up millions in tax-subsidized donations, stand at the forefront of the problem. At the same time, the author details at great length the laudable and helpful activities of such groups as the New Israel Fund; he chronicles a heartbreaking conflict between stated intent and true impact on the ground. In addition to documenting questionable 501(c)(3) activity, Black documents the direct relationship between taxpayer assistance to the Palestinian Authority and individuals engaged in terrorism against civilians.
Chief Findings:
- A broad spectrum of Israeli military men and numerous Knesset members went on record to say the New Israel Fund and its NGO grantees are systematically "destabilizing the Israel Defense Forces." This has resulted in daily harassment and taunting of IDF soldiers in the field, where young Israeli men and women in uniform are pushed to react. If they do, these incidents are commonly videotaped, edited and then used as "evidence" to be distributed for boycott efforts and war crime prosecutions.
- The New Israel Fund and its grantee, B’Tselem, fund programs that tolerate the systematic exploitation of children and the use of children for the purpose of provoking Israeli security responses. These incidents are then videotaped, edited, and distributed.
- Massive daily lobbying to achieve, modify, and block Israeli legislation to create an Israel devoid of Jewish identity, and achieve other political goals, including rigorous involvement in candidate selection and election.
- While claiming to advance democracy in Israel, the New Israel Fund has regularly sought to undermine the democratic process in that nation by convincing Israeli Knesset members not to show up for voting on key issues.
- In addition to the questionable 501(c)(3) activity, Black conclusively documents how millions of American taxpayer dollars are funding the salaries of specific terrorists sitting in Israeli prisons, salaries that are among the best paid jobs in the Palestinian Authority, and are calculated to increase with the level of mass murder and destruction.
- Taxpayer money is being used to further entrench a human-rights double standard where abuses and mistreatment of Jews by Palestinians are tolerated, ignored, and even promoted.
- Some protestors are actually compensated by charitable organizations when they riot—and such riots can occur on a scheduled basis. American and European activists frequently provoke, incite, and video tape the choreographed riots.
- Some of the same NGO grantees in Israel engaged in destabilization of the IDF that receive funding from the New Israel Fund, and other foundations, also receive charitable monies from foundations controlled by Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Einleitung
As I started this project, things did not seem right. In many ways, Israel appeared on fire. Human rights groups were constantly accusing the Jewish State and its security forces of abuses against civilians—primarily, but not exclusively, with regard to the territorial anomaly known as the "West Bank" as well as other relations with the Palestinians.
Israel has occupied the territory known as the West Bank since the 1967 Six-Day War. It is now under the joint control of Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This former Turkish colony, in some places gray-washed and rocky, in some places verdant and bucolic, has never achieved self-sovereignty despite many opportunities to do so. Every opportunity, beginning shortly after World War I, has been spurned by the Arab community. Hence, the West Bank is now in national limbo, claimed in different hectares and sectors by both Palestinians and some Israelis, while its approximate perimeter remains outlined by the shadow of centuries of Turkish sovereignty, converted to decades of international mandate under British control, supplanted by years of Jordanian occupation, and now subject to daily seismic movements beneath the contending forces that dwell within its valleys and atop its hills.
For me, the allegations of human-rights abuses by the Israeli government and society led to a spectacular disconnect. Here was Israel, a country of people yearning to be free even as it laments the reverberations of unspeakable personal suffering. Yet, this people, driven by history, pain, hope, and vision, now stand accused of inflicting hardship, dispossession, and separitude upon the neighbors within its midst, the powerless Palestinians. To do so would be a contravention of its own commanding norms expressed in Exodus 22: "Do not mistreat or oppress a stranger in your midst, for you were strangers in Egypt."
But I had questions. Were the allegations true?
Certainly, the abuses can sometimes look real to those who surf the Internet, watch provocative videos, and read the impassioned accounts of international activists. A picture is worth a thousand words, it has been said. But in today’s world, every picture can be viewed in 3-D. What lurks behind the image can be even more telling than the pixels at the surface.
I also wondered about the empowering dynamic behind the actions of the international protest groups. In my mind, to answer that meant follow the money. For me, the journalistic imperative has always been to follow the money. Money must be followed to understand the following that money attracts.
Human rights must know no political test and must never be used as a political tool. Throughout history, too many have suffered at the hands of those who believed their higher human-rights calling allowed them to pick and choose sides to validate a prejudice on who should live and who should die, who should be mourned and who should be scorned. In the case of Israel, a lopsided human-rights regimen appears to be a manifest and systemic problem. In many ways, the human-rights community reports to no one—they have learned to exceed entire governments, circumvent national laws, burden the legal system that tries to rein them in, and function as imperially as any multinational corporation. We have seen Big Oil and Big Data, and now we must acknowledge the rise of Big NGO or non-governmental organizations. They may also be called supra-governmental organizations.
But in this highly flammable, highly politicized, highly polarized arena, simply raising questions often provokes preemptive fire from those who prefer not to answer. All too often, the facts become a distant echo in a cacophonous international debate over who even has the right to ask. In the din, the burning reality of peace and confrontation in the Middle East—and who is funding it—reposes behind an impenetrable and insulated shield. Clearly, because some of the main accusers in the human-rights and activist communities themselves now stand accused by many leading Israeli voices, to fairly investigate and report, such a probe demands a perspective steeped in decades of human rights.
The title of this book, Financing the Flames, invokes the murky intersection I have monitored during my entire career. For four and half decades, I have been researching and writing about the Middle East and its peoples, as well as the underlying forces that impact both—all within the context of human rights. So, in many ways, this book was a project for which I have prepared during almost a half century of dogged journalism and historical investigation into the tragic world of human rights and the arrogance of corporate-based philanthropic abuse. My goal has always been to uncover the obscure forces that shape our world and the world of our ancestors—in the hope of making a better place for our descendants.
My long journey through the heart-breaking field of human rights has observed one paramount ideal: all people are entitled to equal human rights regardless of their religion, national identity, race, or social class. No group has a monopoly on human rights. None may be disenfranchised. All blood is red. All tears taste of salt. All despair dims the human spirit. For these reasons, I have investigated the pain of so many disparate groups who have suffered throughout time. So many groups. So much anguish. But in this fractious world, perspective matters.
My perspective began most earnestly with a probe of the Armenian genocide at the hand of the Turks—a topic I wrote about in my first book, The Transfer Agreement, published in 1984. I detailed this crime years before the mass murder of more than a million defenseless Armenian civilians became a regular discussion point among human-rights groups.
In my subsequent book, the eugenics chronicle War Against the Weak, the victims crying out for justice were Americans. Poor whites, brown-haired Appalachians, African Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, Asians, and those of mixed lineage were all targeted for biological elimination by virtue of an elitist complex of laws and institutional programs that coordinated coercive sterilization, marriage prohibition, incarceration, and euthanasia.
In another book that prepared me for this task, Banking on Baghdad, I delved further into the anguish of Iraq and the entire extended Middle East. I traced the generation-to-generation nightmare—not just to the wars of modern times, but back 7,000 years to the recession of Ice Age glaciers that enabled the first cradles of civilizations. The disconsolate revelation that emerged was that, over the centuries, there has never been a generation in the Mideast that did not victimize or become victimized. This sad truth continued during the fiery rise of Islam and its turbulent schism into Shi’a and Sunni worlds. Unhappily, those cyclical clashes were interrupted by the colonizing West, which coveted the geography and geology of the region.
Ethnic and religious groups are not the only victims in the world of human rights. For this reason, I have devoted myself to the plight of the deaf, the disabled, and disadvantaged. Three awards granted to me are constant reminders of the universality of human rights. Those three awards are the "International Human Rights Award", by the World Affairs Council Great Lakes; the "Justice for All Award", granted in a Congressional ceremony by the Association of Americans with Disabilities; and the "Drum Major for Justice Award," bestowed by North Carolina Central University. Those of us in the world of human rights are called to rally for those overlooked by the mainstream.
The compulsion to investigate human-rights abuses, for me, is powered by my own background as the child of Polish Holocaust survivors and as a chronicler of Hitler’s war against the Jews. I have written many works on the historical antecedents and submerged forces at work in the mass murder of six million Jews and the persecution of so many other peoples. My questions have always been not just who did it, but who helped? Here, again, I follow the money.
As a lifelong investigative reporter, I've discovered that when one follows the money streams, the ultimate sources generally reside atop the highest mountains of commerce. The rogues' gallery of those complicit in corporate genocide includes IBM, Ford, General Motors, and British Petroleum. Each of those firms worked hand-in-glove with the Nazi regime to propel Hitler’s war against civilization.
The unhappy intersection of big inhumanity and big money finds its most ironic dynamic in philanthropic abuse. It’s a sad reality that some of the world’s greatest charitable nameplates have earned front row positions in the hall of shame as the indispensable enablers of genocide.
In my eugenics book, War Against the Weak, I revealed that the campaign to extinguish the existence of unwanted minorities and social classes—the so-called unfit—was continuously orchestrated and financed by the prestigious Carnegie Institution and the gilded Rockefeller Foundation. The Carnegie Institution powered the rise of a fake science called eugenics and its implementation as the law of the land. The Rockefeller Foundation joined Carnegie in the effort to make the world a better place by destroying most of its inhabitants. Then, the Rockefeller Foundation went further and transplanted its genocidal racism into Nazi Germany. Rockefeller even funded the Reich’s most notorious and murderous doctors—including the program that sent Mengele to Auschwitz—all in the name of progressive improvement.
Within the photons of their corporate gleam, the shining names of business and philanthropy too often conceal a shameful particle. This hidden dark matter lurks deep beneath the albedo. That is the opacity that must be scrutinized.
The preamble above brings me to the present volume. My undertaking for Financing the Flames began not in April 2013 when I first pulled myself out of a spine-altering El Al seat at Ben Gurion Airport to discover Israel's historic soil in historic turmoil. This project actually began more than a decade before. In 2003, I produced the award-winning, multipart, syndicated Jewish Telegraphic Agency series Funding Hate. That investigation revealed that the Ford Foundation, misusing its prodigious tax-exempt, multi-billion-dollar treasury, was funding dozens of NGOs and other organizations engaged in the worst campaigns of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate in recent memory. Some twenty-one congressmen, along with numerous Jewish leaders, launched a concerted effort to stop this abuse. Ultimately, the Ford Foundation abruptly pulled its funding of those groups and instead channeled its millions into an organization called the New Israel Fund.
Since that 2003 investigation, I have received innumerable requests from editors and readers to undertake a follow-up investigation. Most of those requests were centered on allegations that New Israel Fund, run by some of the most talented minds in the Israeli and Jewish community, was perversely using the organization’s access to tax-subsidized millions to actually undermine the Jewish state. The complaint heard most loudly was that the New Israel Fund and its hundreds of grantees were lock-stepped in an ideological struggle to destabilize the Israeli military and erase Israel’s Jewish identity for its own left-wing purposes. The heart-provoking realm of Palestinian human rights, the many allegations assert, was being used as a tool in a towering political agenda to remake the Jewish State into a state that was not Jewish and, indeed, might not even continue to exist as an independent state.
The anglicized Hebrew and Yiddish word chutzpah comes to mind. The word has come to represent the most outrageous form of arrogance and hubris. In many circles, the most precise definition is this: a man murders his parents and then pleads for sympathy from the court on the grounds that he is an orphan. Now, entire communities of Israeli society charge that American-financed human-rights activists in Israel facilitate and encourage aggressive and illegal activity against Israeli security forces in the hope of provoking a response, which could then be videotaped and publicly posted to cause an Internet embarrassment for the State of Israel, especially the Israel Defense Forces. This charge is vigorously denied by the New Israel Fund and its beneficiaries.
The allegations charge that confrontations are staged, financed, and well-choreographed to provoke international outrage against a State that increasingly finds itself armed to the teeth with high-tech weaponry but helpless in the face of contrived accusations. Those making these charges do not dwell at the margins of Israeli society. They come from a gamut of the nation’s leadership—some shouting from the rooftops and some afraid to speak publicly, expressing the fear that the New Israel Fund collective from New York and Washington will launch a retaliatory campaign in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
In this systematic campaign of destabilization, many named critics openly charge, members of the Israel Defense Forces are being abused, harassed, taunted, and provoked until some of them react. Many of the taunted soldiers are mere teenagers who have just graduated into mandatory military service. This web of facilitation, it is charged, is subsidized by American taxpayers by virtue of the tax-deductible status of the 501(c)(3) charitable organizations in question. That makes it everybody’s business.
While those organizations are enabled under the American tax code as taxpayer-subsidized for charitable purposes, it is loudly claimed that many of them, especially those associated with New Israel Fund, are engaged in a prodigious political and electoral struggle in Israel. This would be contrary to the intent and spirit of the American tax code and the American taxpayers, who ultimately pay to fuel this supranational interference in Israel's internal affairs.
The politicking complained of includes nonstop lobbying and ceaseless legislative action in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. It even includes concerted attempts to undermine Israel's democracy by efforts to stop Knesset members from showing up to vote on certain volatile issues. Ironically, while claiming to champion democracy at all costs, it challenges credulity to understand how democracy is served by manipulating Israeli legislators to not exercise their democratic right to vote in their own parliament.#
It is alleged by many critics within Israel that nothing less than an out-of-control, anything-goes Wild West has been established by American-funded international human-rights organizations. In this Wild West, as critics openly charge, video exploitation of child endangerment and the use of children as human shields is an everyday occurrence calculated to provoke outrage at Israel—all to serve some greater cause. Furthermore, a famous grant-making source, sporting an iconic American name and said to supply many millions of dollars to its grantees, is in fact a completely nonexistent entity creating a massive philanthropic fiction. In this upside-down world of human rights driving off the road, videotaped protesting civilians chant to be mistreated by Israeli security forces and loudly object when soldiers decline to fall into the trap. Then, the attack wings appear, wielding skull-crushing rocks and Molotov cocktails.
As a topper, a robust human-rights system that demands equal treatment has entrenched a modus operandi that actively discriminates against Jews in Israel. All this is propelled by American taxpayers and a tax code that seek to proliferate American values of equal treatment for men and women of all religions.
Planned, coordinated violence and provocation by activists change the human-rights equation. The misuse of the banner of human rights to gain political advantage changes that same equation. In the math of the Middle East, many numbers simply never add up.
If the charges are borne out, millions of American dollars are fomenting a culture of confrontation in Israel at a time when peace efforts are a precious shrinking commodity that needs to be nourished not undermined. In other words, are American taxpayers subsidizing a pernicious system that materially drives people in Israel apart rather than sets the stage for reconciliation? Can Palestinians come to peace terms when there is so much money to be made provoking antagonism and when those who labor daily to coexist in peace are dismissed and forced into the shadows by a mindset that ridicules such coexistence?
Even worse, are American taxpayers also paying salaries of convicted terrorists? If so, that would be the most perverted use of dwindling American tax dollars at a time when national institutions are teetering atop the precipice of economic collapse. More than making a mockery of American hopes to fight terrorism and shepherd our funds wisely to promote peace, the direct payment of such terrorist subventions is unequivocally illegal.
These are the tempestuous questions I was called to answer in undertaking this volume. None of this could be achieved from the comfort of a computer screen, through glasses fogged by steaming coffee, and cushioned by an ergonomic chair. This challenge required digging beneath the apparent and burrowing beneath the surface. It required a personal journey into the hearts and minds of the contending parties and an eye-to-eye experience with the war-wounded, the war-weary, and the war-eager of the area. My journey took me from the halls of power and prestige in Israel to the simple Palestinian front rooms where struggle, confrontation, violence, and mourning are a way of life and too often a way of death.
I travelled from the finest hotels in Jerusalem to the corridors of the Knesset, from fiercely antagonist Palestinian hamlets, where the entire town is mobilized to disrupt at the risk of life and limb, to the resplendent Jewish settlements next door, from remote Palestinian villages, too dangerous for most Israelis to visit, to the regaled epicenters of Palestinian prestige in East Jerusalem. I met my contacts in exquisite settings, humble homes, elaborate tents, and sometimes in the shadows. On occasion, the meeting called for a suit and tie; in some cases, it required a bulletproof vest and Kevlar helmet. On one day I heard an Israeli father mourn the loss of his son murdered by terrorists and on another I found myself in a regularly scheduled riot in the West Bank with a community that lionized such killings. In the morning, I could be rushing to a Knesset meeting and, by evening, exploring a moonlit alleyway in a remote West Bank town tracking down a lead.
Such undertakings can only be hands-on. That means holding the hand of inconsolable parents, shaking the hand of brave but uncelebrated men from both the Palestinian and Israeli communities, and nervously eyeing the hand of protesters just yards away preparing to heave rocks or worse my way. Readers will climb atop the steed for this journey through every winding hill, to the Israeli homes still in grief, to the Palestinian dwellings where seething resentment and seemingly inextinguishable anger are served up with every tray of tea and cookies, to hidden camera positions where activists lay in wait, and to classic Arab tents where prestigious men of peace stand up to be loudly counted but become a mere distant voice in the hills.
At first I tried to dig in from the extremities and report from the sidelines. Quickly, I realized that was impossible. My very presence became enzymatic for groups constantly trying to influence my judgment and this book as they attempted to provoke soldiers into cracking down so I could witness it and complain loudly that the authorities were acting responsibly only because my pen and paper were deployed.
Through this journey, I worked closely, continuously, and amicably with the men and women of the international human-rights community, the organized Palestinian popular resistance, the New Israel Fund, B’Tselem, members of the Knesset, the Israel Defense Forces, American Jewish groups, the Ford Foundation, and many others. During these months of question and question again, I found some very decent people, each with a burning vision. Unhappily, those competing visions represent a parallax. Too often they are stigmatized first and reasoned with second. Less astigmatism and more clarity would bring the divergent views closer together.
Nothing in my book should be used to drive people apart in word or deed, but rather to inspire them to find the commonalities that trace back through all the descendants of Abraham. The goal is not victory. It is a victorious peace.
The end product of my project became too vast for an article, as I originally intended, or even a multi-part series, as I did for Funding Hate. For me, the context is too important. Moreover, massive amounts of information were provided to me by my cooperating sources, including New Israel Fund vice president of communications Naomi Paiss, B’Tselem media liaison Sarit Michaeli, and many others. Even though the duty of every such undertaking is to intelligently exclude 99 percent of everything, the vast material I assembled cried out for much more.
I resorted to a genre, which I shall dub the newsbook. Newsbooks were popular in the seventeenth century, devoted to a single vast topic such as a war or a notorious trial. In our century, major newspapers and others have learned to assemble all their coverage of an election, a war, or an epic event in one dense resource, too big for any daily edition but suitable for binding. Today’s technology makes this even more possible.
This means Financing the Flames should be read like any multipart series—but many times larger. This means that like a multipart newspaper series available forever on the Internet, readers must be date aware.
Normally, my books such as IBM and the Holocaust and The Farhud are based on immutable historic fact. Every sentence is a built on a solid factual rock—good forever. In this book, titles, facts and figures, relationships, statuses and so forth are valid during the time frame investigated, as they would be in a breaking feature story in a newspaper or magazine. In this case, the work was investigated and written, day and night, over ten time zones, from late April to late August 2013. Titles, relationships, alliances, and conditions can change. In the Middle East, they can change overnight. The endnotes will aid readers in the process.
Just during the several months of this project, a number of facts changed. My contact in B’Tselem, Sarit Michaeli was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet in the very village I had visited just several weeks earlier. The ever-popular spokesman for the Israeli military, Barak Raz, retired from that particular position. The Ford Foundation announced two major grants to established Jewish causes: Yad Vashem and the Anti-Defamation League.
The saddest update we were compelled to make during these months was a description of the carnage and dispossession in Syria. In late spring we wrote 80,000 killed and 1.2 million refugees. Just before going to press, we made the disconsolate correction: more than 120,000 killed and some 2 million refugees. By the time you read these words, those figures will also be obsolete.
During the manuscript preparation, I submitted my work for close scrutiny and comment to about 30 readers, as I usually do. This includes eminent tax attorneys, military men, historians, political analysts and ordinary unaffiliated people with an interest in the Middle East. Generally, we seek typos and textual suggestions on the history or law that will sharpen precision. In this case, I was amazed at some of the comments. Knowing how political the entire topic is, Paiss of the NIF amiably warned me that every word would be “parsed six ways” by everyone for political intent. For this reason, I tried to walk an editorial tightrope, being, like many Americans, unaligned with Israeli political factions. All truth in Israel is chanted in the dodecaphonic scale. The same note strikes one individual as a sharp and the other as a flat.
One final caution, as in all my books, I have established an explicit contract with my readers based on the complete storyline that unfolds. That contract holds as follows. If you cannot read the entire book without skipping around, please do not buy it. Close the cover, and walk away. That injunction holds supremely true for this volume. I do not seek partial readers. Partial understanding is why this book was necessary. That said, when one tackles a topic of such enormity, going back centuries, the writer must omit 99.9 percent of everything. Every chapter is a mere invitation to read a bookshelf of other excellent works about the subject of that chapter. I wrote Financing the Flames to go beyond the fragments and the fleeting phantasmagoria of selective facts.
Many people know how this saga began, but no one knows how this saga will end. For the Israelis, the resilient ethos embedded in their existence is encapsulated in their national anthem. That song is called Hatikva. In Hebrew, it means "the hope." Until that desire—that hope—triumphs for all its residents, we must recognize those who are seeking the opportunity to construct the durable bridge between Arab and Jew, and confront those who are financing the flames intended to burn it down before it spans that gulf, so narrow—but oh so deep.
