by Jerome du Bois
The first spoken sentence of the movie Schindler's List is a one-word question from a German official to a Jewish internee: "Name?" Thus began the process of the attempted obliteration of the owner of that name, and his name itself, and all that came after him, and their names as well. (Much of this done with cruel irony: "Leave your luggage on the platform. Clearly label it.") All the names were wiped out, in the movie at least, except those names and people preserved on Itzhak Stern's list. Names are important, every leaf, twig, and branch of our gigantic tree.
One of our long-term, room-sized installation projects consists mainly, right now, of working drawings, background research, gathering names, filling files. But I just came across an entry at Frontpage (hat tip:The Big Trunk at Powerline) that shines a fine pure light on the core of the piece. It's a micro-story of how the Romanian Secret Police, guided by Moscow, seeded the Islamic world in the Seventies with millions of copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The man who testifies to this -- Ion Mihai Pacepa -- should know: he ran the RSP at the time. But before we get to that, let me frame the example with some background.
Our installation, which focuses on anti-Semitism / Jew-hatred, will be called Strangers To Reason -- The Poison Flower -- Culprits of the Protocols. It's the last part which concerns us here.
Culprits is the key word: we want to name the actual individuals, the culpable ones, not institutions or vague movements, who hold the blame for publishing or in any way promoting The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous Czarist fabrication which will be one hundred years old next year, and still going strong.
Doubt it? One need only consult, today, November 17, 2004, this entry from Robert Spencer's Dhimmi Watch, titled "Denmark's Sheikh Al-Taleqani: Europeans Are Empty And Need Islam; I Recommend Reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion":
Nabil Shaker Al-Taleqani: There is a fundamental point, Mr. 'Issam. There is a fundamental point. Go back to the book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. We must return to the 24 protocols, to these secret documents. When we turn the pages of these protocols, we see there are some people who pretend to be Muslims, but are actually Jews, and they are the ones who began to distort Islam. These people are behind this media, which is entirely against Islam and the Muslims.
So there's another name for our list: Nabil Shaker Al-Taleqani. Remember, this evil sonofabitch is in Denmark, not Morocco.
Our list includes the famous names, of course -- Henry Ford, Louis Farrakhan -- but also the more important obscure ones:
-- Pyotr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, Czarist Police Chief in Paris. Between 1895-1899, he and his crew concoct the Protocols by plagarizing two French novels. The result is sent on to Moscow.
-- Boris Brasol, 1918, a Russian monarchist emigré who works at the US War Department. Dr. Harris Houghton also works there. His administrative assistant, Natalie DeBogory, another Russian emigré, introduces both Brasol and his copy of Sergei Nilus's translation to Houghton. With Houghton's backing, Brasol and DeBogory create the first English translation of the Protocols, in June 1918.
-- Louis Ray Beam, Jr., ca. 1984. A neo-Nazi, Beam created the Aryan Nations Electronic Bulletin Board Systems. A kind of twisted communication genius, he is (now was) a pioneer of white-supremacist leaderless resistance, adopted by both Timothy McVeigh and al Qaeda.
-- Don Black, 1995, creates Storm Front, the first Internet Hate Site.
-- Muhammad Sudhi, 2001, famous Egyptian actor, conceives and stars in a 30-part TV adaptation of the Protocols. Sudhi plays 14 characters in the series, but there's still room for a cast of 400. The show is produced by Saudi Arabia and broadcast during Ramadan every year since 2001.
Before jumping to Pacepa's story and my closing comments, a word about the infection metaphor. Pancepa says,
According to KGB theorists, the Islamic world was a petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hate.
Long before germ theory, the idea of people (Jews) as a living disease was widespread. Invisible tiny imps or spirits somehow invaded the evil one's victim. It could be any Jew, you see? And that is why names are important: specific individuals, not some mass-mind-plague or meme-infection, spread the insidious lies of the Protocols.
From an interview in Frontpage magazine online by Jamie Glazov with Walter Lacquer, Robert Leiken, and former Romanian Communist intelligence officer Ion Mihai Pacepa. Pacepa explains:
History always repeats itself, and if you can live two lives, you have an even greater chance of seeing that repetition with your own eyes. During the last six years of my other life, as a Romanian intelligence general, the main task of the Soviet bloc espionage community was to transform Yasser Arafat’s war against Israel and its main supporter, the United States, into an armed doctrine of the whole Islamic world. America was our main enemy, and a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on it than could a mere one million. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. Our task was to convert its historical hatred of the Jews into a new hatred of the United States, by portraying this land of freedom as an “imperial Zionist country” financed by Jewish money and run by a rapacious “Council of the Elders of Zion,” the Kremlin’s epithet for the US Congress.
According to KGB theorists, the Islamic world was a petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hate. Islamic cultures had a taste for nationalism, jingoism and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch. Terrorism and violence against America would flow naturally from their religious fervor. We had only to keep repeating, over and over, that the United States was a “Zionist country” bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidel’s occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our dogma that American imperialism wanted to transform the rest of the world into a Jewish fiefdom.
Before I left Romania for good, in 1978, the Soviet bloc intelligence community flooded the Islamic world with Arabic translations of an old Russian, forged, anti-Semitic tract entitled Protocols of the Elders of Zion, along with “documentary” materials, also in Arabic, “proving” that the United States was a Zionist country governed by Jewish money, whose aim was to extend its domination over the rest of the world. We also infiltrated the Islamic world with thousands of Soviet bloc Islamic citizens recruited as intelligence agents and tasked to implant there a rabid, demented hatred for American Zionism. They were to portray everybody and everything in America as being subordinated to Jewish interests: the leaders, the government, the political parties, the most prominent personalities—and even American history. Most of these agents were religious servants, engineers, medical doctors or teachers, and they had excellent credibility.
Although we now live in an age of technology, we still do not have an instrument that can scientifically measure the results of a sustained influence operation. Nevertheless, it is safe to presume that over the course of the further twenty-plus years—until the Soviet Union buckled—the combination between spreading hundreds of thousands of Protocols within the Islamic world and portraying the United States there as a criminal Zionist instrument should have left some trace. The hijacked airplane was launched into the world of contemporary terrorism by the KGB and its puppet Yasser Arafat, and it is significant that this became the weapon of choice for September 11, 2001.
The culprits of the Protocols planted the seeds, and the poison flowers grew, and spawned millions of strangers to reason.
Posted by Jerome at November 17, 2004 12:33 PM | TrackBack