Atonement

During my University years, I happened to live in the same suite as the President of the Jewish Society. He was a rather handsome Orthodox Jew who wore a yamulke and had a different method of dress and use of electronics. Fascinated with a religion I never had been exposed to where I was from on the liberal West Coast, we would spend hours during the week where I would ask him questions about his religion, and he would take time to explain, in a very philosophical manner how he viewed his heritage. He told me that he considered himself an atheist, but that Judaism was about tradition and honouring that tradition. On some days, he wasn't allowed to use electronics, or shave with a razor. Other times, he was fasting, or had celebrations with certain sorts of food, while other kinds of meat weren't allowed.

My best friend at this time was also Jewish, a Boston educated comedy writer, and we would spend most of our time labouring over editing of the shows at our university TV station. Over the years, outside of California, I had made many friends of the Jewish faith, most of them reformed, others who returned to their Orthodox faith, and several who were Israeli citizens: One a politically active man with strong opinions, and another, a female friend who was a model and wanted me to visit her in Tel Aviv.

I can say with certainty that they have shaped my perception of Judaism today, and that I have been honoured to have to gotten to know them and that they are still a part of my life. What bonded us together was not religion, but friendship.

What is troubling however, is the current problem that our government has developed in our foreign relations with Israel over the years. President Reagan had been justified in supporting the UN Security Council resolution demanding that Israel pay reparations to Saddam Hussein.  Then President Clinton resumed the peace talks between Israel and Palestine, and in 1994, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said during the Oslo Accord, "We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today, in a loud and a clear voice, enough of blood and tears ... enough!”

Unfortunately, the following year, he was assassinated by his own government, what we thought was a faction of the Israeli government, but what we know today as the work of the Israeli Mossad, and the slaughter and genocide of the Palestinian people continued, halting the peace talks. Benjamin Netanyahu became the new Israeli Prime Minister, and he had a very different philosophy from the honourable man who preceded him. Then began the Bush Administration years, when our government depended on the Israeli Mossad for joint intelligence gathering missions.  During this time, the Mossad ingratiated itself into our own government, and they fed us with planted information, often to detract us and work to their benefit. We had started to depend on them too blindly, and we did not see what was coming. What culminated in these series of plans would become known as 9/11 and the Iraq War.

It would take us a decade or so to realise that the people who we thought were our allies, the Mossad, were really our Et tu, Brutus.

However, the Mossad wanted the US to know what they were up to, quite openly. And what they did in 2007-2008 would begin to unravel the series of events that we have come to know as 9/11. Mossad agents posed as CIA agents, utilising American passports to recruit terrorists from Pakistan to assassinate leaders of the Iran government. They wanted Iran next, after having duped us into declaring war on Iraq, and nationally televising the execution of Saddam Hussein, who had just a decade before we had forced Israel to pay reparations towards.

We discovered that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, but the Israeli government were vengeful in publicly wanting to execute a leader, President Saddam Hussein, for having made them pay in a UN Security Council resolution during the Reagan Era. The fact of the matter was that we had executed an innocent man, a man who we had supported during the Reagan years.

The Mossad, we believed, were our counter-terrorist group, but which we later discovered were indeed the terrorist groups behind all attacks against the United States, and the attack which took us by surprise: 9/11.

Initially the Mossad had attempted to pin Palestine for the attack, and if successful, it would have likely set off a series of events in which Israel would decimate Palestine off the map, killing off an entire race of people, and once occupying the land that they so desperately wanted, with our help.  However, we discovered Mossad agents celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers, dancing for joy, documenting the event which caught the suspicion of neighboring people.  In a panic, not knowing who had attacked us, we began to blame Osama bin Laden, who made a statement to the BBC that he had nothing to do with the event. 

A decade later, when we discovered the true culprits, and the unraveling the relationship between the Mossad and the CIA began; without public and media disclosure, President Obama, with a heavy conscience and with integrity, began the apology tour: 

“Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. … I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens — fell silent. In other words, we went off course.”

The War in Iraq should've never happened. We should've never executed an innocent leader, a leader who had been our ally.

During Saddam Hussein's last days, he tended a small garden and wrote poetry. In his writings, he wrote it was his responsibility to document history so that "the people...may know the facts as they are and not as those who want to counterfeit it."

As these facts come into focus before us, more than a decade later, President Obama has rightly chosen to ignore the pleas of Prime Minister Netanyahu on his Iran resolution. However, their response was once again of violence, by killing our US ambassador in Libya on the very anniversary of 9/11, sending us a powerful message of their intelligence gathering missions; integrated into the terrorist cells of every group around the globe, we can't escape from the growing threat of the Mossad. So how do we deal with the Israel problem? What solutions are there to stop the single largest terrorist organisation in the world? It wasn't Al-queda who we had been looking for all along, but the one right next to us, the Mossad.

We, as a nation, the United States had blood on our hands.