The Ultimate Miracle

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Ed Warning :

The following may infuriate Muslims, Christians, Jews, Atheists and others who have sets of ideas implanted within themselves through their mentors or their environment. If you are one of those, please go away


Rashad Khalifa. Ph.D.
Imam, Mosque of Tucson 1'
Tucson, Arizona, U.S.A.

Library of Congress Card No. 82-083551


Why haven't you heard about this? Here in the West, Rashad Khalifa's work has not received the attention it deserves. Only two `Western' comments on his momentous discovery are noteworthy. The first comment appeared in the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN of September 1980.

It's an ingenious study of the Quran, but it could have been more impressive if Khalifa had consulted me before he wrote it. Nineteen¹ is an unusual prime. For example, it's the sum of the first powers of 9 and 10 and the difference between the second powers of 9 and 10... (Scientific American, Sept. 1980, p. 22)

Three years later the Canadian Council on the Study of Religion reported in its QUARTERLY REVIEW of April 1983 that the code Khalifa discovered is

"an authenticating proof of the divine origin of the Quran."

There now exists physical evidence for a message from God to the world. This marks the advent of a new era in religion; an era where FAITH is no longer needed. There is no need to "believe, "when one "knows." People of the past generations were required to believe in God, and uphold His commandments ON FAITH. With the advent of the physical evidence reported in this book, we no longer believe that God exists; we KNOW that God exists. Such knowledge is ascertained through God's final scripture, the Quran, wherein overwhelming physical evidence has been encoded.



Historical Background,

In 1968, I realized that the existing English translations of the Quran did not present the truthful message of God's Final Testament [...]

When I saw the truth of God's word thus distorted, I decided to translate the Quran, at least for the benefit of my own children. Since I was a chemist by profession, and despite my extensive religious background - my father was a renowned Sufi leader in Egypt - I vowed to God that I would not move from one verse to the next unless I fully understood it.

I purchased all the available books of Quranic translations and exegeses (Meanings) I could find, placed them on a large table, and began my translation. The first sura (Chapter), The Key, was completed in a few days. The first verse in Sura 2 is "A.L.M." The translation of this verse took four years, and coincided with the divine unveiling of "the secret," the great mathematical Miracle of the Quran.

The books of Quranic exegeses unanimously agreed that "no one knows the meaning or significance of the Quranic Initials A.L.M., or any other initials." I decided to write the Quran into the computer, analyze the whole text, and see if there were any mathematical correlations among these Quranic initials.

I used a time-share terminal, connected by telephone to a giant computer. To test my hypothesis, I decided to look at the single - lettered Quranic Initials -"Q" (Qaaf) of Suras 42 and 50, "S" (Saad) of Suras 7, 19, and 38, and "N" (Noon) of Sura 68. As detailed in my first book MIRACLE OF THE QURAN: SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MYSTERIOUS ALPHABETS (Islamic Productions, 1973), many previous attempts to unravel the mystery had failed.

Employing the ultimate in scientific proof, namely, mathematics, the evidence comes in the form of an extremely intricate code. Thus, every word, indeed every letter in Quran is placed in accordance with a mathematical design that is clearly beyond human ability.

Not only does the evidence prove the authenticity and perfect preservation of Qumn, but also confirms the miracles of previous messengers, including Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus. None of us witnessed the parting of the Red Sea, or the virgin birth of Christ. However, upon reviewing the evidence presented here, and examining the appropriate narrations, the reader will be as positively certain as an eyewitness.

Some the Quranic Challenges to mankind

No power on earth can produce a Quran like this:

"If all the humans and all the jinns banded together to produce a Quran like this, they can never do it, no matter how much assistance they give one another."

A great SECRET will prove the authenticity and divine source of Quran:

"The disbelievers said,'This is a fabrication by him (Muhammad) with the help of others. Indeed, they have produced a blasphemy and a lie. They also said,
'Tales from the past, dictated upon him day and night.' Say, 'This comes from the One who knows the SECRET in the heaven and the earth.'

Quran is God's message to the world, and God guarantees its reservation forever:

"Surely.we have sent down this message, and surely, we will preserve it"

This great secret is to be unveiled at a time subsequent to the era of prophet Muhammad:

"They say, 'How come no miracle came down to him from his Lord?' Say, 'The future belongs to God; so wait and I will wait with you"

***

It will take the reader a long while to research and verify this awesome phenomenon. But please take your time as it is really worth studying.

"One of the Great Miracles" [Quran 74:35]

The Quran is characterized by a unique phenomenon never found in any human authored book. Every element of the Quran is mathematically composed - the suras, the verses, the words, the number of certain letters, the number of words from the same root, the number and variety of divine names, the unique spelling of certain words, the absence or deliberate alteration of certain letters within certain words, and many other elements of the Quran besides its content. There are two major facets of the Quran's mathematical system: (1) The mathematical literary composition, and (2) The mathematical structure involving the numbers of suras and verses. Because of this comprehensive mathematical coding, the slightest distortion of the Quran's text or physical arrangement is immediately exposed.


SIMPLE TO UNDERSTAND - IMPOSSIBLE TO IMITATE

For the first time in history we have a scripture with built-in proof of divine authorship - a superhuman mathematical composition.

Any reader of this book can easily verify the Quran's mathematical miracle. The word "God" (Allah) is written in bold capital letters throughout the text. The cumulative frequency of occurrence of the word "God" is noted at the bottom of each page in the left hand corner. The number in the right hand corner is the cumulative total of the numbers for verses containing the word "God." The last page of the text, Page 372, shows that the total occurrence of the word "God" is 2698, or 19x142. The total sum of verse numbers for all verses containing the word "God" is 118123, also a multiple of 19 (118123 = 19x6217).

Nineteen¹ is the common denominator throughout the Quran's mathematical system.

This phenomenon alone suffices as incontrovertible proof that the Quran is God's message to the world. No human being(s) could have kept track of 2698 occurrences of the word "God," and the numbers of verses where they occur. This is especially impossible in view of (1) the age of ignorance during which the Quran was revealed, and (2) the fact that the suras and verses were widely separated in time and place of revelation. The chronological order of revelation was vastly different from the final format (Appendix 23). However, the Quran's mathematical system is not limited to the word "God;" it is extremely vast, extremely intricate, and totally comprehensive.


THE SIMPLE FACTS

Like the Quran itself, the Quran's mathematical coding ranges from the very simple, to the very complex. The Simple Facts are those observations that can be ascertained without using any tools. The complex facts require the assistance of a calculator or a computer. The following facts do not require any tools to be verified, but please remember they all refer to the original Arabic text:

The first verse (1:1),known as "Basmalah," consists of 19 letters.

The Quran consists of 114 suras, which is ..............19 x 6.

The total number of verses in the Quran is 6346, or ....19 x 334. [6234 numbered verses & 112 un-numbered verses (Basmalahs) 6234+112 = 6346] Note that 6+3+4+6 =.......19.

The Basmalah occurs 114 times, despite its conspicuous absence from Sura 9 (it occurs twice in Sura 27) & 114= 19x6.

From the missing Basmalah of Sura 9 to the extra Basmalah of Sura 27, there are precisely ...............19 suras.

It follows that the total of the sura numbers from 9 to 27 (9+10+11+12+...+26+27) is 342, or .............19 x 18.

This total (342) also equals the number of words between the two Basmalahs of Sura 27, and 342 = ........19 x 18.

The famous first revelation (96:1-5) consists of .......19 words.

This 19-worded first revelation consists of 76 letters .19 x 4.

Sura 96, first in the chronological sequence, consists of .....................................................19 verses.

This first chronological sura is placed atop the last ..19 suras.

Sura 96 consists of 304 Arabic letters, and 304 equals .19 x 16.

The last revelation (Sura 110) consists of ............19 words.

The first verse of the last revelation (110:1) consists of ................19 letters.

14 different Arabic letters, form 14 different sets of "Quranic Initials" (such as A.L.M. of 2:1), and prefix 29 suras. These numbers add up to 14+14+29 = 57 = ......19 x 3.

The total of the 29 sura numbers where the Quranic Initials occur is 2+3+7+...+50+68 = 822, and 822+14 (14 sets of initials) equals 836, or ................. 19 x 44.

Between the first initialed sura (Sura 2) and the last initialed sura (Sura 68) there are 38 un-initialed suras 19 x 2.

Between the first and last initialed sura there are ....19 sets of alternating "initialed" and "un-initialed" suras.

The Quran mentions 30 different numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 99, 100, 200, 300, 1000, 2000, 3000, 5000, 50, 000, & 100, 000. The sum of these numbers is 162146, which equals 19x8534.

This is a condensed summary of the Simple Facts.

***

1. The word ''Nineteen'' was mentioned in the Quran in a mysterious way that has never been adequately explained by Muslim Scholars. How could they without the use of a computer?


For those interested in The Ultimate Miracle and more go to http://submission.org/

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Related:

Jewish Rabbi admits Islam is the oldest religion on earth

Devout Jews know the Truth as revealed by God to all his prophets and messengers from Adam to Mohamed. The last revealed Book of God, the Quran informs us that all prophets and messengers were Muslims (i.e they all submitted to the Will of God) This revelation is not new but was in the Jewish Books all along. (i.e. A group of people known as bani Noah - Children of Noah- were called Muslims, Muslima...

"And indeed We sent Noah to his people and he said O my people! Worship God! You have no other god but Him." (Quran 23:23) and (Quran 11:25-27)




According to the oldest Manuscripts that survived the early Christian Book-burning Frenzy found in Palestine say that Jesus Christ is NOT God!




A Jew explains why Allah is the one and only God A must see!

The legendary video in which a Jew rebuffs the claim of evangelicals, newly edited and now in annotations! Even Jesus said Allah. According to an Aramaic dictionary, ( http://www.peshitta.org/lexicon/ ) the word for God in Aramaic (The language which Jesus spoke) is "Aalah", which is the exact same thing as the Arabic "Allah" since in English there are many ways to spell a foreign word (Example you can spell the Muhammad's name in 27 ways, including Muhammad and Mohamed). Just visit the link and type "God" if you don't believe me, then scroll down to "Pronunciation" So Christians, if your god Jesus said "Allah", it means the Muslims are using the correct word for the creator!

The word Allah is better than the word God and is purer since God can be pluralised (gods) and genderised (goddess), the word Allah is more suitable for being HIS name because it CANNOT be genderised nor pluralised (in Arabic) since it is genderless and single, an example in English would be the planet Mars, it is genderless (you cannot say Marsa or whatever it would be if it could be genderised) and it is unpluralisable (you cannot say Marses), it simply wouldn't make sense to genderise or pluralise this planet, the same goes for Allah (الله) in Arabic, so in essence IT IS SUPERIOR to the word God.

Let's not forget that Arab Christians, and Jews (as is the case in this video below) say Allah, and have been saying it before there were even any western Christians! Jesus said Allah too, so if you consider yourself a serious Christian you should follow Jesus not Paul, the Jewish hijacker of Jesus original message. Nonetheless all of these are Semitic words, so as far as I am concerned, any Semitic word for God is acceptable, but why use a European word for Allah when not a single prophet used a European word? Also, did you notice something? All of these words for Allah begin with either EL or AL, this is because in proto-Semitic (an ancient language which all Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, evolved from) the word for God was AL or EL, Abraham PBUH spoke proto-Semitic and he called God "El shaddai", "El" here meaning God and "shaddai" meaning mountain, so basically he called God "God of the mountain". The Semetic languages evolved in a way that they retain the word AL/EL at the beginning of the word, but there is an additional "lah" in Arabic and an additional "lohim" in Hebrew, I hope this clarifies.




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Early Christians Prayers exact copy of Muslim prayers

Are you prepared for the Mother of All False Flags?

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London starts countdown to 2012 Olympics today

Are the 2012 Olympics part of a plot to take over the world?

by Steve Rose, Guardian.co.uk

Secret Olympic Symbol 2012






Some people believe an elite clique will use the games to simulate an alien invasion in their plan for global domination

When Wenlock and Mandeville, the official mascots of the London Olympic Games, were unveiled to the world in May, the general reaction was one of bemusement. These stumpy, one-eyed, metallic-skinned creatures, the organisers explained, had formed out of stray drops of molten steel during the construction of the Olympic stadium, but most of the public and media simply interpreted them as aliens. What do monocular extraterrestrials have to do with the Olympics? A year earlier, the 2012 Olympic logo was greeted with a similar mix of derision and puzzlement. Jaded observers passed off these designs as sorry reflections of the state of British creativity, but a small minority had a very different answer: we were being primed for the establishment of the New World Order, by means of the greatest hoax in history.

Even in conspiracy-theory terms, the London Olympics plot is a difficult one to swallow, but that hasn't stopped a credulous minority from gulping it down. You'll find them on cult conspiracy blogs such as Red Ice Creations, Godlike Productions and Above Top Secret, or even making their own video presentations on YouTube. The basic scenario goes something like this: while the world's eyes are on London in 2012, a spectacular alien invasion will take place at the Olympic stadium. Or so the public will think; it will actually be a hoax invasion, orchestrated by the New World Order as an excuse to stage a global coup d'etat. Terrified by the appearance of aliens, the world's populace will surrender their civil liberties, and "they" – a vague array of elite cliques such as the Bilderberg group, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and dynasties such as the English royal family, the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds – will have smoothly achieved their goal of a single world government, economy and religion. It sounds like a cross between Dan Brown, the X-Files and Watchmen, but believers insist this stuff is real.

The evidence for such a plot is vague: exhibit A is the 2012 Olympic logo. Rearrange the four angular numerals of the bizarre design, the theorists say, and it really spells "zion". There's even a dot to go over the "i". This is a sign that "they" plan to build the new Jerusalem right here in England's green and pleasant land, just as William Blake's poem predicted. The "dark satanic mills" of the Lea Valley will become the epicentre of the New World Order. Conspiracy theorists insist there is nothing anti-semitic in their use of the word "zion", although the suspicion is there.

The next giveaway is the street names around the Olympic site: Great Eastern Road, Carpenter's Road, Angel Lane, Temple Mills Lane, Church Road – don't they all seem a little biblical? Isn't it strange that such a large patch of land has stood undeveloped in London all this time?

It goes on: Prince William is the obvious choice for king of this New Jerusalem because of his royal bloodline, his birthday (the 21 June – the summer solstice) and the fact that he will be 30 years old in 2012, the year of the 30th Olympiad, or XXX in roman numerals. Numerology counts for a lot in these circles. And as for the fake UFO invasion, the theorists note the closing ceremony of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, in which a flying saucer landed in the stadium and an alien walked out and waved to the crowd. The staged spectacle, in which a blacked-out military helicopter lowered a model spaceship by cable into the Coliseum, did not prompt mass panic, but it has been interpreted as a warm-up. The advocates of "London Zion", as the theory has become known, have been poring over London Olympics promotional videos and finding a lot of suspicious symbolism in them – flying saucers and other spaceship-like objects, lights in the skies, stadiums in flames, all-seeing eyes. Then Wenlock and Mandeville came along and the theory really had legs, albeit stumpy alien ones.

"Once your eyes are open to it, it's amazing what's hidden in plain sight," explains David (not his real name), the friend of a friend who first told me about the London plot a year ago. So in the name of curiosity, and, perhaps, the future of civilisation, we arranged to meet at the Olympics site to look for evidence. You can't get into the site itself – construction continues apace and security is tight – but there are daily guided tours of the perimeter. On a clear, chilly morning, as we wait outside Tesco for the tour to begin, David explains how most of the clouds in the sky are now man-made. Aeroplanes have been lacing the atmosphere with metal particulates for decades to facilitate holographic projection, he claims. That's how they'll pull off the UFO illusion. These "chemtrails" also enable the use of top-secret super-weapons that bounce energy off the upper atmosphere to remote locations. The Haiti earthquake was triggered this way.

David spends hours scouring the internet for conspiracy information, and stumbled on the Olympics plot theory two years ago on a blog called the Cosmic Mind, run by 28-year-old Rik Clay from Leeds. Clay was making a name for himself in these esoteric circles. As well as the Olympics, his blog discussed everything from the significance of the No 11 to crop circles to Princess Diana. But three months after the Cosmic Mind launched, it suddenly went down in August 2008. Clay had died. Internet forums were full of wild allegations about the cause of his death.

As the tour proceeds, David's eyebrows rise at certain points, such as when the guide explains how they had to reroute power lines crossing the site 30 metres underground. "There's bound to be a secret network of tunnels so that dignitaries can escape when it happens," David says. Had the guide ever seen anything paranormal going on here? "What, you mean like flying saucers? No, nothing like that," she laughs. David's eyebrows rise again. No one mentioned flying saucers. The vast construction site looks fairly innocuous to me. David isn't so sure. "What about that cross in the sky up there?" he says. Two short fragments of aeroplane contrail have formed a distinct cross in the sky directly over the stadium. That is good enough for him.

Unsurprisingly, the London Olympics organisers deny all knowledge of the conspiracy. "Since we launched the logo in 2007, many people have passed comment on it and have suggested it resembles different shapes or characters," a spokesperson says. "This is a new one on us. The logo represents the figure 2012, nothing else." The conspirary theory is far from cast-iron: you could make the word "zion" out of the numbers 2,0, 1 and 2 however you designed them. And while some of the road names around the site might sound biblical, the ones that don't, such as Pudding Mill Lane, have been conveniently omitted. "Of course it sounds ridiculous," David acknowledges. And then he delivers the killer blow: "But if I had said to you 10 years ago that a few people were going to destroy the Twin Towers by flying planes into them, and that Britain and the US would start two wars as a result, would that have sounded believable?"

Just as the assassination of JFK and Watergate fuelled a golden age of paranoia, so the attacks of 11 September 2001 and its repercussions have ushered in a new, productive generation of conspiracy theories. It's not just a fringe minority. In a 2006 poll by Scripps Howard/Ohio University, 36% of Americans agreed that the US government was either involved in the 9/11 attacks or did nothing to stop them. Another poll by Zogby in 2007 put the proportion at 26.4%. Then again, polls this year also found that 18% of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim and 27% believe he was born outside the US. Public credulity seems to be at an all-time high, or reliable information at an all-time low. For the conspiracy hardcore, though, 9/11, the London 7/7 attacks and other terrorist incidents are what's known as "false flag" operations; hoax attacks designed to advance the conspirators' agenda, and the London Olympics plot is the next one.

Rik Clay's Olympics theory was chiefly inspired by another British researcher, Ian R Crane, whom he saw speaking at an event in Glastonbury in 2007. A former oil industry executive, Crane is something of a heavy hitter on the conspiracy circuit. He regularly holds public lectures and releases DVDs on what he calls "deep geopolitics", and claims to have predicted the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster, and pre-empted a failed terrorist attack in Chicago in 2006. It was Crane who first deciphered the "Zion" in the Olympic logo, and who suggested a fake UFO invasion was being planned. "We've seen the abilities of computer graphics in Hollywood movies," he says. "It doesn't take much to recast that fantasy as something that's then presented as a reality."

Crane also acknowledges that the Olympics conspiracy sounds crazy, but "it's only when one puts it into context with the much deeper geopolitical agenda that it starts to have some basis," he says. He sketches out this context in dizzying strokes. How the recent financial meltdown was deliberately planned, purported links between Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and extreme rightwing thinktanks, Henry Kissinger and global warming. "They're all inextricably linked," he says. "What we're really looking at here is a web of intrigue that actually goes back a long way. The individuals who believe themselves to be the rightful rulers of the planet have some concern about what the very short-term future holds. In their belief system, they feel they need to have total planetary control by 2012."

Crane and Clay exchanged emails, but never met. Crane doesn't think there was anything suspicious about Clay's death. Nor do others close to Clay, including his parents, who have been understandably distressed not just by the death of their son but by the subsequent internet rumours. "There have been many outlandish ideas put forward about Rik's death, some that beggar belief, but most have come from people ignorant of the real facts and who have been too lazy to do their research," says John Clay, Rik's father. "An autopsy was carried out and an inquest held at Bradford coroners court in February 2009. The official verdict was that Rik took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed." There were clear pointers to where Rik was heading, says John. A few weeks before his death, he had suffered some form of mental breakdown. He had jumped out of a third-floor window, fracturing his heel. His parents took him in for six weeks. "During his time with us he was not the Rik that we knew and was mostly very withdrawn," says John. "He told us that he had things in his head that shouldn't be there but would not elaborate, which was quite normal for Rik – he would only tell you what he wanted you to hear. Rik could be quite obsessional."

Another close friend of Rik's also believes his death was caused by a combination of his work and his mental health: "It's a stressful arena, conspiracy stuff. You can't trust anything any more. What level do you take it to? If you're passionate and paranoid, it can really take over, and I think that's what happened with Rik. He wanted to get to the bottom of everything. Unfortunately the result of that was that he pulled apart his own reality."

One of the problems with many conspiracy theories is that, unlike scientific theories, they're impossible to definitively prove wrong. Any attempt to do so invites accusations that you're in on them. Conversely, labelling something as a "conspiracy theory" is a convenient way to close down political debate or a challenge to authority by painting the theorists as wackos. Tony Blair described his critics as obsessed with conspiracy during the Chilcot inquiry earlier this year, just as George Bush in 2001 urged the UN not to tolerate "outrageous conspiracy theories" about the 9/11 attacks. Neutral observers point out that regardless of their content, conspiracy theories are "unofficial" knowledge, and therefore threaten institutions of official knowledge, such as academia and journalism. The two sides resemble each other more than they would like to admit.

The London Olympics theory is an intriguing case, not least because it actually makes a prediction. Either something will happen in 2012 or it won't: the theory will be right or wrong. What will people such as David do if nothing happens? "I'll be really bloody surprised," he says, "but if nothing happens, I'd say that the forces of good behind the scenes, like us, saved the day and the forces of evil were stopped."

London - Zion - 2012 - The Book

London - Zion - 2012 - Book


London Olympics 2012 Illuminati Card Game NWO Zion False Flag Attack

Might this be a hidden message from Steven Jackson that something will happen under the Olympic games in London 2012?




After Osama bin London, is the next boogieman Colonel Gaddafi? Or...




... The Return of Bin Laden:

Day of the Fake Alien Invaders - worth a listen

An advance warning of the next global event of desolation

The long-term legacy of 9/11

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By David Sirota

Fascinating Article About the Legacy of 9/11, Terrorism, Norway... etc

Nearly 10 years later, new studies point to lasting effects on the nation's mental, physical and political health

Like most Americans, I can still remember it as if it were yesterday: The images of the burning building on the screen, the murmurings of bewildered morning TV anchors, the burst of "holy shit!" subject lines in my email box and then, shattering the slow-mo dreamlike quality of it all, the bark of a police officer telling me to get out of the Capitol complex as quickly as possible because a plane-turned-missile was headed our way.

This was my particular 9/11 experience -- a Washington of complete chaos where chest-thumping tough-on-terror congresspeople were instantly transformed into cowering child-trampling George Costanzas as they fled for the door. I'm sure everyone fortunate enough to survive that day has their own unique flashback -- it was, after all, a generation's "where were you when" moment a la the JFK assassination. Only now, approaching the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, a trio of new studies show the post-traumatic stress of the attacks resulted in deep cultural shifts that go way beyond mere haunting mental images and bouts of insomnia.

As probably the single most politicized event in modern American history, 9/11's most obvious long-term impact can be seen in the electoral arena -- and not merely in individual election cycles or races.

Just as the Vietnam-era draft once produced a structural shift toward the Democratic Party among potential draftees, a recent analysis by the University of Warwick shows that 9/11 generated a permanent shift to the Republican Party among newly registered voters. Using voter data from citizens who registered just before and just after the attacks, the May 2011 study found "that voters with birthdays in September were more likely to register as Republicans than voters with birthdays in August" and that "the political affiliation of these voters persisted through to the year 2008...even for those voters who moved and, thus, had to change their registration." In short, a psychologically traumatized electorate ran to a party that promised quick, easy and vengeful solutions to the terrorist threat.

Less obvious but equally profound is the effect 9/11 had on the health care system, according to two University of California studies looking at what researchers call "collective stress." As reviewed by Miller-McCune, the studies found that:

Among a nationally representative sample of about 2,000 American adults, reports of physical ailments increased 18 percent over the three years following the attacks of September 11, 2001…

It turns out watching [the attacks] in real time had huge health consequences. "When compared to individuals who learned about the attacks only after they happened, those who watched the attacks live on TV reported a 28 percent increased incidence of physical ailments over three years post-9/11," Holman and Silver write.

But maybe the most profound legacy of 9/11 is the attack's effect on our very concept of wars and enemies. Before 9/11, those ideas were finite and tangible -- though there were red scares and McCarthyist crusades that argued otherwise, we for the most part believed that conflicts had beginnings and ends and that villains could ultimately be thwarted. But the post-traumatic stress of 9/11 has elicited a kind of neurotic psychosis that embraces Permanent War and allow enemies to occupy a psychological space usually reserved for immortal bogeymen.

That's the takeaway from Ohio State University's recent national poll, which, thanks to serendipitous timing, inadvertently tracked how Americans attitudes shifted sharply after the killing of 9/11 architect, Osama bin Laden. Here are the key findings:

In the weeks following the U.S. military campaign that killed bin Laden, American attitudes toward Muslim Americans took a significant negative shift, results showed. Americans found Muslims living in the United States more threatening after bin Laden's death, positive perceptions of Muslims plummeted, and those surveyed were less likely to oppose restrictions on Muslim Americans' civil liberties…

Changes in attitudes were not related just to preventing a possible terrorist attack, but also included attitudes about religious tolerance of Muslims. For example, nearly one in three respondents surveyed after bin Laden's death agreed that "Muslims are mostly responsible for creating the religious tension that exists in the United States today." That was up from about one in five respondents before the killing... The negative feelings even carried over to personal relationships. The percentage of respondents who said they were unwilling to have a Muslim as a close friend doubled after the death, going from 9 percent to 20 percent.

Intensifying hatred after an enemy is killed -- this particular particular 9/11-related symptom is rooted in classic paranoia and it explains quite a bit about recent events. For instance, it explains why America barely flinched when, after bin Laden's killing, our government announced plans to stay in Afghanistan, increase the defense budget, begin a new war in the Muslim world and expand the president's authority to unilaterally initiate even more foreign conflicts in the future. It also explains why so many American media outlets initially blame Muslims for terrorist attacks that we later find out had nothing to do with Muslims -- and it explains how we so quickly define terrorism exclusively as violence committed by Muslims, but not by anyone else. In the 9/11-addled psyche, the war must continue even when the threat is neutralized.

No doubt, America's political and media class will collude to turn the upcoming anniversary of 9/11 into yet another platitudinous display of pomp, circumstance and hyper-nationalism that celebrates our abiding Americanness (whatever that means), trumpets our supremacy -- and ignores any of these findings. That's become the standard simplified script for 9/11, and its 10-year anniversary will likely be no exception. Lost in that spectacle, however, will be any effort to develop a deeper understanding of 9/11's impact -- one that both honors the dead, and better appreciates the grave psychological injuries that continue to scar the living.

Ignoring that deeper story, of course, is no accident. Exploring 9/11 as a complex and enduring psychological event requires an uncomfortable look at how the mass PTSD that followed the attacks fundamentally differs from standard PTSD.

Think about it: Whereas the mere act of physically experiencing a natural disaster may psychologically damage a victim, 9/11's immediate aftermath was at least as responsible for its negative stress-inducing psychological effects as the attacks themselves (especially for the majority of Americans who did not actually physically experience the attacks) -- and the 9/11 aftermath was anything but natural. On the contrary, the rank saber rattling and the carefully crafted fear mongering that became the Official 9/11 Reaction was exquisitely manufactured at the highest reaches of the political and media establishment -- and as we see, it worked like a charm, with significant downsides.

To understand those downsides and begin any kind of mass healing process, though, asks the political and media establishment to be willing to scrutinize itself. And in America, that remains the ultimate taboo.

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

Deep Parallels Surface – Norway, 9/11, 7/7 and Bali By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor veteranstoday.com The greatest controversy in the world today is Israeli involvement in 9/11. Israeli terrorists were captured with explosives in New York on 9/11, others with electronics gear. Bali Bombing, Reported as Suitcase Nuclear Weapon A planeload were flown out of the country on presidential order the next day but, in the end, Muslims were blamed and two “revenge” wars buried America. In fact, then Mossad operations chief Mike Harari, who escaped Norwegian police in 1973, after murder charges were leveled against him for killing an innocent Muslim he misidentified as a terror suspect, is the same Mike Harari who confessed to organizing the 9/11 attacks while having breakfast with VT staffer, Dimitri Khalezov on September 12, 2001 in Bangkok. If you don’t remember the Bali bombing of 2002, it was Australian’s 9/11 just as 7/7 was Britain’s 9/11. These attacks were all political, all involved the same people, the same “event planners” and benefited the same players, Israel and right wing extremists in the US, Britain and Australia. Mike Harari planned and executed the Bali bombing but he needed help, he said. What he needed was a “fall guy” to blame and Dimitri Khalezov, former Soviet nuclear weapons intelligence officer was a perfect patsy, or so Harari believed when he approached him. Harari was looking for help in a bombing project he was doing in Bali. Murdering innocent people for economic and political ends can be so tiresome. 202 people died that day, Muslims were blamed, the media said it was planned in Bangkok 10 months before. They just had the wrong “event planners.” If Khalezov were stupid enough to join the crew, news would have gotten out. Bali was a “suitcase nuke” bombing. Now, despite the fact that a “domestic terrorist” has confessed in Norway, the terror attacks there are being tied to Israel, just as with 9/11 and the 7/7 attacks in London. The organizations in Norway and the United Kingdom, tied to the Tea Party in America, being hunted down by police are Israeli trained and funded, part of an operation tying “Islamophobia” to Christian Zionism, bringing to the surface dormant racist traditions. The US result was the Project for a New American Century, the Bush administration and 9/11. In Britain, Tony Blair became an Israeli “lapdog,” joining Bush in America’s failed wars. Britain’s “9/11″ was July 7, 2005. Again, Muslim terrorists were blamed, another one of those predictable coincidences. 9/11 sold a decade of war, 7/7 kept Blair in office and was meant to propel the British into another Galipoli/Dieppe in Iran. Again it was a false start and a far more dangerous enemy proved responsible, having covered its tracks carelessly, perhaps with even less skill than the Neocon/Israeli nexus responsible for 9/11. Not long ago, responsibility for the 7/7 attack was laid at the feet of the British government and its Israeli friends. You missed that one in the news? Two months ago, a British jury, based on evidence presented by John Anthony “Maud Dib” Hill, found exactly that. No, you didn’t see it in the press but you can read about it here and see the video that started one of the most controversial human rights cases in history. After 151 days in dismal Wandsworth Prison, much of it in solitary confinement, John Anthony Hill is finally free. The crime he was accused of was the mailing of a “7/7 truther” DVD from Ireland to the United Kingdom. Yes, you are hearing me right, he was extradited from Ireland for sending a copy of the film, “Ripple Effect,” which outlines complicity by the Blair government in terror attacks that killed 56 back in 2005, including 4 “suicide bombers” now believed by many to have been murdered in a bizarre plot. (see that “restricted” video here) This week, a Norwegian ultra-nationalist laid down his weapons before police after having butchered 93 people. Beyond this, we know little. It is now clear he had accomplices, on the island, more waiting, he says, to duplicate his effort. The puny police response, a “Keystone Cops” schtick, piling into a jalopy and then into a leaking rowboat made it all possible as did counter-terrorism officials who turned a highly focused “blind eye” to the real threat of domestic terrorism. As the day has gone on, the search for accomplices has, overtly, crossed Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The search has spread to the UK, to the ranks of the infamous EDL and even to the United States and the Christian Zionist community, once the “apple” of George “W” Bush’s eye. The very real enemy, right wing terrorism, international in flavor, fascist in nature and underwritten by ultra-nationalists across Europe, closely allied to security agencies in Israel, has finally become a real target. We have seen all this before, New York City, September 11, 2001. Who was arrested that day? A white van filled with explosives was stopped by police on the George Washington bridge. The passengers, armed terrorists, were arrested and jailed. A second white van was pulled over, 5 were arrested there. They had been seen “photographing” the attack on the World Trade Center and openly celebrating the carnage. The "Larynx," a Cruise missile, circa 1925 However, no film, no digital media was seized, in fact no filming went on at all. Why? The “cameras” were very likely something else, laser marking systems such as those used for guiding remote controlled bombs to their targets. Remote controlled aircraft used as weapons are old as the hills, the first dating to September 1925, yes, that old, the British “Larynyx. This radio controlled ramp launched plane traveled at 200 mph and was intended to be used against attacking Zeppelins. What are the parallels with 9/11? The terrorists arrested in the “White Van” incidents were Israeli citizens, “art students” they claimed. Months later, over the objections of the FBI, they were repatriated to Israel without criminal charges tied to 9/11. Why? The Abe Foxman and the ADL, AIPAC, Netanyahu, Barney Frank and the entire Israeli wing of congress demanded it. The real 9/11 terrorists were arrested by NYPD on 9/11, two of the teams at least. How did we honor the dead? We released the culprits, failed to follow the leads which went, went where? Tel Aviv? The White House? This is where all evidence, endless evidence, now leads and America is stuck in neutral, forever damned to a false history. A decade later, America is foiled by two imaginary enemies, the non-existent “Al Qaeda” and the long dead CIA operative, bin Laden while a small group of half starved tribesmen has beaten the greatest military machine in history to, not a standstill, but to full retreat. Where have I seen this before? Norway The initial flurry of “Islamo-blamia” died down, crushed by tons of evidence and, perhaps, the most theatrical mass murderer of all time. Photos have been pouring onto the internet, Brevik dressed in comic opera garb, many of the photos in the monumental style of Mussolini or his young protege, Julian Assange. Only hours after the police announced that they had captured the “lone gunman,” 6 accomplices were arrested. They have since disappeared. One accomplice was seen on the island, a fact pushed out of police statements but which has resurfaced. More are sought but, more likely, the real accomplices are in government itself, inside the security services and the police. It was that way in 1973, according to the Guardian, and it is likely that way still. Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, acted without Norwegian help in a botched 1973 assassination in the ski resort of Lillehammer, a national commission concluded yesterday.Norwegians have long speculated about involvement by their own police or intelligence service in the killing, which has been shrouded in secrecy for 27 years, and which has been a sore point in otherwise warm relations between Norway and Israel The killers in 1973 were released, unpunished. The real planners of this weeks mass murder are probably already out of the country and will remain unpunished Mike Harari escaped prison and planned both 9/11 and the Bali bombing that we know of. He is one of Israel’s greatest national heroes. Who are the secret heroes this week?

9/11: Who Really Benefited? Fact and Not Fiction... Global Research Editor's Note We bring to the attention of our readers this provocative review of the strategic and corporate interests behind 9/11 including Wall Street, the Texas oil companies and the defense contractors. The statements in this article are corroborated by numerous studies, books, news articles and research reports published since September 2001. In the course of almost ten years, Global Research has conducted a detailed review and analysis of the 9/11 attacks, focussing on their broad implications as well as their historical significance. See our 9/11 and the War on Terrorism Dossier by Captain America Forget so-called conspiracy theories. Instead look at reality. Dare ask yourself who actually seems to have benefited from the 9-11 calamity. In light of the debt ceiling debates and the continuous corrupt politics as usual of Washington D.C., it is time for the American people, and individual states of this federation, to look at a troubling set of facts. It seems there were “several” beneficiaries of 9-11 that don’t exactly fit the story line we were constantly fed by the propaganda machine and mainstream media as to how to connect the dots (which we were rhetorically asked to do). Here is a list of peoples that benefited. Most of this list is factual. Some are more opinion but with strong support in reality-based argument: 1) The New York Port Authority was having difficulty renting out space in the Twin Towers. More importantly there was a huge asbestos liability. Surprisingly these Towers were sold to a new owner Larry Silverstein just three months prior—who managed to get an insurance contract for a big payout if any of the Tower buildings got hit by an airplane. This is a fact. 2) Our first international move was to bomb Afghanistan under the assumption that people there were involved. So the heroin industry of Afghanistan came back to life in a big way—that is international and local drug cartels rediscovered a gold mine of money supply. Bin Laden and the Taliban, because of their religious fanaticism, pretty much closed down the trade to a trickle. But after the bombing shake-up, people connected with the heroin trade in Central Asia reaped billion dollars rewards—including money-laundering groups of financiers—such as banksters, etc. (And this is pretty much all the U.S. military/ intelligence has really accomplished—despite all the rhetoric and high-sounding goals about exporting democracy.) This is fact and not fiction. 3) Investors of profitable corporations connected to the military industrial complex made a killing (pun intended). Obviously war has been profitable for some industries for eons as we are told by most war historians profits are an inevitable consequence of war for merchants of death yet they say profit is “not” the driving force behind war. Think again. For our American culture, since at least the Vietnam War, it seems to have become the driving force. (What else does America still manufacture?) Prior to 9/11 there was little in the way of war material inventories being depleted. But soon after 9/11 this all changed. In fact some corporate stocks immediately went up in value—as did some military contracts. Note as well that after the cold war both the Pentagon and the Intelligence apparatus should have cut their budgets in half. (But then no one would have been promoted and the Pentagon would have lost some of its clout.) That did not happen. Rather the budgets doubled in size. How is that for financial austerity? This is fact and not fiction. 4) Some powerful industry leaders and think tank politicos believed it was necessary for certain “companies” to “control” various strategic resources such as oil and gas. And not surprisingly the very countries in which we declared a war against terrorists are surprisingly the same countries that contain such resources—especially in the Middle East. Gas and oil reserves are coveted by every industrial civilization and every military as a necessity. For example, there was a plan to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan to ship out from the Indian ocean—requiring stable societies that don’t sabotage pipelines. Nevertheless despite things not going as planned oil companies for whatever reason reaped huge profits. Fact and not fiction. 5) Advocates, such as Paul Bremer, for extreme laissez faire economic policies, attempted to rewrite an Iraqi constitution to promote a free market system of neo-liberal economic principles to make it especially easy for foreign nations to own Iraq’s resources. And if you do your research you will come to learn that the U.S. did not have any gripes with Saddam Hussein until he kicked oil companies out of Iraq because they wanted to take the lion’s share of the profits. He nationalized oil. This is fact and not fiction. 6) Israel benefited by having one of their neighboring enemies, namely Saddam Hussein and his standing army, weakened and preoccupied. It is not a coincidence that advocates and newspaper pundits most defensive about our invasion happen to be strong advocates of Israel’s right-wing will. Evidence clearly shows that some Israeli supporters were part of the culture of deception to take us to war with Iraq—as they are now working to take us to war with Iran with a similar pattern of phony intelligence. Equally it is a fact that whatever Middle East group harbors hostility toward Israel is now considered terrorist in nature to Americans. It is a fact that the Israeli lobby pushed hard for war with Iraq. 7) Right-wing politicos, especially Christian and Judaic, who like to promote prejudice against anything Muslim and Arab benefited. Since 9-11 there has been a constant propaganda war against Muslims throughout Western countries. (This is not to argue that Americans should not be wary of foreign motives.) But the fact is that those who do not wish Muslims to have influence in this culture have clearly wages a major propaganda campaign for Westerners to fear and distrust a huge segment of the world’s population—as a “cultural clash” or clash of civilizations like the medieval era of The Crusades. This is to say that Israel’s enemies have become our enemies as “neocon” propaganda campaign harps on “Islamo-fascism,” “Islamo-extremism,” and “Islamo-fanaticism”. Meanwhile this event is used to further persuade Americans Israel is America’s “natural” ally and partner against the forces of evil. (Yet rightwing Israelis too are not willing to separate Church and State and so they discriminate against those not Jewish. Therefore they too do not share our democratic values of equality for “all” people—like many of the theocratic countries in the Middle East.) This is opinion but it still reflects reality. 8) Politically motivated people with the desire to use “fear,” namely terrorism, as an excuse to curtail and destroy civil liberties and freedoms normally honored in democratic countries. We have become more a fascist state with Homeland Security surveillance. This curtailment is similar to those who continue to try to censor free speech—and make it more difficult to have the right to “associate” via technologies such as the Internet. Such mentality has allowed spying on citizens by “privatized” corporations not accountable to the tax paying public who pay organizations to secretly spy and keep records on its own citizenry. Obama and his team have done nothing to make real, substantive changes, and in fact have reinforced this tyranny. The curtailment of our freedoms is fact and not fiction. 9) Some international political operatives willing to take American bribe money in exchange to playing and saying our tune have benefited, such as some political factions in the Middle East who equally play they game with our tax dollars—including journalists who will write and say whatever Uncle Sam wants as long as there is a brick of one hundred dollar bills as “disappeared” just like military contracts that did not get performed—but were still played. This could also include those creating phony websites to spew messages or take credit for events done by others. 10) People with a desire to destroy the political strength and good will of the American people and government. Our country is no longer looked upon as a “positive” force for democracy. Further our economy has been severely damaged by corrupt forces willing to sacrifice real national security to greedy and self-interested ends. We are seen as the rogue state by too many. It doesn’t seem to bother some profiting that America goes broke invading foreign countries—irrespective of what the rest of the world thinks—and what could be a long term disaster—if not a World War 3. (It almost seems like a deliberate foil to destroy military preparedness and to weaken our security.) Furthermore, those who believe in a two class system benefited because the wealth investor class, including most of the Congress and Senate, are “not” sending their kids to die—rather they rely on a volunteer military of lower and middle class kids that can’t find jobs or have few prospects to go to school. 11) Along with this financial bust is a drive to destroy liberal notions of any kind of welfare for the less fortunate—save welfare for corrupt corporations. While it is true that there is no free lunch (unless you live in the beltway) there is also way too much scorn for people who are not super-rich as deserving some kind of humanity. Perhaps Obama should let the country default. Perhaps individual states “should” give serious consideration to secede from the Union. It has become one massive failure anyway. This litany is as contentious as the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence written over two hundred years ago. And there is good reason to modify our current banking system and the Federal Reserve. The U.S. Congress, like most pseudo-liberal chicken lefties, who have not had the guts to look seriously at what likely happened on 9/11, or why, have succumbed to the cowardliness of voting to not close the U.S. gulag. They are more afraid of their own lost of stature than they are of honoring the rights of law and justice. Meanwhile the legal system—id est lawyers—have been far too compliant. This is to say that the U.S. is being strangulated by corporate America and its finance sector. This is a form of slavery to be manipulated into doing things under false assumptions. Why the ultra rich became even more so, they “own” Congress with their bribery of lobby money and especially the Republican party—despite all the Tea Party advocates. You may not like these realities. Few do. So go ahead and continue to shun all “theories” about 9-11 as mere skewed imagination. Because while it is true that 99.99% of the Government is innocent that doesn’t mean a relatively small, but high-ranking cabal, could not have been involved—especially given all the security transgressed and air force stand down that ensued. Still it is easy to point fingers at identifiable groups of people as over-generalizations. Nevertheless many people looked the other way to not notice the dots the machine was drawing was itself tainted—which had its own wisdom of reticence. But where are we to go as a culture if we continue to play blind? You can believe in fantasy as most people choose—because in the short term it feels easier. But it may turn out to be worse in the longer term with both parties being irremediably corrupt. More importantly to the sell out of our human rights to corporations with laws like Citizens United vs. the Federal Elections Commission. Good Luck to all people who think they know something because they have been conditioned to believe what they currently do. Yet ask yourself how many Muslims actually benefited? Then ask that irrespective of who did it, does it not seem that our culture has some issues to contend with and some bureaucracy to address besides the liberal agenda? If lawyers don’t start making more noise we could have some serious problems.

After Oslo: Time to Crack Down On Mossad Terrorism

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by Wayne MADSEN

Israel’s most secret and tried-and-true weapon is the “false flag” terrorist attack.

State-sponsored terrorism is defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as the “systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective [and] is employed by governments -- or more often by factions within governments -- against that government's citizens, against factions within the government, or against foreign governments or groups.”

On July 22, a bomb, said to be an Oklahoma City-type explosive device, crafted with fertilizer and diesel fuel, blew up in downtown Oslo, Norway, in the heart of the government district. Shortly thereafter, a man dressed in a Norwegian police uniform opened fire on a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya in Tyri fjord. Access to the island was by boat only. Over 100 people were killed in the twin terror attacks.

Almost immediately, the world’s corporate media began pushing the story that those who were responsible for the blast and mass shooting were associated with “Al Qaeda” and other radical Islamist groups. CNN’s Washington, DC chief anchor Wolf Blitzer, a former spokesman for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby and a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, began his late afternoon program by pointing to “Al Qaeda” and radical Islamists as the chief culprits for the terrorist attacks in Norway.

CNN paraded out a number “experts,” in actuality, propagandists for the Israeli agenda linked to neo-conservative outlets and the Pentagon’s “terrorism industrial complex,” before the cameras to advance the radical Islamist meme even as Norwegian authorities pinned blame on the attack on at least one perpetrator, a Norwegian named Anders Behring Breivik. CNN constantly showed footage of frightened people in downtown Oslo running for their lives from the site of the blast, as well as still photograph of a pall of light-brown smoke over downtown Oslo. Of course, CNN’s intention was to evoke memories of the 9/11 attack in Manhattan.

Breivik, who sometimes anglicized his name as Andrew Berwick in his numerous web postings, was said to be a right-wing Islamophobe who sympathized with Zionism and who was a Freemason… Breivik was also reported to be a fundamentalist Christian but he adopted a stance against the Lutheran Church, the state church of Norway, and argued for a “collective” counter-reformation to return the Protestant churches to the control of the Vatican and the Pope. Breivik lambasted the Lutheran Church and other mainstream Protestant churches, condemning “Priests in jeans who march for Palestine.”

More incredibly, the London tabloid of Rupert Murdoch’s scandal-plagued News International, The Sun, went to press with the following false headline: “Norway’s 911: ‘Al Qaeda’ Massacre.” On March 29, 2011, Harvard Law School’s extremist Zionist Professor Alan Dershowitz penned a piece in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that actively discriminates against the hiring of non-Jews as reporters and editors in violation of U.S. civil rights and equal opportunity employment laws, in which he called Norway anti-Semitic. Dershowitz cited as an example former Norwegian Prime Minister Kare Willock’s criticism of President Barack Obama’s choice of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff because he is Jewish. In fact, Emanuel’s pro- Israeli sympathies as a former member of the Israel Defense Force are what prompted many political observers in Washington and elsewhere to question his primary loyalty to the United States.

A network of Israeli bloggers pushed a claim of responsibility on a previously-unknown group called Ansar al-Jihad al-Alami (the Helpers of the Global Jihad). The group’s claims were picked up and run by several corporate media outlets and then pulled when it was discovered the claim was a hoax. Mossad has a program to distribute bogus claims of responsibility for Islamist terrorist attacks via “Jihadist” websites that are actually operated by the Mossad and a network of “hasbaratchiks,” Israeli and foreign Jews who act as propagandists on the web. These hasbara (propaganda) agents and volunteers operate through such programs as Megaphone and GIYUS (“Give Israel Your United Support.”) After the attempt to blame the Norway attacks on Islamists failed, the “hasbaratchiks” shifted to “sock puppet” troll mode, posting comments on blogs that criticized allegations that Mossad and Zionists were behind the Norway attacks, emphasizing that such beliefs were “anti-Semitic” and wild “conspiracy theories.” Some Israeli “sock puppets” even offered lunatic suggestions that Breivik was planted by Islamists to make Israel and Zionists look bad.

When the “Islamist” connection to the holocaust in Norway was shown to be non-existent after Norwegian security and police agencies began looking at the evidence, the corporate media switched its propaganda line from “radical Islam” being responsible to “far –right extremism” opposed to multiculturalism and immigration in Europe as the culprit. Even outlets that in the past had been known for their independence from the corporate media line, including Al Jazeera and RT [formerly known as Russia Today], echoed the line that Breivik primarily represented right-wing opposition to Muslim immigrants in Europe. Al Jazeera repeated the line that Breivik was a “lone madman,” the insinuation being that he was not linked to any wider network. While Breivik certainly was associated with the far-right xenophobic elements in Norway, Europe, and North America, there was no mention by the corporate media of his admiration for such American Zionist Islamophobes as Richard Pipes and Pam Geller. Geller led the bigoted anti-Muslim campaign against an Islamic Center near the site of “Ground Zero,” the former World Trade Center site, in lower Manhattan. Breivik posted a number of his anti-Muslim and pro-Zionist screeds on the Norwegian website www.document.no, which is operated by Hans-Kristian Rustad, a Norwegian pro-Israeli journalist.

No corporate media outlets reported that the brand of far-right extremism of Breivik is closely associated with Zionist-supported far-right anti-immigrant political parties and movements in Western Europe, including the mis-named Progress Party of Norway, the Dutch Freedom Party of Islamophobe Geert Wilders, the Sweden Democrats, Finland’s True Finns Party, the Danish People’s Party, the English Defense League, the Pro-Germany Citizen’s Movement, and a pan-Nordic fascist terrorist group called “Nordiske.” Breivik also expressed support for the Tea Party in the United States…

The European anti-Muslim xenophobic network is linked to the notorious publication of Prophet Muhammad cartoons by the neo-conservative Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and Norway’s Dagbladet. The Euro-xenophobes are supported by the longtime Zionist Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher who is a friend of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and disgraced former International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn. It is noteworthy that Levy is one of the major backers of the Libyan rebels fighting Muammar Qaddafi. Norway announced it was pulling its aircraft from the NATO campaign in Libya at the end of July. Norway also announced its support for Palestine’s sovereignty resolution in the UN General Assembly in September.

As more and more evidence pointed to Oslo being yet another example of a state-sponsored terrorist attack by Israel’s Mossad, the corporate media studiously avoided mentioning how the Norwegian government through its recent actions, had become a major problem for Israel and its allies abroad, especially on the Palestine sovereignty issue… In addition, Norwegian police and intelligence are painfully aware of Mossad’s past operations in Norway, including the infamous Lillehammer Affair in 1973. On July 21, 1973, Mossad agents assassinated Ali Hassan Salameh, a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, wrongly believing he was the operations chief for the Palestinian terrorist group “Black September.” Norwegian police arrested the Mossad agents who killed Salameh and uncovered an intricate network of Mossad safe houses, phone numbers, and Norwegian sleeper agents for Mossad.

Just as was the case with the coordinated bombings of Madrid trains on March 22, 2004 and London buses and trains on July 7, 2005, viewed by European security services as being the work of not “Al Qaeda” but domestic “radicals,” there was no link to Islamist radicals with the attacks in Norway. However, there was every indication that the attack on Norway was intended to shake up the Norwegian population and damage the reputation of the left-of-center Norwegian government of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.

The corporate media insisted that Breivik was solely responsible for Norway’s worst violent attack since World War II. Norwegian police reports that a second gunman, described as having “thick dark hair and a non-Nordic appearance,” were suppressed in much of the corporate media. The time line of the Oslo attack causes anyone’s imagination to be stretched on being sold a “lone gunman/bomber” theory.

At 3:26 pm Oslo time a massive car bomb was detonated outside the office of the Prime Minister of Norway. Since July 22 was a public holiday, there were relatively few people inside the Prime Minister’s office or the surrounding offices of the Petroleum and Energy Ministry and the VG [Verdens Gang] newspaper, Norway’s largest paper.

As police responded to the downtown Oslo blast, Breivik was said to have taken a boat the Utoya island dressed as a policeman and began opening fire on young members of the Norwegian Labor Party youth camp meeting. The shooting allegedly began at 4:50 pm. Norwegian SWAT team “Delta” had trouble getting a helicopter started and struggled to find a boat to get to Utoya island. The SWAT team finally arrived on the island at 6:20 pm only to find scores of the next generation of Norwegian Labor Party leaders dead. Breivik calmly surrendered to the police. When Breivik arrived on Utoya he told police on the island that he was there for a routine security check following the bombing in downtown Oslo.

Norway’s Acting Police chief Sveinung Sponheim said the police were still investigating whether Breivik was acting with a larger network. Sponheim’s revelation countered the “lone wolf” theory advanced by corporate media outlets in Western nations.

Norway’s coalition Labor-Socialist Left government has been seen as hostile to the interests of Israel and the United States. There is now a widespread belief that the terrorist attack against Norway was engineered to shock erstwhile peaceful Norway, a nation where police generally still patrol the streets unarmed, into adopting the police state tactics of the United States, Israel, Britain, and other Western nations. Norway’s pro-Palestinian foreign policy also irked the Zionist and the far-right anti-Islamic factions in Europe and North America, as well as the governments of Israel and the United States.

In a move that complements American and Israeli propaganda that Norway has not stepped up to the surveillance state model imposed by other Western governments, the suspicious WikiLeaks decided to release U.S. State Department cables from the U.S. embassy in Oslo that criticized Norway for not recognizing the “Al Qaeda” threat and maintaining an insufficient security apparatus to combat Islamist terrorism and Pakistani immigrants.

The Barack Obama-appointed U.S. ambassador in Oslo, Barry White, who is Jewish and received a 2005 award from the pro-Israel American Jewish Committee, complained that the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) rejected two twelve-person British MI-6 intelligence surveillance teams to monitor an “Al Qaeda” cell in Norway. Last November, the Norwegian government was shocked to learn that the U.S. embassy was operating a Surveillance Detection Unit in Oslo that was monitoring Norwegian citizens. Norwegian Justice Minister Knut Storberget said he was not informed of the presence of the U.S. spy unit in Oslo, which employed retired Norwegian police and intelligence officials. The Norwegian Data Protection Commissioner, Bjorn Erik Thon, said he had never seen such an intelligence operation in Norway. White complained that Norwegian security officials were apathetic and incompetent in dealing with the Islamist “terrorist threat.” The failure of the Norwegian SWAT team to quickly respond to the massacre on Utoya may indicate that Norway’s law enforcement and security networks and command-and-control systems had been interfered with by infiltrators with knowledge of the Norwegian systems. Those retired police and intelligence officials working for the U.S. embassy’s surveillance unit are likely suspects in sabotaging the Norwegian police reaction capabilities on 7/22. Just 48 hours before the bombing in Oslo, police units were engaged in a terrorist bombing exercise at the Oslo Opera House, near what would later be “ground zero.” In addition, in the days before the terrorist bombing, there was suspicious sewer work being conducted in the area near the Prime Minister’s office.

In March, the leader of the Socialist Left, Kristen Halvorsen, the Minister of Education of Norway and a former Finance Minister, called for military action against Israel if it attacked Gaza. The Socialist Left and Labor Party, along with the Norwegian Peace Association and the Norwegian energy and telecommunications union, strongly support the Boycott Israel campaign, which includes backing the pan-European Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) committee and an embargo on arms sales to the Jewish state. In August 2010, the Norwegian pension fund divested in two Israeli companies controlled by Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, Africa Israel Investments and its subsidiary Danya Cebus.

Halvorsen had recently met with a delegation of American Jews who complained about Norway’s “anti-Semitism,” the tired and worn-out canard used by Zionists in confronting anti-Israeli sentiment around the world. In January, Halvorsen and her husband, Christo Halvorsen, a producer for the Norsk Rikskringkasting (NRK) television and radio network, took part in an anti-Israel and U.S. march in Oslo where picket signs with phrases like “USA and Israel: Axis of Evil” appeared. The Halvorsens and NRK were subjected to a vicious campaign launched by Zionists and the Israel Lobby in Norway.

Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of the Labor Party has been criticized by the Israel Lobby and Zionists for comparing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. Støre has also called for the demolition of Israel’s “Separation Wall” that runs through Palestinian territory on the West Bank, a stance that has earned him enmity and hatred from Israel’s government and their Zionist allies in the West. Store paid a visit to Utoya before the massacre. The Foreign Minister was on the island as some of the Labor Party youth were participating in a “Boycott Israel” demonstration. The city of Trondheim was criticized by Israel for funding a trip to the UN in New York for Norwegian students to participate in a play called the “Gaza Monologues.” Israel also blasted Norway for distributing a film called “Tears of Gaza.”

After Israel offered assistance to Norway, including forensic and medical assistance, as well as the evacuation of the wounded from the 7/22 attack, Norway declined the offer. The rejection of assistance from Israel indicates that the Norwegian government was suspicious of the offer from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Other Israeli military teams in the West Bank have been accused of trafficking in human organs, an expose brought to light by the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet in August 2009. That same month, Israel’s anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman accused Sweden and Norway of anti-Semitism, adding the outrageous charge that Norway was pro-Nazi, even though Norway’s anti-Muslim and pro-Zionist activists were affiliated with neo-Nazi organizations. On December 11, 2010, a suspicious terrorist explosion took place in downtown Stockholm, injuring two people and blamed on a Swedish-Iraqi suicide bomber. The bombing took place two weeks after the Swedish media reported that a Surveillance Detection Unit, operated form the U.S. embassy in Stockholm, was spying on Swedish citizens.

In the past few months, the Mossad has committed blatant acts of espionage and possible other terrorist attacks against nations it perceives as pro-Palestinian. During last year’s devastating earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, a team of Mossad agents was caught in the city. One of the agents died in the quake. The Mossad agents were found with multiple passports and thumb drives believed to have been used to download sensitive data from New Zealand government computer systems. New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key, who seemingly came from obscurity in New Zealand politics and whose Jewish mother immigrated from England, disregarded claims of Mossad espionage during the quake, even though he spoke to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu four times on the day of the quake, after the dead Mossad agent was discovered by New Zealand police and intelligence.

New Zealand’s Southland Times was criticized by New Zealand’s Jewish community and Israel for promoting “conspiracy theories,” the typical modus operandi for pro-Israeli Jews, known as sayanim and katsas, who are used by Israel abroad as propaganda and espionage agents. Ironically, Key was meeting with Obama at the White House as the bombing and shootings were occurring in Norway. Key was believed to have attended the homo-erotic annual meeting of a men-only fraternity composed of American and foreign political and business elitists at the secluded Bohemian Grove in northern California, a conclave that also saw the attendance of Israel’s most notorious agent-of-influence in America, Henry Kissinger, who also serves as Obama’s “special envoy” to the Russian leadership. Key’s Labor Party predecessor, Helen Clark, was the subject of criticism in leaked 2004 State Department cables from the U.S. embassy in Wellington for cracking down on a Mossad team’s acquisition of forged New Zealand passports. Once again, the cable leaks were courtesy of the suspect WikiLeaks operation.

One of the Mossad perpetrators, Zev William Barkan, who fled New Zealand to avoid arrest, had also been reported in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, where he and other Israelis were producing pornographic and “snuff” movies, in which unsuspecting vagrants were murdered on camera.

In Egypt, Mossad agents have been accused by the present government of fomenting riots between Muslims and Coptic Christians. A recent explosion of seized Iranian weapons and ammunition being stored at a Cypriot naval base, a blast that killed the head of the Cypriot Navy, remains suspicious. The blast followed the decision of Cyprus’s left-of-center government to recognize the sovereignty of Palestine. The resulting public outrage over the blast resulted in the resignation of pro-Palestinian Foreign Minister Markos Kyprianou and a major political embarrassment for Cyprus’s president Dimitris Christofias, a member of the Communist AKEL party.

Mossad is a master at false-flag terrorist attacks designed to alter perceptions and punish opponents of Israeli policy. The fingerprints of Israeli intelligence are all over the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the 3/22 train bombings in Madrid, the 7/7 transit bombings in London, and, now, the 7/22 attacks in Norway… While the Israeli-influenced corporate media has droned on and on about the dangers of Islamist terrorism, it is now obvious that the major threat to public safety comes from the State of Israel, a rogue nation that does not hesitate to murder the innocent to achieve its sordid political aims.

About Wayne MADSEN

Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. Has some twenty years experience in security issues. As a U.S. Naval Officer, he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He has been a frequent political and national security commentator on Fox News and has also appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and MS-NBC. He has been invited to testify as a witness before the US House of Representatives, the UN Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and an terrorism investigation panel of the French government. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club. Lives in Washington, D.C.

Hack Work

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The New Yorker sums it up and bites through Murdoch's jugular vein


by Anthony Lane


August 1, 2011


On March 21, 2002, a thirteen-year-old English schoolgirl took the train home. Usually, she took it all the way to Hersham, seventeen miles from London, where she lived, but on that day she got off one stop before, at Walton-on-Thames, to get something to eat. From that decision flowed two events, one terrible and final, the other more ambiguous and by no means complete. The first was the death of the girl, whose name was Milly Dowler. Walking home from Walton, she was abducted and murdered by a man named Levi Bellfield. Her body was found six months later, in a field twenty-five miles away, by mushroom pickers. The second consequence has been the fraying of an empire, and the sight of its emperor under siege. Many people have dreamed of such a day; far fewer would have predicted the swiftness with which it arrived; others view it as an overreaction tinged with hypocrisy and hysteria; and only the unworldly would claim that the end is nigh. Empires strike back.

The emperor is, of course, Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and C.E.O. of News Corporation; the owner of Twentieth Century Fox, Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal; the proprietor, in Britain, of the Times, the Sunday Times, and the Sun, and the holder of a 39.1-per-cent stake in BSkyB, the country’s leading satellite-broadcasting company; an Australian by birth and an American by choice; the proud father of six children; the thirty-eighth-richest person in this country; and, in the words of his mother, the adamantine Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, now a hundred and two years old, “that wretched boy of mine.” Never underestimate the wish, in the heart of a child, even a child aged eighty, to please the matriarch and prove himself less wretched in her eyes. It takes only three minutes, near the start of “Citizen Kane,” to shift from the stony stare of Mrs. Kane, as she watches young Charles leave forever, to the bullish proposal of the grown lad: “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”

In the past weeks, the fun has leached away. Readers and viewers who know Murdoch purely as a name—or as one of those figures so wealthy, and granted such frictionless mobility by their wealth, that they never seem to be in the part of the world that you expect them to be—were startled to see a senior gent, with sparse white hair and a clownish smile, descend upon London. He was seen jogging in one of the parks, in the thrall of a personal trainer. She was blond and wholly fearsome, like someone whom Sylvester Stallone very nearly married before changing his mind and hiding under the bed. As for her trainee, he was photographed with milk-white shanks exposed unkindly to the elements. This was Rupert Murdoch? The man to whom Prime Ministers bend the knee? More unfamiliar still was the contrite figure who emerged from a meeting in a London hotel and pronounced himself “appalled to find out what had happened.” He was also “humbled to give a full and sincere apology to the Dowler family,” according to the Dowlers’ solicitor. Of all the words one never thought to find in the vicinity of Murdoch, “humbled,” especially in the passive voice, would top the list. But what was he apologizing for?

Chronology matters here, if one is to chart the rising tide. Bellfield, who is serving life imprisonment for two other killings, committed in 2003 and 2004, was tried for Milly’s murder and convicted, on June 23rd of this year. The following day, the Dowlers complained of their legal ordeal; Milly’s father, Robert, who had been an early suspect, had endured fierce cross-questioning. So had Milly’s mother, Sally, who was made to listen to Milly’s private notes, and who collapsed after giving evidence. “My family have had to pay too high a price for justice for Milly,” Robert Dowler said. On June 25th, the chief constable in charge of the investigation, Mark Rowley, said that the Dowlers’ privacy had been “destroyed.” He contrasted their position with that of celebrities who seek to guard their follies through legal injunctions—Ryan Giggs, for instance, a Manchester United soccer player, whose sexual exploits had been concealed, protected by such an injunction, until unloosed on the Internet.

What links all these disparate details is a confused and volatile concern about how, and even whether, our lives still belong to us. Who can possibly remain a closed book, when others try to open it and leaf through? Have the millions who volunteer their thoughts, on Facebook and in other social media, made it more treacherous for others—and for themselves—when a secret begs to be kept? The hungering quest to know, in short, and the debatable right to pry were already being stirred in the public mind. A sportsman with too many girlfriends could be jeered like a baited bear, but bereaved parents, who had sought no fame, were another matter. Something had to give, and it came on July 4th, with the allegation that the News of the World, the Sunday paper owned by Murdoch, had hacked into Milly Dowler’s cell phone. In the days after she vanished, it was said, journalists had deleted messages on her phone, in order to clear space for more. This may have compromised the police inquiry, and had also, more damnably, given her family false hope that she might be alive.

The story was broken by the Guardian, the upmarket daily paper that has been pursuing the matter of illegal conduct by the tabloids since 2002. The royal editor of the News of the World and a private investigator employed by the paper had already been jailed for hacking into phones used by members of the Royal Family, yet it would be fair to say that such occurrences had been met, by the wider public, with a shrug. So what was different now? The received wisdom—that the extreme sufferings of ordinary folk do not merit exploitation—is correct. There was, furthermore, a sense that the hacking of Milly Dowler’s messages represented a desecration of the dead. The obloquy deepened in the ensuing days, during which it was reported that the cell phones of families of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan may also have been hacked. These are, as yet, allegations: nothing has been proved, although little has been denied. What hackers could conceivably have gleaned from such activity, apart from listening to messages of condolence, is hard to imagine; maybe hacking, profitable or not, had stiffened into a reflex.

From here, the outcry gathered force, and rolled over those who stood in its path. On July 8th, Andy Coulson, a former editor of the News of the World, who later became the communications director in the office of David Cameron, the Prime Minister, was arrested in connection with the allegations. On July 14th, the same fate befell Neil Wallis, who had been the deputy editor first of the Sun and later of the News of the World, where he rose to become executive editor. The next day, Les Hinton, the C.E.O. of Dow Jones, a subsidiary of News Corporation, and a colleague of Murdoch’s for half a century, resigned his post, as did Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of News International, which publishes all the Murdoch newspapers in Britain. She had edited the Sun from 2003 to 2009, and before that the News of the World, from 2000 to 2003—the period that included the alleged hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone. Brooks is evidently close to Murdoch, who, on July 10th, having arrived in London to limit the damage, was asked what his greatest priority was. “This one,” he replied, indicating Brooks. A week later, she was arrested.

Later that day, Sir Paul Stephenson, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and thus the senior law-enforcement official in the land, also quit his job. He had been hobbled by the revelation—and here we are treading close to farce—that Neil Wallis, after leaving the News of the World, in 2009, had been hired by the Metropolitan Police (the Met, as it is known), as a public-relations consultant. Stephenson, in his resignation speech, pointed out that Wallis, unlike Andy Coulson, had not been forced to resign from the paper. The Prime Minister had nonetheless gone ahead and hired Coulson. Cameron was, and remains, under fire not just for his naïveté in that appointment but for the ease with which he had mingled with members of News International; lips were pursed at his personal amity with Brooks, who was a neighbor of Cameron’s, in Oxfordshire. (Her husband, a racehorse trainer, was educated at Eton, as was the Prime Minister: nothing suspicious about that, but it does oil the wheels.) How high would this scandal rise? Could it not merely corrode but pull down a government?

Of all the charges being levelled, the social one—that the Prime Minister was fraternizing with the wrong sort—is at once the most splenetic and the weakest, especially to anyone familiar with the dance that politicians and newspapers have led one another in the past hundred years. No waltz could have been merrier than the weekend gathering in November, 1923, at Cherkley Court, a resplendent country house, in Surrey. The guests included David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Austen Chamberlain (a former Chancellor of the Exchequer), and Lord Birkenhead, until recently Lord Chancellor. Their plan was to discomfit the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and form a new coalition—a scheme abetted by their host, Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of the Daily Express, then a newspaper of great potency and reach. “I think Baldwin will be defeated,” Beaverbrook wired to another press baron, Lord Rothermere, who owned not just the Daily Mail but also the Daily Mirror. Later, in the Second World War, Beaverbrook became, at Churchill’s invitation, Minister of Aircraft Production. His colleague Ernest Bevin, the wartime Minister of Labour, said that, when it came to Beaverbrook, Churchill “was like a man who’s married a whore; he knows she’s a whore but he loves her just the same.” Churchill himself, incidentally, once wrote for the News of the World.

The joke is that the anti-Baldwin plotting petered out; when it comes to moguls and ministers, not all convenings are conspiracies, and few conspiracies succeed. It is natural, in the present frenzy, that Carl Bernstein, writing in Newsweek, should claim that comparisons with the Watergate affair are “inevitable.” But is that so? On the Presidential watch, men were hired to commit criminal acts; Cameron, by comparison, took on a man, Coulson, who had been tarnished by association with criminality, and gave him a respectable (if serpentine) job, which by all accounts Coulson performed with aplomb. The Prime Minister erred, but was he guilty of anything darker than lousy judgment? Ian Katz, the deputy editor of the Guardian, may well be right when he says, “The conspiracy reading is that Cameron wasn’t prepared to risk the ire of News International by dumping Coulson overboard, because once he dumped Coulson, the whole thing would chase back up the ladder towards Murdoch. I don’t really buy that. I think it was more a combination of arrogance and a reluctance to confront a really difficult situation.”

If the Nixonian shadow falls anywhere in this case, it is not on Cameron but on Murdoch, for it was doubtless under his aegis that cell phones were allegedly hacked, and the law transgressed. As he admitted, “I don’t know any better than anyone else where the electronic age is taking us, or how it will affect a large newspaper company.” Those words were quoted in Fortune, in February, 1984. Whether he is wiser now, more than a quarter of a century later, God only knows. And, as yet, no one has hacked His phone.

For a small nation, Britain has an awful lot of national newspapers. Six days of the week, you can choose among five tabloids, some of them known, for reasons of design rather than of ideology, as “red-tops” (the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express, the Daily Star, and the Daily Mail), and five broadsheets—the Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, and the Daily Telegraph. Only the last two are still technically broadsheets, in terms of their page size, but the term has adhered to anything that lays claim to higher ground. (There is also a new kid, simply called i, which the Independent launched last year, and which fillets much of its content from its elder brother.) On Sunday, there is the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday, and the Observer, and, at the more perspiring end of the market, the Sunday Mirror, the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Star Sunday, the People, and the Sunday Express. There was the News of the World, the heaviest breather of all, but its final edition came out on July 10th. Murdoch, in a bid to avert the hacking crisis, shut the paper, like a veterinarian who takes one look at your boisterous, nippy, but otherwise healthy mastiff and puts it down.

This barrage of print has one overriding effect: in Britain, you cannot hear yourself think. You never really notice this until you leave the country, whereupon the white noise suddenly stops. The noisiest paper, without doubt, was the News of the World, which resounded with three continuous notes. The first and most defensible was sport; last year, the paper laid bare a match-fixing racket in Pakistani cricket—a bigger and more lucrative deal than it sounds. Then, there were television performers, who furnished an astounding proportion of the paper’s stories. (When historians come to measure the age of Murdoch, that symbiosis between media will loom large.) Last and most cacophonous, there was the assumption, or the ardent hope, that somebody, somewhere, was having sex with somebody he should not be having sex with. Viewed from outside, what this fixation suggested was a giggling braggart, fidgeting in the school playground, and pointing at girls with whom he would never stand a chance.

The resulting product was the best-selling newspaper in the country; make of that what you will. Murdoch certainly did. He bought the paper in 1969, acquiring the Sun later that year, and both Times titles in 1981. The News of the World had been alive since 1843, but, at the time of Murdoch’s approach, it had not been kicking for some while. In 1950, its circulation stood close to eight and a half million, an astonishing command of the reading public, but had since fallen to around six million. This was in line with a general subsidence; as Kevin Williams explains in his book “Read All About It,” “the decline of the mass Sunday newspaper is attributed to the incorporation of its values into the mainstream daily papers. The reader did not have to wait for the sleaze, scandals, and sex that up until the 1960s had only been available on Sundays.” Lurking somewhere behind this is a sulfurous inversion of religious practice: it’s not enough to confess your faith on the Lord’s day; you must go out and live it every day of the week.

One of the last people to inveigh, with any effect, against that heresy was Cardinal Heenan, the Archbishop of Westminster, who took Murdoch to task, in 1969, for having bought and splashed, or resplashed, the memoirs of Christine Keeler in the News of the World. She was the woman who had enjoyed simultaneous affairs with the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and a Soviet attaché—a grave security risk and, by any standards, a superheated news story. But that had all happened six years earlier; Profumo had resigned and devoted himself to work among the poor, in the East End, and the saga had grown cold. Murdoch was warming it up again, because his instinct, as keen as ever, told him that the will to forgive is weaker, in the communal conscience, than the urge to drool. He was reported as saying, “People can sneer all they like, but I’ll take the hundred and fifty thousand extra copies we’re going to sell.”

Nonetheless, he apologized to the Cardinal, thus setting a pattern that persists to this day. Murdoch would preside over an exclusive, reap the reward, and, if necessary, express contrition, while his underlings readied themselves for the next scoop. On July 16th of this year, as the hacking scandal bloomed, News Corporation placed full-page advertisements in several newspapers—including, with some panache, the Guardian—headlined “WE ARE SORRY,” and adding, “Our business was founded on the idea that a free and open press should be a positive force in society. We need to live up to this.” That is a direct descendant of a statement that Murdoch issued in 1995: “This company will not tolerate its papers bringing into disrepute the best practices of popular journalism.” The fault, on that occasion, was a story, in the News of the World, about Victoria, the troubled wife of Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother. Included were photographs, described by the paper’s editor, Piers Morgan, as “evocative,” of Victoria Spencer on the grounds of a private clinic. The matter was referred to the Press Complaints Commission, the invertebrate body that oversees the misdeeds of British newspapers. “That press complaining thingamajig,” Murdoch called it, according to Morgan, when they spoke a few days later.

Morgan owes much to Murdoch. He ran “Bizarre,” the show-biz column at the Sun, before taking the helm at the News of the World, in 1994, at the age of twenty-eight. From there, he left to edit the Mirror, the Sun’s enduring—and traditionally more left-wing—rival, from which he was sacked in 2004, having published photographs of British troops abusing Iraqi civilians. The front page showed a soldier urinating on one of his victims. It was more than possible that such images could stoke retaliation against British forces, and Morgan soon had a fresh problem: the pictures were fakes. (He has said that he is still uncertain of this.) For anyone who wishes to learn how the cycle of contumely and pardon—or simple forgetfulness—spins in England, note the consequence. Morgan went on to become a judge on “Britain’s Got Talent,” on ITV, and on “America’s Got Talent,” on NBC, before ascending to the throne of Larry King, on CNN.

Morgan’s diary, published as “The Insider,” in 2005, is a tour guide to the freakery of life among the red-tops. What stands out is not the crowing thrills, or the major foul-ups, but the run-of-the-mill assumptions on which the tabloid press relies; they are the secret of the Murdoch mill. In the News of the World, on November 13, 1994, Morgan ran a photograph of Spike Milligan, once a harebrained figure in British comedy and now, apparently, whittled to what the caption called “a shadow of his former self.” The picture, it turned out, was not of Milligan at all, but, as Morgan reassured himself, “Spike will see the funny side, I’m sure. He’s a comedian.” Four days later, when a letter arrived from Milligan’s lawyer, expressing a grievance and requesting compensation, Morgan wrote, “I genuinely cannot believe how prickly Spike is being over all this.” Such is the quintessence of the tabloid: to bruise and bully, and then to back off, exclaiming, Come on, we’re only having a laugh. Can’t you take a joke? The British sense of humor is both an invaluable broadsword and an impenetrable shield.

The most thickly armored warrior, in this regard, was Kelvin MacKenzie, who edited the Sun from 1981 to 1994. When it comes to ethical discrimination, MacKenzie makes Morgan look like Ronald Dworkin. Students of the period should consult “Stick It Up Your Punter!,” by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie, much of which is consumed by MacKenzie’s reign. Here you will find, for instance, details of the interview with Marica McKay, the widow of a British sergeant who died in the Falklands and was honored with a posthumous Victoria Cross, the highest British award for gallantry—an interview compromised by the fact that she never actually spoke to the Sun. Or, there was the mission to out Peter Tatchell, the Labour candidate for the London constituency of Bermondsey, who was finally snared by the headline “RED PETE ‘WENT TO GAY OLYMPICS.’ ” MacKenzie was informed that Tatchell had not, in fact, attended the Gay Olympics in San Francisco, but, undaunted, the editor simply inserted the claim between single quotation marks and ran it anyway. It suited MacKenzie’s bellowing homophobia, which, in turn, was consonant with his racial fears. “Botha has said the days of white power are over in South Africa. What he doesn’t say is what’s going to happen when the darkies come down from the trees,” he said. That was reported in the New Statesman, in 1985, by Peter Court, who had briefly worked as a graphic designer for the Sun.

When “Stick It Up Your Punter!” first came out, in 1990, it was hailed for its comic momentum, and the back cover of the paperback is strewn with snippets of admiring reviews from, among others, The Economist, the London Review of Books, and, yes, the Guardian—the well-bred visitors laughing at the tabloid zoo. Read now, it seems less amusing, and what previously felt like a string of high jinks comes across as a tireless parade of emotional cruelty. Court had a colleague in the art department who was instructed by MacKenzie to “do us all a favour, you useless cunt—cut your throat.” According to Matthew Engel, in “Tickle the Public: One Hundred Years of the Popular Press,” a news editor was discovered whacking his skull against a wall, in an effort to preëmpt what he thought a raging MacKenzie would do to him later.

All of which suggests that the seeds of the current crisis were planted long ago. If your attitude toward the lives of others is that of a house burglar confronted by an open window; if you consider it part of your business to fabricate conversations where none exist; and if your boss treats his employees with a derision that they, following suit, extend to the subjects of their inquiries—if those elements are already in place, then the decision to, say, hack into someone’s cell phone is almost no decision at all. It is merely the next step. All that is required is the technology. What ensues may be against the law, but it goes no more against the grain of common decency than any other tool of your trade. This has been confirmed by Paul McMullan, a former deputy features editor at the News of the World, who started by blowing the whistle on phone-hacking and now appears, for the hell of it, to have switched from a whistle to a trumpet. Questioned on the BBC, on July 5th, he said that, having pondered the matter of Milly Dowler’s messages being hacked, he has come to view it as “not such a big deal.”

McMullan cuts exactly the figure that one would hope: the stained white suit, the tie askew, the despairing beard, the eruptive complexion, and the hair that no comb would dare engage. Yet, at present, he is perhaps the only player in this drama who speaks without a trace of caution—cheerfully confessing to what he hardly perceives as wrongs, and manfully struggling to grasp those moments when even he may have exceeded his brief. On BBC Radio, he spoke, with a fuddled melancholy, of Jennifer Elliott—no celebrity, but the daughter of the actor Denholm Elliott, who was in “Trading Places” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He died in 1992. She had a drug problem, and McMullan wrote about her in the News of the World, in 1995, alleging that she was a beggar and a part-time prostitute. Just to coarsen things, he admitted that the tipoff came from a policeman who had taken payment from one of his colleagues. Jennifer Elliott later hanged herself. Asked by the BBC, “Do you think that decision had anything to do with what you wrote and what you did?,” McMullan replied:

Yeah, I totally humiliated and destroyed her. It wasn’t necessary, she didn’t deserve it. She was having a bad time after her own dad had died. Yeah, I went a step too far. And it was based on a now criminal act, and so you gotta sometimes question, well, in some cases, criminal acts perpetrated by journalists aren’t always justified. And in this case, not only was it not justified, it was downright wrong, I sincerely regret it, and, again, if there was anyone to apologize to, I would. But they’re all dead.

If you want to track down a forebear of McMullan, try George Flack:

That’s about played out, any way, the idea of sticking up a sign of “private” and thinking you can keep the place to yourself. You can’t do it—you can’t keep out the light of the Press. Now what I’m going to do is to set up the biggest lamp yet made and to make it shine all over the place. We’ll see who’s private then!

Flack was a fiction—a journalist dreamed up by Henry James, for his 1888 novel “The Reverberator.” To pass from the author of “The Golden Bowl” to the News of the World is to range from one end of the human pH scale to the other, yet James detected the note of pure threat, and wondered how we might cower beneath it. Fear and loathing of the press is as old as the press itself, and the press would argue that the mighty in their seats have much to be fearful about; but the British tabloid press, in particular, spends much less time on the mighty, from day to day, than on the lowly, the lecherous, and the foreign. The Sun, July 4, 2003: “Police swooped on a gang of East Europeans and caught them red-handed about to cook a pair of Royal swans.” The Press Complaints Commission found that the newspaper “was unable to provide any evidence for the story.”

Yet the story ran, deftly hardening the readers’ xenophobia, though its primary purpose, in the land of the gray sky, was surely to dispel their clouded gloom. As one scans the history of Murdoch’s rise, this mission to entertain assumes far more importance than his political agenda. Unlike Rothermere and Beaverbrook, he relishes not the orotundity of power (“It is the duty of newspapers to advocate a policy of optimism in the broadest sense,” Beaverbrook said, in 1922) but the more subtle power of suggestion. (When Murdoch was angling to buy the Times, he entered a committee room “like someone visiting a friend in hospital”—the recollection of Harry Evans, who was about to cross over as editor of the Sunday paper to editor of the daily paper.) Murdoch is not prone to intellectual nicety, and his support for any given government has been determined, more often than not, by its willingness to strike the fetters from the market; once the Conservatives chose not to refer his takeover of the Times and the Sunday Times to the Monopolies Commission, it was easy to guess where Murdoch’s fealty would lie. But if one had to isolate an instant, in the thirty years of his ownership, that best portrayed the Murdoch touch it would be the dictum that he issued, over the phone, on the evening of Saturday, April 23, 1983. The Sunday Times, poised to publish Hitler’s diaries, had hit a wrinkle; the historian Lord Dacre, who had verified their authenticity, was having second thoughts. Stop the presses, or forge ahead? Over to Murdoch, in New York: “Fuck Dacre. Publish.”

That is a sheer tabloid instinct, in a broadsheet world. It paid off, too; the diaries were soon exposed as forgeries, but, as William Shawcross explains in his 1992 biography of Murdoch, “the circulation of the Sunday Times rose 60,000 while the controversy raged, and 20,000 of those readers stayed with the paper.” Shawcross admires Murdoch, with reservations—more so than detractors like Evans, who noted a “bleak hostility,” or Evans’s successor, Frank Giles, who found Murdoch “intemperate and disagreeable.” Then, there is Michael Wolff, who, throughout “The Man Who Owns the News,” his 2008 exploration of Murdoch, is openly fascinated by the elusiveness of his prey: “He uses his newspapers to change himself. It’s as though he can’t express himself without one.” This notion of an Australian chameleon is not easy to accept, especially for those who prefer to label Murdoch a cantering rhino, yet on one thing all the commentators, warm or frosty, are agreed: the guy likes newspapers, or at any rate the rough business of newspapers. Less has changed than Wolff proposes, perhaps, in the years since Murdoch bought the News of the World and declared:

Since a paper’s success or failure depends on its editorial approach, why shouldn’t I interfere when I see a way to strengthen its approach? What am I supposed to do, sit idly by and watch a paper go down the drain, simply because I’m not supposed to interfere? Rubbish! That’s the reason the News of the World started to fade. There was no one there to trim the fat and wrench it out of its editorial complacency.

That could be Margaret Thatcher, acquiring an equally faded Britain ten years later. Fat-trimmers, like all diet obsessives, understand one another; in the words of Charles Moore, Thatcher’s authorized biographer, “they were both trying to do something against the status quo; what’s happened since is that Murdoch has become the status quo.” He is hardly the first outsider, or upstart, to make that switch; like a News of the World reporter writ large, he loitered on the doorstep of the British establishment, then muscled his way in and decided to hang around. Whether he likes the look of the joint, after all these years, is far from certain. America suits him better. Britain, for its part, has never really liked the look of Murdoch, thus confirming the prejudices of the youngblood who turned up from Australia in the nineteen-sixties and found himself tussling with bishops. Spurned by the British as a colonial, from an uncouth continent, he exacted the perfect revenge: he colonized their imagination.

That is why witnesses at the House of Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media, and Sport, which summoned Rupert Murdoch and his son James to appear on July 19th, were so taken aback. Almost the first move of the father, as the session began, was to cup his ear toward an interlocutor, and, with that tiny gesture, he broke the spell—the wicked charms that he had wreathed around the United Kingdom for decades. Here was no beast, no warper of souls or glutton for companies; here was an oldster, tortoise-slow on the uptake, with head drooping, shoulders slumped, rousing himself now and then to make a point by slapping the table before him. Though meant to sound decisive, the slap reminded some viewers of a grumpy grandpa asking when his Jell-O would be served. What ensued was equally bewildering, for Murdoch’s answers to the committee denoted at once a Kane-like power (“The News of the World is less than one per cent of our company. I employ more than fifty-three thousand people around the world”) and minimum control, as the chief executive officer declared himself scandalized by events, while also appearing ignorant of what many of those events were and when they had occurred. Even the fact that News Corporation had paid the sums of seven hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds ($1.2 million) and a million pounds ($1.6 million) to two victims of phone-hacking, in an out-of-court settlement, seems barely to have flickered on his radar.

Seasoned Murdoch watchers, who have pursued the man since he appeared on the cover of Time, in 1977, clambering towers in the guise of King Kong, were not convinced. He may have voiced his belief, before questions began, that “this is the most humble day of my life,” and he may have deflected many of those questions onto the Prince Kong who sat, alert and in possession of the facts, at his side, but might this not have been the greatest impersonation of semi-senility since Harold Pinter performed “Krapp’s Last Tape,” in London, in 2006? Could it be that Murdoch, once the quizzing was done, had leaped into a limousine, cracked open a beer with his teeth, and started barking orders into half a dozen phones? He could even have paused, despite himself, to applaud the efforts of the Guardian, which, in its doggedness to unveil illicit dealings in the labyrinths of those who rule and police the nation, is doing precisely what the younger, keener Murdoch had in mind. To make trouble for an Etonian in Downing Street: nothing would have been sweeter.

Whatever the case, the last laugh has been his. Murdoch knows something that his assailants will seldom concede, and that renders their call for radical change, in the rapport between governance and the media, both tardy and redundant. The change has already happened; culture, media, and sport are not in Murdoch’s pocket, but the British, not least in their yen to watch soccer and cricket on Sky, have reached into their pockets and paid for his feast of wares. The country is in uproar just now, but outrage en masse functions like outrage in private: we reserve our deepest wrath not for the threat from without, which we fail to comprehend, but for forces with which we have been complicit. The British press has long revelled in the raucous and the irresponsible; that was part of its verve, and it was Murdoch’s genius, and also the cause of his current woes, to recognize those tendencies, bring the revelry to a head, and give the people what they asked for. He reminded them of themselves.

Look at an average copy of the News of the World, from March 27th, well before the latest outcry. There are only scraps of news here, and almost nothing of the world. No woman in the first six pages wears anything warmer than lingerie. An entrant from a televised ice-dancing contest is granted a double-page spread to muse upon his newly transplanted hair. And the column on the op-ed page is by Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator—a respectable weekly journal, loosely tied to the Tories, with a strong showing in arts and books coverage. Over the course of four decades, under Murdoch’s approving gaze, the lowbrow has paid no more attention to the highbrow than it ever did, while the highbrow has paid both heed and obeisance to the low—submission, in the weird wrangling of British class consciousness, being preferable to condescension. The most telling piece in the Guardian, in the wake of the hacking scandal, came from a former editor of the paper, Peter Preston, who analyzed the sales figures and showed that more ABC1 readers (that is, those with better education, employment, and pay, and thus close to advertisers’ hearts) read the News of the World than the Sunday Times—more, indeed, than the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph, and the Independent on Sunday put together. Murdoch must have closed the Screws with a pang.

The front page of the March 27th edition bore an archetypal story, in that it was barely a story at all. The headline read “JORDAN DROVE ME TO SUICIDE.” Now, this could not literally be true, unless the paper’s foreign desk was even more foreign than we knew. Rather, the lucky survivor was Alex Reid, a professional cage-fighter, and formerly the paramour of Jordan—the defining, improbable deity of the past ten years, acclaimed for her volcanic breast implants, for her crowning appearance on a jungle-based reality show, “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!,” and for the five best-selling novels that she engendered but did not actually write. In short, like other personae in the Murdochian drama, she scarcely exists outside the appetites of the tabloid press—and there, you might expect, she would remain, as safe a standby as Christine Keeler was. Should you wish, however, to delve into all that Jordan means, and the reasons for her reign in the jungle that is Great Britain, there were two lengthy, in-depth interviews published last year, one with her and the other with Alex Reid. Both were in the Guardian.


http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/01/110801fa_fact_lane?currentPage=all