Israel Near Detonation:
Will the Abramoff Factor Sink Bibi?
by Anton Chaitkin
Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies, seeking an immediate war with Iran or Syria, desperately want war-bent Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu to win Israel's March election, to succeed the comatose Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. While acting Prime Minister, and Kadima Party candidate Ehud Olmert has been a Likud bloc fixture for decades, and is hardly a viable "peace candidate," he, like Sharon, would likely draw the line, and oppose a suicidal Israeli war provocation against either Syria or Iran. Only Bibi Netanyahu, among the candidates in this month's election, would flagrantly defy Israeli nationall interests, to pursue a George Shultz/Dick Cheney-dictated agenda of regional chaos and perpetual war.
At the moment, Israeli public sentiment apparently favors Olmert over Netanyahu. Only some fearful security devolution, perhaps an unprecedented terrorist outrage, might now panic Israelis to opt for Bibi—as they did in 1996, following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and the subsequent unleashing of a string of suicide bombings on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
The notorious Jack Abramoff is the Washington pivot for the underground apocalyptic movement inside Israel that could precipitate such a terror wave. The felony indictments of lobbyist Abramoff and his associates, including former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), have been headline news as a "corruption scandal." But the Abramoff of organized crime, fascist guerrilla movements, and death squads, whose apparatus gives the Cheney power cartel a chance to blow Israel up for a Netanyahu takeover—this Abramoff has not until now emerged into public view.
Jack's Loot Funds the 'Jewish Intifada'
Israeli intelligence sources have told EIR that Abramoff has been financing the Temple Mount fanatics, who would destroy Islam's holy shrines on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, and build a new Solomon's Temple on the site instead. A bombing or other assault on the Temple Mount would set off a tsunami of revenge-driven religious wars.
In recent years Abramoff has had at his disposal hundreds of millions of dollars from gambling casinos and slave-labor sweat shops, much of it in untraceable cash.
Yet the traceable public record, of crimes and cash flows already revealed and confessed to, provides crucial leads for those acting to protect civilization at this juncture.
Senate investigators showed that from gambling casino proceeds, which Indian tribes had contributed to him for charitable and political-lobbying purposes, Abramoff diverted funds into guerrilla training, specialized killing equipment, and other military gear for West Bank Jewish settlers, and for the radicalization of the Israeli army. He was priming an "end-times" movement that is at war against the government of Israel, as well as against Palestinians.
More than $140,000 donated in 2002 to Abramoff's tax-exempt Capital Athletic Foundation, actually paid for sniper scopes, sniper shooting mats, camouflage suits, night-vision binoculars, and a thermal imager; the money also "paid a monthly stipend [of $3,560], and Jeep payments to Mr. Abramoff's [Hollywood] high school friend living in the Israeli West Bank, who conducted sniper workshops for members of the Israeli Defense Force and others."[1]
The U.S.-bred Abramoff paramilitary agent, now going by the name of Shmuel Ben Zvi, resides in Beitar Illit, the largest ultra-orthodox Jewish settlement in the Palestinian West Bank. (Beitar Illit's 25,000 residents are Haredi Jews, with wide-brim black hats and a feudal outlook.)
Among the international communications which Senate probers published, this e-mail (Nov. 10, 2002) from Ben Zvi to Abramoff casts a light on the political aims involved:
"Last night one of their guys who was in the army when I did the workshop for the snipers in his unit, said that they need the workshop badly.... I am now writing out a program for ... containment and neutralization of terrorists.... When I showed them the didactic materials, manuals, and videos, they had tears in their eyes from the excitement. There is so much that they have not had the opportunity to learn in the army.
"The army for the most part creates soldiers, not warriors.... It is not the interest of any government to create warriors that they feel will one day become a fifth column.... Shulamit Aloni, the Labor [Party] blabbermouth, has always expressed fears that the Mizrachi movement will one day make a call to arms, and announce Medinat Yehuda [State of Judea]. So they have always been leery about arming the ishuvim [settlements] properly, let alone training them in guerrilla warfare...."[2]
Medinat Yehuda—the State of Judea—means a projected new Jewish nation to be erected on the ruins of the existing, hated secularist State of Israel, the new kingdom to include the Palestinian territories and neighboring Arab countries, as a supposed revival of the Biblical kingdom of Judea.
The movement for "a State of Judea" is among the foreign terrorist organizations that were named on Oct. 8, 1999, by the Office of the U.S. State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, as one of many initiatives of the American-born fascist, Meir Kahane. (Kahane had been murdered in 1990.)
The state of mind of Abramoff's agent may be gleaned from the e-mail sent Oct. 19, 2001 from Ben Zvi, discussing the hoped-for apocalypse:
"The Zohar [the mystical Cabbala] says that before Moshiach [the messiah] comes, three towers will burn in the gate of Rome (edom). I freaked out when I saw how the schematic drawing in Newsweek referred to the smaller (45 story) world trade center building ... as the 'third tower'...."[3]
The Nazi Underworld
Here we see Abramoff in a realm of lethal action for which greed and simple corruption cannot account.
What in his personal history would have prepared Abramoff to coldly perpetrate political crimes that could lead to the deaths of millions?
The accompanying article, "The Abramoff Family and the Mob Families," shows how organized crime, particularly tied to casinos, boosted Jack Abramoff all through his life (see also "Abramoff, the Russian Mob, and Israel").
His relations to Netanyahu's supporters reflect a quarter-century career at the intersection of the criminal underworld and fascist politics, helping to operate an axis of mayhem between South Africa and Israel.
In 1985, Abramoff opened the Washington headquarters of the International Freedom Foundation (IFF). He thereafter chaired the Foundation, a front for the South African racial apartheid regime's secret police and military intelligence, with other offices in London, Hamburg, Brussels, Rome, and Johannesburg. IFF closed down in 1993 when the South African government cut off its $1.5 million per year covert funding.
The famous South African "superspy" Craig Williamson, a global director of assassinations, ran IFF's actual Johannesburg center. After the black-majority government took power, Williamson confessed to numerous state-sponsored murders. He and other secret police officials revealed that Abramoff's IFF was part of a larger South African military intelligence initiative. Code-named Operation Babushka, it was tasked to counter and destroy the leading black anti-apartheid movement—the African National Congress (ANC)—led by Nelson Mandela.
According to South African intelligence sources who were close to Williamson's and Abramoff's work:
- The South Africans began funding Abramoff even before his 1981 takeover of the College Republicans—perhaps when he was the campus rightist leader at Brandeis University.
- The South Africans financed the College Republicans when Abramoff and his political partners, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed, ran the national group (1981-85).
- Craig Williamson personally trained Abramoff in the arts of deception and political dirty tricks.
University of Durbin professor John Daniels, researcher for the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, reports[4] that Abramoff traveled to South Africa in 1983 to cement relations between the College Republicans and the secret-police-funded National Students Federation (NSF), headed by Williamson's intelligence cohort, Russel Crystal. The IFF, founded in 1985, was reportedly Crystal's idea.
Also in 1985, Abramoff became the director of a putatively private organization called Citizens for America. It was one strand of a worldwide network of mercenaries, illegal arms dealers, drug traffickers, money launderers, terrorists, and private spies, known collectively among intelligence specialists as "the asteroids." Citizens for America was sponsored by rightist financier Lewis Lehrman, in coordination with the Vice President George H.W. Bush side of the Reagan Administration.
Abramoff, his lieutenant Grover Norquist, and South Africa's Crystal-Williamson-linked NSF, organized a 1985 summit conference of rightist guerrilla movements, hosted by Jonas Savimbi's diamond-smuggling UNITA movement in Jamba, Angola. The heroin-trafficking Afghan mujahedin, Oliver North's cocaine-smuggling Nicaraguan contras, Laotian guerrillas, Jack Abramoff, and Russel Crystal were on hand, trying to form a global coordinating body in tandem with the World Anti-Communist League.
Professor Daniels reports that the same groups held a followup conference in Johannesburg a month later.[5]
Abramoff's mentor, Craig Williamson, confessed to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he had co-managed the 1982 bombing of the African National Congress's London office; had ordered the murder of ANC activist Ruth First, a close friend of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme; and had carried out other killings with bombs, along with numerous unconfessed but documented murders, kidnappings, sabotage, and insurrection.
South African paramilitary police death-squad murderer Col. Eugene de Kock, during his own 1996 trial, told the court that Craig Williamson had directed the 1986 assassination of Olof Palme. Williamson's one-time boss inside the paramilitary police, Brig. Johan "Dirk" Coutzee, issued a statement corroborating Williamson's guilt, and added details of the Palme hit, as did Peter Casselton, another associate of Coutzee and Williamson.
The motive? Aside from Palme's public support for the ANC anti-apartheid movement, the Swedish Prime Minister was deeply cognizant of the global arms and explosives cartel (which involved major Swedish companies), and the vast underground apparatus, in which Williamson was a leader, for smuggling arms into the rightist guerrilla movements which people like Abramoff managed. At the time of his murder, Palme chaired the UN's "Palme Commission" for embargoing arms into the Iran-Iraq War.
The Israel-South Africa Axis
Israel stepped into the trade gap when the apartheid regime in South Africa came under international sanctions. Israel traded South African uranium and diamonds for Israeli arms and expertise, and may have tested a nuclear bomb jointly with South Africa during 1979.
Citing universal non-recognition of Israel's right to occupy Palestinian territory, Israel was the only country to recognize the bantustans, South Africa's native-herding enclaves, as sovereign nations.
Israeli intelligence sources have told EIR that Abramoff worked closely with Shabtai Kalmanovitch, the fascist politician and master of the casino gambling, prostitution, and diamond-smuggling based in the Bophuthatswana bantustan.
A Russian immigrant to Israel, with close ties to the Soviet and Russian-Jewish mobsters in North America, Kalmanowitch became the political partner of Israeli mobsters who sponsored Meir Kahane, and of the Gush Emunim radical settlers' movement. Kalmanowitch took part in Israeli, U.S., and Russian spy swaps, teamed up with the Washington-based "asteroids" overlapping Abramoff's interests, and ran coups for Israeli intelligence in black Africa. Israel arrested Kalmanovitch in 1987 and imprisoned him as a Soviet spy.
... And the U.S.-Israel End-Times Axis
In 1988-89, Abramoff produced, with covert South African funding, Red Scorpion, a low-grade action/propaganda movie celebrating rightist African guerrilla movements.
While filming Red Scorpion in South Africa, Abramoff met David Lapin. What Lapin was doing back in South Africa, to hook up with Abramoff at that particular time, remains unexplained.
David Lapin and his brother Daniel had emigrated with their father from South Africa to California in the 1970s. David introduced Jack to Daniel, and it was Daniel who later introduced Jack to Tom DeLay.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin was trained in Israeli Orthodox yeshivas, and was the student and protégé of Rabbi Avigdor Miller, spokesman for Haredi Judaism in America, and an avid supporter of Meir Kahane. After Kahane's murder in 1990, Miller directed Jews to attend Kahane's funeral and to direct their anger against the centrist Jews whom he blamed for Kahane's death.
Here we approach the core of the U.S.-based circle, pivoting on Abramoff, that is intervening in Israel.
It was the effort, over many years, of Baruch Marzel, head of Meir Kahane's terrorist Kach Party, that was uniquely responsible for recruiting the Haredi Jews—the Beitar Illit settlers—into support for the violent Kahane agenda, for the "State of Judea" and apocalyptic war.
Daniel Lapin had lavish funding from Abramoff's war-chest of looted money, and Abramoff's connections to DeLay and to Jack's partner in mammoth fraud, Ralph Reed; so Rabbi Lapin rose to stardom with the radical-right Christian Zionists. Brother David headed Abramoff's Eshkol Academy (a Maryland Jewish school that sank into the morass of Jack's funding frauds), and pulled a million dollars from sweatshops in the Northern Marianas.
Ultra-Right Channels Into Israel:
A Tour Into Hell
Abramoff fueled the West Bank paramilitaries in 2002, as the Cheney-DeLay faction demanded war with Iraq, and new American entities arose to push Israel into war.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin launched the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, co-chaired by Gary Bauer, with James Dobson, Charles Colson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jack Abramoff on the Advisory Board.
That same year, Ralph Reed launched Stand for Israel, an intended Christian-Zionist version of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), co-chaired by Rabbi Yeckiel Eckstein, a covert multimillion-dollar funder of Israel rightists. Reed and Eckstein held a founding convention in Jerusalem and met with top Israel government leaders.
And in 2002, Abramoff's personal network could be seen taking a tour of Israel, to meet with the principal leaders of the movement seeking the end of the state of Israel, a war that could end civilization, and the elevation of Cheney's choice, Bibi Netanyahu, to the Prime Minister's chair.
This was the Jan. 19-27, 2002 Solidarity Mission to Israel of the Orthodox Union, an ultra-right group of some 1,200 North American synagogues, including those with which Abramoff has been affiliated. (The Orthodox Union substantially overlaps with the Mizrachi Movement, named by Shmuel Ben Zvi as potentially invoking the "State of Judea.")
This particular tour is reported on the website of Woodside Synagogue Ahavas Torah (WSAT), Jack Abramoff's own synagogue, in his home base of Silver Spring, Md., a Washington suburb.
The reporter, who took the tour, is the synagogue's webmaster, Jerry Saunders.
Saunders' Woodside Synagogue website has had a shameless relationship with the great benefactor Abramoff: It ran an effusive full-page plug (removed since Abramoff's downfall) for two of his Washington, D.C. restaurants, called Stacks and Archives, both of them "the creation of lobbyist and WSAT member Jack Abramoff.... This reporter has eaten [at Stacks] twice so far and looks forward to the opportunity to try everything on the menu.... Jack we love ya! I can't wait to try Archives."
Saunders reports as follows:
"Where did I go? To Judea and Samaria (West Bank), of course! First I went north to the Binyamin area, visiting Pisgat Zev, Shilo, Eli, Ofra, Givat Amuna. In the south I visited Gilo, Tekoa, Gush Etzion, Efrat, Har Etzion, and Hevron. I went to Yeshivat Beit Orot at its Mt. Scopus Campus, and visited Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem....
"I also met and heard officials speak, including: Rabbi Benny Elon, the new Minister of Tourism.... I met the head of the Binyamin Area Council, Pinchas Wallerstein ... with senior officers from Yesha [Jewish settlers political council] army headquarters.... I had breakfast with Rabbi Yitzchak Levy, Member of Knesset [parliament]. I met with Shaul Goldstein, Head of the Gush Etzion Area Council ... with Eli Suissa, Minister responsible for Jerusalem affairs.... I attended a breakfast with Avraham Duvdevani, Chairman, Settlement Department of the World Zionist Organization.
"Our [Sabbath] speakers included ... Rabbi Schonfeld from the [Orthodox Union's] R[abbinical] C[ouncil] of A[merica] ... and Rabbi Nachman Kahane, Rav of Young Israel of the Old City.
"...The next day I joined a group touring the old city led by Daniel Luria [of] 'Ateret Cohanim' [which acts in Jerusalem to replace] ... Arab protected tenants [with] Jewish families.... We visited one of the homes and later a shul called "The Young Israel of the Old City" and its ... Rabbi Nachman Kahane. Rabbi Kahane would later deliver a talk to our group on [Sabbath]...."
We shall briefly describe here, the role of these individuals, the leaders of the most extreme provocations on which rest the only hope for Netanyahu to take power.
Leaving Rabbi Benny Elon for last, they are:
Pinchas Wallerstein, Mayor of the Benjamin Settlement. While Ariel Sharon's government was negotiating with the Labor Party to get started on withdrawing Jewish settlements from Gaza, and some from the West Bank, Wallerstein issued a call to the settlers to break the law, and physically resist the Israeli government. This deeply polarized Israeli society.
Yitzchak Levy was one of two ultra-radical Knesset members of the National Religious Party (along with Effi Eitam) who in 2005 resigned from, and shattered Sharon's governing coalition over the settlements issue, while four other of his party's members, ordinary right-wingers, stayed with Sharon.
Shaul Goldstein is the head of the Gush Etzion Area Council, famous as a leader of street resistance by settlers against the Sharon government's disengagement plan.
Eli Suissa, as Interior Minister in 1998, cancelled the ban on entry to Israel that had been imposed on American Rabbi Abraham Hecht, who had proclaimed to thousands of rabbis the religious decree calling for the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Suissa said that if Hecht came to Israel, he would be ready to shake his hand.
Avraham Duvdevani is a key planner of the strategy for creating the corridor of radical Jewish settlements reaching southward from Jerusalem (and including Beitar Illit). He heads the settlement division of the World Zionist Organization, the parent body of the Jewish Agency for Israel, which was asked to supervise the resettlement of Jews uprooted from Gaza by the Sharon plan. Duvdevani led a staff revolt within that division against disengagement, and as a board member of the Jewish Agency, gave a strident anti-government speech which led to the Agency backing away from complying with the Sharon plan.
Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld, a former president of the Orthodox Union's "Rabbinical Council of America," was featured in an Aug. 25, 2005 meeting in Queens, N.Y., to fundraise for the radical settlers. Rabbi Schonfeld introduced the featured speaker, New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, top lieutenant to Meir Kahane until the early 1970s. The slogan for Schonfeld's meeting was, "Amidst the Disengagement Darkness, Aliyah [immigration to Israel] Light Pours In." Rabbi Schonfeld reflects the guidance of Rabbi Max N. Schreier, chairman of the Israel Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America, and a director of the Orthodox Union, who hosted many appearances by Meir Kahane at his Brooklyn synagogue, the Avenue N Jewish Center in Flatbush.
Nachman Kahane is a surviving brother of Meir Kahane, and rabbi of the Young Israel synagogue inside what was Arab East Jerusalem. In October 2005, a "Sanhedrin" was formed pretending to revive the Jewish governing council by that name from 400 A.D. They designated Nachman Kahane and six other ethnic-cleansing advocates, to a committee charged with drawing up architectural plans for the new Temple of Solomon to be built on the Temple Mount after the Temple Mount mosques are destroyed.
The "Sanhedrin" recently convened a global meeting of "Noahides"—followers of a hoked-up occult version of the pre-Moses religion of Noah which will allow former Christian and animal-sacrificing Jews to worship together in the State of Judea, when Israel is crushed. The Noahide conference was a decades-earlier project of Nachman's brother, the violent Meir Kahane.
Meir Kahane was jailed in New York in 1971 on explosives charges. Mafia boss Joe Colombo personally came to the jail and paid Kahane's $25,000 bail. After a joint press conference announcing mutual support for their "civil rights," Colombo's Mafia financed Kahane's movement with untraceable cash, while Kahane's Jewish Defense League commandos provided Colombo with bodyguards and muscle for debt collection. Kahane poured untraceable streams of cash into the Ateret Cohanim yeshiva—which was the project of British occult strategists to train priests for the new post-Judaism religion—and into the movement to blow up the Temple Mount. Kahane in the gutter, and Netanyahu the bankers' prince, share a common heritage: Kahane implemented pro-Mussolini Vladimir Jabotinsky's street-fighting program; Bibi is the son of Jabotinsky's private secretary.
Bibi's Tunnelers
Likud party chairman Benjamin Netanyahu is frequently a guest in the Jerusalem home of the Ira Rennert, who made nearly a billion dollars, stripping assets from, and collapsing American companies. Rennert is a heavy donor to Likud campaigns. Rennert's Long Island, N.Y. house with 29 bathrooms and a 100-car garage, is thought to be a possible site for conversion into a U.S. headquarters palace for Bibi if he takes over Israel.
Ira Rennert and his wife, Ingeborg, finance the Western Wall Heritage Foundation. As Prime Minister in the 1990s, Netanyahu gave Rennert's New York-based fanatic group physical control over the tunnel entrance to the complexes underneath the Temple Mount, where the dynamiters hope to go, putting Rennert's foundation in charge of screening and admitting visitors to this potential world-war flashpoint.
But it is to Rabbi Benyamin "Benny" Elon—the man at the head of the visit-list of Abramoff's man Saunders—that Netanyahu has turned to in recent days, in the desperate attempt to overturn the present Olmert government.
Elon is a principal leader of Israeli relations with the U.S. Abramoff-DeLay machine, and the Christian Zionists. Elon visited with Tom DeLay, his main U.S. contact, when President George W. Bush was snubbing Elon for his incitements against the U.S.-backed Road Map for peace program.
Beginning in the 1980s, Elon was a teacher in the Ateret Cohanim apocalyptic cult center in Jerusalem. He is an authority on the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, a founder of the project to blow up the Temple Mount. Elon was considered a key leader of the "inner circle" of the Gush Emunim, the original fascist settlers movement. Elon has been in the Knesset since 1996, and was Tourism Minister until ejected from office by Ariel Sharon.
When Sharon was felled by a stroke, Benny Elon attempted to put together a coalition of rightist parties to make Netanyahu the interim Prime Minister rather than Ehud Olmert, who was Sharon's deputy. Failing in this effort, Elon organized a merger of extreme rightist religious parties, putting himself at the head of their candidates list, to attack Olmert and bolster Netanyahu in the forthcoming election.
In early February, while leading street rioting by settlers against the Israeli government, Elon was injured. This is the foreign-sponsored insurrectionary chaos that might put Netanyahu in power.
It is this facet of Jack Abramoff's operations that must be thoroughly probed by American investigators, if the full extent of the ex-lobbyist's criminal enterprise is to be unearthed, and genuinely shut down, and those American elected officials and others implicated, are to be brought to justice. By the terms of Abramoff's plea agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, he cannot dodge cooperating.
[1] U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing transcript, June 22, 2005.
[2] U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing transcript, Nov. 2, 2005 (emphasis in the original).
[3] U.S. Senate, June 22, 2005, op. cit.
[4] Claudia Braude, "A Blast from the Past," Mail & Guardian Online (South Africa), Jan. 24, 2006.
[5] Ibid.
