Guest Editorial: Under the Black Flag by Uri Avnery

Guest Editorial from OpEdNews.com by Uri Avnery, Israeli writer, ex-Israeli soldier and now peace activist with Gush Shalom:

Israeli War Crimes

Under the Black Flag

(Click here for original article.)

By URI AVNERY

A Spanish judge has instituted a judicial inquiry against seven Israeli political and military personalities on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The case: the 2002 dropping of a one ton bomb on the home of Hamas leader Salah Shehade. Apart from the intended victim, 14 people, most of them children, were killed.

For those who have forgotten: the then commander of the Israeli Air Force, Dan Halutz, was asked at the time what he feels when he drops a bomb on a residential building. His unforgettable answer: “A slight bump to the wing.” When we in Gush Shalom accused him of a war crime, he demanded that we be put on trial for high treason. He was joined by the Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who accused us of wanting to “turn over Israeli army officers to the enemy”. The Attorney General notified us officially that he did not intend to open an investigation against those responsible for the bombing.

I should be happy, therefore, that at long last somebody is ready to put that action to a judicial test (even if he seems to have been thwarted by political pressure.) But I am sorry that this has happened in Spain, not in Israel.

* * *

ISRAELI TV VIEWERS have lately been exposed to a bizarre sight: army officers appearing with their faces hidden, as usual for criminals when the court prohibits their identification. Pedophiles, for example, or attackers of old women.

On the orders of the military censors, this applies to all officers, from battalion commanders down, who have been involved in the Gaza war. Since the faces of brigade commanders and above are generally known, the order does not apply to them.

Immediately after the cease-fire, the Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak, promoted a special law that would give unlimited backing by the state to all officers and soldiers who took part in the Gaza war and who might be accused abroad of war crimes. This seems to confirm the Hebrew adage: “On the head of the thief, the hat is burning”.

* * *

I DO NOT object to trials abroad. The main thing is that war criminals, like pirates, should be brought to justice. It is not so important where they are caught. (This rule was applied by the State of Israel when it abducted Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and hanged him in Israel for heinous crimes committed outside the territory of Israel and, indeed, before the state even existed.)

But as an Israeli patriot, I would prefer suspected Israeli war criminals to be put on trial in Israel. That is necessary for the country, for all decent officers and soldiers of the Israeli army, for the education of future generations of citizens and soldiers.

There is no need to rely on international law alone. There are Israeli laws against war crimes. Enough to mention the immortal phrase coined by Justice Binyamin Halevy, serving as a military judge, in the trial of the border policemen who were responsible for the 1956 massacre in Kafr Kassem, when dozens of children, women and men were mown down for violating a curfew which they did not even know about.

The judge announced that even in wartime, there are orders over which flies “the black flag of illegality”. These are orders which are “manifestly” illegal – that is to say, orders which every normal person can tell are illegal, without having to consult a lawyer.

War criminals dishonor the army whose uniform they wear – whether they are generals or common soldiers. As a combat soldier on the day the Israeli Defense Army was officially created, I am ashamed of them and demand that they be cast out and be put on trial in Israel.

My list of suspects includes politicians, soldiers, rabbis and lawyers.

* * *

THERE IS not the slightest doubt that in the Gaza war, crimes were committed. The question is to what extent and by whom.

Example: the soldiers call on the residents of a house to leave it. A woman and her four children come out, waving white handkerchiefs. It is absolutely clear that they are not armed fighters. A soldier in a near-by tank stands up, points his rifle and shoots them dead at short range. According to testimonies that seem to be beyond doubt, this happened more than once.

Another example: the shelling of the United Nations school full of refugees, from which there was no shooting – as admitted by the army, after the original pretexts were disproved.

These are ”simple” cases. But the spectrum of cases is far wider. A serious judicial investigation has to start right from the top: the politicians and senior officers who decided on the war and confirmed its plans must be investigated about their decisions. In Nuremberg it was laid down that the starting of a war of aggression is a crime.

An objective investigation has to find out whether the decision to start the war was justified, or if there existed another way of stopping the launching of rockets against Israeli territory. Without doubt, no country can or should tolerate the bombing of its towns and villages from beyond the border. But could this be prevented by talking with the Gaza authorities? Was our government’s decision to boycott Hamas, the winner of the democratic Palestinian elections, the real cause of this war? Did the imposition of the blockade on a million and a half Gaza Strip inhabitants contribute to the launching of the Qassams? In brief: were the alternatives considered before it was decided to start a deadly war?

The war plan included a massive attack on the civilian population of the Strip. The real aims of a war can be understood less from the official declarations of its initiators, than from their actions. If in this war some 1300 men, women and children were killed, the great majority of whom were not fighters; if about 5000 people were injured, most of them children; if some 2500 homes were partly or wholly destroyed; if the infrastructure of life was totally demolished – all this clearly could not have happened accidentally. It must have been a part of the war plan.

The things said during the war by politicians and officers make it clear that the plan had at least two aims, which might be considered war crimes: (1) To cause widespread killing and destruction, in order to “fix a price tag”. “to burn into their consciousness”, “to reinforce deterrence”, and most of all – to get the population to rise up against Hamas and overthrow their government. Clearly this affects mainly the civilian population. (2) To avoid casualties to our army at (literally) any price by destroying any building and killing any human being in the area into which our troops were about to move, including destroying homes over the heads of their inhabitants, preventing medical teams from reaching the victims, killing people indiscriminately. In certain cases, inhabitants were warned that they must flee, but this was mainly an alibi-action: there was nowhere to flee to, and often fire was opened on people trying to escape.

An independent court will have to decide whether such a war-plan is in accordance with national and international law, or whether it was ab initio a crime against humanity and a war-crime.

This was a war of a regular army with huge capabilities against a guerrilla force. In such a war, too, not everything is permissible. Arguments like “The Hamas terrorists were hiding within the civilian population” and “They used the population as human shields” may be effective as propaganda but are irrelevant: that is true for every guerrilla war. It must be taken into account when a decision to start such a war is being considered.

In a democratic state, the military takes its orders from the political establishment. Good. But that does not include “manifestly” illegal orders, over which the black flag of illegality is waving. Since the Nuremberg trials, there is no more room for the excuse that “I was only obeying orders”.

Therefore, the personal responsibility of all involved - from the Chief of Staff, the Front Commander and the Division Commander right down to the last soldier - must be examined. From the statements of soldiers one must deduce that many believed that their job was “to kill as many Arabs as possible”. Meaning: no distinction between fighters and non-fighters. That is a completely illegal order, whether given explicitly or by a wink and a nudge. The soldiers understood this to be “the spirit of the commander”.

* * *

AMONG THOSE suspected of war crimes, the rabbis have a place of honor.

Those who incite to war crimes and call upon soldiers, directly or indirectly, to commit war crimes may be guilty of a war crime themselves.

When one speaks of “rabbis”, one thinks of old men with long white beards and big hats, who give tongue to venerable wisdom. But the rabbis who accompanied the troops are a very different species.

In the last decades, the state-financed religious educational system has churned out “rabbis” who are more like medieval Christian priests than the Jewish sages of Poland or Morocco. This system indoctrinates its pupils with a violent tribal cult, totally ethnocentric, which sees in the whole of world history nothing but an endless story of Jewish victimhood. This is a religion of a Chosen People, indifferent to others, a religion without compassion for anyone who is not Jewish, which glorifies the God-decreed genocide described in the Biblical book of Joshua.

The products of this education are now the “rabbis” who instruct the religious youths. With their encouragement, a systematic effort has been made to take over the Israeli army from within. Kippa-wearing officers have replaced the Kibbutzniks, who not so long ago were dominant in the army. Many of the lower and middle-ranking officers now belong to this group.

The most outstanding example is the “Chief Army Rabbi”, Colonel Avichai Ronsky, who has declared that his job is to reinforce the “fighting spirit” of the soldiers. He is a man of the extreme right, not far from the spirit of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party was outlawed in Israel for its fascist ideology. Under the auspices of the army rabbinate, religious-fascist brochures of the ultra-right “rabbis” were distributed to the soldiers.

This material includes political incitement, such as the statement that the Jewish religion prohibits “giving up even one millimeter of Eretz Israel”, that the Palestinians, like the Biblical Philistines (from whom the name Palestine derives), are a foreign people who invaded the country, and that any compromise (such as indicated in the official government program) is a mortal sin. The distribution of political propaganda violates, of course, army law.

The rabbis openly called upon the soldiers to be cruel and merciless towards the Arabs. To treat them mercifully, they stated, is a “terrible, awful immorality”. When such material is distributed to religious soldiers going into war, it is easy to see why things happened the way they did.

* * *

THE PLANNERS of this war knew that the shadow of war crimes was hovering over the planned operation. Witness: the Attorney General (whose official title is “Legal Advisor to the Government”) was a partner to the planning. This week the Chief Army Attorney, Colonel Avichai Mandelblut, disclosed that his officers were attached throughout the war to all the commanders, from the Chief of Staff down to the Division Commander.

All this together leads to the inescapable conclusion that the legal advisors bear direct responsibility for the decisions taken and implemented, from the massacre of the civilian police recruits at their graduating ceremony to the shelling of the UN installations. Every attorney who was a partner to the deliberations before an order was given is responsible for its consequences, unless he can prove that he objected to it.

The Chief Army Attorney, who is supposed to give the army professional and objective advice, speaks about “the monstrous enemy” and tries to justify the actions of the army by saying that it was fighting against “an unbridled enemy, who declared that he ‘loves death’ and finds shelter behind the backs of women and children”. Such language is, perhaps, pardonable in a pep-talk of a war-drunk combat commander, like the battalion chief who ordered his soldiers to commit suicide rather than be captured, but totally unacceptable when it comes from the chief legal officer of the army.

* * *

WE MUST pursue all the legal processes in Israel and call for an independent investigation and the indictment of suspected perpetrators. We must demand this even if the chances of it happening are slim indeed.

If these efforts fail, nobody will be able to object to trials abroad, either in an international court or in the courts of those nations that respect human rights and international law.

Until then, the black flag will still be waving.

Strange weapons by the Israelis in Gaza!.... an Interview with French doctor inside Gaza

Has Israel been using diabolical new weapons on Gazans. Was the assault on Gaza used for new weapons experiments. This must be investigated Big Time!

Sidebar for this video:

Dr. Jan Brommundt talks on Aljazeera TV about the use of strange weapons in Gaza against the civilians. You can see the images of devastation by the Israeli army in Gaza, as well as the people who are trying to recover dead bodies from under the rubble.

GAZA (Ceasefires) Tenuous but Holding, Both Sides Speak

Israel declared a ceasefire unilaterally early Sunday morning, Jan 18, which Hamas did NOT sign, so they did not cease their own hostilities for several more hours before declaring their own. Was there posturing going on. Yes, without a doubt.

So now we have two unilateral ceasefires, which is not exactly reassuring, since neither side is under compulsion to honor the other's. So forces for peace must act to firm peace up. Simultaneously, peace with JUSTICE must be sought, and that means investigating charges of war crimes on both sides, but even more importantly, the elephant in the living room must be confronted, and that is the Occupation. Until the Occupation is ended and Palestinians allowed a free and open state to exist in, there will never be peace.

Here is the sidebar for this video:

ITN (UK) - (Independent Television News)

Sunday 18 January 2009

Hamas announces ceasefire on Israel

Palestinian militant group Hamas has announced a ceasefire with Israel, giving the Jewish state one week to pull troops out of the Gaza strip.

It comes hours after the Israeli leaders voted to halt the offensive in region that has killed nearly 1,200 people.

A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said earlier that if a ceasefire held in the Hamas-ruled enclave, Israel could start the process of withdrawing its forces.

A Hamas official in Cairo, Ayman Taha, said: "Hamas and the factions announce a ceasefire in Gaza starting immediately and give Israel a week to withdraw."

The Islamist group said previously it would not stop its attacks as long as Israeli soldiers remained in the Gaza Strip.

Taha said Hamas was demanding the opening of all Gaza border crossings for the entry of "all materials, food, goods and basic needs".

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has touched down in the Middle East for an international summit on the crisis.

International leaders are holding a summit at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh which is to be co-chaired by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Also attending are United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and senior politicians from Germany, Italy, Spain, Turkey and Jordan.

As he arrived in Egypt, Mr Brown announced an additional £20 million of British humanitarian aid and called for renewed efforts to find a lasting peace in the region.

In an apparent criticism of the scale of the Israeli response to Hamas rocket attacks, Mr Brown said "too many" innocent people had died in the 22-day assault on Gaza.

Mr Brown said the violence in Gaza must not halt the search for a path to peace, but should spur the international community on in its efforts to establish a sustainable two-state solution.

"This conflict has once again demonstrated the urgent need to forge a longer term settlement which gives security to both Israelis and Palestinians," he said.

(source)

---
AFP

18/01/2009

At least 1,206 Palestinians, including 410 children, have been killed since the start of Israel's deadliest-ever assault on the territory on December 27, according to Gaza medics, who said another 5,300 people have been wounded.

Those slain in the war also include 109 women, 113 elderly people, 14 paramedics, and four journalists, according to Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza emergency services.

Since the start of the operation10 Israeli soldiers and three civilians have been killed in combat or in rocket strikes. The army says more than 700 rockets and mortar rounds have been fired into Israel during that period.

Meet Anna Baltzer: Life In Occupied Palestine, Parts One Thru Six

PART ONE:

PART TWO:



PART THREE:


PART FOUR:


PART FIVE:


PART SIX:


Meet Anna Baltzer, young, articulate, highly intelligent and committed to justice for Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East. She offers a new paradigm for the up and coming generation of American Jews (and Jews beyond America) who are shocked and bewildered by the brutality and racism of the Israeli State and are grasping for a way out of this dark cycle of violence that affects Jews all over the world at least indirectly. She offers a paradigm of compassion and understanding toward Palestinians, in a word, a strong step toward the path of Love. For the last six decades everyone has tried the opposite path, the path of FEAR, and we can see to what wretched point that has brought us now.

Here is the video sidebar for Part One:

Life in Occupied Palestine: Eyewitness Stories and Photos

Anna Baltzer, Jewish American Columbia graduate, Fulbright scholar, author of "Witness in Palestine", and the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, shares her discovery of Israel's human rights violations in Palestine.

Anna's MySpace page: http://tinyurl.com/83mr7d

Anna's Eyewitness Reports from Palestine: http://annainpalestine.blogspot.com/

Huge Rally for Gaza in Madrid: Manifestacion por Gaza (Palestina) en Madrid

Estimates as high as 250,000 people marched in solidarity with the people of Gaza today, Sunday, January 11, 2009.

John Pilger's Classic Documentary: "Palestine is Still the Issue"

A must-watch video for understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict:


From John Pilger:

Twenty-five years ago, I made a film called Palestine Is Still The Issue. It was about a nation of people - the Palestinians - forced off their land and later subjected to a military occupation by Israel. An occupation condemned by the United Nations and almost every country in the world, including Britain.

But Israel is backed by a very powerful friend, the United States. So in 25 years, if we're to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed. What has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back.

Stateless and humiliated for so long, they've risen up against Israel's huge military machine, although they themselves have no army, no tanks, no American planes and gun ships or missiles.

Some have committed desperate acts of terror, like suicide bombing. But for Palestinians, the overriding, routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison. This film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the oldest human struggle - to be free. (source)

France Blasts Israeli Ground Offensive

This is an excerpt from an article posted on the website, Palestine Chronicles, an excellent source of news about Palestine and Israel.

France condemned late on Saturday, January 3, an Israeli ground military offensive against the heavily-populated besieged Gaza Strip, while London said the operation shows the urgent need for an immediate ceasefire.

"France condemns the Israeli ground offensive against Gaza just as it condemns the continuing firing of rockets," Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said in a statement issued by his office.

Israeli ground forces began moving into Gaza earlier Saturday following a week of massive strikes, which have so far left 460 Palestinians dead including 75 children.

Israeli tanks rolled into Gaza and engaged in night-time battles with resistance fighters.

"This dangerous military escalation complicates the efforts undertaken by the international community, in particular the EU and France, the members of the Quartet, and the states in the region to stop the fighting, bring immediate aid to civilians and find a permanent ceasefire," Kouchne warned.

President Nicolas Sarkozy is due to fly to the Middle East on Monday, hoping to rally key players in the region behind a French plan to pressure Israel and Hamas to renew a failed ceasefire.

For the full article, click here

Palestinian and Israeli Officials' Positions on January 3rd

In interviews with MSNBC, the Palestinian official headed for the UN is demanding peace while the Israeli official is protesting that Israel only wants peace, so why is Gaza still sinking into the lower rings of Hell right now? Because Israel is still determined to decapitate Hamas, preferring a docile government in control of Gaza and because it is trapped in its own rhetoric of demonizing Hamas as a terrorist organization, rendering Israel incapable of even negotiating with Hamas. Yet a few years back, Israel was working to enhance Hamas's power in Gaza against then Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Now that's cynical politics.

Anyway, you can can compare these two officials' statements.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

An Excerpt from A Hundred Eyes for an Eye:

Israel's airstrikes "have killed at least 270 people so far, injured more than 1,000, many of them seriously, and many remain buried under the rubble so the death toll will likely rise," Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies pointed out on Sunday, two days into Israel's attack. "This catastrophic impact was known and inevitable, and far outweighs any claim of self-defense or protection of Israeli civilians." She mentioned that "the one Israeli killed by a Palestinian rocket attack on Saturday after the Israeli assault began was the first such casualty in more than a year."

Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel's violations of the Geneva conventions and the long terrible history of its methodical collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage in the conflict.

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," Gandhi said.

What about a hundred eyes for an eye? ...

What's going on in Gaza right now is not just an eye for an eye. It's a hundred eyes for an eye. And the current slaughter is not only an ongoing Israeli war crime. It has an accomplice named Uncle Sam.

"Al Nakba"--The Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948

With the situation in Gaza and the West Bank growing more chaotic daily, and while the world is pressing for Israel and Palestinians to come up with a real and just solution, it is absolutely indispensible to know the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially what happened in and around 1948. To the Palestinians this was the time of the infamous "Al Nakba" (the Catastrophe), when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven into exile from their villages and lands in areas Israelis were now claiming as their own, and where they needed to eliminate the Palestinian majority for political reasons as well.

Here is a video that gives you a look at events in 1948 from the Palestinian perspective. Some will criticize this as propaganda, or simply part of a more complex picture. However, be that as it may, this is still how Palestinians themselves largely view their history, and we cannot begin to understand their differences with the State of Israel unless we can see things through their eyes. Personally, my studies of history lead me to consider this video as quite representative of what happened. Leading Jewish scholars like Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, and Tom Segev have debunked, to my satisfaction at least, the official Israeli revionist claims that Al Nakba is a myth.

Another reason to show this video is to simply point out, in photographs, that a viable Palestinian culture existed prior to 1948, and that, moreover, some Palestinians were and are Christians, not just Moslems. Revisionist propagandists on the Right have also been trying to paint a picture of wandering "Arab" populations that just happened to be more or less squatting on or enticed into settling in Palestinian territory just prior to 1948, and that they had no history, no culture, nada.

Yet nothing could be farther from the truth as you will see as you watch this video. And again, let me point out, especially for those of you who are Christians, that both Palestinian Moslems and Christians were driven from their homes by Israeli forces in 1948.

Outlandish & Sami Yusuf "Try not to cry" 4 Children of Adam

This is a song of love, compassion and solace for all the children of the world suffering from war, occupation, oppression and indifference.

Jesus said "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me."

Hundreds of thousands of children have been slain, maimed, beaten, starved, abandoned, orphaned, sexually abused, expolited, enslaved, turned into child-soldiers, and on and on in just this year alone. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, to name some of the major conflicts, have been particularly gruesome for children. What does this translate into in the light of Christ's passage above?

The murder of Christ, relentlessly, daily, ghoulishly.

Some of the worst murderers of Christ are countries that pretend to be Christian, such as the United States, Great Britain, Ethiopia, which are, as I write, employing artillery strikes, air strikes and military engagements that inevitably hit civilian communities or random civilian victims, including children. Moreover, war creates circumstances that traumatize, terrorize and deprive children in these war zones of hope, health, education, and even food and shelter.

But the murder of Christ in the external world is but the result of the murder of Christ in each and every one of our internal worlds. A psychiatrist explained it to me once decades ago, how society takes every very young child, each of them a beautiful child of God, and begins to imprison that child behind bars of denigration, punishment, rejection and/or conditional love, entrapping the body in a coffin of repressed emotions, as the living essence within that child growing into an adolescent is met with painful prohibitions against being itself or expressing itself, including sexually ultimately, for sexuality connects one to Nature and the Cosmos in the most fundamental way. In a word, one becomes armored, armored against one's own feelings and emotions.

Eventually one grows into a socially adjusted and rigid mannequin of the State, to lesser or greater degree, going through the motions of living while actually feeling dead or alienated on the inside, quite divorced from the divinity within, the Christ-essence within. Having lost this core essence, it is an easy step to become a mechanistic automation of the State, nowhere more manifest than in the Armed Forces of a country, where this rigidity, this armoring, is taken to its ultimate extremity both physically and psychologically, where one is now expected to blindly kill, and kill, and kill when so ordered, creating actual rigor mortis in one's victims.

The opposite of the living Christ within us is death and contraction. A nation or people that actually worships war is a culture that worships the annihilation of the life force, a death culture, in a word.

The great psychosomatic pioneer, Wilhelm Reich, actually wrote a book on this subject, entitled The Murder of Christ. Counterpunch Online Magazine actually reprinted Chapter 14 of this profound work back in 2002, the chapter entitled Gethsemane. Here is an excerpt:

Christ is Life. And Christ was manhandled just as Life was manhandled long before him and long after the crucifixion and is still manhandled today.

And all his admirers fled and forsook him while he was captured, just as they all had fallen asleep again and again before he was taken and while he went through the agony of the innocent one in supreme distress.

And even his God seemed to have abandoned him. But Life within had not abandoned him. His Life within kept acting as Life acts, up till the last breath. And this is so because God is Life within and without. God did not abandon him at all, except as an image of misled men, corresponding to no reality.

Life had known who would deliver it to its enemies. It had known it for a very long time. It saw the traitor step up to it and kiss it on the cheek as he still said, " Master! "

And this, again, is the plague.

Christ's story has moved and stirred humanity to tears and sorrow and great art because it is humanity's own tragic story. Men are Christs and victims of the plague, helpless before their own courts and fleeing disciples and sleeping admirers and Judases kissing the Master with a kiss of death, and Marys who give Christ a forbidden, godly love, and deadened bodies that seek in vain God's sweetness in their frozen limbs, but never cease to sense his presence within and without themselves. Men, basically, in spite of all armoring and sin and hate and perversion, are living beings who cannot help but feel the Force of Life within themselves and without themselves.

Christ is Life, dying innocently for many millennia at the hands of a Life that had lost and could not restore God's ways, and therefore kept guarding the ancient laws with glowing, murderous eyes, and swords ready to kill whoever has lived God's life.

Christ is the infant tied down or filled with nuisance drugs until it vomits, not knowing why all is so terribly painful, and slowly settling down into a living death, to grow into a future murderer of Christ.

Christ is the agony of a boy or girl of four lying in his bed in the darkness, desperate because God is stirring in its little body, terrified that mother or father might come and yell or hit because the hands are not above the covers.

Christ is the nightmare of a suppressed God in God-made genitals in infants and children in the first puberty, returning from suppression as terror of ghosts and robbers with knives, and bleak shadows at the windows, as multiarmed octopuses and devils with glowing forks, and a fire burning in hell to engulf the little, poor souls jammed in between God's stirring in their bodies and the parents, the representatives of God on earth, who punish for feeling God in the limbs. This is the source of all sin punished in Dante's inferno, a man-made, madman's nightmare.

And the Judases are the educators and the councils for mental hygiene and the doctors and the priests who guard the entrance to the knowledge of God with threatening words and flaming swords. Did you ever think of how many billions of small children on this earth went through the nightmare of Christ at Gethsemane and Golgatha over the millennia? Did you? You did not. You were " social" and " good to your neighbors " and " liked your enemies like yourselves " and you sent prayers up to heaven for salvation and redemption of your soul, and you knelt before altars of many kinds to obtain forgiveness of your sins. But never, never did you think of the billions of babies and children who bring the very sap of God's fresh life from your endless universe into this miserable world of yours; and you maimed and punished and frightened these children, and do to this very day, for knowing God and living the Life of Christ. And you guard well every single entrance to the houses of knowledge against intrusion of the truth about these countless Murders of Christ committed by you and your appointed ones in the name of God.

And you, defender of the honor of God in some darkened room in some village in some country, don't you think right now, hard, of how you could get at the writer of such " blasphemies " and tar him and put feathers on his skin and put fire to the tar and feathers and make him run screaming with agony through the streets, a warning to every good citizen? You are doing this this very minute. But the times are against you. Some well-guarded gates at the entrances to some of the palaces of knowledge have been broken down and we begin to get an inkling of what has been committed in the name of God for such a horribly long time on so great a number of innocent little Christs, sons of Life and God.

The knowledge of God as the love in your body, which you persecute, is breaking down your guards at the entrance to paradise, which you yourself have put up in your dreams, and your obstruction of living Life on this earth.

You kept brooding over the riddle of the Murder of Christ for centuries and it is your failure to find the answer which revealed you as the true and only murderer of Christ. You kept hiding this well and for a long time. But not much longer will hiding be possible. (http://www.counterpunch.org/reicheaster.html)

This murder of Christ, or as Reich called it, the Emotional Plague, is the halmark of the modern patriarchal, authoritarian state, where only the external symbols of Christ can be worshipped, where the stirrings of Christ within are zealously guarded against by their Fundamentalist priestcraft, the watchdogs of formality, rigidity and alienation.