Messages from the “Office”

© David Burton 2019

Background

     To date, Daniel Silva has written some 19 books about a fictional Israel spy, Gabriel Allon, and the Israeli Intelligence service, referred to in the books as the “Office”. In real life, Israel’s intelligence agency is commonly known as the “Mossad”.

     Israel’s Mossad, (Merkazi le-Modiin ule-Tafkidim Meyuhadim - Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations) is one of the three major intelligence organizations of Israel, along with Aman (military intelligence) and Shin Bet (internal security). It is concerned with foreign intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis, and covert operations.
     The Mossad maintains numerous Israeli secret agents in Arab and other nations. The Mossad and its operatives have carried out undercover operations against enemies of Israel and former Nazi war criminals living abroad. Mossad agents tracked down and assassinated the Arab guerrilla leaders responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. In Operation Wrath of God, members of Mossad, supported by special operations teams from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spent years tracking down and killing those suspected of planning or participating in the Munich massacre. The Mossad has also been linked with several assassinations of Palestinian leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.[1]

     The first book in the Gabriel Allon series is titled “The Kill Artist” and was written in 1998 The most recent book is titled “The New Girl” and was released in hardcover form on 16 July 2019.

     This article is mainly composed of edited quotations from the Gabriel Allon series of books that, in time, span the first two decades of the twenty-first century. While most of the writing in the books in the series is fictional, the series contains much that is non-fictional and is historically accurate and/or historically relevant. Looking back in time, many of these statements were quite prescient at the time they were written. In addition, there is some recounting of historically accurate events that predate the time span in which Gabriel Allon’s adventures are recounted. My edited excerpts from the nineteen books are restricted to what is historically correct or are related to actual historical events or figures.

     I have enclosed the written material extracted from the nineteen-book Gabriel Allon series of books in quotation marks. If directly quoted, writing from other sources will also be enclosed in quotation marks. Any original writing and material from other sources that is not a direct quote appears without quotation marks.

The Lord spoke to Moses saying, “Send men that they may spy out the land of Canaan, which I give to the children of Israel; of every tribe of their fathers shall you send a man, every one a prince among them.” - Numbers 13:1-2
”By way of deception, thou shalt do war.” - Motto of the Mossad (2001 - Ref. 2; Forward)

Europe

     “On present demographic trends, by the end of the twenty-first century at the latest, Europe will be Muslim - Bernard lewis (2007 - Ref. 3; Forward)

     “Whether Europe will remain a strategic ally of the United States or become a staging ground for future attacks on American soil is not yet known. What is clear, however, are the intentions of al-Qaeda and the global jihadists. Mohammed Bouyeri, the unemployed Dutch-Moroccan immigrant from Amsterdam who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, stated them unambiguously in the manifesto he adhered to his victim’s body with the point of a knife: ‘I surely know that you, O America will be destroyed. I surely know that you, O Europe, will be destroyed. I surely know that you, O Holland, will be destroyed.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pge 483)

     There exist in Europe “useful leftist Euro-idiots.“ (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 102)

     Europeans “are in the midst of a full-blown existential crisis.  . . . it’s one of the reasons they despise {Israelis}. {Israelis} have a purpose. {Israelis} believe {their} cause is just. {Europeans} believe in nothing except their thirty-five hour workweek, their global warming, and their annual six-week vacation in the south.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 165)

     “Another article of faith lay in tatters that November {2011} – the belief that Europe could absorb an endless tide of Muslim immigrants from its former colonies while preserving its cultural and basic way of life. What had started as a temporary program to relieve a post-war labor shortage had now permanently altered the face of an entire continent. Restive Muslim suburbs ringed nearly every city, and several countries appeared demographically Fated to Muslim majorities before the end of the century. No one in a position of power had bothered to consult the native population of Europe before throwing open the doors, and now, after years of relative passivity, the natives were beginning to push back.  . . . No longer would the majority bend to the will of the minority . . . Europe’s age-old contest with Islam, it seemed, had entered a new and potentially dangerous phase.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 11)

     By 2012, “Europeans now viewed the Zionist enterprise with almost universal contempt and scorn. Israel no longer a beacon of democracy in a troubled Middle East; it was an illegitimate rogue, an occupier, and a threat to world peace.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 58)

- England -

     It is estimated that there are 500,000 CCTV cameras dotted around London. Because of criminal activity and CCTV Legal Requirements, many businesses invest in CCTV to improve their business security. This is also the same for domestic use, inside and outside the home to deter crime, especially in a capital city where crime rates tend to be high. There are 15,516 cameras in action in the London subway system alone. It is a well-known fact that the average person living in London will be recorded on camera 300 times in one day.[6]

     MI5 (Military Intelligence, Section 5) is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). The service is directed to protect British parliamentary democracy and economic interests, and counter terrorism and espionage within the UK. MI5 is England’s version of America’s FBI, while MI6 is England’s version of the CIA.

     “. . . the crisis now facing Britain was many years in the making and, to a large degree, self-inflicted. For two decades, beginning in the 1980's and continuing even after the attacks of 9/11, British governments both Labour and Tory had thrown open their doors to the world’s most hardened holy warriors. Cast out by countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria, they had come to London, where they were free to publish, preach organize, conspire, and raise money. As a result, Great Britain, the land of John Locke, William Shakespeare, and Winston Churchill, had unwittingly allowed itself to become the primary incubator of a violent ideology that sought to destroy everything for which it had once stood.  . . . Extremism was tolerated so long as it was directed outward, toward the secular Arab regimes, America, and, of course, Israel. The failure of this policy of appeasement had been held up for all the world to see on July 7, 2005, when three bombs exploded inside the London Underground and a fourth tore a London city bus to shreds in Tavistock Square. Fifty-two people were killed and seven hundred more wounded. The perpetrators this bloodbath were not destitute Muslims from abroad but middle-class British boys who had turned on the country of their birth. And all evidence suggested it was only their opening salvo. Her Majesty’s security services estimated the number of terrorists residing in Britain at sixteen thousand – three thousand of whom had actually trained in al-Qaeda camps – and recent intelligence suggested that the United Kingdom had eclipsed America and Israel as al-Qaeda’s primary target.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pges 63-64)

     “Londonistan . . . They have allowed their capital to become a breeding ground, a spiritual mecca. And a safe haven for Islamic terrorists of every stripe. And it’s a threat ot us all.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pge 460)

     “There was perhaps no more appropriate symbol of Britain’s current predicament than the North London Central Mosque, known commonly as the Finsbury Park Mosque. Built in 1990 with money donated by the king of Saudi Arabia, it was among the most radical in Europe. Richard Reid, the infamous shoe-bomber, had passed through its doors; so had Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker, and Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian terrorist who was arrested shortly before the millennium for plotting to blow up Los Angels International Airport. British police raided the mosque in January 2005 – inside they discovered such sacred items as forged passports, chemical protective suits and a stun gun . . .” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pges 68-69)

     In 2007, England “was now home to several thousand Islamic extremists with known terrorist connections. And just to keep things interesting, Russian espionage activities in London were now at levels not seen since the end of the Cold War. Those activities included the 2006 murder of Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former FSB agent and Kremlin critic who had been poisoned with a dose of highly radioactive polonium-210, an act of nuclear terrorism carried out by the FSB in the heart of the British capital.” (2008 - Ref. 7; Pge 190)

     ‘During the worst of the long and bloody war for Northern Ireland, the region truly was the most dangerous place in the world to wear the uniform of a soldier or police officer. The largest single loss of life occurred on August 27, 1979, when two large roadside bombs killed eighteen British soldiers at Warrenpoint. The attack occurred just hours after Lord Mountbatten, a British statesman and relative of Queen Elizabeth I, was killed by an IRA bomb concealed aboard his fishing boat . . .” (2014 - Ref. 8; Pge 521)

     “In 2005 eight British soldiers were killed in Basra {Iraq} by a sophisticated roadside bomb that was identical to devices used by the IRA in South Armagh {Northern Ireland}. Counterterrorism experts speculated that the blueprints for the weapon reached Iraq as a result of the IRA’s long association with the PLO. Both organizations enjoyed the patronage of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and trained at his infamous desert camps, where they shared knowledge and resources. Libya did indeed supply virtually all the Semtex {explosive material} used by the IRA during the war for Northern Ireland.
     “But Libya was not the only state sponsor of the IRA. The KGB also provided material support to the terrorists in an attempt to create mayhem in Great Britain and thus weaken the Atlantic Alliance.  . . .” (2014 - Ref. 8; Pges 522-523)

     With respect to the enormous amount of Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) monitoring activities in London, Silva wrote: “. . . in Orwellian London looks could be deceiving. MI5 didn’t have to rely on watchers to surveil suspected terrorists. The eyes of CCTV never blinked.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 211)

     In 2018, “there’s a good chance Labour will win the next election. Which means {Israel} will have to contend with the most anti-Israel prime minister in British history.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 282)

     “{One did apply} to work for the {British} Secret Intelligence service. One did not ask to join Britain’s most exclusive club, one was invited. And only if one came from the right sort of family, had the right sort of connections, and had earned a decent degree from either Oxford of Cambridge.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 289)

     “Fort Moncton {is} MI6’s school for fledgling spies.
      - - -
     “Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming {was} the first ‘C’ of the British Secret Intelligence Service. {In the James bond movies, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service is called ‘M’}” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 290)

     “Brexit, which was clandestinely supported by the Kremlin, was a national calamity. Britain would soon be a shell of its former self, unable to put up any meaningful resistance to Russia’s spreading influence and growing military power.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 3)

- France -

     Events in France over the last decade have taken a decided turn for the worst in terms of Islamic fundamentalist terror committed against the Jews of that nation and against the rest of the non-Moslem citizens of France.

     “The French . . . would soon be a minority in their own country, colons in their own land. Someday soon, a century, perhaps a bit longer, France would be a Muslim country.” (2005 - Ref. 12; Pge 208)

     In 2016: “France was presently in the grip of the worst spasm of violence against Jews since the Holocaust.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 4) . . . was it time for the 475,000 Jews of France. The third-largest Jewish community in the world, to pack their bags and leave?” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pges 8-9)

     “Marseilles was no longer a place for Jews.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 117)

     “Anti-Semitism in France, much of it emanating from Muslim communities, has compelled thousands of French Jews to leave their homes and emigrate to Israel. Indeed, eight thousand departed in the twelve months following the brutal murder of four Jews at the Hypercacher kosher market in January 2015. Many French Jews pass their afternoons in Independence Square in Netanya, at Chez Claude or one of the other cafes that cater to a growing francophone clientele.  . . . they feel safer in Israel than they do in Paris, Toulouse, Marseilles, or Nice. Such is the condition of modern France.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pges 517-518)

     Muslim emigres to France, “the citizens of the other France . . . saw {their} Arab world . . . as a cruel and unforgiving place, a place with no future, a place to be fled. . . . a small minority {of the Arab immigrants to France} – small in percentage, but large in umber – had fallen victim to the siren song of radical Islam. Some were prepared to slaughter their fellow Frenchmen in the name of the caliphate {ISIS}.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 327)

     “France is changing rapidly . . . It is no longer a place where it is safe to be a Jew. Each day, it seems, brings news of another horror. Another child beaten or spat upon, another shop window broken, another synagogue sprayed with graffiti, another gravestone toppled.” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pge 217)

     “{B}anlieues . . . ringed large metropolitan centers like Paris and Lyon and Toulouse. For the most part, their residents lived in shabby high-rise housing blocks that were factories of crime, drug abuse, resentment, and, increasingly, radical Islam. The overwhelming majority of France’s growing Muslim population wanted nothing more than to live in peace and care for their families. But a small minority had fallen victim to the siren call of ISIS. And some . . . were prepared to slaughter in the name of the caliphate.” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pge 77)

     “France as they once knew it was gone . . . Soon it would be just another outpost in the Islamic Maghreb.” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pge 241)

- Belgium -

     In 2016: “Belgium had earned the dubious distinction of being Western Europe’s largest per capita supplier of manpower to the Islamic Caliphate {ISIS}” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 56)

- Holland -

     “Holland was now under a sustained and systematic assault by jihadist Islam. The goal of this assault was to colonize the Netherlands and turn it into a majority Muslim state, where, in the not-too-distant future, Islamic law, or Sharia, would reign supreme.  . . . unless the government took immediate and drastic action, everything the freethinking Dutch held dear would soon be swept away.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pge 4)

     “Back in the mid-nineties . . . we began to realize the Netherlands was going to be a problem . . . down the road. The demographics of the country were changing rapidly. Amsterdam was well on its way to becoming a Muslim city. The young men were unemployed and angry, and they were being fed a steady diet of hate by their imams, most of whom were imported and funded by our friends in Saudi Arabia. There were a number of attacks against the local {Jewish} community. Small stuff, mostly – a broken window, a bloody nose, the odd Molotov cocktail.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pge 26)

     Under Nazi occupation, “110,000 Dutch Jews {were} sealed into freight cars and dispatched eastward for murder and cremation. Only one-fifth of Holland’s Jews survived the war, the lowest percentage of any Western country occupied by the Germans. Several factors contributed to the lethality of the Holocaust in Holland, not least of which was the enthusiastic support given the project by many elements of Dutch society. Indeed, from the Dutch police officers who arrested Jews to the Dutch rail workers who transported them to their deaths, Dutch citizens were active at nearly every stage of the process. Adolph Eichmann, the managing director of the Final Solution, would later say of his local helpers, ‘It was a pleasure to work with them.’ ” (2010 - Ref. 13; Pge 92)

- Austria -

     “The Germans are fond of saying that only Austria could convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German. {The Austrians} like to pretend that {they} were Hitler’s first victims instead of his willing accomplice. {They} choose not to remember that Austrians joined the Nazi party at the same rate as {their} German cousins, or that Austria’s representation in the SS was disproportionately high. {They} choose not to remember that Adolph Eichmann was a German, but that eighty percent of his staff was Austrian, or that seventy-five percent of his death camp commandants were Austrian.” (2004 - Ref. 14; Pge 68)

     Kurt Waldheim was a post-war president of Austria. It was later revealed that three weeks after the German annexation of Austria in 1938, Waldheim applied for membership in the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB), a division of the Nazi Party. Shortly thereafter he became a registered member of the mounted corps of the SA. In early 1941, Waldheim was drafted into the Wehrmacht. It eventually came to light that Waldheim rose to the rank of Oberleutnant.. In 1987, the United States Department of Justice and the United States Department of State announced that evidence amassed in an investigation conducted by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI) had established a prima facie case that Waldheim participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution during World War II.[Ref. 15]

     “Remember {former Austrian President Kurt} Waldheim and the revelations about his Nazi past? They were dismissed as foreign agitation and outside interference in Austrian affairs. Ordinary Austrians closed ranks around him, as did the Austrian authorities. The affair raised the level of anti-Semitism inside the country.” (2004 - Ref. 14; Pge 119)

     “ONE HUNDRED MILES west of Vienna, the river Danube bends abruptly from the northeast to the southeast. The ancient Romans installed a garrison on the spot; and when the Romans were gone, the people who would one day be known as Austrians built a city they called Linz. The city grew rich from the iron ore and salt that moved along the river, and for a time it was the most important in the Austro-Hungarian Empire – more important, even, than Vienna. Mozart composed his Symphony no. 36 while living in Linz; Anton Bruckner served as the organist in the Old Cathedral. And in the small suburb of Leonding, at Michaelsbergstrasse 16, there stands a yellow house where Adolph Hitler lived as a child. Hitler moved to Vienna in1905 in hopes of winning admission to the Academy of Fine Arts, but his beloved Linz would never be far from his thoughts. Linz was to be the cultural center of the Thousand-Year Reich, and it was there that Hitler planned to build his monumental Fuhrermuseum of plundered art. Indeed, the very code name of his looting operation was Sonderauftrag Linz, or Special Operation Linz. Modern Liz had worked hard to conceal its links to Hitler, but reminders of the past were everywhere. The city’s most prominent firm, the giant Voestalpine AG, was originally know as the Hermann-Goering-Werke. And twelve miles east of the city center were the remnants of Mauthausen, the Nazi camp where inmates were subjected to ‘extermination through labor.’ Among those prisoners who lived to see the camp liberated was Simon Wiesenthal, who would later become the world’s most famous Nazi hunter.” (2014 - Ref. 16; Pges 272-273)

     “The banks of Austria were once among the most secretive in the world – more secretive, even , than the banks of Switzerland. But in May 2013, under pressure from the European Union and the United States, Austrian banks agreed to begin sharing information on their depositors with the tax authorities of other countries. For better of worse,  . . . family-owned boutique-style banks that cater to the very wealthy . . . are fast becoming a dying breed. {By2014} Switzerland’s ledger of private banks had shrunk to just 148 institutions, with further consolidation and attrition expected to reduce that number even further in the future. Clearly, the days of the gnome seem numbered, as American and European governments engage in ever more aggressive measure to combat tax evasion {and money laundering}.” (2014 - Ref. 16; Pge 495)

- Italy and the Vatican -

     The issue of the return of anti-Semitism in Western Europe was brought up in Silva’s 3rd Gabriel Allon book in 2004. In truth, Western Europe’s anti-Semitism had not died with WWII and had been a constant ever since the Jews were driven out of their homeland, the Land of Israel, in the 1st century, CE and some of those driven out had settled on the continent of Europe. Anti-Semitism took a decidedly more intense and deadly turn with the rise of Christianity and the ascendancy of papal Catholicism based in Rome. “Security had been tightened at Jewish sites across Europe. So far, Venice had been spared, but in Rome and in cities across France and Austria, synagogues and cemeteries had been vandalized and Jews attacked on the streets. The newspapers were calling it the worst wave of public anti-Semitism to sweep the continent since the Second World War.” (2003 - Ref. 17; Pge 130)

     There were indeed many righteous among the Gentiles who aided the Jews during the Nazi horror of WWII. Italy deserves special thanks. However, such gratitude does not appear to be due the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church. “. . remarkably, four-fifths of Italian Jewry survived the war. As soon as the Germans occupied Italy, thousands immediately sought and were provided shelter in convents and monasteries, as well as in Catholic hospitals and schools. Thousands more were given shelter by ordinary Italians. Adolph Eichmann testified at his trial that every Italian Jew who survived the war owed his life to an Italian.
      - - -
     “. . . there is no evidence to suggest the Vatican issued instructions to Church institutions to offer shelter and comfort to Jews fleeing the {Nazi} roundup {of Italian Jews}. . .
      - - -
     “. . . The Italian Catholics who rescued Jews did so out of goodness and compassion – not because they were acting under the orders of their Supreme Pontiff. If they had waited for a papal directive to act . . . many more Italian Jews would have died at Auschwitz and Birkenau. There was no such directive. Indeed, despite repeated appeals from the Allies and Jewish leaders around the world, Pope Pius never found it in his heart even to speak out against the mass murder of Europe’s Jews.
     “despite public profession of love for the Jewish people, . . . His holiness did not care much for {Jews}. Remember, he was raised in a Catholic Church that preached anti-Semitism as a matter of doctrine. He equated Jews with Bolshevism and bought into all the old hatreds that Jews were interested only in the material. Throughout the nineteen thirties, while he was the Secretary of State, the Vatican’s official newspapers were filled with the same sort of anti-Semitic filth one might have read in Der Sturmer. One article in the Vatican journal La Civilta Cattolica actually discussed the possibility of eliminating the Jews through annihilation. . . “ (2003 - Ref. 17; Pges 136-138)

     Adolph Eichmann “had escaped via ‘the convent route’ – a chain of monasteries and Church properties stretching from Germany to the Italian port of Genoa. In Genoa, he had been given shelter by Franciscans and, through the auspices of Church haritable organizations, was provided with false papers describing him as a refugee. On June 14, 1950, he emerged from the shelter of the Franciscan convent long enough to board the Giovanna C, bound for Buenos Aires. Bound for a new life in the New World . . . The leader of the Church had not been able to find the words to condemn the murder of six million, but his bishops and priests had given comfort and sanctuary to the greatest mass killer in history.” (2003 - Ref. 17; Pge 263)

     “Pope Pius XII reigned from 1939 until his death in 1958. His public silence in the face of the annihilation of Europe’s Jews, despite repeated Allied requests to speak out, is . . . a fact that is ‘rarely contested, nor can it be.’ So is the sanctuary and aid given by Church officials to Adolph Eichmann and other prominent Nazi murderers after the defeat of the Third Reich.” (2003 - Ref. 17; Pge 453)

     Alois Hudal was an Austrian bishop in the Catholic church, based in Rome. For thirty years, he was the head of the Austrian-German congregation of Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome. In his 1937 book, The Foundations of National Socialism, Hudal praised Adolf Hitler and his policies and indirectly attacked Vatican policies. After World War II, Hudal helped establish the ratlines, which allowed prominent Nazi German and other European former Axis officers and political leaders, among them accused war criminals, to escape Allied trials and denazification.[18] Bishop Hudal “helped hundreds of Nazi war criminals flee Europe, including Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl. The Vatican maintains that Bishop Hudal was acting without the approval or knowledge of the pope or other senior Curial officials.” (2004 - Ref. 14; Pge 420)

     “The assistance given to fugitive Nazi war criminal by the Roman Catholic Church has been well documented.” (2010 - Ref. 13; Pge 522)

     “The Vatican Bank . . . has a long and well-documented history of financial transgressions. The latest {as of 2012} occurred in September 2010, when Italian authorities conducting a money-laundering probe seized $30 million from the bank and placed two of its top officers under investigation. The following month, police in Sicily announced they had uncovered a money-laundering scheme that utilized the Vatican Bank account of a priest whose uncle had been convicted on charges of Mafia association.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 438)

     Located in Rome is the “Division for the Defense of Cultural Patrimony. But within the world of law enforcement, the unit is known simply as the Art Squad.
     “At the time of its formation in 1969, it was the only police organization anywhere in the world dedicated exclusively to combating the lucrative trade in stolen art and antiquities. Italy surely had need of such a unit, for it was blessed with both an abundance of art and countless professional criminals bent on stealing every last bit of it. During the next two decades, the Art Squad brought charges against thousands of people suspected of involvement in art crime and made numerous high-profile recoveries, including works by Raphael, Giorgione, and Tintoretto.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pges 82-83)

- Germany -

     “Ome would think that businessmen from Germany, the country that carried out the Holocaust, would have at least some qualms about doing business with a regime that has spoken openly about wiping the State of Israel from the face of the map. One would think, too, that Switzerland, the country that profited most from the Holocaust, would have similar reservations. But apparently not. If Iran succeeds in developing nuclear weapons, other countries in the region will surely want a nuclear capability of their own. Which means there is the potential for enormous future profits for firms willing to sell sensitive, export-restricted material to the highest bidder.” (2010 - Ref. 13; Pge 523)

- Switzerland -

     Switzerland “turned looted Nazi gold into hard currency. It turned the dental gold and wedding rings of the Jewish people into hard currency. Thousands of terrified Jews placed their life savings in {Swiss} banks on the way to the death chambers of Auschwitz and Sobibor, and then those same banks kept the money instead of handing it over to their rightful heirs.” (2002 - Ref. 19; Pge 383)

     “{Switzerland} didn’t sit on the sidelines. {Switzerland} collaborated with Adolph Hitler! {Switzerland} gave him guns and {Switzerland} gave him money. {The Swiss were} his servants . . .
     “. . . {Switzerland} did reap a financial reward for {its} neutrality {in the Second World War} . . . After the war, {the Swiss} settled with the allies and all was forgiven, because the West needed {Swiss} money to help rebuild Europe. Then came the Cold War, and the West needed {Switzerland} again. Now {circa 2002}, the Cold War is over, and everyone from both sides of the Iron Curtain is beating down the Swiss door with their cap in hand. Everyone wants an apology. Everyone wants money. But someday, you’re going to need us again. It’s always been that way. The German princes the French kings, the Arab sheiks and the American tax evaders, the drug lords and the arms merchants. . .” (2002 - Ref. 19; Pge 400)

    ”During the Occupation of France, the forces of Nazi Germany seized hundreds of thousands of paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and other objects d’art. Tens of thousands of pieces remain unaccounted for to this day {circa 2002}. In 1996, the Swiss federal assembly created the so-called Independent Commission of Experts and ordered it to investigate the actions of Switzerland during the Second World War. In its final report, released in August 2001, the commission acknowledged that Switzerland was a ‘trade center’ for looted art. And that substantial numbers of painting had entered the country during the war. How many of those works remain hidden in the vaults of Switzerland’s banks and in the homes of its citizens no one knows.” (2002 - Ref. 19; Pge 435)

     “. . . the shameful wartime behavior of Switzerland’s banks {has been well documented.} Less well-known, however, is the role played by Swiss high-technology firms in secretly supplying aspiring nuclear powers with the sophisticated equipment required to produce highly enriched uranium.  . . . {An} expert describes how in the 1990s, CIA operatives ‘witnessed Swiss government officials helping suppliers send sensitive goods to Pakistan, making a mockery of the official Swiss policy to maintain strict export control laws.’ Furthermore, ‘the Swiss government demonstrated an unwillingness to take action to disrupt these activities or to work with the CIA.’ Quite the opposite . . .
     “While many Swiss firms have been willing proliferators – and no doubt remain so today - there is little disagreement among intelligence officials as to which Western European country has the most firms involved in the lucrative clandestine trade in nuclear materials. That dubious distinction belongs to Germany.” (2010 - Ref. 13; Pges 522-523)

     The Geneva Freeport is a free port zone close to the Geneva city center. Tucked away within its walls, somewhere around a million of some of the most exquisite artworks ever made are crated and sealed in cramped storage vaults.
     Concealed and incarcerated in wooden cases of the Geneva Freeport, treasures of art history are hidden within miles of identical corridors with faceless locked metal doors. Whilst there, these artworks are not the property of a single institution or art-crazed individual – no, they are the possessions of an unaligned group of art dealers, collectors and offshore companies, all of whom enjoy the anonymity and prison-like security provided by the Swiss facility.
     The reason why someone would choose to keep their prized possessions in such conditions is a simple one – the world’s financial elite is increasingly investing in expensive stuff, and freeports are becoming their repositories of choice. Freeports offer security and confidentiality, the ability for owners to hide behind aliases or false nominees, and an array of tax advantages.
     Freeports originated in the 19th century when they served the purpose of temporary storage for goods like grain and tea. In the last few decades, a handful of them (including the Geneva’s one) have increasingly come to operate as lockers for the superrich.[20]

     “Geneva Freeport, a secure tax-free repository where the global superrich stashed away treasures of every kind: gold bars, jewelry, vintage wine, automobiles, and, of course, art.” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pge 196)

     The Swiss intelligence community is a group of agencies with responsibilities to protect the interests and infrastructure of Switzerland. As of 1 January 2010, a new security policy instrument was created in Switzerland, the Intelligence Service of the Federation or NDB (Nachrichtendienst des Bundes) in German. [21]

     “The NDB, like Switzerland itself, was small but efficient. Headquartered in a drab office block in Bern, the service was responsible for keeping the many problems of a disorderly world from crossing the borders of the Swiss Confederation. It spied on the spies who plied their trade on Swiss soil, watched over the foreigners who hid their money in Swiss banks, and monitored the activities of the growing number of Muslims who made Switzerland their home.” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pge 196)

- Russia -

     As reported in 2008, “the threat to Russian journalists is all too real. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, forty-seven reporters, editors, cameramen, and photographers have been killed in Russia since 1992, making it the third-deadliest country in the world in which to practice the craft of journalism, after Iraq and Algeria. Fourteen of those deaths occurred during the rule of Russian president Vladimir Putin, who undertook a systematic crackdown of press freedom and political dissent after coming to power in 1999. Virtually all the murders were contract killings, and few have been solved or prosecuted.
     “The most famous Russian reporter murdered during the rule of Vladimir Putin was Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in the elevator of her Moscow apartment house in October 2006. A vocal critic of the regime, Politkovskaya was about to publish a searing expose detailing allegations of torture and kidnapping by the Russian military and security forces in Chechnya.  . . .” (2008 - Ref. 7; Pge 502)

     “After a brief stint as prime minister, Putin was elected to a third term as Russia’s president in March 2012. A former officer of the KGB, he is now in a position to rule until at leat 2014, longer than Leonid Brezhnev and nearly as long as Joseph Stalin. Needless to say, not all Russians support Putin’s dictatorial hold on power, but increasingly the voices of opposition are being silenced, sometimes harshly. In November 2009, Sergei Magnitsky, a Moscow lawyer and accountant who accused tax officials and police officers of embezzlement, died suddenly in a Russian jail at the age of thirty-seven, provoking international condemnation and sanctions from the United States. Now it appears the Kremlin has set its sights on Alexi Navalny, Russia’s most prominent dissident and a leader of the protest movement that swept the country after Putin’s return to the presidency. At the time this writing, Navalny is awaiting trial on embezzlement charges - charges he and his legion of supporters have denounced as politically motivated. If convicted, he faces the prospect of spending ten years in prison, where he would be no threat to Putin and his fellow siloviki in the Kremlin. {On 18 July 2013, Navalny was sentenced to five years in jail for embezzlement.[22] }
     “Russians made the lives of{Jews} so miserable that they chose to live beside a malarial swamp in Palestine instead. They supported the creation of Israel to begin with, but in the sixties they threw in their lot with those who were sworn to destroy {Israel}. The Russians like to portray themselves as allies of the West in the war against international terrorism, but we should never forget they helped to create international terrorism in the first place. They encouraged leftist terror groups across Western Europe in the seventies and eighties, and, of course, they were the patron saints of the PLO. They gave Arafat and his killers all the weapons and explosives they wanted, along with freedom of movement behind the Iron Curtain. Don’t forget . . . the attack on {Israel’s} athletes in Munich was directed from East Berlin.” (2008 - Ref. 7; Pge 49)

     “. . . the Kremlin {has} been selling sophisticated weapons systems to the rogue regimes of the Middle East at an unprecedented rate. The mullahs of Iran are one of their best customers, but they’ve also been selling antiaircraft and antitank systems to their old friends in Damascus.” (2008 - Ref. 7; Pge 79)

     “The Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, has assumed most of the internal security functions that were once the province of the KGB, including counterintelligence. Though the FSB liked to present itself to the outside world as a modern European security service, it was staffed largely by KGB veterans and even operated from the KGB’s notorious old headquarters in Lubyanka Square. Many Russians didn’t even bother calling it by its new name. To them, it was still the KGB.” (2008 - Ref. 7; Pge 84)

     The new Russia’s ” ‘managed democracy’ and ‘State capitalism’ . . . {are} just euphemisms for something more sinister: fascism. {Russia} has lurched from the ideology of Lenin to the ideology of Mussolini in a decade. We should not be surprised by this.  . . . The history of Russia in nothing but a series of convulsions. {Russians} cannot live as normal people. {They} never will.” (2008 - Ref. 7; Pge 109 )

     "All too often, a prison sentence of any length in the new Russia of Vladimir Putin is tantamount to a death sentence. According to Russian officials, 4,121 people died in custody in 2012 alone, though pro-democracy advocates say the actual figure is likely far higher. Which might help to explain why Alexander Dolmatov, a Russian pro-democracy activist, chose to take his own life in a Rotterdam detention center in January 2013. Fearing arrest and prosecution in Russia, Dolmatov had fled to the Netherlands in search of political asylum; and when his application was denied, he hanged himself in his cell. The Dutch government has said the denial of asylum had nothing to do with Dolmatov’s suicide. His friends from the opposition movement believe otherwise.
     “Magnitsky, Navalny, Dolmatov: their names are known in the West. But there are many others who already languish in Russian prison cells because they dare to carry a sign, or write an Internet blog, critical of Vladimir Putin. In Russia, the steady descent into authoritarianism continues.  . . .” (2013 - Ref. 23; Pges 475-476)

     “Much of Russia’s spying against the United States is industrial and economic in nature. The reasons are painfully obvious. Nearly a quarter century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia remains largely an economic basket case, heavily dependent on raw materials and, of course, oil and gas. President Vladimir Putin has made no secret of what energy means to the new Russia. Indeed, the Kremlin spelled it out clearly in a 2003 strategy paper that declared the ‘role of the country in the global energy markets largely determines its geopolitical influence.’ Wisely, the Kremlin has softened its language when talking about the importance of Russia’s energy sector, but the goals remain the same. Stripped of its empire and militarily feeble, Russia now intends to wield power on the world stage with oil and gas rather than nuclear weapons and Marxist-Leninist ideology. What’s more, the Kremlin’s state-owned energy giants are no longer content to operate only within the boundaries of Russia where production of oil and gas has leveled off. They are now acquiring both ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ assets as part of their stratagem to become truly global energy players. In short, the Russian Federation is attempting to become a Eurasian Saudi rabia.
     “Gazprom, the state-owned Russian behemoth, is the world’s largest gas company. And its revenues are the source of much of the Kremlin’s annual federal budget. Several former Soviet Republics receive alI their natural gas from Russia, as does tiny Finland. Austria receives more than 80 percent of its gas from Russia; Germany, about 40 percent. While advances in drilling technology are bringing more gas to the international marketplace, the pipelines linking Europe and Russia will help to ensue Gazprom’s dominant position for years to come. Its many European customers should bear in mind that Gazprom operated as an instrument of political repression in 2001, when it purchased NTV, Russia’s only independent national broadcast outlet and a harsh critic of Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party. NTV’s editorial outlook is now reliably pro-Kremlin.” (2013 - Ref. 23; Pges 474-475)

     “. . . Much has changed in the quarter century since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but fomenting discord within the Western alliance remains a primary goal of Russia under Vladimir Putin. Indeed. Putin would like nothing more than to see the complete collapse of NATO so he can reconstitute Russia’s lost empire without the meddlesome West standing in his way. Under his leadership, Russia is once again quietly funneling money to extreme political parties in Western Europe on both the left and right. It seems Putin doesn’t care much about his friends’ politics, so long as they are opposed to the United States and see the world roughly as he does. He is a kleptocrat and has no philosophy other than the cynical exercise of power.” (2014 - Ref. 8; Pge 523)

     “. . . {Russia, under Vladimir Putin} has stood by a murderous client regime in Syria. It has agreed to sell sophisticated antiaircraft missiles to Iran. Crimea and eastern Ukraine are under Russian control. Nuclear-armed Russian bombers are buzzing NATO allies. Indeed, a pair of Russian bombers recently took a joyride down the English Channel with their transponders switched off, disrupting civil aviation for hours. As the West takes a budget ax to its defenses, the Red Army is modernizing at a furious pace. Putin has spoken openly about the use of tactical nuclear weapons to preserve his gains.
     “{The} British Foreign Secretary . . . is rightfully alarmed by what he sees. In March 2015, he described Russia as ‘the single greatest threat’ to Britain’s security. A month later, however, President Obama offered a sharply different view, dismissing Russia as a ‘regional power’ that was acting out of weakness rather than strength. The implication is that, by invading Ukraine and snatching Crimea, Vladimir Putin is actually losing. If only it were so. Putin is winning, which means Ukraine is but a preview of coming attractions.” (2014 - Ref. 8; Pge 524)

     In 2013, Silva wrote. “The increased spying on the part of Russia’s intelligence services against Western targets has been well documented. The KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky recently told the Guardian newspaper that the size of the SVR’s London rezidentura has reached Cold War levels. Gordievsky is in a unique position to make such a claim because he worked for the KGB in London from 1982 to 1985. Furthermore, he is not alone in his assessment; {Britain’s} MI5 has come to the same conclusion. ‘It is a matter of some disappointment to me,’ said {the} MI5 Director, ‘that I still have to devote significant amounts of equipment, money, and staff to countering this threat. They are resources which I would far rather devote to countering the threat from international terrorism.’
     “While London is clearly an important hub of Russian intelligence activity, the United States remains the primary focus of Moscow Center.  . . .” (2014 - Ref. 23; Pge 473 )

     In Russia, “There are striking parallels between then and now. Russia under Vladimir Putin is both revanchist and paranoid, a dangerous combination. Economically and demographically weak, Putin uses his powerful intelligence services and cyber warriors as a force multiplier. When Putin sows political chaos in Western Europe and seeks to disrupt and discredit an American election, he is reaching deep into the KGB’s old playbook. He is engaging in ‘active measures.’
     “Like the tsars and Party chairmen who came before him, Vladimir Putin readily uses murder as a tool of statecraft.  . . .
      - - -
     “Security analysts estimate that two-thirds of the ‘diplomats’ stationed at a typical Russian embassy in Western Europe are actually intelligence officers.” (2017 - Ref. 24; Pges 514-515)

     In the summer of 2016, “The Tsar {Putin} had high hopes for the American presidential election that fall. He was also confident Washington’s days as the hegemon in the Middle East were coming to an end. The Americans had blundered into Iraq and paid a high price in blood and treasure. They were eager to put the entire region, with its intractable problems, in their rearview mirror. In contrast, the Tsar had prevailed in the fight for Syria. He had ridden to the rescue of an old friend and in the process sent a signal to the rest of the region that Moscow, not Washington, could be counted on in times of trouble.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 278 )

     “Moscow’s influence is on the rise because the Russian president did not allow his ally in Syria to be swept away by the madness of the Arab Spring. The rest of the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia, couldn’t help but notice.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 362)

North and South America

- Argentina-

     “Following the collapse of Hitler’s Reich, thousands of war criminals – German, French, Belgian, and Croatian – had streamed into Argentina, with the enthusiastic approval of the {Juan} Peron government and the tireless assistance of the Vatican.” (2004 - Ref. 14; Pge 232)

     “Most of the files dealing with Nazis in Argentina are kept under lock and key in the {Argentinian} Information Bureau. They’re still officially off-limits to reporters and scholars even though the traditional thirty-year blackout period expired long ago.  . . . By all accounts, Peron had the most damaging files destroyed in 1955, when he was run out of the office in a coup.” (2004 - Ref. 14; Pge 238)

     “Argentina, like the rest of South America, was a hotbed of Hezbollah activity.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pge 24)

- America-

     “. . . this ludicrous need of {America} to be powerful and loved at the same time. The American president {Bush} reached halfway around the world and toppled the ruler of Mesopotamia in an afternoon. Not even Caesar could manage that. And now he wants to be adored by those who oppose him. The sooner we stop worrying about being liked, the better off we’ll be.” (2006 - Ref. 25; Pge 372)

     “Every American administration has its buzzwords. This one {the Obama administration} likes to speak in terms of equity. They’re constantly reminding {Israel} of the equity they have have invested across the Middle East.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 166)

     “The new American president {Obama} is an idealist. He believes he can repair relations between the West and Islam, and he’s convinced himself that {Israel is} part of the problem.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 288)

     “These days we try not to mention the enemy by name, lest we offend him.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 82)

     Written in 2016, Silva was highly critical of America’s actions in the Middle East during the second Bush and Obama presidencies. “The invasion of Iraq turned the regions into a cauldron. And when the new American president {Obama} decided the time had come to withdraw, the cauldron boiled over. And then there was this folly we called the Arab Spring. Mubarak must go! Gaddafi must go! Assad must go! . . . It was madness, absolute madness. And now we are left with this. ISIS controls a swath of territory the size of the United Kingdom, right on the doorstep of Europe. Even Bin Laden would have never dared to dream of such a thing. And what does the American president {Obama} tell us? ISIS is not Islamic. ISIS is the jayvee team.”
      - - -
     “A willful ignorance?” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pges 78-79)

     “. . . the American invasion overturned virtually every aspect of Iraqi life.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 64)

     “{By the end of 2009} al-Qaeda in Iraq had been decimated. But in 2011 two events conspired to revive its fortunes: the outbreak of the civil war in Syria and the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq. Now known as ISIS, the group rose from the ashes and rushed into the power vacuum along the Syria-Iraq border.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 104)

     A fictitious Jordanian intelligence officer says in 2016: “We had our problems with Saddam, but we warned the Americans they would rue the day they toppled him. They didn’t listen, of course. Nor did they listen when we asked them to do something about Syria. Not our problem, they said. We’re putting the Middle East in our rearview mirror. No more American wars in Muslim lands. And now look at the situation. A quarter of a million dead, hundreds of thousands more streaming into Europe, Russia and Iran working together to dominate the middle East.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 111)

     Concerning 911 and the rise of ISIS, America “failed to see the gathering storm. And then, it ‘refused to pack a raincoat and an umbrella.’
      - - -
     “. . . {America} overreacted to nine-eleven. The one about how terrorism is a nuisance, not a threat. The one about how we can absorb another strike like the one that brought our economy and transportation system to its knees, and be stronger as a result. And let us not forget the president’s unfortunate remarks about ISIS being the jayvee team. Presidents don’t like being proved wrong.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 261)

     Because of radical Islam, “Americans would once again die . . . becsasue of an ideology, and a faith, born of a region that most could not find on a map. The enemy could not be reasoned with or dismissed; it could not be appeased by an American withdrawal from the Islamic world. America could leave the Middle East . . . but the Middle East would follow it home” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 358)

     As a result of America’s increasingly dysfunctional politics, “There is no doubt that the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 created the seedbed from which ISIS sprang. And there is also no doubt that the failure to leave a residual American force in Iraq in 2011, combined with the outbreak of civil war in Syria, allowed the group to flourish and spread on two sides of an increasingly meaningless border. To dismiss the group as ‘un-Islamic’ or ‘not a state’ is wishful thinking and, ultimately, counterproductive and dangerous. As the journalist and scholar Graeme Wood pointed out in a groundbreaking study of ISIS published in the Atlantic: “The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 520)

     A year or two after the 2016 American elections, Silva wrote: “The new American president had made no secret of his admiration for Russia’s Authoritarian leader and expressed a desire for better relations with Moscow. Now he was embroiled in an investigation into whether the Kremlin had provided covert assistance that helped him prevail in a close election against his Democratic opponent.” (2017 - Ref. 24; Pge 113)

     “The news from America was the usual fare – a looming government shutdown, another school shooting, moral outrage over a presidential tryst with an adult film star.” (2017 - Ref. 24; Pge 218)

     In the 2018-2019 time frame, “the American president declared his intention to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, effectively ceding control of the country to the Iranians and their ally, Russia.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 215)

     ‘. . . The American president {Donald Trump} was obsessed by his standing in the parallel universe of Twitter and Facebook.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 235)

- The CIA -

     “We’re not in the Boy Scouts. If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts, we would have joined the Boy Scouts.” - RICHARD HELMS, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR (2004 - Ref. 14; Forward)

     “The CIA program known as ‘extraordinary rendition,’ the practice of clandestinely transferring suspected terrorists from one country to another for the purposes of incarceration or interrogation, has been well documented. It was put into place not by President George W. Bush by his predecessor, Bill Clinton.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pge 482)

     Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist and columnist for the Washington Post was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey in October 2018. “The CIA . . . concluded that the murder was ordered by none other than Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman {of Saudi Arabia}.
     "Not for the first time, President Donald Trump disagreed with the findings of his intelligence community.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 473)

Arab and Muslim Nations

     “I predicted the Arab Spring would end disastrously, and it has. The Arabs are not yet ready for true democracy, not at a time when radical Islam is in ascendance.” (2014 - Ref. 16; Pge 251)

     “The Arab Spring had briefly held the promise of change in the Middle East. But, sadly, it had reverted into a death struggle between Sunni and Shiite, between the global jihadists and the old order of Arab strongmen.  . . .” (2014 - Ref. 16; Pge 416)

     “The entire Middle East is in flames, and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better
      - - -
     “. . . {The} Americans did that. The president {Obama} and his advisors were too quick to part ways with the Arab strongmen. Now the president’s confronted with a world gone mad, and he doesn’t have a clue as to what to do. About it.” (2014 - Ref. 8; Pge 45)

     By 2015, the “Arab Spring had turned into the Arab Calamity.  . . . The American president had allowed the old order to topple without a viable alternative in place, a reckless act with no precedent in modern statecraft.  . . .” (2014 - Ref. 8; Pge 496)

     “. . . The American president {in 2014-2015} writes love letters to the ayatollah.  . . .” (2014 - Ref. 8; Pge 502)

     Following the Arab defeat in the War of 1967, “While the rest of the world advanced, the Arabs, despite their massive petrowealth, went backward. Arab radio raged against the Jews while Arab children went barefoot and hungry. Arab newspapers printed blood libels that few Arabs could even read. Arab rulers grew rich while the Arab people had nothing but their humiliations and resentment – and Islam.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 144)

     1956 to 1963 was “a time when Britain was fading, America was rising, the Russians were encroaching, the youthful State of Israel was flexing its newfound muscle, and the Arabs were flirting with all the failed isms - Pan-Arabism, Arab Nationalism, Arab Socialism - that would eventually lead to the rise of Islamism and jihadism and the mess of the present.” (2017 - Ref. 24; Pge 287)

     “Do you know what the Middle East will look like if Russia, Iran, and the Chinese displace the Americans in the Persian Gulf?
     “It would be a disaster.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 285)

- Iran -

     As of 2010, Silva wrote “thousands of international companies are currently doing business in Iran. {America’s} old friends in China are among the worst offenders. They’ll do business with anyone, but the Germans aren’t much better. Everyone wants their market share, and in times like these, they’re reluctant to give it up over something as trivial as Iran’s nuclear ambitions. At least seventeen hundred German firms are doing business in Iran, many of them makers of sophisticated industrial equipment. We’ve {the U.S.} been pleading with the Germans for years to scale back their business ties to the Iranians, but they refuse. Some of our closest allies are in bed with Tehran for one reason and one reason only. Greed.” .” (2010 - Ref. 13; Pges 258-259)

     “Bushehr, Arak, Isfahan, Natanz. The key sites in the Iranian nuclear program.  . . . Bushehr is the nuclear power station built with German and Russian help. Isfahan is a conversion facility where uranium ore is turned into hexafluoride gas and uranium oxide. Arak is a heavy water plant. And Natanz, of course, is Iran’s primary uranium-enrichment facility.  . . . Or so it claims.
     “Our governments have long suspected those four sites are just the tip of the iceberg and that Iran is also building a chain of secret underground enrichment facilities.” (2010 - Ref. 13; Pge 346)

     ”The holy city of Qom . . .
     “It was Qom that proved the mullahs were lying. Qom that shattered any misplaced hopes the Iranian nuclear program was intended for anything other than producing weapons. Why else would they conceal a secret uranium-enrichment facility deep in a desert mountain? And why else would they refuse to disclose the facility to the International Atomic Energy Agency, nuclear watchdog of the United Nations?” But there was a nagging problem with Qom. It was designed to house just three thousand centrifuges. And if those centrifuges were Iranian-made IR-1s, Qom could only manufacture enough highly enriched uranium to produce one bomb every two years, not enough for Iran to become a full-fledged nuclear power.
     “Which should mean Qom is worthless. Unless, of course, there are other Qoms, Other secret enrichment facilities just like it scattered around the country.” (2010 - Ref. 13; Pge 347)

     VEVAK (Vezarat-e Ettela'at va Amniat-e Keshvar), in Silva’s books, has today been renamed the Ministry of Intelligence (MOI). With a large budget and extensive organization, the MOI is one of the most powerful ministries in the Iranian government. A significant part of the MOI’s tasks consists in keeping an eye on political, social, ethnic, and religious dissidents, both overseas and at home. It plays the lead role in organizing and conducting terrorist operations abroad, and it runs operations out of Iranian embassies, consulates, and Islamic centers overseas. [Ref. 26]

     “VEVAK was the Persian-language acronym of the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security, Iran’s formidable intelligence service. Department Five was among its most important divisions, for it dealt exclusively with the State of Israel.” (2012 - Ref. 4; Pge 63)

     In 2018, Israel announced it had Iranian documents proving that Iran was violating its nuclear arms agreement. “The documents proved conclusively that Iran had been working on a nuclear weapon when it was telling the global community the precise opposite. But there was no firm evidence they were violating the terms of the nuclear accord they had negotiated with the previous American administration.
     “. . . . {The new American president} made no secret of his intention to withdraw the United States from the Iran nuclear deal . . .” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pges 10-11)

- Egypt -

    ”Takfir was a concept developed in Egypt in the 1970s. a theological sleight of hand designed to give the terrorists a sacred license to kill almost anyone they pleased in order to achieve their goals of imposing sharia and restoring the Caliphate. Its primary target was other Muslims. A secular Muslim leader who did not rule by sharia could be killed under takfir for having turned away from Islam. So could a citizen of a secular Islamic state or a Muslim residing in a Western democracy. To the takfifi, democracy was a heresy, for it supplanted the laws of God with the laws of man; therefore, Muslim citizens of a democracy were apostates and could be put to the sword. It was the concept of takfir that gave Osama bin Laden the right to fly airplanes into buildings or blow up embassies in Africa, even if many of his victims were Muslims. It gave the Sunni terrorists of Iraq the right to kill anyone they wanted in order to prevent democracy from taking root in Baghdad. And it gave Muslim boys born in Britain the right to blow themselves up on London subways and buses, even if some of the people they were taking to Paradise with them happened to be other Muslims who wished to remain on earth a little longer.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pge 54)

     “. . . in September 1970 . . . Nasser died and his vice-president, Anwar Sadat, came to power in Egypt. Nasser had regarded Egypt’s Islamic radicals, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, as a grave threat to his regime and had used mass arrests, executions, and torture to keep them in their place. Sadat had tried a different approach.
     “Sadat had none of Nasser’s charisma and no popular base of support. He was also a rather religious man. He was more afraid of the Communists and the Nasserites than the Brothers, and so he made what would turn out to be a fatal reversal of Egypt’s approach to Islamic extremism. He branded the Communists and the Nasserites as enemies of his new regime and let the Brothers out of jail.
     “And then he compounded the mistake. He allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to operate openly and encouraged them to spread their fiery brand of Islam abroad, especially into the newly occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He also encouraged and funded the creation of groups that were even more radical than the Brotherhood. One was al-Gama’a-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Group. Another was al-Jihad. In October 1981, al-Jihad turned on the man who had helped bring it into existence, assassinating Sadat as he stood on a military reviewing stand outside Cairo. In the eyes of the Islamists, Sadat’s sins were many, but none so egregious as his peace treaty with Israel. Before opening fire, Sadat’s assassin . . . screamed: ‘I have killed a Pharaoh, and I do not fear death.
     “The Gama’a and al-Jihad, of course, are with us still. Their goal is to destroy the Mubarak regime, replace it with an Islamic republic, and then use Egypt as a base of operations to wage a global jihad against the West and Israel. Both groups are signatories of al-Qaeda’s declaration of war against the Crusaders and the Jews, and both are formally under the umbrella of Osama bin Laden’s command structure. Egyptians make up more than half of al-Qaeda’s core personnel, and they hold five of the nine positions in the ruling Shura Council. And, of course, Osama’s right-hand man is Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Jihad.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pges 139-140)

     “Egypt is the spiritual heartland of Islamic fundamentalism, and of course the Egyptian Islamists are a Major component of al-Qaeda.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pge 126)

     By the second decade of the 21st century, Egypt’s “Sinai Peninsula {was} a virtual safe haven for several violent Islamic militias, including a branch of ISIS.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 55)

- Saudi Arabia -

     “The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader.” . . . “Unless the ideological roots of the hatred that led to September 11 are addressed, the war on terrorism will not be won. It will only be a matter of time before the next Osama bin Laden emerges.” . . . “We control the land of the Vatican. We will control Rome and introduce Islam in it.” (2006 - Ref. 25; Forward)

     “. . . Saudi charity has always been a two edged sword.  . . . The charities build mosques and Islamic centers around the world and madrassas that churn out the Wahhabi militants of tomorrow. And they also give money directly to the terrorists, including our friends in Hamas. The engines of America run on Saudi oil, but the networks of global Islamic terrorism run largely on Saudi money.” (2006 - Ref. 25; Pge 25)

     “The Americans know that in many ways the Saudis are the wellspring of Islamic terrorism. That the Saudis planted the seeds, watered them with petrodollars, and fertilized them with Wahhabi hatred and propaganda. The Americans seem content to live with this, as if Saudi-inspired terrorism is just a small surcharge on every tank of gasoline. What they don’t understand is that terrorism can never be defeated unless they go after the source: Riyadh and al-Saud.” (2006 - Ref. 25; Pge 101)

     What about the supposed connection between Saudi Arabia and the financing of Islamic terrorism? Silva writes about “Saudi Arabia’s financial and doctrinal support for global terrorism. The pipeline between Saudi religious charities and Islamic terrorists has been well documented.  . . . after the attacks of 9/11, American officials traveled to Riyadh and demonstrated to the Royal Family how twenty percent of all money given to Saudi-based Islamic charities ends up in the hands of terrorists. Under American pressure, the Saudi government has put in place tighter controls on the fundraising activities of the charities. Critics, however, believe these steps to be largely window dressing.
     “An example of Saudi Arabia’s new commitment to stemming the flow of money to terrorist organizations came in the April 2002. Eight months after 9/11, with Saudi Arabia besieged by inquiries about its role in the attack, state-run Saudi television broadcast a telethon that raised more the $100 million to support 'Palestinian martyrs,' the euphemism for suicide bombers from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The telecast featured remarks by Sheikh Saad al-Buraik, a prominent government sanctioned Saudi cleric, who described the United States as 'the root of all wickedness on earth.' The Islamic cleric went on to say 'Muslim brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy, neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don’t you enslave the women? Why don’t you wage jihad? Why don’t you pillage them?' ” (2006 - Ref. 25; Pges 487-488)

     “A century {ago, Riyadh} the Saudi capital had been little more than a mud-walled desert outpost, all but unknown to the Western world, a speck on the map somewhere between the slopes of the Sarawat Mountains and the shores of the Persian Gulf. Oil had transformed Riyadh into a modern metropolis of palaces, skyscrapers, and shopping malls. Yet in many respects the trappings of petrowealth were a mirage. For all the billions the al-Saud had spent trying to modernize their sleepy desert empire, they had squandered billions more on their yachts, their whores, and their vacation homes in Marabella. Worse still, they had done little to prepare the country for the day the last well ran dry. Ten million foreign workers toiled in the oil fields and the palaces, yet hundreds of thousands of young Saudi men could find no work. Oil aside, the country’s biggest exports were dates and Korans. And bearded fanatics . . . When it came to producing Islamic extremists, Saudi Arabia was a market leader.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pges 254-255)

     The airport terminal in Riyadh, “like every other public space in Saudi Arabia, was segregated by gender.
      - - -
     “. . . The mutaween {the Saudi religious police} were always on the lookout for unveiled women riding in automobiles – especially rich Westernized women returning home from Europe.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 257)

     “THE MAPS REFER TO IT ominously as the Rub’ al-Khali – literally, the Quarter of emptiness. The Bedouins however, know it by another name. They call it the Sands. Covering an area the size of France, Belgium and the Netherlands, it stretches from Oman and the Emirates, across Saudi Arabia, and into portions of Yemen. Dunes the size of mountains roam the desert floor in the relentless wind. Some stand alone. Others link themselves into chains that meander for hundreds of miles. In summer the temperature routinely exceeds one hundred forty degrees, cooling to a hundred degrees at night. There is almost no rain, little in the way of plant or animal life, and few people other than the Bedouin and the bandits and the terrorists from al-Qaeda who move freely across the borders. Time matters little in the Sands. Even now, it is measured in the length of the walk to the next well.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 390)

     “. . . a decade after the attacks of 9/11, much of this money {to the global jihadist movement} still comes from the citizens of Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the Sunni Muslim emirates of the Persian Gulf.  . . . ‘It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist funding emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.’ Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.’
     “One would think that Saudi Arabia, the country that produced Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, would do more to clamp down on terrorist fund-raising on its soil. But . . . the House of Saud has been unable or unwilling to shut down the flow of money to al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Militant groups operate front charities inside Saudi Arabia with impunity or simply solicit cash donations openly during the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 451)

     “Saudi Arabia is a classic straddling state. It combats Sunni extremism while at the same time nurturing it. They’re like a man holding a tiger by the ears. If the man lets go of the tiger, it will devour him.
     “. . . The Saudis are more afraid of Iran than they are of ISIS. Iran is Shiite. And ISIS, for all its evil, is Sunni.
     “And from the Saudi perspective, a Sunni caliphate is far preferable to a Shiite Crescent that stretches from Iran to Lebanon.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 333)

     Nejd in Saudi Arabia is where, “in the early eighteenth century, that an obscure desert preacher named Muhammad Abdul Wahhab came to believe that Islam had strayed dangerously from the ways of the Prophet and the al salaf al salih, the earliest generation of Muslims. During his travels throughout Arabia, he was horrified to see Muslims smoking, drinking wine, and dancing to music while dressed in opulent clothing. Worse still was their veneration of trees and rocks and caves linked to holy men, a practice Wahhab condemned as polytheism. Or shirk.
     “Determined to return Islam to its roots, Wahhab and his zealous band of followers, the muwahhidon, launched a violent campaign to cleanse the Nejd of anything not sanctioned by the Koran. He found an important ally in a Nejd tribe called the Al Saud. The pact they formed in 1744 became the basis of the modern Saudi state. The Al Saud held earthly power, but matters of faith they left in the hands of the doctrinal descendants of Muhammad Abdul Wahhab – men who despised the West, Christianity, Jews, and Shiite Muslims, whom they regarded as apostates and heretics. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda shared their view. So, too, did the Taliban and the holy warriors of ISIS and every other Sunni jihadist terrorist group. They toppled skyscrapers in Manhattan, the bombs in Western European train stations, the beheadings and the battered markets in Baghdad: all of it could be traced back to the covenant reached more than two and a half centuries ago in the Nejd.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pges 55-56)

     Much of the land of Saudi Arabia is “harsh and unforgiving, like the brand of Islam practiced by Wahhab and his intolerant followers.  . . . it was no accident. The cruelty of the desert had influenced the faith.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 58)

     “. . . after the attacks of 9/11, {the Americans} demanded the royal family crack down on al-Qaeda and stem the flow of money and Wahhabi ideology that had given rise to it. The Kingdom’s links to the worst attack on the American homeland in history was undeniable. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi citizens, and Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s founder and guiding light, was the scion of a notable Saudi family that had grown fabulously wealthy through its close financial ties to the House of Saud.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 236)

     “The Mabahith {is} the secret police division of the Saudi Interior Ministry.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 57)

     “Beginning in early 2011, the popular uprising known as the Arab Spring swept the region. Oppressive regimes crumbled in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya, and a full-fledged civil war erupted in Syria. The old ancestral monarchies fared better, but in Saudi Arabia there were violent clashes. Dozens of demonstrators were shot or executed. Hundreds were jailed, including many women.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 256)

     “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has directly and indirectly helped to turn {Great Britain} into the world’s preeminent center for Salafist-jihadist ideology.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 356)

     “. . . Saudi Arabia is not a democracy with entrenched institutions. It is one of the world’s last absolute monarchies.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 473)

     “. . . the U.S. – Saudi relationship appears frozen, and MBS {Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman} is trotting the globe in search of friends. Chin’s Xi Jinping entertained him in Beijing in early 2019. And at a G20 summit in Buenos Aires, MBS exchanged an unseemly high five with Vladimir Putin.  . . . the exuberant greeting was a message to MBS’s critics in the U.S. Congress. Saudi Arabia, he was saying, no longer had to depend only on the Americans for protection. Putin’s Russia was waiting in the wings, no questions asked.
     “A decade ago, such an implicit warning would have been toothless. But no more. Putin’s intervention in Syria has once again made Russia a power to be reckoned with in the Middle East, and America’s traditional friends have taken notice. MBS’s father, King Salman, has made a single overseas trip. It was to Moscow. The emir of Qatar embarrassed the Trump administration by stopping in Moscow on the eve of a visit to Washington. Egypt’s al-Sisi has visited Moscow four times. So too has Benjamin Netanyahu. Even Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East, is hedging its regional bets. Putin’s Russia is too powerful to be ignored.
     “But would a Saudi leader ever break the historic bond with America and tilt toward Russia? A version of the tilt has already begun, and it is Mohammed bin Salman who is leaning Moscow’s way. The U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia was never based on shared values, only on oil. MBS knows full well that the United States, now a major energy producer, no longer needs Saudi Arabian petroleum the way it once did. In Putin’s Russia, however, he has found a partner to help manage the global supply of oil and its all-important price. He has also found, if need be, a source of weapons and a valuable conduit to the Shiite Iranians. And perhaps most important, MBS can rest assured his new friend will never criticize him for killing a meddlesome journalist. After all, Russians are rather good at that too.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pges 474-475)

- Dubai -

     ‘”The Emirate of Dubai is one of the seven emirates of the United Arab Emirates. The capital of the emirate is the . . . city of, Dubai. It is located in the Arabian Desert on the coast of the Persian Gulf.  . . . Dubai has been ruled by the Al Maktoum family since 1833; the emirate is a constitutional monarchy.” (Ref. 27)

     by 2011, the plan to turn Dubai, “a sleepy fishing port into a center of global trade, finance and tourism had been crushed by a mountain of debt. The Dubai dream had turned iut to be unsustainable. What’s more, it had also produced an ecological disaster in the Making. The residents of Dubai had the largest carbon footprint in the world. They consumed more water than anyone else on the planet, all of which came from energy-consuming desalinization plants, and burned untold amounts of electricity refrigerating their homes, offices, swimming pools, and artificial ski slopes. Only the foreign laborers did without air-conditioning. They toiled beneath the merciless sun – in some cases, for up to sixteen hours a day – and lived in squalid fly-infested bunkhouses without so much as a fan to cool them. So wretched was their existence that hundreds chose suicide each year, a fact denied by the Ruler and his business associates.
     “For the eighty thousand charmed citizens of Dubai, life could not have been much better . The government paid for their health care, housing, and education, and guaranteed their employment for life – provide, of course, they refrained from criticizing the Ruler. Their grandparents had subsisted on camel’s milk and dates; now an army of foreign workers powered their economy and saw to their every whim and need.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 343)

     “The residents of Dubai and not only among the richest people in the world, but they are also statistically some of its worst drivers. A collision – be it with another car, pedestrian, or object – occurs every two minutes in the emirate, resulting in three fatalities a day on average.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 377)

- Lebanon -

     “The Lebanese Canadian Bank {exists}, and it is there, according to U.S. officials, that Hezbollah launders at least a portion of the money it earns through its global criminal fund-raising operations. It was an unnamed U. S. federal agent, speaking to the New York Times in December 2011, who first described Hezbollah as ‘the Gambinos on steroids.’ “ (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 438)

- Syria -

     “. . . It is better to leave the monster {Bashar al-Assad} in place, at least for now, because the alternative would be worse. And the Americans and Europeans have reached the same conclusion, despite all the happy talk about a negotiated settlement. No one wants Syria to fall into the hands of al-Qaeda, but that’s what will happen if the ruling family goes.” (2014 - Ref. 16; Pge 226)

     The Assad family “belonged to the Alawites, followers of a tiny, persecuted branch of Shia Islam whom the majority of Sunnis regarded as heretics.  . . . {The grandfather of Bashar al-Assad,} a minor village notable who was good with his fists and a gun, was known as al-Wahhish, the Wild Man, because he had once thrashed a traveling Turkish wrestler. His Father (Hafez al-Assad} could put a bullet through a cigarette paper at a hundred paces.” (2014 - Ref. 16; Pge 261)

     The rise to power of Hafez al-Assad {the father of Bashar al-Assad} “ended a long cycle of political instability in Syria, but at a high cost to the Syrian people and the rest of the Middle East. A client of the Soviet Union, his regime was among the most dangerous in the region. He supported radical elements of the Palestinian movement – Abu Nidal operated with impunity from Damascus for years – and equipped his military with the latest in Soviet tanks, fighters, and air defenses. Syria itself became a vast prison, a place where fax machines were outlawed and a misplaced word about the ruler would result in a trip to the Mezzeh, the notorious hilltop prison in western Damascus. Fifteen separate security services spied on the Syrian people and on one another. All were controlled by Alawites, as was the Syrian military. An elaborate cult of personality rose around the ruler and his family. His face, with its domed forehead and sickly pallor, loomed over every square and hung on the walls of every public building in the country.  . . .
     “Within a decade of his ascent, however, much of the country’s Sunni majority was no longer content to be ruled over by an Alawite peasant . . . Bombs exploded regularly in Damascus, and in June 1979 a member of the Muslim Brotherhood killed at least fifty Alawite cadets in the dining hall of the Aleppo military academy. A year later, Islamic militants hurled a pair of grenades at the ruler during a diplomatic function in Damascus – at which point the ruler’s hot-tempered brother declared all-out war on the Brotherhood and its Sunni Muslim supporters. Among his first acts was to dispatch units of his Defense Companies, the guardians of the regime, to the Palmyra desert prison. An estimated eight hundred political prisoners were slaughtered in their cells.
     “But it was in Hama, a hotbed of Muslim Brotherhood activity along the banks of the Orontes River, that the regime showed the lengths to which it would go to ensure its survival. With the country teetering on the brink of civil war, the Defense Companies entered the city early on the morning of February 2, 1982, along with several hundred agents of the feared Mukhabarat secret police. What followed was the worst massacre in the history of the modern Middle East, a month-long frenzy of killing, torture, and destruction that left at least twenty thousand people dead and a city reduced to rubble. The ruler never denied the massacre, nor he quibble over the number of dead. In fact, he allowed the city to lie in ruins for months as a reminder of what would happen to those who dared to challenge him. In the Middle East, a new term came into vogue: Hama rules.
     “The ruler never again faced a serious threat.  . . . {Later, the} hotheaded younger brother attempted to seize power when the ruler was incapacitated with illness, and was cast into exile. The cherished eldest son, a soldier, a champion equestrian, died violently in an automobile accident. Which left only the soft-spoken middle son {Bashar al-Assad}, a London-educated eye doctor to assume control of the family business.
     “The first years of his rule were filled with hope and promise. He granted his fellow citizens access to the Internet and allowed them to travel outside the country without first securing the government’s permission. He dined in restaurants with his fashion-conscious wife and freed several hundred political prisoners. Luxury hotels and shopping malls altered the skyline of drab Damascus and Aleppo. Western cigarette, banned by his father, appeared on Syrian store shelves.
     “Then came the great Arab Awakening. The Syrians remained on the sidelines as the old order crumbled around them, as if they had a premonition of what lay ahead. Then in March 2011, fifteen young boys dared to spray anti-regime graffiti on the wall of a school in Daraa, a small farming town sixty miles south of Damascus. The Mukhabarat quickly took the boys into custody and advised their fathers to go home and produce new children, because they would never see their sons again. Daraa exploded into protests, which quickly spread to Homs, Hama, and eventually, to Damascus. Within a year, Syria would be engulfed in a full-blown civil war. And the son, like his father before him, would play by Hama rules.” (2014 - Ref. 16; Pges 262-265)

     “There were some Middle East experts who mistook Bashar for a reformer. But in March 2011, when the so-called Arab Spring finally came to Syria, he responded with a savagery that included the use of poison gas against women and children. {As of 2014, more} than 150,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war, and another two million have been left homeless or have fled to neighboring countries, mainly Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. The number of Syrians living as refugees is soon expected to surpass four million, which would make it the largest refugee population in the world. Such is the legacy of four and a half decades of Assad family rule. If the slaughter and dislocation continues, the Assads might one day be rulers of a land without people.” (2014 - Ref. 16; Pge 496)

     By 2017, “One-fourth of the Syrian population {was} living outside Syria’s borders . . . and hundreds of thousands more are dead. And yet {Israel and the Jews} are the ones the world blames for the suffering of the Arabs. As if the creation of a Palestinian state would magically solve all the many problems of the Arab world. The lack of education and jobs, the brutal dictators, the repression of women.
      - - -
     “. . . This horror in Syria should make it abundantly clear what would happen if {Israel’s} enemies ever managed to breach {its} defenses. If the Butcher of Damascus {Bashar Hafez al-Assad} is willing to slaughter his own people, what would he do to {Israelis and Jews}? If ISIS is willing to kill other Muslims, what would they do if they could get their hands on the Jews?” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pges 552-553)

     “Syria {is} where an axis of Russia, Hezbollah, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Shiite militias from Iraq and Afghanistan have propped up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Kremlin’s closest friend in the Middle East. Assad has repeatedly and flagrantly used chemical weapons against his own people, presumably with Moscow’s blessing, perhaps even with Moscow’s help. Thus far, an estimated four hundred thousand people have perished in Syria’s civil war, and there is no end to the conflict in sight.  . . .” (2017 - Ref. 24; Pge 516)

- Jordan -

     During the 1960’s Jordan’s King Hussein “had been concerned about the growing power of the Palestinians living in his midst. The western part of his country had become a virtual state within a state, with a chain of refugee camps ruled by heavily armed Fatah militants who openly flouted the authority of the Hashemite monarch. Hussein, who had lost half his kingdom already {to Israel in the Six Day War of 1967}, feared he would lose the rest unless he removed the Palestinians from Jordanian soil. In September 1970 he ordered his fierce Bedouin soldiers to do precisely that.” (2005 - Ref. 12; Pge 92) The Palestinian expulsion from Jordan became known in the Arab world as Black September

     “If you send a prisoner to Jordan, you get a better interrogation. If you send a prisoner, for instance, to Egypt, you will probably never see him again.” – ROBERT BAER. AS QUOTED BY STEPHEN GREY IN Ghost Plane (2007 - Ref. 3; Forward)

     “The headquarters of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department {GID}, {is} known as the Mukhabarat, the Arabic word used to describe the all-pervasive secret services that safeguarded the fragile kingdoms, emirates, and republics of the Middle East.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 99)

     “Israel and Jordan had more in common than a border and a shared British past. They were both westward-looking countries trying to survive in a Middle East that was spinning dangerously out of control. They had fought two wars, in 1948 and 1967, but had formally made peace in the afterglow of the Oslo process.   . . . Jordan was universally considered the most fragile of the Arab states, and it was the job of the GID to keep the king’s head on his shoulders and the chaos of the region at bay. Israel wanted the same thing, and in the GID had found a competent and reliable partner with whom they could do business. The GID was a bit more civilized than its brutal Iraqi and Egyptian counterparts, though no less ubiquitous. A vast network of informers watched over the Jordanian people and monitored their every word and deed. Even a stray remark about the king or his family could result in a sojourn of indeterminate length in the GID’s labyrinth of secret detention centers.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 100)

     “The Butcher of Damascus {Bashar Hafez al-Assad} and his Russian backers has driven several hundred thousand Syrian refugees across the border into Jordan.” (2017 - Ref. 24; Pge 214)

- Libya -

     “Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s tyrannical ruler, would not follow the example of his counterparts in Tunis and Cairo and go quietly into the Arab night. He had ruled Libya with an iron fist for more than four decades, stealing its oil riches and murdering his opponents, sometimes only for the sake of his own entertainment. A man of the desert, he knew the fate that awaited him if he fell. And so he plunged his backward nation into a full-fledged civil war. Fearing a bloodbath, the West intervened militarily, with France taking a leading role.” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pge 123)

     “It {the ouster of Gaddafi} was a dream come true, made possible by the president of France and his friends in Washington and London who declared that Gaddafi had to go. Once the regime crumbled, Libya was open for business. It was the Wild West. No central government, no police, no authority of any kind except for the militias and the Islamic psychos.” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pge 16)

     “. . . ISIS had taken over most of Iraq and Syria, and established a base of operations in Libya . . .” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pge 10)

- Morocco -

     In Morocco, the shantytowns are called “Bidonvilles”. “I suppose it sounds better than a slum. The people there have nothing. No running water, barely enough to eat.
      - - -
     “The one thing they do have in the Bidonvilles . . . is Islam. And thanks to Wahhabi and Salafist preachers, it’s getting more and more extreme.
     “. . . an al-Qaeda affiliate known as Salfia Jihadia . . . had ties to the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group. For all its natural beauty and Western tourism, Morocco remained a hotbed of radical Islam where ISIS had managed to establish deep routes and numerous cells. More than thirteen hundred Moroccans had traveled to the caliphate to fight for ISIS – along with several hundred more ethnic Moroccans from France, Belgium, the Netherlands – and Moroccans had played an outsize role in ISIS's recent terror campaign in Western Europe. And then there was Mohammed Bouyeri, the Dutch Moroccan who shot and stabbed filmmaker and writer Theo van Gogh on a street in Amsterdam. The killing was not the spontaneous act of one troubled man; Bouyeri was a member of a cell of radical North African Muslims based in The Hague known as the Hofstad Network. For the most part, Morocco’s security services had managed to deflect the coutry’s extremism outward. Still there were plenty of plots at home.  . . .” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pges 365-367)

     The Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire or DST is the Moroccan Secret Service. “The DST stages raids in the Bidonville{s} from time to time and carted off the Salafis to the Temara interrogation center to be tortured.” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pge 374)

- Yemen -

     “Yemen is well on its way to becoming the next Afghanistan.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 81)

- al-Qaeda, ISIS and Other Islamic Terrorist Organizations -

     “The Wahhabi-inspired terrorists of al-Qaeda and its affiliates regard everyone who doesn’t adhere to its brand of Islam as kafur and mushrikun, worthy only of death. Kafur are infides, and mushrikun are polytheists. They regard even Sunni and Shiite Muslims as mushrikun.  . . .” (2006 - Ref. 25; Pge 29)

     “. . . al-Qaeda and its affiliates and imitators are actively plotting to murder and maim on a mass scale in Western Europe and the United States.  . . . the former head of{Britain’s} MI5, predicted in 2006 that the struggle against Islamic terror would ‘be with us for a generation,’ while other security officials have warned of a ‘forever war’ that will force the West to maintain aggressive counterterrorism programs for decades, if not longer.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 452)

     “Hezbollah {in Lebanon} is now in possession of at least eighty thousand rockets and missiles capable of reaching every square inch of Israel.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pges 70-71)

     “It was Hezbollah, not al-Qaeda, that first turned human beings into bombs, and Hezbollah that first developed a truly global capability. Indeed, on two occasions, it was able to reach its tentacles across the Atlantic and attack targets in Buenos Aires – first in 1992, when it bombed the Israeli Embassy, killing twenty-nine people, and again in 1994, when it destroyed the AMIA Jewish community center, leaving another ninety-five dead. Hezbollah’s ranks were filled with several thousand highly trained terrorists, many hidden within the worldwide Lebanese diaspora, and its vast arsenal of weaponry included several Scuds, making it the only terrorist group in the world to possess ballistic missiles. In short, Hezbollah had the ability to carry out a cataclysmic terrorist attack at the time and place of its choosing. All it required was the blessing of its Shiite clerical masters in Tehran.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 171)

     “. . . more evil has been carried out in the name of religion than any other force in human history.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 51)

     “There exists in the world today an organized force that seeks to weaken or even destroy the West through acts of indiscriminate violence. This force is a part of a broader radical movement to impose Sharia law and restore the Islamic Caliphate. And no amount of wishful thinking will make it go away.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 151)

     ISIS focused on the city of Dabiq in northern Syria because it features in Islamic apocalyptic prophecies as the site of an end-of-times showdown between Muslims and their "Roman" enemies. The Prophet Muhammad is believed to have said that "the last hour will not come" until Muslims vanquished the Romans at "Dabiq or al-Amaq" - both in the Syria-Turkey border region - on their way to conquer Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul).[28] Dabiq is the ISIS version or Armageddon in the Judeo-Christian version of the end of times.

     “The armies of Rome {the non-Muslim world} and the men with black flags and long hair and beards would clash in a place called Dariq on the plains of northern Syria. The men who flew black flags would prevail, thus unleashing a chain of apocalyptic events that would bring about the appearance of the Mahdi and the end of days.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 339)

     Celebrated as the “Pearl of the Desert,” Palmyra, about 150 miles northeast of Damascus in Syria, was once a refuge for travelers on the Silk Road, the ancient trade route. Temples stood in Palmyra for thousands of years. ISIS destroyed many of the ancient structures in Palmyra, a further attempt by the group to impose its will by destroying monuments or artifacts that it says do not conform to its strict interpretation of Islam.

     “ISIS had imposed an Islamic death sentence on the non-Islamic past. The colonnades had been toppled, the arches smashed. Whatever ISIS’ ultimate fate, it had left an indelible mark on the Middle East. Palmyra . . . would never be the same.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 294)

     “Many Western ISIS recruits, men and women, have returned home. Some are disillusioned; others remain committed to the cause of the caliphate. And still others are prepared to carry out acts of mass murder and terror in the name of Islam. In the near term, Western Europe faces the greatest threat, in no small measure because of the large and restive Muslim population living within its open borders. ISIS has no need to insert terrorists into Western Europe because the potential terrorists are already there. They reside in the banlieues of France and the Muslim quarters of Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Malmo, East London, and Luton. At the time of this writing {2015-2016} ISIS had carried out devastating attacks in Paris and Brussels. The perpetrators, for the most part, were born in the West and carried European passports in their pockets. More attacks will surely follow, for the security services of Western Europe have proven themselves woefully unprepared – especially the Belgian Surete, which has countenanced the creation of a virtual ISIS safe haven in the heart of Brussels.
     “The American homeland, however, is ISIS’ ultimate target.  . . . this state of affairs is ‘the new normal’ – that we must live with the fact that bombs will occasionally explode in our airports and subways, that we can no longer expect to be fully safe in a restaurant or concert hall because of an ideology, and a faith, born in the Middle East. President Barack Obama seemed to express this point of view after the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the siege at the Hypercacher market. Cautioning against overreaction, he dismissed the perpetrators as a ‘a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.’ They were Jews. And for that reason alone they were targeted and mercilessly slaughtered.
     “. . . Unfortunately, the promise of the Arab Spring has been broken, and the Arab world is in turmoil. With the age of oil in retreat, its future is bleak.  . . .” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pges 521-522)

     By 2017, “The caliphate of ISIS was slipping away. Too slowly, it was true, but it was dying nonetheless. But that did not mean the end of ISIS was at hand. In all likelihood, it would become just another Salafist-jihadi terrorist group, a first among equals with adherents around the globe who were willing to take up a knife or a bomb or an automobile in hatred’s name.
      - - -
     “Let’s assume the Americans and their allies eventually defeat ISIS and roll back the caliphate. What then? Will Syria be put back together again? Will Iraq? Will the Americans stay this time to ensure the peace? Unlikely, which means there’s going to be several million disaffected and disenfranchised Sunni Muslims living between the Tigris and the Euphrates. They will be a source of regional instability for generations to come.
     “They were artificial countries to begin with, Iraq and Syria. Maybe it’s time to draw new lines in the sand.” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pges 550-551)

Arabs, Jews and Christians

     Arab-Jewish fighting began long before Israel’s War of Independence in 1947-1948. On 15 April 1936, “a gang of Arabs shot three Jews on the road east of Tulkarm. Members of the Jewish Irgun Bet retaliated by killing two Arabs not far from Beit Sayeed. Events spiraled rapidly out of control, culminating with an Arab rampage through the streets of Jaffa that left nine Jews dead. The Arab revolt had begun.
     “There had been periods of unrest in Palestine, times when Arab frustration woul boil over into rioting and killing, but never had there been anything like the coordinated violence and unrest that swept the land that spring and summer of 1936.” (2005 - Ref. 12; Pge 76)

     During the Second World War, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the chairman of the Arab Higher Council in Jerusalem “had thrown in his lot with Adolph Hitler. From his lavish palace in Berlin, the Islamic religious leader had served as a valuable Nazi propaganda tool, exhorting the Arab masses to support Nazi Germany and calling for the destruction of the Jews. An acquaintance of Adolph Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, the mufti had even planned to construct a gas chamber and crematoria in Palestine to exterminate the Jews there. As Berlin was falling, he boarded a Luftwaffe plane and flew to Switzerland. Refused entry, he went next to France. The French realized that he could be a valuable ally in the Middle East and granted him sanctuary, but by 1946, with pressure mounting to put the mufti on trial for war crimes, he was permitted to ‘escape’ to Cairo. By the summer of 1947 the mufti was living in Alayh, a resort in the mountains of Lebanon.” (2005 - Ref. 12; Pge 80)

     Who is to blame for the situation in which the Arabs from Pre-Israel Palestine and their descendants find themselves today? As a fictitious Palestinian Arab lamented: “I blame the Arab leaders. If Haj Amin and the others had accepted the partition {1947-1948}, the Western Galilee would have been part of Palestine. But they chose war, and when they lost the war, they cried that the Arabs had been victims. Arafat did the same thing at Camp David, yes? He walked away from another opportunity at partition. He started another war, and when the Jews fought back, he cried that he was the victim. When will we learn?” (2005 - Ref. 12; Pge 363)

     “Early on the morning of September 5, 1972, two years after the expulsion {of the Palestinian refugees} from Jordan, six Palestinian terrorists scaled the fence at the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany, and entered the apartment building at Connollystrasse 31, which housed members of of the Israeli Olympic team. Two Israelis were killed in the initial assault. Nine others were rounded up and taken hostage.  . . . at ten-ten p.m., the terrorists and the hostages boarded two helicopter and took off for Furstenfeldbruck airfield. Shortly after arriving, West German forces launched an ill-conceived and poorly planned rescue operation. All nine of the hostages were massacred by the Black September.” (2005 - Ref. 12; Pge 94)

     “History dealt us {Israel} a losing hand. In 1947, the united Nations decided to give us a scrap of land to found our new state. Remember, four fifths of Mandatory Palestine had already been cut away to create the state of Transjordan. Eighty percent! Of the final twenty percent, the United Nations gave us half – ten percent of Mandatory Palestine, the Coastal Plain and the Negev. And still the Arabs said no. [Emphasis mine] Imagine if they’d said yes. Imagine if they’d said yes in 1937, when the Peel Commission recommended partition. How many millions might we have saved? . . . But what did the Arabs do? They said no, and they aligned themselves with Hitler and cheered our extermination.
      - - -
     “. . . The land the UN gave us contained five hundred thousand Jews and four hundred thousand Arabs. Those Arabs were a hostile force, committed to our destruction. We knew that the minute we declared our independence we were going to be the target of a pan Arab military invasion.  . . .
     “. . . Do you think that if the Arabs had won the war that there would be any Jewish refugees? Look at what happened in Hebron. They brought the Jews to the center of town and cut them down. They attacked a convoy of doctors and nurses heading up Mount Scopus and butchered them all. To make certain no one survived, they doused the vehicles with gasoline and set them alight. This was the nature of our enemy. Their goal was to kill us all, so we would never come back. And that remains their goal today. They want to kill us all.” [Emphasis mine] (2005 - Ref. 12; Pges 392-394)

     “The creed of the global jihadists was not just; it was a mental illness. One could not reason with those who massacred the innocent in the belief that they were doing God’s will on earth. One had to kill them before they killed you.” (2006 - Ref. 3; Pge 12)

     “. . . There will never be peace. We’re {Palestinians} the scapegoats for Arab failings – the pressure valve for Arab unrest. The Arabs loathe us, but they cannot live without us.” (2007 - Ref. 3; Pge 8 - 2007)

     “The sacred plateau in Jerusalem referred to as the Temple Mount by Jews and Haram al-Sharif by Muslims is . . . under the control of the Islamic waqf. The southern retaining wall of the mount did . . . develop a precarious bulge as a result of the {illegal} construction of the Marwani Mosque  . . . {and} archaeologically rich debris {from the mosque construction site was also hurled into a dump} in the Kidron Valley.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 439)

     “Holocaust denial is now mainstream thinking in the Arab and Islamic world, as is its first cousin, Temple Denial. Virtually the entire leadership of the Palestinian Authority – even some of those regarded as ‘moderates’ in the West – deny there was ever an actual Jewish Temple atop the Temple Mount.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 440)

     “Using the religious authority of the Waqf, the Palestinians are systematically trying to erase any evidence that there was ever an actual temple on the Temple Mount. We’re fighting an archaeological war here in Jerusalem every day. One side is trying to preserve the past, and the other is trying to destroy it, primarily under the guise of construction projects like the Marwani Mosque.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 162)

     “Our Muslim brothers have conveniently forgotten that their great Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque are built on the ruins of the First and Second Jewish Temples. The political battle for Palestine in now a religious war for Jerusalem. And we have to prove to the world that we {Jews} were there first.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 250)

     In 2000, American President Bill Clinton “placed . . . a non-negotiable set of terms for a final agreement before {Yasir Arafat and Ehud Bark, in which} the Parameters called for the creation of a Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and 96 percent of the West Bank. The Temple Mount Plateau, sacred to the three Abrahamic faiths, would have been included in the Palestinian state, while the Western Wall and Jewish Quarter of the Old City would have remained under Israeli control. [Emphasis mine] Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak accepted the terms, but Yasir Arafat, after much dithering and equivocation, did not.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 441)

     “. . . why has the Christian population of Bethlehem fallen from ninety-five percent to just one-third? And why are Christians fleeing the territory at an alarming rate?” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 344)

     Palestinian clerics and officials continually spread the anti-Semitic screed that “the Holocaust had never happened and that the Jews were secretly planning to destroy the Dome of the Rock with the help of fundamentalist Christians from America.  . . . {They ignore the fact that} the Israelis were the first conquerors in the history of Jerusalem to leave that status quo of the Holy Mountain unchanged.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 347)

     “Across the Islamic world, Muslim holy men routinely preach that the Holocaust did not occur, while at the same time, radical jihadists promise to bring about another one. The contradiction is amusing to some, but not to {an Israeli}, while a nation that has sworn to wipe Israel from the face of the earth is relentlessly developing the capability to do just that.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 360)

     Arabs and Jews belong to the same family and, like in some families, hatreds govern the familial relationship. “Arab and Jew were bound together by hatred, blood and victimhood. And for their punishment they would be forced to live together as feuding neighbors for all eternity.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 49) Reflecting on the ongoing war with radical Islam, a fictional Israeli immigrant from France says to herself, “It is our punishment for having survived.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 155)

     There are those anti-Semites and anti-Israel fanatics who claim that Israel is and apartheid nation. It is definitely not! But what about Arab and Islamic nations? The French-Algerian war ended in the early 1960’s. Most Jews fled Algeria when “The new regime declared that only Muslims could be citizens of Algeria.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pge 137)

     “. . . most debates about the Arab-Israeli conflict quickly took on the quality of a cat chasing its own tail.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 255)

Israel

     “For most West Bank Arabs, the end of Jordanian occupation {after the 1967 Six Dat War} had led to a marked improvement in the quality of their lives. With the Israelis had come access to a vibrant economy, running water electricity, and education. Infant mortality rates, once among the highest in the world, plummeted. Literacy rates, among the world’s lowest, increased dramatically. Radical Islam and the influence of the PLO would eventually turn the West Bank into a seething cauldron and place IDF soldiers in daily confrontations with rock-throwing children . . . “ (2005 - Ref. 12; Pge 134)

     “{Biblical} scholars and those obsessed by the end-time prophesies believed {that Megiddo or Armageddon as it is also known} would be the setting for the apocalyptic confrontation between the forces of good and evil. Regardless of what calamity might lay ahead, Tel Megiddo had already witnessed much bloodshed. Located at the crossroads between Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, it had been the site of dozens of major battles over the millennia. Assyrians, Israelites, Canaanites, Egyptians, Philistines, Greeks, Romans, and Crusaders – all had shed blood beneath this hillock. Napoleon defeated the Ottomans there in 1799, and a little more than a century later, General Allenby of the British army defeated them again.” (2005 - Ref. 12; Pges 376-377)

     Beginning just south of Tel-Aviv and extending north of Tel- Aviv, past the Glilot interchange is Highway 20. “To the left lay Tel-Aviv and its suburbs. To the right was a towering gray wall separating Israel from the West Bank.  . . . The separation barrier had helped to drastically reduce acts of terrorism but had caused much damage to the country’s already low standing abroad.” (2009 - Ref. 29; Pge 222)

     “Though economically prosperous and militarily strong, Israel remained surrounded by a world that was, for the most part, hostile to its very existence.” (2011 - Ref. 4; Pge 61)

     “. . . {Jew have} returned to the land of {their} birth only to find {themselves} locked in a war without end. Is this really what God had in mind when he made his pact with Abraham?” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 51)

     “Unit 8200 was Israel’s signals intelligence service, the equivalent of the National Security Agency in the United States. Though formally under the command of the military chief of staff, it carried out tasks for all the Israeli intelligence and security agencies, including the {Mosad}. Its alumni included some of the most successful entrepreneurs in Israel’s thriving high-tech industry. {Much of its signal gathering capability is located at Glilot Junction.}” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 65)

     “The soil of this sacred city {Jerusalem} is filled with the remnants of empires that miscalculated. Jerusalem is the city of God. But it is also a gravestone to the folly of man.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 352)

     In 2012, “The Old City of Jerusalem was once again connected to the new by a footbridge. It stretched from the Jaffa Gate to the sparkling Mamilla Mal, one of the few places in the country where Arab and Jew mingled with relatively little tension.” (2012 - Ref. 5; Pge 160)

     “On the afternoon of July 22, 1946, the extremist Zionist group known as the Irgun detonated a large bomb in the King David Hotel, headquarters of all British military and civilian forces in Palestine. The attack, a reprisal for the arrest of several hundred Jewish fighters, killed ninety-one people, including twenty-eight British subjects who had ignored a telephone warning to evacuate the hotel. Though universally condemned, the bombing would quickly prove to be one of the most effective acts of political violence ever committed. Within two years, the British had retreated from Palestine, and the modern State of Israel, once an almost unimaginable Zionist dream, was a reality.” (2013 - Ref. 23; Pge 29)

     “THE ISRAELI MARTIAL ARTS DISCIPLINE KNOWN AS KRAV mAGA is not known for its gracefulness, but then it was not designed with aesthetics in mind. Its sole purpose is to incapacitate or kill an adversary as quickly as possible. Unlike many Eastern disciplines, it does not frown upon the use of heavy objects to ward off an attacker of superior size and strength. In fact, instructors encourage their students to use whatever objects they have at their disposal to defend themselves. David did not grapple with Goliath, they are fond of saying. David hit Goliath with a rock. And only then did he cut off his head.” (2013 - Ref. 23; Pge 84)

     Israel does not have totally clean hands in its dealings with the Arab population of what became known as Palestine. Case in point is Deir Yassin, “the site of a notorious massacre that occurred during the darkest days of the sectarian conflict in 1948 that gave birth to both the modern State of Israel and the Palestinian refugee crisis. The old village is now the home of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center, a psychiatric hospital that utilizes some of the old buildings and homes vacated by Deir Yassin’s original Arab residents. Kfir Shaul is affiliated with the Hadassah Medical Center and specializes in the treatment of Jerusalem syndrome, a disorder of religious obsession and delusion n that begins with a visit to God’s fractured city upon a hill.” (2015 - Ref. 9; Pges 518-519)

     “{Israel was constantly reminded} of the transient nature of political and military power in this turbulent corner of the Eastern Mediterranean. Canaanites, Hittites, Amalekites, Moabites, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Turks, British: all had come and gone. Against overwhelming odds, the Jews had managed to pull off one of history’s greatest second acts. Two millennia after the fall of the Second Temple, they had come back for a return engagement.” (2016 - Ref. 11; Pge 356)

     Where is the Mossad really located? There “are some indications its location has been figured out. An apparent former Mossad agent claimed to have revealed its location at a highway intersection called Glilot Junction in 1987. In journalist Patrick Tyler’s 2012 book Fortress Israel, he located Mossad’s headquarters as a ‘partially hidden campus of low-slung office buildings sandwiched between the Glilot highway junction, a Cineplex, and a shopping center.’ “ (Ref. 30) Glilot Junction is a main interchange just north of Tel Aviv. Located there is “a flashy new complex just north of Tel Aviv, in Ramat HaSharon.   . . . {It’s on a} plot of land along a high-tech corridor near the Glilot Interchange, adjacent to a shopping center and multiplex called Cinema City.” (2017 - Ref. 24; Pge 50)

     Tel Aviv in Israel is a lively, thriving and modern seaside. The vibe in Tel Aviv “was secular and Southern California, Santa Monica on the shores of the Mediterranean. It was hard to imagine that the chaos and civil war of Syria lay just over the border. Or that less than ten miles to the east, atop a bony spine of hill, were some of the most restive Palestinian villages of the West Bank. Or that the Gaza Strip, a ribbon of human misery and resentment, was than an hour’s drive to the south. In hip Tel Aviv . . . Israelis might be forgiven for believing the dream of Zionism had been achieved without cost.
     Still, in Tel Aviv, its well-known “ Dizengoff Street had been the target of a Hamas suicide bombing in October 1994 that killed twenty-two people.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pges 40-41) There were other sites in Tel Aviv where Islamic terrorists had killed and maimed.

     From Tel Aviv north lies “the heart of Israel’s version of Silicon Valley. Shiny new office buildings lined both sides of the flawless {North-south} highway. In the space of a few years, Israel had traded its socialist past for a dynamic economy driven by the technology sector. Much of that innovation went directly to the military and the security services, giving Israel a decided edge over its Middle East adversaries.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 43)

     On the Mediterranean coast, between Tel Aviv and Haifa, lies the city of Netanya with its tall white buildings, somewhat reminiscent of Cannes in southern France. Many French Jews had fled France’s violent Muslim-inspired anti-Semitism and made Aliyah {immigrated to Israel} and settled in Netanya – sometimes referred to as “the Israeli Riviera”. At Netanya’s broad esplanade is a “dilapidated hotel . . . where the Passover Massacre happened back in 2002. Thirty dead, a hundred and forty wounded.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 47) In Netanya, many people speak “not in Hebrew but in French . . . were it not for the worn-out khaki-colored buildings and the blinding Middle Eastern sunlight, {one} might have imagined {he/she} was crossing a square in twentieth arrondissement of Paris.” (2018 - Ref. 10; Pge 8)

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