"It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable[.]
[***] The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world[.]"
-- Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, as quoted in BBC News, "Rabbi calls for annihilation of Arabs", www.news.bbc.co.uk,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1270038.stm, (10 April 2001).
Rabbi Yosef is one of the most powerful religious figures in Israel, He is known for his outspoken comments and has in the past referred to the Arabs as "vipers".
... statement made by the former Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, in reference to the African nations who voted in support of the 1975 U.N. resolution, which denounced Zionism as a form of racism.
He said:
"It is unacceptable that nations made up of people who have only just come down from the trees should take themselves for world leaders ... How can such primitive beings have an opinion of their own?"
(Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, November 14, 1975).
And the point of this is? That Israel isnt racist?
Haim Cohan, a former judge of the Supreme Court of Israel:
"... The bitter irony is that the same biological and racist laws that are preached by the Nazis and led to the Nuremberg trials, formed the basis of the doctrine of Judaism in the State of Israel."
"To this end we must organize. Organize, in the first place, so that the world may have proof of the extent and the intensity of our desire for liberty. Organize, in the second place, so that our resources may become known and be made available . . . .
"Organize, organize, organize, until every Jew must stand up and be counted - counted with us, or prove himself, wittingly or unwittingly, of the few who are against their own people."
-- Louis D. Brandeis, Justice of the United States Supreme Court, "Zionism," pp. 113, 114.
"We Jews regard our race as superior to all humanity, and look forward, not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them."
-- (Goldwin Smith - Oxford University Modern History Professor - October 1981)
The Jew, the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky:
"If the Jews are the people, it is very despicable people."
"Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best.
Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron.
The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves."
-- (Menachem Begin - Israeli Prime Minister 1977-1983)
"Not only was Karl Marx from a long line of Talmudic scholars, he also hated Russians with a passion that could be described as pathological. I looked up Karl Marx in the Jewish encyclopedias, and I found to my amazement that the man who taught him many of the principles of Communism was Moses Hess. As incredible as it might seem, contemporary Zionist leaders venerate Moses Hess as the 'forerunner' of modern Zionism.
"In The Encyclopedia of Zionism in Israel, under the entry for Moses Hess, is found the following:
'Pioneer of modern socialism, social philosopher, and forerunner of Zionism... Hess was thus a forerunner of political and cultural Zionism and of socialist Zionism in particular. He became deeply involved in the rising socialist movement.
'Karl Marx and Frederick Engels acknowledged that they had learned much from him during the formative years of the movement...
-- The Encyclopedia of Zionism in Israel1
as quoted by David Duke,
http://www.davidduke.com/general/my-awakening-chapter-15-the-jewish-question-2_135.html
"The customs of the Jews are base and abominable and owe their persistence to their depravity. Jews are extremely loyal to one another, always ready to show compassion, but towards every other people they feel only hate and enimity.
As a race (the Jews are not a race, because they have mingled with the other races to the point that they are only a people, not a race), they are prone to lust; among themselves nothing is unlawful."
(Roman Historian Tacitus).
For Jews Only: Racism Inside Israel:
An Interview with Phyllis Bennis
By Max Elbaum, special to ColorLines,
15 December 2000
Phyllis Bennis, a longtime analyst and activist around Middle East issues, is now head of the Middle East Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. She is the author of From Stones to Statehood: The Palestinian Uprising, a book about the Palestinian intifada of the late 1980s, and Calling the Shots: How Washington Dominates Today's U.N. In this interview, Phyllis analyzes the racist character of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as well as its treatment of Palestinians who live within Israel's pre-1967 borders.
Max Elbaum [ME]: What do you see as the root cause of the current Palestinian uprising?
Phyllis Bennis [PB]: What's going on right now can be summed up in one word: occupation. Contrary to the U.S. media's portrayal, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is at the root of what the media at best identify only as a disproportionate use of violence by the Israelis on the West Bank and Gaza.
Certainly the Israeli troops' use of helicopter gunships, of machine guns mounted on tanks, and so on is profoundly disproportionate when used against a Palestinian civilian population armed only with stones and some old Kalashnikov rifles.
But the real issue is the Israeli military occupation of Palestine - not only that it is inherently violent and a violation of international law and contrary to United Nations resolutions. Even if Israel used only proportionate violence, it would still be absolutely illegal, because the occupation of Palestinian land is illegal.
[ME]: And why is there an occupation?
[PB]: From its origins in the 19th century, Zionism centered on the idea of creating a specifically Jewish state in which Jews would be protected and privileged over non-Jews. Zionist occupation of Palestine was at first meager, amounting to about 10 percent of the population by 1900. By 1947, Jews were still only about 30 percent of the population of Mandate Palestine and owned only six percent of the land, but the UN Partition Resolution that year still assigned 55 percent of the land to a new Jewish state. However, by means of the 1947-48 war, Israel took over even greater expanses of land and forcibly expelled about 750,000 Palestinians. This travesty was the basis for the official founding of the Israeli state in 1948.
[ME]: In this latest intifada, there have been numerous protests by Arabs living within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. What are their numbers and their conditions of life?
[PB]: Inside what is called the Green Line - the unofficial borders of Israel before the 1967 war - there are still about one million Palestinians, just under 20 percent of the total Israeli population. Most Palestinians are Muslim, some are Christian.
>From 1948 to 1966, the Palestinians within Israel lived under explicit military rule. They were considered a military threat to the Israeli state, and they were ruled under a completely different set of laws than the Jewish population.
After 1966, military rule was lifted, but it was replaced by a set of Jim Crow-like laws designed to discriminate against Arabs in Israel. According to Adalah, an Arab rights organization, today there are at least 20 laws that specifically provide unequal rights and obligations based on what the Israelis call nationality, which in Israel is defined on the basis of religion. Israelis must carry a card which identifies them as either a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian. All non- Jews are second class citizens. The Israeli Supreme Court has dismissed virtually all cases which dealt with equal rights for Arab citizens.
[ME]: Can you be more specific about how this discrimination works and what it means?
[PB]: All Israeli citizens, including Palestinians, have the right to vote in elections for members of the Knesset (parliament) and for the prime minister. But not all rights are citizenship rights. Other rights are defined as nationality rights, and are reserved for Jews only. If you are a Jew, you have exclusive use of land, privileged access to private and public employment, special educational loans, home mortgages, preferences for admission to universities, and many other things. Many other special privileges are reserved for those who have served in the Israeli military. And military service is compulsory for all Jews (male and female), except for the ultra- Orthodox who get the same privileges as other Jews, but excludes Palestinians, who do not.
Over 80 percent of the land within Israel that was once owned by Palestinians has been confiscated. All told, 93 percent of Israel's land can only be leased or owned by Jews or Jewish agencies. Moreover, despite Israel's booming economy, Palestinian unemployment is skyrocketing - Adalah says it is about 40 percent. In 1996 twice as many Arab citizens (28.3 percent) as Jewish citizens (14.4 percent) lived below the poverty line. Less than five percent of government employees are Arab. And eighty percent of all student drop-outs are Arab.
There are also vast disparities between Arab towns and Jewish towns in government spending on schools, medical systems, roads and electricity, clean water, and social services.
Unlike any other country in the world, Israel does not define itself as a state of its residents, or even a state of its citizens, but as a state of all the Jews in the world. Jews from anywhere in the world, like me, can travel to Israel, declare citizenship, and be granted all the privileges of being Jewish that are denied to Palestinians who have lived in the area for hundreds of years.
[ME]: Are Palestinians within Israel participating in the current uprising?
[PB]: The recent resistance has seen a whole new level of involvement in demonstrations by Palestinians inside the Green Line. They are protesting the discrimination they face in Israel as well as the occupation itself and Israeli brutality against Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. Such protests are not completely without historical precedent; in 1976 there were a series of demonstrations on what became known as Land Day which protested continuing Israeli seizures of Palestinian land. Six Palestinian demonstrators, citizens of Israel, were killed by Israeli forces.
But this time there is a vast increase in the participation of Palestinians inside the Green Line. Their demonstrations have been met with the same brutal military tactics used against Palestinians in the West Bank. So, far 13 Israeli Palestinians have been killed. These tactics are in sharp contrast to the methods used by Israeli authorities in response to demonstrations by Israeli Jews.
In 1982, for example, when there was an upsurge of Jewish protests against the Israeli war in Lebanon, one Israeli Jewish protester was killed and there was such an enormous outcry that people remember his name to this day - Emil Grunzweig. But when a Palestinian is killed by Israeli military occupation forces, that is not considered news. We might hear a body count, but we never hear their names, who their parents or children are, what they did for a living.
On the West Bank and Gaza, as well as inside the Green Line, police randomly fired live ammunition into crowds of unarmed Arab demonstrators that were throwing stones. The racist double standard is everywhere. A mob of Israeli Jews even attacked the house of an Arab member of the Knesset, Azmi Bishara. But the police would not act against the rioters.
Unfortunately, the years of occupation have created, or have allowed to flourish, an incredibly racist vantage point among the majority of Israeli Jews. The majority of Israeli Jews are willing to accept the killing of Palestinians and collective punishment of the Palestinian population as justified state policy.
[ME]: Can you tell us more about Palestinian politics within Israel?
[PB]: Not surprisingly, Palestinians inside Israel have historically felt themselves excluded and disempowered by the Israeli government. The Communist Party of Israel was long a predominantly Arab party and received the vast majority of Palestinian votes. The CP remains strong, but a few Palestinian Knesset members have recently allied themselves to the Labor Party and more and more Palestinians have joined newer nationalist blocs. Azmi Bishara, who leads the Tajamoah (National Democratic) Party, became the first Arab citizen to run for prime minister last year. He and others actually call for the de- Zionization of Israel&$151;for the transformation of Israel from a theocratic state privileging the Jewish majority to a democratic, secular state of all its citizens.
[ME]: You are painting a picture of an Israeli government, with the support of a substantial part of its Jewish population, which aims toward permanent subordination of Palestinian Arabs within its borders, along with domination over something that might be called a Palestinian state but what would really amount to a dependent Bantustan. Essentially the same vision that motivated apartheid South Africa.
[PB]: Yes. And there are even more complexities. Within Israel there are really four levels of citizenship, the first three being various levels of Jewish participation in Israeli society, which are thoroughly racialized. At the top of the pyramid are the Ashkenazi, the white European Jews. At the level of power the huge contingent of recent Russian immigrants - now about 20 percent of Israeli Jews - are being assimilated into the European-Ashkenazi sector, though they are retaining a very distinct cultural identity.
The next level down, which is now probably the largest component of the Jewish population, is the Mizrachi or Sephardic Jews, who are from the Arab countries. At the bottom of the Jewish pyramid are the Ethiopian Jews, who are black. You can go into the poorest parts of Jewish West Jerusalem and find that it's predominantly Ethiopian.
This social and economic stratification took shape throughout the last 50 years as different groups of Jews from different part of the world came, for very different reasons, to Israel. So while the divisions reflected national origins, they play out in a profoundly racialized way.
The Yemeni Jews in particular faced extraordinary discrimination. They were transported more or less involuntarily from Yemen to Israel. On arrival they were held in primitive camps, and many Yemeni babies were stolen from their mothers and given for adoption to Ashkenazi families. In the early 1990s a high-profile campaign began to try to reunite some of those shattered families.
Beneath all these layers of Jews come the Palestinian citizens.
A rigid hierarchy, highly racialized both within and between religious or national groups, orchestrates Israeli social life. Much of it is legally enforced. The most significant difference between this scenario and other similar ones is in the world's perception of the Israeli reality. For the overwhelming majority of the world's population, South Africa was always considered a pariah state. But Israel is not in that position. Israel is given a pass, if you will, on the question of racism. Because Jews were victims of the Nazi Holocaust, there's a way in which Israeli Jews are assumed to be either incapable of such terrible racialized policies, or that it's somehow understandable because of what Jews went through.
But the new intifada has refocused attention on the nature and extent of Israeli racism, among other things. You have new reports from Amnesty International looking at the Israeli treatment of its own Palestinian citizens - minors, children, being arrested, beaten and held for days. Israel treats Palestinians, inside or outside the Green Line, as being less human than Jews. This is rooted in the very definition and Basic Law of the Israeli state. And the new intifada may give us a chance to challenge that apartheid character.
Max Elbaum is the former editor of CrossRoads magazine and author of Revolution in the Air: From Malcolm and Martin to Lenin, Mao & Che, a book about the new communist movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, forthcoming from Verso.
"Yet despite the lack of Jewish worship and observance, and my family's total assimilation into everything American and secular, we were thoroughly Jewish. Our perspective was Jewish, as was our very essence.
"The world was split into two distinct halves: Jews and gentiles. Jews were always sought in business or social dealings over gentiles. A common expression used by Jews to describe a slow, dense person was-and still is-'He's got a goyisher kop,' which literally means 'He's got a gentile head' but figuratively means 'slow-witted.' First question when I came home and boasted of making a new friend always was 'Is he Jewish?'
"'God forbid!' (my father's expression) if I should ever go out with a gentile girl, and 'Oy vey!' (which literally means 'Oh pain!') if I ever got serious with her.
"All my parents' friends were Jews. They all shared the same role models: Sandy Koufax, Bernard Baruch, Bess Meyerson, Sam Levinson, Hank Greenberg, Arthur Goldberg, Golda Meir, Albert Einstein-these were people to be admired. And that poet with the beard, Allen Ginsberg, so smart, but the faygeleh (homosexual) business, such a waste!"
-- S. G. Bloom, Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, Harcourt, Inc., New York, (2000), pp. 63-64.
"We will also act to end the relationships between Arab men and Jewish women that is now growing and that so desecrates the Name of G-d."
-- Rabbi Meir Kahane, On Jews and Judaism: Selected Articles 1961-1990, Volume 1, Institute for the Publication of the Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane, Jerusalem, (1993), p. 81.
"...the bitter irony of fate which has led the same biological and racist laws propagated by the Nazis and which inspired the infamous Nuremberg laws, to serve as a basis for the definition of Judaism within the State of Israel.
-- Badi, J. (1960). Fundamental Laws of the State of Israel. New York. p.156.
"Who are we gentiles to argue.
-- Ariel Sharon
It's rather telling that the Jewish people elected Ariel Sharon as Prime Minister after his OWN government had earlier found him complicit in the massacre of thousands of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps.
Sums up how Israeli Jews really feel, I would have thought. And they stand condemned for it."
As famed violinist Lord Yehudi Menuhin told the French newspaper Le Figaro in January 1988:
"It is extraordinary how nothing ever dies completely. Even the evil which prevailed yesterday in Nazi Germany is gaining ground in that country [Israel] today."
For it to have any moral authority, the UN must equate Zionism with racism. If it doesn't, it tacitly condones Israel's war of extermination against the Palestinians."
-- Greg Felton, Israel: A monument to anti-Semitism
"America: Submerged in a Sea of Zionism. Will history remember America merely as a major captive nation of Zionist world conquest, ignoring the lustrous ascendance and near triumph of the glorious potential of free man?
Will Zionist scorched-earth shots to the heart of all that is wholesome buy them their long-sought victory for Babylonian humanism with its showy irreverence and the glorification of all that is sordid? Will all of the goodness, wholesomeness and productivity of our unique Christian Republic, which millions forfeited their lives to give us, be purged from the world, leaving man to enter the 21st century enslaved to the least of God's creations?
Must Americans forever witness Zionist self-promotion and self-portrayal as our best and brightest, as our most deserving and selfless citizens suffering a society of lesser humans with intellectually inferior pursuits? Will God allow animal cunning, arrogance, greed and self-aggrandizement a final victory over humanity?
With 'political correctness' based upon Zionist fascism in the ascendance, with the American media system largely a Zionist tool, with Foundations and Zionist Political Action Committees spreading legislative dollars and providing selected candidates massive financial support, with two parties and political commentary dominated by the Zionist International, can traditional Americans hope to reverse the current course of history? Can we develop a formula to reclaim our Republic and the tools of a productive society, recapturing or rebuilding the essence of a nation one deservedly the noble and gracious leader of the world's nations?
Can we collectively observe that our governmental processes are captive to Zionist appointees at every level, that our State, Treasury and Commerce Departments as well as the Presidency are operated by Zionists who take their order from Zionism? Can we perceive that almost all of the national information-flow reaches us only through a Zionist filter and pro-Israel/Zionist propaganda machine?
Have we not discovered the demise of education, the growth and development of crime, the decay of our cities and our rapid decline as a united people have happened concurrent with the intrusion of Zionists and Zionism into the American system?
Have we not noticed that today it is increasingly difficult for ordinary people, Jew or Christian, White, Black, Yellow or Brown, to live together in 'live and let live' affection and respect, as the ADL the ACLU and the AIPAC attack society's pillars, move to destroy the Christian history of America and indoctrinate our children with ideas and philosophies that most of the world holds to be reprehensible, society-destructive, and beyond civility?
Have we not noticed the fear in our church bodies, the manipulation of them to amend and mutate the teaching of Jesus' word to men?
Here we have history's master victimizers, representing themselves as the victims, as betrayed and sinned against, demeaned and tormented because of society's jealousy; a colony of Culicidae (insects such as mosquitoes and gnats) decrying the occasional angry slap by those that have been stung. We observe the creators of much of man's sordid and duplicitous record artfully and deceitfully altering, amending, abridging and censoring the record to point the finger of responsibility to others, begging society's pity and solace for pain suggested to have been shared by no other people and never publicly recognizing, though surely perceiving, that it has been their centuries-long manipulation of their fellow man and their self-ordination as gods that has cause the animosity they correctly sense.
Consider an alien system with such a firm hold on American policy mechanisms that they are capable of having American citizenship granted overnight to one of Zionism's most energetic employees and then have him named as American ambassador to his former employer nation and confirmed without a word from our 'illustrious Senate,' including that great defender of American interests, Mr. Jesse Helms?
And consider a President's cabinet with 80% Jewish Zionist members and a President, himself a Rhodes Scholar (but unable to finish at Oxford) and a member of the Zionist International; a Trilateralist, Bilderberg secret communist.
Consider an alien philosophy carefully scheming to own and control America's newspaper and broadcasting systems, then combining its now massive propaganda and reinstruc-tional capabilities with the movie, entertainment and documentary producers of Hollywood, in short order reducing life to drugs and sexual fantasies and living to a succession of mindless escapades and romps in the hay; surely and continuously changing Americans then America... finally creating such irresponsible and chaotic conditions in our lives that we then welcome massive regulation, police restraints and New World Order socialist oppression just to get order again; forget morality or social ethics, productivity or national focus.
Consider the raw source of energy and money for the pro-abortion and homosexual lifestyle movements, the illegal immigration madness, loss of personal heritage identity, multi-cultural disarray and the move to make our precious English subordinate to the first choice of everyone's original homeland language.
These are funded, not by the grassroots but by single source money ...given in every case to reduce our influential Christian nation to helplessness; Babylonians filled with hate for the Christian people who bade them welcome, spending enormous effort and endless dollars to destroy our once wholesome influence on an ugly world. Witness the altered state of church in America; intimidated, compromised, fearful and spiritless. Are they winning? Look and listen to the new mores of our changed society.
Consider which nation is our number one recipient of loans' and aid. Note that they take what they want from our military arsenal and then without apology copy and sell it around the world, wherever money is to be made or counties subverted. Note their demand for U.N. (American) troops to clear away the enemy which surrounds their homeland and as stalking horses for their political influence thought the world. From the Pentagon, State, Presidency or the United Nations, their influence and numbers overwhelm any possible opposition and America increasingly does what they demand of us.
And then, dear friends, we have just witnessed once again their absolute mastery over our financial affairs. They own Banking, Investment Banking, the control of every major corporation, of course the 'Fed' and control of the Treasury of the United States. As we have just seen in Mexico, they do as they please, manipulating conditions, loaning then withdrawing support capital and grasping control of the resources of nations one by one, sometimes for profit but always for control. And then there is the depreciating dollar and Americans and the humble Mexicans are about to be enslaved by its demise.
When we add thought-control (political correctness) emanating from our college campuses and the continuous flow of Marxist ideas from Zionist professors to the 'hate crimes' laws and the massive effort to close down unwelcome publishers and Republican ideas, we can see that our Zionist fascist New World Order elitists have left no scheme destructive of Christian freedom left unutilized.
Consider then the 'we-are-in-charge' arrogance of the 'Justice' department's 92 Waco murders, followed by official lies and media cover-up, to be followed by massive raids on the citizens' militias that resulted... and national martial law, orchestrated and controlled by our Zionist fascist President in collaboration with the ADL.
Finally, we can watch with dismay as black- shirted, hooded world police power is deployed in America, computer programs are prepared for our personal control and prisons are readied for any who would underscore their First Amendment rights by using them. And huge funds of propaganda and money are expended to take from us our last hope of freedom; the Second Amendment and our guns.
And 90% of Americans haven't a hint, a clue. So brainwashed are they that when push comes to shove, most of them will unknowingly side with this enemy. So we who perceive must do the work of thousands."
(Ameirch Focus, Commentaries on America).
"More important still, during all that period and to the present time, it was not possible freely to report or discuss a third vital matter: Zionist Nationalism. In this case the freedom of the press has become a fallacy during the past two decades. Newspaper-writers have become less and less free to express any criticism, or report any fact unfavourable to this new ambition of the Twentieth Century. When I eventually went to America I found that this ban, for such it is in practice, prevailed even more rigidly there than in my own country.
Today an awakening is supposed to have occurred in the matter of Communism. During the most fateful and decisive years of the Second War, when the things were being done which obviously set the stage for a third one, it was in fact almost impossible for any independent writer to publish any reasonable criticism, supported by no matter what evidence, about Soviet Communism and its intentions.
Now, when the damage is done, Communism is much attacked, but even so the mass of Communist writers who were planted in the American and British press during those years has by no means been displaced; and the attentive newspaper-reader in either country may see for himself how the most specious Communist sophistries are daily injected into the editorial arguments and the news-columns of newspapers professing the most respectable principles.
In the matter of Zionist Nationalism, which I hold to be allied in its roots to Soviet Communism, the ban is much more severe. In my own adult lifetime as a journalist, now covering thirty years, I have seen this secret ban grow from nothing into something approaching a law of lese majeste at some absolute court of the dark past.
In daily usage, no American or British newspaper, apparently, now dares to print a line of news or comment unfavourable to the Zionist ambition; and under this thrall matters are reported favourably or non-committally, if they are reported at all, which if they occurred elsewhere would be denounced with the most piteous cries of outraged morality. The inference to me is plain: the Zionist Nationalists are powerful enough to govern governments in the great countries of the remaining West!
I believe Zionist Nationalism to be a political movement organized in all countries, which aims to bring all Jews under its thrall just as Communism enslaved the Russians and National Socialism the Germans. I hold it to be as dangerous as both of those, and when I recall the results that came of the subtle suppression of information in the cases of Stalinism and Hitlerism, I judge that the consequences of this even more rigorous suppression will not be less grave.
I think it a cardinal error to identify 'Jews' with Zionist Nationalism, 'Russians' with Communism, or 'Germans' with National Socialism. I saw the enslavement of Germans and Russians and know different.
I believe that the astonishingly powerful attempt to prevent any discussion of Zionist Nationalism by dismissing it as the expression of an aversion to Jews, as Jews, is merely meant to stop any public discussion of its objects, which seem to me to be as dangerous to Jew as to Gentile.
Of the three groups which have appeared, like stormy petrels, to presage the tempests of our century, the Zionist Nationalists appear to me the most powerful. National Socialism, I think, was but a stooge or stalking horse for the pursuit of Communist aims.
Communism is genuinely tigerish, and was strong enough to infest governments everywhere and distort the policies which were pursued behind the screen of military operations; but, if forced into a corner by the rising unease of their peoples, Western politicians are prepared in the last resort to turn against it.
But Zionist Nationalism! ... That is a different matter. Today American Presidents and British Prime Ministers, and all their colleagues, watch it as anxiously as Muslim priests watch for the crescent moon on the eve of Ramadan, and bow to it as the faithful prostrating themselves in the mosque at Mecca.
The thing was but a word unknown to the masses forty years ago; today Western politicians hardly dare take the seals of office without first, or immediately afterwards, making public obeisance towards this strange new ambition."
-- Douglas Reed, Somewhere South of Suez, Devin-Adir, U. S. A., (1951), pp. 8-10.