“Salam,” I say, covering my heart with my right hand. The original plan was for me to lie down for an hour nap, but we are already an hour late for the talk, so all I have time to do is shower and change into my white suit. Kevin Barrett thinks that my white suit makes me look like a CIA agent. Winston Churchill also wore a white suit when visiting Tehran. Looking in the mirror as I tie my tie, I wonder if wearing a white suit will help me expiate their sins. The image in the mirror gives no answer to this question.
When we climb into the car, the cute young woman in the tan airline stewardess version of the chador who greeted me when we arrived is introduced as my translator. Her name is Habibe.
“I’ve heard that you’re an anti-Semite and a racist,” Habibe says by way of introducing herself.
Hamed and I burst out laughing.
“Where did you hear that?” I asked.
“On the web,” she said, confirming my conviction that the main function of the internet, aside from bringing pornography into everyone’s home, is slander, in particular slander of people that Jews don’t like, the current definition of an anti-Semite. Being accused of anti-Semitism by an Iranian is like showing up at an AA meeting and being called a drunk.
As my picture on billboards throughout Fasa indicated, the sponsors of my talk decided to advertise, and as a result five hundred people were waiting when I arrived at the hall. I confess to feeling overwhelmed. The cumulative effects of the heat and lack of sleep combined with the effect of walking into a hall where five hundred pairs of eyes were focused on someone who, for all they knew, could have been the revenant of Kermit Roosevelt, left me momentarily unhinged. And so I walked out of the hall back into the hot night and, ignoring what seemed like an equally large crowd outside the hall and the children who were pestering me for an autograph, I said a prayer, and the Lord answered by saying, “You were made for this moment. Go back into the hall.”
So I went back in and began my talk, pausing after every sentence so that Habibe could translate what I said into Farsi. The Iranians saw me as the representative of America, so the first thing I had to make clear is that there was no such thing as an American. According to the sociological theory known as the triple melting pot, America is made up of three ethnic groups based on three religions: Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. Those three groups have been in a state of constant cultural conflict since before America launched its covert warfare attack on Iran in 1953. In fact, what happened to Catholics then is happening to Iranians now, especially in the area of birth control and gender ideology.
The Iranian crisis of 1953 began as the Catholic Crisis in 1933 when Cardinal Dougherty called for a boycott of the Warner Brothers theaters in Philadelphia. After a few weeks, Warner Brothers began to feel the pinch. Joe Breen attended a meeting, after which he reported that Harry Warner was “crying tears as big as horse turds because he was losing $100,000 a week in Philadelphia alone.” The refusal of Mr. Giannini, founder of the Bank of America, to lend Hollywood more money, combined with the debts that Hollywood had incurred in 1929 to retool to make talking pictures, convinced the studio bosses to back down on the obscenity issue.
What followed was the Hollywood Production Code, which for the next thirty one years insured that people like Joe Breen kept nudity, blasphemy, obscenity, and foul language out of Hollywood films. No theater would show unapproved films, and no film got approved without the tacit approval of Catholics like Joe Breen.
On February 29, 1936, shortly after the American bishops imposed the Production Code on Hollywood, Augustin Cardinal Hlond, the primate of Poland, issued a pastoral letter on morals, in which he claimed that the Jews were having a similarly corrupting influence on Poland.
In 1965 the Catholics in America lost their nerve. When the Catholics lost their nerve in the war on Hollywood, they lost the culture wars. Before long there was no opposition to Jewish control of the media. This led to Jewish control over American foreign policy and the decriminalization of usury.
The thirty year battle over the sexualization of the culture ended in 1965 when the Legion of Decency ran up the white flag and Hollywood broke the Code. Once the Catholics lost their nerve in the war over the sexualization of culture, once they backed away from holding Hollywood Jews to the basic rudiments of sexual decency, it was inevitable that the instruments of culture they failed to control would get used against them in all out cultural warfare. The sexualization of the Catholic clergy dates from this period.
There are no truces in cultural warfare. The law of cultural life is either occupy your own cultural territory or have it occupied by alien forces. “The truth of the matter was that I did not like the Catholic Church,” Leo Pfeffer admitted in his memoirs. The truth of the matter goes beyond that as well. Leo Pfeffer was not just talking about personal animus; he was talking about an animus which was shared by his employer, the American Jewish Committee, as well as by Hollywood’s motion picture and television industries. The latter group was described by Stephen Steinlight as “the Jewish industry, par excellence.” Even toward the end of his life, after proclaiming the triumph of secular humanism over the Catholic Church in 1976, Pfeffer was concerned about Catholic activism on the abortion issue because “the partial success which it has so far achieved may encourage further Catholic intervention in the political arena and bring back the days when the Roman Catholic Church was a powerful force in the American political system.”
The destruction of Catholic political power meant the rise of Jewish power. In a Protestant culture, there was no one else to keep the Jews in check. What happened to American Catholics in the 1960s was a prelude to what happened in Poland after the fall of Communism, and to what is happening to the Islamic world today. When American Catholics lost the culture wars of the 1960s, the rest of the world was subjected to the same regime of control through the manipulation of appetite that was erected in America after their defeat. The results were the same. Democracy led to tyranny. Extreme “freedom” led to equally extreme forms of slavery. Hollywood is now putting those Trotskyite globalist ideals into practice by promoting the widespread dissemination of things like pornography and MTV. Stephen Steinlight indicates that “MTV, for better or for worse, will prove more powerful with young Muslim immigrants than the mullahs.”
Once I exposed the ethnic subtext to the culture wars in America, it became clear that what happened to the Catholics in the 1930s was happening to the Iranians now. The same WASP/Jewish alliance was responsible for both incidents of covert warfare. A year after the coup in Tehran, the CIA staged another coup in Guatemala for United Fruit. Eddy Bernays, Freud’s nephew, supplied the PR. An awareness is growing that the same thing happened in Paris in 1968:
More and more young Frenchmen are looking back at the history of France since 1945 and they are gradually coming to the realization that the country has been ruled by an arrogant cabal of plutocrats who overthrew de Gaulle in 1968 and who replaced this remarkable national leader with a protégé of the Rothschild family, Georges Pompidou, who began his career as a director of the Banque Rothschild and who was later [chosen] by the French elites to replace de Gaulle. The French plutocracy which, together with the CIA, had covertly orchestrated the “May 68” riots to achieve “regime change” in France, now had free rein to radically change the “sovereignist” political course chartered by de Gaulle. Can you guess when the policy of mindless import of cheap foreign labor into France began? Under Pompidou, of course! Now ... both native and immigrant French people are re-discovering their common history and are beginning to understand that they both were victims of the same politicians (frenchdissidents.wordpress.com, November 14, 2013).
The Soral-Dieudonne coalition that is trying to circumvent the dialectical relationship between the policies of the left and right, each of which generates the need for the other as its corrective, are beginning to see that it is counterproductive to demonize all Muslims, as nationalist parties like the BNP in England was paid to do, as Martin Web
ster has pointed out. A more nuanced view recognizes that Iran “fosters a far more refined and sophisticated look at the flaws of modern society than either the pro-regime mosques in France and abroad or the Wahabbis” (ibid).
The 1979 revolution in Iran was an important milestone in the history of resistance to post-World War II CIA covert warfare. Both the negative consequences and the unintended consequences of the Hostage Crisis of 1979 are traceable to the CIA’s 1953 coup to overthrow Mossadegh. The revolution and hostage crisis inspired the Shi’a in Heerat to imitate the Iranians’ example. It also inspired Osama bin Laden who declared war on the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan and on America shortly after the Soviet defeat. All of that was traceable to Operation Ajax. More importantly:
The success of Operation Ajax had an immediate and far-reaching effect in Washington. Overnight, the CIA became a central part of the American foreign policy apparatus, and covert action came to be regarded as a cheap and effective way to shape the course of world events (Kinzer).
The chain of American involvement in CIA sponsored covert warfare which began with the coup d’etat in Iran found its culmination in the late winter of 2013 in Victoria Nuland’s coup d’etat in the Ukraine. The results of the Ukrainian coup d’etat were disastrous for the United States. The return of the Crimea to Russia signaled the beginning of the end of the American Empire as well as the end of the one hundred year-long campaign based on the Mackinder thesis to dominate the Eurasian landmass and the pivot of civilization, but the playbook was the same one put into action in 1953 in Iran. The results were the same as under the Shah. After the coup d’etat, the Ukrainian Nazis had to pass sexual nondiscrimination laws. Once they did, they qualified for IMF loans and the system of complete control based on sodomy and usury was in place.
“Operation Ajax has,” in Kinzer’s words, “left a haunting and terrible legacy.” It “turned whole regions of the world bitterly against the United States.” Kinzer tells us that: “The violent anti-Americanism that emerged from Iran after 1979 shocked most people in the United States. Americans had no idea of what might have set off such bitter hatred in a country where they had always imagined themselves as more or less well-liked.”
I had the mirror image of that feeling during the more than an hour of Q&A which followed my talk. These were passionate people looking for honest answers in troubled times. They could have stormed the stage and taken me hostage if they wanted to. I had no protection, no security guards, no secret back entrance, no helicopter waiting to fly me away. The only thing that protected everyone in that hall, especially me, from the chaos of passion fueled by historical grievance was the Logos, the same Logos the Magi discerned in the sky when the star led them to The Logos Incarnate.
When the Iranians chanted “Death to America,” I was told not to take it personally, and I didn’t. “I love America,” I told my audience in Fasa. “I love the St. Joseph River and my home in Indiana under the trees.”
“But I hate the American Empire,” I continued. I hate what it did to the Catholic Church in America under the guise of “doctrinal warfare,” and I hate what it did in Iran in 1953 after C.D. Jackson and the Dulles brothers hijacked American foreign policy under the guise of the anti-Communist crusade.
The first successful insurrection against that American Empire took place in Iran in 1979 when Imam Khomeini came to power. That revolution is in danger now. The revolution needs to become conscious of itself. Revolutionary action needs Logos to complete its trajectory into a new, but lasting social order. The first item on the agenda is birth control.
“Throw away your birth control pills,” I told the audience in Fasa. “Support the Supreme Leader.”
Back at the hotel I shared a cup of tea with Habibe after the talk.
“God,” I said, still wound up from the talk and almost two-hour Q&A which followed, “created heaven and earth. God created space and time. We perceive time as history. God is the Lord of History. God cannot create something evil. This means that history cannot have an evil end. History must result in something good in spite of the machinations of evil men. God uses these evil men to bring about good. It’s like the story of Joseph in the Bible. Joseph’s brothers did evil, but God brought good out of it. When the brothers came to Joseph for grain after the famine struck Egypt, Joseph told them, ‘the evil that you intended to me has been turned by God’s power into good.’ The same thing applies to all of human history. The intentions of evil men don’t have the final word. God does.”
“You sound like a Muslim,” Habibe told me after I paused to take a breath. “You’re not at all like your description on the internet.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“You’re much better looking in person than in your pictures,” she continued.
“Thank you,” I said, warming to my attractive young interlocutor.
“Your suit goes well with your gray hair.”
Gray hair?
I don’t perceive myself as a grandfather, but I suspect that that is the way 20-year-old Iranians perceive me. During the long Farsi language introduction in Fasa, a cheer went up from the crowd. When I asked what they were cheering about, I was told it was the announcement that I had five children and thirteen grandchildren. Every time Shaheen insisted that he wanted me to be his father-in-law, Hamed would correct him by saying “grandfather-in-law.”
We are on the verge of a new new world order symbolized by the picture of Pope Francis at the Apartheid Wall. Kevin Barrett summed it up when he wrote:
The Pope’s historic prayer at the apartheid wall illustrates the rise of religion as a force for social justice. Prior to 1979, social justice struggles were associated with “the left,” meaning socialism or communism. Both movements were dominated by atheists and secularists. They saw religion as a tool of oppression, an “opiate of the people.” In 1979, two epochal events signaled a sea change in modern history. In Iran, the Islamic Revolution overthrew a corrupt and brutal secularist dictatorship and established a new social model — one that sought social justice through a religiously-based society. And in Poland, the Catholic Solidarity labor movement arose to challenge atheistic Communism. Soon religious Afghans were challenging the atheist Soviet occupation of their country. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down ... and with it the “Godless Communism” of the Soviet Empire. Since then, the Islamic awakening has been challenging secular capitalism in many parts of the world (veteranstoday.com, June 1, 2014).
Kevin then mentioned my first trip to Tehran:
Catholic historian E. Michael Jones foresees such an eventuality. In February 2013, Jones and I were returning to Tehran from a meeting with religious scholars in Qom. Jones, who admires Iran’s God-centered society, expressed the fervent hope that the Pope would come to Iran to make common cause with the Islamic Republic — and turn decisively against Zionism. “But could this Pope [Benedict] ever do such a thing?” we asked. “He won’t be Pope forever!” Jones announced. An hour or so later, regular programming was interrupted by a special bulletin: “Pope Resigns!” It was the first time in 600 years that a Pope had decided to step down. If E. Michael Jones is ever nominated for sainthood, I will happily testify to his miraculous powers of premonition. The new Pope, Francis, seems blessed with a heartfelt concern for ordinary people. He appears genuinely pained by the suffering of the Palestinians under Israeli oppression. And he seems instinctively opposed to the heartless power of New World Order bankster capitalism. Will Pope Francis soon be “Going to Tehran”? Will he announce that Netanyahu needs an exorcism, and Zionism needs a funeral? Will he stand with Putin against NATO’s nuclear encirclement of Russia? Will he join the world’s Muslim scholars calling for an end to usury and the destruction of the current international banking system in favor of something more humane and equitable? Will he demand that the US radically scale back its obscene military spending and lead the planet towards demilitarization ... and the transfer of trillions of wasted military d
ollars into schools, hospitals, mass transit, and sustainable energy? Might he call for an end to biological technologies that threaten human dignity and even human existence — such as bio-weapons, designer genes, and trans-humanism? None of these things are possible today. But could they be possible tomorrow? If the new religious movements for social justice unite — and make common cause with everyone who supports justice, including those who consider themselves secularists — who knows what the future might bring.
On the day that I arrived in Tehran, Pastor Joel Hunter, a man the press billed as “Obama’s spiritual adviser,” was winding up a week-long visit to discuss “religious tolerance.” Needless to say, there was no small amount of condescension in the report. One can imagine the reaction in the press if the Supreme Leader were to come to America to discuss religious tolerance for Americans who objected to gay marriage. But Pastor Hunter didn’t seem bent on making political points. “Those of us” who want to make progress, “know we’re going to be blamed by some of the hardliners, for even having these conversations,” but “we believe it’s worth the risk because we’re not going to make progress as countries or even as religious communities for not talking to one another.”
“We believe,” Hunter continued, “that we have something in common, and out of the commonality of our religious communities, we can build the kind of relationship and trust that politics simply can’t,” he said. “Only through religious leadership or the exchange of religious leaders, we believe peace is going to be successfully built between our two countries.” Hunter said he believes religious leaders can play a role in decreasing tensions between the United States and Iran.
Hunter planned to report on his trip to President Obama. As another indication that the world is changing, the U.S. State Department praised Hunter’s efforts. “We commend such efforts to promote interfaith tolerance and religious freedom,” said one State Department official, who considered this sort of dialogue “a foreign policy priority for the Department.” The same official added that “a small delegation of U.S. Catholics visited Iran in March, entirely independent of the U.S. government.”
Islam and Logos Page 12
