The trust is built around the person of Alfred Mann, without him it would collapse.’
‘So you think it’s a kind of sect?’
‘Not a sect in the sense of the Raelians,’ he said laughing. ‘But you have to admit all the key persons are either members of his family, in-laws or close friends of long date.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘It’s a fact. They hold the purse strings and managed the trusts finances in the greatest opacity and in a somewhat amateur fashion. Not one of them is a trained professional, some are good doers with vested interests, especially the Swiss.’
‘I have to agree with you there.’
‘Their conferences are designed to attract a maximum of international attention, to show that the rabbis were open minded and modern, that they held out their hands to the Muslims, a good public relations act, not quite what our journalist friend told us.’
‘Who?’
‘Shlomo, he said they were mostly hard-liners.’
‘In any case all decisions seem to taken arbitrarily manner by Mann, and only him, no other person has a say except for the details, any initiative that doesn’t suit his own precise goals is stifled and I’ve seen that those who display an excess of personal initiative are quickly ejected from the inner circle of his minions or altogether.’
‘His technique consists of convincing the members of the different committees and structures he sets up are the deciders, in reality the members of those committees are compliant or naïve or have a programme of their own.’
Alfred Mann appeared to those who did not know him well as an engaging man of about sixty, his thick white hair was always well combed and his close beard well trimmed, he walked with a stick, which at once disarmed those who did not know him. He radiated charisma, but was given to violent outbursts when he was in disagreement with his followers and felt with whom he felt a natural superiority, sulking if reproached by his equals, disdaining his adversaries and stonewalling superior authority.
When speaking he focused his pale blue eyes on his interlocutor and articulated his well chosen words with what was obviously great care to those who knew him. He tolerated no nonsense from those who worked with him or his associates.
Alfred Mann had learnt that communication was power, the Abraham Heritage Trust was functioned on the basis of a broad communication network with the press and media and its world wide contacts. His philosophy was based on Oscar Wilde's motto according to which there is only one thing worse than having a bad press, and that is to have no press at all.
Mann had dedicated a good part of his life to humanitarian work before discovering that he was treating the results of man's follies and not the causes. The success he had achieved in his humanitarian work had brought rewards in the form of gratitude from those he had helped, but not the recognition he had hoped for in his country or from the international establishment, rather envy of his achievements with so little means and jealousy from his rivals.
He sought a moralising source as a remedy for the causes of international strife and conflict. In the Yugoslavian war he discovered the role of religion in the conflict and the rejection of Islam by the Orthodox Serbs. As the war in Yugoslavia came to an end he turned his attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and discovered Israel and Judaism. He came to believe that the cause of the problem was due to a clash between Islam and Judaism and by reconciling the two, peace could be achieved.
Mann was not content with minor achievements, over the years he had not only made enemies, but had created a following of loyal followers, idealists and workers, who believed in him, believed in his destiny and were seduced by his undeniable charisma. His goal was to build a structured that would confederate the great monotheist religions, an organisation led by himself, which he headed, as a consequence of the great religions’ inability to cede the controlling power of one of their own. He had become a unifier, an undeclared modern prophet, his followers came from all faiths.
He had dedicated his life to a mystical community of peace based on a fusion of the holy books of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, a path that ignored the reality of the world; possession, economics, land, power, human cupidity and deceit.
Many were there to finance his vision, people of all faiths who could not afford to go against peace, who to be politically correct before the world rejected violence and terror to gain their ends or to hold onto them. He had a sense of a personal mission and destiny in uniting feuding religions into one congress.
One of his backers was Messaoud Darmon a rich Algerian Jew who had made his fortune in business in France. He had started with his fathers transport business before Algeria’s independence and moved to France after independence where he built a huge conglomerate of companies. Darmon never forgot his roots cherishing the idea that Muslims, Jews and Christians had once lived in harmony in Algiers of his childhood, it was for this reason he backed Mann with generous donations to encourage the reconciliation between the Jews and Arabs
Mann’s background was psychology and it seemed to O’Connelly that he applied his training with skill to manipulate all those he met on his path to sainthood. O’Connelly wondered if his walking stick was a simply a prop to disarm, or draw sympathy and attention from, all those he met. In the same way Mann avoided drawn out meetings maintaining his reserve by withdrawing to rest or retiring early in evening feigning his need for a good night’s rest.
After having been a journalist for many years O’Connelly had an ongoing interest in the Israeli-Palestine question, and why had this question occupied the world’s headlines more regularly than any other region of the world over the previous seventy years. War and strife was an old tradition of the region, going back almost four thousand years. Wars had ensnared the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Crusaders, the Ottoman and British Empires. Why did men fight of the piece of land called the Holy Land, which would have been better named the Land of Blood and Strife, where countless men women and children of all religions and races had left their bones in its parched soil.
A land of milk and honey? Certainly not. For thousands of years it had been a land burnt dry by the sun, a land of harsh contrasts, which lay between the fertile mountains of the Lebanon and the Nile Delta. Myth said it had been transformed by the sweat of Israel’s brow; reality was that dollars, twentieth century technology and know-how had brought about the transformation that certain Israelis pointed to with pride, forgetting that the regions scare water resources were being depleted to grow avocados and oranges.
De Lussac’s latest backers were amongst Mann’s supporters, a hard-line Orthodox sect, who unknown to de Lussac had not the least intention seeing his controversial theory concerning the Temple published, which could only provide addition arguments to the Waqf. De Lussac’s naivety and stubbornness reached its limit when Mann’s hard line friends learnt that he had been in contact with Palestinian archaeologists close to the Waqf – who saw their rights to Esplanade historically confirmed by his theories – it was too much.
Two days later, returning to his hotel late in evening de Lussac was roughly bundled into a van by armed men wearing masks and brought to a house in the suburbs of southern Tel-Aviv. He was cross-examined and accused him of being a false Jew and collusion with the enemy, after a couple of hours of questioning using Tsahal methods, he was thrown into a darkened room overnight and left to ponder his future. Early the next morning, tired and frightened without having eaten or offered even a glass of water, he was dropped on a street in the Arab quarter of Jaffa with notice to quit the country at once under the threat of being abandoned in the Negev Desert if he persisted with his plans. The same evening he left for Bangkok with a low cost fare with no intention of using the return portion of the ticket.
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The Covenant
The Legacy of Solomon Page 61
