By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
The Semites, the Semitic peoples, and speakers of the Semitic languages started as a figment of the German imagination in the late 18th century and early 19th century.
It quickly became a German racial epithet, used in contrast to Aryan. By the time Adolf Hitler came along, this was the pseudo-scientific doctrine in which the Germans lumped both the Jews and the Arabs into a single category – the inferiors of the Aryans.
That is one of the reasons Hitler refused to listen to the advice of his general staff on aiding the Arab nationalist forces in Iraq, Syria and Palestine in the Wehrmacht’s war plans against the British and the Soviet Union. The pseudo-science of Semitism and Aryanism, and the idea of anti-Semitism which the Germans, together with the British and Americans, adopted in the run-up to World War II was spelled out at Harvard University by an anthropologist called Carleton Coon; he cribbed directly from German academics, turning out papers on the Berbers of Morocco and advancing his racial superiority-inferiority ideas between 1925 and 1939. When the war began, Coon joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he demonstrated his keenness for pistol shooting, hare-brained sabotage missions, and homicidal mania. Among his wartime schemes he proposed to remove the Arabs of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) as unfit to rule; replace them with the restoration of the French empire; and kill those French officials whom Coon judged to get his way. He was one of the planners of the assassination of Admiral Francois Darlan, the French military commander, in Algiers on December 24, 1942; Coon’s pistol was the murder weapon.**
American murderers of the Arabs like Coon then — like Israeli murderers of Arabs now — have succeeded in establishing their doctrine of exceptionalism and racial superiority in state policy as the successor to the doctrines of Aryanism and Nazism which were interrupted by Hitler’s suicide in 1945, then the Nuremberg trials concluding in 1946. The crime of racial and cultural genocide became international law in 1948. It was then modified by the new Israeli state doctrine of anti-Semitism: this decriminalised the genocide of the Palestinian people; and outlawed instead media criticism, political opposition, even science for threatening the legitimacy of Israel’s Basic Law of Arab exclusion, and Israeli military operations to enforce it.
In the present war between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas on the Gaza battlefield – “the American project”, as the Russian Foreign Ministry called it in a statement on October 29 *** – the doctrine of anti-Semitism as a race hatred crime is being applied to protect the race hatred crime being perpetrated against the other Semites, the Palestinians.
This doctrine, however, has had a negative impact on the ability of the Israelis and the Americans to wage their war. A fresh Russian analysis of the military intelligence failures exposed by Hamas in its offensive of October 7, illustrates how and why the Israelis failed to anticipate because they underestimated their Arab adversary; and because they regarded him as a racial inferior.
This assessment appeared on October 29 in the Telegram channel of a Russian analyst named Alexander Hoffmann, a senior member of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). Hoffmann sets out in brief the causes of the Israeli intelligence and military failures preceding the start of the Hamas operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7.
It has been immediately republished by Boris Rozhin, editor and writer of the influential Colonel Cassad military blog; and by Yevgeny Krutikov, Moscow security analyst, historian, and former GRU military intelligence staff officer.
Left: Alexander Hoffmann and the name of his Telegram account, @thehegemonist. Right: Yevgeny Krutikov and his Telegram account, Mudraya Ptitsa (“Wise Bird”).
If we abstract from the versions about the eschatological motives of the parties to the conflict and various hypotheses about the scenario of how events developed, the Al-Aqsa Flood operation exposed three vulnerabilities of the Israelis of a military intelligence nature:
— a failure in strategic intelligence regarding the plans and intentions of Hamas. Although, based on the received HUMINT [human intelligence] data, there were warnings from the Egyptian intelligence services. The Israelis position their technical intelligence capabilities as dominant [above their human intelligence].
— the discrepancy between the capabilities of the advanced, expensive Iron Dome missile defense system and the requirements for repelling the direct and asymmetric threats [employed by Hamas].
— strategic miscalculation in the use of a complex, high-tech, expensive security barrier around the perimeter of the Gaza Strip. The construction of the barrier strategically set restrictions on offensive manoeuvre for the IDF and the ability of the Israelis to anticipate. Hamas has gained thereby the operational initiative – the mobility of their forces against the static dispersion of the Israelis. Considering the barrier impenetrable before the operation, the Israelis had relocated most of their regular forces to northern-sector control of the territories near the borders of Lebanon and Syria,and to the West Bank.
Hoffmann illustrates his report (right) with heavy IDF armour in fixed position above ground and below ground Hamas forces on the move.
The “great Israeli wall” has appeared to be almost totally useless. Hamas overcame it in a short time, which allowed it to operate almost unhindered in the adjacent territories. The disabling of [the IDF’s] technological means demonstrated the lack of the human resources to respond. In terms of communications, the dependence of the Israeli forces on wireless data transmission has become a critical vulnerability.
As in the case of Iron Dome, the Israelis relied on technological solutions, methods, and thinking, neglecting the principle of war being waged by people, not by machines (yet). To this is added a doctrinal and strategic discrepancy with the actual conditions of combat. Technological superiority was placed at the forefront, but the complex systems showed vulnerability to a cascade of failures, leading the system to collapse. A regional conflict would make this catastrophic.
[*] The lead cartoons are, left, by Carlos Latuff in Brazil in 2006 and, right, by Mr Fish in the US (Harper’s Magazine) also in 2006. They have been reproduced by Evan Jones in a collection of western media cartoons on the meaning of anti-Semitism as an information warfare weapon in US-Israeli military operations against the Arabs until editorial censorship was imposed in both the UK and US. Click to read.
[**] Read the 80-year old story of the German General Staff plans for the Arab states and Hitler’s failure to implement them, followed by the plans of Coon, the OSS, and the CIA homicidalists against the Arabs, which are still being followed in Washington and Tel Aviv. Click. On Saturday night, October 28, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed his intelligence services and military staff for failing to warn him of the Hamas war plan. Under counter-attack from the services and the military, Netanyahu then apologised and retracted his claims. The Israeli press record of the episode reveals that the entire Israeli political and military leadership shares the same racial superiority doctrine.
[***] In a special session of security officials called to discuss the Makhachkala airport incidents, President Vladimir Putin said: “We must clearly understand who in reality is behind the tragedy of the peoples of the Middle East and other regions of the world, who organizes deadly chaos, who benefits from it. Today, in my opinion, it has already become obvious and understandable for everyone – customers act openly and brazenly. It is the current ruling elites of the United States and their satellites that are the main beneficiaries of global instability. They extract their bloody rent from it. Their strategy is also obvious. The United States as a global superpower – everyone sees it, understands it, even according to trends in the global economy – is weakening, losing its position. The American-style world, with one hegemon, is being destroyed, is leaving, gradually but steadily going into the past…The events in Makhachkala last night were inspired, including through social networks, not least from the territory of Ukraine, by the hands of agents of Western special services. I want to ask myself in this regard: is it possible to help Palestine by trying to attack the Tats and their families? Tats, by the way, are the titular nation in Dagestan. Palestine can only be helped in the fight against those who are behind this tragedy. We, Russia, are fighting them as part of a special military operation, it is with them – both for ourselves and for those who strive for real, true freedom.”
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