Using food as a reward or as solace
also interferes with eating mindfully; if you're eating to satisfy emotional
hunger, it's hard to ever feel full. "Ask yourself, what do you really
need and what else can you do it fulfill it?" says Ms. Loring.
Have you had learned to eat
consciously? Has it changed your life? If not, does it sound like something
you'd like to try? Share your thoughts.
Chronic dieters in particular have
trouble recognizing their internal cues, says Jean Kristeller, a psychologist
at Indiana State, who pioneered mindful eating in the 1990s. "Diets set up
rules around food and disconnect people even further from their own experiences
of hunger and satiety and fullness," she says.
Mindful eaters learn to assess taste
satiety. A hunger for something sweet or sour or salty can often be satisfied
with a small morsel. In one exercise, Ms. Kristeller has clients mindfully eat
a single raisin -- noticing their thoughts and emotions, as well as the taste
and texture. "It sounds somewhat silly," she explains, "but it
can also be very profound." http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
Mindful eating also means learning to
ignore urges to snack that aren't connected to hunger. And it's critical to
leave food on your plate once you are full; pack it to go, if possible.
In contrast to other diet programs,
the researchers involved with mindful eating avoid making weight-loss claims;
that's still being investigated. But some practitioners say it's life-changing.
"I don't think about food
anymore. It's totally out of my mind," says Mary Ann Power, age 50, of
Pittsboro, N.C., a lifelong dieter who thinks she's lost eight or 10 pounds in
two weeks since learning the practice at Duke. "I think you could put a
piece of chocolate cake in front of my nose right now, and it wouldn't tempt
me. Before, I could eat three pieces."
One mindful meal at Duke made a big
impression on me -- I was satisfied with minimal meals for days afterward. But
it's hard to sustain. I find myself eating mindlessly again in front of the TV,
or at the computer.
"Try to eat one meal or one snack
mindfully every day," advises Jeffrey Greeson, a psychologist with the
Duke program. "Even eating just the first few bites mindfully can help
break the cycle of wolfing it down without paying any attention."
For thirteen centuries, between 1200
B.C. and the second century A.D., the Jews lived in, and often ruled, the land
of Israel. The population was clustered mainly in Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee.
The Jews’ dominion was long but not eternal. The Romans invaded and, after
suppressing revolts in A.D. 66-73 and 132-135, killed or expelled much of the
Jewish population and renamed the land Palaestina, for the Philistines who had
lived along the southern seacoast. After the conquest, some Jews stayed behind,
and the faith of the Hebrews remained a religio licita, a tolerated religion,
throughout the Roman Empire.
By the nineteenth century, Palestine
had been ruled by Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Arabs, Christian Crusaders, and
Ottoman Turks. When Mark Twain visited in 1867, his imagination soaked with the
Biblical imagery of milk and honey, he discovered to his surprise “a hopeless,
dreary, heartbroken land . . . desolate and unlovely.” Jericho was “accursed,”
Jerusalem “a pauper village.” Twain’s passages on Palestine in “The Innocents
Abroad” have, over the decades, been exploited by propagandists to echo Lord
Shaftesbury’s notion that, before the return of the Jews to Zion, Palestine was
a land without a people for a people without a land. Twain and Shaftesbury, as
it turned out, were hardly alone in failing to recognize a substantial Arab
population in the Judaean hills and beyond. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
And yet nineteenth-century Palestine
certainly was desolate and impoverished. The population in 1881 consisted of
four hundred and fifty thousand Palestinian Arabs and twenty-five thousand
Jews, nearly all of them ultra-Orthodox non-nationalists living in Jerusalem,
Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. Palestine, despite its importance to the three
monotheistic religions, was a political backwater. The Ottomans divided the
land into sanjaks, or districts, which were ruled from Constantinople, Damascus,
and Beirut. It was at this time, however, that European Jews—poor, mainly
secular, and feeling the onset of an intensified anti-Semitism in their
countries of origin—began to emigrate to Palestine. This was the First Aliyah,
or ascent. Most European Jewish emigrants headed to North America and Great
Britain, but some, in small numbers at first, sailed to Palestine. The local
Ottoman bureaucrats were strapped for cash, and the new arrivals had little
problem obtaining entry rights, agricultural plots, and building permits. This
was colonialism not by conquering armies but by persistent real-estate
transactions—and, when necessary, baksheesh.
The plans of the early Jewish settlers
were unambiguous, even if they seemed, at the time, wholly incredible. As one
early Zionist, Ze’ev Dubnow, wrote to his brother Simon, “The ultimate goal . .
. is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the
political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years.
. . . The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they
are the masters of their ancient homeland.”
In the midst of this first wave of
immigration, Zionism found its chief tribune, dreamer, and theorist in Theodor
Herzl. A mediocre playwright and the Paris correspondent for a liberal Viennese
daily newspaper, Neue Freie Presse, Herzl witnessed the Dreyfus trial in 1894
and the appalling anti-Jewish demonstrations that followed. In the four-volume
“History of Anti-Semitism,” Léon Poliakov writes that in the last decades
before the First World War it was “hard to determine whether the French Jews or
the German Jews were the more fervently patriotic.” But Herzl concluded that if
anti-Semitism was as pervasive in the capitals of the European Enlightenment as
it was in tsarist Russia there was no hope for assimilation. He was thoroughly
secular and had no real Jewish learning. He spoke neither Yiddish nor Hebrew.
(Indeed, the pathos of his conversion to Zionism lay in his devotion both to
Vienna and to German culture, and in the degree to which events in Europe
would, with the rise of the Third Reich, surpass his darkest predictions.)
When Herzl published “Der Judenstaat”
(“The Jewish State”), in 1896, the book seemed to most readers as utopian as
Bacon’s “New Atlantis.” As portrayed in Amos Elon’s wonderful 1975 biography,
Herzl was an almost comically quixotic figure—the bearded café intellectual
with his historical dreams travelling the world, trying (and failing) to win
financial support from the Rothschilds and political support from the Kaiser
and the Ottoman sultan. And yet the Zionist movement, with Herzl at its center,
took hold, and in 1897, at the First Zionist Congress, in Basel, Switzerland, a
motley collection of Jewish intellectuals and political activists voted to
establish a Heimstätte, a “publicly and legally secured home,” for the Jews in
Palestine.
Although the delegates surely had a
sovereign state in mind, they were careful in these early days not to use such
terms, so as not to alarm the Gentiles or offend any Jewish grandees who might
eventually decide to fund their project.
In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the Palestinian Arabs identified themselves not as a
unified people but as subjects of the Ottoman Empire and of the greater
community of Islam; their local identities were tied to their villages, clans,
and families. Resistance to the earliest wave of Jewish immigration was
apparent, but it was polite compared to what came later. In 1899, the mayor of
Jerusalem, Yusuf Dia al-Khalidi, wrote to Zadok Kahn, the chief rabbi of
France, saying that the Zionist idea was in theory “natural, fine, and just. .
. . Who can challenge the rights of the Jews to Palestine? Good lord,
historically it is really your country.” But, like other Palestinian notables,
he opposed Jewish immigration, because the land was inhabited and resistance
would inevitably follow. “In the name of God, let Palestine be left in peace,”
Khalidi wrote. Rabbi Kahn passed the letter on to Herzl, who blithely wrote to
Khalidi to reassure him that the Zionists, with their wealth, their skills, and
their education, would build an economy to benefit both Arab and Jew.
As the flow of immigration increased,
so did the resistance, especially with the end of the First World War and the
beginning of British control over Palestine, in 1917-18, and culminating in the
1936-39 Arab revolt against the Yishuv, the name for the pre-state Jewish
community. The resistance took the form of demonstrations (some of them
virulently anti-Semitic), riots, assaults, and bombings. The Palestinian
leadership became more and more radicalized, and small clandestine groups were
formed. In turn, radical Jewish factions and militias began to win support.
Where the Arabs were concerned, Herzl
had been more oblivious than cruel. But the leader of the Yishuv, David
Ben-Gurion, recognized the us-or-them nature of the conflict; he sensed the
emotional force of his adversary’s position even as he fought for the
establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Between 1931 and 1939, as Jewish
emigration mounted, the Arab majority declined from eighty-two per cent to
seventy per cent. “What Arab cannot do his math and understand that immigration
at the rate of sixty thousand a year means a Jewish state in all of Palestine?”
Ben-Gurion stated. As he confessed years later to the Zionist Nahum Goldmann,
“Why should the Arabs make peace? . . . We have taken their country. Sure, God
promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We
come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to
them?”
Among Arab clerics, kings, and
diplomats, the view of the Jews hardened into a maximalist politics, at once
threatened and threatening. In 1943, when Franklin Roosevelt sent out feelers
to King Ibn Sa’ud of Saudi Arabia to solve the Palestine situation, the King
responded that he was “prepared to receive anyone of any religion except
(repeat except) a Jew.” In a letter to F.D.R., he wrote, “Palestine . . . has
been an Arab country since the dawn of history and . . . was never inhabited by
the Jews for more than a period of time, during which their history in the land
was full of murder and cruelty.” In 1947, Jordan’s prime minister, Samir
Rifa’i, hardly the most radical politician in the region, told reporters, “The
Jews are a people to be feared. . . . Give them another twenty-five years and
they will be all over the Middle East, in our country and Syria and Lebanon, in
Iraq and Egypt. . . . They were responsible for starting two world wars. . . .
Yes, I have read and studied, and I know they were behind Hitler at the
beginning of his movement.”
What followed was a drama of
redemptive, liberating settlement on one side and catastrophic dispossession on
the other—all of it taking place on a patch of desert land too small for easy
division and too imbued with historical and holy claims for rational
negotiation. For the Jews in Palestine, Zionism was a movement of national
liberation after untold suffering; for the Arabs, Zionism was an intolerable
assault by the colonial West against sacred ground and Islam itself. Even now,
more than a century later, politicians and scholars alike quickly betray
prejudices, passions, and allegiances in the details they select when relating
the saga that led to the U.N. Partition Plan, on November 29, 1947, and the war
that began just hours later.
In Soviet-era Russia, honest young men
and women of academic inclination knew never to enter the field of modern
history. In order to live a scholarly life relatively free of cant and
suppression, one studied Byzantine manuscripts, Mayan civilization, medieval
Burma—anything that would safely skirt mention of one’s own time and place. In
the new society of Israel, however noisily democratic, national history is
inescapably political, too. And, like any young nation, especially one born of
conflict, Israel did not readily accept scholarly work that challenged its most
cherished national myths. Self-doubt, complexity, and reflection are not the
modes of infancy; in any country, mythmaking precedes documentary rigor. For
nearly forty years, Israeli histories and textbooks, with few exceptions,
endorsed the notion that the more than seven hundred thousand Arabs who left
Palestine as refugees in the years between 1947 and 1950 did so voluntarily or
at the urging of their leaders. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
This was a view echoed abroad by Leon
Uris in his fantastically popular novel “Exodus”; Uris writes of “the
absolutely documented fact that the Arab leaders wanted the civilian population
to leave Palestine as a political issue and a military weapon.”
In the late eighties, Israel
encountered its first revisionist historians, a group of rigorous young
scholars intent on seeing clearly the founding and development of the state,
come what may. At the head of that small and diverse movement was Benny Morris,
a Sabra and a Cambridge-educated leftist, who, like Israel itself, was born in
1948. His latest book on that pivotal year of war and transformation, “1948: A
History of the First Arab-Israeli War” (Yale; $32.50), is a commanding,
superbly documented, and fair-minded study of the events that, in the wake of
the Holocaust, gave a sovereign home to one people and dispossessed another.
Remarkably, the book makes every attempt at depth and balance, even though its
author has professed a “cosmic pessimism” about the current situation in the
Middle East and has denounced the Palestinian leadership in the harshest terms
imaginable.
Benny Morris’s family emigrated from
Britain in 1947, and Morris grew up in the heart of a left-wing pioneering
atmosphere. As an infant, he lived on Kibbutz Yasur, which had been established
in 1949 on the ruins of the Arab village of Al Birwa, where the Palestinian
poet Mahmoud Darwish lived before going into exile. His father, Ya’akov Morris,
was an Israeli diplomat and a published historian and poet.
In 1982, Morris experienced Mena-chem
Begin and Ariel Sharon’s invasion of southern Lebanon, first as a correspondent
for the Jerusalem Post, then as a soldier, when his division was called up and
took part in the siege in West Beirut. As a reporter, he visited Rashidiye, a
Palestinian refugee camp near Tyre, and interviewed refugees who had lived in
the town of Al Bassa, in Galilee. When Morris returned home, he examined newly
declassified papers in the Israel State Archive, along with documents in
archives in the U.S. and Britain and at the United Nations. (Arab governments
have made available very little archival material on the period.) His subject
was the military conflict between the early Zionists and the Arabs and the
subsequent exile of the Palestinians from their cities and towns.
In 1988, Morris published “The Birth
of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” which revolutionized Israeli
historiography and, to a great extent, a nation’s understanding of its own
birth. Relying less on testimony than on the newly available documents, Morris
described how and why sixty per cent of the Palestinians were uprooted and
their society destroyed. It was a far more complex picture than many Israelis
were prepared to accept. The book features a map that shows three hundred and
eighty-nine Arab villages, from upper Galilee to the Negev Desert. Morris
revealed that in forty-nine of these villages the indigenous Arabs were
expelled by the Haganah and other Jewish military forces; in sixty-two
villages, the Arabs fled out of fear, having heard rumors of attacks and even
massacres; in six, the villagers left at the instruction of Palestinian local
leaders. The refugees, who probably expected to return to their homes in a
matter of weeks or months, went to Gaza and the West Bank, and also to
surrounding Arab countries—Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria—where, to this
day, they have never been fully absorbed.
Morris’s aim was not simply to invert
the standard Zionist narrative. He provided a stark picture of the
anti-Semitism that infected the Arab leadership, including the influential
mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini, who refused any compromise
with the Zionists and, in the forties, promoted anti-Jewish propaganda from
Berlin and recruited Bosnian Muslims for the S.S. Morris quoted the many
leaders among the Palestinians and the Arab countries who vowed to eliminate
the nascent state of Israel and force the European Jewish arrivals back to where
they came from. But he also wrote at length about acts of wartime cruelty
committed by the Jewish victors against the Palestinians. He counted about a
dozen documented cases of Israelis raping Palestinian women but concluded that
more likely went unrecorded. He said that there were about two dozen acts of
massacre, some involving four or five executions but others involving many
more, at Saliha, Deir Yassin, Lydda, and Dawayima. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
Morris wrote that, although the leader
of the Jewish forces, David Ben-Gurion, did not give explicit orders to expel
Palestinians from their villages and urban neighborhoods, he was, from April,
1948, onward, projecting a message of transfer, an “atmosphere” in which, for
example, a young commander, Yitzhak Rabin, could sign an order to expel the
Arabs from Lydda just after receiving a visit from Ben-Gurion. “He understood
there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its
midst,” Morris has said.
“The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee
Problem, 1947-1949” was the most important text in that first wave of Israeli
revisionism. (Other “new historians,” as Morris dubbed his generation of
like-minded scholars, included Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, and Tom Segev.) The book
was published at the height of the first intifada, a Palestinian uprising in
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip led by young people throwing stones at Israeli
troops. Morris supported the intifada as a legitimate expression of outrage
against the occupation. When his Army unit was called up for service in the
West Bank city of Nablus, he refused to go and spent three weeks in jail.
Morris went unrewarded for his
independence. Although his book received serious attention in Israel and
abroad, he could not get a university job. In 1996, he announced in the press
that he planned to leave the country. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
When the interview was published, Ezer
Weizman, a key military figure in the 1948 war and the President of Israel,
summoned Morris to his office and asked if he supported Israel’s right to exist
as a Jewish state. Morris, who considered himself a liberal Zionist, said that
he did. Weizman called the president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in
Be’er Sheva, and, a year later, after passing through the usual academic
checkpoints, Morris began his career there as a professor of history.
Between 1993 and 1998, amid the
optimism of the Oslo Accords and the possibility that the century-long conflict
between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs might be coming to a negotiated
end, Morris worked on a comprehensive survey of the confrontation. The title,
“Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001,” attests
to the book’s historical and imaginative sympathy both for the Zionists, who
acquired a homeland but never a sense of security, and for the Palestinians,
whose demand for a homeland remained unsatisfied. Like all Morris’s work, the
book does not pretend to some sort of absolute objectivity—he has been attacked
from every side over the years—but its attempt at balance is obvious: where
there is anti-Arab racism among the Zionist forefathers, it is quoted; where
there is venality among the early Palestinian leadership, it, too, is pointed
out. The epitaph to “Righteous Victims” is the famous passage from Auden’s
“September 1, 1939” that speaks to the degrading costs of war and persecution:
“I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is
done / Do evil in return.”
But, just as the Arab world’s rejection
of the 1947 partition plan pushed Israeli leaders toward an even harsher view
of their adversaries, Yasir Arafat’s rejection of the peace proposals proffered
by Ehud Barak in 2000 at Camp David and at Taba, Egypt, coupled with the second
intifada, which followed, disillusioned Benny Morris to the point of
embitterment.
Morris, who has always voted for
parties on the left, said that Arafat had “defrauded” the Israelis, and he
decided that the Palestinians had no intention of forging a compromise. Morris
was not at all persuaded by explanations and press reports claiming that
Clinton and Barak had offered Arafat an unfair, hastily prepared deal. Even if
Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders, Morris concluded, the Palestinians
would consider that only a step in a “phased plan” to eliminate a “crusader
state” from sacred Arab lands. After 2000, he said in a 2004 interview with
Ha’aretz, “I understood that they were unwilling to accept the two-state
solution. They want it all. Lod and Acre and Jaffa.” Morris did criticize the
Israeli government for continuing to build on occupied territory, but,
especially in his role as pundit and polemicist, he was no longer giving equal
weight to two “righteous victims.”
In the Ha’aretz interview, Morris took
a tone that was in scant evidence in his earlier journalism or scholarly work.
He spoke of a “deep problem in Islam,” of a world in which “life doesn’t have
the same value it does in the West.” The Arabs belonged to a “tribal culture”
in which “revenge” played a “central part,” a society so lacking in “moral inhibitions”
that “if it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use
them.”
Morris was hardly the only Israeli
liberal dispirited by Arafat’s behavior in 2000 and the suicide bombs and
re-occupations that followed; nor was he alone in his gloom after September
11th. But his new language came as a shock. He described the Arab world as
“barbarian,” and said that the Israeli massacres committed in 1947-48 were
“peanuts” compared with those in Bosnia. Then, there was his call to build
“something like a cage” for the Palestinians: “I know that sounds terrible. It
is really cruel. But there is no other choice. There is a wild animal that has
to be locked up in one way or another.” Upon reflection, even Morris was
appalled by those words and later apologized.
To some extent, Morris has been
writing the same book throughout his scholarly life, and one theme that has
been pronounced is that of “transfer.” In all his work, he has explored the
thorny question of whether or not Ben-Gurion and his colleagues explicitly
endorsed a policy of “transferring”—exiling—the Arab population from Israel.
By the time of the 2004 Ha’aretz
interview, Morris had adopted a harsher, more prescriptive tone that was
sometimes chilling to the liberal audience that had first welcomed him. Fearing
the loss of a Jewish majority and the rise of an Arab fifth column, some
right-wing politicians have advocated transferring either the Palestinian Arabs
or the Israeli Arabs, or both, to Jordan—a country they refer to as the true
Palestinian state. (That was once a theme of Ariel Sharon’s.) Although Morris
does not endorse such a policy—“It is neither moral nor realistic”—he does say
that, historically speaking, BenGurion “faltered” in 1948. “If he was already
engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job,” he told
Ha’aretz. “I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the
politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter
and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all.”
Morris acknowledged that ethnic cleansing was “problematic” but later pointed
out catastrophic situations in which it could be “beneficial for humanity.” He
cited the Turkish expulsion of the Greek minority, Greece’s expulsion of its
Turkish minority after the First World War, and the expulsion of the Sudeten
Germans from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
(His sanguine perspective is unlikely to have been shared by,
say, the German survivors of the Brünner Todesmarsch, the Brno death march.)
Four years ago, Morris said that only
“apocalyptic” circumstances would demand that Israel carry out a policy of
transfer. By January, 2007, writing in the Jerusalem Post, he seemed convinced
that apocalypse was around the corner. The United States has been driven to
isolationism by its “debacle” in Iraq, Russia and China are “obsessed with
Muslim markets,” and Israel, led by a “party hack of a prime minister,” who
botched the war with Hezbollah in 2006, will now be “like a rabbit caught in
the headlights” as Iran prepares to launch nuclear-tipped Shihab missiles at
Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva. In this scenario, which Morris implied
is nearly inevitable, the Israeli leadership knows that it cannot launch a
unilateral attack on Iran, for fear of igniting a “world-embracing” terror
campaign:
So Israel’s leaders will grit their
teeth and hope that somehow things will turn out for the best. Perhaps, after
acquiring the Bomb, the Iranians will behave “rationally”?
But the Iranians are driven by a
higher logic. And they will launch their rockets. And, as with the first
Holocaust, the international community will do nothing. It will all be over,
for Israel, in a few minutes—not like in the 1940s, when the world had five
long years in which to wring its hands and do nothing.
What is so striking about Morris’s
work as a historian is that it does not flatter anyone’s prejudices, least of
all his own. The stridency and darkness of some of his public pronouncements is
not a feature of “Righteous Victims,” which is the most useful survey of the
conflict, or of “1948,” which is the best history of the first Arab-Israeli
wars. In “1948,” the assembled compendium of aspiration, folly, aggression,
hypocrisy, deception, bigotry, violence, suffering, and achievement is so
comprehensive and multilayered that no reader can emerge without a feeling of
unease—which is to say, a sense of the moral and historical intricacy of the
conflict.
One of the lingering mythologies that
Morris set out to confront in “1948” is the iconography of strength and
weakness, the competition between Jews and Palestinians for the role of
underdog and chief victim. There were two wars following the U.N. partition
resolution: first, the immediate Palestinian uprising against the Yishuv, and
then, after the Palestinian defeat, the coördinated invasion by the armies of
Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. Morris concludes that the Arabs were
demographically and geopolitically stronger—the Palestinians outnumbered the
Jews of the Yishuv two to one, and the surrounding Arab states had a
population, all told, of forty million. But in the years leading to the war the
Yishuv had organized political and military institutions that were suited to
crisis. Troop call-ups, expert foreign military personnel, and
weapons-procurement systems were in place. By contrast, very few Palestinians
came from the Hebron, Ramallah, and Nablus areas to aid their fellow
Palestinian Arabs in Jaffa, Haifa, Jerusalem, and the Jezreel and Jordan
Valleys. “The Yishuv had fought not a ‘people,’ ” Morris concludes, “but an
assortment of regions, towns, and villages.” http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com/
http://louis-j-sheehan.de/When the four Arab armies invaded, on May 15, 1948, they, too,
were disorganized and—compared with the Jews, who were fighting for their
survival—far less motivated.
About six thousand Jews and twelve
thousand Palestinians died in the conflict; the Egyptians lost fourteen hundred
men; the Iraqis, Jordanians, and Syrians lost several hundred each. Not long
afterward, seven hundred thousand Palestinians were exiled from their homes,
and the Jewish minorities in the Islamic world—in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Iran,
Yemen, and Libya—experienced anti-Semitic demonstrations, pogroms, threats,
internments, bomb attacks, synagogue fires. This, too, was a product of the
war, and half a million Jews, the Sephardim, eventually left Islamic countries
for Israel and, largely because of the circumstances of their exile, formed the
Likud rank and file.
In his closing pages, Morris writes
with rueful understanding and keen judgment of the consequences of his subject,
the rise of a state that gave him a home while displacing so many others:
The war was a humiliation from which
that world has yet to recover—the antithesis of the glory days of Arab Islamic
dominance of the Middle East and the eastern and southern Mediterranean basins.
The sense of humiliation only deepened over the succeeding sixty years as
Israel visibly grew and prospered while repeatedly beating the Arabs in new
wars, as the Palestinian refugee camps burst at the seams while sinking in the
mire of international charity and terrorism, and as the Arab world shuttled
between culturally self-effacing Westernization and religious fundamentalism.
Next month, the Israelis mark the
sixtieth anniversary of their independence, the Palestinians the sixtieth
anniversary of al-nakba, the catastrophe.
The history of the cocaine trade
between Andean countries and the United States over the past 30 years shows
that no sooner have police and customs officials become adept at spotting one
smuggling method than the drug-traffickers come up with a new one. Light planes
and commercial flights gave way to shipping containers. Where once cocaine was
hidden in shipments of fresh vegetables and flowers, more recently it has been
found in specially moulded furniture and concrete fencing posts.
But the latest method is especially
cunning: home-made submarines. These first appeared a decade ago, but were
considered by officials to be an oddity. Now it seems the traffickers have
perfected the design and manufacture of semi-submersible craft (although they
look like submarines, they don't fully submerge). In 2006, American officials
say they detected only three; now they are spotting an average of ten a month.
Of those, only one in ten is
intercepted. Many sail up the Pacific coast, often far out to sea. With enough
cargo space to carry two to five tonnes of cocaine, they also carry large fuel
tanks, giving them a range of 2,000 miles (3,200km). They are typically made of
fibreglass, powered by a 300/350hp diesel engine and manned by a crew of four. http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com/
They normally unload their cargo onto
fast power boats for the final leg to shore. None has been sighted unloading at
ports or beaches.
One theory is that the switch to
submarines is part of an effort by Colombian cocaine producers to win back from
their Mexican rivals-cum-partners a bigger slice of the profits from drugs. In
the 1990s most cocaine began to enter the United States across its southern
land border, rather than across the Caribbean. That allowed Mexican gangs to
oust Colombians from much of the lucrative retail-distribution business in
American cities.
The latest innovation may mean that a
claimed increase in the retail price of cocaine (up 44% between January and
September according to the United States' Drug Enforcement Administration)
could prove short-lived. The price rise may have stemmed from a crackdown by
Mexico on its drug gangs, which has prompted murderous feuding between them.
But many independent analysts reckon that cocaine consumption in the United
States has remained more or less constant. John Walsh, of the Washington Office
on Latin America, an NGO, says that four similar price increases in the 1980s
and 1990s were quickly reversed.
Interdiction of cocaine shipments fell
by 20% last year. Stopping the subs requires “wide-area surveillance systems,
acoustics and better intelligence,” says Admiral James Stavridis, the head of
the United States' Southern Command, based in Miami. Having shot drug planes
out of the sky, and used army troops to destroy coca fields and laboratories,
it seems that the drug warriors will have to move into anti-submarine warfare.
A disease that carries with it a
social stigma causes additional and unnecessary suffering. This has often been
so with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), or chronic-fatigue syndrome, as it is
also known. Despite debilitating symptoms, patients have been accused of
suffering from an imaginary illness: “yuppie flu”. Doctors have struggled to
distinguish the ailing from the malingering. Nonetheless, evidence has grown in
recent years that the syndrome is real, and now there is news that it has its
roots in genetics.
ME manifests as extreme exhaustion,
something that may include a range of other symptoms, such as disturbed sleep,
difficulties in remembering and concentrating, headaches, and painful muscles
and joints. Psychological symptoms, such as anxiety and irritability, can also
be present. As the symptoms can vary in severity, the syndrome can be hard to
identify, and patients can suffer for months before a diagnosis is made.
However, new hope for ME sufferers
arrived this week at a conference in Cambridge, in Britain. The event,
organised by ME Research UK and the Irish ME Trust, two charities that help to
fund studies and assist sufferers, was attended by researchers investigating
what causes the illness and how it could be treated.
Jonathan Kerr of St George's
University of London told the meeting that with his colleagues they have
identified 88 genes which are expressed differently in the blood of patients
who had been diagnosed with ME. http://louis3j3sheehan3.blogspot.com/
Moreover, in studying the records of
55 patients with ME, they found that they could divide them into seven separate
sub-types that consistently pair distinct genetic patterns with a combination
and severity of patients' symptoms. This, says Dr Kerr, points to a biological
basis for the illness and holds out hope that a blood test could be developed
to identify its different forms. His group are now trying to find the
biological markers that such a blood test would need to detect.
ME, myself, why?
One tactic for dealing with ME is to
treat its symptoms with drugs that are already used against other diseases.
Patients with some of the severest symptoms suffer from low blood pressure and
have difficulty regulating their heartbeat. Julia Newton, of Newcastle
University in Britain, says this is because of problems with their autonomic
nervous systems, which is responsible for subconscious activities. In studies
using a magnetic-resonance imaging scanner, she found a build-up of acid in the
muscles of ME patients when they took exercise. This can cause muscle weakness
and pain. Dr Newton believes the build-up could be influenced entirely, or at
least in part, by the degree to which the autonomic nervous system fails to
properly maintain blood flow. It could also mean that drugs that already exist
to help improve blood flow might also help some ME patients.
But what triggers ME? Some estimates
put its occurrence at around one in 200 people in America and Britain.
Sufferers are often in their 20s and 30s, and more women are affected than men.
That it is so widespread suggests to some researchers that there are many
causes, including exposure to certain viruses and other infectious diseases.
A long period of fatigue after
suffering from an infectious disease is not unusual. At the conference, a team
of Australian researchers speculated that many cases of ME are in fact cases of
“post-infectious chronic fatigue”. Stephen Graves, of the Australian
Rickettsial Reference Laboratory, said they had found a proportion of
Australian ME sufferers may have a genetic predisposition to developing ME as a
result of exposure to Q Fever or Flinders Island Spotted Fever. These are a
pair of relatively uncommon diseases caused by two bacteria which can pass
between animals and humans. If their hypothesis is correct, Dr Graves believes
the incidence of ME in Australia may be reduced by greater public-health
measures.
Although the trigger for most cases of
ME may remain a mystery, the discovery of its biological roots and the promise
of a test will bring hope of a diagnosis to sufferers. And, perhaps, inspire a
sudden recovery in the malingerers.
http://www.soundboard.com/sb/UFO_Edward_Air_Force_Base.aspx
Up to twelve luminous UFOs flew over
this secure test facility and the region, and at least one F-106A interceptor
was scrambled from George AFB at Victorville. All of this action was captured
on classified U.S. Air Force audio tapes which have now been declassified and
are available to the public along with official documentation.The question in
my mind is, what was going on during those 3-4 hours we don't know about? If we
were allowed to hear only 6 hours of 40,
and read only 17 pages of hard-to-read documents, what is it we were NOT
allowed to hear and see? The documents we have make it clear that by the time
Alpha Lima Zero One was scrambled at at 1209Z or 5:09 PM PDT, "the
activity was just about over." http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com/
Major Struble from an outfit known as
LAADS (Los Angeles Air Defense Sector), a division of ARADCOM (Army Air Defense
Command) authorized the making of these recordings of voice transmissions made
by military personnel to and from Edwards Air Force Base- from base to base
communications, phone patches, ground to air radio & tower to air radio.
These recordings archived the conversations which documented this event of UFO
visitation of a highly secure military base. The audio recordings were made on
an extra track of large reels of radar data tapes, which were running all the
time in the case of an accident and the need to review the radar tracks.
The event at Edwards Air Force Base
took place over about a five hour period and since the voice recordings were
made from at least 8 positions, approximately 40 hours of audio recordings had
to have been made. Out of the possible 40 hours of these tape recordings only 6
hours were declassified by the Department of the Air Force.
Darryl Clark, Capt. 329th Fighter Interceptor Squadron (FIS),
George AFB, Calif., was an alert pilot with Detachment.1 at Edwards AFB. He
happened to be on duty this evening and was called upon to observe the activity.
His observations were all made from the ground. Captain Clark was one of the
important Alert Pilots at Edwards Air Force Base on the night of October 7,
1965. He was entrusted with flying one of the Hot Birds, as planes loaded with
Nuclear Weapons were called, that protected the western part of the United
States. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire2.blogspot.com/
Skilled at target identification, Captain
Clark is heard on the original Air Force recordings describing his UFO sighting
of that night. (See Darryl Clark actual statement below)
That evening, October 7 (and the
following one, October 8), 1965, some 700 engineers and scientists attended the
Fourth X-15 Technical Conference at the (then) NASA Flight Research Center at
Edwards AFB. This dealt with the research results of the 150 some X-15 flights
made since 1959. (Astronautics and Aeronautics 1965 NASA SP-4006, page 464 - Joel Carpenter)
I am a film producer who is a product
of the 1950s: the Saucer Scares, the Cold War, and the beginning of the U.S.
Government's official denial of ET visitation of Planet Earth. I guess I have
always thought our world was being visited by intelligent beings from
elsewhere. When I had a UFO sighting in 1961 and was ridiculed for trying to
discuss it, I became determinued to probe and study the UFO issue for as long
as it took to discover the truth.
As a logical outcome of that longterm
goal, I spent years researching and collating data in preparation of the
production of a major film documentary on the UFO/ET issue. I finally got to
the point of starting production in 1992. However, so strong is our programmed
cultural and political denial of ET visitation that even members of my own
staff treated me as an object of derision. This only made me more determined
than ever to solve the UFO enigma, and I then began going straight to the very
institutions which were witholding the truth from us: our own Military and Space
agencies. My goal was to somehow obtain legitimate hard data from them that
would be virtually impossible to debunk.
Back on the night of October 7, 1965,
an event of historic proportions, a true landmark in UFO history, took place -
the actual incursion over Edwards Air Force Base in the Palmdale/Lancaster area
of California's Mojave Desert of a number of extraterrestrial craft. If this
astonishing event is now, finally, gaining any measurable attention, it is a
direct result of my efforts. I make that statement in all humility...it is
simply the truth. In fact, this unprecedented event is not to be found in any
of the major UFO books, and with the exception of a few UFO magazines reviewing
my work, and interviews done with me on programs like Jeff Rense's SIGHTINGS,
this event still remains virtually unknown.
What makes this historic intrusion and
visit so important is that the US Air Force thoroughly documented it and even
gave it a code name: "The Incident." During that fall night in 1965,
it seems that 12 luminous UFOs came right down low and just over a secure
military runway. These craft were all sighted visually by Air Force personnel
and by several types of radar. Further, the Air Force scrambled several jet
fighters after them and during the event the possible use of nuclear weapons
even became an issue. The entire incident was additionally documented with
written reports, radar photos, and AUDIO TAPES made by Air Force personnel
while they were actually SEEING the objects, FLYING AFTER the objects, and
considering taking SERIOUS MILITARY ACTION against what they might imply as a
threat. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com/
From my calculations at least 40 hours
of recordings were made (a five hour event recording from at least 8
locations). However, only six hours of tapes were de-classified many years ago
as a mass of noise and unclear voices, which truly defied interpretation. They
had SCRAMBLED the tapes into what they felt was a hopeless jumble of random
pieces of conversation utterly out of sequence and logical progression. When I
realized what had been done, it presented a challenge which made me determined
to find out what was hidden within that chaotic mass of sound.
After many months and countless hours
of laborious research, cataloging, and editing the snips and pieces of the
audio tape, I was able to organize the sound so the conversations could be
understood. I had successfully restored the tapes to their original and correct
sequencing. I then added carefully researched narration, which explained what
was taking place, so that the listener would clearly understand the unfolding
event.
As narrator, I sought out Jackson
Beck, the true dean of radio announcers and films commentators - the voice of
the Paramount Newsreel, countless original Military films, and even the
original narrator of the Superman radio program. Mr. Beck is now heard on many
important new national radio and TV commercials. His voice is known to
millions, even if his name is not. I felt he would add credibility to the
narration of this astonishing historical event. In fact, he told me that he has
made a life long study of the UFO field and has had several important sightings
himself.
The resulting reconstructed tapes are
now ironclad documented proof of the existence of extraterrestrial UFO
visitation to this planet. I have sent copies of my finished product directly
to a number of major Government Agencies and have received NO NEGATIVE
COMMENTS! Not a single Official Agency has tried to debunk or discredit the
event, or my presentation of the tapes.
Furthermore, The CSETI organization
has used my tape presentation in meetings with members of Congress with the aim
of having our government tell the public the truth of ET involvement on the
Earth. TSgt Charles Sorrels, heard prominently on the original Edwards
recordings of October 7, 1965, and in newly-produced segments confirming the
event, made the presentation in Washington which featured my documentary
version of the Edwards Tapes. And yes, the plane spotters at Edwards KNEW that
UFOs or UFOBs, as they called them then, were not our "black"
projects, Soviet bombers, or any known aircraft - they were unknown, fabulously
high-tech craft with capabilities beyond any known technology. And..as they
said on the old Superman series: "far beyond that of Mortal Man!"
In 1961 I saw and photographed an
illuminated domed disc over New York City. I was treated with ridicule then and
didn't like it. I had three other witnesses to this event. I planned to do a
UFO documentary in the 1960's on this subject and use some of the stills and
motion picture footage photographed.
At the time I was more interested in
going to LA to make dramatic films, which I did. I came back to my old project
in 1992. I had to endure the slings and arrows of ridicule from friends, and
even business associates working on this film, now called Beyond This Earth.
I decided that I needed hard evidence
that the subject was a real one, especially evidence from government agencies
(which would add credibility if they had any connection to this subject).
From December 1992 to about June 1994
we filmed interviews, staged reenactments, obtained unique UFO footage, and
even sent up a plane to chase and film UFOs from the air. (The plane succeeded
in its mission, but that is another story.)
Having that success, I felt we were on
a roll and more real events would take place which we would cover, but they did
not. Not knowing if what we filmed in Northern California posed a threat to the
public, I felt we should make an official report on it. Which we did. http://louis7j7sheehan.blogspot.com/
This led to the suggestion that we go
to various government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act and
otherwise.
This has been a long, tedious process
because we found out that we could classify the people we were in contact with
into three categories, regarding the UFO phenomenon:
1. They knew nothing and couldn't help at all.
2. They knew nothing but wanted to help and were
pro-release and moved us along.
3. They knew something and didn't want to help or
encourage us.
Even still, we obtained the following
de-classified materials, related to the UFO subject: Over 4000 pages of paper
documents and correspondence; still photographs, radar photos, motion picture
film, videotapes and audio tapes. Audio tapes?? Who was interested in that? We
all wanted to see something.
Well, it turned out that the sounds
presented some fantastic images all their own. I reviewed the audio materials
last, as I had shelved them for months, I wanted visuals. What a mistake! I
listened to six hours of confusing audio recordings from Edwards Air Force Base
from the night of October 7, 1965 in which it sounded like a UFO alert was
taking place over the base with 12 strange luminous objects coming down over
the runway of one of our nation's most secure test facilities. This was/is the
place where they fly the black, classified projects. They know what they are
and what planes, helicopters, stars, weather balloons, planets and satellites
are.
So what were they getting excited
about? It was difficult to tell on the six hours of tapes. These tapes were
de-classified, but in a form called "scrambled release" - all chopped
up out of sequence, so they made no sense at all. I knew there was a story in
there somewhere.
Between the chopped up editing and the
overlay of noise, something very important lay in waiting. I decided to analyze
the tapes for possible use in a segment in Beyond This Earth.
I took eight months in my own audio
studio editing 1/4 inch audio tapes, after signal processing them in computer
to remove noise. I got to know the tapes so well, I felt I almost knew the
people on the tapes, which I would in time.
Now, what were these tapes and why
were they made? In 1965 the Air Force ran large reels of recording tapes which
recorded all of the signals from Radar. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com/
Then if an accident or problem took
place, the Radar could be re-played like running a video tape to figure out
what took place. In the case of special events a track on these radar tapes
could be used to record voice transmissions at the air base.
This included all Phone Patches,
Base-to-Base Communications and Ground- or Tower-to-Air Radio. Now this is what
took place on the night of October 7, 1965 at Edwards Air Force Base. By
putting the tapes into chronology and doing further research the story emerged.
At approximately 12:30AM, the Tower
Operator at Edwards (a/k/a Edwards Tower) - Tech Sgt. Charles "Chuck"
Sorrels saw a group of luminous objects flashing red, white, and blue or green
light coming over the field. His job as an air traffic controller taught him to
be watchful, so he could identify incoming planes. when these objects started
to do unusual maneuvers, he knew this was out of the ordinary and called the
Air Defense Command - in this case a unit known as LAADS (The Los Angeles Air
Defense Sector).
Major Struble at LAADS ordered the
recordings to be made--now we hear all this taking place on the actual tapes.
He involved NORAD and the following other air bases- NORTON, HAMILTON, GEORGE
and MARCH.
The major wanted to send planes up
after the objects but could not do this until a CAPTAIN at Edwards approved
sending up the planes. This Captain was the . . . get this . . . UFO officer
(pronounced Yoo-fo) officer in charge on the base.
This was apparently more than just a
job classification for reporting sightings, but he had to request the plane or
planes go up, from the 28th Air Division at Hamilton, or they would not go up.
In short the Air Defense Command needed HIS authority.
Well, here we are: the UFO subject,
which we have heard does not exist, has its own UFO officers . . . how strange.
There were no officers on base for the
other paranormal pursuits - Demon Officers, Ghost Officers or Leprechaun
Officers. http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com/
Once I started editing the tapes into
some kind of sequence, everybody wanted to hear them. I then started making
some cassettes as samples, and everybody wanted them. I gave many away and was
encouraged to go further with my research. I did.
I found Chuck Sorrels, who
authenticated the event and recorded an audio interview for my tape verifying
the details.
I went to about a dozen military
agencies, and they helped with the research. Eventually I put this together
into a 54-minute audio documentary on audio cassette, along with a copy of Air
Force written documentation, in a large vinyl display case and called the final
program . . .
"THE EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE
ENCOUNTER."
I have had great positive response to
this work. Where I have made feature films for theatres for many years, and do
have some fans, nothing I ever worked on yielded this response. Apparently many
people, like myself, had been researching the UFO subject seriously, and were
ridiculed by friends and family.
They, as I, needed some hard evidence
to show/play for others, to gain new respect. I have been told that people are
getting this tape, inviting their friends over and having a UFO party playing
the tape to the amazement of all present.
That is what has been going on. The
media caught onto this. I have been interviewed on numerous radio and TV
programs on this subject and Paramount flew me out to California to appear in
and work on a two-part "Sightings" episode on the Edwards tapes. We
filmed in the Mojave Desert near Edwards AFB, where the original event took
place.
They were very pleased with how it
turned out and got good reaction to it. I have also sent copies of the
documentary back to official agencies, with positive reaction, on a
person-to-person basis.
I think many people want to get this
UFO information out to the public. One well-known airline pilot, who is also a
UFO investigator, sent me a nice letter when he finally got our tape and said:
"When I first heard of your tape, I said to myself, who needs this? How
wrong I was. This is solid evidence in a field where there is precious little
(evidence)."
Since this has only been a side issue
away from the production of my film, this tape is not yet available in stores,
although we have had requests for it. Many people have contacted me who wanted
to obtain it and said it was hard to find. So, we set up a mail order division
to make the tape available, generally on short turn-around.
The tapes are guaranteed to be
authentic. I am still researching the subject for a two-hour TV special on the
same topic and an interactive CD-ROM on it. These programs will take this
subject and broaden out the events of 10-7-65 and go forward and back in time.
On the tapes the UFOs were spotted on Radar, Heightfinder Radar, Weather Radar
and Visual Observations from many locations--ground, towers, tops of buildings,
and planes. On the tapes we hear one F-106 pilot chasing a UFO up to 40,000
feet. However, my research shows that one plane may have crashed and a third
plane also sent up. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
The six hours of tape I received, I
believe to have been cut down from over 40 hours of original tapes . . . what
could be on the rest of them?? I am seeking further research on this event and
connecting events at Edwards and related bases.
I am also seeking to locate Major
Struble, Captain John Balent (the UFO officer) and others involved with this
event which was given a Code Name: "The Incident." http://louis1j1sheehan.blogspot.com/
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