Israel – the Global Leader in Illegal Organ Trafficking

"On Monday 6th of May it was widely reported in the Turkish press that four Israelis were arrested for their part in an illegal organ trafficking operation."

During raids that took place across the country, multiple properties were searched and Turkish police seized large sums of cash along with numerous fake passports and what was described as “digital materials”. Those arrested face charges related to organ trafficking as well as people smuggling and forgery.

Illegally harvesting human organs and trafficking them across national borders for the benefit of what is presumably a group of high paying clients is a pretty grim business. And initially this case may be waved away as a one off, something of little or no interest to British audiences – and that’s exactly how it was treated by the British media – as I didn’t see this case reported by any mainstream British source.

But I also didn’t see this case reported on by any US outlet either. It’s almost as if this story wasn’t newsworthy – or maybe it was being deliberately ignored, or maybe even covered up. But why would the press do that? Well, it could be all about timing, because this story comes hot on the heels of recent reports of organ harvesting in Gaza.

At the end of last year, a report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, an NGO working in Gaza, raised the alarm about organ theft from Palestinian bodies that had been collected and removed by Israeli forces during the on-going conflict.

This was reported on by Euronews, which stated the following, and I quote:

“The NGO claimed it has documented Israeli forces confiscating dozens of dead bodies from the al-Shifa and Indonesian hospitals in northern Gaza, alongside others in the south.”

“Medical professionals reportedly found vital organs, such as livers, kidneys and hearts, alongside cochleas and corneas, were missing, which the Euro-Med Monitor called ‘evidence’ of potential organ theft.”

“They also claimed Israel exhumed and confiscated corpses from a mass grave that was dug more than 10 days ago in a courtyard at al-Shifa.”

End quote. But this report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is not a one off, in fact, you only have to do a little digging to find similar stories that stretch back over decades.

In August 2009 an article in Aftonbladet, one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, reported that Israeli troops were harvesting organs from Palestinians who had died in their custody. The mere reporting of this story caused a furious response from the Israeli government – leading to Israeli officials demanding an explanation from the Swedish government.

The Israeli government and several US representatives went on to condemn the article as “baseless and incendiary” and accusations of antisemitism and blood libel against Jews soon followed. The Swedish government was then put under pressure to denounce the article – which thankfully, it didn’t.

However, the article in Aftonbladet wasn’t written in a vacuum, in fact it came hot on the heels of another similar article. Earlier in that same year the Sydney Morning Herald ran the following headline, and I quote:

“Organ trafficking: Rabbis arrested over massive crime ring.”

End quote. The article revealed that US authorities had arrested 44 elected officials and rabbis in New Jersey in a huge “anti-corruption” campaign. Those arrested were charged with extortion, bribery, money laundering and human organ trafficking.

“Although New Jersey is more famous for a history of Italian Mafia families, it was Jewish clergy who allegedly played a central role in the crime network.”

“Authorities raided several synagogues and among those arrested was the chief rabbi of Syrian Jews in the United States.”

“One rabbi, Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, was charged with conspiring to broker the sale of a human kidney for transplant.”

“Marra said Rosenbaum’s ‘business’ was to entice vulnerable people to give up a kidney for $US10,000 ($A12,300), which he would turn around and sell for 160,000 dollars.”

“He’d allegedly been peddling kidneys for a decade.”

End quote. But don’t worry the FBI were quick to issue a statement telling the public the following, and I quote:

The article stated, and I quote:

“This case is not about politics, certainly not about religion. It is about crime. It is about criminals who use politics and religion.”

End quote. However, despite that assertion, it is highly likely that there was an ethnic aspect to this case, and that the organs harvested and trafficked ended up – one way or another – in Israel.

Whether that was via direct export, or because the organs were purchased by an Israeli who had them transplanted in America before heading home.

And if you think that’s the end of this, you are very wrong!

2009 wasn’t a good year for Israeli organ harvesters, and it was rounded off by an article published by CNN detailing the Israeli state’s complicity in this ghoulish practice, the article stated the following, and I quote:

“Israel harvested organs from bodies in the 1990s without permission of family members, the former head of a state-run forensic laboratory said in a newly released interview.”

“Government officials acknowledge that the practice happened, but emphasise that it ended years ago.”

“In an interview in 2000, which was released to an Israeli TV channel and broadcast over the weekend, Dr. Yehuda Hiss — who was once head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute — discussed the practice.”

“‘We started to harvest corneas for various hospitals in Israel,’ Hiss said in the interview on Israel’s Channel 2 network.”

“‘Whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the families,’ he said.”

“Hiss said the harvesting also included heart valves, skin and bones.”

End quote. Moving into 2010, an article in the Guardian published in April of that year yielded further information about the size and scope of Israeli organ harvesting operations, and I quote:

“Israel has charged five of its citizens, including a retired army general, with operating a nationwide organ trafficking ring that ensnared dozens of potential victims. The charges include human trafficking for the purpose of organ harvesting and money laundering.”

End quote. Fast forward to 2013 and the truly global nature of this trade began to become clear.

As the Times of Israel reported on another case of Israeli organ trafficking, this time in Italy, they published the following, and I quote:

“Italian border authorities arrested 77-year-old Israeli citizen Gedaliah Taub on Friday on suspicion of international human organ trafficking. Taub was detained at the Rome airport after officials determined his passport was forged.”

End quote. Later that same year, Haaretz, an Israeli news source, reported on a similar story, but this time the crimes took place in South America.

An Israeli organ trafficking ring was uncovered in Costa Rica. Costa Rican police stated that they learnt that doctors were performing kidney transplants to sell to patients in Israel. In some cases, Costa Ricans were being trafficked to Israel in order to have the surgery done in Israeli medical facilities.

Costa Rican authorities raided a number of medical labouratories and clinics suspected of involvement in the organ harvesting ring. Costa Rican Attorney General Jorge Chavarria said that two people arrested in the raids were just the “tip of the iceberg” of the organ trafficking network. One of those arrested was in touch with Israeli doctors and had been testing the suitability of the local residents who were to be trafficked so that their organs could be harvested in Israel.

Then in 2018 a similar story was reported on by the German website Deutsche Welle – this time the arrest of an Israeli organ trafficker took place in Cyprus. But the network he was involved in was far larger and had a much greater reach than those mentioned previously. Deutsche Welle wrote the following, and I quote:

“Police in Cyprus have arrested an Israeli man described as the ringleader of a world-wide organ trafficking network that operated out of the tiny Balkan country of Kosovo several years ago.”

“Moshe Harel is accused of luring donors from eastern Europe, Turkey and the former Soviet Union to Kosovo, promising to pay them €12,000 ($14,500) for a kidney. He then allegedly charged people (most of them Israelis) in need of a kidney as much as €100,000 for the implant.”

End quote. The article reports that Moshe Harel preyed upon poor people in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Turkey and Russia.

The more you dig, the more it becomes clear that organ harvesting is a truly global trade and during the research for this piece, I uncovered numerous other reports of organ trafficking from all over the world – but the common thread between them all is Israeli involvement.

But what makes this even more eye-opening is how long this has been going on, with reports of such criminality stretching back for decades. And whilst it isn’t often discussed in the West in Israel the illegal trade appears to be an open secret, being the subject of books and documentaries.

In fact, an Israeli doctor named Meira Weiss published a book in 2014 titled “Over Their Dead Bodies” which detailed that between 1996 and 2002 organs were illegally harvested from dead Palestinians and then used for both transplants and for medical research at Israeli universities. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate an English translation of the book.

But the evidence presented in Meira Weiss’s book was corroborated by an Israeli television investigation that was screened the same year and included confessions from high-ranking Israeli officials that skin was taken from the bodies of dead Palestinians and African workers to treat Israelis, such as soldiers with burn injuries.

In this documentary, the director of the Israeli Skin Bank revealed the country’s reserve of “human skin” reached 17 square meters — a huge number relative to Israel’s population.

The evidence of these organ trafficking networks can be found all over the world, and it is both clear and overwhelming! And I am sure that if you spent a few moments with your favourite internet search engine you too could find similar reports of organ trafficking that involves Israelis.

And this is all summed up perfectly by Human Trafficking Search – a site set up to combat human trafficking and modern slavery. On the issue of organ harvesting, they said the following, and I quote:

“Israel Became Hub in International Organ Trade Over Past Decade”

End quote. From the evidence presented, it appears that human organ trafficking forms a world-wide spider’s web of connections – but at the centre of that web is Israel. And despite all the cases discussed taking place in many different countries which span multiple continents – the common denominator in them all is Israeli involvement.

But what is even more alarming, is that these horrific practices are not confined to back street clinics operated by criminal gangs.

They take place in Israel’s state-run hospitals and involve Israeli government officials, high ranking military officers and even religious leaders. And whilst this all seems to be an openly discussed fact in Israel, for some reason, on the rare occasions when Western news outlets talk do about the issue, the term “anti-semitism” is deployed in order to stifle discussion.

But that leaves one question unanswered: Why is Israel the centre of this illegal human trafficking and organ harvesting conspiracy?

Well after some research, it appears that a lot of this stems from Jewish religious or spiritual beliefs, which many cite as a reason as to why Israeli Jews do not sign up as organ donors, with some sources reporting as little as just 12 per cent of the Israeli population are registered as organ donors. This has left Israel, in terms of human organs, as the country that donates the least, but at the same time having an unnaturally high demand for organs per capita.

However, it does seem strange that whilst such religious folk will not donate their own organs, they are at the same time happy to be involved in the highly unethical and morally abhorrent practice of trafficking both people and human organs.

And that fact shines a light on another aspect of these crimes – whilst those purchasing these organs are wealthy Israeli jews, the victims of this trade all appear to be gentiles, many of whom give up their organs due to poverty, desperation or even have them forcibly removed against their own will.

But of course, none of this is considered newsworthy in Britain! And Israel continues to enjoy the unequivocal support of the British government.

Mark  Collett

Ethics; Vice & Virtue

 

An ethics that does not command us to renounce is a crime against the dignity to which we should aspire and against the happiness which we can obtain.

Moral perfection lies in feeling that we cannot do what we ought not to do.
Ethics culminates where the rule appears to be an expression of the person.

Any rule is preferable to caprice.
The soul without discipline disintegrates into the ugliness of a larva.

Moral delicacy forbids to itself things it allows to others.

There is something definitively vile about the man who only admits equals, who does not tirelessly seek out his betters.

The only antidote to envy, in vulgar souls, is the conceit of believing that they have nothing to envy.

Virtue that does not doubt itself culminates in attacks against the world.

Evil, like the eyes, does not see itself.
May he tremble who sees himself as innocent.

Modern man does not escape the temptation to identify what is permitted with what is possible.

Today they are trying to make “to pardon” mean to deny that an offense was committed.

The individual today rebels against immutable human nature so that he might refrain from amending his own correctable nature.

There is something unforgivably vile in sacrificing even the most foolish of principles to the most noble of passions.

“Human” is the adjective which serves to excuse any infamy.

Nothing makes more evident the reality of sin than the stench of souls that deny its existence.

There are vices of a fallen archangel and there are vices of the simple, infernal crowd.

To interpret certain men, sociology is enough.
Psychology is overkill.

Capable men accept degrading themselves in order to triumph.
And eventually they fail because they degraded themselves.

When we accept our mediocrity with good humor, the disinterestedness with which we take joy in another’s intelligence almost makes us intelligent.

Power more surely corrupts the man who covets it than the man who exercises it.

The only man who should speak of wealth or power is one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach.

Rigid moralism dulls the ethical sensibility.

I do not know of a sin which is not, for the noble soul, its own punishment.

The higher part of ethics does not deal with moral behavior, but with the quality of the soul.

God ends up being a parasite in souls where ethics predominates.

Perhaps religious practices do not improve ethical behavior, but they do without question improve manners.

The mechanisms of modern society encourage the annoying virtues and punish the endearing vices.

Nobody will ever induce me to absolve human nature because I know myself.

Nobody who knows himself can absolve himself.

Today, if a man does not have a good opinion of himself, they think he is a hypocrite.

To condemn oneself is no less pretentious than to absolve oneself.

What is called the modern mentality is the process of exonerating the deadly sins.

In their childish and vain attempt to attract the people, the modern clergy give socialist programs the function of being schemes for putting the Beatitudes into effect.
The trick behind it consists in reducing to a collective structure external to the individual an ethical behavior that, unless it is individual and internal, is nothing.
The modern clergy preach, in other words, that there is a social reform capable of wiping out the consequences of sin.
From which one can deduce the pointlessness of redemption through Christ.

Theoretical affability toward vice is not a proof of liberality and elegance, but of vulgarity.

The sight of the modern world is so repugnant that ethical imperatives are becoming certainties in the indicative for us.

I have only one theme: pride.
Every stain is a vestige of it.

The cause of the modern disease is the conviction that man can cure himself.

We try to excuse the defects we have by supposing they are the reverse of qualities we falsely attribute to ourselves.

In every individual sleeps the germ of the vices and the mere echo of the virtues.

We doubt the importance of many virtues as long as we do not come across the contrary vice.

Man frequently owes to his defects the failures he avoids.

It is easy to believe that we partake of certain virtues when we share in the defects they imply.

Spiritual maturity begins when we stop feeling like we have to take care of the world.

To satisfy man’s pride is perhaps easier than our pride imagines.

Modern man is less proud than presumptuous.

Pride’s shadow smothers the sprouting of a thousand infamies.

To challenge God, man puffs up his emptiness.

Every cry of human pride ends as a cry of anguish.

Radical sin relegates the sinner to a silent, gray universe, drifting on the surface of the water, a lifeless shipwreck, toward inexorable insignificance.

The scent of the sin of pride attracts man like blood attracts a wild beast.

God does not ask for our “cooperation,” but for our humility.

Sometimes only humiliations leave ajar for humanity the gates of wisdom.

Even if humility did not save us from hell, in any event it saves us from ridicule.

An extreme ambition protects us against vanity.

When associated with humility, even defects turn out to be unpublished virtues.

Justified pride is accompanied by profound humility.

So-called frustrated lives tend to be merely overweening, frustrated ambitions.

Dreams of excellence do not deserve respect except when they do not disguise a vulgar appetite for superiority.

Just as much as by the fact which humbles our pride, I am delighted by the noble gesture which dispels the fear of our radical baseness.

The soul is man’s task.

Each act of resignation is a brief agony.

Upon each person depends whether his soul, deprived of its many pretensions by the years, is revealed as bitter spite or as humble resignation.

Serenity is the fruit of uncertainty freely accepted.

To educate the soul consists in teaching it to transform its envy into admiration.

A noble society is one where obeying and exercising authority are ethical behaviors, and not mere practical necessities.

Nothing is more common than to despise many persons who should actually arouse our envy.

Man does not admire anything sincerely except what is undeserved.
Talent, lineage, beauty.

Egalitarian societies strangle the imagination without even satisfying envy.

How many things would seem less irritating if we were less envious!

The number of censurable things is greatly reduced when one ceases to covet.

Envy is not a poor man’s vice, but a rich man’s.
Of a less rich man before a richer man.

The rich man is not disconcerted by anyone except by someone who does not envy him.

Modern luxury disarms envy.

Goodness and beauty are not mutually exclusive except where goodness serves as a pretext for envy and beauty for luxury.

More surely than an accursed wealth there is an accursed poverty: that of the man who suffers not from being poor but from not being rich; that of the man who complacently tolerates every misfortune shared by someone else; that of the man who desires not to abolish poverty, but to abolish the good he covets.

Envy differs from the other vices by the ease with which it disguises itself as a virtue.

Envy tends to be the true force behind moral indignation.

A paean to justice intoxicates us, because it seems to us to be an apology for the passion, just or unjust, which blinds us.

Reason, truth, justice, tend not to be man’s goals, but the names he gives to his goals.

Justice has been one of the motors of history, because it is the name envy assumes in the mouth of the son contesting his parents' will.

The compassion we display to some helps us to justify the envy which others awaken in us.

It is easier to be compassionate than it is not to feel envy.

We do not always distinguish what harms our delicate nature from what provokes our envy.

Compassion is the best excuse for envy.

Whoever denies the bourgeoisie its virtues has been infected with the worst of its vices.

The fool does not content himself with violating an ethical rule: he claims that his transgression becomes a new rule.

Yesterday’s bourgeois forgave himself everything, if his sexual conduct was strict.
Today’s forgives himself everything, if it is promiscuous.

Decadence does not derive from an excess of civilization, but from the attempt to take advantage of civilization in order to elude the prohibitions of which it consists.

To unleash great catastrophes today, great ambitions are not required; the accumulation of small envies is enough.

Every society eventually bursts when envy expands too far.

Those whose gratitude for receiving a benefit is transformed into devotion to the person who grants it, instead of degenerating into the usual hatred aroused by all benefactors, are aristocrats.
Even if they walk around in rags.

Ingratitude, disloyalty, resentment, rancor define the plebeian soul in every age and characterize this century.

The only man who thanks life for what it gives him is the man who does not expect everything from life.

We only know how to carry ourselves with decency in front of the world when we know that we are owed nothing.
Without the pained grimace of a frustrated creditor.

Man prefers to excuse himself with somebody else’s fault rather than with his own innocence.

Rare are those who forgive us when we make it harder for them to shirk their duties.

The downfall of the powerful seems to us like a decree of providence, because it delights our envy.

Common life is so miserable that the most unfortunate man can be the victim of a neighbor’s envy.

A man is noble if he prefers to fail rather than to debase the tools of his triumph.

The surest ways of winning are more disastrous than any defeat.

Modern souls do not even become corrupted; they become rusty.

Nations or individuals—with rare exceptions—only behave themselves decently when circumstances do not allow for anything else.

Succumbing to noble temptations prevents surrendering to base temptations.

Good will is the panacea of the foolish.

History erects and topples, incessantly, the statues of different virtues on top of the unmoving pedestal of the same vices.

The increasing integration of humanity merely makes it easier to share the same vices.

Individuals or nations have distinct virtues and identical defects.
Baseness is our common patrimony.

There is no villainy equal to that of the man who supports himself with the virtues of his adversary in order to conquer him.

Honesty in politics is not stupidity except in the eyes of the swindler.

The vice which afflicts the right is cynicism, and that which afflicts the left is deceit.

It is not possible to choose between injustice and disorder. They are synonyms.

The stupidity of immoralism consists of seeing in the crime nothing but the murderer’s fearlessness.

Depravity always arouses the secret admiration of the imbecile.

Sins that appear “splendid” from afar are from close up nothing more than small sordid episodes.

The ancient who denied pain, the modern who denies sin—they entangle themselves in identical sophisms.

It has taken Christian philosophers work to take sin seriously, that is to say: to see that it transcends ethical phenomena.

Everything that is physically possible soon seems morally plausible to modern man.

The modern world demands that we approve what it should not even dare ask us to tolerate.

Even when sin does assist in the construction of every society, modern society is the beloved child of the capital sins.

Man’s full depravity does not become clear except in great urban agglomerations.

Industrial society is the expression and fruit of souls in which virtues destined to serve usurp the place of virtues destined to command.

In an egalitarian society neither the magnanimous nor the humble fit in; there is only room for pretentious virtues.

The effectiveness of an individual is less a virtue than a threat to his neighbors.

Intellectual honesty is a virtue which every successive generation presumes it is practicing for the first time.

May God preserve us from purity, in all fields.
From the mother of political terrorism, from religious sectarianism, from ethical severity, from aesthetic sterility, from philosophical stupidity.

It fell to the modern era to have the privilege of corrupting the humble.

There is nobody who does not suddenly discover the importance of virtues he scorns.

The prophet who accurately foretells the growing corruption of a society is not believed, because the more that corruption grows, the less it is noticed by the corrupt.

Loyalty is sincere as long as it does not believe itself to be a virtue.

Just as evil was the first betrayal, betrayal is the only sin.

Once youth is past, chastity forms a part not so much of ethics as of good taste.

Virtue has become less rare than good breeding.

Sin ceases to seem like a fiction when we have been slapped in the face by its aesthetic vulgarity.

More so than the immorality of the contemporary world, it is its growing ugliness that moves one to dream of a cloister.

Ethics and aesthetics, when divorced, each submit more readily to man’s whims.

Ethical conduct is the aesthetically satisfactory conduct.

Whoever abandons himself to his instincts degrades his face as obviously as he degrades his soul.

To refute the new morality, all one needs to do is examine the faces of its aged devotees.

By merely looking at the face of the modern man one infers the mistake in attributing ethical importance to his sexual behavior.

The ugliness of the modern face is an ethical phenomenon.

Souls become vitiated when bodies make themselves too comfortable.

Religious austerity fascinates; ethical severity repels.

Discipline is not so much a social necessity as an aesthetic obligation.

Ethics should be the aesthetics of conduct.

Where gestures lack style, ethics itself becomes debased.

Individualism degenerates into the beatification of caprice.

Sincerity, unless it is in a sacramental confession, is a factor leading to demoralization.

The Gospels, in the hands of a progressive clergyman, degenerate into a compilation of trivial ethical teachings.

An atheist is respectable as long as he does not teach that the dignity of man is the basis of ethics and that love for humanity is the true religion.

Nicolas Gomez Davila

Bully for Darwin (Actually, Several Bullies for Darwin)

IN2001 I received a letter from a group that had learned that I was skeptical of modern evolutionary theory. They wanted to know if I would be willing to add my name to the statement mentioned previously in these pages: “We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutations and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.” I was happy to respond in the affirmative, and a list with a hundred names was soon published. Most of the signers had doctoral degrees in science, with a handful having Ph.Ds. in fields that, while not part of the natural or life sciences, gave them a valuable and relevant perspective on the evolution question—e.g., engineering and mathematics. Today close to a thousand have signed this Dissent from Darwinism statement.5Its purpose is to show that there are serious scientists who question Darwin’s theory. I am confident, incidentally, that the number of names on the list only scratches the surface, since I know scientists who, while skeptical of modern Darwinism, have not signed the document because they are afraid of the consequences. The danger is far from imaginary. Immediately after the list became public, I received an email from the late Skip Evans of a pro-evolution lobbying group in the United States, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). Evans was a militant atheist and defender of evolution. He wanted to clarify my motives for signing and inquired if I understood the kind of dangerous people with whom I was in contact. I knew too many good things about the scientists and scholars who had started the dissent list, and too much off-putting stuff about the pro-evolution NCSE, to be impressed by his warnings. However, I could imagine a scientist with little knowledge of either group being taken in by the NCSE’s well-poisoning campaign.

Since 2010 I have been on the advisory board of the German scholarly associationStudiengemeinschaft Wort und Wissen,and I have spoken twice (in 2009 and 2014) at their annual main conference. In the invitation letter to join their advisory board, they were considerate enough to warn me of a potential negative consequence. “In this connection we want to inform you that there is in Germany a very active group of confessing atheistic evolutionary biologists who carefully follow every move of our organization and who do not avoid ad hominem attacks,” the letter explained. “It is possible that as a member of the scientific advisory board you personally can become a target. You should take this into consideration when you think about your participation.” The group had no motivation to exaggerate about this. They were, after all, hoping I would join their advisory board. It was purely out of a sense of fair play that they warned me at all.

Their warning, of course, did not shock me, since I had long been a target of the evolutionary materialists. I have already mentioned several such examples in these pages. Here’s another: I applied for an assistant professorship in biochemistry in 1984 at Helsinki University of Technology (TKK). I later learned from the biochemistry professor who had recommended me for the position that in the meeting of the professors’ council where the hiring decision was made, one professor stood up and strongly opposed my nomination. A person so badly mistaken about biological origins cannot be a teacher in this university, he insisted. My former professor told me that he had to defend my application, telling the others in the meeting, “We are not here to discuss Leisola’s world-view but his competence in biochemistry.” Most of the other professors, he said, clearly felt uneasy in the situation and were looking at the walls.

 In 1987 I was a consultant for the Finnish Sugar company. (In 1989 the name was changed to Cultor.) I worked at the company first as a senior scientist, then as a department manager, and beginning in 1991, as a research director. Later I heard that another consultant of the company had advised the executive director not to hire me due to my questionable views on origins and my involvement in Christian student ministry.6

Wilder-Smith had similar stories to relate. He told me how a Professor Hoimar von Ditfurth tried to intimidate him by contacting universities where he had obtained his degrees to expose Wilder-Smith’s supposed deception. He was convinced that no one could get three doctoral degrees in such a short time and at the same time become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). Reading and Geneva confirmed the degrees, but the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) did not find any information in their files of such a person. Ditfurth wrote to Wilder-Smith that he had exposed his deceit. “You have not obtained a doctoral degree at ETH!” he wrote.

Wilder-Smith called ETH and they immediately found him in their records with his correct name. Ditfurth had misspelled Wilder-Smith’s name when he made the inquiry. ETH wrote a letter to Ditfurth and explained the situation. Next Ditfurth contacted the Royal Society of Chemistry inquiring into the authenticity of Wilder-Smith’s title of FRSC. The society was not impressed with the inquiry and did not even care to answer and passed the letter on to Wilder-Smith.

Ditfurth wasn’t the only evolutionist who tried to play this game. After an Oxford Union debate, Richard Dawkins let it be known that no one by the name of Wilder-Smith had studied at Oxford University and graduated from there.7In reality, Wilder-Smith had studied at Oxford from 1933 to 1935 and finalized his doctoral degree at Reading. If Dawkins had taken only a little care in his investigation of the matter, he might have discovered this.

 These incidents suggest how headlong some people can be in their efforts to discredit scientists skeptical of Darwinism.

And by the way, Dawkins wasn’t finished sliming Wilder-Smith. All the information concerning the debate between Dawkins and Wilder-Smith has been lost from Oxford Union’s files. When Dawkins was asked about the debate in May 2003, he admitted that the debate had taken place but then added, “Wilder-Smith I remember as a genial old buffoon... I am not interested in following up Wilder-Smith’s history. The man is too unimportant to waste time over... Wilder-Smith’s account lies somewhere between fantasy, lies, and paranoid delusion.”8Venomous much? The tirade is all the more shameful in light of this: Although Dawkins is a gifted writer and popularizer, Wilder-Smith’s lasting contributions in the field of experimental biology (see above) dwarf those of Richard Dawkins. (A review in the journalNatureof Dawkins’s career autobiography describes the man as a gifted “lyricist” but adds that “a curious stasis underlies his thought, with his view of the genome “grounded in 1970s assumptions.”9) Dawkins’ heavy-handed dismissal fits very well his style. Dawkins is, after all, the one who used these labels for evolution skeptics, including undergraduates: “little fool,” “pathetic little idiot,”10“ignorant,” “stupid,” “insane,” and “wicked.”11Sometimes the attacks go well beyond words. I am just now reading an official report12by a U.S. congressional subcommittee that investigated the treatment of evolutionary biologist Richard von Sternberg. (See Figure 8.2.) Sternberg has two doctoral degrees—one in evolutionary biology and another in theoretical biology. He worked in the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Institutes of Health and in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. He also was the editor-in-chief of a science journal published by the Smithsonian, theProceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. One of his responsibilities was to sort submitted papers and send them to two or three experts for peer review.

As is normally the case with peer-reviewed science journals, these reviews happen anonymously. The author does not know who the reviewers are and, based on their report, the editor makes a decision on publication. The decision may be acceptance, a call for minor or major corrections, or rejection.

Stephen Meyer submitted a paper, “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories,” which considered intelligent design as a possible explanation for the Cambrian explosion, a geological period in which a large number of basic animal body types (not just new species but whole new phyla) appeared abruptly. The three peer reviewers read the paper and unanimously favored its publication. Sternberg accepted the manuscript and it was published.

Then the persecution started.

The hue and cry went up: Science and religion had been mixed! If the paper wasn’t immediately retracted, the reputation of the world-renowned Smithsonian Institution would be forever tarnished! Together with the pro-evolution NCSE, the Smithsonian hatched a plan to destroy Sternberg’s career. As the congressional report details, in an early stage of this campaign, Sternberg’s friends were questioned and false rumors were spread both inside and outside the Smithsonian. The rumors grew so wild that finally a colleague of Sternberg sent Sternberg’scurriculum vitaeto members of the Smithsonian as a proof of his impressive record of scientific accomplishment. Meanwhile, those gunning for Sternberg insisted that the reviewers must have been know-nothing supporters of intelligent design. Sternberg’s religious motives were also questioned and his privileges narrowed. His keys were taken away, he was transferred to a much inferior office space, and he was denied access to scientific samples. The atmosphere became so hostile that Sternberg eventually decided to leave the Smithsonian.

At that point Sternberg’s professional career seemed all but ruined. Who would hire such a suspicious person? Two official investigations were made and all accusations were shown to be groundless and the rumors unfounded, but no one involved at the Smithsonian corrected the rumors or apologized. (Sternberg describes on his webpage the drama of those days.13) In the midst of these events, Sternberg came to Finland and faced similar turmoil. The email discussion I mentioned in Chapter 3, the one that unfolded on the university’s professor list, referred to the incident at the Smithsonian and it was one reason given for canceling the ID seminar.

Later I got a telephone call from one of Sternberg’s friends, who asked if I could offer Sternberg a job in my laboratory till the situation calmed down. I promised to take him onto my team, but he found another job in the United States.

This story places in a whole new light the charge that intelligent design researchers are not legitimate because they do not publish their work in peer-reviewed science journals. In fact, they have had several such articles published in peer-reviewed journals. But is it any wonder it doesn’t happen more often, given what happened to Richard Sternberg?14

Many science journals will under no condition publish a paper that explicitly makes a case for intelligent design. And many journal editors who might have considered doing so will think twice after seeing what Sternberg went through. This was undoubtedly a key reason why so much energy was poured into harassing Sternberg. Darwinists didn’t just want to punish him for heterodoxy. They wanted to make an example of him.

From: HERETIC

ONE SCIENTIST’S JOURNEY FROM DARWIN TO DESIGN

Matti Leisola

Jonathan Witttt

Taking Leave Of Darwin A Longtime Agnostic Discovers The Case For Design

Description

University professor Neil Thomas was a committed Darwinist and agnostic—until an investigation of evolutionary theory led him to a startling conclusion: “I had been conned!” As he studied the work of Darwin’s defenders, he found himself encountering tactics eerily similar to the methods of political brainwashing he had studied as a scholar. Thomas felt impelled to write a book as a sort of warning call to humanity: “Beware! You have been fooled!” The result is Taking Leave of Darwin, a wide-ranging history of the evolution debate. Thomas uncovers many formidable Darwin opponents that most people know nothing about, ably distills crucial objections raised early and late against Darwinism, and shows that those objections have been explained away but never effectively answered. Thomas’s deeply personal conclusion? Intelligent design is not only possible but, indeed, is presently the most reasonable explanation for the origin of life’s great diversity of forms.

**

PROLOGUE

WHAT IF CHARLES DARWIN GOT IT WRONG? WHAT IF ALL THE crises, alienations, and losses of faith we associate with the aftermath of the publication of The  Origin of Species1 had been triggered by a false prospectus? What if the latent but ever-present hostilities between science and religion of the last 160 years had been fomented by the equivalent of a “dodgy dossier”?

Like many others who “learned about” Darwin in school, I internalized his ascent-of-man narrative without demur, through what in retrospect seems like little more than a passive process of osmosis. By the second half of the twentieth century, Darwinism had become accepted as part and parcel of the mental furniture and indeed the fashionable thinking of the day, such that it would have seemed politically incorrect (and worse, un-hip) to challenge the truth-status of The Origin of Species. I must certainly have thought so since I recollect showing off my (superficial) knowledge of Darwinism to my first girlfriend, and doing so absolutely convinced that what I was saying was uncontestable.

To be sure, it had sometimes struck me that The Origin of Species contained some strange and counter-intuitive ideas, but I told myself that modern science is often counter-intuitive2 (remembering the vast indeterminacies thrown up by recent advances in quantum theory), and I gave the matter little further thought.  Since Darwin had been fêted by the scientific community for more than a century and a half, I deferred to what I imagined must be the properly peer-reviewed orthodoxy. Surely, I reasoned, any opposition to Darwin must be confined to the peripheral ranks of Biblical fundamentalists and young-earth creationists.

This complaisant (and complacent) stance was rather shaken when more recently I encountered some less easily disregarded opposition emerging from some of Darwin’s latter-day peers in the ranks of scientific academe. Collectively, these publications made me alive to the possibility that the grand story of evolution by natural selection was little more than a creation myth to satisfy the modern age; and I found it impossible to ignore the dispute as being a “merely academic” issue, for if there is one subject which has had huge, often convulsive implications for the generality of humankind, it is Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Any dispute concerning Darwin must necessarily have far-reaching implications beyond the guild of the biological sciences. It is not given to many to be able to muster the kind of equanimity shown by Charles  James Fox Bunbury (brother-in-law to nineteenth-century geologist Sir  Charles Lyell), who opined that, mortifying as the notion of human descent from jellyfish might be, “it will not make much difference practically”3; or to equal Dr.  Johnson’s priceless reaction to the notion held by an eccentric nobleman (Lord Monboddo) that man could be descended from apes: “Conjecture as to things useful, is good, but conjecture as to what would be useless to know, such as whether men went on all fours, is very idle.”4T he majority of our Victorian forbears certainly could not find it within themselves to be so philosophical about a theory of human evolution that projected them into “a suddenly mechanistic world without a mechanic,” to borrow a phrase used by  Noel Annan in his biography of Sir  Leslie Stephen (said to have lost his faith after reading Darwin).5 This sense of being cast adrift from the erstwhile reassurances of the Christian faith was at painful variance with the paradigm of a providentially directed cosmos which had prevailed throughout the Christian centuries up to 1859.

In addition, when Darwin discharged his famous Parthian shot twelve years after publication of The Origin of Species in the  Descent of Man (1871),6 with its notorious claim of humankind’s consanguinity with simian forbears, this amounted to a rather unambiguous demotion of humankind to a considerably lesser place in the scheme of things than its wonted pedestal just “a little lower than the angels,”7 a demotion later exacerbated by  Sigmund Freud’s conclusions about the “hominid” nature of our subconscious minds.

It struck me that if a group of tenured academics and other responsible scientists could no longer support the claims on which these devastating inferences depended, and on which the worldview of much of the West presently rests, then this was surely a matter of some existential moment. Such disquieting possibilities drove me to investigate for myself the dispute between pro- and contra-Darwin factions. I make no apology for having made the attempt to read my way into a subject for which I have no formal qualifications, since my researches have led me to the conviction that the subject is of too universal an import to be left entirely in the hands of subject specialists, some of whom exhibit an alarming degree of bias and intransigent parti pris unconducive to the dispassionate sifting of scientific evidence.

Few coming to this subject can of course claim to occupy that fabled Archimedean vantage point of “seeing things clearly, and seeing them whole,” and I make no such hyperbolic claim for myself. However, given the dismayingly sectarian nature of many evolution debates, it is a tedious but unavoidable necessity that I should add here at the outset that I have long been a non-theist and can at least give the assurance that the critique which follows will be based solely on rational criteria and principles.

The book is structured as follows. In the first chapter, I introduce the broad subject of how Charles Darwin and  Alfred Russel Wallace came to formulate their theory of evolution by natural selection.

The second chapter looks at Darwin’s intellectual formation from boyhood to maturity and the immediate reception of his Origin of Species with non-specialist British readers.

Chapter 3 turns to the mostly critical nineteenth-century reviews and receptions of The Origin of Species in the years and decades just after its publication, before Darwin had become the respected sage of his later years. The refreshing honesty of the early responses gives added clarity to the voices of dissent from Darwinism that were always present but which have become more insistent in recent decades. Those more recent responses are also covered in this chapter, together with the fraught issue of the fossil evidence marshalled to support Darwin’s claims (which is exiguous and has occasionally even been proven fraudulent). We then look at what is in effect Darwin’s companion volume to the Origin, namely The Descent of Man.

The fourth chapter considers those cosmological discoveries in the last half century with a bearing on the question of how the earth gained the unique supportive biosphere which enabled the evolution of plants, animals, and humans. Thereafter I unpack, and in some cases unmask, the frequently unacknowledged religious or anti-religious attitudes which have scarred the search for solidly based empirical findings for more than a century and a half.

In Chapter 5 I turn to the subject of what we can reasonably expect of the scientific method and what not to expect in the perennial quest to reveal the mysteries of life. In particular I question whether unrealistic expectations have led to questionable conclusions and issue an open invitation to subject specialists to reappraise the whole subject of natural selection as an evolutionary pathway.

In the final chapter I draw together threads from previous chapters to form a concluding synthesis. I round off the volume with some reflections on how researching and writing about this subject has brought me to a place I would have found surprising before I embarked on the project, especially regarding the intersection of science and religion. A short epilogue is also appended.

**

EPILOGUE 

WHEN MY WIFE AND I VISIT RURAL BRITTANY, ONE OF OUR FAVORITE ports of call is a lovely coastal church called St. Jean du Doigt (Saint John of the Finger), where the eponymous digit of the apostle is popularly supposed to be stored. For us this quaint belief adds to the unspoiled charm of the Breton countryside. Historically the medieval practice of collecting saints’ relics is now of course commonly regarded as a form of “pious fraud,” a means of buttressing the power and influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. What struck me recently is that the instrumentalization of an unverifiable, non-evidence-based hypothesis to prop up today’s secular ideology presents a telling mirror image of the medieval practice. Given the secularizing volte-face experienced in post-Christian Europe, an important motive for giving such an easy pass to the quasi-magical notion of natural selection seems to be the desire to deter people from entertaining any notion of divine creation.

If anything, this modern form of hoodwinking seems less forgivable than its medieval variant, since it is so out of line with the values of our “age of the masses” (to borrow the title of Michael Biddiss’s classic), an age of universal suffrage and democracy where each individual has the right to make up his or her mind. To allow and abet a deception to be practiced upon people in the attempt to prevent them making up their own minds about something as fundamental as their preferred existential position in life is to my mind as misguided and paternalistic a practice as any perpetrated by the medieval Church.

It is now half a human lifetime since Michael Denton issued his decisive critique of modern evolutionary theory, and yet many biologists continue on, business as usual. School textbooks still purvey the same broadly Darwinian interpretation of life, including the presentation of “evidences” for evolution that have long since been discredited.1 Richard Dawkins was recently given a very easy ride by Mark Urban on BBC’s Newsnight program.2 And in the teeth of all empirical evidence to the contrary, contemporary Darwinism has become accepted as the most grown-up form of understanding of humankind’s existential status by the many who, I suspect, have had little time or opportunity to “fact check” the propositions they are buying into. For more and more people, this acceptance seems to be a wholly unexamined assumption.

However, not all have been so unenquiring or supine, and Richard Dawkins has even been stung to lament the fact that outsiders have presumed to question the assumptions of biology specialists whereas they disregard what goes on in other branches of science such as, say, quantum theory. The reason for this is of course (as he must surely know) that his particular discipline holds such vast implications for the existential situation of all men and women, for the very “ground of their being,” such that many quite rightly find it impossible to ignore. If nothing else has been achieved in this short volume, I hope, by presenting views which differ from current orthodoxy, to have given readers the chance to reflect with me on the many problematical facets of modern evolutionary theory, and to grapple with the possible implications of evidence that does not easily accord with materialism.

My own position, as a long-standing humanist with no allegiance to any revealed faith, remains that we each have to come to terms with an inscrutable universe in the best, and most morally accountable, way we can. Others should be free to come to their own conclusions on an issue in which there may be no unalloyed truth-bearers, only truth-seekers, in whose number I very much still count myself.

Taking Leave Of Darwin

A Longtime Agnostic Discovers The Case For Design

Neil Thomas

The Urbicide Of Palestine

 

The confidence the Jewish command in early April had in their capacity not only to take over, but also to cleanse the areas the UN had granted to the Jewish state, can be gauged from the way, immediately after operation  Nachshon, they turned their attention to the major urban centres of Palestine. These were systematically attacked throughout the rest of the month, as UN agents and British officials stood by and watched indifferently.

The offensive against the urban centres began with Tiberias. As soon as news of Deir Yassin and the massacre three days later (12 April) in the nearby village of Khirbat Nasr al-Din reached the large Palestinian population in the city, many fled. 11 The people were also petrified by the daily heavy bombardments by the Jewish forces situated in the hills overlooking this historic, ancient capital on the Sea of Galilee, where 6000 Jews and 5000 Arabs and their forbears had for centuries co-existed peacefully. British obstruction meant that the ALA had only managed to supply the city with a force of about thirty volunteers. These were no match for the Hagana forces, who rolled barrel bombs down from the hills and used loudspeakers to broadcast terrifying noises to frighten the population – an early version of the supersonic flights over Beirut in 1983 and Gaza in 2005, which human rights organisations have decried as criminal acts. Tiberias fell on 18 April. 12The British played a questionable role in the attack on Tiberias. At first they offered to protect the Palestinian residents, but soon urged them to negotiate a general evacuation of the town with the Jewish forces. King Abdullah of Jordan was more ‘practical’: he sent thirty trucks to help move women and children. In his memoirs he claimed he was convinced another Deir Yassin was about to occur. 13 British officers later professed to having had similar apprehensions, but documents showing heavy British pressure on the community’s leaders to leave do not reveal any great concern about an impending massacre. Some would say that the British thereby prevented Tiberias’ Arab residents from being massacred; others would argue that they collaborated with the expellers. The role of the British is much clearer, and far more negative, in the next chapters of Palestine’s urbicide, when Haifa and Jaffa were occupied.

The De-Arabisation of Haifa

As mentioned previously, operations in Haifa were retroactively approved and welcomed by the Consultancy, although not necessarily initiated by it. The early terrorization of the city’s Arab population the previous December had prompted many among the Palestinian elite to leave for their residences in Lebanon and Egypt until calm returned to their city. It is  hard to estimate how many fell within this category: most historians put the figure at around 15,000 to 20,000. 14On 12 January 1948, a local leader called Farid Sa’ad, the manager of the Arab Bank in Haifa, and a member of the local national committee, telegraphed Dr. Husayn Khalidi, the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, in despair: ‘It is good the Jews do not know the truth.’ 15 The ‘truth’ was that the urban elite in Palestine had collapsed after a month of heavy Jewish shelling and aggression. However, the Jews knew exactly what was going on. Indeed, the Consultancy was well aware that the rich and well-to-do had already left in December, that the Arab arms were not arriving, and the Arab governments did little beyond airing their inflammatory war rhetoric in all directions so as to hide their inaction and unwillingness to intervene on behalf of the Palestinians.

The departure of the affluent meant that between 55,000 and 60,000 Palestinians in Haifa were leaderless and, given the relatively small number of armed Arab volunteers in the town, at the mercy of the Jewish forces in April 1948. This was despite the presence of British troops in the city, who were theoretically responsible for the locals’ safety and well-being.

This phase of the Jewish operation around the city was given the ominous name of ‘Scissors’ (Misparayim), indicating both the idea of a pincer movement and of cutting the city off from its Palestinian hinterland. Haifa, like Tiberias, had been allocated in the UN plan to the Jewish state: leaving the only major port in the country in Jewish control was yet another manifestation of the unfair deal the Palestinians were offered in the UN peace proposal. The Jews wanted the port city but without the 75,000 Palestinians who lived there, and in April 1948, they achieved their objective.

As Palestine’s main port, Haifa was also the last station on the trail of the British pull-out. The British had been expected to stay until August, but in February 1948 they decided to bring the date of departure forward to May. Their troops were consequently present in great numbers and they still had the legal and, one could argue, moral authority to impose law and order in the city. Their conduct, as many British politicians were later to admit, forms one of the most shameful chapters in the history of the British Empire in the Middle East. 16 The Jewish campaign of terrorization, begun in December, included heavy shelling, sniper fire, rivers of ignited oil and fuel sent down the mountain-side, and detonated barrels of explosives, and went on for the first months of 1948, but it intensified in early April. On 18 April,  the day the Palestinians of Tiberias were put to flight, Major General Hugh Stockwell, the British commander of the Northern Sector seated in Haifa, summoned the Jewish authorities in the city to his office and informed them that in two days the British forces would be removed from locations in which they had been serving as a buffer zone between the two communities. This ‘buffer’ was the only obstacle preventing Jewish forces from a direct assault on, and takeover of, the Palestinian areas, where more than 50,000 people still resided. The road was wide open for the de-Arabisation of Haifa.

This task was given to the Carmeli Brigade, one of the top units of the Jewish army (there were brigades of ‘lesser quality’ such as Qiryati, made up of Arab Jews who were sent only on looting or less attractive ‘missions’; the definition of Qiryati as possessing a ‘lesser human quality’ can be found in the Israeli documents). 17 The 2000 Carmeli Brigade troops faced a poorly equipped army of 500 local and mainly Lebanese volunteers, who had inferior arms and limited ammunition, and certainly nothing to match the armoured cars and mortars on the Jewish side.

The removal of the British barrier meant Operation Scissors could be replaced by Operation ‘Cleansing the Leaven’ (bi‘ur hametz). The Hebrew term stands for total cleansing and refers to the Jewish religious practice of eliminating all traces of bread or flour from people’s homes on the eve of the Passover, since as these are forbidden during the days of the feast. Brutally appropriate, the cleansing of Haifa, in which the Palestinians were the bread and the flour, began on Passover’s eve, 21 April.

Stockwell, the British commander, knew in advance about the impending Jewish attack, and earlier that same day invited the ‘Palestinian leadership’ in the city for a consultation. He met with a group of four exhausted men, who became the Arab community’s leaders for the hour, as none of the positions they held officially prepared them for the crucial historic moment that unfolded in Stockwell’s office on that morning. Previous correspondence between them and Stockwell shows they trusted him as the keeper of law and order in the city. The British officer now advised them that it would be better for their people to leave the city, where they and most of their families had lived and worked ever since the mid-eighteenth century, when Haifa came to prominence as a modern town. Gradually, as they listened to Stockwell and their confidence in him faded, they realised that they would be unable to safeguard their community, and so they prepared for the worst: as the British would not protect them, they were  doomed to be expelled. They told Stockwell they wanted to leave in an organised manner. The Carmeli Brigade made sure they would leave in the midst of carnage and havoc. 18On their way to meet the British commander, the four men could already hear the Jewish loudspeakers urging the Palestinian women and children to leave before it was too late. In other parts of the town, loudspeakers delivered a diametrically opposing message from the town’s Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levi, a decent person by all accounts, who beseeched the people to stay and promised no harm would befall them. But it was Mordechai Maklef, the operation officer of the Carmeli Brigade, not Levi who called the shots. Maklef orchestrated the cleansing campaign, and the orders he issued to his troops were plain and simple: ‘Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.’ (He later became the Israeli army Chief of Staff.) 19When these orders were executed promptly within the 1.5 square kilometres where thousands of Haifa’s defenceless Palestinians were still residing, the shock and terror were such that, without packing any of their belongings or even knowing what they were doing, people began leaving en masse. In panic they headed towards the port where they hoped to find a ship or a boat to take them away from the city. As soon as they had fled, Jewish troops broke into and looted their houses.

When Golda Meir, one of the senior Zionist leaders, visited Haifa a few days later, she at first found it hard to suppress a feeling of horror when she entered homes where cooked food still stood on the tables, children had left toys and books on the floor, and life appeared to have frozen in an instant. Meir had come to Palestine from the US, where her family had fled in the wake of pogroms in Russia, and the sights she witnessed that day reminded her of the worst stories her family had told her about the Russian brutality against Jews decades earlier. 20 But this apparently left no lasting mark on her or her associates’ determination to continue with the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In the early hours of dawn on 22 April, the people began streaming to the harbour. As the streets in that part of the city were already overcrowded with people seeking escape, the Arab community’s self-appointed leadership tried to instil some order into the chaotic scene. Loudspeakers could be heard, urging people to gather in the old marketplace next to the port, and seek shelter there until an orderly evacuation by sea could be  organised. ‘The Jews have occupied Stanton road and are on their way’, the loudspeakers blared.

The Carmeli Brigade’s war book, chronicling its actions in the war, shows little compunction about what followed thereafter. The brigade’s officers, aware that people had been advised to gather near the port’s gate, ordered their men to station three-inch mortars on the mountain slopes overlooking the market and the port – where the Rothschild Hospital stands today – and to bombard the gathering crowds below. The plan was to make sure people would have no second thoughts, and to guarantee that the flight would be in one direction only. Once the Palestinians were gathered in the marketplace – an architectural gem that dated back to the Ottoman period, covered with white arched canopies, but destroyed beyond recognition after the creation of the State of Israel – they were an easy target for the Jewish marksmen. 21Haifa’s market was less than one hundred yards from what was then the main gate to the port. When the shelling began, this was the natural destination for the panic-stricken Palestinians. The crowd now broke into the port, pushing aside the policemen who guarded the gate. Scores of people stormed the boats that were moored there, and began to flee the city. We can learn what happened next from the horrifying recollections of some of the survivors, published recently. Here is one of them:

Men stepped on their friends and women on their own children. The boats in the port were soon filled with living cargo. The overcrowding in them was horrible. Many turned over and sank with all their passengers. 22

The scenes were so horrendous that when reports reached London, they spurred the British government into action as some officials, probably for the first time, began to realise the enormity of the disaster their inaction was creating in Palestine. The British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was furious with Stockwell’s behaviour, but Field-Marshal Montgomery, the chief of the imperial staff and thus Stockwell’s boss, defended him. 23 The last communication between Haifa’s Palestinian leaders and Stockwell took the form of a letter that speaks volumes:

We feel distressed and profoundly aggrieved by the lack of sympathy on the part of the British Authorities to render aid to the wounded although they have been requested to do so. 24

 Safad is Next 25

By the time Haifa fell, only a few towns in Palestine were still free, among them Acre, Nazareth and Safad. The battle over Safad began in the middle of April and lasted until 1 May. This was not due to any stubborn resistance from the Palestinians or the ALA volunteers, although they did make a more serious effort here than elsewhere. Rather, tactical considerations directed the Jewish campaign first to the rural hinterland around Safad, and only then did they move on the town itself.

In Safad there were 9500 Arabs and 2400 Jews. Most of the Jews were Ultra-Orthodox and had no interest at all in Zionism, let alone in fighting their Arab neighbours. This, and the relatively gradual way the Jewish takeover developed, may have given the eleven members of the local national committee the illusion that they would fare better than other urban centres. The committee was a fairly representative body that included the town’s notables, ulama (religious dignitaries), merchants, landowners and ex-activists from the 1936 Revolt, of which Safad had been a major centre. 26 The false sense of security was reinforced by the relatively large presence of Arab volunteers in Safad, totaling more than 400, although only half of them were armed with rifles. Skirmishes in the town had begun in early January, triggered by an aggressive reconnaissance incursion by some Hagana members into the Palestinian neighbourhoods and market. A charismatic Syrian officer, Ihasn Qam Ulmaz, held the defences against repeated attacks by the Hagana’s commando unit, the Palmach.

At first, these Palmach attacks were sporadic and ineffective, as its units focused their actions on the rural area around the town. But once they were through with the villages in Safad’s vicinity (described later in this chapter) they could concentrate fully on the town itself, on 29 April 1948. Unfortunately for the people of Safad, at precisely the moment they needed him most, they lost the able Ulmaz. The volunteers army’s new commander in the Galilee, Adib Shishakly (to become one of Syria’s rulers in the 1950s) replaced him with one of the ALA’s more incompetent officers. However, it is doubtful whether even Ulmaz would have fared better in view of the imbalance of power: 1000 well-trained Palmach troops confronting 400 Arab volunteers, one of many local imbalances that show the falsity of the myth of a Jewish David facing an Arab Goliath in 1948. 27 The Palmach troops drove most of the people out, only allowing 100 old people to stay on, though not for long. On 5 June, Ben-Gurion noted dryly in his dairy: ‘Abraham Hanuki, from [Kibbutz] Ayelet Hashahar, told me that since there were only 100 old people left in Safad they were expelled to Lebanon.’ 28The Phantom City of Jerusalem

The urbicide did not skip Jerusalem, which quickly changed from the ‘Eternal City’, as a recent book by Salim Tamari puts it, into a ‘Phantom City’. 29 Jewish troops shelled, attacked and occupied the western Arab neighbourhoods in April 1948. Some of the richer Palestinian inhabitants of these more affluent sections had left town a few weeks before. The rest were expelled from houses that still testify to the architectural beauty of the neighbourhoods the Palestinian elite had started building outside the walls of the Old City by the end of the nineteenth century. In recent years some of these masterpieces have begun to disappear: real estate fervour, architectural eccentricism and constructors’ greed have combined to transform these elegant residential areas into streets of monstrous villas and extravagant palaces for rich American Jews who tend to flock to the city in their old age.

The British troops were still in Palestine when these areas were cleansed and occupied, but they remained aloof and did not intervene. Only in one area, Shaykh Jarrah – the first Palestinian neighborhood built outside the Old City’s walls, where the leading notable families such as the Husaynis, the Nashashibis and the Khalidis had their domicile – did a local British commander decide to step in.

The instruction to the Jewish forces was very clear in April 1948. ‘Occupy the neighbourhood and destroy all its houses.’ 30 The cleansing attack began on 24 April 1948 but was halted by the British before it could be fully implemented. We have vital testimony of what happened in Shaykh Jarrah from the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, Dr Husayn Khalidi, who lived there: his desperate telegrams to the Mufti were often intercepted by the Israeli intelligence and are kept in the Israeli archives. 31 Khalidi reports how the British commander’s troops saved the neighbourhood, with the exception of the 20 houses the Hagana succeeded in blowing up. This confrontational British stance here indicates how very different the fate of many Palestinians would have been had British troops elsewhere  intervened, as both the imperatives of the Mandatory charter and the terms of the UN partition resolution required them to do.

British inaction was the rule, however, as Khalidi’s frantic appeals highlight as regards the rest of the Jerusalemite neighbourhoods, especially in the western part of the city. These areas had come under repeated shelling from the first day of January and here, unlike in Shaykh Jarrah, the British played a truly diabolical role, as they disarmed the few Palestinian residents who had weapons, promising to protect the people against Jewish attacks, but then instantly reneged on that promise.

In one of his telegraphs in early January, Dr Khalidi reported to Al-Hajj Amin, in Cairo, how almost every day a crowd of angry citizens would demonstrate in front of his house seeking leadership and calling for help. Doctors in the crowd told Khalidi that the hospitals were overcrowded with the injured and that they were running out of shrouds to cover the dead bodies. There was total anarchy and people were in a state of panic.

But worse was to come. 32 A few days after the aborted attack on Shaykh Jarrah, with the help of the same three-inch mortar bombs used in Haifa, Palestinian Northern and Western Jerusalem were hammered by endless shelling. Only Shu’fat held on and refused to surrender. Qatamon fell in the last days of April. Itzhak Levy, the head of the Hagana intelligence in Jerusalem, recalls: ‘While the cleansing of Qatamon went on, pillage and robbery began. Soldiers and citizens took part in it. They broke into the houses and took from them furniture, clothing, electric equipment and food.’ 33

The entry of the Jordanian Arab Legion into the fighting changed the picture, and the cleansing operations were halted in the middle of May 1948. Some Jordanians were involved in the fighting before, as volunteers, and their contribution had helped slow down the Jewish advance, especially during the takeover of Qatamon, which involved intensive fighting with Jewish troops in the monastery of San Simon. But despite their heroic – in the description of Levy and his friends – attempt to defend the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the west, they failed. All in all, eight Palestinian neighbourhoods and thirty-nine villages were ethnically cleansed in the Greater Jerusalem area, their population transferred to the eastern part of the city. The villages are all gone today, but some of Jerusalem’s most beautiful houses are still standing, now inhabited by Jewish families who took them over immediately after their eviction – silent reminders of the tragic fate of the people who used to own them.

 Acre and Baysan

The urbicide continued into May with the occupation of Acre on the coast and Baysan in the east on 6 May 1948. In the beginning of May, Acre proved once again that it was not only Napoleon who found it hard to defeat it: despite severe overcrowding due to the huge influx of refugees from the neighbouring city of Haifa, heavy daily shelling by the Jewish forces failed to subdue the Crusader city. However, its exposed water supply ten kilometres to the north, from the Kabri springs, via an almost 200-year old aqueduct, proved its Achilles’ heel. During the siege typhoid germs were apparently injected into the water. Local emissaries of the International Red Cross reported this to their headquarters and left very little room for guessing whom they suspected: the Hagana. The Red Cross reports describe a sudden typhoid epidemic and, even with their guarded language, point to outside poisoning as the sole explanation for this outbreak. 34On 6 May 1948, in Acre’s Lebanese hospital, which belonged to the Red Cross, an emergency meeting was convened. Brigadier Beveridge, chief of the British medical services, Colonel Bonnet of the British army, Dr Maclean of the Medical Services, and Mr de Meuron, the Red Cross delegate in Palestine, met with city officials to discuss the seventy casualties the epidemic had already claimed. They concluded that the infection was undoubtedly water-borne, not due to crowded or unhygienic conditions, as the Hagana claimed. Tellingly, it had affected fifty-five British soldiers who were transferred to Port Said hospital in Egypt. ‘Nothing like that ever happened in Palestine,’ Brigadier Beveridge told de Meuron. The minute they had identified the aqueduct as the source, they switched to artesian wells and water from the agricultural station north of Acre. The refugees from Acre already in camps in the north were also examined in order to prevent the epidemic from spreading.

With their morale weakened by both the typhoid epidemic and the intensive shelling, residents heeded the call from loudspeakers that shouted at them: ‘Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy you to the last man.’ 35 Lieutenant Petite, a French UN observer, reported that after the city fell into Jewish hands, there was widespread and systematic looting by the army, including furniture, clothes, and anything that might be useful to the new Jewish immigrants, and the removal of which might discourage the refugees’ return.

 A similar attempt to poison the water supply in Gaza on 27 May was foiled. The Egyptians caught two Jews, David Horin and David Mizrachi, trying to inject typhoid and dysentery viruses into Gaza’s wells. General Yadin reported the incident to Ben-Gurion, then Israel’s Prime Minister, who duly entered it in his diary, without comment. The two were later executed by the Egyptians without any official Israeli protestations. 36Ernest David Bergman, together with the Katzir brothers mentioned earlier, was part of a team working on Israel’s biological warfare capability set up by Ben-Gurion in the 1940s, euphemistically called the Science Corps of the Hagana. Ephraim Katzir was appointed its director in May 1948, when the outfit was renamed ‘HEMED’ (Sweetness, the acronym of Hayl Mada – the Science corps). It did not contribute in any major way to the 1948 campaigns but its early input was indicative of the unconventional aspirations the state of Israel would pursue in the future. 37

Roughly at the same time that Acre was occupied, the Golani Brigade seized the town of Baysan in Operation Gideon. As in Safad, after occupying several villages in the vicinity, they moved in on the town. The Jewish forces, with the successful takeovers of Haifa, Tiberias and Safad behind them, were confident and highly effective. Experienced now in mass evictions, they tried to force a swift departure in Baysan by issuing an ultimatum to the people to leave their homes within ten hours. The ultimatum was delivered to the ‘city notables’, namely a fraction of the local national committee. These notables declined and hastily tried to accumulate food stocks for a long siege; they organised some weapons, mainly two cannons brought in by volunteers, in order to repel the impending assault. Nahum Spigel, the commander of the Golani Brigade, wanted a swift offensive and to take a number of prisoners of war in order to exchange them for some Jewish prisoners the Jordanian forces had captured earlier in their successful bid for both the Jewish quarter in the Old City and the Zionist settlement of Gush Etzion. In fact, the Legion rescued the Gush Etzion settlers from the hands of angry Palestinian paramilitary groups that had attacked the isolated Jewish colony and the convoy that had come to save it. 38 (Today, Gush Etzion is a large Jewish settlement in the West Bank.) These settlers, together with the residents of the old Jewish quarter, were among the few Jewish POWs captured during the war. They were treated fairly and released soon after, unlike the thousands of Palestinians who were now, according to international law, citizens of the State of Israel, but on becoming prisoners were caged in pens.

 After heavy daily bombardments, including from the air, the local committee in Baysan decided to surrender. The body that took the decision consisted of the qadi, the local priest, the municipal secretary and the richest merchant in town. They met Palti Sela and his colleagues to discuss the terms of surrender (before the meeting, the members asked permission to travel to Nablus to discuss capitulation, but this was refused). On 11 May, the town passed into Jewish hands. Palti Sela remembered particularly the two pathetic old artillery guns that had been meant to protect Baysan: two French anti-air cannon from the First World War, antiquated weaponry representative of the overall level of the arms the Palestinians and the volunteers possessed, on the eve of the regular Arab armies’ entrance into Palestine.

Immediately after, Palti Sela and his colleagues were able to oversee the ‘orderly expulsion’ of the town’s people. Some were transferred to Nazareth – still a free Palestinian city in May, but not for much longer – some to Jenin, but the majority were driven across the nearby Jordan River onto the opposite bank. 39 Eyewitnesses remember the hordes of people from Baysan as particularly panic-stricken and cowed, hurriedly making their way in the direction of the Jordan River and from there inland to makeshift camps. While the Jewish troops were busy with other operations nearby, however, quite a few of them succeeded in returning; Baysan is very close to both the West Bank and the River Jordan and therefore slipping back unnoticed was relatively easy. They succeeded in staying on until mid-June when the Israeli army loaded the people at gunpoint onto trucks and drove them across the river once again.

The Ruination of Jaffa

Jaffa was the last city to be taken, on 13 May, two days before the end of the Mandate. Like so many of Palestine’s cities, it had a long history going back as far as the Bronze age, with an impressive Roman and Byzantine heritage. It was the Muslim commander, Umar Ibn al-‘Aas, who took the town in 632 and imbued it with its Arab character. The Greater Jaffa area included twenty-four villages and seventeen mosques; today one mosque survives, but not one of the villages is left standing.

On 13 May, 5000 Irgun and Hagana troops attacked the city as Arab volunteers headed by Michael al-Issa, a local Christian, tried to defend it.  Among them was an extraordinary unit of fifty Muslims from Bosnia as well as members of the second generation of the Templars, German colonists who had come in the mid-nineteenth century as religious missionaries and now decided to try and defend their colonies (other Templars in the Galilee surrendered without a fight, and were swiftly driven out of their two pretty colonies, Waldheim and Beit Lehem, west of Nazareth).

All in all, Jaffa enjoyed the largest defense force available to the Palestinians in any given locality: a total of 1500 volunteers confronted the 5000 Jewish troops. They survived a three-week siege and attack that began in the middle of April and ended in the middle of May. When Jaffa fell, its entire population of 50,000 was expelled with the ‘help’ of British mediation, meaning that their flight was less chaotic than in Haifa. Still, there were scenes reminiscent of the horrors that took place in the northern harbour of Haifa: people were literally pushed into the sea when the crowds tried to board the far-too-small fishing boats that would take them to Gaza, while Jewish troops shot over their heads to hasten their expulsion.

With the fall of Jaffa, the occupying Jewish forces had emptied and depopulated all the major cities and towns of Palestine. The vast majority of their inhabitants – of all classes, denominations and occupations – never saw their cities again, while the more politicised among them would come to play a formative role in the re-emergence of the Palestinian national movement in the form of the PLO, demanding first and foremost their right to return.

11. Filastin, 14 April 1948.

12. Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe, pp. 107–8.

13. Ibid., p. 107.

14. See a summary in Flapan, The Birth of Israel, pp. 89–92.

15. This telegraph was intercepted by the Israeli intelligence and is quoted in Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 12 January 1948.

16. See Rees Williams, the Under Secretary of States statement to Parliament, Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol. 461, p. 2050, 24 February 1950.

17. Arnan Azariahu, who was Israel Galili’s assistant, recalled that when the new Matkal was moved to Ramat Gan, Yigael Yadin demanded that the Qiryati people not be put in charge of protecting the site. Maqor Rishon, interview, 21 May 2006.

18. Walid Khalidi, ‘Selected Documents on the 1948 War’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 107, Vol. 27/3 (Spring 1998), pp. 60–105, uses the British as well as the Arab committee’s correspondence.

19. Hagana Archives, 69/72, 22 April 1948.

20. Central Zionist Archives, 45/2 Protocol.

21. Zadok Eshel (ed.), The Carmeli Brigade in the War of Independence, p. 147

22. Walid Khalidi, ‘Selected Documents on the 1948 War’.

23. Montgomery of Alamein, Memoirs, pp. 4534.

24. Walid Khalidi, ‘The Fall of Haifa’, Middle East Forum, XXXV, 10 (December 1959), letter by Khayat, Saad, Mu’ammar and Koussa from 21 April 1948.

25. The information on the Palestinian side is taken from Mustafa Abasi, Safad During the British Mandate Period: A Social and Political Study, Jerusalem: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2005 (Arabic); a version of it appeared as ‘The Battle for Safad in the War of 1948: A Revised Study, International Journal for Middle East Studies, 36 (2004), pp. 21–47.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 7 June 1948.

29. Salim Tamari, Jerusalem 1948.

30. The reconstruction of the orders was done by Itzhak Levy, the head of the Hagana intelligence in Jerusalem in 1948, in his book Jerusalem in the War of Independence, p. 207 (these interviews were later incorporated into the IDF archives).

31. Fourteen of these telegrams are quoted by Ben-Gurion in his diary, see Rivlin and Oren, The War of Independence, pp. 12, 14, 27, 63, 64, 112, 113, 134, 141, 156, 169, 170, 283.

32. Mentioned in Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 15 January 1948.

33. Levy, Jerusalem, p. 219.

34. Red Cross Archives, Geneva, Files G59/1/GC, G3/82 sent by the international Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegate de Meuron on 6–19 May 1948 describe a sudden typhoid epidemic.

35. All the information is based on the Red Cross sources and on Salman Abu Sitta, ‘Israel Biological and Chemical Weapons: Past and Present’, Between the Lines, 15–19 March 2003. Abu Sitta also quotes Sara Leibovitz-Dar’s article in Hadahsot, 13 August 1993, where she traces, from a clue from the historian Uri Milstein, ‘those who were responsible for the Acre operation, but who refused to answer her questions. She concluded her article by saying: ‘What was done then with deep conviction and zealotry is now concealed with shame’.

36. Ben-Gurion’s Diary, 27 May 1948.

37. Ibid., 31 January 1948 and his notes on the history of HEMED.

38. Levy, Jerusalem, p. 113, although he does accuse the Legion of joining earlier in attacks on those who had already surrendered. See pp. 109–12.

39. Interview with Sela (see chapter 2, note 31).

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Ilan Pappepe

Mahāsīhanāda Sutta - The Greater Discourse on the Lion’s Roar

 Attached to The Buddha on himself ...

MN12 

1. THUS HAVE I HEARD. On one occasion the Blessed One was living at Vesālī in the grove outside the city to the west.

2. Now on that occasion Sunakkhatta, son of the Licchavis, had recently left this Dhamma and Discipline. He was making this statement before the Vesālī assembly: “The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him, and when he teaches the Dhamma to anyone, it leads him when he practises it to the complete destruction of suffering.” 

3.Then, when it was morning, the venerable Sāriputta dressed, and taking his bowl and outer robe, went into Vesālī for alms. Then he heard Sunakkhatta, son of the Licchavis, making this statement before the Vesālī assembly. When he had wandered for alms in Vesālī and had returned from his almsround, after his meal he went to the Blessed One, and after paying homage to him, he sat down at one side and told the Blessed One what Sunakkhatta was saying.

4. [The Blessed One said:] “Sāriputta, the misguided man Sunakkhatta is angry and his words are spoken out of anger. Thinking to discredit the Tathāgata, he actually praises him; [69] for it is praise of the Tathāgata to say of him: ‘When he teaches the Dhamma to anyone, it leads him when he practises it to the complete destruction of suffering.’

5. “Sāriputta, this misguided man Sunakkhatta will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘That Blessed One is accomplished, fully enlightened, perfect in true knowledge and conduct, sublime, knower of worlds, incomparable leader of persons to be tamed, teacher of gods and humans, enlightened, blessed.’ 

6. “And he will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘That Blessed One enjoys the various kinds of supernormal power: having been one, he becomes many; having been many, he becomes one; he appears and vanishes; he goes unhindered through a wall, through an enclosure, through a mountain, as though through space; he dives in and out of the earth as though it were water; he walks on water without sinking as though it were earth; seated cross-legged, he travels in space like a bird; with his hand he touches and strokes the moon and sun so powerful and mighty; he wields bodily mastery even as far as the Brahma-world.’

7. “And he will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘With the divine ear element, which is purified and surpasses the human, that Blessed One hears both kinds of sounds, the heavenly and the human, those that are far as well as near.’

8. “And he will never infer of me according to Dhamma: ‘That Blessed One encompasses with his own mind the minds of other beings, other persons. He understands a mind affected by lust as affected by lust and a mind unaffected by lust as unaffected by lust; he understands a mind affected by hate as affected by hate and a mind unaffected by hate as unaffected by hate; he understands a mind affected by delusion as affected by delusion and a mind unaffected by delusion as unaffected by delusion; he understands a contracted mind as contracted and a distracted mind as distracted; he understands an exalted mind as exalted and an unexalted mind as unexalted; he understands a surpassed mind as surpassed and an unsurpassed mind as unsurpassed; he understands a concentrated mind as concentrated and an unconcentrated mind as unconcentrated; he understands a liberated mind as liberated and an unliberated mind as unliberated.’

 (TEN POWERS OF A TATHĀGATA)

9. “Sāriputta, the Tathāgata has these ten Tathāgata’s powers, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.181 What are the ten?

10. (1) “Here, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the possible as possible and the impossible as impossible. And that is a Tathāgata’s power that the Tathāgata has, by virtue of which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

11. (2) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the results of actions undertaken, past, future, and present, by way of possibilities and causes. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...18312. 

12. (3) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the ways leading to all destinations. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...18413.

13. (4) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the world with its many and different elements. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...

14. (5) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is how beings have different inclinations. That too is a Tathāgata’s power.... 

15. (6) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the disposition of the faculties of other beings, other persons. That too is a Tathāgata’s power...

16. (7) “Again, the Tathāgata understands as it actually is the defilement, the cleansing, and the emergence in regard to the jhānas, liberations, concentrations, and attainments. That too is a Tathāgata’s power... 

17. (8) “Again, the Tathāgata recollects his manifold past lives, that is, one birth, two births...(as Sutta 4, §27)...Thus with their aspects and particulars he recollects his manifold past lives. That too is a Tathāgata’s power…

18. (9) “Again, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, the Tathāgata sees beings passing away and reappearing, inferior and superior, fair and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate...(as Sutta 4, §29) …and he understands how beings pass on according to their actions. That too is a Tathāgata’s power…

19. (10) “Again, by realising for himself with direct knowledge, the Tathāgata here and now enters upon and abides in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints. That too is a Tathāgata’s power that the Tathāgata has, by virtue of which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

20. “The Tathāgata has these ten Tathāgata’s powers, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

21. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me: ‘The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him’—unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. Just as a bhikkhu possessed of virtue, concentration, and wisdom would here and now enjoy final knowledge, so it will happen in this case, I say, that unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. 

(FOUR KINDS OF INTREPIDITY)

22. “Sāriputta, the Tathāgata has these four kinds of intrepidity, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā. What are the four?

23. “Here, I see no ground on which any recluse or brahmin or god or Māra or Brahmā or anyone else at all in the world could, in accordance with the Dhamma, accuse me thus: ‘While you claim to be fully enlightened, you are not fully enlightened about these things.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

24. “I see no ground on which any recluse…or anyone at all could accuse me thus: ‘While you claim to be one who has destroyed the taints, you have not destroyed these taints.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

25. “I see no ground on which any recluse…or anyone at all could accuse me thus: ‘Those things called obstructions by you are not able to obstruct one who engages in them.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

26. “I see no ground on which any recluse…or anyone at all could accuse me thus: ‘When you teach the Dhamma to someone, it does not lead him when he practises it to the complete destruction of suffering.’ And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity.

27. “A Tathāgata has these four kinds of intrepidity, possessing which he claims the herd-leader’s place, roars his lion’s roar in the assemblies, and sets rolling the Wheel of Brahmā.

28. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me…he will wind up in hell. 

(THE EIGHT ASSEMBLIES)

29. “Sāriputta, there are these eight assemblies. What are the eight? An assembly of nobles, an assembly of brahmins, an assembly of householders, an assembly of recluses, an assembly of gods of the heaven of the Four Great Kings, an assembly of gods of the heaven of the Thirty-three, an assembly of Māra’s retinue, an assembly of Brahmās. Possessing these four kinds of intrepidity, the Tathāgata approaches and enters these eight assemblies.

30. “I recall having approached many hundred assemblies of nobles…many hundred assemblies of brahmins…many hundred assemblies of householders…many hundred assemblies of recluses…many hundred assemblies of gods of the heaven of the Four Great Kings…many hundred assemblies of gods of the heaven of the Thirty-three…many hundred assemblies of Māra’s retinue…many hundred assemblies of Brahmās. And formerly I had sat with them there and talked with them and held conversations with them, yet I see no ground for thinking that fear or timidity might come upon me there. And seeing no ground for that, I abide in safety, fearlessness, and intrepidity. [73]31. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me…he will wind up in hell.

 (FOUR KINDS OF GENERATION)

32. “Sāriputta, there are these four kinds of generation. What are the four? Egg-born generation, womb-born generation, moisture-born generation, and spontaneous generation.

33. “What is egg-born generation? There are these beings born by breaking out of the shell of an egg; this is called egg-born generation. What is womb-born generation? There are these beings born by breaking out from the caul; this is called womb-born generation. What is moisture-born generation? There are these beings born in a rotten fish, in a rotten corpse, in rotten porridge, in a cesspit, or in a sewer; this is called moisture-born generation. What is spontaneous generation? There are gods and denizens of hell and certain human beings and some beings in the lower worlds; this is called spontaneous generation. These are the four kinds of generation.

34. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me…he will wind up in hell. 

(THE FIVE DESTINATIONS AND NIBBĀNA)

35. “Sāriputta, there are these five destinations. What are the five? Hell, the animal realm, the realm of ghosts, human beings, and gods.

 (1) “I understand hell, and the path and way leading to hell. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell.

(2) “I understand the animal realm, and the path and way leading to the animal realm. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in the animal realm.

(3) “I understand the realm of ghosts, and the path and way leading to the realm of ghosts. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in the realm of ghosts.

(4) “I understand human beings, and the path and way leading to the human world. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear among human beings.

(5) “I understand the gods, and the path and way leading to the world of the gods. And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, on the dissolution of the body, after death, reappear in a happy destination, in the heavenly world.

(6) “I understand Nibbāna, and the path and way leading to Nibbāna.  And I also understand how one who has entered this path will, by realising for himself with direct knowledge, here and now enter upon and abide in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints.

37. (1) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell.’ And then later on, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, I see that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he has reappeared in a state of deprivation, in an unhappy destination, in perdition, in hell, and is experiencing exclusively painful, racking, piercing feelings. Suppose there were a charcoal pit deeper than a man’s height full of glowing coals without flame or smoke; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same charcoal pit. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path, that he will come to this same charcoal pit’; and then later on he sees that he has fallen into that charcoal pit and is experiencing exclusively painful, racking, piercing feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…piercing feelings.

38. (2) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in the animal realm.’ And then later on, with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, I see that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he has reappeared in the animal realm and is experiencing painful, racking, piercing feelings. Suppose there were a cesspit deeper than a man’s height full of filth; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same cesspit. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same cesspit’; and then later on he sees that he has fallen into that cesspit and is experiencing painful, racking, piercing feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…piercing feelings.

39. (3) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in the realm of ghosts.’ And then later on…I see that…he has reappeared in the realm of ghosts and is experiencing much painful feeling. Suppose there were a tree growing on uneven ground with scanty foliage casting a dappled shadow; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same tree. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves… that he will come to this same tree’; and then later on he sees that he is sitting or lying in the shade of that tree experiencing much painful feeling. So too, by encompassing mind with mind …much painful feeling.

40. (4) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear among human beings.’ And then later on…I see that…he has reappeared among human beings and is experiencing much pleasant feeling. Suppose there were a tree growing on even ground with thick foliage casting a deep shade; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same tree. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same tree’; and then later on he sees that he is sitting or lying in the shade of that tree experiencing much pleasant feeling. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…much pleasant feeling. 

41. (5) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that on the dissolution of the body, after death, he will reappear in a happy destination, in the heavenly world.’ And then later on…I see that…he has reappeared in a happy destination, in the heavenly world, and is experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. Suppose there were a mansion, and it had an upper chamber plastered within and without, shut off, secured by bars, with shuttered windows, and in it there was a couch spread with rugs, blankets, and sheets, with a deer-skin coverlet, with a canopy as well as crimson pillows for both [head and feet]; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only and directed to that same mansion. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same mansion’; and then later on he sees that he is sitting or lying in that upper chamber in that mansion experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…exclusively pleasant feelings.

42. (6) “By encompassing mind with mind I understand a certain person thus: ‘This person so behaves, so conducts himself, has taken such a path that by realising for himself with direct knowledge, he here and now will enter upon and abide in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints.’ And then later on I see that by realising for himself with direct knowledge, he here and now enters upon and abides in the deliverance of mind and deliverance by wisdom that are taintless with the destruction of the taints, and is experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. Suppose there were a pond with clean, agreeable, cool water, transparent, with smooth banks, delightful, and nearby a dense wood; and then a man scorched and exhausted by hot weather, weary, parched, and thirsty, came by a path going in one way only towards that same pond. Then a man with good sight on seeing him would say: ‘This person so behaves…that he will come to this same pond’; and then later on he sees that he has plunged into the pond, bathed, drunk, and relieved all his distress, fatigue, and fever and has come out again and is sitting or lying in the wood [77] experiencing exclusively pleasant feelings. So too, by encompassing mind with mind…exclusively pleasant feelings. These are the five destinations.

43. “Sāriputta, when I know and see thus, should anyone say of me: ‘The recluse Gotama does not have any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. The recluse Gotama teaches a Dhamma [merely] hammered out by reasoning, following his own line of inquiry as it occurs to him’—unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. Just as a bhikkhu possessed of virtue, concentration, and wisdom would here and now enjoy final knowledge, so it will happen in this case, I say, that unless he abandons that assertion and that state of mind and relinquishes that view, then as [surely as if he had been] carried off and put there he will wind up in hell. 

(THE BODHISATTA’S AUSTERITIES)

44. “Sāriputta, I recall having lived a holy life possessing four factors. I have been an ascetic—a supreme ascetic; I have been coarse—supremely coarse; I have been scrupulous—supremely scrupulous; I have been secluded—supremely secluded.

45. “Such was my asceticism, Sāriputta, that I went naked, rejecting conventions, licking my hands, not coming when asked, not stopping when asked; I did not accept food brought or food specially made or an invitation to a meal; I received nothing from a pot, from a bowl, across a threshold, across a stick, across a pestle, from two eating together, from a pregnant woman, from a woman giving suck, from a woman in the midst of men, from where food was advertised to be distributed, from where a dog was waiting, from where flies were buzzing; I accepted no fish or meat, I drank no liquor, wine, or fermented brew. I kept to one house, to one morsel; I kept to two houses, to two morsels;…I kept to seven houses, to seven morsels. I lived on one saucerful a day, on two saucerfuls a day…on seven saucerfuls a day; I took food once a day, once every two days…once every seven days; thus even up to once every fortnight, I dwelt pursuing the practice of taking food at stated intervals. I was an eater of greens or millet or wild rice or hide-parings or moss or ricebran or rice-scum or sesamum flour or grass or cowdung. I lived on forest roots and fruits; I fed on fallen fruits. I clothed myself in hemp, in hemp-mixed cloth, in shrouds, in refuse rags, in tree bark, in antelope hide, in strips of antelope hide, in kusagrass fabric, in bark fabric, in wood-shavings fabric, in head-hair wool, in animal wool, in owls’ wings. I was one who pulled out hair and beard, pursuing the practice of pulling out hair and beard. I was one who stood continuously, rejecting seats. I was one who squatted continuously, devoted to maintaining the squatting position. I was one who used a mattress of spikes; I made a mattress of spikes my bed. I dwelt pursuing the practice of bathing in water three times daily including the evening. Thus in such a variety of ways I dwelt pursuing the practice of tormenting and mortifying the body. Such was my asceticism.

46. “Such was my coarseness, Sāriputta, that just as the bole of a tindukā tree, accumulating over the years, cakes and flakes off, so too, dust and dirt, accumulating over the years, caked off my body and flaked off. It never occurred to me: ‘Oh, let me rub this dust and dirt off with my hand, or let another rub this dust and dirt off with his hand’—it never occurred to me thus. Such was my coarseness.47. “Such was my scrupulousness, Sāriputta, that I was always mindful in stepping forwards and stepping backwards. I was full of pity even in regard to a drop of water thus: ‘Let me not hurt the tiny creatures in the crevices of the ground.’ Such was my scrupulousness.

48. “Such was my seclusion, Sāriputta, that I would plunge into some forest and dwell there. And when I saw a cowherd or a shepherd or someone gathering grass or sticks, or a woodsman, I would flee from grove to grove, from thicket to thicket, from hollow to hollow, from hillock to hillock. Why was that? So that they should not see me or I see them. Just as a forest-bred deer, on seeing human beings, flees from grove to grove, from thicket to thicket, from hollow to hollow, from hillock to hillock, so too, when I saw a cowherd or a shepherd…Such was my seclusion.

49. “I would go on all fours to the cow-pens when the cattle had gone out and the cowherd had left them, and I would feed on the dung of the young suckling calves. As long as my own excrement and urine lasted, I fed on my own excrement and urine. Such was my great practice of feeding on filth.

50. “I would plunge into some awe-inspiring grove and dwell there—a grove so awe-inspiring that it would make most of a man’s hairs stand up if he were not freed from lust. When those cold wintry nights came during the ‘eight-days period of snowfall, ’ I would dwell by night in the open and by day in the grove.194 In the last month of the hot season I would dwell by day in the open and by night in the grove. And there came to me spontaneously this stanza never heard before:

‘Chilled by night and scorched by day, 

Alone in awe-inspiring groves, 

Naked, no fire to sit beside, 

The sage yet pursues his quest.’ 

51. “I would make my bed in a charnel ground with the bones of the dead for a pillow. And cowherd boys came up and spat on me, urinated on me, threw dirt at me, and poked sticks into my ears. Yet I do not recall that I ever aroused an evil mind [of hate] against them. Such was my abiding in equanimity. 

52. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through food.’ They say: ‘Let us live on kola-fruits,’ and they eat kola-fruits, they eat kola-fruit powder, they drink kola-fruit water, and they make many kinds of kola-fruit concoctions. Now I recall having eaten a single kola-fruit a day. Sāriputta, you may think that the kola-fruit was bigger at that time, yet you should not regard it so: the kola-fruit was then at most the same size as now. Through feeding on a single kola-fruit a day, my body reached a state of extreme emaciation. Because of eating so little my limbs became like the jointed segments of vine stems or bamboo stems. Because of eating so little my backside became like a camel’s hoof. Because of eating so little the projections on my spine stood forth like corded beads. Because of eating so little my ribs jutted out as gaunt as the crazy rafters of an old roof-less barn. Because of eating so little the gleam of my eyes sank far down in their sockets, looking like a gleam of water that has sunk far down in a deep well. Because of eating so little my scalp shrivelled and withered as a green bitter gourd shrivels and withers in the wind and sun. Because of eating so little my belly skin adhered to my backbone; thus if I wanted to touch my belly skin I encountered my backbone, and if I wanted to touch my backbone I encountered my belly skin. Because of eating so little, if I wanted to defecate or urinate, I fell over on my face right there. Because of eating so little, if I tried to ease my body by rubbing my limbs with my hands, the hair, rotted at its roots, fell from my body as I rubbed.

53–55. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through food.’ They say: ‘Let us live on beans,’…‘Let us live on sesamum,’…‘Let us live on rice,’ and they eat rice, they eat rice powder, [81] they drink rice water, and they make many kinds of rice concoctions. Now I recall having eaten a single rice grain a day. Sāriputta, you may think that the rice grain was bigger at that time, yet you should not regard it so: the rice grain was then at most the same size as now. Through feeding on a single rice grain a day, my body reached a state of extreme emaciation. Because of eating so little…the hair, rotted at its roots, fell from my body as I rubbed.

56. “Yet, Sāriputta, by such conduct, by such practice, by such performance of austerities, I did not attain any superhuman states, any distinction in knowledge and vision worthy of the noble ones. Why was that? Because I did not attain that noble wisdom which when attained is noble and emancipating and leads the one who practises in accordance with it to the complete destruction of suffering.

57. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through the round of rebirths.’ But it is not easy to find a realm in the round that I have not already [82] passed through in this long journey, except for the gods of the Pure Abodes; and had I passed through the round as a god in the Pure Abodes, I would never have returned to this world.

58. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through [some particular kind of] rebirth.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of rebirth that I have not been reborn in already in this long journey, except for the gods of the Pure Abodes…

59. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through [some particular] abode.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of abode that I have not already dwelt in…except for the gods of the Pure Abodes…

60. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes about through sacrifice.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of sacrifice that has not already been offered up by me in this long journey, when I was either a head-anointed noble king or a well-to-do brahmin.

61. “There are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘Purification comes through fire-worship.’ But it is not easy to find a kind of fire that has not already been worshipped by me in this long journey, when I was either a head-anointed noble king or a well-to-do brahmin.

62. “Sāriputta, there are certain recluses and brahmins whose doctrine and view is this: ‘As long as this good man is still young, a black-haired young man endowed with the blessing of youth, in the prime of life, so long is he perfect in his lucid wisdom. But when this good man is old, aged, burdened with years, advanced in life, and come to the last stage, being eighty, ninety, or a hundred years old, then the lucidity of his wisdom is lost.’ But it should not be regarded so. I am now old, aged, burdened with years, advanced in life, and come to the last stage: my years have turned eighty. Now suppose that I had four disciples with a hundred years’ lifespan, perfect in mindfulness, retentiveness, memory, and lucidity of wisdom.197 Just as a skilled archer, trained, practised, and tested, could easily shoot a light arrow across the shadow of a palm tree, suppose that they were even to that extent perfect in mindfulness, retentiveness, [83] memory, and lucidity of wisdom. Suppose that they continuously asked me about the four foundations of mindfulness and that I answered them when asked and that they remembered each answer of mine and never asked a subsidiary question or paused except to eat, drink, consume food, taste, urinate, defecate, and rest in order to remove sleepiness and tiredness. Still the Tathāgata’s exposition of the Dhamma, his explanations of factors of the Dhamma, and his replies to questions would not yet come to an end, but meanwhile those four disciples of mine with their hundred years’ lifespan would have died at the end of those hundred years. Sāriputta, even if you have to carry me about on a bed, still there will be no change in the lucidity of the Tathāgata’s wisdom.

63. “Rightly speaking, were it to be said of anyone: ‘A being not subject to delusion has appeared in the world for the welfare and happiness of many, out of compassion for the world, for the good, welfare, and happiness of gods and humans,’ it is of me indeed that rightly speaking this should be said.”64. Now on that occasion the venerable Nāgasamāla was standing behind the Blessed One fanning him.198 Then he said to the Blessed One: “It is wonderful, venerable sir, it is marvellous! As I listened to this discourse on the Dhamma, the hairs of my body stood up. Venerable sir, what is the name of this discourse on the Dhamma?”“As to that, Nāgasamāla, you may remember this discourse on the Dhamma as ‘The Hair-Raising Discourse.’”

That is what the Blessed One said. The venerable Nāgasamāla was satisfied and delighted in the Blessed One’s words.