He Who Tells the Truth Gets Chased out of Nine Vil­lages, Part IV

Recorded Sep­tem­ber 9, 2006
REALAUDIO
NB: This stream con­tains both FTR #s 567 and 568 in sequence. Each is a 30 minute broadcast.

A Euro­pean social critic termed anti-Semitism “the social­ism of fools.” In the wake of the Lebanon war, anti-Semitism has been more evi­dent than ever, par­tic­u­larly in Europe and in the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor in the United States. In the wake of the US inva­sion of Iraq, blame for that tragic mis­ad­ven­ture has been ascribed by many to the “Israel Lobby” and the neo-cons (some of whom are Jew­ish). Much of this broad­cast sets forth jour­nal­ist Greg Palast’s analy­sis of the con­tention that the Iraq war was a Jew­ish con­spir­acy. Not sur­pris­ingly, Palast con­cludes that the dri­ving force behind the inva­sion was not “Jews,” but the petro­leum indus­try, uti­liz­ing its pro­found influ­ence in the admin­is­tra­tion of George Bush, who (like Vice Pres­i­dent Cheney) is a for­mer petro­leum indus­try CEO. Ear­lier in 2006, an arti­cle gen­er­ated at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity cited the “Israel Lobby” as a coun­ter­pro­duc­tive force in Amer­i­can society—one that under­mines America’s posi­tion in the world. The pub­li­ca­tion of that arti­cle fol­lowed on the heels of a multi-million dol­lar endow­ment by Saudi Prince Alwaleed to Har­vard, an occur­rence that may not be uncon­nected to the pub­li­ca­tion of the paper on the Israel Lobby. Alwaleed’s gift and the paper that fol­lowed on its heels were fore­shad­owed by Islamist and neo-Nazi Achmed Huber, a direc­tor of appar­ent Al Qaeda fund­ing source Bank Al Taqwa.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: A vir­u­lently anti-Semitic arti­cle pub­lished in a Berke­ley [Cal­i­for­nia] com­mu­nity news­pa­per; Grover Norquist’s author­ship of the plan for pri­va­ti­za­tion of the Iraqi econ­omy; the influ­ence of the James A. Baker Insti­tute on the gen­e­sis of the Iraqi inva­sion plans.

1. Exem­pli­fy­ing “the social­ism of fools”, a Berke­ley com­mu­nity paper pub­lished an arti­cle that epit­o­mized the sort of rabid anti-Semitism that has become almost rou­tine in parts of the so-called pro­gres­sive polit­i­cal sec­tor. “The fall­out from an opin­ion piece pub­lished in Berkeley’s twice-weekly com­mu­nity news­pa­per has mush­roomed well beyond the con­fines of the nation’s first des­ig­nated Nuclear-Free Zone. And while it is not unusual for The Berke­ley Daily Planet’s exec­u­tive edi­tor and owner Becky O’Malley to pub­lish con­tro­ver­sial, far-flung opin­ion pieces and wacko reader responses, the deci­sion to run a com­men­tary head­lined ‘Zion­ist Crimes in Lebanon’ is being ques­tioned by scores of crit­ics. The arti­cle, which appeared as com­men­tary on the opin­ion pages of the newspaper’s Aug. 8 edi­tion was more an attack on Jew­ish peo­ple than a log­i­cal argu­ment against Israel’s mas­sive mil­i­tary response to the con­tin­u­ing rocket attacks from Hezbol­lah forces in Lebanon. . . .”
(“Why Did Berke­ley Paper Run anti-Jewish Col­umn?” by Chip John­son; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 9/1/2006; p. B1.)

2. “ . . . ‘Let us go back to 539 B.C., when Cyrus the Great, King of Per­sia, went to Baby­lo­nia and lib­er­ated Jews. One can ask why Jews were enslaved by Baby­lo­ni­ans. Also, one can ask why Jews had prob­lems with Egyp­tians, with Jesus, with Euro­peans, and in mod­ern times with Ger­mans?’ wrote Ari­an­pour, a for­mer Berke­ley res­i­dent who is a stu­dent in India. The newspaper’s crit­ics, and here are plenty of them, aren’t too inter­ested in Arianpour’s his­tor­i­cal view. What more than two dozen rab­bis and Jew­ish com­mu­nity groups and scores of Bay Area res­i­dents really want to know is why in the heck would the paper print such an inflam­ma­tory, hate­ful piece in a news­pa­per that makes its mark with sto­ries about Berke­ley land-use and City Hall pol­i­tics? It’s a rea­son­able ques­tion.” (Idid.; pp. B1-B7.)

3. “The Anti-Defamation League’s North­ern Cal­i­for­nia chap­ter sent O’Malley a let­ter demand­ing a pub­lic apol­ogy for the arti­cle. It car­ries the sig­na­tures of more than a half-dozen elected offi­cials from the East Bay, includ­ing the may­ors of Oak­land, Berke­ley and Emeryville. The let­ter described the author’s words as ‘a racist attack on all peo­ple of Jew­ish descent when he asserted that Jews have been the cause of every tragedy that has befallen them—from slav­ery in Egypt to the Holo­caust. We are not sur­prised when hate-mongers make such state­ments or when neo-Nazi pub­li­ca­tions print them. Vul­gar and hate-filled state­ments are writ­ten all the time—editors choose whether or not to pub­lish them. We were, how­ever, sur­prised, to find them in a Berke­ley ‘com­mu­nity’ news­pa­per since racism of any kind vio­lates all that our city and region stands for,’ it read. . . .” (Ibid.; p. B7.)

4. Much of the pro­gram con­sists of an arti­cle by jour­nal­ist Greg Palast, in which he exam­ines the charge that Jews engi­neered the U.S. inva­sion of Iraq in order to neu­tral­ize an enemy of Israel. This view has achieved con­sid­er­able cir­cu­la­tion in the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor, and has even been par­roted by Joseph Wil­son, the for­mer diplo­mat who is mar­ried to outed CIA offi­cer Valerie Plame. Palast exam­ines the charge and finds it bogus. Not sur­pris­ingly, he con­cludes that the inva­sion was backed by ele­ments within the GOP right and the closely-related petro­leum lobby. Ques­tion: are the Pres­i­dent and Vice-President of the United States rab­bis, or are they for­mer petro­leum indus­try CEO’s from the state of Texas?! “The US Con­gress will open hear­ings this week on the War in Iraq — a wee bit late one might think. But one ques­tion at the fore­front of the minds of many on both the Left and the Right is sure not to be asked: Did the Jews do it? I mean, after killing Jesus, did the Elders of Zion manip­u­late the gov­ern­ment of the United States into invad­ing Baby­lon as part of a scheme to abet the expan­sion of Greater Israel? The ques­tion was first posed to me in 2004 when I was speak­ing at a meet­ing of Mobi­liza­tion for Peace in San Jose. A mem­ber of the audi­ence asked, ‘ Put it together— Who’s behind this war? Paul Wol­fowitz and Elliott Abrams and the Project for a ‘ Jew’ Amer­i­can Cen­tury and, and, why don’t you talk about that, huh? And ....’”
(“Was the Inva­sion of Iraq A Jew­ish Con­spir­acy?”; By Greg Palast, Tikkun Mag­a­zine; July/August 2006.)

5. “But the ques­tioner never had the full oppor­tu­nity to com­plete his query because, flushed and red, he began to charge the stage. The peace activists attempted to detain the gentleman—whose con­fed­er­ates then grabbed some chairs to swing. As the Peace Cen­ter was tak­ing on a some­what war­like char­ac­ter, I chose to call in the author­i­ties and slip out the back. Still, his ques­tion intrigued me. As an inves­tiga­tive reporter, ‘ Who’s behind this war?’ seemed like a rea­son­able challenge—and if it were a plot of Christ-killers and Illu­mi­nati, so be it. I just report the facts, ma’am. And frankly, at first, it seemed like the gent had a point, twisted though his spin might be. There was Paul Wol­fowitz, before Con­gress in March 2003, offer­ing Amer­i­cans the bar­gain of the cen­tury: a free Iraq—not ‘ free’ as in ‘ free­dom and democ­racy’ but free in the sense of this won’t cost us a penny. Wol­fowitz tes­ti­fied: ‘ There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. tax­payer money.’” (Idem.)

6. “And where would these bil­lions come from? Wol­fowitz told us: ‘ It starts with the assets of the Iraqi peo­ple.... The oil rev­enues of that coun­try could bring between $50 and $100 bil­lion over the next two or three years.’ This was no small mat­ter. The vulpine Deputy Defense Sec­re­tary knew that the num­ber one ques­tion on the minds of Amer­i­cans was not, ‘ Does Sad­dam really have the bomb?’ but ‘ What’s this lit­tle war going to cost us?’ How­ever, Wol­fowitz left some­thing out of his tes­ti­mony: the truth. I hunted for weeks for the source of the Pentagon’s oil rev­enue projections—and found them. They were wildly dif­fer­ent from the Wol­fowitz tes­ti­mony. But this was not per­jury. Ever since the con­vic­tion of Elliott Abrams for per­jury before Con­gress dur­ing the Iran-Contra hear­ings, nei­ther Wol­fowitz nor the other Bush fac­to­tums swear an oath before tes­ti­fy­ing. If you don’t raise your hand and promise to tell the truth, ‘ so help me, God,’ you’re off the hook with fed­eral pros­e­cu­tors. How the Lord will judge that lit­tle ploy, we can­not say.” (Ibid.; pp. 47–48.)

7. “But Wolfowitz’s lit­tle num­bers game can hardly count as a Great Zion­ist con­spir­acy. That seemed to come, at first glance, in the form of a con­fi­den­tial 101-page doc­u­ment slipped to our team at BBC’s “News­night.” It detailed the eco­nomic ‘ recov­ery’ of Iraq’s post-conquest econ­omy. This blue­print for occu­pa­tion, we learned, was first devised in secret in late 2001. Notably, this pro­gram for Iraq’s recov­ery wasn’t writ­ten by Iraqis; rather, it was pro­moted by the neo-conservatives of the Defense Depart­ment, home of Abrams, Wol­fowitz, Harold Rhode and other desk­top Napoleons unafraid of mov­ing toy tanks around the Pen­ta­gon war room. The neo-cons’ 101-page con­fi­den­tial doc­u­ment, which came to me in a brown enve­lope in Feb­ru­ary 2001, just before the tanks rolled, goes boldly where no U.S. inva­sion plan had gone before: the com­plete rewrite of the con­quered state’s ‘ poli­cies, law and reg­u­la­tions.’ A cap on the income taxes of Iraq’s wealth­i­est was included as a mat­ter of course. And this was undoubt­edly history’s first mil­i­tary assault plan appended to a pro­gram for tough­en­ing the tar­get nation’s copy­right laws. Once the 82nd Air­borne lib­er­ated Iraq, never again would the Ba’athist dic­ta­tor­ship threaten Amer­ica with boot­leg dubs of Brit­ney Spears’s ‘ ...Baby One More Time.’” (Ibid.; p. 48.)

8. Palast notes Grover Norquist’s influ­ence in the cre­ation of the pri­va­ti­za­tion plan for Iraq. As dis­cussed in—among other pro­grams– FTR#’s 435, 454, 515– Norquist has been a point man for the Mus­lim Brotherhood/Islamist ele­ment within the GOP. “It was more like a cor­po­rate takeover, except with Abrams tanks instead of junk bonds. It didn’t strike me as the work of a Kosher Cabal for an Impe­r­ial Israel. In fact, it smelled of pork—Pig Heaven for cor­po­rate Amer­ica look­ing for a slice of Iraq, and I sus­pected its porcine source. I gave it a big sniff and, sure enough, I smelled Grover Norquist. Norquist is the capo di capi of right-wing, big-money influ­ence ped­dlers in Wash­ing­ton. Those jeal­ous of his inside track to the White House call him ‘ Gopher Nose-Twist.’ A devout Chris­t­ian, Norquist chan­neled a mil­lion dol­lars to the Chris­t­ian Coali­tion to fight the devil’s tool, legal­ized gam­bling. He didn’t tell the Coali­tion that the loot came from an Indian tribe rep­re­sented by Norquist’s asso­ciate, Jack Abramoff. (The tribe didn’t want com­pe­ti­tion for its own casino oper­a­tions.) I took a chance and dropped in on Norquist’s L Street office, and under a poster of his idol [‘ NIXON— NOW MORE THAN EVER’ ], Norquist took a look at the ‘ recov­ery’ plan for Iraq and prac­ti­cally jumped over my desk to sign it, filled with pride at see­ing his baby. Yes, he pro­moted the pri­va­ti­za­tions, the tax limit for the rich, and the change in copy­right law, all con­cerns close to the hearts and wal­lets of his clients.” (Idem.)

9. The neo-cons hoped that an uptick in Iraqi oil pro­duc­tion would break OPEC and Saudi Ara­bia. “The very un-Jewish Norquist may have framed much of the U.S. occu­pa­tion grabfest, but there was, with­out doubt, one notable item in the 101-page plan for Iraq which clearly had the mark of Zion on it. On page seventy-three the plan called for the ‘ privatization....[of] the oil and sup­port­ing indus­tries,’ the sell-off of every ounce of Iraq’s oil fields and reserves. Its mas­ter­mind, I learned, was Ariel Cohen of the Her­itage Foun­da­tion. For the neo-cons, this was The Big One. Behind it, no less a goal than to bring down the lynch­pin of Arab power, Saudi Ara­bia. It would work like this: the Saudi’s power rests on con­trol of OPEC, the oil car­tel which, as any good monop­oly, with­holds oil from the mar­ket, kick­ing up prices. Sell-off Iraq’s oil fields and pri­vate com­pa­nies will pump oil in their lit­tle Iraqi patches to the max. Iraq, the neo-cons hoped, would crank out six mil­lion bar­rels of oil a day, bust its OPEC quota, flood the world mar­ket, demol­ish OPEC and, as the price of oil fell off a cliff, Saudi Ara­bia would fall to its knees.” (Ibid.; pp. 48–49.)

10. “‘ It’s a no-brainer,’ Cohen told me, at his office at Her­itage. It was a dim lit­tle cubby, in which, in our hour or two together, the phone rang only once. For a guy who was sup­posed to be The God­fa­ther of a globe-spanning Zion­ist scheme to destroy the Arab oil monop­oly, he seemed kind of, well...pathetic. And he failed. While the Norquist-promoted sell-offs, flat taxes and copy­right laws were dic­tated into Iraqi law by occu­pa­tion chief Paul Bre­mer, the Cohen neo-con oil pri­va­ti­za­tion died an unhappy death. What hap­pened, Ari? ‘ Arab econ­o­mists,’ he hissed, ‘ hired by the State Depart­ment … the witches brew of the Saudi Royal fam­ily and Soviet Ost­block.’ Well, the Soviet Ost­block does not exist, but the Arab econ­o­mists do. I spoke with them in Riyadh, in Lon­don, in Cal­i­for­nia, in wry accents mix­ing desert and Oxford drawls. They speak with con­fi­dence, know­ing Saudi Arabia’s polit­i­cal author­ity is pro­tected by the royal fam­i­lies — of Hous­ton petro­leum.” (Ibid.; p. 49.)

11. Palast attrib­utes respon­si­bil­ity for the inva­sion to think tanks asso­ci­ated with the petro­leum indus­try, the James A. Baker III Insti­tute in par­tic­u­lar. Baker was sec­re­tary of state under Rea­gan and is very close to the elder George Bush, as well as to Saudi oil inter­ests. Baker’s law firm rep­re­sented many of the Saudis sued by rel­a­tives of the vic­tims of the 9/11 attacks. “After two mad years of hunt­ing, I dis­cov­ered the real plan for Iraq’s oil, the one that keeps our troops in Fal­lu­jah. Some 323 pages long and deeply con­fi­den­tial, it was drafted at the James A. Baker III Insti­tute in Hous­ton, Texas, under the strict guid­ance of Big Oil’s min­ions. It was the cul­mi­na­tion of a series of plan­ning groups that began in Decem­ber 2000 with key play­ers from the Baker Insti­tute and Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions (includ­ing one Ken Lay of Enron). This was fol­lowed by a State Depart­ment invasion-planning ses­sion in Wal­nut Creek, Cal­i­for­nia, in Feb­ru­ary 2001, only weeks after Bush and Cheney took office. Its con­cepts received offi­cial bless­ing after a March 2001 gath­er­ing of oil chiefs (and Lay) with Dick Cheney where the group reviewed with the Vice-President the map of Iraq’s oil fields. Once I dis­cov­ered the Big Oil plan, sev­eral of the play­ers agreed to speak with me (not, to the cha­grin of some, real­iz­ing that I rarely hold such con­ver­sions with­out secretly record­ing them). Most forth­right was Philip Car­roll, for­mer CEO of Shell Oil USA, who was flown into Bagh­dad on a C-17 to make sure there would be no neo-con mon­key busi­ness in America’s newest oil fields.” (Idem.)

12. In FTR#564, John Lof­tus main­tained that Mobil/Exxon and other transna­tional oil com­pa­nies favored the insur­gency in Iraq, because it keeps Iraqi oil off the mar­ket and keeps prices high. Palast’s obser­va­tions fit nicely with Lof­tus’ analy­sis. “It had been a very good war for Big Oil, with tripled oil prices mean­ing tripled prof­its. In Hous­ton, I asked Car­roll, a com­mand­ing, steel-straight chief exec­u­tive, about Ari Cohen’s oil pri­va­ti­za­tion plan, the anti-Saudi ‘ no-brainer.’ ‘ I would agree with that state­ment’ Car­oll told me, ‘ pri­va­ti­za­tion is a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by some­one with no brain.’ Bush world is divided in two: neo-cons on one side, and the Estab­lish­ment (which includes the oil com­pa­nies and the Saudis) on the other. The plan the Estab­lish­ment cre­ated, crafted by Hous­ton oil men, called for lock­ing up Iraq’s oil with agree­ments between a new state oil com­pany under ‘ profit-sharing agree­ments’ with ‘ IOCs’ (Inter­na­tional Oil Com­pa­nies). The com­bine could ‘ enhance the [Iraq’s] government’s rela­tion­ship with OPEC,’ it read, by hold­ing the line on quo­tas and thereby uphold­ing high prices.” (Idem.)

13. “So there you have it. Wol­fowitz and his neo-con clique— book­ish, fool­ish, vainglorious—had their asses kicked utterly, finally, and con­vinc­ingly by the pow­ers of petro­leum, the Houston-Riyadh Big Oil axis. Between the neo-cons and Big Oil, it wasn’t much of a con­test. The end-game was crush­ing, final. The Israelites had lost again in the land of Baby­lon. And to make cer­tain the arriv­iste neo-cons got the point, pub­lic pun­ish­ment was exacted, from exile to demo­tion to ban­ish­ment. In Jan­u­ary 2005, neo-con point­man Dou­glas Feith resigned from the Defense Depart­ment; his assis­tant Larry Franklin later was busted for pass­ing doc­u­ments to pro-Israel lob­by­ists. The State Department’s knuckle-dragging enforcer of neo-con ortho­dox­ies, John Bolton, was booted from Wash­ing­ton to New York to the pow­er­less post of U.N. Ambas­sador. Finally, on March 16, 2005, sec­ond anniver­sary of the inva­sion, neo-con leader of the pack Wol­fowitz was cast out of the Pen­ta­gon war room and tossed into the World Bank, mov­ing from the testosterone-powered, war-making deci­sion cen­ter to the lend­ing office for Bangladeshi chicken farm­ers. ‘ The real­ists,’ crowed the tri­umphant edi­tor of the jour­nal of the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions, ‘ have defeated the fan­ta­sists!’ So much for the Big Zion­ist Con­spir­acy that sup­pos­edly directed this war. A half– dozen con­fused Jews, wan­der­ing in the pol­icy desert a long dis­tance from main­stream Jew­ish views, armed only with Leo Strauss’ silly apho­risms, were no match for Texas oil majors and OPEC poten­tates with a com­bined throw weight of half a tril­lion bar­rels of oil.” (Ibid.; pp. 49–61.)

14. Next, the pro­gram exam­ines the heated debate about the influ­ence of the Israel Lobby in Amer­i­can soci­ety. Two pro­fes­sors, John Mearsheimer from the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago and Stephen Walt from Har­vard recently pub­lished a paper com­piled under the aus­pices of Har­vard Uni­ver­sity. Intrigu­ingly, the pub­li­ca­tion of this paper fol­lowed shortly on the heels of a multi-million dol­lar dona­tion to Har­vard by Saudi prince Alwaleed. Are the two events con­nected? “Uni­ver­sity of Chicago polit­i­cal sci­en­tist John Mearsheimer was in town yes­ter­day to elab­o­rate on his view that Amer­i­can Jew­ish groups are respon­si­ble for the war in Iraq, the destruc­tion of Lebanon’s infra­struc­ture and many other bad things. As evi­dence, he cited the influ­ence pro-Israel groups have on ‘John Boner, the House major­ity leader.’ Actu­ally, Pro­fes­sor, it’s ‘BAY-ner.’ But Mearsheimer quickly dis­pensed with Boehner (R-Ohio) and moved on to Jew­ish groups’ nefar­i­ous sway over Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who Mearsheimer called’ von Hollen.’”
(“Pro­nounc­ing Blame on the Israel Lobby” by Dana Mill­bank; Wash­ing­ton Post; 8/29/2006; p. A02.)

15. “Such gaffes would be trivial—if Mearsheimer weren’t claim­ing to be an author­ity on Wash­ing­ton and how power is wielded here. But Mearsheimer, with co-author Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School, set off a furi­ous debate this spring when they argued that ‘the Israel lobby’ is exert­ing undue influ­ence in Wash­ing­ton; oppo­nents called them anti-Semitic. Yes­ter­day, at the invi­ta­tion of the Coun­cil on American-Islamic Rela­tions (CAIR), they held a forum at the National Press Club to expand on their alle­ga­tions about the Israel lobby. Blur­ring the line between aca­d­e­mics and activism, they accepted a but­ton pro­claim­ing ‘Fight the Israel Lobby’ and won cheers from the Mus­lim group for their denun­ci­a­tion of Israel and its friends in the United States. What­ever moti­vated the per­for­mance, the result wasn’t exactly schol­arly. . . .: (Idem.)

16. “. . . . This line of argu­ment could be con­sid­ered a pre­car­i­ous one for two blue-eyed men with Ger­manic sur­names. And, indeed, Walt seemed defen­sive about the charges of anti-Semitism. He cau­tioned that the Israel lobby ‘is not a cabal,’ that it is ‘not syn­ony­mous with Amer­i­can Jews’ and that ‘there is noth­ing improper or ille­git­i­mate about its activ­i­ties.’ . . .” (Idem.)

17. The broad­cast high­lights Prince Alwaleed’s gift to Har­vard, a cou­ple of months before the pub­li­ca­tion of the Walt/Mearsheimer paper. “Har­vard Uni­ver­sity today (Dec. 12) announced the cre­ation of a University-wide pro­gram on Islamic stud­ies, made pos­si­ble by a $20 mil­lion gift from Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdu­laziz Alsaud. . . .”
(“Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Donates $20 Mil­lion to Sup­port University’s Islamic Stud­ies Pro­gram”; Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Gazette; 12/12/2005; p. 1.)

18. Con­clud­ing with an inter­est­ing and per­haps sig­nif­i­cant quote from Islamist/neo-Nazi and Bank al Taqwa direc­tor Ahmed Huber. Huber pre­dicts that “we” will defeat the Israel Lobby and change pub­lic opin­ion in Amer­ica. Was his pre­dic­tion made with fore­knowl­edge of the finan­cial offen­sive in Amer­i­can acad­e­mia and media by the likes of Alwaleed? (For more about Huber, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 343, 354, 456. For more about Alwaleed, see FTR#’s 560, 561.) “ . . . The U.S. is the ally of 15 mil­lion Jews against 1.3 bil­lion Mus­lims; it is allied with 5 mil­lion Israelis against 200 mil­lion Arabs,’ he [Ahmed Huber] said. ‘We will bring down the Israel lobby and change for­eign pol­icy. We’ll do it in Amer­ica. When it hap­pens, you’ll under­stand.’ . . .”
(“Swiss Probe Anti-U.S. neo-Nazi Sus­pected Finan­cial Ties to al Aqaeda” by Jay Bushin­sky; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 3/12/2002)

19. This descrip­tion presents mate­r­ial from the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle quoted in the pre­ced­ing para­graph. Although it was not in the orig­i­nal broad­cast itself, this text excerpt is archived in this descrip­tion in order to present more depth on the rela­tion­ship between Huber and key Nazi oper­a­tive Fran­cois Genoud. Note that Genoud and Huber were very close to and admir­ing of Aya­tol­lah Khome­ini, who headed the Islamist gov­ern­ment of Iran. Genoud financed Khomeini’s exile in France, before he returned to Iran. (For more about Genoud, see—among other programs—FTR#453. For more about Huber and Genoud, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 354, 371.) “ . . . [Le Monde cor­re­spon­dent Jean-Claude] Buhrer also assailed Huber for deny­ing the scope of the Nazi Holo­caust and for being a faith­ful dis­ci­ple of Fran­cois Genoud, a Swiss lawyer who funded Hitler and served as a Ger­man agent dur­ing World War II. After the war, Genoud under­wrote the clan­des­tine Odessa orga­ni­za­tion, which, accord­ing to famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesen­thal, enabled such noto­ri­ous Nazi fugi­tives as Adolf Eich­mann, Alois Brun­nerand Klaus Bar­bie to escape to South Amer­ica and the Mid­dle East. Author­i­ties believe Genoud founded al Taqwa Bank and allo­cated its resources to sup­port inter­na­tional ter­ror­ists such as Vladimir Ilich Ramirez, alias Car­los the Jackal, and bin Laden. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.] Genoud com­mit­ted sui­cide in 1996, shortly after Jew­ish lead­ers and Swiss bank­ing offi­cials announced an unprece­dented agree­ment to set up a com­mis­sion to exam­ine secret bank and gov­ern­ment files to search for funds deposited in Switzer­land by Holo­caust vic­tims, accord­ing to Buhrer. Over the years, Genoud paid French attor­ney Jacques Verges to defend Ramirez and Bar­bie and also cov­ered the legal expenses of Eich­mann before an Israeli court in 1961. He also sub­si­dized Khmeini’s pro­longed exile in France when Iran was gov­erned by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Genoud’s admi­ra­tion for Khome­ini is shared by Huber. ‘He was a fan­tas­tic man’ Huber said. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’.]” (Idem.)