Against Our Better Judgement; book summary

No one, including the President can get much done without the support of a majority of the legislators. We need to elect  a congress who will work together to promote peace and protection of the environment. Wars on terror have seemed to only cause increased terror and destruction and for what benefit or whose benefit?

Alison Weir is a journalist who didn’t like what she saw when she visited Palestine in the early 2000s and so she started reading and was brave enough to have written a book. It is still dangerous to people’s careers to report on the treatment of Palestine by Israel. It is a short book, 93 pages of text, and 109 pages of footnotes with further details, and 24 pages of works cited, and three pages of books for further reading which didn’t make it into the 93 pages of text. Her original goal was to write an article but it kept getting longer. Her goal was to share this information with the American public because Palestinians are still being mistreated and killed without cause or repercussions. We as a nation are continuing to support this apartheid situation.

This is not a book review in the normal sense of the genre, consider it a book summary or an attempt at the more condensed article that the author may have first envisioned. I encourage you to read the book as there are many more details which I didn’t attempt to include, it is a concise and well written book, but I also know that it is a busy world and not everyone has time to read a book, even an important book that is short in length and tall in character.

This summary was not written with consultation or permission of the author of the book Against Our Better Judgement, please see the website IfAmericaKnew.org for a link to the book and for more information about conditions in modern day Palestine  — any errors contained in this summary are my own and the opinions expressed are my own.

The book “Against Our Better Judgement; The hidden history of how the U.S. was used to create Israel,” by Alison Weir (2014) suggests that our nation has had people in positions of power since the early 1900s who have been promoting a Zionist agenda to takeover Palestine and create a nation for “all” Jews to live. However the Jews throughout the world were more interested in staying settled where they were and were not interested in being singled out as an exclusionary religion. The group working for an Israeli nation were known as Zionist and many Jewish people were anti-Zionist. The media and financial support for creating a nation for Jews in Palestine had become too powerful however. Speaking out against Zionism became dangerous:

“Berger and other anti-Zionist Jewish Americans tried to organize against “the deception and cynicism with which the Zionist machine operated,” but failed to obtain anywhere near their level of funding. Among other things, would be dissenters were afraid of “the savagery of personal attacks” anti-Zionists endured. ref.155. (page 38, Against Our Better Judgement)

There was a lot of dark money already in play as people in the Zionist movement were also involved in banking and the creation of the Federal Reserve. Fund raising efforts also were very successful among people of the Jewish and Christian faiths — creating a nation in the Promised Land for Jewish people sounded nice.

Zionist supporters did get an agreement from the negotiations with Great Britain during World War I promising that if the U.S. could be brought into WWI to help Great Britain win the war, then Jews would be allowed to settle in Palestine. The region where Palestine is located was under the control of Great Britain at the time. And the U.S. was able to be encouraged by Zionist supporters to enter WWI and we did help win the war for Great Britain. And Jewish immigrants were allowed to settle in the Palestine region. The area at the time had been mainly populated by Muslims and Christians living without conflict.

The early Zionist settlers found out however that Jews living peacefully elsewhere did not have a strong urge to move to a desert to grow oranges. European Jewish settlements started experiencing violence that was publicized as hate crimes of anti-semitism but were actually undercover Zionists hurting Jews in order to cause fear and promote immigration to Palestine.

The German people who ended up on the losing side of WWI had some knowledge of the Zionist influence used to bring the U.S. into the war. During the build up to WWII this may have added to the power of Hitler and the Nazi regime. However Zionist worked with the Hitler regime during the 1930s and Jews who wanted to settle in Palestine were allowed to leave and to transfer their financial assets to Palestine. During WWII the areas where Jewish people lived in close communities ended up making it easier for the large numbers of victims of the concentration camps and death chambers.

And the large numbers of deaths made it easier for Zionist efforts after the war was over to work on international sympathy for the cause of having the Palestine area be made into a nation called Israel – partition was promised – Arab groups were supposed to be able to have their own place in the area but it .didn’t work out that way and the plan was “Against Our Better Judgement;” it was expected that a dual nation was not the ultimate goal and that there would be blood shed:

An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through armed aggression masked as defense:

“…the Jews will be the actual agressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the U.N…. In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.” (ref.195) (page 48, Against Our Better Judgement)

At the time Zionists were working towards support of a voting majority of the members of the United Nations to accept Israel as a new nation President Truman was in office. He was also pressured to vote to partition the nation of Palestine:

‘Truman wrote in his memoirs: “I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance.”‘

The paragraph continues with information by the author of the book:

“There were now about a million dues-paying Zionists in the U.S.” (ref.206) (page 51, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

And financial incentives were involved as we learn in the next paragraph:

“Then, as now, in addition to unending pressure there was financial compensation, Truman reportedly receiving a suitcase full of money from Zionists while on his train campaign around the country.” (ref.207) (page 51, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

Enough nations did end up voting for the partition of Palestine to create Israel and there was bloodshed as the fledgling nation cleared out Arabs and Christians, and even went after some British people:

“Begin, head of the Irgun militia, sent the following message to his troops about their victory at Deir Yassin:

‘Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest. Convey my regards to all the commanders and soldiers. We shake your hands. We are all proud of the excellent leadership and the fighting spirit in this great attack. We stand to attention in memory of the slain. We lovingly shake the hands of the wounded. Tell the soldiers you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue thus until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.'” (ref.246) (page 60, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

There was an eye witness report of the blood shed that had occurred there:

“Deir Yassin in April 1948 — before any Arab armies had joined the war. A Swiss Red Cross representative was one of the first to arrive on the scene, where he found 254 dead, including 145 women, 35 of them pregnant.” (ref.240) (page 59, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

Begin ended up traveling throughout America six months later on a tour that the State Department had tried to deny but which had the support of “11 Senators, 12 governors, 70 Congressment, 17 Justices and numerous other public officials,” (ref. 249) (page 60) but the attempt by the State Department to deny Begin’s visa “was overruled by Truman.” (ref.250) (page 61, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

“Begin later proudly admitted his terrorism in an interview for American television. When the interviewer asked him, ‘How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East?’ Begin proclaimed, ‘In the Middle East? In all the world!'” (ref.251) (page 61, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

At least 33 massacres of Palestinian villages occurred, half of them before a single Arab army joined the conflict. (ref.232) (page 58) The Zionist militias had more weapons (ref.233) (page 58) “and by the end of Israel’s ‘War of Independence’ over 750,000 Palestinian men, women and children were ruthlessly expelled.” (ref.234) (page 58, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

Zionists had been working within the United States under assumed names during the late 1930s through 1948 under a variety of “organizations, including the ‘Emergency Committee to Save European Jewry’ and ‘American Friends of a Jewish Palestine.‘” (ref.252) (page 62, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014) The groups had support from many people.

“Baumel reports that an American Jewish leader who had immigrated to Palestine wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt asking her to withdraw support from the Brando production, [”We Will Never Die!’ celebrating the Jewish contribution to Western civilization”] because its profits ‘were being used to fund terrorist activity.'” (ref.261) Eleanor ignored this advice apparently unaware that it was well founded.” (page 64, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

Another supporter did withdraw support after finding out that the fund-raising organizations were all connected to the same group and who were connected to terrorism:

“One supporter, best-selling author Pierre van Paassen, resigned when he learned that various Delegation-spawned ‘committees’ to save Jews were all tied to horrific terrorist actions in Palestine.”

“He declared that he did not believe they had the means or intention to truly save Jews from the Nazis, writing: ‘To speak bluntly, that “Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe” is a hoax, in my judgement a very cruel hoax perpetrated on the American public, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.'” (ref.264) (page 65, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

“…critics point out that it [the group] did not manageto rescue any Jews during the Nazi holocaust,” (ref.265, “though it may have helped contribute to the pressure on President Roosevelt to later create a War Refugee Board.” (ref.266) (page 65, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

“The group had numerous opponents among Jewish leaders, both Zionist and anti-Zionist. (ref.267) Some, unlike the general public, were aware of the secret connections to Menachem Begin’s Irgun, whose violent tactics many found abhorrent, particularly when they targeted the British at a time that England was fighting to defeat Hitler — the most effective way, many felt, to rescue Jews.” (page 65, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

The main leader of the many ‘committees’ operating in the U.S. to raise funds was working under the name “Peter Bergson” but was really named “Hillel Kook.” (page 62) His “uncle was Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, often known as ‘Rabbi Kook the Elder.””…and eventually became the ‘Chief Rabbi of Palestine.‘” (page 66) He is the founder of “an ideology that merged a Kabbalistic version of religious Judaism with political Zionism, founding an extremist religious Zionism that continues in existence today.” (ref.273) (page 67)

“The Kabala teaches that non-Jews are the embodiment of Satan and that the world was created solely for the sake of Jews. (ref.274) Rabbi Kook, who achieved saintly status among his followers in Israel and the U.S., stated: ‘The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews. . . is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.'” (ref.275)

American money raised by just one of the organizations, between 1939 and May 1948, would be the equivalent of $3.5 billion in today’s dollars. (ref.309) (page 73, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014) The money was used in part to buy guns for the immigrants already settled in Palestine “for use in taking over the land for a Jewish State.” (ref.306) (page 72, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

After WWII was over the Zionist movement ran into the same trouble again — refugees didn’t want to move to a desert — they were forced to anyway. Even Jewish orphans were forced to leave families that had been hiding them safely throughout WWII and who frequently had come to love the children and would have happily adopted them. The children were then placed in temporary orphanages in Belgium and were forced to speak only Hebrew. They also weren’t allowed to leave the facilities to seek out whether any of their relatives had survived in order to prevent them from possibly staying in Europe instead of going to Palestine. (page 75-76, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014) “Displaced persons” some of whom may already have had visas approved for immigration to other countries were forced to go to Palestine instead drafted into military service. (page 78-79) Where they weren’t treated with equally as the Zionists:

“Israeli author Tom Segev reports that most of the immigrants from Germany were refugees who came ‘against their will… They were not Zionists.’ In Israel they were ‘objects of condescension and contempt.'” (ref.326)

“The American public, however, was led to believe that European Jews desperately wished to go to Palestine, and the well organized, well funded, and frequently ruthless operation behind the emigration was hidden from view. (page 79-80, (page 75, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

Palestinian Arabs weren’t the only population to suffer massacre and forced eviction by the Israeli forces when the nation was voted into existence.

“Journalist and academic Anders Strindberg reports: ‘In the process of “Judaizing” Palestine, numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians. In one of the most spectacular attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds — launched by Zionist forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount Zion. The bombardment also damaged St. Jacob’s Convent, the Archangel’s Convent, and their appended churches, their two elementary and seminary schools, as well as their libraries, killing eight people and wounding 120.'” (ref.335) (page 83, (page 75, Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, 2014)

One financial control is held over a nation’s politicians and its media than history is reported according to the goals of the financiers. Propaganda does not actually mean history didn’t happen but if enough people are led to believe a one-sided story then it is almost as if history didn’t happen.

I will be celebrating Nakba Day this year on May fifteenth [for more info: Nakba Day (The Catastrophe) fifteenth of May, 1948] and as many years as I survive — in honour of the many Arabs, Christians, Jews and British people who lost their lives to Zionist terrorism. And I may visit a cemetery on May seventeenth in memory of the eight people who lost their lives during the shelling of the Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate, on May 17, 1948.

Our nation was founded on a strong belief in the separation of church and state but our priorities were manipulated by financial incentives and threats. It is time to end WWII and let Palestine be free again. Our nation’s War on Terror is actually a war on common sense and a war on decency and a war on the future of the planet. It is past time to stop terrorizing the world and to stop funding apartheid.

And, a second copy of this statement:

This summary was not written with consultation or permission of the author of the book Against Our Better Judgement , please see the website IfAmericaKnew.org for a link to the book and for more information about conditions in modern day Palestine  — any errors contained in this summary are my own and the opinions expressed are my own.

An addition, 6/30/2017, history books may also have failed to discuss the possible role U.S. discriminatory laws played as models for policy developed by Hitler and the Nazi Party. Racist laws were in place in many states in the U.S. during the 1920’s-30’s. A book review regarding the topic: truth-out.org/opinion/item/41107-racist-us-laws-provided-inspiration-to-the-nazis-an-interview-with-james-q-whitman

/Disclosure: Opinions are my own and this information is provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of fair use. While I am a Registered Dietitian this information is not intended to provide individual health guidance. Please see a health professional for individual health care purposes./

An additional history of Zionism that includes similar information found in more detail in the book by Alison Weir, along with more detail about the Russian socialist fight against anti-Semetism and pogroms in Eastern Europe and then against Nazi Germany. http://www.isreview.org/issues/24/hidden_history.shtml

Some excerpts, see embedded Tweet and scroll up to the beginning, https://twitter.com/deNutrients/status/1151844177099022339

Nakba Day (The Catastrophe), fifteenth of May, 1948

On Nakba Day (The Catastrophe), the fifteenth of May, 1948, there were 700,000 Palestinians expelled from Palestine. I’ve always wondered why did Palestine lose WWII? Why didn’t Germany get divided up into a concentration camp of Germans and a free Jewish population that was then allowed to restrict the other Germans travel and commerce — for decades — why didn’t that happen? And why is it still okay for Palestinians to be penned up and have their lives restricted or ended? Because Hitler fooled the German population therefore the Palestinian population should be treated like prisoners for decades? It’s not logical or fair or just or humane, in my opinion.

The following video mentions that on the fourteenth of May, 1948, paperwork was signed that declared Palestinians no longer owned their homeland.

And a discussion of the “Right of Return” concept is included in the following video with Miko Peled, the son of an Israeli general, who has written about the plight of the Palestinian people in the book “The General’s Son- Journey of An Israeli In Palestine.”  If Israeli’s have a right to return to an ancient homeland then why don’t Palestinians have a right to return to their more recently owned homes and land?

The estimates on the number of people who were killed during the Nazi Holocaust vary some but include:

  • 130,000 – 1,500,000 Roma (Gypsies)
  • 200,000 – 250,000 Handicapped People
  • 5000-15,000 Homosexual Men may have spent time in concentration camps, but death statistics are not available.
  • 1000-2000 Roman Catholic clergy, approximately 1000 Jehovah Witnesses and an unknown number of Freemasons died in Nazi prisons and concentration camps. Black people suffered atrocities that “ranged from isolation to persecution, sterilization, medical experimentation, incarceration, brutality, and murder.”[229] During the Nazi era Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, and trade union leaders were victims of Nazi persecution.
  • Yad Vashem estimates over 500,000 [Serbs were] murdered, 250,000 expelled and 200,000 forcibly converted to Catholicism.[231
  • 3.1 million Prisoners of War, including 2.6-3 million Soviet prisoners of war
  • The Cambridge History of Russia puts overall civilian deaths in the Nazi-occupied USSR at 13.7 million persons including 2 million Jews.” (So why didn’t Russia get given a country too?)
  • All of these statistics and quotes are from Wikipedia, World War II Casualties: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Non-Jews_persecuted_and_killed_by_the_Nazis]

Why did Palestine lose WWII? Why didn’t we give away other countries to the other victims who suffered atrocities at the hands of Nazis? And would we be as supportive of Roma, or Handicapped, or black people, or clergy or Serbs treating a new host country the way Israel has been treating Palestine — for decades? The Nazis harmed other people from approximately 1933 to 1945, twelve years of atrocity. Israel has been limiting Palestinian’s freedom and their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness since 1948. This is 2016. This will be the 68th year that the world has allowed Israel to keep another nation penned up in what is basically a concentration camp. Hitler was bad, indeed, but is a 68 year concentration camp any better, any more noble, or more right and just, — just because it is Jewish people who are doing the penning? A 68 year concentration camp is wrong whoever is doing the penning and whoever is ignoring the penning, in my opinion at least. The U.S. gave Israel $3.1 billion in 2015 or $10.2 million per day – more than to any individual state or any other foreign nation. The aid is equivalent to one fifth of all aid given to foreign nations by the U.S. — it is a large world and yet each Israeli citizen receives  the equivalent of $500 per year in foreign aid from the U.S.. Why?

“as of the end of 1995, Israel—with a population less than that of Hong Kong—had received $62.5 billion in foreign aid, almost exactly the amount received by all of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa and of Latin America and the Caribbean combined.”

Perhaps equally astonishing is that Israel, which has received $14,692 per capita from the U.S. and $5,345 per capita from Germany for a combined total of $20,037 per capita, is not a poor country. In 1995 its per capita gross domestic product was $15,800. That put it below Britain at $19,500 and Italy at $18,700 and just above Ireland at $15,400 and Spain at $14,300.

All of these countries have contributed a very large share of immigrants to the U.S., yet none has ever tried to put together an ethnic bloc to lobby for U.S. foreign aid, which none of these countries has collected since the days of post-war reconstruction. Rather, all have proudly contributed funds and volunteers to economic development and emergency relief work in many less fortunate parts of the world.[https://www.stormfront.org/forum/t19469/]

An article about Nakba Day from Israel’s perspective, (tl:dr ~ there will be refugees in a War of Independence and therefore Nakba Day isn’t Israel’s fault because they were fighting for their independence and therefore all’s fair in love and war or something like that but with thinking like that then Hitler was justified in protecting the Aryan Nation from everybody else – Right? Wrong.): [http://www.virtualjerusalem.com/news.php?Itemid=3566]

An article about how celebrating Nakba Day has been prohibited by Israel and a description of the investigation of the deaths/murder of two Palestinian children that occurred on Nakba Day, 2014: [http://mondoweiss.net/2015/03/the-nakba-day-denial/]

Nazi Germany didn’t leave any other countries with a 50% birth defect rate. We have already made the sand glow in many areas of the Middle East.

Only North Korean’s have to believe North Korean propaganda and only U.S. citizens have to believe U.S. propaganda and only Israeli citizens have to believe Israeli propaganda — or we all have to pretend to believe it but the rest of the world can look on and snicker or cringe in horror.

The families of the volunteers and civilians who were killed by U.S. bombs “accidentally” falling on a hospital in Afghanistan every fifteen minutes for an hour are going to be reimbursed $6000 for each dead person or $3000 for each wounded person. We are so noble. [http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2016/feb/27/afghan-clinic-payments-assailed-2016022/?f=news]

Update, Great Britain and France are also really noble (and/or like oil rich regions):  ( — this is the propaganda version of events, see the book Against Our Better Judgement for a condensed version of what may be the truer history of Why did Palestine lose WWII? See this post for a link: Speaking out against Israel’s occupation of Palestine – may be dangerous to careers, )

In 1920/1921 state borders were drawn in the Middle East largely by Great Britain and France. Before then nomadic tribes wandered throughout the region without recognizing national or state borders and there had always been a mix of ethnic groups and religions throughout the region.

The new states were not peaceful:

From the beginning, these newly created states were engulfed by riots, revolts, and even civil war.”

Palestine was created as partially a Jewish and Arab state at that time:

“In the new state of Transjordan (which later became Jordan), the British installed the son of a Saudi ruler to preside over the Bedouin population; and in Palestine, it promised the Jews a homeland and their own fledgling state within a state under the Balfour Declaration while promising only civil and religious rights to the Palestinian Arabs who made up the overwhelming majority of inhabitants.”

Protecting oil interests in the region seemed to be involved:

“At San Remo in 1920, the British got the territory that in 1921 they divided into Palestine and Transjordan and all of what became Iraq. (France gave up northern Iraq in exchange for 25 percent of oil revenues.)

-quotes by John B. Judis, June 26, 2014, from the article: “The Middle East That France and Britain Drew is Finally Unravelling; and there’s very little the U.S. can do to stop it.” [https://newrepublic.com/article/118409/mideast-unravelling-and-theres-not-much-us-can-do]

/Disclosure: Opinions are my own and this information is provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of fair use. While I am a Registered Dietitian this information is not intended to provide individual health guidance. Please see a health professional for individual health care purposes./