While the world slithers into the black hole of economic collapse, those that head the institutions that sit astride its nations and peoples met in Davos, Switzerland last week for the World Economic Forum. Attendance was, as always, by invitation only and that included the press so we can be sure that whatever came out of Davos 'on-the-record' was intended to. In case you doubt the ability of conference organizers to manage the information flow consider two things; there are numerous "off-the-record" briefings throughout the conference the details of which we never hear, and all those attending, including journalists, want to be invited back for they are members of the Inner Circle and rely on their membership for their place in life.

We were not invited which is somewhat galling given that in October 2005 (The Economic Collapse: An Insider's View) and then again in August 2006 (Signs of the Economic Apocalypse - Update) sott.net (or signs-of-the-times.org as it was then) was hosting podcasts in which the forthcoming collapse of the free market capitalist system was discussed in detail as well as our consistent warnings over the last five years. It is even more galling to find that Nouriel Roubini is being treated as some sort of god for saying exactly the same thing as sott.net after we said it. The upside of not being invited is that you, dear reader, can rest assured of our continued independence of both mind and spirit.

For it is the day of the Lord's vengeance and the year of recompences for the controversy of Zion. - Isaiah 34:8.

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to be silent. Edmund Burke, 1789

In his own time Douglas Lancelot Reed (1895 - 1976) was widely-read. Nowadays he is either pretty much forgotten, or the mere mention of his name evokes outrage among those Establishment experts who have heard of him. The reason for this outrage isn't hard to find: he drew attention to what he saw as a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, and wrote about its history at length in his book The Controversy of Zion. This was completed in 1956 - but not submitted for publication until 1978, two years after his death.

In the obituary for him which appeared in The Times, Douglas Reed was described as a "virulent anti-Semite". A careful reading of The Controversy of Zion, however, shows this to be questionable - even though Reed himself may on occasion have described himself as a writer of anti-Semitic material. In saying that, Reed seems rather to have been referring to his ardent anti-Pharisaism, anti-Talmudism and anti-Zionism. He doesn't however seem to have been an anti-Semite, in the sense of being a hater of Jews, as there are many, many instances where he shows considerable sympathy for ordinary rank-and-file Jews.

Nevertheless, Reed's anti-Zionism, expressed in such implacable terms, makes a first reading of The Controversy of Zion uncomfortable, if not repellent, in that any liberal sensitivities one might have are constantly challenged. Those sensitivities, ingrained by reflections on the Nazi Holocaust, and reinforced by Israeli state propaganda, would equate an attack on any aspect of Jewish cultural or political thinking as anti-Semitic.

In The Controversy of Zion Reed constantly counters such Western bias, and shows it for what it is - unthinking and unreflective. The question he asks is: Is Zionism actually helpful for Jewish people? In other words, is Zionism pro-Jewish or anti-Jewish? Or, to rephrase it further, is Zionism pro-Semitic or actually anti-Semitic? Reed's book constantly challenges commonly held assumptions about justice with regard to Jewish and Israeli matters. So the question is really about fundamental honesty. How true is the book? What credence do we give to the historical research which forms its foundation? And how humane is the thought which lies behind it?

Cute, cuddly, harmless-looking, liberal Barack Obama. Now there's a guy to get the U.S. back on track! If he can just 'win' the primary (s)election process, and then the (s)election process after that, what's it called...oh yeah, the (p)residential (s)elections, he'll bring an end to the mindless massacring of innocent civilians for profit that has come to define the "war on terror", and the American people need never again be stirred out of their mind-numbing complacency by stories of small brown children being decapitated by a brave American teenager with a .50 caliber machine gun. I mean, Viet-nam and My Lai was containable, it was successfully pitched as an "American tragedy", but this Iraq business is getting out of hand! After all, the harsh realities of war 'over there' are meant to stay 'over there', not ooze out of the carefully manipulated American daily broadsheets and into the fragile mind of the average American.

So Obama's the man to fix it all, right? He'll stop the Republican rot! Or am I missing something?

The Israeli government repeatedly denies that its treatment of the Palestinians is anything like the treatment suffered by Jews under the Nazi regime. But the Nazis too denied that they were engaging in genocide and war crimes.

Rather than attempting to argue in writing the point that the stewards of the state of Israel appear to be the ideological descendants of the Nazis, the following photo essay of juxtaposed images of Palestinian life today in the occupied territories and Jewish life 68 years ago in Germany and Poland say much more than words ever could:

Organized by the Revolution Books in Manhattan, an unprecedented Emergency Town Hall Meeting took place last night at the New York City Society for Ethical Culture on 2 West 64th Street. The focus of the evening was the intolerable humanitarian catastrophe that is being inflicted on the Palestinian People by the Israeli military in Gaza.

SOTT.net editors attended the event, this is their report: