“Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy.”
By Richard Edmondson
Reading the gospels in the light of current events becomes a more eye-opening experience for me with each passing day. Take the words of Jesus in Luke 12:1. “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy,” he remarks to his disciples.
Leaven, of course, means “yeast.” Yeast is used by bakers to make bread, but it is actually classified as a fungus. When added to dough, it converts fermentable sugars that are present into the gas carbon dioxide, causing the bread to rise. Jesus was saying the Pharisees were full of gas and hypocrisy. They were, in effect, a fungus, and they were something you literally had to be wary of. Webster’s dictionary defines the word “beware” as: “to be on one’s guard.”
In other words, Jesus was giving us a warning we would all do well to heed.
Jewish hypocrisy was something we weren’t particularly aware of when I was growing up in the 1960s, and gospel passages like that from Luke were more abstract and theoretical, rather than something we could relate to from our own experience. But that was before the Six Day War and the rise to power of a successive line of Israeli prime ministers–all professing publicly to want peace while at the same time building settlement after settlement on occupied Palestinian land. It was also before Zionist Jews began burdening us with the repetitious claim of being “the only democracy in the Middle East,” this while imposing a blockade and/or occupation upon roughly 4.5 million people.
Today is what Palestinians refer to as “Nakba Day.” The occasion is observed each year on May 15–one day after the anniversary of the formal declaration of the state of Israel. The word “nakba” means “catastrophe.” In 1948, some 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly driven from their homes and lands. In the process, approximately 400 Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated or destroyed. At the village of Deir Yassin, members of two Jewish terrorist groups systematically murdered more than a hundred men, women, and children. At one point people were lined up and shot execution-style, and in addition to bodies left lying in the streets, corpses, some of them dismembered, were dropped into a cistern.
“Israel is not what’s wrong in the Middle East, it is what’s right with the Middle East,” the Jewish state’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said a few years ago at a world economic forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The leaders of Israel, along with the nation’s lobby groups in various countries, are the modern-day Pharisees. That at any rate is what I would argue. They are full of gas and hypocrisy. The same would also apply to the owners/CEOs of major Western media conglomerates, the majority of whom are Jewish. Nothing but gas and hypocrisy there too. And if Jesus were here, I suspect he would agree with me in this.
The establishment of the state of Israel wasn’t just a catastrophe for Palestinians. It has been a catastrophe for the entire world. Endless war and bloodshed has been the result–along with regime changes that have led to even worse wars and more bloodshed. It isn’t only the people of the Middle East who have suffered in all this. Large numbers of Americans have died in these wars as well. The carnage and regime changes we have launched in the Middle East were advocated by Zionist neocons, many of whom have been Jewish.
“I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened”–so New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is reported to have said in an interview with an Israeli newspaper in 2003.
Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It’s the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It’s the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.
But as it turns out, Friendman himself did quite a bit of “selling”too.
So why were so many Zionist Jews (Pharisees) in favor of a war with Iraq? Is it because they all thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Was it really a “terrorism bubble” they were concerned about? Or could it possibly have had something to do with the fact that Saddam Hussein had begun making payments, in some cases as high as $25,000, to the families of Palestinian martyrs killed in the second intifada against Israel–an intifada which began in September of 2000, just one year before the attacks of 9/11?
“After 50 minutes of fiery speeches praising Saddam and Arafat and vilifying President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, 25 Palestinians are called to the stage one by one. Each is handed a check — a gift from Saddam Hussein,” ABC News reported at the time in a story datelined Gaza City.
The story goes on:
Each recipient is the mother, father, wife or other close relative of either a suicide bomber or someone killed in a clash with Israeli soldiers or security guards at settlements in the Gaza Strip or West Bank.
Today’s donation: a total of $285,000 — a princely sum in the economically distressed Gaza Strip.
One of the recipients is Nada Mahdi, a 22-year-old student, who arrived for the ceremony carrying her 3-month-old son, Ismail. Her husband, Mohammad, blew himself up last month trying to attack an Israeli military post in the Gaza Strip. There were no other injuries in the incident.
“I am proud of him,” she says in Arabic after collecting her $25,000 check. “May God reward him.”
So is it possible Saddam’s payments to Palestinian families may have had something to do with why the neocons were so staunchly in favor of a US invasion of Iraq? Could that maybe have played at least a teeny weensy part in their thinking? Hard to say for sure, but after 9/11 came they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it.
After Jesus’ warning about the leaven of the Pharisees in Luke 12:1, he goes on, in verses two and three, to offer the following:
Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.
What Jesus is saying essentially is that if you’re a hypocrite, your hypocrisy is going to be exposed. And indeed that is often the case. Above I commented that the establishment of the state of Israel has been a catastrophe not just for the Palestinians, but for the entire world. I include Jews in that as well. Yes…Israel has been a catastrophe for Jews. It’s policies have done more to expose Jewish hypocrisy than anything else ever could have. Because of Israel and the power of its lobbies in Western countries, more people have awakened to the full extent of the power that Jews hold–in media, banking, government, academia and other areas–than ever would have occurred otherwise. And that power is now being demonstrated on an ongoing, almost daily basis through such means as the introduction of bills, at the state and federal levels, seeking to criminalize the BDS movement.
And just like rising dough, Zionist hypocrisy continues to expand to new heights. I have written previously about North American and European Jews who passionately support the state of Israel while at the same time championing multiculturalism, diversity and open borders in their countries of residence. This carries on unabated. Meanwhile, mainstream media pundits are busily promoting support for “moderate rebels” in Syria, while the US and Russia are closer to the brink of war than at any time ever in history. The US is now, at least according to some analysts, even planning a nuclear first strike. Jewish-controlled media outlets continuously pump out stories (without presenting any evidence) of Russian interference in the US election while saying little to nothing about US interference in elections in other countries. We have overthrown governments, most recently in Ukraine in 2014 and Libya in 2011, while active regime change efforts are currently underway in Syria and Venezuela, but mention of this is largely omitted in media reports. Hypocrisy abounds in every facet of public life. The United States, at the close of World War II one of the most respected and admired nations on earth, now has a reputation for being the most hypocritical.
With the world facing a nuclear cataclysm, Nakba Day may be about to take on a whole new meaning. Paying heed to Jesus’ warning could be a matter of life and death. So beware the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. And if you’re a modern-day Pharisee, remember nothing covered up will not be revealed. We are at a point where heeding these two respective warnings may be vital to life on the planet.