Israel Shamir

From “Et Unum Sint”: A Report from Planet Mammon by E. Michael Jones, on CultureWars.com :

Shamir was born in Novosibirsk in the Soviet Union in 1947. In 1968 he converted to Zionism and emigrated to Israel, where he joined the IDF and fought in the 1973 war. Stationed in Sinai during a fierce battle whose point he failed to understand, Shamir used that war as a symbol of what it meant to be a Jew. Being a Jew provided no help in understanding what Jews want from themselves and from bewildered mankind, “just as belonging to the elite troops does not help you with an understanding of the general staff” (Cabbala of Power, p. 12). When it comes to understanding the principle of unity among Jews, we are confronted with the opposite problem from the one we encountered with Catholics. Catholics have the prinicple of unity in Christ but no practical unity. Jews, on the other hand, have no principle of unity but, as Shamir says, like the locusts mentioned in the book of Proverbs, they “‘have no king, but they attack in formation’ and devastate whole countries as if by plan.”

In 1975, after studying law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Shamir moved to London where he worked for the BBC. From 1977 to 1979 he worked in radio in Japan. By this point, some ten years after he had left Russia, Shamir had become disillusioned with Zionism because of the way the Israeli government discriminated against non-Jews. From 1989 to 1993 Shamir returned to Russia where he worked as the Moscow correspondent for Ha’aretz. In 1993 he returned to Israel and settled in Jaffa, where he lives today.

At some point during the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, Shamir became a presence on the Internet and at around the same time he became a Christian. The connection between the two events was more than coincidence because, as Shamir himself put it, getting baptized by the Palestian priest, Archbishop Theodosius Attalla Hanna “helped me sort out the question of identity.”

If there were ever a sign of contradiction for the age of irenic interreligious dialogue inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council, it is Israel Shamir. Shamir’s conversion to Christianity was a sign that the repressed had returned just in time to save the Church from total apostasy on the Jewish question. Shamir, the Jewish convert, saw Jews not as our “elder brothers” but as St. Paul saw them, which is to say, as “the enemy of mankind.” In accepting baptism, Shamir joined a long line of “Jews by birth who denounced the Judaic cult of Death and accepted the Living Christ.” For Shamir, the crucial “sieve” which separated good from evil in the great struggle of his day was the “relationship to the Palestinian suffering”; “whoever disregarded it followed Antichrist; whoever denounced it began his way to Christ.”

Like St. Paul, Shamir has become a ... more >>

Shamir's book, Masters of Discourse and his website.