Temple Mount Fanatics Foment
a New Thirty Years' War

by an EIR Investigative Team

This special report was prepared by Salvatore Montagna, Jeffrey Steinberg, Michele Steinberg, Scott Thompson, and Anton Chaitkin. This article represents only a brief summary of the voluminous material gathered by the task force since the Nov. 4, 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. A comprehensive Special Report, featuring the transcripts of many of the key interviews, and scores of heretofore secret documents, is now in preparation.

On Oct. 16, Israeli police turned back members of the Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement, as they attempted to enter the Dome of the Rock to anoint the cornerstone of a Third Temple. It was an extraordinary provocation, given that, for the previous 17 days, the Israeli military and police had been waging a round-the-clock shooting war against Palestinian protesters, armed mostly with stones. Dozens of Arab demonstrators had already been killed, and Jerusalem was about to explode in religious warfare.

An earlier press release by the Temple Mount Faithful had claimed that "the event has the approval of the Israeli authorities and will be protected by the Israel security forces."

The press release, written by Faithful leader Gershon Salomon, proclaimed, in blood-curdling language, "Now it is the time to rebuild the House of G-d on the holy Temple Mount, the location of the First and Second temples. G-d is ready for this and He expects Israel to re-liberate the Temple Mount from the pagan Arab worshippers and to rebuild His house to again be the heart, soul, and focus of Israel and all the nations. . . . Come and see for yourself what G-d is doing with Israel at this great time and be a part of this major end-time event."

Had the Israeli authorities allowed these Temple Mount fanatics to carry out their provocation--the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are among the holiest sites in Islam and have been the targets of scores of terrorist attacks by Jewish "Temple Mount" terrorists--a holy war of incalculable consequences would have erupted.

Just three weeks earlier, Israeli authorities had permitted Ariel Sharon, the head of the Likud bloc, the notorious "Butcher of Sabra and Shatilla" Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and a leading player in the Temple Mount apparatus, to enter the site, accompanied by thousands of Israeli security personnel. Sharon's Sept. 28 appearance triggered the Arab protests, which were followed by deadly-force Israeli retaliation. In a matter of days, the entire Mideast peace process was in shambles, and war just a moment away. Such is the horrific power of religious warfare in the Middle East--in the hands of lunatic zealots.

On the day when Sharon staged his well-financed provocation at the Temple Mount, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in New York City had reported that they were hours away from concluding an agreement, that would have restored the momentum to the peace process. The peace process had come to a screeching halt the instant that President Bill Clinton, under the influence of Vice President Al Gore and some treacherous advisers on the President's Mideast team, had convinced the President to raise the issue of the Temple Mount and Jerusalem at the Camp David summit last July. Lyndon LaRouche described the insertion of the Temple Mount issue into the peace talks as "President Clinton's greatest blunder."

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York City at the beginning of September, President Clinton had met, separately, with Arafat and Barak, and extracted a commitment to attempt, once again, to reach a final agreement. Sources indicate that, this time around, the issues of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount were to be deferred, in favor of a more limited, but acceptable agreement.

It was at that moment that Sharon played the "Temple Mount card," and, literally, all holy hell broke loose.

The Invisible Chain of Command

It is no secret that Sharon is the most visible and prominent "godfather" of the Temple Mount fanatics inside Israel. The Ateret Cohanim yeshiva, located in the Old City of Jerusalem, is one of the hubs of Jewish underground guerrilla warfare activity, directed against the Islamic holy sites on the Temple Mount. Sharon has been a fixture at New York fundraisers of the Friends of Ateret Cohanim, as has his ostensible rival within the Likud, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sharon has reportedly been the conduit of millions of dollars to the Gush Emunim movement of Rabbi Moshe Levinger and the late Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook, which serves as a religious fundamentalist death squad, out of the Kiryat Arba settlement near Hebron, on the West Bank, and out of at least 130 other settlements dotted throughout the Israeli occupied territories, which Gush Emunim cadre have founded since the late 1960s.

(In February 1994, shortly after the signing of the Oslo I Accords at the White House, a Kiryat Arba fanatic in the Israeli Defense Forces reserves, Baruch Goldstein, massacred scores of Islamic worshippers as they prayed at the Cave of the Patriarchs mosque in Hebron. Goldstein is heralded as a hero and a martyr by the Gush Emunim.)

Through months of investigation, more than 30 interviews, and a review of thousands of pages of primary source documents, some never previously made public, EIR has established that the entire Temple Mount provocation is being run, top-down, by the most lunatic elements within the highest levels of British Freemasonry--with the blessing and involvement of members of the House of Windsor.

This Masonic control is exerted through the Quatuor Coronati "research" lodge of the Grand Mother Lodge of British Freemasonry, headed by the Queen's first cousin, the Duke of Kent, and run on a day-to-day basis by the Seventh Marquess of Northampton (Spencer "Spenny" Douglas David Compton), a maternal descendant of the Baring family, of British East India Company notoriety.

Lord Northampton, who has been atop the Temple Mount conducting "Temple studies," candidly has admitted in interviews, that he is an adherent of British Israelism, which holds that the British oligarchy has mystical powers, because England was colonized by one of the lost tribes of Israel. "I think the tradition of the Kabbalah is very strong in England, because I think one of the lost tribes came to England. And I think you can spot them, quite clearly, in old English families. I am sure you can. I know they came to Ireland, then to the north of Wales, and then down into England. And then that became some of the oldest families we have."

He ranted on that America, too, had been colonized by another of the lost Tribes. "That was all predicted, that one would go to Hyperborea, the land of the north, and one would go across the sea. And so I think that America and England got the Two Lost Tribes, and that is why they then, in a very intellectual Jewish way, started to run the world!"

Lord Northampton is, by his own admission, a practitioner of the Satanic rituals of Aleister Crowley. Indeed, as he explained to an interviewer, Lord Northampton installed one of the world's leading "scholars" of the Golden Dawn cult, R.A. Gilbert, as the editor-in-chief of Ars Quatuor Coronarum, the theoretical journal of the lodge. Crowley had written an account of his "spiritual progress" in magic and Satanism under the title The Temple of Solomon the King.

The Jerusalem Lodge

In December 1995, the "Jerusalem" freemasonic lodge was established, adjacent to the Temple Mount, in the Grotto of King Solomon, to work for the rebuilding of Solomon's Temple. The lodge worked side by side with the on-the-ground networks of Jewish and Christian fundamentalist fanatics, to foment a bloody religious war over the control of the Temple Mount. That such a lodge would be founded shortly after the Israel-Palestine peace breakthroughs at Oslo--and just weeks after the assassination of Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, an architect of that peace--is surely no coincidence.

The Jerusalem Lodge was founded by the Grand Master of Italian Regular Freemasonry, Giuliano di Bernardo, the right-hand man of Lord Northampton on the Temple Mount project. At the ceremony launching the Jerusalem Lodge, Di Bernardo declared, "The rebuilding of the Temple is at the center of our studies." In June 1996, Di Bernardo published an Italian edition of his book, Rebuilding the Temple, which was to be published in English by the Quatuor Coronati Lodge.

In interviews, Di Bernardo candidly admitted that he has constructed an entire irrationalist "utopian" belief system, centered on the revival of Jewish Cabbalism and the rebuilding of the Temple. "A new utopia may be based on the Cabbala. I see a utopia based on Jewish mysticism, but Jewish mysticism as a place . . . a material place, Solomon's Temple. . . . This is my intention. This is my will!"

Di Bernardo also let slip that Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith director Abe Foxman is a collaborator in the Temple Mount project. Di Bernardo revealed that, while Foxman lacks intellectual capital, Lord Northampton and he had met Foxman in Switzerland, just prior to the launching of the Jerusalem Lodge, to discuss their project, and have met with him on several other occasions. "There are strong relations between B'nai B'rith and Freemasonry," Di Bernardo explained.

The role of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge in the Temple Mount plot significantly predates the launching of the Jerusalem Lodge. Dr. Asher Kaufman, a corresponding member of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, did some of the first post-war archaeological "studies" of the Temple Mount, laying the foundations for the upsurge of Jewish fundamentalist assaults on the site. He was personally dispatched to Jerusalem by the lodge's Dr. T.E. Allibone, a senior figure in the British Royal Society, and one of Britain's preeminent nuclear physicists, who served for 30 years as the "Lord of the Manor" of Britain's most top-secret nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston.

Another key figure, whose work has dovetailed with the Quatuor Coronati activities on Temple Mount, is the Dutch-born architect Leen Ritmeyer, who received his doctorate from Manchester University in England on the design of Solomon's Temple. Ritmeyer's work in Israel, in which he claims to have discovered the resting place of the lost Ark of the Covenant inside the Dome of the Rock, has been almost wholly financed by Lord Jacob Rothschild, the son of the late Lord Victor Rothschild, and the head of Rothschild Investment Trust. The Rothschilds are at the very center of the British oligarchy's "Club of the Isles" (see "The True Story Behind the Fall of the House of Windsor," EIR Special Report, September 1997, for an in-depth profile of the Club of the Isles), the inner elite of policymakers, senior intelligence officials, City of London financiers, and raw materials barons, who are centered around the Royal Consort, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.

Another Dimension of the Assault

With the deployment of Dr. Asher Kaufman to Jerusalem in 1967, just weeks after the conclusion of the Six Day War in June, another dimension was added to the Temple Mount assault. An extensive network of American-based Christian fundamentalists, largely associated with the Darbyite movement and its Dallas Theological Seminary, soon were linked up to the Temple Mount operations under way inside the Old City of Jerusalem, which was now in the hands of Israeli authorities for the first time in 1,900 years.

Through Temple Mount Faithful founder Stanley Goldfoot, a member of the Stern Gang terrorist underground, Dr. Lambert Dolphin, a physicist at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, was brought to Jerusalem in the early 1980s. Dolphin had already been in correspondence with Kaufman, but it was Goldfoot who put the Quatuor Coronati field operative, Kaufman, together with the Darbyite fundamentalist, Dolphin. During World War II, Goldfoot had worked for Lord Martin Charteris, then-British intelligence station chief for the Middle East, and later, private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II.

Soon, massive amounts of money from American-based Darbyite Christian fundamentalists began pouring into the Jerusalem operations, aimed, ultimately, at blowing up the Muslim holy sites at the Temple Mount, and building the Third Temple. The American Jerusalem Temple Foundation was one early source of financing for this insane effort. According to Dolphin's exhaustive writings, now posted on his website, another big source of largesse has been Chuck Missler, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and CEO of a string of U.S. defense companies, who runs a Darbyite publishing firm, Koinonia House, which propagandizes for the destruction of the Islamic sites and the building of the Third Temple.

Dolphin set all of this down in a written account of his 1994 visit to Israel, accompanied by Missler and 70 "pilgrims." "My specific responsibility on this tour," he wrote, "was to organize and host the Third Annual Temple Conference in Jerusalem where Jewish scientists and religious leaders presented ten papers concerned with the location of the First and Second Temples and plans and projections concerning the coming of the Jewish Messiah."

Dolphin revealed his own views on the current state of affairs inside Israel: "Now, strangely, the Jews have become their own worst enemies. The present government is openly, blatantly anti-Biblical and has set about dismantling the state of Israel piece by piece, giving it all back to Israel's own sworn enemies in exchange for peace promises everyone knows are empty and meaningless. Even more amazing is that the public is well informed about all these issues and chooses to do nothing."

Dolphin was referring to the Oslo Accords, recently signed by Prime Minster Rabin, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, and President Clinton.

Dolphin made no bones about the fact that a great deal of blood would have to be shed for the Temple project to be completed. "Some things are clear," he wrote. "Sinful man can not approach a holy God without a suitable sacrifice. The shedding of blood is somehow necessary to make atonement for human evil. Even forgiven sinners need washing and regular cleansing in order to enjoy fellowship with their Creator. . . . God in His love wishes to teach us the depths of his love and forgiveness and mercy through the symbolism of the temple."

Dolphin ended with an ominous warning: "The time is fast approaching when the Temple Mount will (by one means or another) be accessible both for full-scale geophysical exploration, and for digging and exploring."

It is no small irony that the Darbyism preached by Dolphin, Missler, and the other central figures in the American Jerusalem Temple Foundation, is deeply anti-Semitic. At the core of the Gnostic "dispensational premillennarianism," advocated by Nineteenth-Century Anglican clergyman John Nelson Darby, is the belief that the extermination of the Jews, in a final battle of Armageddon, brought on by the rebuilding of Solomon's Temple, is the Biblical precondition for the second coming of the Messiah and the Rapture. Pastor Chuck Smith, Dolphin's mentor at the Calvary Baptist Church, when asked by EIR whether he had any compunctions about unleashing a holy war that would lead to the possible extermination of millions of Jews and Muslims, replied, "Frankly, no, because it is all part of Biblical prophesy."

Smith was also full of praise for the Jewish zealots of the Temple Mount Faithful, and their founder, Goldfoot: "Do you want a real radical?" he asked. "Try Stanley Goldfoot. He's a wonder. His plan for the Temple Mount is to take sticks of dynamite and some M-16s and blow the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosques and just lay claim to the site."

Rabbi Kook and `Vladimir Hitler'

Shortly before Prime Minister Rabin was murdered by a Jewish underground assassin, Yigal Amir, who was associated with the radical West Bank settlers and the Temple Mount crazies, Rabin had described the Jewish fundamentalist fanatics as an "errant seed," that had nothing to do with Judaism. The Judaism to which Rabin was referring, was the Mosaic tradition, carried into the founding of the state of Israel by such followers of Moses Mendelssohn as David Ben-Gurion, Abba Eban, and Rabin's "peace partner," Shimon Peres.

But, under the sponsorship of the British Crown, the Club of the Isles, and the British masonic structures, the "errant seed" had been injected into the religious and political life of the Jewish community in Palestine long before the launching of the current Temple Mount project. And not surprisingly, that irrationalist theological current closely paralleled the Jewish fascism of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of the so-called Revisionist movement, that spawned the Likud bloc and the Gush Emunim of today's "fundamentalized" Israel, and the man whom Ben-Gurion, the founding father of the state of Israel, referred to as "Vladimir Hitler."

British imperial occult designs on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount first surfaced prominently in 1865, with the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund, under British royal sponsorship, and the first archaeological expeditions to the Holy Land. Prince Edward Albert, the son of Queen Victoria who would succeed her as King Edward VII, had visited Jerusalem in 1862, and put his imprimatur on the launching of the Palestine Exploration Fund immediately thereafter. Prince Edward Albert, known as the "Prince of the Isles," was a dominant figure in Britain's imperial designs of the late Nineteenth Century, and Jerusalem and the Holy Land was one of his personal priorities.

The first excavation of the holy sites in Jerusalem, centered on the Temple Mount, was carried out by the Palestine Exploration Fund, under the direction of Gen. Sir Charles Warren, during 1867-70. This expedition launched the British Freemasonic "Temple Mount project." In 1884, Warren was one of only nine Freemasons who founded the Quatuor Coronati Lodge, and he became its first head.

Within occult Judaism, the pivotal religious figure in this British-sponsored saga was Rav Abraham Isaac Kook. According to Kook's autobiography, in pre-World War I London, he was an intimate collaborator of Jabotinsky, recruiting and raising funds for Jabotinsky's Jewish Legion, which fought the Ottoman Turks on behalf of the British Empire.

After the British Mandate was established over Palestine, Rabbi Kook was appointed by London to serve as Palestine's Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi, a post he held until his death in 1935. Rabbi Kook revived Jewish mysticism, the teaching of the Cabbala, and the prophesies relating to the Third Temple.

Even more relevant to the present onrush of a religious war over the Temple Mount, Rabbi Kook the Elder founded Merkaz HaRav (the "Rabbi's Center") in Jerusalem, as a training academy for young religious zealots. When he died, his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, inherited the entire apparatus, including the infrastructure of training academies, which had spawned out of the original Merkaz HaRav yeshiva.

A famous story about Rabbi Kook the Younger is told by his students. On Israeli Independence Day in 1967--three weeks before the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli war--Rabbi Kook was delivering a sermon, in which he recounted, "Nineteen years ago, on the very night that the decision of the United Nations to create the State of Israel was handed down, as the entire people rejoiced . . . I was unable to join in their happiness. I sat alone--quiet and depressed. In those very first hours I was not able to accept what had been done, that terrible news, that indeed `my land they have divided' had occurred! Yes, where is our Hebron--have we forgotten it? And where is our Schechem [Nablus], and our Jericho, where--will we forget them? And all of Transjordan--it is all ours, every single clod of earth, each little bit, every part of the land is part of the land of God--is it in our power to surrender even one millimeter of it?" He then told his students that "the Army of Israel will liberate the land of Israel."

Three weeks later, the Israeli Army took control of East Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, in the June 6-11, Six Day War. Rabbi Kook's followers claimed that he had performed a miracle. In fact, there is no doubt that Rabbi Kook was one of a handful of figures who was aware of the secret plans for the war.

Among the Israeli paratroopers who seized control of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, were students from Merkaz HaRav, who arranged for an armored car to fetch Rabbi Kook, to preside over the hoisting of the Israeli flag on the Western Wall and the blowing of the shofar, the ceremonial ram's horn.

Two weeks later, in London, the greatest gathering of Freemasons in memory took place, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United Grand Lodge of England, and to inaugurate His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent as the new Grand Master of Masonry. It was out of that gathering, according to T.E. Allibone, that the decision was made to dispatch Kaufman to Jerusalem, launching the Quatuor Coronati drive to locate the precise spot where the Third Temple would be built. Almost on the same date, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook launched the Temple Mount Faithful, with the Stern Gang terrorist Goldfoot. Kook also established the Gush Emunim (although Gush Emunim would not be formally constituted as an organization until 1974).

The Jewish Underground, Unravelled

Rabbi David Samson, a student of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is one of the leading biographers and promoters of the Cabbalistic teachings of Rabbi Kook the Elder. He confirmed to an interviewer that the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva networks founded by the Kooks is at the heart of the Gush Emunim settlers movement and the Temple Mount Faithful. "The entire settlements of Judea and Samaria, and the Golan, is all Merkaz HaRav," he said. "Rabbi Kook decided that `I am going to establish a settlement movement.' Gush Emunim is Merkaz HaRav. And the leaders of Gush Emunim are all the students of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, and whenever they would make a major policy decision, it would be in his dining room, sitting at his table." He later added, "Definitely, Rabbi Kook's students are again at the forefront."

Rabbi Samson also confirmed that Sharon had developed a deep personal collaboration with Rabbi Kook, specifically around the launching of the illegal settlements in the West Bank and other parts of the territories occupied after the Six Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. "Immediately after the Yom Kippur War," Samson said, "Sharon went, together with Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, to the first illegal settlement, that was meant as a demonstration against the Army." He added, "His [Sharon's] connection with Merkaz HeRav was with Gush Emunim. . . . He was in the opposition together with Merkaz HaRav ideology."

Rabbi Samson also confirmed that the Merkaz HaRav networks have heavily penetrated the Israeli Defense Forces, through the hesder yeshivas, which are, in effect, military training institutes that also teach the Kooks' Cabbalistic fundamentalism. Students at the 22 hesder yeshivas, mostly in the occupied territories, spend their five years of study serving part-time in the Army, and spending the rest of their time in Cabbalistic studies. This apparatus has transformed the IDF into an evolving instrumentality for the Cabbalistic-fundamentalist holy war.

With Rabbi Kook the Younger's death in 1982, the leadership of Gush Emunim and the Temple Mount Faithful has been picked up by a group of even more violent and radical protégés, including Rabbi Moshe Levinger and Rabbi Eleazer Waldman. Waldman has asserted that Kook demanded a holy war, as the only means of achieving the coming of the Messiah. "On the one hand," Waldman wrote, "war is accompanied by destruction and death, on the other hand, it increases the power of the Messiah. . . . Unfortunately, it is still impossible to achieve the completion of Redemption by any means other than war."

Rabbi Samson confided that former Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu "himself studies Rabbi Kook's writings with some of the biggest rabbis in Merkaz HaRav, on a regular basis. . . . Bibi Netanyahu is very oriented this way. He was in Merkaz HaRav on Jerusalem Day [1996] and it seems that his relationship with Rabbi Kook is very serious. The Minister of Justice that he appointed, not because of any coalition agreement, just because he was the one he wanted the most, is a proponent of Rabbi Kook's philosophy and is very well-versed in Rabbi Kook's philosophy." This, too, should come as no surprise, given that Netanyahu's father was the personal secretary of Jabotinsky, the intimate collaborator of Rabbi Kook the Elder.

Where Does It Lead?

In the mid-1980s, after the United States arrested American citizen Jonathan Jay Pollard on charges of spying for Israel, the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Academic Research Support Program funded a research paper on the rise of fundamentalism in Israel and its strategic implications. The report, written by Ian Lustick, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, was published in expanded form by the New York Council on Foreign Relations in 1988.

Its conclusions were blunt: Were the emerging Jewish fundamentalists, associated with Gush Emunim, and a growing faction of ultra-nationalists within the Israeli military (veterans, for the most part, of Merkaz HaRav), to seize power, "An Israel decoupled from the United States, opposed in principle to a negotiated peace, unfettered by the norms of liberal democracy, animated by redemptionist imperatives, and disposing of a large and sophisticated nuclear arsenal would pose challenges to American foreign policy and security interests at least as profound as those resulting from the Islamic Revolution in Iran."

Lustick's best-case scenario, under such an eventuality: a religious war as devastating as the Thirty Years' War in Europe (1618-48). His worst-case scenario was thermonuclear World War III.