Introduction

Introduction
by Hajj Dawud Ahmad al-Amriki
Š2008 Muslim America
Unlike academic historians, who must glean their findings from indirect sources, Douglas Reed was a journalist and later a novelist, a passive participant ~ although later expelled for his integrity in reporting what he wasn't supposed to notice ~ in much of what he chronicles. Throughout the latter chapters, he notes his presence, along with his personal ignorance ~ then ~ of the hidden dimensions of what he witnessed, assessing only in retrospect what he saw and heard in the light of his later knowledge. Although he would not be considered, in academia, as an "historian" per se, and did not consider himself to be such, his present work must sit alongside Arnold Toynbee's The Islamic World Since the Peace Settlement (Royal Institute of International Affairs, Oxford University Press 1927), Denna Fleming's The Cold War and Its Origins (DoubleDay, NY 1961), and Gene W. Heck's Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism (Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des islamischen Orients, Berlin 2006) for its sheer wealth of insight and detail.
Controversy of Zion spans the periods of all three of those voluminous histories, reaching into the past to the time before Solomon and nearly to the end of the Cold War. This is just enough: the origins of Reed's history lie in the apostasy of Judah and the Levite pharisees of Temple Israel in the time of Solomon, while his historical analyses chillingly illuminate events in Europe and America from the revolutions of the Eighteenth Century through 1956 (the end of the book) and thereafter.
Reed's analysis of Scripture ~ specifically, of the Old Testament period before the Babylonian Captivity ~ does not match his consideration of his experiences and later researches. He relies on Biblical accounts that seem to explain his observations, but dismisses the remainder as myth or forgery. Of the formulation, by the apostate pharisees of Temple Israel, of their ancient plan for world dominion, which Reed places "on a day in 458 BC," he says (on the first page):
Why it was born at that particular moment,
or ever, is something that none can explain.
The "Why?" escapes him because the conspiracy of zion was actually born some four centuries before, when the reign of Solomon extended over the entirety of the Promised Land, from the Nile to the Euphrates including the Horn of Africa and all of Arabia ~ which the pharisees knew would eventually become the dominion of others for a thousand years, displacing and replacing the reign of Israel over the tiny kingdom of Saul and David. They devised a diabolical plan to deceive the nations, to regain that Solomonic dominion, and to perpetuate and extend their hegemony far beyond Israel, usurping the heritage of Abraham that Scripture bestows on all humanity. This, however, requires a deeper analysis of Scripture, and an objectivity regarding the history of religions, than what Reed, as a Pauline Christian seeking to understand the mysteries of his time, was able to reach. He is meticulous to differentiate the Sephardic Jews, descended from Israel and largely disdained by the pharisees after the fall of Islamic Spain, from the "Ostjuden," the khazar or Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe and Russia, who became the shock troops of the zionists in Europe and more particularly in America. But of his heritage in Abraham, as a descendant of Noah's son Japheth, he appears to have no knowledge.
Fortunately, Reed's chronology of this conspiracy, which begins four centuries after its inception in the Promised Land empire of Solomon (see map, below), does not suffer at all from this failure to explain "Why," just as the plan of the pharisees did not suffer from their loss of the Promised Land for nearly two thousand years that scarcely appear in Reed's narrative other than as an ambition and not as a coveted object of envy. That the Promised Land during that period was the scene of the pharisees' actual envy, the Millennial Kingdom, is apparently unknown to Reed. But the pharisees have returned to claim what is not theirs, with all the travail that Reed documents and anticipates ~ and Reed's history shows, in stunning detail, how they have accomplished that, at the expense of countless others.
The Promised Land
The Empire of Solomon