James Petras

“City of London demands ad firm stop using spy cams in trash cans” Fox News, August 12, 2013

The story was headlined: “Jerusalem mayor demands investigation of secret ‘smart tracking devices’ in toilets”. The executives of an Israeli company that installed high tech toilets to secretly track the smart-phones of defecators are facing charges of ‘privacy violation’. The company, cleverly named ‘Two Commandments’, ( as in ‘Ye shall make money’ and ‘Ye shall not get caught’), a Tel Aviv-based marketing and private government subcontractor, developed ‘smart pods’ to capture smells, color, expulsive energy and volatile gases. One of the owners, Bibby Dershitz, (a ‘21st century Moses’, according to the Wall Street Journal), claimed the device provided valuable marketing information on consumer habits. According to Bibby’s partner, Laura Klapshitz, “the color, size, texture, density and chemical composition of turds reveals eating and drinking habits and can lead to the development of food products, which are easier to digest, reducing gas and disagreeable lower bowel sounds.”

They marketed the devices as a major breakthrough in health: Israelis would enter public or private bathrooms unaware that their most natural, intimate experiences were being recorded and photographed, because, as Bibby liked to point out, “facial expressions and sphincter tone can reveal serious underlying health issues which will benefit our Israeli pharmaceutical companies in designing new treatments – thus expanding their market”.

The original idea for high tech smart-tracking in public toilets came from Bibby’s time as an intern at the prestigious Israeli research center, Technion, where he was assigned to analyze the blood content in the turds of Palestinian prisoners following what Shin Bet (Israeli secret police) officials laughingly called ‘routine’ interrogation. Israeli scientists maintained that high blood content correlated positively with ‘high quality physical interrogation’ sessions. This could be used to track the performance of ‘interrogators’ for future promotion and bonuses. More importantly, they concluded that high blood content identified prisoners classified as ‘highly resistant (HR)’ to providing ‘reasoned responses’. Israeli scientists maintained that HR prisoners were most likely ‘members of terrorist cells’ and candidates for higher level interrogation protocols. All this critical national security data was derived from turd analysis!

From this stint at ‘Technion’, Bibby concluded that, ‘Turds talk!’ With this entrepreneurial insight, Bibby asked his partner, Laura Klapshitz, to prepare a prospectus to secure the backing of wealthy venture capitalists. Bibby and Laura’s success in raising funds focused initially on the impact on ‘consumer goods’ market. Rigorous analysis of foods and drinks, kosher and otherwise, provided invaluable “data in the well”, to use Laura’s euphemism for turds in the toilet. Ms. Klapshitz explained that the “visual dimension thing, especially through facial expressions, and the tight sphincter thing, can help us to break into the trendy, upscale health food market”. Laura also introduced innovative toilet accessories and upgrades, like ‘the gauge to accurately measure sphincter tone’. She and Bibby used the gauge to provides data measuring the ‘constipation index, to identify and address a common problem among “our highly stressed sedentary techno-warriors and high BMI index(overweight) settlement rabbis.”

Bibby described the initial heady days of the new ‘start-up’: “As soon as our campaign to install smart tracking in public toilets took off, the market-savvy investors and wealthy ‘insider’ financiers from the Diaspora jumped on board!” Their success, he philosophically declared to Laura, confirmed one of Freud’s most profound insights: that ‘money is crap and crap is money’.

Laura and Bibby met with a team of young Harvard law graduates and newly-minted Wharton MBAs to patent the ‘Crap Watch’ (as it came to be known to the insiders) and to discuss ‘new markets’.

This team of the best and brightest from the Ivy Leagues jokingly dubbed themselves as ‘the toilet tribe’, (TT). They developed a new marketing strategy based on moving to upscale private corporate toilets and government bathrooms and formed a joint venture with major Israeli business groups and security agencies. The ‘TT’ also decided to upgrade their promotional material and consider a public stock offering.

They agreed to eventually consider mergers and acquisitions -especially in what they called ‘turd-centered appliances’ designed to enhance ‘data collection’.

After winning the prestigious Forbes Award as ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’, Bibby and Laura signed off on a million-dollar book contract for a manuscript entitled, ‘Defecation: The Eye in your Toilet’.

Bibby and Laura were no longer just running a ‘mom and pop’ business: They borrowed big and re-invested their profits like ‘true entrepreneurs’, hiring salespeople, public relations specialists, market researchers and ‘special’ field technicians (a euphemism for agents adept at discreetly penetrating high-security facilities and planting smart pods in toilets under delicate circumstances).

Despite the major expansion of their workforce, Bibby and Laura were still personally responsible for negotiating with high-end clients. They secured lucrative contracts with Israel’s leading multi-nationals by convincing the CEOs that ‘smart’ turd-analysis could identify employees who were consuming well beyond their income level – important clues to rooting out potential trouble-makers, embezzlers, corporate spies and rogue speculators. In addition analysis of turd composition (color, texture, smell) would reveal if lower level employees had potentially expensive, undeclared health problems or drug habits – both grounds for their immediate dismissal without severance pay. As an added bonus, Bibby promised to provide ‘smart insurance’ to top CEOs: a security device, which would detect any smart-pod secretly placed in their own toilets.

Klapshitz insisted on the competitive advantages that toilet espionage offered to corporate clients: “Toilets are frequently used as discreet meeting places”. She argued persuasively that, “Behind the closed doors, strategic decisions are discussed which we record with our high-quality monitoring while removing any irrelevant, unseemly noises, such as flatulence”. “She means farting”, Bibby ejaculated. ‘Look. We provide the intimate data”, Bibby argued to potential clients,“ Call it blackmail, if you like. But it can increase your competitive advantage in any contract negotiation”.

Laura, striking a moralistic posture, pointed out that, “Our recordings may reveal ‘perversions’, unethical corporate activity during business hours, such as masturbation among the highly stressed executives or government officials grabbing female or male employees inside the water closet. This gives you powerful leverage in closing deals”.

As part of a major expansion program, a joint venture was worked out with the Mossad. Two Commandments went global! The new target market included the Arab countries, North America and the European Union.

Entry-level field technicians with Middle Eastern (Sephardic) backgrounds were hired especially for their ‘Arab looks’ for missions to plant the toilet-pods in Muslim countries – considered a ‘smelly assignment’ by Bibby, a Zionist-Neo-Con, who claimed that, “Arabs rarely flush”.

Laura, the Zionist-Liberal, corrected Bibby’s bigotry by pointing out that it wasn’t the Arabs’ poor hygiene, but their “frequent water shortages because the US and Israel had bombed their water systems and the West blocked sale of replacement parts”. She added that “Our target population, especially the elite in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, use ultra-modern perfumed, air-conditioned toilets, especially designed with soothing musical flushing systems - better than anything here. Bibby, it’s wrong to label all Arabs as ‘non-flushers’. Do you really want our Sephardic technicians to complain that we are giving them the dirtiest and most dangerous assignments because they look like Arabs? ”.

The joint venture with Mossad took “Two Commandments” into the US market, where AIPAC and its cohorts among the ‘52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations’ brokered a long-term, large-scale, multi-million dollar contract to ‘toilet-watch’ members of Congress, White House officials, generals, oil company executives and anyone else involved in Middle East policy affecting Israel.

As Bibby later wrote in his ‘memoirs’, Defecation: The Eye in Your Toilet: “The AIPAC and Co. sent the toughest negotiators we had ever encountered. First, they tried the ‘tribal gambit,’ telling us that, “If it’s for Israel you should do it for free”. So I told them: “First, you should give up your $100 million dollar annual lobbying budgets.” Then they bargained for a discount rate claiming that AIPAC was a ‘non-profit’. “Yeah.”, I said, “You’re not counting the annual $ 3 billion-plus that Israel milks from the US Treasury and the big kickback to you and the Defamation League”. Finally, they resorted to the cheap charge that we were ‘profiteering at the expense of Israel’s security’, accusing us, Sabras, of verging on anti-Semitism for not confronting Israel’s ‘existential threat’. Such Chutzpah!”

“I laughed in their face! Both Laura and I served in the military, we are still in the Reserves and who are these guys really working for? Wall Street bankers! These guys were stink-tank policy wonks drawing six figure salaries to con the goys. And most of them weren’t even married to Jews. I started for the door saying, “No Deal! You AIPAC bums screwed up the Rosen Weismann spy case; you let Pollard get caught with bags of documents; ‘Lobo’ Wolfowitz temporarily lost his security clearance and Marty Indyk too! What amateurs! If you want a professional job you have to pay. Pick up the phone and call any of your billionaire philanthropists. Tell’um to cough up 20 million for Israel!”

“After some shouting and even shoving, Laura and I walked out the door. They called us back and signed the contract.”

“They got their money’s worth. The Congressional toilets were hooked up and in the first week we picked up one constipated senior Senator who uttered prophetic anti-Semitic slurs while he struggled: “The Jews won’t let me have a moment’s peace. They follow me into the bathroom to bugger me (!!) about upping the annual payola, tightening the sanctions on Iran and not cutting aid to the Egyptian military … They make me feel (“grunt and grunt”) like I am just working for Israel.” This guy was marked as a “fence-sitter on Israel”.

“The State Department, Pentagon and Treasury toilets were all brought ‘on-line’ by our teams of dual citizen agents and terror ‘experts’, strategically placed by AIPAC inside the institutions. We monitored members of Congress who had ‘plumbing problems’ (urinary frequency) and couldn’t sit through long-winded appropriation sessions. They could be relied on to close the debate and call for a vote to fund wars against Israel’s enemies – just so they could rush off to the nearest ‘facilities’.”

“Our ‘smart-pods’ tracked a top White House staffer with financial problems who we caught trying to arrange a loan on his cell-phone while ‘sitting in the stall’. AIPAC , used their financial contacts to cultivate this White House asset. They got ‘the inside dope’ on the White House’s Palestine peace proposals in exchange for a low-interest loan. Prime Minister Bibi ‘the Whale’ used that information to pre-empt Vice President Biden’s visit when he announced the construction of three thousand new settlement units”.

“This ‘toilet talk’ had become a goldmine: We went from continent to continent, deal to deal. We paid for new settlements in the West Bank, (Laura objected ‘a little’). The press crowed that our “Jewish genius had turned shit to gold”. The only objection came from some self-righteous Haredi draft-dodging loser who condemned us for worshiping ‘Mammon instead of the Y- guy’.”

“At the pinnacle of our success, the curse of that Haredi loud-mouth came back to haunt us! No it wasn’t an Arab terrorist, they were all under toilet surveillance; nor was it a competing intelligence service like the US Homeland Security, the Mossad had their own people in there. We were brought down by one of our own: The rat was a graduate of Hebrew University, Joshua Ben Ezra. We had hired him as a field technician, assigned (on account of his ‘Arab’ looks) to bug and monitor the toilets and turds of the Palestinian Authority: A dangerous and smelly assignment to which he felt he was over-qualified. This Ben Ezra, got some ‘chip on his shoulder’ because he looked Arab, forgetting, that was the reason we hired him in the first place. Then rumors began to circulate among our other employees that his ‘blood was tainted’ or that he was ‘using the race card to promote his career’… Joshua, from the start, was very good at what he did: He discovered ‘President’ Mahmoud ‘the Bagman’ Abbas’ secret overseas bank account worth $400 million while monitoring a long cell-phone call to his London bankers from a ‘session on the throne’ (Constipation- Conspiracy- Confidentiality) which only yielded a puny turd. Then he monitored a secret tryst between a devout Hamas leader and a rival’s daughter ‘over the toilet seat’. This helped the Mossad to set-off a mini-civil war in Gaza. Joshua was that good!”

“There was no doubt that Ben Ezra would ‘go places’. But he was too impatient. He felt his professional and personal ambitions were blocked by his ‘skin problem’. He secretly tried skin products, lightened and straightened his hair, waxed off his hairy arms, legs, chest and the rest… Josh was hoping to score some upscale Ashkenazi or make it with our leggy blond Long Island ‘college intern on the aliya’ junket. We know this because we bug our own employees’ toilets.”

“In the aftermath of our debacle, we investigated what led Ben Ezra to turn traitor, or what Laura called, a ‘whistle blower’. The historic turning point took place on the edge of the bath tub. His puny ‘performance’ with his tall Long Island lovely was a fiasco: He was too short, she giggled instead of moaning. He drooped and she dressed, walked out and described the whole encounter to the secretarial staff during a coffee break.”

“The fact is that Ben Ezra was and is a computer genius, whatever his other shortcomings. He had access to our files all around the world and he mined our findings, reports and evaluations, including industrial spying, speculation and blackmail. He secretly exposed our joint venture with the Mossad in Arab countries, including the assassinations, infiltration, bribes and converted spies (with their names, dates and bank account numbers). He released information on our collaboration with ‘the Lobby’ where we secured confidential White House documents, how we ‘arm-twisted’ Congressional ‘vacillators on Israel’ and demolished the ‘anti-Semitic’ critics of Israel.”

Nobody knew who he was. Ben Ezra escalated. At first, as a loyal Zionist, he would only leak documents to the Israeli press but the Israeli papers ‘self-censored’ and refused to print. Long Island leggy had done a lot of damage: He was ridiculed at work, Bibby and Laura snubbed him and the secretaries snickered. Joshua then sent a stream of documents to independent journalists, major newspapers and web sites the world over. The NY Times, Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, the major TV networks and NPR all contacted the Israeli embassy in Washington and refused to follow-up on any of the documents. The BBC, quoted an anonymous Israeli official, who claimed that the ‘so-called whistleblower was an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi holocaust denier with a conspiracy complex’. Al Jazeera quoted a Gulf State expert who claimed the allegations especially the reports on Gulf state collaboration with Mossad were part of an ‘Al Qaeda disinformation campaign’.”

Ben Ezra then contacted Rachel (“Ray”) Klapshitz, the ‘black-sheep’ daughter of the Two Commandments founder, who had renounced her Israeli citizenship and become an investigative journalist for the Gatekeeper. Ray’s stories exposing the turd spy operations busted through the media blackout. The mass circulation ‘yellow press’ couldn’t resist: ‘Fellatio for Israel in Pentagon Toilets’, headlined the Daily Sun. ‘400 Million Bucks for Abbas, Turds for the Pals’, wrote an Israeli scandal sheet. The Washington Post discreetly jumped with its article entitled, ‘Presidential Toilets as a Site of alleged Israeli Spying. Is Israel endangering its ‘special relationship?’

Prime Minister Bibi, the Whale, was hysterical. Jowls twitching, he called in the heads of Mossad, Shin Bet’s Special Operations Unit (Yamas) and the National Security Council: “Find the Turd Spy at all costs and shut him up forever!” he bellowed. “Even, I mean, especially, if he’s a Jew, a self-hating traitor!”

The Mossad had already checked the toilets of all its spies and employees, including the mobile assassins, whores and bankers. It was realized much later that because of his computer skills and his innocuous reputation, Bibby and Laura recommended that Joshua Ben Ezra be made a member of the special investigating unit. He worked 18 hour days; 9 hours for the Jewish State and 9 hours for Truth, Democracy, Freedom and Justice for the Sephardi. Even more incriminating documents were published including the covert consultations between top Pentagon Zionists and Israeli Foreign Policy officials when they concocted the ‘data’ about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the lead up to the US invasion, proof that Treasury Zionists had written the entire policy for new sanctions on Iran in consultation with Tel Aviv and shocking information about the Mossad’s ‘prior knowledge of the 9-11 attack and its monitoring of the perpetrators in the air and on the ground’.

Ben Ezra had deeply penetrated the highly vaunted Mossad counter-espionage apparatus. Prime Minister Bibi ‘the Whale’ called for a much smaller super-elite Mossad team to investigate the investigators and Joshua was picked to be among the ‘final five’.

Meanwhile ‘Two Commandments’ became ‘No Commandments’: The company went ‘belly-up’. Investment capital evaporated. Bibby and Laura were under investigation. Share prices dropped from 500 shekals to near zero. Investors jammed the lines and traders refused to answer their phone. The Harvard ‘Toilet Tribe’ returned to Cambridge to scrounge for post docs. The ‘victims’ filed law suits. The clients claimed innocence and paid fines ‘without admitting guilt’. Forbes withdrew its entrepreneurial award. Bibby and Laura signed up for an extended cruise on the Nile. The whistleblower, Ben Ezra, hidden in broad sight on the elite Mossad ‘Special Commission’ quietly worked away. While he drew a double-salary as chair of the investigation, he planted amorous e-mails between Prime Minister Bibi ‘the Whale’ and Long Island Long Legs - special references to his ‘oversize gut and undersize ‘member’. ‘Yamas’ was exposed to have been spying on Mossad agents within Hamas, resulting in a shoot-out, which wounded an IDF soldier from Brooklyn…

‘Two Commandments’ filed for bankruptcy. The ‘Holocaust Foundation’, a major investor, lost millions and denounced it as a Ponzi scam claiming that Bibby and Laura were “worse than Madoff”. To escape threats and charges of “blood libel”, and Defamation League charges of “soiling the pristine reputation of Israel, the Only Democratic Country in the Middle East governed by the Only Moral People”, Bibby Dershitz and Laura Klapshitz left for their cruise, leaving no forwarding address. They made sure to check the ship’s toilets and ignore the turds.

Rachel’s reportage, based on Ben Ezra’s leaked documents, led to fame and harassment: She won the Colombia University Annual Investigative Journalism Award and the furious condemnation of the World Zionist Council. Meanwhile Joshua quietly packed his toothbrush and computer files and bought a one way ticket to Teheran, avoiding security checks by flashing his official passport as a member of the Whale’s Elite Super Special Counter Espionage Commission.

Furious, Israel demanded that Iran extradite the traitor, Ben Ezra. AIPAC threatened to round up a unanimous Congressional vote of support for whatever Israel demanded. The Iranians calmly pointed out that since Joshua’s grandfather was born in Iran, Ben Ezra could claim citizenship and Iranian citizens could not be extradited abroad; it was against their Constitution.

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James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of 64 books published in 29 languages, and over 560 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles in nonprofessional journals such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, Partisan Review, Temps Moderne, Le Monde Diplomatique, and his commentary is widely carried on the internet. His most recent books are: The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack (Clarity Press 2012) 2nd edition, The Power of Israel in the United States and Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militants, (acquired for Japanese, German, Italian, Indonesian, Czech and Arabic editions), Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power, Global Depression and Regional Wars: The United States, Latin America and the Middle East, and War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column in America. He has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In 1973-76 he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, Le Jornada, and previously, for the Spanish daily, El Mundo. He received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.