“Once you have the fissile highly enriched uranium, which isn’t that hard to purchase on the black market, a high school student could cobble together a Hiroshima-style nuke. That’s what Luis Alvarez, the inventor of the Hiroshima triggering mechanism, wrote.”
—Jules Meredith
Danny McMahon escorted Jules Meredith to right-center stage. They each seated themselves on dark leather-and-steel armchairs and faced the applauding audience. When the ovation subsided, McMahon gestured to one of the cameramen, who then projected the photo of an extremely obese Middle Eastern man in a white thawb, or robe. He was standing in the desert in front of a tank. Beside him stood a slender, dark-haired, highly attractive Middle Eastern woman in camouflage fatigues and boots, the stock of an AK-47 cocked on her hip. Even in army issue she was … stunning.
“What do you think of this new global terrorist threat?” McMahon asked. “It’s known as the ‘New United Islamist Front,’ and these two people there on the screen, Kamal ad-Din and his smoking-hot femme fatale sidekick, Raza Jabarti, are heading it up. According to your recent Huffington Post article, Kamal’s bankrolling it. You wrote that Kamal and Raza have organized the strongest, most violent, most ruthless parts of al Qaeda, ISIS, and TTP into that new terrorist operation and that their goal is the nuclear destruction of the U.S. of A.”
“Danny, after what those groups and their comrades have already done to Europe and the U.S., I will never discount the significance of their threat. And, yes, I do have sources who tell me that a nuclear attack is coming, that it’s funded by wealthy Saudis and that President Tower is so deep in hock to them that he won’t address this menace or even acknowledge it.”
“I’m willing to believe all of that,” McMahon said. “Look at President Tower’s Muslim immigration ban. He claimed that there are people in those six countries—the ones whose people he prohibited from entering the U.S.—who would kill Americans on U.S. soil. No one from those nations has ever killed anyone on U.S. soil. Yet Saudi citizens and their Sunni allies have murdered Americans on U.S. soil by the thousands, and those nations aren’t covered by the ban. Tower has clearly gone into the tank for the Saudis, their client states and for Mikhail Putilov.”
“Tower is in willful nuclear denial,” Jules said.
“How hard would it be for the New United Islamist Front to nuke a major U.S. city?” McMahon asked.
“Unfortunately,” Jules said, “nuking a city doesn’t take that much skill. If I drop a grapefruit-size chunk of bomb-grade highly enriched uranium on a same-size chunk from a height of six feet and hit it square, I could get 50 percent of the Hiroshima yield.”
“But wouldn’t making an actual bomb be seriously difficult?” McMahon asked.
“Not really,” Jules said. “Once you have the fissile highly enriched uranium, which isn’t that hard to purchase on the black market, a high school student could cobble together a Hiroshima-style nuke. That’s what Luis Alvarez, the inventor of the Hiroshima triggering mechanism, wrote, which is why we have to kill this threat in the cradle and hunt down and eliminate its backers.”
“And you’ve said the New United Islamist Front has the money to finance the building of a nuke and carry out the operation?”
“They get their money from a group of super-rich Saudis,” Meredith said, “led by Kamal ad-Din, and I’ve also said that Kamal and his coven of billionaire killers are protected by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I have some evidence that they’re in league with Putilov—and these are all Tower’s allies.”
“Can’t we do anything to stop that funding?” McMahon asked.
“We won’t even try,” Meredith said. “Tower views Pakistan and the Saudis as allies and has declared their enemies our enemies.”
“I see no difference between the Saudis and the New United Islamist Front,” McMahon said. “From my point of view, Saudi Arabia is nothing but a New United Islamist Front that has made it.”
“And has it made,” Jules said. “The New United Islamist Front’s caliphate is Saudi Arabia.”
“Yet many on the left say we’re too hard on Islam,” McMahon said, “saying most Muslims are moderate and peace-loving.”
“The truth is,” Jules said, “Kamal and his kind pose a far graver danger to those moderate peace-loving Muslims than we do. Kamal and company hate Islamic moderates far more than they hate us. They consider peaceable Muslims to be apostates, and therefore far more dangerous than any possible heretics.”
“And still,” McMahon said, “many moderate Muslims view you and me as the enemy.”
“Maybe,” Jules said, “but when young girls are accused of violating Islam’s so-called sacred laws, you and I don’t stone them to death or cut off their hands or gouge their eyes. We don’t clitorize and behead them. We don’t sentence them to 10,000 lashes or incarcerate them in Middle Eastern hellhole prisons until Gehenna freezes over.”
“True, but they nonetheless accuse us of tarring all Muslims with the same terrorist brush.” McMahon asked. “Our critics point out that most Western Muslims are law abiding.”
“But we can’t compare Islam in the West to the True Faith as practiced in the Mideast. Here, Islam is a small sect, a weak minority. As Sam Harris has written, the West’s Muslims practice their faith in fetters. If they attempted violent insurrection, they’d be instantly crushed. If, however, Islam had the upper hand in the U.S. and Europe, who is to say they would not heed the clarion call of the jihadists in their midst? I’ve lived in that world for twenty years, and I deeply fear that if Islam held sway in the world today, we’d be witnessing a global jihad of thermonuclear proportions.”
“Jules, I would love to discuss this further. We are short of time though, and I want you to talk about your new book. It’s not about Islamist terrorism but about the depredations of the super-rich, focusing on our own president, J. T. Tower. I should tell the audience that you let me have a surprise look at a few chapters. You have come up with the best, most important, most terrifying reportage that I have ever laid eyes on. Anyone out there who doesn’t buy and read Jules Meredith’s book when it’s released should be flogged, jailed, amputated and decapitated…” At that point, McMahon rose from his chair and roared as loud as he knew how: “… LIKE A REBELLIOUS SAUDI WOMAN!”
The audience exploded with shocked but tumultuous laughter while Jules stared at Danny, slowly shaking her head.
“And now I’m told you have a surprise announcement,” Danny said.
Danny McMahon then sat down, and Jules stood.
“My friends,” Jules began, “this week on my blog, www.TheJulesView.com, I’ll be posting a series of articles for immediate release to the public and the media. In my new book, Filthy Lucre: J. T.’s Tower of Financial Power, I’m exposing President J. T. Tower—who is also the owner of a lethal petrochemical empire, a dangerously deceptive consortium of Wall Street hedge funds, a chain of horrifyingly exploitative casinos and one of the most corrupt real estate development companies in the world—as the fascistic bastard that he is. With your permission, Danny, I’d like to read a segment of a new blog I will post tomorrow.”
“Please do.”
Jules Meredith began:
Three years after President Tower’s election, we are now witnessing the rise of a J. T. Tower financial/political imperium run by Tower and a cadre of supercilious oligarchical billionaires. Profit and power are their sole raison d’être, and they destroy anything and anyone who gets in their way or even voices dissenting opinions. They view the U.S. Treasury as a cash hoard to be plundered, the federal regulatory agencies as enemies to be destroyed and the electorate as their lawful prey. Distrust and hatred of government is their rallying cry, and for a time they infected the Body Politic with that same anti-government rage.
It was not always thus. For decades the U.S. public feared big business more than they feared their government. The Great Depression and fear of the Wall Street fat cats who caused it—and who grew rich exploiting workers—made the American public skeptical of predatory plutocrats. Then the elites turned the public’s hatred toward government; unfortunately for the public, government is the only entity capable of reining the plutocrats in.
But the American people are now awakening from their long dark night of anti-government paranoia and have taken the Senate back. After the American people witnessed repeated orgies of upper-bracket tax cuts, Wall Street deregulation and Bill of Rights infringements alongside the simultaneous rise of the new Tower Oligarchy, the electorate’s fear of rapacious elites has returned with a vengeance.
Tower and his plutocratic pack are no ordinary band of psychopaths. They are men who have made their fortunes bilking entire nations out of trillions … men engaged in enterprises so preposterously profitable that there is no way they cannot be exploitative. For unlike the robber barons of the 19th century, Tower’s billionaires produce almost nothing that is useful or socially redeeming. Instead they rip the public off with their Wall Street skim-scams, through fiscally destructive mergers—yes, 80 percent of mergers line the coffers of the key players but impoverish everyone else—through their predatory casinos and, of course, through their debt-derivative con games that Warren Buffett has called “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Theirs is an avarice so arrogant, a self-entitlement so maniacal and a hubris so soaringly grandiose that at some level these people have to be … deranged.
They have to be stopped. The fate of this nation depends on it. We all have to stop them.
“So, J. T. Tower,” Jules shouted, pointing her finger into the TV camera, “I’m coming after you. I got your name; I got your number; I know where you live. I’m fouling your nest and shitting where you eat and sleep. I’m dragging your dirty laundry into the streets and pissing on your grave. I’m going to make that UN global expropriation movement look like a trade union beer blast. I’m burning you down to bedrock and sowing your fields with salt like Carthage. And this is just the beginning, Jimmy Boy. When I’m done with you, there won’t be enough left for the birds to carry away. When my book comes out, you’re going read my words and weep. So give it up, bitch. Eat shit and die. You’re going down hard.”
Jules Meredith turned and walked off the proscenium, stage left.
For the first time in his professional life, Danny McMahon looked … shaken.
Clearing his throat, he finally rasped:
“And now for my closing remarks.”