For Immediate Release

Noah Beck
Noah Beck Books

www.TheLastIsraelis.com

“The Last Israelis” – a Gripping Military and Psychological Thriller – Gets Five-star Reviews

New York, New York – July 16, 2012 – “The Last Israelis” – a gripping military and psychological thriller – was recently published on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Israelis-ebook/dp/B008HEFVI2/) and has already garnered a large number of five-star reviews, including from some of Amazon’s top book critics. Amazon Vine Voice reviewer Chris Kruschke calls it “One part ‘Crimson Tide’ and another part ‘Twelve Angry Men,’” and raves that “the final third of the book is some of the fastest paced and most gripping literature I have ever read…I would hold it up against the writing of even the most established writers of political/military thrillers.”

The book is a work of fiction about the near future but is heavily based on the facts of today. Depicting a doomsday scenario, this cautionary tale about a nuclear Iran takes a suspense-filled ride aboard the Dolphin submarine. The mightiest vessel in the Israeli Navy, the Dolphin provides Israel’s “second-strike” answer to the existential threat posed by a nuclear Iran. Daniel, captain of the Dolphin, is abruptly ordered to cut his military drill short and bring his crew back to shore. His gut tells him that something ominous is happening, as he and the submariners under his command commence a mission that will be one of the most important in world history. “The Last Israelis” is full of surprises and unpredictable twists. In his five-star review, David Edmiston, another Amazon Vine Voice reviewer, calls the book “amazing” and a “spectacular account” noting that the “story plays out as well as any Tom Clancy novel.”

The book has enough naval action to qualify as a military and geopolitical page-turner about a Middle East Armageddon, but it also entertains under the genre of psychological thrillers. The submarine space in which most of the story takes place provides a kind of social experiment that is more intense and compelling than any reality show: 35 men from completely diverse backgrounds who must survive or die together under regular and sometimes life-threatening challenges. The Dolphin’s crew almost represents a microcosm of Israeli society: there are two descendants of Holocaust survivors; two native Arabic speakers, including a Christian and a Druze; the son of Persian Jews who escaped from the Iranian revolution of 1979; an Ethiopian who crossed Sudan by foot as a child to reach Israel; religious Jews who serve on a mostly secular crew; the atheist son of a Soviet Refusenik; a submariner who holds staunchly right-wing views and another who secretly attends leftist rallies; and even a homosexual whose parents were among the Vietnamese refugee boat-people saved by Israel in 1977. How do all of these individuals get along through the relentless pressures of submarine life, various threats at sea, and an intensely divisive and mind-bending dilemma placed before the group of 35 men?

Added to the cauldron of complexity are the rivalry and suspicion between the captain and his deputy, and the fact that one of the submariners suffered a tragic horror as a child and quietly lives with the resulting emotional scars – psychological wounds that could blow up unpredictably at any time.

In addition to all of the page-turning human drama, the novel has a deeply philosophical element. The diverse submariners must struggle with the weightiest of moral questions as they vigorously debate how to make the toughest decision of their lives. Extremely timely, “The Last Israelis” tackles an issue that regularly dominates world headlines: the unyielding march towards a nuclear weapon by the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite six rounds of economic sanctions by the UN Security Council and about a decade of diplomatic initiatives.

The story explores in detail one of the potential nightmare scenarios that most pundits would rather not address because of how horrific it could be: the catastrophic conflict that could materialize the day after Iran obtains a nuclear weapon. In his five-star review of the book, author and political commentator Alan Elsner writes, “This thriller is most timely because it reminds us of a scenario that unfortunately is all too realistic.”

The novel is now available on Kindle and Nook and will soon be sold through iBookstore, Sony, and other major e-book distributors. Learn more about Noah Beck and the Last Israelis at http://www.TheLastIsraelis.com.

Iran has been threatening to wipe Israel off the map while actively developing the nuclear means to do so. The Islamic Republic will soon enter the so-called “zone of immunity” by transferring all centrifuges and other key components of its nuclear weapons program into Fordo. This nuclear enrichment facility near Qom was built under hundreds of feet of rock and is thus highly fortified against aerial attack by Israeli fighter jets.

But even the hardened Fordo facility could be vulnerable to the U.S. military’s Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound, earth-penetrating bomb. So the Iranian regime is working on an ominous parallel track to prevent even the last superpower from ending its nuclear weapons quest. As the drumbeats of war get louder, the Prime Minister of Israel is suddenly hospitalized.

This is the dramatic, geopolitical backdrop for “The Last Israelis” – a gripping military and psychological thriller just published this week on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/The-Last Israelis-ebook/dp/B008HEFVI2/).

The book is a work of fiction about the near future, but it’s heavily based on the facts of today.

Depicting a doomsday scenario, this cautionary tale about a nuclear Iran takes a suspense-filled ride aboard the Dolphin submarine. The mightiest vessel in the Israeli Navy, the Dolphin provides Israel’s “second-strike” answer to the existential threat posed by a nuclear Iran. The powerful, German-made, diesel-electric submarine is armed with nuclear-tipped missiles that can strike targets 1,500 kilometers (about 930 miles) away.

Daniel, captain of the Dolphin, is abruptly ordered to cut his military drill short and bring his crew back to shore. His gut tells him that something ominous is happening, as he and the submariners under his command return for a brief visit with their loved ones, before commencing a mission that will be the most important of their careers, and one of the most important in world history.

“The Last Israelis” is full of surprises and unpredictable twists. The story has enough page-turning naval action to qualify as a military and geopolitical novel about a Middle East Armageddon, but it also entertains under the genre of psychological thrillers. The submarine space in which most of the story takes place provides a kind of social experiment that is more intense and compelling than any reality show: 35 men from completely diverse backgrounds who must survive or die together under regular and sometimes life-threatening challenges.

The Dolphin’s crew almost represents a microcosm of Israeli society: there are two descendants of Holocaust survivors; two native Arabic speakers, including a Christian and a Druze; the son of Persian Jews who escaped from the Iranian revolution of 1979; an Ethiopian who crossed Sudan by foot as a child to reach Israel; religious Jews who serve on a mostly secular crew; the Russian-speaking atheist son of a Soviet Refusenik; a submariner who holds staunchly right-wing views and another who secretly attends leftist rallies; and even a homosexual whose parents were among the Vietnamese refugee boat-

people saved by Israel in 1977. How do all of these people get along through the relentless pressures of submarine life, various threats at sea, and an intensely divisive and mind-bending dilemma placed before the group of 35 men?

Added to this cauldron of complexity are the rivalry and suspicion between the captain and his deputy, and the fact that one of the submariners suffered a tragic horror as a child and quietly lives with the resulting emotional scars — psychological wounds that could blow up unpredictably at any time. With so many different characters managing so many different issues, it is a remarkable feat whenever the crew manages to function cohesively enough to meet its challenges. But conflict is inevitable. Sometimes the boiling point is reached only in a crewmember’s dream, but at other times, the situation is all too real.

In addition to all of the human drama, the novel has a deeply philosophical element that provides all of the deliberative suspense of Twelve Angry Men. The diverse submariners must struggle with the weightiest of moral questions as they vigorously debate how to make the toughest decision of their lives.

The novel is also very timely, tackling an issue that regularly dominates the headlines: the unyielding march towards a nuclear weapon by the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite six rounds of economic sanctions by the UN Security Council and almost a decade of diplomatic initiatives. The story explores in detail one of the potential nightmare scenarios that most military commentators would rather ignore because of how horrific it could be: the catastrophic conflict that could materialize the day after Iran obtains a nuclear weapon.

I decided to stop the ayatollahs’ march toward the bomb with nothing but my imagination

By most measures, fiction writers are a fairly self-indulgent lot: they sit around mulling and forming ideas, converting concepts into stories, refining their drafts, and then hoping that someone — perhaps with enough prodding — takes notice. In most cases, when stacked up against physicians, firefighters, and home builders, it’s hard to see how scribes have earned their right to food and shelter on any given day. At best, they produce a few days or weeks of occasional entertainment for whomever happens to enjoy what they write. And yet, story-telling has been around since the dawn of time, so clearly fiction has the potential to serve an important purpose — to provide a call to action, a warning, or a source of courage or inspiration.

But can a novel change world history? It’s a fanciful idea, yet not outside the realm of possibility. As with free speech generally, the novels that have the greatest potential to alter world events are probably those that governments most vigorously try to censor and repress. For example, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” the 1928 novel by D. H. Lawrence that was internationally banned or censored for its sexually explicit content, may have been most responsible for overturning book censorship, even though — ironically enough — the novel had nothing to do with censorship and was never written with the intent to subvert it (unlike, say, Ray Bradbury’s “Farenheit 451″).

Some writers who set out to change the course of human events with their stories actually succeed, as did Harriet Beacher Stowe. Her anti-slavery novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was published in 1852 and is credited with helping to foment the US Civil War. Legend has it that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe at the start of the Civil War, he declared, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”

Nevertheless, writing a world-changing novel is an outlier so beyond any writer’s control that there is something preposterous about aspiring toward such an outcome. Thus, when I decided to stop the ayatollahs’ march toward the bomb with nothing but the imagination of an unknown author telling an Armageddon story about 35 men on an Israeli submarine, I knew the odds were slightly against me. And yet, with a trace of the irrepressible optimism that I apparently inherited from my father, I quixotically dropped everything else in my life — my job, my plans, my social life — in pursuit of an absurdly improbable objective. After all, the odds of writing a novel that stops Iran from getting nuclear weapons are infinitely better if one writes it than if one doesn’t. So I did. The book that resulted from that sleepless, ten-week effort is titled “The Last Israelis”.

What struck me most about this writing experience — besides the absolutely exhausting, marathon-like nature of it — was how surreal the whole endeavor seemed at times. Creating a world out of one’s imagination inherently detaches the writer from reality to some extent, but that experience is somehow intensified when the imagined reality takes place mostly in the cramped hull of a submarine. My small apartment, which I had barely left during the few months that I was writing, began to resemble the submarine that I was writing about and which the main characters were also stuck in for months. There was also something bizarre about writing a doomsday novel that takes place in the very near future and is based entirely on the facts of today. The writer becomes one part omniscient spectator, one part passive participant in a gruesome end that is theoretically just around the corner.

Now that I am firmly back in reality, I’m relieved to see that there is still time to prevent the fanatical regime in Iran from acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapons. I can only hope that my novel — by reaching the right decision-makers and/or changing the terms of the public debate — helps to inspire the policy changes needed to prevent the Iranian nuclear threat from materializing. Even if six rounds of UN Security Council sanctions could not stop Tehran’s atomic warpath, surely my submarine thriller can!

SOURCE: http://www.timesofisrael.com/is-the-pen-mightier-than-the-nuke

This instructive video shows what news reports would look like if they applied their outrageous Israel-reporting techniques to terrorist attacks in the rest of the world. In the hope of lessening the egregious anti-Israel bias, here are some pointers to members of the media:

1) Your job is to report facts, not reinforce a narrative. Really. The facts matter – they form the basis for judgments. So here are some facts for you, meticulously documented and updated (with details and graphs worthy of a data scientist) in a shared Google spreadsheet by Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho. According to his data, in the fifty days from September 11 through October 31, there have been 1,315 Arab Muslim attacks on Jews, including stabbings, bombings, rock-throwing, etc. That’s about 26 attacks per day resulting in the murder of 11 innocent Jews. Adjusted for the U.S. population, that’s over 1,000 knife, bomb, and other attacks per day that kill 440 people during fifty days of terror. How would the U.S. react to that?

2) Remember that the weaker party can be wrong. Actually, when a Palestinian man stabs a 70-year old woman, he’s not even the weaker party. Sometimes Palestinians do indefensible things. Sometimes Israel is guilty of only trying to protect its citizens from insanely hateful violence. And as an honest reporter, you should try to show this.

3) Properly identify the terrorist and the victim when reporting on casualties, and describe the main causal sequence of events with relevant context. That’s how you avoid headlines like “Jewish man uses his neck to attack the blade of Palestinian’s knife.” The BBC’s distortions were actually not far from that when they effectively turned terrorists into victims. The BBC’s bias is so egregious that even their former chief complained.

4) Do your homework on this region. Learn its basic history so that you don’t moronically suggest (as the NY Times did) that Jews have no historical connection to the Temple Mount. Otherwise it looks like you’re trying to support Palestinian revisionism against basic facts and endless archaeological evidence (including what a 10-year old recently discovered).

5) Learn the history of this conflict enough to know that Pallywood has been actively deceiving journalists for at least 15 years now, in an effort to delegitimize Israel. Before publishing “information” fed to you by fixers and “eyewitnesses,” realize that even Amnesty International has admitted the unreliability of “eyewitnesses” in this conflict. The most galling Pallywood example from this latest round of Arab terrorism is the inflammatory lie – by “moderate” Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas – that Israeli forces had “executed” a 13-year old. The truth: he was treated in the same Israeli hospital caring for the boy he tried to murder.

Such lies can kill. Because when it comes to this conflict, Arab leaders know that violence replaces reason at the slightest provocation – like hooligans at a football game incited to attack the opponents of their beloved team. So inciting lies are very much a weapon. The media should know this and expose the falsehoods, rather than blindly proliferate them. Journalists should know that “reporting” inflammatory claims can produce mob violence, and should therefore be doubly careful about checking facts, unless of course their goal is to trigger riots (which do produce more sensational news stories).

6) Learn the history of this conflict enough to know that Arab Muslims have been killing Jews in this area for over a century, with shifting excuses over time.

7) Stop trying to use the latest of those shifting excuses to justify the unjustifiable (here too, the BBC is an offender). No alleged grievance warrants randomly stabbing people in the street. The average Syrian is infinitely worse off than anyone in Gaza or the West Bank, but Syrian teens aren’t randomly stabbing civilians. Countless refugees from Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere have risked their lives for the hope of a better future in Europe. And yet there are virtually no Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza among the millions desperate to reach Europe. So random stabbings don’t reflect some miserably unfair existence – they are the product of raw hatred and incitement.

8) Take note of nuances. 92 Israeli Arab Muslims have committed terrorist attacks. They are not under occupation (and have better freedoms and living standards than most of the Arab world has). So clearly these attacks are not about any political dispute; they are driven by the same hateful incitement that rejects any state for the Jews.

9) Show cause and effect (ideally one before the other), and not just effect. When you show only Israeli responses to attacks, it makes Israelis look as if they wake up every morning asking how they can hurt Arabs. Israelis actually have better things to do with their mornings. Like cure cancer and stuff. But when people are trying to kill them, they understandably get a bit distracted. If the world could keep Israelis safer, cancer might get cured faster.

10) Articles should contain a logical subject and verb, preferably in a way that indicates who did what. According to CNN, Joseph’s Tomb spontaneously “catches fire.” CNN would rather change the laws of physics than blame Muslims for trying to burn a Jewish holy site. But there is a long list of non-Muslim sites that have been desecrated or destroyed by Muslims – from the Buddhas of Bamiyan razed by the Taliban to the countless monuments and churches destroyed by the Islamic State. History is also littered with Islamic conquests that converted non-Muslim holy sites into mosques.

11) Israeli lives matter. Getting both sides of the story means including photos and profiles of Israeli victims of Arab terrorism at least as often as you include photos and profiles of Arab attackers who were killed while trying to murder innocent Israelis. In case you’re not sure what it’s actually like to survive a stabbing attack, Kay Wilson’s TED Talk is a must-watch for some valuable context (and a reminder of what a life-affirming culture looks like, as opposed to the death cult trying to stamp it out).

12) Don’t be afraid to present Gazans as they present themselves (brandishing butcher knives and calling for Jewish blood). Show this Palestinian mother who celebrates that her child was killed trying to murder Israelis and who hopes that she and her other children all die for the same “cause.” Showing the Palestinian death cult of Jew-hatred that runs from crib to coffin might help observers understand why there’s still no peace.

Just for some context, when was the last time that you saw a video of a Jewish mother hoping that she and her children can all die for the sake of murdering some Germans to avenge the German Nazi murder of six million Jews (which seems a bit worse than praying on a contested holy site)?

13) If you want to falsify information to sanitize Palestinian terror, as NBC correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin did, try not to do so on live TV, because you’ll look really biased (and stupid).

14) It’s better to research whether the maps you display on your “news” broadcast were produced by anti-Israel propagandists BEFORE you broadcast them, because otherwise you’ll look as biased (and stupid) as NBC/MSNBC did.

15) To ensure that your reporting is fair and consistent, consider how a similar event was covered in other countries/contexts. For a strikingly convenient example, contrast how differently NBC News (again!) reports on airstrikes taking place in two neighboring Mideast conflicts, within just eight days of each other:

On October 3, NBC News used this headline to report that 60 Russian airstrikes in Syria killed 39 civilians: “Russia Launches New Wave of Airstrikes in Syria.” On October 11, NBC News used a much more personalized headline – with victim profiles – when reporting on one Israeli air strike that killed two civilians: “Israeli Strike in Gaza Kills Palestinian Woman, Child as Violence Continues.” So are two Gazan civilians more worthy of attention and sympathy than 39 Syrian civilians?

Ironically, despite your endless bias in favor of Palestinian terrorists, they thank you by posing as journalists in order to stab Israelis – a deceit that only undermines the trust that combatants have in the label “PRESS” and potentially endangers true war correspondents.

Each small instance of bias may seem like a mere “journalistic microagression” against Israel, but its cumulative effect is toxic and sometimes deadly. At best, the persistent anti-Israel bias poisons many millions – from voters to policy-makers – against Israel.  Even worse, it can lead to anti-Semitic violence, by mobs and/or individuals thugs, as is so often the case in Europe.

You journalists are key to a fair and civilized world. Start acting like it.