STATE OF DENIAL ON HUMAN RIGHTS; OBAMA'S DELUSION ABOUT JIHAD; DOES TERRORISM BOOST THE PRESTIGE OF ISLAM? Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 31, 2009.

STATE OF DENIAL ON HUMAN RIGHTS Half my critics ponder evidence, including mine, and debate issues. The other half fight without regard to evidence, rather than debate. They accept any claims against Israel before it is checked and after it is disproved. They let nothing interfere with their Western-movie-cardboard-storefront stereotype of Zionism, Israel, and Jews. One way they deal with my articles, which present evidence and cite earlier articles for more evidence, is to ignore the evidence. They ignore the content of the articles. Disliking the title and conclusion of the article, they denounce the whole article and me. Strangely, they don't denounce my sources. They generalize: Israel bad, Arabs good. If helps them not to be logical. Their view of Jews is, Jews are too prejudiced to be fair about the Arab-Israel conflict. All Jews stick together. Except all the leftist Jews, such as Noam Chomsky and Rabbi Lerner. When my pro-Arab critics deal with Jews with whom they disagree, they forget about the Jews who agree with them. Not fair. The Nazis used to condemn "the Jews" as being Communists. The Communists used to condemn "the Jews" as being "cosmopolitan," i.e., not tied to the Soviet Union. Jews get it from all sides. Arabs, thinking other people solidly divide along confessional (religious) lines, as in Lebanon and Iraq, urge that there be a minimum quota of Arabs in the U.S. Executive branch to "represent" the Arabs. This confessional stereotype causes them to suspect all Jews in the federal government of being Israeli agents, formally or informally. Somehow such Arabs don't notice the many leftist, appeasement-minded Jews in government, such as "Baker's Jews" and Obama's Chief of Staff Emmanuel. Actually, Jews, like Protestants and Catholics, have a diversity of views. (People contend that not all the Palestinian Arabs want terrorism. Polls, however, show that most do. The whole society there is run in behalf of jihad. Nobody dares protest. Tolerant dissidents don't count, there.) Can't dispute my facts with other evidence? Call me a name. Defamation works in their circles. I am not qualified to discuss the issue, because I am a Jew? Only gentiles may discuss the issue? And what is the gentiles' record? Gentiles have practiced a certain amount of discrimination. But Western society is diverse in views, so one should deal with individual cases. What do these critics know about me? Nothing but what they read. Whence, then, their speculation about my having bad motives? About my conspiring with others? That is not sincere debate, that is smear, akin to street-fighting. It doesn't belong in our forum. They try to cram me into their narrow stereotype of Jews. I have worked with some Jewish organizations and walked out on some. I think for myself and I study news and documents. But one claimed that I follow an AIPAC line. Why? Because she stereotyped AIPAC as the archetypical Jewish lobby. She judged me by very few articles out of my 600 on display and my 18,000 in all. A number of my articles dispute AIPAC's strength and ideology. However, those critics don't have the big picture. The make snap judgments fitting stereotypes. Misrepresentation is another of their tactics. One put words into my mouth, and then condemned me for what I actually had not written. Another accused me of "cherry-picking" international law, to support my argument. At least she recognized that I had cited some international law. Others don't. Did I cherry-pick? No. My procedure assumes that most people have heard the powers that be. The ruling class has and pursues personal interests, sometimes at odds with their national interests, not objectivity. As a result, most people have misconceptions. This is true of many issues, not just of jihad. Therefore, in the course of a dozen articles, I presented both side's cases. Regarding international law, as well as Arab claims, I state the Arab case as well as my own analysis. I have to, in order to refute it. I have discussed international law with three leading experts and read their briefs: Dr. Paul Riebenfeld, deceased, Douglas Feith, and Dr. Malvina Halberstam. I read the explanations of State Dept. official Eugene Rostow involved in UN resolutions and Arthur Goldberg, who wrote UN Resolution 242. They explained the popular distortions of their documents and selective quoting from the Geneva Conventions so as to condemn Israel for nothing that the conventions really prohibited. I analyze all aspects. That is not cherry-picking. This is working out a conclusion. I am fallible, but those who condemn Israel do cherry pick. They quote parts of laws out of context, and omit other law altogether, such as the Palestine Mandate, still determining the legal status of the Territories. They do not take up the points my sources and I bring out. Just as the law is complex, so is the question of human rights, as in the Gaza war. War is not conducted before a jury. Not all aspects of war are clear immediately or even after investigation. People purport to be witnesses. Are they reliable? Claims are made. How do we evaluate competing views? The critics' standard is, if it's against Israel, they believe it. No analysis. They exhibit little background information against which to judge it. My approach: First, ideology. The jihadist ideology is to do anything for the cause. That includes murder and deceit. They may attack primarily civilians always to demoralize them and sometimes to exterminate them. They may risk their own civilians both to inhibit Israel (because they know that Israel really doesn't like to kill civilians and doesn't want infamy for doing so) and to criticize Israel hypocritically if Israel does find sufficient military necessity to attack a munitions depot in a house. Hamas can count on the international humanitarian organizations to condemn Israel unjustifiably. The humanitarian organizations have become political or ideological, with double standards against the Jewish state. I haven't only said so, but showed it. The IDF ideology is to give civilian lives top or a high priority. A friend of mine was an IDF psychologist, who specialized in sensitivity training toward Palestinian Arabs. The result is to refrain from some attacks and some military surprise, in order to spare enemy civilians, and when attacking, to try to spare civilians. Israel has taken measures that no other country has, such as warning whole cities of civilians to evacuate, and telephoning house residents to evacuate, so only the forts and arms depots are bombed. Israel has the most humane war ideology and the worst public relations. Go figure! Second, the record. Human Rights Watch had to retract a number of important accusations against Israel. The UN had to admit its haste in condemning Israel, several times. A French Court, despite its prejudice in favor of French TV, eventually found the TV presentation of the death of an Arab boy at the hands of the IDF a fraud. Other investigators found no evidence of the boy's death. The PLO stages such scenes. The State Dept. traditionally is anti-Zionist, having opposed the formation of the Jewish state and reneging on its promises to Israel. Third, the methods used. The UN several times voted its conclusions before it sent out investigators. Its votes come from biased governments, perpetrators and allies of human rights violations. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch focuses on Israel and gives the Arabs almost a free ride. They come up with unverified statements from local Arabs without considering that those people may be terrorists or pro-terrorist. They rarely consult the IDF, to get its videos and explanations. The hysterical, blood libel still emanating from Arab governments and mosques make them a most unreliable source. All this is beyond the ken of certain anti-Zionists. They keep bringing up long-disproved accusations. One who ignores the frequent and widespread Arab dancing in the streets upon news of successful terrorism against the U.S. or Israel, including 9/11, brings up the instance of six Israelis detained when filming 9/11. They did film it; they weren't celebrating it, as first alleged. The last thing Israeli Jews would want is destruction of the U.S.. U.S. authorities realized the police were being cautious and that the youths were not hostile to the U.S.. My various articles flesh out these summaries. Rather than paraphrase the human rights issues in Gaza, I am including links to two more analyses of them. I was particularly impressed by the high level and objectivity of the scientist, himself an active humanitarian: http://israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=3663&q=1 http://israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=3661&q=1 THE U.S.-ISRAEL AGREEMENT ON SETTLEMENTS Governments often discuss terms, agree verbally, and file a record of agreement. Dov Weissglass, aide to PM Sharon, with whom Pres. Bush made an agreement on settlements, explains that the verbal agreement was on exceptions to the Roadmap provisions. On December 18, 2003, PM Sharon detailed both his Gaza evacuation plan and the Bush agreement assurances, which gave Sharon confidence [really cover] in proceeding with evacuation. "The text of the speech was read, analyzed, and carefully studied everywhere, and especially in the United States. Yet nobody, either here or there, stood up or protested: "What construction? What agreement?" The speech was met with loud applause, among others by the US ambassador to Israel at the time — who was among the guests of honor at the Herzliya Conference, and who recently made a point of denying the existence of the agreement in an article he wrote." "Talk such as 'there was never such agreement,' "'these were only verbal understandings," or 'if there was an agreement, it was violated by Israel, and in any case it should be annulled given the changing circumstances' is reminiscent of a person who at court claims that he never signed a promissory note, while at the same time arguing that he already paid it in full a long time ago." "A former senior White House official, Elliot Abrams, wrote recently that Clinton is wrong, and that an agreement was reached. "I was there," he noted in a Wall Street Journal article last week." The Arab-Israel conflict is delicate. U.S. guarantees and verification will be made. U.S. reneging and denial of its agreement breaches the necessary trust. Who will accept a Presidents' pledge, if his successor asks, what pledge? (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/2). I remember the conditions on which Sharon accepted the Roadmap. The U.S. cannot hold Israel to the Map without those conditions. I also remember Pres. Bush's letter. It was uncomfortably vague, for me, but what Israel says it means was clear enough in the letter. Hence Clinton and Obama denials of any such agreement or conditions are deliberate falsehoods. What else? The whole Obama administration duplicity is disgusting and dismaying. For an example of what U.S. pressure gets Israel to do, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner ~y2009m7d28-Jerusalem-to-halt-most-demolition-of-Arab-houses FALSE REASON GIVEN FOR ROADBLOCK DISMANTLING PM Netanyahu dismantled many roadblocks to increase Arab mobility, at the risk of Israeli civilian lives. He did not admit it. Instead, Israel implied there was no significant risk. [That falsely implies that roadblocks never were needed.] One result: Obama demands more Israeli risk. Another result will be terrorist attack. The Israeli response should include authorizing an outpost (Dr. Aaron Lerner, http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/2). Israel has had to restore roadblocks repeatedly, after acceding to U.S. pressure to remove them. It is an exercise whose repetition speaks ill of the Palestinian Arabs, the U.S., and Israel, for murder, accessory to murder, and weakness to the point of betrayal, respectively. DOUBLE STANDARD ON BLOCKADE OF GAZA Both Israel and Egypt maintain a partial blockade of Gaza. Only Israel receives criticism for it. Those who criticize Israel as inhumane for blockading, do not criticize Egypt as inhumane for blockading. That demonstrates still another double standard against Israel. It also exposes as pretext the professed humanitarianism of the protestors against Israel. If they cared about the people of Gaza, they would protest to Egypt, too. Then, again, if they cared about the people of Gaza, they would protest to Hamas for causing the blockade, for attacking gates through which humanitarian aid otherwise would go, for stealing humanitarian aid, for diverting foreign aid to jihad instead of to the people, and for using the people as human shields. The same diversion of humanitarian aid to jihad and to personal use should provoke a great international outcry against Abbas' Palestinian Authority (P.A.). Instead, the EU and U.S. keep allocating more foreign aid to the P.A. and blame P.A. economic problems on Israel. A similar double standard exists in America over foreign aid. People complain about U.S. aid to Israel. They do not complain about the equally expensive subsidy of Arab groups, some of which are terrorist and imperialistic and all of whose peoples hate America. It's not the expense that bothers complainers against aid to Israel. They either are just anti-Zionist or don't know the issue. For more on the blockade, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d28-How-Israel-handled-wouldbe-blockade-breakers OBAMA'S DELUSION ABOUT JIHAD I met someone familiar with the public personalities involved. This person gave me insights that I share with you, undocumented. President Obama and Chief-of-Staff Rahm were Chicago activists who view the rest of the world from their Midwestern municipal perch. Narrow! Rahm is a left-wing radical. They are full of the conceit that Arab leaders don't mean their threats, the way Chicago politicians may not, and that the fast-talking Obama and Rahm could persuade them to make peace. This attitude is delusional. My observation is that the thousands of murders after Arafat made peace, and the PLO dedication of its whole society to carrying out its threats, should disillusion Obama-Rahm. After years of indoctrinating their people in jihad, if Arab leaders tried to stop the incitement and imperialistic claims, admit the years of misinforming the people, and urge tolerance of infidels, their hate-filled people would purge them. Arafat feared assassination by Hamas. How is Obama diplomacy going? Putin lectured Obama for 45 minutes. When Obama asked the Saudi King to make a small gesture to Israel, he refused, as everybody knows. Less known is that the King lost his temper and gave Obama a tongue-lashing. He had to apologize to Obama. To see Obama misstatements about jihad, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d28-Repercussions-of-Obamas-murky-talk-about-Islam DOES TERRORISM BOOST THE PRESTIGE OF ISLAM? The Indian government recorded the phone calls between the Mumbai terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan. Here are key points from the translation. The handlers instructed the terrorists to kill every non-Muslim they can, including hostages no longer useful in shielding them from police. The terrorists were not to be taken alive. They referred to their chief being a major-general [implying complicity by the Pakistani Army]. The assault team was told they were contributing to the "prestige of Islam," and "in the name of Allah," for "Allah is with you." (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 7/2). Does terrorism boost the prestige of Islam? Is Allah with those who murder innocent people? What do you think? I'd like to hear from Muslims whether those terrorists speak for you. I'd also like to hear from those who think that the only problem with Radical Islam is Israel. In a few weeks, I may be documenting hundreds of instances of millions of victims of jihad all over the world. What ethnic cleansing in Pakistan! ANOTHER PALESTINIAN ARAB DESECRATION When Israel expelled the Jews from Gaza, they also expelled them from four communities in northern Samaria, turned over to the Palestinian Authority. Now Arabs raided an unauthorized yeshiva in one of those towns, Homesh. Ignoring beds and other personal equipment, the vandals burned the copies of the Talmud and Five Books of Moses. Yeshiva students buried the ashes, saved a few pages, and suggest that the government reconstitute an even larger town of Homesh as its answer to Arab intolerance (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 7/2). So far, the government has no response to this religious desecration. Therefore, no deterrence. (I am not discussing the complex legal situation.) IDF CANCELS TRAINING ON MT. HERMON, FOR WILDLIFE Finding out that military training on the top of Mt. Hermon, in the Golan, would harm the unique and delicate wildlife in summertime, the IDF canceled training there in summers (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/2). Israel has a mixed record, but its Society for the Protection of Nature In Israel, whose tours I took, has been correcting one track emphasis on building. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

REPEALING THE LAWS OF PHYSICS Posted by Shaul and Aviva Ceder, July 30, 2009.

Subject: Automotive Industry Challenge... Dr. David Cole From a senior level Chrysler person Monday morning I attended a breakfast meeting where the speaker/guest was Dr. David E. Cole, Chairman, Center for Automotive Research, (CAR and Professor at the University of Michigan ). You have all likely heard CAR quoted, or referred to in the auto industry news lately. Dr. Cole, who is an engineer by training, told many stories of the difficulty of working with the folks that the Obama administration has sent to save the auto industry. There have been many meetings where a 30+ year experience automotive expert has to listen to a newcomer to the industry, someone with zero manufacturing experience, zero auto industry experience, zero business experience, zero finance experience, and zero engineering experience, tell them how to run their business. Dr. Cole's favorite story is as follows: There was a team of Obama people speaking to Dr. Cole (Graduate Engineer, automotive experience 40+ years, Chairman of CAR). They were explaining to Dr. Cole that the auto companies needed to make a car that was electric and utilized liquid natural gas (LNG) with enough combined fuel to go 500 miles so we wouldn't "need" so many gas stations, (a whole other topic). They were quoting the BTU's of LNG and battery life that they had looked up on some website. Dr. Cole explained that to do this you would need a trunk FULL of batteries and a LNG tank as big as the car to make it happen and that there were problems related to the basic laws of physics that prevented them from... The Obama person interrupted and said (and I am quoting here): "These laws of physics? Who's rules are those? We need to change that." (Some of the others diligently wrote down the law name so they could look it up). "We have both the congress and the administration. We can repeal that law, amend it, or use an executive order to get rid of that problem. That's why we are here, to fix these sort of issues". This country is in big trouble... Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il To Go To Top

TISHA BE'AV: THE THIRD TEMPLE THAT WASN'T Posted by Shaul Ceder, July 30, 2009.

This was written by Alexander Zvielli, a veteran Jerusalem Post staffer, and it appeared July 23, 2007 in Jerusalem Post www.jpost. com/servlet/ Satellite? cid=118476604461 9& pagename= JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

On this day, as we mourn the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, it seems fitting to recall a little-known story of how a Roman emperor stood ready to rebuild the third temple. He acted not out of love for the Jewish people, but because he was a pagan who — despite its ascendency — despised Christianity. The Roman Emperor Julian, who ruled 361-363 CE, called on the Jews to return to the Land of Israel and rebuild their Temple in Jerusalem. Whatever his motives, he showed our ancestors unusual respect and understanding. Julian was hardly an ordinary emperor, though history has failed to pay sufficient attention to his policies. In Julian, the Romans had a just ruler and brave soldier. He was a modest man who labored to relieve the distress of his subjects while endeavoring to connect authority with merit and happiness with virtue. As a young soldier Julian subdued, against the odds, the German threat in Gaul with a small force. He ruled ancient Gaul with wisdom and authority, hardly ever seeking a personal gain. He slept on the ground with his legionnaires, earning their respect. Julian was an excellent organizer, an honest judge, a writer and a philosopher. Brought up as a Christian, Julian rejected the religion and turned back to the paganism of Greek and Roman days. He argued that Christianity would weaken and ultimately destroy the Roman Empire. As a result, he attempted to restore Hellenism, which earned him everlasting Christian disdain. Known to Christians as Julian the Apostate, the emperor restored pagan temples and the cult of the old Roman gods. These were to be served by a reform-minded pagan clergy with high moral character, who would compete with the Christian clergy in meeting the religious needs of the people. Julian remains famous for having declared absolute freedom for all religious beliefs — making him perhaps the first leader to extend toleration of religion to all Romans. ON THE July 19, 362 C.E., Julian left Constantinople and arrived in Antioch to prepare for the invasion of Persia. However busy he must have been, he met with "the chiefs of the Jews." The details of this fascinating meeting, preserved only in Christian sources, are cited in Michael Avi Yona's The Jews under Roman and Byzantine Rule — A Political History from the Bar Kochba War to the Arab Conquest. Julian, who wanted to form a common cause with the Jews against Christianity, asked: "Why do you not sacrifice to God, as required by the laws of Moses?" The Jews replied: "We are not allowed by our laws to sacrifice outside our Holy City. How can we do it now? Restore to us the City, rebuild the Temple and the altar, and we shall offer sacrifices, as in days of old." He promised: "I shall endeavor with the utmost zeal to set up the Temple of the Most High God."   THE RESTORATION of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem would, in Julian's opinion, defeat the Christian argument of replacement theology — that the Church was the true Israel, and that the Temple's destruction and the subsequent exile was the just punishment suffered by the Jewish people for the Crucifixion. The Temple's restoration, Julian figured, would persuade Christian converts that God still favored the Jewish people. As an army commander, embarking on a war against a formidable Persian enemy, Julian could also expect that the Jews of Mesopotamia would assist his legions. But there can also be no doubt that Julian's attitude of fairness and his respect for the stubborn stand of the Jewish remnant played a role in his desire to achieve a Jewish restoration. In his "Four Letters" addressed to the Jewish people, Julian recognized their dire situation and appealed to them to join him in his campaign. That's a vast difference from the Persian ruler Cyrus, who had only allowed the Jews to rebuild the Temple; Julian virtually ordered them to do so, and perhaps, upset by their initial hesitation, appointed Alypius, a pagan native of Antioch and his best friend, to supervise the work. In a letter to the Jewish Patriarch Hillel II, residing in Tiberias, Julian abrogated the entire gamut of anti-Jewish legislation and recognized Jewish authority in Israel, including the right to levy taxes.   ACCORDING TO the Christian sources, there was considerable initial enthusiasm among the Jews of Diaspora. Many purses were opened. But other leading Jews were confused and apprehensive. The community had only recently suffered yet another painful defeat in the failed uprising against Gallus (351 C.E.), which erupted in protest against discriminatory anti-Jewish legislation. The Patriarchate had lost Lydda, the few remaining settlements in Judea and several vital Galilean villages. The people quoted a verse from Daniel (11:34): "Now when they shall stumble, they shall be helped with a little help; but many shall join themselves unto them with blandishments. " The Jews were doubtless divided between those who believed that Julian was a savior and those who remembered Rabbi Simon Ben Eliezer's warning against the youthful enthusiasm of the second generation after the Bar Kochba disaster: "If children tell you: 'Go, build the Temple — do not listen to them.'" Above all, could Jewish hopes depend on the fortunes of one man? In the end, no attempt was made to set up a temporary altar and offer sacrifices on the former Temple grounds, as the Maccabeans had done. While the Jews could not oppose the will of the Roman emperor, they could drag their feet. Apparently the majority did. They remembered Rome as Amalek, not as a benefactor.   THE WORK ordered on the Temple's foundation advanced slowly. It took time to provide silver spades and pickaxes, since no iron was allowed to be used. And then, according to the Roman writer Ammianus, "balls of fire" supposedly erupted from the foundations and rendered the place inaccessible. The Christian majority of Jerusalem described this fire in glowing terms, as a splendid miracle, a further proof of the rightness of Christianity. The Jews suspected Christian arson. Meanwhile Alypius, Julian's pagan friend, seemed hardly in a hurry to carry out the emperor's order. At any rate, the opportunity to rebuild the Temple was lost. Notwithstanding the lack of Jewish sources for this fascinating episode, there can be little doubt that Julian's failure resulted in yet another deep national trauma, traces of which can be found among anti-Zionist circles in our own time. Moreover, the failures of the 67, 112 and 135 CE Jewish uprisings, other bloody skirmishes with the Roman and Byzantine Christian regimes, and the further trauma of Julian's endeavor were more than the Jewish nation could bear for many generations. With Julian's death came the Emperor Jovian, a faithful Christian, and a Church-led assault on Jews and Judaism. And so it was that by the time of the Persian and finally Arab conquests of Jerusalem, the local Jewish population was a mere remnant of a once-thriving society. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il To Go To Top

WHY THE MUSLIMS WILL NEVER RECOGNISE THE JEWISH STATE Posted by Shaul Ceder, July 30, 2009.

Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a research associate at the BESA Center and a lecturer in the departments of Arabic and Middle East Studies at Bar-Ilan University, is a 25-year veteran of IDF Military Intelligence specializing in Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinians and Islamic groups. This article appeared as Begin-Sadat Center Perspectives Papers No. 87, July 28, 2009. http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/perspectives87.html

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish nation-state, or as the rightful homeland of the Jewish People, is a necessary condition of any future Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty — according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Arab and Islamic leaders have rejected this demand. The reason for Arab inability and unwillingness to consider Netanyahu's demand is the fact that the Islamic world is ideologically incapable of according legitimacy to the State of Israel, for deep-seated religious, nationalistic and historical reasons. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has set out five conditions for the conclusion of an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal involving establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The first, and the hardest for the Arab world to accept, is Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish nation-state, or as the rightful homeland of the Jewish People. In fact, it is close to impossible, because Islam is intrinsically incapable of according legitimacy to the State of Israel for the embedded ideological reasons detailed below. The First Component: Religion According to Islam, the Jewish religion was invalidated by the birth of Christianity, which in turn was invalidated by the arrival of Islam. This concept was set down in the Koran: "Surely the true religion with Allah is Islam" (Chapter 3, Verse 19). Thus Allah does not recognize any other religion besides Islam. Islam — according to its own perception — brought the message of truth to the world, after the Jews and Christians changed and distorted the word of Allah given to them. In light of their conduct, Allah removed their religious role and theological message and passed it to the Muslims, who are the sole "believers." Thus, Islam's basic approach is not that it came to the world to exist alongside other religions as equal among equals, but to replace them. A conclusion from this is that Judaism as a religion has lost its significance and role in the world. If so, how could one establish a Jewish state? And how could one claim that land can be holy to Judaism after this religion has been declared null and void? And since when do Jews — members of a meaningless religion — have the right to a state in any land, after they betrayed Allah and refused to accept Din al-Haqq "the religion of truth," Islam? In practice, Islam recognized the Jews as "people of the Book" and not as infidels, although on condition that they live under Islamic rule as "dhimmis" — protégés of Islam, and "pay the Jizya (per capita tax) with willing submission." (Koran Chapter 9, Verse 29). However, once they conquered land, and killed and deported Muslims, they lost the privileges granted to them by the "Pact of Omar." Therefore, Israel's demand that Islam recognize it as a state for the Jewish People contradicts the most basic tenets of Islam, which view Judaism as null and void. Israel's demand actually requires Islam to recognize Judaism as a legitimate religion even though God himself stated in the Koran that "whoever seeks a religion other than Islam, will never be accepted" (Chapter 3, Verse 85). The Second Component: Nationality Judaism is perceived in the Islamic world as a communal religion, without either an ethnic or national basis. There are other instances of this. The people living in Iraq consist of many religious groups: Muslims, Christians, Sabaiis, Mandeans, Yazidis, and Jews. They are all members of the Arab nation, all sons of the Iraqi people and they all have a place in Iraqi land. There are Arab Iraqi Muslims, Arab Iraqi Christians and Arab Iraqi Jews, all members of religious communities which are part of the Iraqi people. The same goes for Yemen — which has Arab Yemenite Muslims and Arab Yemenite Jews, and for Morocco and the rest of the Islamic states, which have Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities. Furthermore, from an Islamic perspective this is a way to view other countries: the Jew in Poland is Polish from an ethnic perspective and Jewish from a religious perspective. The French Jew is a member of the French nation who practices Judaism. Thus, there are no ethnic Jews in the world, just as there are no ethnic Christians or Muslims. Suddenly, Jewish communities declare that they are one people, sharing the same ethnic background, as if all the Jews in the world look alike, speak the same language, share customs and cuisine, and dress in similar fashion! This is the "great lie" of the Zionist movement, according to Islamists: creating a Jewish people out of nothing, and trying to convince the world at large that a Jewish People does indeed exist. Even worse, these Jewish communities have decided to migrate to Palestine, to "displace" the original inhabitants and to establish a state, whose name has no connection to the Jewish people but to the mythological Sons of Israel. So, from the Islamic perspective, how can one recognize this state as the "State of the Jewish People" — an ethnic group that does not really exist? The Third Component: Land Palestine was sanctified as Muslim land by two acts. The first was its conquest during the period of Khalif Omar bin al-Khattab in the third decade of the seventh century. This placed Palestine within the group of countries which were under Islamic rule, like Spain, Sicily and part of the Balkans, and which must be returned to the bosom of Islam. The second act was the Islamic tradition which claims that the Khalif Omar declared Palestine, from the sea to the Jordan, as Waqf (holy endowment) land, consecrated for all Muslim generations forever. So how can the Jews — whose religion is illegitimate and who are not an ethnic people — demand that the Muslims recognize the conquest of the land of Palestine which is holy to Muslims alone? Ideological Realities Thus, according to Islam, the State of Israel is not legitimate. From a religious point of view, Judaism is void. The Jewish nation is an invention of the Zionist movement. The land called "Israel" is considered Islamic Waqf land, consecrated for Muslims. Netanyahu's insistence on recognition of the state as a Jewish nation-state contradicts the Islamic faith, and questions the very essence of Islam, whose relevance is based on the invalidity of Judaism (and Christianity as well). Therefore, there is no escape from the conclusion that Israel's struggle for survival is religiously based, even if externally it assumes the form of a territorial struggle. It does not matter what its size, Israel will never gain recognition by the Arab and Muslim world as a legitimate state. Similarly, international documents which legitimize the "Jewish State," such as United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 of 29 November 1947, are viewed by Muslims as illegitimate. Many say: "You are turning a territorial conflict into a religious one," when they mean to say that territorial concessions would facilitate the recognition of the Arabs and Muslims in the legitimacy of the State of Israel. Such a statement assumes that the Arab and Muslim world is as secular as our own, and shares our concepts, values and priorities. This is the result of Israeli and Western ignorance of all that is related to Islam and the Arab world, derived from the fact that Westerners do not understand Arabic and Arab and Islamic culture. Israelis and Westerners alike are not exposed to the harsh truths which are expressed in the local tongues, and are well-concealed by spokesmen of "inter-religious dialogue." Recognition of Israel as a legitimate Jewish nation-state has no hope or chance as long as Islam perceives itself — and itself alone — as "the true religion with Allah." Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il To Go To Top

A WARNING TO ISRAEL — A MODERN MIRACLE DENIED Posted by Louis A. Romo, July 30, 2009.

I hope you like my "warning" in a loose style poetic form and publish it. I recently sent the following e-mail to Mr. Netanyahu. with today being the 9th of Av, I think it is a real warning that is in a more "readable" form FOR many people who would not ordinarily read through a regular op-ed. sincerely, Louis........ I truly believe the noose is being tightened deliberately against Christians now to intimidate them for when the real clamp down on Jews begin. With obama's openly "kill the elderly" by denying them health care we are now just as bad as Nazi Germany in 1930. Euthanasia was extremely popular in America before wwII

Gather around all yea nations of the earth, sing with gladness and plot no evil against the Lord. Hear the word of the Lord, it is truth, declare It in the Isles; publishing and praising. Man's 6000 allotted years are up, — latter days truly here — In 1948 God made Israel reappear!   HE that scattered Israel long ago has re-gathered him from all countries. Jacob — you are the Lord's watchman, Shake yourself from dust, Arise and loosen shackles of distrust. 2520 year exile over earth done, Falter not as Esau selling birthright for stew called peace — Security. Today you are at the final, the last crossroad, watch with forebode. Hell about to explode.   Read the Scrolls of life and follow your star through coming cleansing fire. Beware Covenant guarantor with pen of peace; to be Messiah his supreme desire. Make not pact with Sheol and give land for thorny peace. Kings of earth ready to gulp from Cup Of Wrath as they plan your existence to cease! When greedy kings divide Holy land for your demise, Surely at Lord's out cry the dead will rise! And he that divides the land, his land divided in middle and coasts in upheaval in Day Of the lord.   My Beloved Israel, Keeper of the sacred holy book, Hold my trembling hand, listen to my plea! Trust not America, the fallen lady of liberty; with great sorrow and tears, to save freedom dear, I give thee a warning cry clear as enemy comes near. Though dressed in fine purple linens of royal attire, her children drowning in devil's quagmire. Clouds of evil darkness laden with greed, deceit, and lust blanket the nation entire. Trust not lady Of Liberty past; blindfolded, mind set and molded.   Look in the mirror called truth and see America's stealthy stealers and CEO looters! 3-piece suited thieves; like vultures plucking in quietude; clients delude, God exclude. America — lewd and nude. At 234 years unable to endure, the nation's spirit and soul seen as manure. Truth has fled away, the laws are burnt, it's the time of parting asunder of the times. Sounding alarm to keep all from harm, to no avail, for hell shall prevail. Look in the mirror! Already the nations tip the scales of justice, heavy with rebellion. Wickedness has exceedingly polluted the prostrated planet, moving as a violent stallion. Man has become an evil destroyer of self, living like beasts, raping the righteous. Friends fight one another like enemies because of great greed and horrendously vain pride.   Remember, O'Israel, YOU are HIS SERVANT JACOB, Seed of Abraham, whom HE has chosen. The Lord has not forgotten you. You are HIS witnesses and men shall call you ministers of God. FOR THIS MOMENT, The redeeming lord has assembled you with everlasting kindness. Be not rebellious and stiff necked; trust not in vain, false, and narcisstic pharaohs. Gather your American and European daughters and sons, let them not look back like Lot's wife. Oh' little Israel, The world asleep, sees you not as the last light before the coming night. All mankind — once again God's message rejected, Darwin elected. Scoffers walking after their own lusts. Servants and teachers of sensual corruption, living in pleasures like devils freed, surrounded by Fountains of evil bursting with greed.   For YOU, Jacob, were chose long ago to protect and uphold divine revelation without abdication. Our souls bound by yoke and sin, are tossed by Satan from woe to woe like leaves in wind. The world drunk, reeling and saying, God's laws we transgressed; with sin obsessed. Jacob, be my candlestick, light the trail; take my hand and lead me to the promised land as the last ray of light, starting to fade as we begin descent into Valley Of Decision. Standing at edge of end's time, Way is clear, path not hidden, tis same fight all over again. Israel, you will ride the thunderbolt of truth across vile earth as the devil's night descends. In The Canyon a new world order awaits to MARK all for hell, but in you God will dwell. Elijah the Prophet at the door, set his cup for he by your side you'll excel and evil repel. Armageddon at end of trail, an angel shall bind Lucifer with chains and to bottomless pit befell. Messiah of Isaiah 52 and 53 you will first see when HE sets HIS feet at Mount of Olives.   With you by HIS side Messiah shall reign on 7th day, a thousand years of peace. On the eighth day new heaven and earth — restoration of all creation; time in never ending circle. A new eternity, a new paradise for those with name in Book of Life, shining like the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness, as the stars forever and ever. Mr. Romo is a non-denominational Christian. He lives in Stockton California. To Go To Top

IT'S CRUNCH TIME FOR ISRAEL ON IRAN Posted by Cpocerl, July 30, 2009.

This is by Ambassador John Bolton and it appeared as a Wall Street Journal Opinion piece http://online.wsj.com/article/ SB10001424052970203609204574316093622744808.html# Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations" (Simon & Schuster, 2007). After years of failed diplomacy no one will be able to call an attack precipitous.

Legions of senior American officials have descended on Jerusalem recently, but the most important of them has been Defense Secretary Robert Gates. His central objective was to dissuade Israel from carrying out military strikes against Iran's nuclear weapons facilities. Under the guise of counseling "patience," Mr. Gates again conveyed President Barack Obama's emphatic thumbs down on military force. The public outcome of Mr. Gates's visit appeared polite but inconclusive. Yet Iran's progress with nuclear weapons and air defenses means Israel's military option is declining over time. It will have to make a decision soon, and it will be no surprise if Israel strikes by year's end. Israel's choice could determine whether Iran obtains nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future. Mr. Obama's approach to Tehran has been his "open hand," yet his gesture has not only been ignored by Iran but deemed irrelevant as the country looks inward to resolve the aftermath of its fraudulent election. The hardliner "winner" of that election, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was recently forced to fire a deputy who once said something vaguely soothing about Israel. Clearly, negotiations with the White House are not exactly topping the Iranian agenda. Beyond that, Mr. Obama's negotiation strategy faces insuperable time pressure. French President Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed that Iran must re-start negotiations with the West by September's G-20 summit. But this means little when, with each passing day, Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile laboratories, production facilities and military bases are all churning. Israel is focused on these facts, not the illusion of "tough" diplomacy. Israel rejects another feature of Mr. Obama's diplomatic stance. The Israelis do not believe that progress with the Palestinians will facilitate a deal on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Though Mr. Gates and others have pressed this fanciful analysis, Israel will not be moved. Worse, Mr. Obama has no new strategic thinking on Iran. He vaguely promises to offer the country the carrot of diplomacy — followed by an empty threat of sanctions down the road if Iran does not comply with the U.S.'s requests. This is precisely the European Union's approach, which has failed for over six years. There's no reason Iran would suddenly now bow to Mr. Obama's diplomatic efforts, especially after its embarrassing election in June. So with diplomacy out the door, how will Iran be tamed? Mr. Gates' mission had extraordinary significance. Israel sees the political and military landscape in a very inauspicious light. It also worries that, once ensnared in negotiations, the Obama administration will find it very hard to extricate itself. The Israelis are probably right. To prove the success of his "open hand," Mr. Obama will declare victory for "diplomacy" even if it means little to no gains on Iran's nuclear program. Under the worst-case scenario, Iran will continue improving its nuclear facilities and Mr. Obama will become the first U.S. president to tie the issue of Israel's nuclear capabilities into negotiations about Iran's. Israel understands that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent commitment to extend the U.S. "defense umbrella" to Israel is not a guarantee of nuclear retaliation, and that it is wholly insufficient to deter Iran from obliterating Israel if it so decides. In fact, Mrs. Clinton's comment tacitly concedes that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons, exactly the wrong message. Since Israel, like the U.S., is well aware its missile defense system is imperfect, whatever Mr. Gates said about the "defense umbrella" will be politely ignored. Relations between the U.S. and Israel are more strained now than at any time since the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. Mr. Gates's message for Israel not to act on Iran, and the U.S. pressure he brought to bear, highlight the weight of Israel's lonely burden. Striking Iran's nuclear program will not be precipitous or poorly thought out. Israel's attack, if it happens, will have followed enormously difficult deliberation over terrible imponderables, and years of patiently waiting on innumerable failed diplomatic efforts. Absent Israeli action, prepare for a nuclear Iran. Contact CPocerl at Cpocerl@aol.com To Go To Top

CAN AMERICA & ISRAEL SURVIVE 4 YEARS OF OBAMA? Posted by Rock Peters, July 30, 2009.

I believe Obama is an anti-Semite and I know that he is anti-Israel. Do me a favor and post this forwarded article on your site. I am trying to raise funds to produce a series of national PAC TV commercials that will end the Obama regime quickly. Have you seen my latest work "Fly Infidel Airlines"? It's on my site under POEMS. You'll get a laugh. Yours in Liberty, Rock Peters author, songwriter, poet, patriot email: rockpeters@aol.com web site: WWW.GODSAVEUSA.COM

In FOUR Years of Obama in the White House 1) Obama will allow Iran to develop nuclear weapon which will give Muslim terrorists "Weapons of Mass Destruction" we will see WMD Muslim terrorist attacks in the US and around the world. a nuclear Iran will mean the total annihilation and the END of Israel, (a Second Jewish Holocaust.) 2) Obama will finish his socialization and nationalization of the US economy; this will stifle human initiative, destroy our standard of living, bankrupt the US economy which will mean the END of the Free Enterprise System and the END of Capitalism in America. 3) Obama will attempt to infringe upon and take away our right to bear arms, try yo pass "Hate Speech" laws and do all he can to silence conservative talk radio which, will be the END the American liberty we enjoy today. 4) Obama will give amnesty to 25,000,000 illegal aliens and 99% of them will register Democrat which will mean the END of the Republican Party, the END of the two party system and the END of the America as we know it. TAKING ACTION Will we Americans sit by and watch as Obama systematically dismantles and destroys our country and betrays Israel? We absolutely can not wait four years for the next election. Obama must go immediately. After six months in office Obama has still not released his birth certificate. I have created an explosive national PR campaign, a series of powerful TV PAC commercials that will bring incredible, unbearable public pressure on the Obama White House to prove his eligibility. Unite with us in launching these commercials on the air across the USA, dethroning Obama and saving our nation. NOTE It is possible that Obama's destruction of America is intentional. Obama may very well be functionally insane. Israeli psychologist, Dr. Sam Vankin, (the world's leading expert on NPD) has stated that Obama shows clear signs and has all the symptoms of "Narcissistic Personality Disorder." Obama is undoubtedly an anti-Semite and he has deep seated animosity for the United States.   Can this person really be in our White House? Fact: America will not and Israel may not survive four years of Obama. To Go To Top

BETTING ON DENNIS ROSS Posted by Daniel Mandel, July 30, 2009.

One of the small, but interesting, indeed significant, things to have emerged from the Alan Dershowitz — Melanie Phillips FrontPage Magazine debate over the Obama Administration's policies towards Israel is the manner in which Dershowitz seeks a security blanket in the existence of individual Obama Administration figures deemed pro-Israeli. Yet, his is a curious argument: it tacitly concedes that the President's background and the record of at least some of his relevant advisers and appointees — and thus the auguries regarding the likely direction of policy under his stewardship — have indeed given reason for worry. Consider some of these advisers and appointees: Zbigniew Brzezinski, who lauded the 2006 Mearsheimer-Walt demonization of the pro-Israel lobby — a demonization Dershowitz himself felt impelled to rebut; General Merrill 'Tony' McPeak, who thinks American Jewish voters prevent the U.S. playing a constructive role in bringing about peace; Robert Malley, who has urged an imposed settlement on Israel and advocated negotiations with Hamas; Samantha Power, now on the National Security Council, who has also advocated external imposition of a settlement on Israel; George Mitchell, now Special Envoy to the Middle East, whose response to the outbreak of the Palestinian terror wave in 2000 was to call for more Israeli concessions before demanding Palestinians fulfill their already existing, unfulfilled obligations under Oslo; and Daniel Kurtzer, who largely blames Israel for the 2000 Camp David negotiations failure. Yet pro-Obama Israel supporters frequently ignore these officials' records and point to other officials, or even the same ones, in the conviction that they are Israel's friends or that their mere presence foreshadows cordial American-Israeli relations: Marc R. Stanley, chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council, has pointed to several advisers and appointees — Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, George Mitchell, Peter Orszag, Dennis Ross, Kathleen Sebelius and Lawrence Summers — with "long-standing close relationships with us" among reasons for Jews to feel at ease with the Obama Administration. The Washington Jewish Week, in an October 2008 editorial supporting Obama's candidacy, asserted blithely, "On Israel, there is no doubt that McCain is a stalwart supporter, but Obama, too, is a strong friend. Need proof? Look at his closest Israel advisers, people like Dennis Ross, Robert Wexler and Daniel Kurtzer, who wouldn't work so hard as his surrogates if they didn't believe his concern for and commitment to the Jewish state were genuine and unshakable." Now, in FrontPage, Dershowitz has done the same thing. Scolded by Phillips for ignoring as formative influences on Barack Obama his own radical past associates deeply hostile to Israel, Dershowitz caviled, "No one who fits that characterture [sic] would have appointed Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, Dennis Ross (who she also attacks) as an adviser on Iran and Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff." The case for skepticism regarding Clinton and Emanuel has been made by others. However, when it comes to Dennis Ross, liberal, pro-Obama Israel supporters speak as though they are on a sure thing. Before Obama's election, the New Republic's Marty Peretz, another liberal champion of Israel, said any misgivings he had were allayed by the presence on Obama's team of the "clear-headed" Ross. Ross was to be found last year seeking to reassure Jews that it was kosher — indeed meritorious — to vote for Obama. But is Ross' own record of judgment and deeds reassuring? In an interview with me eight years ago, Ross was candid about the mistakes President Clinton and he committed in working for an Arab-Israeli peace. He was explicit about their having fatally ignored Palestinian terror and incitement to hatred and murder: [I] believe that we ... became so preoccupied with this process that the process took on a life of its own. It had self-sustaining justification. Every time there was a [Palestinian] behavior, or an incident or an event that was inconsistent with the process ... the impulse was to rationalize it, finesse it, find a way around it and not allow it to break the process. Holding the Palestinian leadership responsible for the failure of the Oslo process, Ross concluded, "I don't believe that one can focus now on the solution. You have to focus on management and defusing of the conflict." However, last year, campaigning for Obama, Ross could be found declaring that "the Bush administration walked away from peace-making for more than six years." Apparently, what Ross told me in 2001 to be impossible he now believes should have been tried ceaselessly since about that date. What made Ross change his mind? Apparently, the notion that, while Arafat could not make peace, Mahmoud Abbas ("whose intentions, I think, are for peace") and his cohorts can — and will — with U.S. support. The trouble is, precisely such supportive efforts were the sum total of the Bush Administration's approach — and it proved a failure. The Bush Administration accepted (over strenuous Israeli objections) the Roadmap peace plan in April 2003, which ordained immediate Israeli concessions and redeployments in response to untested Palestinian reforms. It pressured Israel into concessions — like the perilous abandonment of the Gaza/Egypt border. It engaged ceaselessly with a reshuffled pack of veteran Arafat loyalists — Mahmoud Abbas, Saeb Erekat, Nabil Shaath, Ahmed Qurei, with Salaam Fayyad later added to the deck — claiming these amounted to new Palestinian leadership. This embrace of Arafat loyalists was not the result — Ross' confidence in Abbas' moderation notwithstanding — of the Palestinian Authority (PA)'s dismantling the apparatus of terror or the ending of the incitement to hatred and murder that feeds it. Terrorists are not jailed — in fact, Mahmoud Abbas explicitly ruled out doing that already in 2005, contrary to Oslo and the Roadmap. Glorification of terror within the PA remains the norm and Abbas himself has described wanted terrorists as "heroes," publicly mourned dead terrorists (George Habash) and congratulated the families of living ones (Samir Kuntar) on their release by Israel. In short, the logic of dealing with Arafat loyalists involves feigning ignorance of all this. Thus, George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice liberally showered Abbas and the PA with praise, money ($600 million of U.S. taxpayer's money in Bush's last year) and arms for undetectable moderation. Under Obama, all that has changed is the magnitude of the taxpayer funds remitted to the PA (some $900 million in 2009) and the volume of pressure applied to Israel to make concessions to it. Ross served throughout the two Clinton Administrations as Middle East envoy. Where is he now? As of last month, he carries the unwieldy title of Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for the "Central Region," having been quickly shifted from the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia brief he took up only months ago within Clinton's State Department team. Whether this move presages increased or reduced influence for Ross remains to be seen. But even assuming that Ross occupies a position of influence and authority, the question is: will he serve as a bridle on the Obama Administration's heavy-handed tendencies to bully Israel, as in the present fracas over Israel building homes for Jews in Jerusalem or the West Bank? His own record affords little reason to think so. On his conduct during the Oslo years, as he conceded in 2001, Ross did not call a halt to a policy of pressure on Israel and indulgence of the PA. But his record is longer than the Oslo years. In 1992, for example, Ross and his State Department colleagues, wishing to prevent Arafat from boycotting upcoming peace talks, persuaded the George H. W. Bush Administration to strongly condemn Israel in the U.N. for expelling a dozen Palestinian ringleaders after a series of lethal terror attacks on Israelis. Then, as later, Palestinian terrorism was insufficient grounds for upsetting diplomacy that we now know led no-where but to bloodshed. And when last year Marty Peretz took Robert Malley to task for hostility to Israel, Ross joined Sandy Berger, Dan Kurtzer, Martin Indyk, Aaron Miller and other Clinton era advisers in indignantly repudiating Peretz's critique. In short, Ross' is not the record of someone who will readily oppose pressure on Israel from within the inner sanctum of an Obama Administration if these get in the way of the latest 'peace process.' Liberal supporters of Israel like Alan Dershowitz who bank on Dennis Ross to provide a countervailing influence within the Obama Administration should take note. Daniel Mandel is a fellow in history at Melbourne University, director of the Zionist Organization of America's Center for Middle East Policy, and author of H.V. Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist (Routledge, 2004). This article appeared today on Front Page Magazine http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35754 To Go To Top

RE PIECE BY PETRA MARQUARDT-BIGMAN ON FACTS DON'T MATTER Posted by Levi Sokolic, July 30, 2009.

NOTE: The Marquardt-Bigman article is available as a Think-Israel May-June 2009 feature.

She rightly takes Antony Lerman to task. But one part of the context of the psychosis of people like Lerman is to understand English society, and particularly its chattering classes. The English in general have an insane and almost incomprehensible hatred of victims and fall over themselves to succour the perpetrators of violence and to protect them from their victims. In England if a victim does anything other then passively submit they will be prosecuted and probably more harshly then the criminal. Indeed, even a passive victim is liable to arrest and prosecution. If an English person behaves beastly to you, they are outraged when you defend yourself and attack them in return. This is not something only of the idiot left. It is general in English society. Regards Levi Sokolic Contact Levi Sokolic by email at LSokolic@aol.com To Go To Top

OBAMA ADMITS HIS IRAN POLICY; HIS ANTI-DEMOCRATIC POLICY; U.S. DOUBLE STANDARD ON ISRAEL; AMNESTY INTL VS. ISRAEL Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 30, 2009.

PAKISTAN OBJECTS TO U.S. EXPANSION OF AFGHAN WAR Pakistan opposes the U.S. surge in Afghanistan. It fears a Taliban flight into Pakistan. Contradicting itself, it also denies U.S. complaints that Taliban take refuge in Pakistan. Pakistan tells the U.S. it should negotiate with the Taliban, instead of fighting them. [Since the Taliban goal is imposing their radical version of Islam, how can the U.S. negotiate them into standing down?] Why doesn't Pakistan capture the fleeing Taliban, and end the war? Not enough troops available in that sector. Most of the best troops are guarding the border with India (Eric Schmidt, Jane Perlez, NY Times, 7/22, A1). Why the border with India? They would profess fear of an Indian invasion. However, if Pakistan kept the peace with India, India wouldn't have any reason to invade. Instead, Pakistan harbors and trains terrorists who attack India, especially its Kashmir province. (Later articles will document that.) Pakistan is doing what S. Arabia and Egypt do: fight terrorists who threaten the regime, but condone terrorists who take jihad abroad. Those three countries have played the U.S. for suckers. U.S. policy failures rarely are averted or reviewed. We got into the Afghanistan war when the U.S. drained USSR strength by arming Afghans against the USSR. We let Pakistan deliver our arms. They gave the arms to jihadists. When the Soviets left, the jihadists took over. Nevertheless, the U.S. continued to trust Pakistan as an ally. The U.S. then ignored years of reports that Pakistani intelligence assisted terrorists against India. Now our Secretary of State is trying to gain the trust of India. Good luck. OBAMA ADMITS HIS IRAN POLICY Persistent reporters got President Obama to stop feigning high-sounding hopes for human rights in Iran. He doesn't care that the regime smashed its people's democratic hopes. Ambassador Rice poses in the UN as a champion of human rights, but she, too, accepts Iran's brutality. All Obama cares about is a dialogue with just such a rogue regime, regarding nuclear weapons. But he doesn't expect dialogue until, without a logical connection, he forces Israel to allow sovereignty to Abbas' Arabs, despite their jihadist policies, bad for America. "To recap, take a Holocaust-denying president who has advocated genocide and the elimination of the Jewish state, a government hell-bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, said government's brutal repression of its own people, and the subsequent "re-election" of the aforementioned maniac, and what do you get? A call from Obama to isolate this regime? An urgent campaign to impose harsh sanctions? Immediate support for the destruction of their nuclear sites before it's too late? No. Obama's focus is delivering Israel to the same Islamic audience he stroked in Cairo (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/1 from EYEontheUN). For more on this, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner~ y2009m7d23-Irans-response-to-Obamas-criticism OBAMA'S ANTI-DEMOCRATIC POLICY Pres. Bush II started out upholding democracy. Liberals criticized him for it. Pres. Obama immediately abandoned and even opposed democratic movements. "FROM IRAN to Venezuela to Cuba, from Myanmar to North Korea to China, from Sudan to Afghanistan to Iraq to Russia to Syria to Saudi Arabia, the Obama administration has systematically taken human rights and democracy promotion off America's agenda. In their place, it has advocated 'improving America's image,' multilateralism and a moral relativism that either sees no distinction between dictators and their victims or deems the distinctions immaterial to the advancement of US interests." The President of Honduras violated a Supreme Court order against one of his moves against democracy. He replaced the Army chief as another. His Congress deposed him, but the U.S. has calls that a "coup." "While Obama's supporters champion his 'realist' policies as a welcome departure from the 'cowboy diplomacy' of the Bush years, the fact of the matter is that in country after country, Obama's supposedly pragmatic and non-ideological policy has either already failed — as it has in North Korea — or is in the process of failing. The only place where Obama may soon be able to point to a success is in his policy of coercing Israel to adopt his anti-Semitic demand to bar Jews from building homes in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria." These policies are impractical. For example, the Arabs now believe they need not to move toward peace, because Obama will make Israel yield to them. [Their demands would render Israel vulnerable to conquest by them.] "Why, with blood running through the streets of Iran, is he still interested in appeasing the mullahs? Why, with Venezuela threatening to invade Honduras for Zelaya, is he siding with Zelaya against Honduran democrats? Why, with the Palestinians refusing to accept the Jewish people's right to self-determination, is he seeking to expel some 500,000 Jews from their homes in the interest of appeasing the Palestinians? Why, with North Korea threatening to attack the US with ballistic missiles, is he refusing to order the USS John McCain to interdict the suspected North Korean missile ship it has been trailing for the past two weeks? Why, when the Sudanese government continues to sponsor the murder of Darfuris, is the administration claiming that the genocide in Darfur has ended?" "The only reasonable answer to all of these questions is that far from being non-ideological, Obama's foreign policy is the most ideologically driven since Carter's tenure in office. If when Obama came into office there was a question about whether he was a foreign policy pragmatist or an ideologue, his behavior in his first six months in office has dispelled all doubt. Obama is moved by a radical, anti-American ideology that motivates him to dismiss the importance of democracy and side with anti-American dictators against US allies." "For his efforts, although he is causing the US to fail to secure its aims as he himself has defined them in arena after arena, he is successfully securing the support of the most radical, extreme leftist factions in American politics." (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/30 from Caroline Glick.) I agree, but am less puzzled about Obama. Remember his candidacy's zig-zagging daily, not only on his policies but on what he had said? Remember his legislative record of voting "present," so as to duck almost all controversial issues? He avoids unpopular stands on issues not central to his ideology. This may be clever but it also is cowardly and unethical. Also unethical is his posture, at odds with his policies. I find that in some key ways, every President is worse than his predecessor. That is subjective — current pain always seems more intense than past pain. To further round out our view of Obama policy on democracy, click here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d28-Repercussions-of-Obamas-murky-talk-about-Islam ISRAEL'S FOREIGN MINISTER, BETWEEN THE LINES Israel's Foreign Minister Liberman rated his meetings with E.U., Canadian, and U.S. officials as successful. He recommends that Israel devote more attention to the friendlier states. He said that, having internal problems, Holland and Denmark are more understanding of Israel's (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/28). He does not seem to be the pathetic figure that his partisan detractors aver. However, his assessment of meetings may be self-serving. He hints that Holland's and Denmark's understanding is due to their masses of hostile, indigestible Muslims. Why just hint at the precarious state of European civilization? The West tip-toes so as not to offend, and the jihadists murder. A Lighter Touch: Chairman Bernanke praised his Federal Reserve Board's protection of consumers. It must be comforting to consider the loss by consumers of much of their savings, jobs, and houses as a mark of one's excellent protection of them. OLD BUT FORGOTTEN U.S. DOUBLE STANDARD ON ISRAEL The U.S. has condemned Israeli punishment of terrorists by demolishing their houses. The U.S. ignores the powerful deterrence, when persisted in. Instead, the U.S. becomes civil libertarian about it. It calls this unfair to other residents, whose complicity with their terrorist relative usually has not been proved in court. Meanwhile, the U.S. seized houses, ships, and cars, in which even a tiny amount of illicit drugs was found, without having proved in court that the owners knew of drug presence. In some examples, it is clear they didn't know. One standard for the U.S., another for Israel (Alan Dershowitz, Contrary to Public Opinion, 1992). Reminding ourselves of that U.S. double standard puts current and new U.S. double standards in perspective. Double standards are a human trait. Suppose something of yours is missing. If you think that someone in your household lost it, you resent it. When you realize you lost it, you forgive sooner. That trait may be more common in, say, the U.S. and the Organization of Islamic Conference, which can get away with more. I think that some of the resentment against the U.S. was due to its frequent sermonizing while behaving inconsistently with its declared principles. But always remember that other resentment is due to our good fortune, hard work, and obstacles to their imperialism. Dershowitz wrote that in a war, civil liberties must give way to some extent to national security protection of the people's very lives. He fails to recognize that Radical Islam is at war with Israel, giving Israel greater leeway in opposing terrorism. That shows the disadvantage of Western societies that try to wage war without acknowledging that it is a war permitting some military rules. President Bush stumbled over that problem, because he tried to conduct considerable wars without proper mobilization, as if everything else were normal. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL VERSUS ISRAEL Amnesty International (A.I.) issued a 117-page report on the recent war in Gaza. 109 pages were about Israeli forces and only 8 pages were about terrorist forces. Those 8 pages do acknowledge that Hamas rocket fire at Israeli civilians was a war crime, but claims to have found no evidence of much other Hamas war criminality alleged by Israel. How does it know? For example, it asked Atta Rmeilat and other Arab "eyewitnesses" if they saw any rockets launched from alongside his house. They said no. Their testimony cannot be verified. The report ignored Hamas abuse of its Israeli prisoner. A.I. denied Hamas use of human shields. It ignored a video showing some such usage and an independent report on it. A.I. calls Israel the occupying power in the Gaza Strip, from which Israel left. The report has some aggressive quotes from Israeli troops, taken out of context. Macho talk does not prove over-aggressive action. [Apparently it did not use that quotation technique against Hamas, which makes many threats.] Other A.I. reports blamed the start of the war on Israel, which was responding to rocket attacks, made even during truces. In this report, "Amnesty advocates an international arms embargo, which would deny Israel's basic right to self-defense in the face of daily security threats and attacks. The authors repeat calls on the international community to 'exercise universal jurisdiction' in national courts against 'alleged perpetrators' of war crimes. This encourages the 'lawfare' campaign to delegitimize Israel." The 117-page pamphlet is part of A.I.'s Durban plan, to isolate Israel (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/1 from NGO Monitor). Terrorist launching of thousands of rockets on Israel was not the cause of the IDF incursion hoping to stop such launching? Is that too logical for A.I.? Having established that war crime, why didn't A.I. pair it with the related war crime of Hamas fortifying civilian areas, from which it launched the rockets? If you were a Muslim in Gaza interviewed by A.I., would you accuse Hamas of anything? Want to be killed? Maybe you belong to Hamas. "Eyewitnesses!" AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL VERSUS SAUDI ARABIA Amnesty International (A.I.] accused S. Arabia of a "sustained assault on human rights," in the name of fighting terrorism. The government secretly arrested, tortured, or killed thousands, in this effort. Being a world power, S. Arabia gets away with these crimes (NY Times, 7/23, A16). I inserted this to show some balance by A.I.. It does not show balance where Israel is concerned. There, A.I. has a blind spot. I am not able to judge this report. A government needs some civil rights leeway in a war, particular a war on terrorists, in an age when they can travel to take vengeance. On the other hand, a government may abuse people's rights unnecessarily in that fight. Some dictatorships claim to be fighting against terrorism or Communism, but really are repressing their own dissidents unrelated to terrorism or communism. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

RARE RITUAL INSCRIPTION FOUND Posted by Arutz-Sheva, July 30, 2009.

Stone Vessel with 'Priestly Inscription' Uncovered In Jerusalem This was written by Hana Levi Julian and Gil Ronen and it appeared in today's Arutz-Sheva.

Vessel discovered near the Zion Gate may be inscibed with a 'priestly code' and the Name of G-d. Also found were snails for making 'tekhelet.' Inscription found on Mt. Zion. (Israel news photo: UNC) "Such stone vessels were used in connection with maintaining ritual purity related to Temple worship, and they are found in abundance in areas where the priests lived," Gibson reported. "We have found a dozen or more on our site over the past three years. However, to have ten lines of text is unprecedented. One normally might find a single name inscribed, or a line or two, but this is the first text of this length ever found on such a vessel," he said. Although the letters are clearly visible it will take some time before their meaning can be discerned due to the style of the writing. Gibson estimated in his preliminary report that it could take up to six months to translate the inscription. "It is written in a very informal cursive hand and is quite difficult to read," he explained. Initially, Gibson thought the inscription was written solely in Aramaic. However, a group of experts consulting on the matter was not convinced; they say there is a possibility that the text contains the sacred name of G-d and is deliberately cryptic. Ancient Mikveh. (Israel news photo: UNC) "Stephen Pfann, of the University of the Holy Land, is leaving open the possibility that it is Hebrew. He has also suggested that the text might have had meaning within a closed circle of priests, similar to texts at Qumran," said Dr. James D. Tabor, co-director of the dig. The excavations, which lasted several months, were carried out under the auspices of the Jerusalem branch of the Nature and Parks Authority. At least 30 people per week "sacrificed their own money, time, and hard labor to advance this important effort," according to Gibson, who said the results "have been simply astounding, the finds quite spectacular, and the whole area has been transformed." He added that the excavation site was in ancient times "precisely at the center of Herodian/2nd Temple Jerusalem...we have extraordinarily well preserved ruins from the 2nd Temple period, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE." It is that terrible holocaust that is commemorated, as well as the destruction of the First Temple, on the Fast of Tisha B'Av. Room with two ovens. (Israel news photo: UNC) Excavations began on June 14, in the same site where previous archaeologists had probed the earth searching for clues to Israel's history in the 1970s. This time around, structures from the First and Second Temple periods were discovered, including a mikvah (ritual pool) left almost completely intact, a vault, and a room with two ovens. Buildings from the Byzantine and early Islamic periods were also uncovered, as well multiple coins, intact lamps, ceramic and glass vessels, bits of jewelry and similar items. Tekhelet snails found? Also uncovered were at least half a dozen Murex snail shells with holes drilled through them. "Prior to our excavation one or two such shells had been found in all of Jerusalem," Gibson said. "That so many would be found at our site further supports our supposition that we are in a priestly residential area." Murex snail. (Israel news photo: UNC) Murex snails were cultivated in ancient times at sites along the Mediterranean Sea, and a royal blue dye was extracted from them. "According to some experts this blue color was used for the priestly garments, as well as the tzitzit or threaded tassels worn by all pious Jews of the period," he explained in his report, referring to the Biblical tekhelet — the thread of blue that G-d commanded male Jews to include in the ritual fringes on the corners of their garments. "Speak to the Children of Israel and bid them that they make fringes on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of each corner a thread of blue (tekhelet). And it shall be for you as a fringe, that you may look upon it and remember all the commandments of G-d, and do them..." (Numbers 15:38-15:39) Such fringes are worn by observant Jews to this day, although the thread of blue is no longer included, since the precise technology for making the dye has been lost. To Go To Top

DEFENSE ANALYST, LARRY FRANKLIN, SPIED FOR FBI ON AIPAC Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, July 30, 2009.

This was written by Bill Gertz and it appeared yesterday in the Washington Times www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/29/former-double-agent-says- fbi-turned-on-him/?feat=home_top5_shared

Larry Franklin, the former Pentagon analyst convicted of revealing classified information, says he worked undercover as an FBI double agent to gather information on the pro-Israel lobby in the United States before the bureau turned on him and pressured him to plead guilty to spying for Israel. Talking to a U.S. newspaper for the first time since his arrest five years ago, Franklin told The Washington Times that he wore a portable recording device for the FBI to capture conversations between Keith Weissman, a lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Israeli Embassy official Naor Gilon and that he cooperated on other matters during a 10-week period in 2004. He said he never sought to spy for Israel and felt betrayed when the same FBI agents whom he had assisted suddenly told him to get an attorney and threatened to send him to prison for disclosing classified information to AIPAC officials and the Israeli Embassy. "I cooperated without a lawyer because I thought we were on the same side," Franklin said in a wide-ranging interview with The Times last week at the office of his attorney, Plato Cacheris. "And I was dumbfounded. I had no money, I told them, for a lawyer. They assigned me a lawyer who was paid by the government who wanted me to sign something that was anathema to me, an abomination." FBI Assistant Director John Miller declined to comment on the case or Franklin's cooperation. Franklin eventually pleaded guilty to releasing classified information on Iraq and Iran and was sentenced in 2006 to nearly 13 years in prison. A federal judge reduced the sentence to probation and spared him from having to spend any time in prison after considering his cooperation with the FBI and the Justice Department. Franklin had been a top Pentagon analyst on Iran during the early days of the George W. Bush administration and acknowledged he was talking to the news media and AIPAC officials because he was concerned about the administration's plan to go to war with Iraq without a policy for containing Iran. Franklin said the FBI first pressed him about working undercover in an investigation into alleged Israeli spying in the United States in May 2004, after he had become a subject of investigation into whether he provided sensitive information to reporters at CBS News on Iraqi exile leader Ahmed Chalabi's relations with Iran. He said his FBI handlers convinced him that AIPAC analysts Steven Rosen and Mr. Weissman were "bad people" and that the agency needed his help in making a criminal case against the pro-Israel lobby officials. The two AIPAC officials were eventually indicted, but this spring — after years of legal wrangling — the government reversed course and dropped all charges against them. Prior to his FBI work, Franklin said he began talking to AIPAC officials in an attempt to influence the Bush administration over a policy dispute about Iran prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The two-year dispute involved setting U.S. policy on Iran in a national security presidential directive. "The differences were insoluble between the secretary of defense's office — represented by me, an Iran desk officer, and a couple of others — and the State Department. And CIA was kind of in the middle," he said. Mr. Franklin said that as part of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans — a special analytical group in the office of Douglas J. Feith, then the undersecretary of defense for policy — he also felt an urgency to influence Iran policy because he knew in advance the dates for the March 23, 2003, invasion of Iraq. "And not having a policy on the country next door [to the one] that you are invading I thought was a problem," he said. "I knew what the Iranians had prepared for us in Iraq. Sure, they were glad we would knock off Saddam. But as soon as we got in, they were not going to allow us to succeed, nor were they going to allow us to pull out without pain." Franklin, who held a "top secret" security clearance during his Pentagon work, said the Iranians had prepared "an entire mosaic of agents and cooperatives inside Iraq before we had invaded." "And I knew we would be coming home in bunches of body bags if we didn't do something to frighten Iran into neutrality," he said. Senior Pentagon officials, he said, mistakenly thought the United States could "persuade Iran to be part of the solution and not part of the problem" in Iraq. However, Franklin was convinced that Iranian officials would not cooperate and that Tehran remembered U.S. support to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988. "So I wanted to delay and shock the National Security Council staff into convincing [National Security Adviser] Condoleezza Rice and others that, hey, maybe we ought to think this out a little more because there was so little time," Franklin said. His plan was to use Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman to relay his concerns to the National Security Council (NSC) staff. Instead, the AIPAC officials, without telling Franklin, took his information, some of which was classified, to Mr. Gilon at the Israeli Embassy and to a Washington Post reporter. "I felt betrayed by Rosen and Weissman because I had risked everything for what I had thought were the interests of our republic," he said. "And, yeah, second of all, I felt very disappointed in the FBI." Abbe Lowell, the lawyer who successfully represented Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman, disputed Franklin's account about his interests in talking to the AIPAC officials. Franklin, Mr. Lowell said, sought AIPAC's help, through Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman, beyond the effort to reach the NSC as part of an "ideological war with the Department of State." "His request of them was to try to get AIPAC to weigh in on his side of the group at [the Department of] Defense," Mr. Lowell said. "It was not singularly focused on the NSC." Mr. Lowell said Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman had no immediate comment on the case. Spokesmen for AIPAC and the Israeli Embassy also declined to comment. Mr. Lowell said Franklin did not have access to all the conversations and transcript records he obtained from the government while representing the two AIPAC officials during the case. He said that the records are classified and that he could not discuss them. Franklin, a former reserve colonel in the Air Force who worked undercover as an intelligence officer in Israel, said Mr. Gilon "was a source of mine, registered at [the Defense Intelligence Agency], and I wrote several intelligence information reports, which I cannot go into, that detailed the information that he gave me." The comments were used during a broadcast on CBS News and "a few weeks later, I was notified that I was a subject of interest," Franklin said. He pleaded guilty in October 2005 to illegally disclosing classified information on Iran and Iraq, and in January 2006 was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison. Franklin never served prison time because a federal judge reduced the sentence to probation and 10 months in a halfway house after the espionage case against Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman was dropped by federal prosecutors in May. On May 1, Dana J. Boente, the acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement that when Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were indicted, "the government believed it could prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt based on the [espionage] statute." However, subsequent unfavorable court rulings produced a "diminished likelihood" of winning at trial and the case was dropped, he said. The government was then required to submit a motion to reduce Franklin's sentence based on the plea agreement and sought an eight-year prison term. However, based on his attorney's appeal for no prison time, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis sentenced him on June 11 to probation. Franklin said his cooperation with the government was a factor in the judge's decision to reduce the sentence. "I didn't do anything morally wrong," Franklin said. "I was totally motivated by love of this republic and knowingly risked my job, my clearance and the welfare of my family because I thought it was important to do." Franklin also illegally kept 83 classified documents at his house in West Virginia but said he did so "because I needed to keep up my expertise that both the secretary and deputy secretary [of defense] — that is [Donald] Rumsfeld and [Paul] Wolfowitz — depended upon. "I never showed a document, never gave a document to anyone ever," he told The Times. "The only other illegality I performed was I talked — blurted out on May 20, 2004, over a phone call from CBS, from "60 Minutes." They were doing a show on Chalabi, and I said: 'Don't ask me for any good news about Chalabi 'cause he had just met with a nefarious Iranian who was guilty of killing Americans.' " Mr. Cacheris, Franklin's attorney, said that the FBI sought the guilty plea from Franklin because the Bureau hoped to use his testimony in its case against AIPAC and that it did not make any promises to him in exchange for the cooperation. "Unfortunately, Larry wasn't astute enough to find out during the time of his cooperation what was going to happen," Mr. Cacheris said. Franklin said he agreed to the plea deal because he hoped it would keep him out of jail so he could take care of his seriously ill wife. He thanked Mr. Cacheris for coming to his rescue in the case. Once one of the U.S. government's leading intelligence and policy analysts on Iran, Franklin said he does not favor using force to take out Iran's nuclear program. "I'm not in favor of an attack," he said, noting that he wrote an internal paper in the late 1990s on Israel, Iran and nuclear weapons. Franklin said U.S. policy should be "regime change without war," and he had a list of eight or nine things that could be done to help the Iranian people overthrow that regime. He said he hopes to give some advice to President Obama or his staff on how to deal with Tehran. Iran, he said, was able to put down recent protests over the disputed presidential election because the opposition forces do not have strong leaders and lack a cohesive ideology. Franklin said the key to ousting the cleric-backed regime is for Iranians to launch a "Ghandi-esque" nationwide strike that would bring the ruling leadership to a standstill and prompt the regime to use force against the opposition. "There are a couple of divisions of pasdarans [internal security troops] — whose names I can't mention — who are trained just to do this," he said, "to protect ... the leadership center in Tehran. They would have to fire en masse on the people, and they are not confident enough to do this. "And as soon as the people realize that there is a break in the will of the mullahs and the veterans of the Iran-Iraq war that are now in high positions in Iran, as soon as they sense there is a break in the will, it's over." Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com To Go To Top

THE 9TH OF AV'S NEW TEARS Posted by Barbara Taverna, July 30, 2009.

The article below was written by Yisrael Medad, who resides in the Shiloh community and blogs at myrightword.blogspot.com. http://www.latimes.com:/news/opinion/commentary/ la-oe-medad30-2009jul30,0,500261.story?vote48358070=1

An apocryphal story is told of Napoleon Bonaparte entering a darkened synagogue and observing weeping Jews, sitting on low stools. Asking what misfortune had occurred to cause such behavior, he was informed that it was the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. On that day, as Napoleon learned, Jews commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem and the fall of the Fortress of Betar. The day, marked with a 25-hour fast and a public reading of the book of Lamentations, signifies not only the loss of Judaism's singular holy site but the end of independent political sovereignty and the eventual expulsion, a second time, into exile. On hearing that story, Napoleon exclaimed: "A people that cries these past 2,000 years for their land and temple will surely be rewarded." Today, the 9th of Av, there are many new threats to Jerusalem, including the recent diplomatic dissing of Israel by the U.S. Fortunately, the words of President Obama and other U.S. officials have served to reinforce a consensus among Israelis that Jerusalem must remain exclusively under Israeli control and that even communities of Jews living outside the former Green Line, the armistice line drawn after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, must remain a part of Israel. A liberal Washington think tank, the Center for American Progress, recently conducted a panel discussion based on the premise that the Old City of Jerusalem is the main impediment to solving the Israeli-Arab conflict. The group's plan recommends that Israel and a future state of Palestine appoint a third-party administrator that would run and police the city. An audience member who asked why the status quo could not be retained was informed by a panelist that that "would be too intangible." We have to hope Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton knows better than to upset the status quo. As longtime diplomat Dennis Ross informed us in his book, The Missing Peace, the only new idea Yasser Arafat raised at Camp David in 2000 was that the temple didn't exist in Jerusalem, claiming it had been located in Nablus. Her husband, then-President Clinton, was astonished at this. Instead of "Holocaust denial" we were given "temple denial." U.S. policy toward Jerusalem has long tended toward the "denial" side of the equation. If an American living in Jerusalem gives birth to a child in either West Jerusalem or post-1967 East Jerusalem, for example, her progeny is not recognized by the U.S. as being born in Israel. The birth certificate and passport will list only a city name — Jerusalem — as the place of birth. This rule follows the U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual, which notes: "For a person born in Jerusalem, write JERUSALEM as the place of birth in the passport. Do not write Israel, Jordan or West Bank ..." The "logic" for this is that Israel is considered by the United States to be "occupying" territories — including Jerusalem — whose final status must be negotiated. As State Department spokesman Ian Kelly admitted on June 22, before being reined in, the recent Obama administration fixation on a "settlement freeze" also targets neighborhoods in East Jerusalem whose Jewish population's "natural growth" is to be halted. And there is more State Department trickery. Births of children of American citizens in any of the Arab towns or Jewish communities outside of Jerusalem and beyond the Green Line will have their birthplace noted, as per the above-mentioned regulations, as the "West Bank." Is the "West Bank" a state? Is the State Department engaged in creating new states? This is an illogical and quite unreasonable bureaucratic situation. On the one hand, the State Department has fashioned a new "state" while, on the other, it is ignoring Israel's status in its own capital. The "West Bank" never existed as a geopolitical entity until April 1950, when Jordan annexed the area. That annexation, incidentally, was considered by all the world — except for Britain — as an illegal occupation. Yet the U.S. has established the "West Bank," with the stroke of a pen, as if it were a state entity. If the U.S. insists on using boundaries dating to 1948, shouldn't it also use the place names in use at that time? "Judea" and "Samaria" were both names written into the U.N. partition resolution. A baby born to U.S. citizens in Shiloh, for example, should therefore be registered as having been born in "Shiloh, Samaria." Today is a day of lament for a long-ago event seared into the collective memory of Jews the world over. But the contemporary pressures the Obama administration has brought on Israel have created another lamentable situation between the two nations. This year, the ancient fast days will also provide an outlet for contemporary frustration over issues of sovereignty, political independence and security. Contact Barbara Taverna at bltaverna@yahoo.com To Go To Top

OBAMA'S OXYMORON: BLACK AND RACIST AT THE SAME TIME! Posted by Moshe Rosenblatt, July 30, 2009.

Last time a german leader said "Juden Raus" (Jews Out), six million jews were murdered, including 1.5 million children. And a total of more than 20 million people lost their lives because of the arian-nazi racism. Astonishingly, an israeli leader, Ariel Sharon, in his last years as Prime Minister of Israel, implemented a new Juden Raus in the Gaza Strip. The result was devastating: more than 7.000 missiles of many kinds, were launched from Gaza to cities and villages in Israel, murdering and woundering citizens, including children. Juden Raus is probably, the worst racist demand!!! Now, the new president of the United States of America — the first black president — comes with this same racist demand to our Prime Minister Netanyahu. Obama demands a Juden Raus from Judea and Samaria, so that a new criminal arab-islamic country may emerge, completely "clean" of jews. I can't understand how can a president of USA be black and racist at once! I could explain to president Obama that there is only one single international enforceable decision upon the ownership of Judea & Samaria (and also Gaza strip): the decision of the League of Nations during the San Remo Conference in 1920 that gave all those areas to the jewish people; that this decision was reiterated and ratified at the creation of the United Nations in 1945 (item 80 of chapter 12 of The Charter of the UN). I could explain to him that all the other decisions upon the jewish-arab conflict (the decision on the division of Palestine, the 242 and 338 decisions, etc.) were only "recommendations" because they were based on chapter 6 of the charter above and not on the 7th chapter which permits the UN to use force against the country which oppose their decision. I could explain to him that all the wars are caused only because of non-democratic regimes; that all the wars are always between dictators or between a dictator and a democracy; that 2 democracies never went to war one against the other, so that Israel, as the only democratic country in the area, can never be culpable of any war. I could explain to him that for Islam, there is no place for a non-islamic country, not only in the Middle East but in the whole world, because there are only 2 places in the world: The House of Islam (Dar el Islam) and The House of War (Dar el Harb). So, whatever place that is still not islamic, is a place of war. I could explain him that the name Palestine was robbed by the arabs from the romans; that never existed any "palestinian people"; that they never had a country of their own, a capital of their own, a language of their own, a religion of their own or money, stamp or whatever characteristic sign a nation has; that this is a fabricated people commited to one single aim: the destruction of the State of Israel. I could explain him a lot of things but, when he comes to us with a racist demand like Juden Raus, he probably wouldn't listen to anything else. Fortunately, there can be another possibility. Maybe, just maybe, Obama demands Juden Raus from Judea & Samaria because he knows that the moment a new palestinian country is established, all the jews left there will be slaughtered by these barbaric arabs that call themselves "the palestinian people". If this is the case, I'm happy to know that, after all, he is not a racist. On the other hand, if such is the case, why is President Obama so eager to build a criminal country, made of murderers, whose leader, Mr. Abu Mazen, says clearly that he does not even recognize Israel as the Jewish Country? But then again, if Mr. Obama wants so much to create a new arab-islamic country — as racist as all other arab-islamic countries — doesn't it make him a racist as well ?! /font> Moshe Rosenblatt, M.D. lives in Hadera, Israel. Contact him at mosrosen@bezeqint.net. To Go To Top

WAR ON WANT, A.K.A. WAR ON ISRAEL Posted by LEL, July 29, 2009.

This is by Carol Gould and it appeared on Pajama Media http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/war-on-want-a-k-a-war-on-israel/

Pajamas Media[1] readers will be aware of the worrying events that unfolded on June 17, when a London debate on Sharia law between Douglas Murray of the Centre for Social Cohesion and Anjem Choudary of al-Muhajiroun was terminated. The discussion had to be canceled due to disturbances inside the venue, Conway Hall, when al-Muhajiroun's "security men" objected to male guests wishing to sit with women. A protracted standoff in Red Lion Square ensued. Giles Enders, chairman of the South Place Ethical Society, which runs Conway Hall, took to the stage and said he was canceling the event, telling the crowd, "I am not prepared to have fundamentalist thugs in our hall preventing people from coming in. We do not condone segregation." In July another alarming event unfolded in London that has sinister connotations for the future of free speech in this country and in Western democracies. It revolves around Jonathan Hoffman, who is vice chair of the Zionist Federation; he is a gentle and self-effacing man with whom I appeared on Press (Iranian) TV on June 12[2] in a debate against Ilan Pappe, Hajo Meyer, and moderator Alan Hart on anti-Semitism and Israel. (During the "debate" moderator Hart bellowed at Hoffman that he would be evicted from the studio[3] if he did not stop spouting Zionist propaganda. It was a viscerally searing broadcast for me; I had told Hart to bring Hoffman along and he ended up being repeatedly bullied until I threatened to walk out of the program if this did not stop.) Hoffman tried to book a place at Toynbee Hall for the July 12 launch of Ben White's new book, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide.[4] The book-signing and lecture were sponsored by War on Want,[5] a registered charity. (They are supposed to be politically neutral, right?) To his astonishment Hoffman was told he would not be welcome at the launch and that he would not be allowed entry to Toynbee Hall! I will pause here and say it was a blessing in disguise that I delayed by a week or so writing up this story. It has now become an international issue because Ronald Lauder, [6] president of the World Jewish Congress, has made it known to the British Charity Commission that he wants War on Want investigated for breach of its guidelines. It appears Hoffman's offense was to have raised objections at a previous anti-Israel event attended by some of the organizers of the Toynbee Hall launch. What is so appalling about the banning of Hoffman is that an "official statement" was issued by War on Want's executive director, John Hilary: "War on Want welcomes all members of the public to our events. Mr. Hoffman alone has been told he will not be welcome on Thursday because he is known for causing serious disturbances at public events on this issue." Hoffman commented later that when he had raised objections to biased propaganda at another event, the police had been called. This was used as justification for his banning by War on Want. "I heckle the anti-Semites," he said [7]. "And they call the police so that at the next meeting they can ban me, saying 'the police had to be called last time.' And the police are always annoyed to be called out on false pretenses. It's called 'free speech — provided we like what you say.'" To his credit Hoffman went to Toynbee Hall on July 12 and stood outside distributing a leaflet he had compiled, citing errors in Ben White's book. In a letter seen by the Jewish Chronicle, Ronald Lauder has made it clear that Ben White's book promulgates the use of the expression "Israeli apartheid" and that this "incites hatred and contempt for the state of Israel." He added that the recent definition of anti-Semitism by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia states "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination ... is a racist endeavor." Hoffman's leaflet [5] refuting many of Ben White's claims made these points: Colin Chapman features three times: He is the author of Whose Promised Land, which revives the ancient Christian canard of "supercessionism" — the belief that because the Jews denied the divinity of Christ, God transferred His favors to the Christians while the Jews were cast out as the party of the Devil. This doctrine lay behind centuries of Christian anti-Jewish hatred. ... In April 2000 Nelson Mandela came to London and spoke to the Board of Deputies of British Jews. ... [He said]: "Israel cannot be expected to withdraw from the Arab territories which she legitimately conquered when the Arab states wanted to [wipe] her out of the map of the world." No mention of "apartheid" in Israel — from a man who spent 27 years as a prisoner of the loathsome apartheid regime in South Africa. To add salt to the wounds of supporters of Israel, Ben White is having an American tour this summer! The fact is that the followers of Ben White, one of whom made the standard accusation at the lecture that the Palestinian viewpoint is muzzled in Britain because the media are controlled by others (translate: Jews), did not want debate. They wanted to spread the usual mantras about the "genocidal, ethnic cleansing, apartheid Israelis." That anyone was banned from the book launch is yet another disturbing case of the left and its radical allies bullying individuals and curtailing free speech. This creeping censorship by an increasingly strident left, along with the proliferation of radical Muslim groups who effectively destroyed the Douglas Murray event, must be challenged at every juncture. Britain's — and America's — cherished legacy of freedom of speech is under threat and must not be allowed to die. Footnotes: [1] Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com../../../../../ blog/newsweek-an-islamic-europe-is-no-cause-for-concern/ [2] June 12: http://www.oyvagoy.com/2009/06/the-trouble-with-alan/ [3] he would be evicted from the studio: http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/06/14/%E2%80%9Ci-will- have-you-removed-i-will-have-you-evicted%E2%80%9D/ [4] Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide: http://www.amazon.com/ Israeli-Apartheid-Beginners-Ben-White/dp/0745328873 [5] War on Want: http://seismicshock.wordpress.com/ 2009/07/08/a-beginners-guide-to-ben-whites-false-apartheid-analogy/ [6] Ronald Lauder: http://www.thejc.com/articles/charity-pushes-global-israel-boycott [7] said: http://www.hurryupharry.org/2009/07/10/ben-white-at-war-on-want/ Contact LEL at LEL817@yahoo.com. To Go To Top

RELIGION OF PEACE — GAZA MUSLIM KILLS DAUGHTER, 27, FOR OWNING A CELL PHONE Posted by Cpocerl, July 29, 2009.

This is from AP and the Jerusalem Post staff, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid= 1248277924578&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter

A Gaza man is being held on suspicion of bludgeoning his daughter to death with an iron chain because he discovered she owned a cell phone, human rights groups said Wednesday. The groups added that the victim's three brothers were also detained. The woman, a 27-year-old divorced mother of five, was apparently the tenth victim of a so-called "honor killing" in the Palestinian territories and among Arabs in Israel this year. A police spokesperson confirmed that the man had turned himself in, but did not provide further details. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to media. Human rights groups said the man believed his daughter used the cell phone to speak to a man outside the family. They added that she was beaten so severely she suffered a cracked skull. Contact CPocerl at Cpocerl@aol.com To Go To Top

DUMPING ON ISRAEL Posted by LEL, July 29, 2009.

This article was written by Ralph Peters and it appeared yesterday in the New York Post http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url= http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nypost.com%2Fseven%2F07282009%2F postopinion%2Fopedcolumnists%2Fdumping_on_israel_181768.htm

YOU'VE sacrificed all your family had to build your modest dream home by a lake. Now a wildfire races toward you. A former friend phones from his mansion across the water, ordering you not to call the fire brigade — he's sending a servant to discuss things with the flames. Meanwhile, your rich buddy insists you tear down the tree-house you built for your kids: It annoys the local thugs he wants to befriend. That's Israel's position today. Iran blazes with nuclear ambitions. Key leaders in Tehran have called, without cease, for the "Zionist entity's destruction." And Israel's former ally, the United States, implies that the situation isn't that serious. No, what's most important to the Obama team is a total freeze on Jewish settlements on anything the State Department's Bureau of Politically Correct Geography decides is Arab land. Preventing a long-established settler from building a new room for a growing family is more important than halting Iran's weapons program. It's true: Iran might not use the nukes it intends to acquire. But if you were raising your children in Tel Aviv, how would you like your chances? Pick an arbitrary number. Say the odds are only one in five that Iran would actually launch nukes at Israel. In Washington, that might seem like a reasonable calculation. In Jerusalem, the "only" part would sound like pure irony. President Obama's position may evolve as he comes to grips with reality (his views on Russia are already maturing, if Joe Biden can be believed). But he appears to have come to the Oval Office with an anti-Israel chip on his shoulder — put there by left-wing associates over the decades. What our president presents as even-handedness toward the Palestinians not only ignores countless facts and the lessons of history but also encourages Arab intransigence. Why compromise, when Washington's backing away from Israel? The road to peace — if there is one — doesn't lead through tolerance of those who want every Jew dead. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Israel. For six hours. A very good man thrust into an uncomfortable spot, the SecDef must have spent much of his time "explaining" the new Obama doctrine as expounded by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week. Clinton test-marketed the administration's willingness to accept a nuclear-armed Iran. Instead of trying to prevent Tehran's acquisition of such weapons, she told our regional allies (real or imagined) that we'd respond by extending a "defense umbrella" to negate the effects of Iranian nukes. Except that it wouldn't. What good would such a defense umbrella be to Israel after its destruction? And one suspects that, with Tel Aviv a wasteland, "cooler heads would prevail" and there would be no response in kind, that we'd all just "deplore" what happened and hold conferences to insure it "never happens again." Apart from its bewildering reluctance to try to understand Iran's leaders on their own terms, this administration clearly doesn't grasp the dynamics of nuclear proliferation among rogue regimes. When one more bad actor gets nukes, the increase in the threat of nuclear war isn't plus-one-more, but exponential. While I doubt that the majority of Iranians want to risk launching nuclear weapons at Israel, wars aren't unleashed by the masses, but by determined leaders. And for all its other weaknesses, Iran has tough guys at the top: After all, ruthlessness is what's kept them in power for 30 years. Our government's shift from the position that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable to the stance that a nuclear-armed Iran can be handily deterred could prove to be the most dangerous error the United States ever made in the Middle East — a high standard, indeed. Our president is good at sending signals — not least, when he sends the wrong ones. When he spent several days in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, lavishing praise on Islam and slyly comparing Palestinian misfortunes with the Holocaust, he sent one signal. When he sent Secretary Gates to calm down those troublesome Israelis, he sent another. This administration must stop living in a fantasy world in which monstrous fanatics will do what we want because we're suddenly nice to them. You don't deter butchers who believe they're on a mission from their god by complimenting them on their rich history. The only hope — albeit a slim one — for peace in the Middle East is to make it clear that our support for Israel is steadfast and unwavering, that Israel will endure and its enemies must accept its existence. The current rift between the Israeli government and the Obama administration isn't about expanding settlements in the West Bank. It's about declining courage in the West. Contact LEL at LEL817@yahoo.com. To Go To Top

FEAR AND SELF-LOATHING AT THE SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL Posted by LEL, July 29, 2009.

This was written by Abraham H. Miller and it appeared in Pajamas Media http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/ self-loathing-at-the-san-francisco-jewish-film-festival/

Simone Bitton[1] is a French-Israeli director who numbers among the 479 Israelis who called for a complete boycott of Israel during the Israel Defense Forces incursion into Gaza to stop rockets from exploding in Sderot. Obviously, Bitton exempted her own endeavors from the call. Bitton has now directed the film Rachel, a documentary on Rachel Corrie. If there is any doubt regarding Bitton's politics or the film's slant, note that the documentary tours film festivals along with Cindy Corrie,[2] Rachel's mother and a propagandist for the likes of Hamas[3] and the International Solidarity Movement[4] — groups committed to Israel's destruction. One would expect Bitton's work to be showcased by the usual gaggle of progressives and ultra-liberal church groups intent on destroying the Jewish state. But in the San Francisco area? The Jewish Film Festival shows Bitton's work. Peter Stein,[5] the festival's director, knew exactly what he was doing in selecting this film. Stein was familiar with both Bitton's work and her politics. He invited the American Friends Service Committee, now helping with the boycott of Israeli goods, to participate in the showing. Stein also had on his board Rachel Pfeffer, the interim director of Jewish Voice for Peace — a group committed to the destruction of the Jewish state. (Since Rachel Pfeffer's outing as JVP director, her biography on the festival web site has been thoroughly cleansed.[6]) Despite protests which have further fractured a sharply divided Jewish community, Rachel and the film festival are moving forward with the film in the name of free speech and open debate. Typically worthy aspirations, but in this case? A smoke screen. Cindy Corrie has been up and down this community more times than the Hayward geological fault. Name an Israeli-bashing leftist group, and you'll find its headquarters lies somewhere within five miles of the Berkeley campus. For several years, Berkeley's Hillel[7] didn't celebrate Passover, but it did celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a holiday that is not even celebrated throughout Mexico. But for leftist Jews, it's better to align oneself with the revolt of the oppressed masses in Puebla, Mexico, than with Jews throwing off Pharaoh's yoke of slavery. Berkeley Hillel, under the ever-vigilant eye of the Jewish community, brought in the anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine, a lead organization in the anti-Israel boycott, to disseminate its propaganda to impressionable and naïve Jewish students. Berkeley Hillel could not have better served the bidding of the anti-Israel left and their Muslim allies than if it had turned over the organization to them. If you want to get a forum in the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish community, you need to be anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, or preferably both. Cindy Corrie is not the only Cindy to get access to the community calendar here — Cindy Sheehan has also been a popular speaker. Yes, the Cindy Sheehan who said that her son died because the Iraq war was fought for Israel and orchestrated b neocons. This is a message she now denies but which others persist in claiming she wrote.[8] Cindy Sheehan got a platform at the Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center. When the members of San Rafael's Osher-Marin Jewish Community Center were not embracing the delicate bouquet of a good Sonoma pinot noir, they were sniffing after Cindy Sheehan, giving her a platform for a book reading and signing. You might not be able to get Obsession — the video about radical Islam — shown in some of the synagogues here (it is too pro-Israel). But you will get Sheehan. So no — the local Jewish community is screening Rachel not out of free speech concerns, but due to strong support for its message. Why the Jewish community would choose to subsidize propaganda directed at the destruction of Israel is the real issue. Why would they play fast and loose with lies designed to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state? Why would they welcome people whose political mission is the killing of Jews? Quickly justifying its clumsiness in dealing with this event, the organized Jewish professional community has issued a statement that gives new meaning to the term "sophistry." The organized community claims to be "working behind the scenes," at which they are so adept that no one ever knows what they are doing or can see any consequences of their work. What few in the organized community want to acknowledge publicly is that this community is inundated with a sizeable group of leftist, self-loathing Jews who are Jews when it is convenient to propagate their leftist agenda. As a non-Jewish acquaintance of mine, who is familiar with the people who run the festival, put it: "Most of these people don't give a damn about Israel and wish it would disappear. To them, Israel is an embarrassment." He, incidentally, shares that vision. Cindy Corrie traffics in sympathy for her daughter, but I have not read a single interview where she shows the slightest compassion for the mothers of the other dead Rachels whose deaths were brought about by people her daughter sought to protect and whom she venerated. Nor does Cindy Corrie display the slightest insight into her daughter's role as a facilitator of mass murder of innocents. Maybe Cindy Corrie should look in the mirror and ask herself why she let her daughter walk into a war zone run by terrorists, where there were daily confrontations between people trying to kill Jews and the Israeli military trying to stop them. Maybe Cindy Corrie should turn some of her anguish toward Evergreen State University, which provided academic credit for this indulgent stupidity. In continuing her daughter's work, Cindy Corrie is not promoting peace, she is promoting human carnage. To someone like me who remembers being taken by my grandmother to a storefront in Chicago's Lawndale so I could help her cull through the lists of death camp survivors looking for the names of her sisters (we found one of four), I am unable to comprehend the behavior of these leftist Jews. As someone who remembers the pride that ignited a room of immigrant Jews and displaced persons when the first newsreels were shown of Jews (then called "Palestinians") fighting for a homeland, I am incapable of imagining how these leftist Jews have been permitted to control a major community event. They are propagating the seeds of their own destruction. Neither their leftist politics nor their pathetic condemnation of everything Israel does to defend itself will save them if the ideology, politics, and people they so mindlessly support should ever come to power. Enamored of Marx, they should remember one of Marx's most insightful and prophetic statements (probably taken from Georg Buchner): "Like Saturn, the revolution devours its own children." URLs in this post: [1] Simone Bitton: http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=917 [2] Cindy Corrie: http://www.keshertalk.com/archives/2006/11/corrietalkback.php [3] Hamas: http://www.mideastweb.org/hamas.htm [4] International Solidarity Movement: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6233 [5] Peter Stein: http://sfjffwatch.blogspot.com/ [6] thoroughly cleansed: http://sfjffwatch.blogspot.com/2009/07/ disappearing-hairy-gray-elephant.html [7] Berkeley's Hillel didn't celebrate Passover: http://southjerusalem.com/2009/03/we-couldnt-make-any-of-this-up [8] but which others persist in claiming she wrote.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Sheehan Contact LEL at LEL817@yahoo.com. To Go To Top

IT WAS JUST DESERTS FOR ZELAYA Posted by Daniel Mandel, July 29, 2009.

Some attention is being paid at the moment to Honduras — a small Latin American country that would normally be off the radar screen. The reason is the unseating of its aspiring tyrant, Manuel Zelaya, who, keen to become president for life, illegally attempted to hold a referendum to alter the Honduran constitution to give him that power. He was deported by the military, acting at the behest of the country's Supreme Court and Congress. The evidence of Zelaya's bad faith is clear. Article 4 of the constitution limits the president to one four-year term. It also decrees that only Congress can initiate and approve referendums for constitutional amendments. Nonetheless, in May, Zelaya tried to initiate a referendum anyway. When the Supreme Court stopped him, he tried to circumvent its ruling by taking a poll that was simply a referendum under another name. Zelaya's own Liberal Party, which controls Congress, opposed him and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, the court and his own attorney-general all declared a poll illegal. Zelaya proceeded anyway. Lacking legally printed ballots, he demanded them of the army, which is empowered to distribute such materials, and sacked its commander, Gen. Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, when he refused to comply. The court then called on Zelaya to reinstate Velasquez, but he refused. Instead, he called on his mentor, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, to send ballots by plane. When the attorney general demanded that the ballots be confiscated, Zelaya ignored him and called on his supporters to seize them at the Air Force base and distribute them. At this point, the attorney general called for Zelaya's arrest for treason. The Supreme Court duly ruled 15-0 for his removal for contravening Article 239, which states that "whomever changes or attempts to change" Article 4 "will be immediately removed from public office." When ballots were nonetheless distributed on June 27, authorities, fearing Chavez-style orchestrated unrest, moved to arrest and deport Zelaya. As prescribed in the constitution, his place was taken by the president of Congress, Roberto Micheletti, who confirmed that the elections due in November would be held. Has democracy and legality ever been put to a clearer test? Yet, remarkably, almost no one outside Honduras is standing up for Honduras and mostly everyone is condemning it. Not only has Zelaya found predictable, vociferous support from veteran democracy dissolvers like Chavez, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega and Bolivia's Evo Morales, but also from the U.S. The Obama administration, so diffident about commenting on a rigged and blood-spattered Iranian election, suddenly discovers its voice for "legitimacy" in Honduras — on behalf of its subverter. Lacking U.S. leadership, the world's democracies, whose fight this should be, acquiesced on June 30 in this beat-up of a small, harmless power, producing what may well be the only unanimous U.N. General Assembly resolution, which condemned Zelaya's removal. Never has a deposed autocrat enjoyed more immediate or unanimous diplomatic support. Nor is such support confined to words: the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank have both frozen loans to Honduras, bordering nations have cut off trade and Standard & Poor's has foreshadowed a credit downgrade. Ambassadors have been withdrawn. The U.S. has halted military aid. The State Department says it's working at "resolving" the "crisis," but that's double-talk: The crisis ended when Zelaya was removed. The current crisis is a manufactured one aimed at restoring the last one. This has been a lost decade in Latin America, in which the radical left has subverted democracy in one country after another: Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador. In 2003, on President George W. Bush's watch, the U.S. not only looked on but provided the duress — a threatened aid cut — that compelled Bolivia's lawful president, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, to be resign. Today, Chavez soul mate Evo Morales, who orchestrated much of the violence and sabotage that led to Sanchez de Lozada's downfall, sits in his place. But past practice provides no excuse for President Obama to foist upon a small democracy a corrupt and lawless president now clearly reviled by his countrymen. If the White House continues on its current course, then the mea culpas that Obama expresses so extravagantly on behalf of past American conduct elsewhere in Latin America and the world will for once have profound truth when uttered by one of his successors to Zelaya's victims. Daniel Mandel is a fellow in history at Melbourne University. This article appeared today in Philadelphia Daily News www.philly.com/dailynews/opinion/ 20090729_It_was_just_deserts_for_Zelaya.html To Go To Top

POLLARD'S INNOCENCE MEANS WEINBERGER'S GUILT; ARABS TRY TO DRIVE JEWISH FARMERS OUT OF ISRAEL; SHRINKING DEAD SEA Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 29, 2009.

POLLARD'S INNOCENCE MEANS WEINBERGER'S GUILT Alan Deshowitz was a defense counsel for Jonathan Pollard. Dershowitz had access to then Secretary of Defense's private written admissions that, says Mr. Dershowitz, contradicted his sworn testimony that Pollard was the most harmful spy, though he merely helped a U.S. ally, when other spies were turning military secrets over to our enemies. Top security officials told Dershowitz that Weinberger was lying. Unfortunately, neither Dershowitz nor the special prosecutor couldn't do much with this knowledge, not even state it in detail, because it was classified. Over-classification is a means of injustice. It enabled Weinberger presumably to commit perjury and he and other officials to cover up the crimes of top officials. Lower ranks paid, as did Pollard. Isn't that customary! (Contrary to Popular Opinion by A. M. Dershowitz, p.180.) Pres. Bush Sr. abused his authority to pardon his whole Cabinet in advance! THOMAS FRIEDMAN: IT'S A CLASH WITHIN A CIVILIZATION Thomas Friedman interprets the "war on terrorism" as giving moderates time to reform their society. The great clash is "...a war of ideas within Islam — a war between religious zealots who glorify martyrdom and want to keep Islam untouched by modernity and isolated form other faiths, with its women disempowered, and those who want to embrace modernity, open Islam to new ideas and empower Muslim women as much as men." To retard modernity, Radical Islam represses real education. ""it is no accident...that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned, or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 250 schools in Pakistan..." In such a clash, the role of the U.S. military cannot be just military. "The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It's all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more, and serving the people of Afghanistan." (NY Times, 5/19, Op.-Ed., with some ideas from author Greg Mortenson.) I think that Friedman is right but still misses a major problem. Radical Islam is both trying to take over Islam and also take over the rest of the world. My question is how moderate is non-Radical Islam. Beware a careless embrace of modernity! Modernity also includes hedonism, anarchy, and purposelessness. Observant Muslims scorn Western immorality. I share much of the Muslims' feeling about that, because modernism contradicts eternal and higher values, and destroys Western civilization from within. Many Muslims would not join us against Radical Islam, if they thought they simply were exchanging Radical Islam's depravity for Western depravity. ARABS TRY TO DRIVE JEWISH FARMERS OUT OF ISRAEL 16793 Bedouin and other Israeli Arabs are trying to drive Jewish farmers out of Israel. They attack in daytime and on the farmers' own property. During some attacks, the Arabs frankly admit it. They attempt lynching, threaten murder, and inflict great losses upon Jewish farmers, some of whom gave up their farms. The Arabs break into farms owned by Jews, rustle the Jews' livestock, set their own flocks onto the Jews' grazing land, and attack and try to kill the Jewish farmers. This happens in the Negev, where Bedouin demand "protection" money, and in the Galilee. Kibbutzim had had to install fences. The government does little about it. A farmer may file a hundred complaints, and police may interrogate suspected Arabs. Claiming to be under-staffed, police rarely arrest Arab rustlers. Punishment is minor. The police close most of their cases under the excuse, "insufficient public interest." To fill the vacuum, young Jewish veterans have formed The New Guardians organization, like the one in the pioneering days when Jewish communities needed protection from Arab marauders. The veterans are volunteers. They depict themselves as aides to the police, not replacements. Using an old law, they confiscate temporarily sufficient property of the raiders to cover losses, until the matter is resolved. This has some deterrent effect. The New Guardians profess a religious Zionist love for the Land. "The organization would love to be superfluous and would like to see the government put an end to the proliferation of unlawful flocks which have not been inoculated, illegal building, police inaction and protection payments. At this point, they need help to continue their aid to farmers and to encourage legislation that will give the landowners more authority to act to protect themselves. They also want to create a grassroots movement that will lead to enhanced ideological convictions and a change in attitude towards the problem (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 7/1). Will this problem get addressed by the so-called right-wing government? I have been reporting major and extensive rustling and vandalism for years, because the Western media ignores it — how many critics of Zionism know about it? The greater shame is, the supposed Jewish state ignores the problem and even had punished Jews who defend themselves, then claims it is a government of law. Years ago, the late Rabbi Meir Kahane was vilified for suggesting that Israeli national security required the Arabs to emigrate. He wasn't politically correct. It is another instance in which liberal ideology is impermeable to reality. Liberals want to be tolerant, but if one is tolerant with people of violent, primitive, acquisitive values, they impose violence upon good people. It is like letting delinquent students get away without limits to misbehavior. Doesn't work. PLO REASSURES ISRAELI ON JOSEPH'S TOMB Mr. Gershon Baskin of the Israel/Palestinian Center for Research and Information received a letter from a bureau chief of Abbas reassuring him that the PLO respects the Oslo accords it signed. Since the accords recognize the sanctity of Joseph's Tomb as a Jewish holy site, so does the PLO. What good is that letter? The PLO let its people burn and desecrate Joseph's Tomb [more than once]. The PLO left it in that state for years (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/1). Jewish visitors to Joseph's and Rachel's Tomb have been attacked, even killed, and now need an IDF escort. Hebron's Arab mayor declared that if he gained control over the Cave of the Patriarchs, he would bar Jewish worshippers. The PLO and P.A. and their nice Palestinian Arab people violate the Oslo accords in all the important ways, especially in their violent intolerance. These are the people whom the U.S. and the Left expects to make peace with the Jews, but those Arabs have been violating the existing peace agreements in serious ways, having murdered thousands since coming to terms. The U.S. must think that this is the age of miracles. WHAT SHALL ISRAEL DO WITH THE SHRINKING DEAD SEA? Like many bodies of water and ice, the Dead Sea has been shrinking drastically. The shrinkage exposes dry land. What should be done about it? Let commercial interests encroach on it? Bring in replacement water from the Red Sea or the Mediterranean? That may dilute the remaining, famed Dead Sea healing waters. The government of Israel thought to protect the newly exposed terra firma by declaring it state land. Immediately the Palestinian Authority accused Israel of stealing land that the Arabs want ((http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/1). The Dead Sea is the lowest place on earth. It has been selected as a finalist in the New 7 Wonders of Nature online competition. Competitors include the Amazon R., the Galapagos Islands, the Grand Canyon and the Maldives (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/21). The Dead Sea buoys not only my body but my spirits. Next vacation: Grand Canyon. At first the P.A. objected to the competition, because it wasn't consulted. That disqualified the project. Then the P.A. relented (IMRA, 7/22). I think Israel made a deadly mistake in not annexing most of Yesha and encouraging Arab emigration. It cannot co-exist with violent religious fanatics. SAUDI ARABIA TO BUILD AIRCRAFT INDUSTRY Saudi Arabia will start an aircraft industry by assembling British Typhoon jets and fabricating some parts (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis). Iran has its own, advanced military industry. Jordan has started one. Countries that get these industrial newcomers started jeopardize future business and influence in restraining their bellicosity. The U.S. ties U.S. military aid to Israeli purchases of U.S. military products. That way, Israel forfeits some of its own Army purchases. Israel had to drop its own aircraft industry, despite technical success but with cost overruns. The U.S. also demands that Israel terminate valuable deals, though the U.S. does sell and even give arms to Israel's main enemies. Keeping Israel dependent, the U.S. periodically threatens and does withhold certain equipment from Israel. U.S. foreign aid often is a cover for U.S. subsidy, contradicting the U.S. pretense of favoring free trade. Israel remains hooked on its foreign aid, not that it remains a major part of Israel's budget, but subsidy has that corrupting effect. TROOPS ARREST HEBRON ARAB OVER KNIFE The Muslim in charge of Islamic religious services at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron complained of the arrest of a 23-year-old Arab there, "in the pretext of possession of a knife. He condemned the military actions carried out by Israeli occupation forces on a daily basis, to citizens on the way to visit the Haram al-Sharif from the various towns, saying that such practices aimed at closing in on the citizens and draining the old town of its population." (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/.1) I have reported many instances of Arabs actually or intending to stab Jews, and didn't bother reporting dozens of others. But the Arab leader calls the youth's arrest a pretext, the way his leaders regularly call slain terrorists civilians. They don't admit criminality. Must be an Israeli plot. Actually, Israeli police are loathe to arrest Arabs, even when rioting. Not that Israel doesn't frame people, but it frames Jewish nationalists, as reported a few years ago. Enough Muslim Arabs commit crimes even in holy places and use women and children to assist terrorism, to warrant frequent inspection. The notion that inspections are meant to get Arabs to depart is paranoid and disproved by Israel's siding with Arab squatters against Jewish property owners in Hebron and Jerusalem. Arabs often make up charges without foundation, for propaganda. Other articles of mine demonstrated this, readers please take notice. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

JEWISH SETTLEMENTS AND ISRAELI LAW Posted by John David Lewis, July 29, 2009.

We are hearing a lot now about Israel's creation of "Jewish" settlements on "Palestinian land." These settlements are created, we are often told, to extend the "apartheid state" of Israel by squeezing out the local populations and establishing a superior Jewish ruling class. Typical here is CBS News anchor Bob Simon, who in January of 2009 described Israel as an "apartheid state." To understand this it is instructive to read an Israeli Supreme Court ruling, the Decision on Katzir, dated March 8, 2000, which applies directly to the issue of land, and to the rights of Arabs under Israeli law. A Jewish group, the Katzir Cooperative, which accepts only Jewish members, had received land from the Israeli government for a settlement in 1982. The group later tried to prevent an Arab couple from building a home in this settlement. The Arab couple sued. In the ruling, the Supreme Court summarized the basis of the suit as follows: "The Petitioners claim that the policy constitutes discrimination on the basis of religion or nationality and that such discrimination is prohibited by law with regard to State land." The Court heard the case, and ruled against the cooperative. This section from the ruling is direct and clear about the principle at stake: The Court examined the question of whether the refusal to allow the petitioners to build their home in Kaztir constituted impermissible discrimination. The Court's examination proceeded in two stages. First, the Court examined whether the State may allocate land directly to its citizens on the basis of religion or nationality. The answer is no. As a general rule, the principle of equality prohibits the State from distinguishing between its citizens on the basis of religion or nationality. The principle also applies to the allocation of State land. This conclusion is derived both from the values of Israel as a Democratic state and from the values of Israel as a Jewish state. The Jewish character of the State does not permit Israel to discriminate between its citizens. In Israel, Jews and non-Jews are citizens with equal rights and responsibilities. The State engages in impermissible discrimination even it if is also willing to allocate State land for the purpose of establishing an exclusively Arab settlement, as long as it permits a group of Jews, without distinguishing characteristics to establish an exclusively Jewish settlement on State land ("separate is inherently unequal"). Next, the Court examined whether the State may allocate land to the Jewish Agency knowing that the Agency will only permit Jews to use the land. The answer is no. Where one may not discriminate directly, one may not discriminate indirectly. If the State, through its own actions, may not discriminate on the basis of religion or nationality, it may not facilitate such discrimination by a third party. It does not change matters that the third party is the Jewish Agency. Even if the Jewish Agency may distinguish between Jews and non-Jews, it may not do so in the allocation of State land. On principle Israeli law is not religious; it is secular. Many of the "settlements" are Jewish and we might assume that establishing Jewish enclaves in the Jewish state would be encouraged. But the law gives them no privileged status. The Jewish state is not akin to the Islamic state of Iran — in which clerics rule — or to Saudi Arabia, in which an ancient religious text is the law of the land. In Israel, all are equal in principle before the law. While under Israeli control, Jerusalem is an open city. People of all religions — and of no religion — can walk around freely, protected by Israeli law. There is an important limitation here. Many of the areas that Israel was forced to take in self-defense, following the 1967 and 1973 attacks, are under military law, because Israel's enemies have not ended the war, and because these areas have not been formally annexed. The source of this problem is the Arab leadership, who refused to accept an Arabic state next to Israel, as called for in the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, November 29, 1947, and rather declared war on Israel. Unremitting suicide attacks were the source of the later separation wall. But this is all the more reason to end the war, eliminate the ambiguity, and extend Israeli law — and its principle of non-religious discrimination — fully into those areas. Palestinian opposition to Jewish towns — as well as the ruling of the Israeli court — demonstrate where the commitment to apartheid lies, and it is not in Israel. Palestinian leaders do not thank Israel for its instructive example in separating politics from religion, while pressing to instill such principles in their own society. They rather condemn Israel, and demand its withdrawal under threat of force. Dr. John David Lewis is VIsiting Associate Professor, Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program, Duke University. Contact him by email at classicalideals@yahoo.com and visit his website: www.classicalideals.com. The author thanks Boaz Arad for his assistance. To Go To Top

CAIR'S CONGRESSIONAL STOOGES Posted by Susana K-M, July 29, 2009.

House Dems Carry Islamists' Water Dear All, we do not want to live under Saharia law. It is humiliating. Stop Islamization. Stop all these preposterous ways of making billonaires trained to hate and kill. Stop them before it is too late. President Obama does not practise Islamic Cult. Now is the precise moment to show the world that America can still be the World´s leading country and has a democratic President.

Seven House Democrats have written Attorney General Eric Holder invoking a list of grievances from radical Islamist groups and asking that Holder meet with representatives from those groups to hear their concerns. The grievances include the use of convicted felons as informants in mosques, alleged religious profiling of Somali Muslims in Minnesota and elsewhere and allegations that the FBI is working with foreign governments to question American citizens who are terror suspects. In the letter, the representatives said: "These concerns raise legitimate questions about due process, justice, and equal treatment under the law. We hope you will meet with American Muslim leaders to ensure that core American values are respected for all Americans, regardless of race, ethnicity, or faith. For your convenience, we have attached a contact list of American Muslim leaders." These issues have been pushed by radical Islamist groups for months. The letter's close tracking of the interest groups' positions indicates that their officials dictated its terms for the members of Congress to sign. In fact, the nine entities all are listed in exactly the same sequence in this release from the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). The April 2009 release also cites two of the same issues as in the letter to Holder. The letter was signed by California representatives Loretta Sanchez, Adam Schiff, Mike Honda and Lois Capps, along with Ohio representatives Mary Jo Kilroy and Dennis Kucinich. Northern Virginia Congressman James Moran joined the group. Moran serves on the House Appropriations Committee subcommittee on defense. Schiff and Honda serve on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies. Kilroy sits on the House Homeland Security Committee. Schiff also serves on the House Judiciary Committee and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Many of the groups listed for Holder to meet have radical histories and agendas. For example, the Islamic Circle of North America adheres to similar ideology as the Jamaat-i-Islami, which calls for Islamic revolution and creating an Islamist state in Pakistan. In the U.S., ICNA aggressively proselytizes among non-Muslims. The Muslim Public Affairs Council argues that Hizballah should not be a designated terrorist organization. Three other groups listed for contact have direct roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, an international movement based in Egypt which seeks the creation of a global Islamic state, or Caliphate. Those groups include the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Students Association, the Muslim American Society's Freedom Foundation, which is run by a convicted felon and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Prosecutors included CAIR on a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and development, considered the nation's largest terrorism-finance case. FBI case Agent Lara Burns labeled CAIR a front group for Hamas during sworn testimony last fall. While CAIR claims to condemn terrorist attacks, it has not been able to specifically condemn Hamas suicide bombings or Hizballah bombings of civilian communities In a 2000 interview with Al Jazeera (translation here), CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad defiantly refused to criticize Hamas or Hizballah: "We do not condemn nor will we condemn any liberation movement inside Palestine, or inside Lebanon. If they want us to condemn a liberation movement inside Palestine, or Lebanon, they must condemn Israel dozens of times at all levels at all times. We will not condemn any organization. We are not under anyone's hammer. We are in the country of freedom. Why should we renounce principles?" This is the leadership Holder is asked to meet. As reporter Mary Jacoby recently noted (free registration required): CAIR "has been working to stoke tensions in local Muslim communities over FBI investigative tactics. CAIR is angry at the FBI, because the bureau embarrassed it. How? By cutting off contacts with CAIR's national leadership last year. Why did the bureau do that? Because evidence in a major terrorism-support prosecution in Texas showed CAIR's origins as a propaganda arm of Hamas." Indeed, a letter from an FBI congressional liaison states that the Bureau can't rule out an ongoing "connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS" and would cut off outreach communication with the group until it can. Letters like the Democrats' letter to Holder representing constituents' concerns are not unusual and are "part of the propaganda war that goes on beneath the surface all the time and part of their efforts to undermine law enforcement," said Bob Blitzer, who led the FBI's domestic terrorism section in the 1990s. He said he encountered "a couple hundred" letters of this nature during his career. Each is handled seriously because members of Congress signed the letters. Many of the representatives who signed this letter have a history of supporting CAIR. For example, Kucinich sent a video message praising the organization to the CAIR-Chicago 4th Annual Banquet on February 23, 2008: "As the Council on American-Islamic Relations meets I want to pledge to you. I continue to pledge for your efforts to make sure that the powerful message of Islam, a message of peace and reconciliation reverberates. I want to make sure that you know that you have a friend in the United States Congress." Sanchez has repeatedly attended annual CAIR banquets in Anaheim. Likewise, Honda spoke at CAIR's 2006 national banquet in Virginia, where called his hosts "the civil rights group that will speak on behalf of the community." Capps is included on a page of laudatory statements about CAIR, saying "I applaud CAIR for its important role in advocating for civil liberties, enhancing the understanding of Islam, and condemning acts of terrorism." Moran is included on the same page, saying "It is through the activities of groups like CAIR that cooperation-rather than competition-between the various faiths can be achieved." Honda is quoted saying "CAIR's commitment to social justice and civil rights for all Americans will help our country to ensure that respect and tolerance exists for people of all religions and ethnicities." In their letter, the representatives accept the claims of defendants in two criminal cases unqustioningly, despite sworn testimony to the contrary. In Irvine, Cal., Ahmadullah Niazi, has been indicted on immigration charges. His brother-in-law has served as Osama bin Laden's security coordinator and Niazi is accused of lying about communication with him and a visit to Pakistan to see him. He also told an FBI informant that he considered bin Laden to be "an angel" and repeatedly discussed bombing buildings in California. Niazi's supporters say he was entrapped by an agent provocateur and emphasize the informant's criminal record for forgery. They point out that Niazi even went to authorities in 2007 to report that the informant was discussing terrorist plots. In sworn testimony during Niazi's bond hearing in February, FBI agent Thomas Ropel III said Niazi went to authorities only after learning of a separate terror-indictment involving an informant and collaborated with CAIR official Hussam Ayloush to accuse the informant of being the terrorist. Niazi then lied repeatedly about his conversations with the informant. For example, Niazi claimed that he and the informant had discussed jihad once or twice, when agents already possessed "at least 15 to 20 such conversations." The following exchange took place between Ropel and Magistrate Judge Arthur Nakazato: Agent Ropel: "We had discussed conducting terrorist attacks and blowing up buildings. We had discussed Mr. Niazi or anybody talking about sending money overseas and Mr. Niazi said none of those things were ever discussed between himself and this individual. And we had personally listened to recordings in which Mr. Niazi had instigated these conversations with that individual." Judge: "He instigated the conversations?" Agent Ropel: "Yes, Mr. Niazi did, specifically regarding these statements." Another case involving informants four New York men were arrested after planting what the defendants thought were bombs outside New York synagogues. Their indictment alleges they also wanted to shoot down U.S. military planes. The informant issue raised in the letter isn't expected to generate much excitement. It is "normal" to see informants in criminal investigations have felony records of their own, said Barry Sabin, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. There are guidelines and layers of supervision to ensure the sending informants into houses of worship are necessary investigative steps. That's a point FBI Director Robert Mueller made in testimony March 25 before the Senate Judiciary Committee: "I will say that we do not focus on institutions, we focus on individuals. And I will say generally if there is evidence or information as to individual or individuals undertaking illegal activities in religious institutions, with appropriate high-level approval, we would undertake investigative activities, regardless of the religion." [Emphasis added] In Minneapolis, CAIR has complained of religious profiling in the investigation and urged people not to meet with the FBI without an attorney present. This has triggered a backlash from some members of the Minneapolis Somali community, who have repeatedly demonstrated against CAIR for, in their view, hindering law enforcement efforts to stop the recruitment of young men to return to the African nation to engage in jihad. At least 20 young men are believed to have traveled from Minneapolis to Somalia in the past year, with one killing himself in a suicide bombing attack. Three other young men from Minneapolis have been shot and killed in Somalia in the past two months. Two men have been indicted in connection with facilitating travel for the young men to Somalia, where they were to join up with the al-Shabab terrorist group. These are among the grievances for which Holder is being asked to devote his attention. That the representatives would accept at face value the claims of an organization the FBI has concluded is not "an appropriate liaison partner" is disturbing. CAIR has documented roots in a U.S-based Hamas support network. Among secretly recorded wiretaps in evidence in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development are conversations including two CAIR founders about deceiving Americans about their political ambitions and the outright declaration that "war is deception." Before carrying their water again, the politicians may wish to find out whether the war ended. Contact Susana K-M at suanema@gmail.com To Go To Top

GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED — TISHA' BE'AV (9TH DAY OF THE MONTH OF AV) Posted by Yoram Ettinger, July 29, 2009.

Tomorrow (July 30, 2009) commemorates the most calamitous day in Jewish history — Tisha' Be'Av (9th day of the Jewish month of Av) — which highlights the critical need to nurture national memory/history, as a prerequisite for survival and growth. It is also a prerequisite to avoid another day of national calamity! Enclosed you'll find my version of Guide for the Perplexed on Tisha' Be'Av. Hang in there, Yoram

The Ninth Day of Av (Tisha' Be'Av) 2009 1. Napoleon was walking at night in the streets of Paris, hearing sad voices emanating from a synagogue. When told that the wailing/lamenting commemorated a 586 BCE catastrophe, he stated: "Any People which solemnizes its ancient history is destined for a glorious future!" Memory is deliverance; Forgetfulness is oblivion. 2. The Ninth Day of Av — the most calamitous day in Jewish history — is the 9th day in the 11th Jewish month: 9/11! Fasting on Tisha' Be'Av commemorates catastrophic national destructions, as well as the moral causes for the destruction. It was first mentioned in the book of Zechariah 7:3. 3. Major national calamities in Jewish history occurred on the Ninth Day of Av (July 30, 2009): *The failed "Ten Spies/tribal presidents" (VS. Joshua & Caleb) — who slandered the Land of Israel, preferring immediate convenience and conventional "wisdom" over faith and long term vision — which prolonged the wandering in the desert for 40 years. *The destruction of the First Temple and Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (586BC) — 100,000 killed and a national exile. *The destruction of the Second Temple and Jerusalem by Titus of Rome (70AD) — 1MN killed and a national exile. *Bar Kochba (Great) Rebellion crashed (135AD) with the fall of Beitar (in Gush Etzion, Judea & Samaria) and the plowing of Jerusalem by Quintus Tinius Rofus, the Roman Governor — 580,000 killed. *First Crusade Pogroms (1096) — scores of thousands slaughtered. *Expulsion from Britain (1290). *Expulsion from Spain (1492). *WW1 erupted (1914). *Warsaw Ghetto Uprising crashed by the Nazis (May 1943) — 50,000 slaughtered. 4. The Ninth Day of Av is the central of the Four Days of Fast, which commemorate the destruction of the First Temple: 10th Day of Tevet (the onset of the siege that Nebuchadnezzar laid to Jerusalem), 17th day of Tamuz (the walls of Jerusalem were breached), 9th day of Av (destruction of both Temples) and 3rd day of Tishrey (The murder of Governor Gedalyah, who maintained a level of post-destruction Jewish autonomy, which led to a savage Babylonian murder and exile). 5. The Ninth Day of Av culminates the Three Weeks of Predicament ("Yemey Beyn Hameitzareem" in Hebrew), starting with the 17th day of Tamuz, when the walls of Jerusalem were breached by Nebuchadnezzar (1st Temple) and by Titus (2nd Temple). 6. The month of Av represents Faith in G-D (in spite of calamities) and a transformation from Curse to Blessing & Consolation, which is also represented by the two Hebrew letters of AV ("Aroor" = cursed and "Barookh" = blessed). The Hebrew letters of AV constitute the letters of Father (a synonym to G-D) and the first two letters of "EVEL" (mourning). The transformation from Curse to Blessing could forge one's character, as suggested by the numerical value of AV (Aleph=1 and Bet=2), which is Three, the combination of the basic even and odd numbers (King Solomon: "A triangular string/knot cannot be broken"). The zodiac sign of Av is a lion, which represents the Lion of Judah, rising in the aftermath of destruction. Aharon — the embodiment of human kindness — died on the 1st day of Av. 7. The Ninth Day of Av concludes a series of three Torah readings (Haphtarah) of Jewish calamities (two by the Prophet Jeremiah and one by the Prophet Yeshaayahu, and launches a series of seven Torah readings (Haphtarah) of consolations (by the Prophet Yeshaayahu). 8. The Book of (5) Lamentations (The Scroll of Eikhah — by Jeremiah the Prophet, who prophesized the destruction, the exile and the deliverance) is read on the Ninth Day of Av and since the first day of Av. The numerical value of Eikhah is 36, which is equal to the traditional number of righteous Jewish persons. The Hebrew meaning of Eikhah could be construed as "A reproaching How Come?!", as well as "Where are you?" (Why have you strayed away?). The first three Hebrew letters of Eikhah mean "How" and the fourth/last letter stands of G-D. Ambassador Yoram Ettinger is a consultant on US-Israel relations as well as the Chairman of Special Projects at the Ariel Center for Policy Research. Formerly the Minister for Congressional Affairs to Israel's Embassy in Washington, DC, Ettinger also served as Consul General of Israel to the Southwestern US. He is a former editor of Contemporary Mideast Backgrounder, and is the author of the Jerusalem Cloakroom series of reports. Contact him at yoramtex@netvision.net.il This essay is archived at http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3746153,00.html To Go To Top

AMERICANS NO LONGER SEE TERRORISM AS THREAT Posted by Michael Travis, July 28, 2009.

This article is by Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. and is archived on The Last Crusade website: www.thelastcrusade.org

Forget 9/11. Forget the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Forget the fatwahs of al Qaeda and its sister organizations. Forget the scores of attacks that have occurred or been thwarted on American soil during the past eight years. Americans, according to a Gallup poll, are less concerned about terrorism than at any point since August 2004 — with only 36 percent saying they are very or somewhat worried that they or a family member will become a victim of a terrorist attack. Americans' collective level of worry about terrorism is the lowest recorded since August 2004 (34 percent) and down sharply from the all-time high of 59 percent recorded in October 2001, just after the September 11th attacks. Thirty percent now say they are not too worried about the threat of another terrorist attack and 34 percent say they are not at all worried. In a separate Gallup Poll, a scant 1 percent of the Americans surveyed mentioned terrorism as the most important problem facing the United States. Although President Obama, apart from Bubba Bill Clinton, is the only U.S. Commander-in-Chief never to serve in the Army, 73 percent of Americans say they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in the Obama Administration and the Democrat majority in the House and Senate to protect them from future acts of terrorism — unchanged from 2006. Two-thirds of the liberals in America, according to a recent ABC poll, maintain that Islam is a peaceful religion that poses no threat to the country. Sixty-two percent of the registered Democrats and Independents concur. Islam, the ABC pollsters discovered, is more apt to be seen unfavorably by less-educated adults, Southerners and senior citizens than by their counterparts. Compared with the ABC poll of October 2001, unfavorable views of Islam have increased by 23 points among senior citizens, 19 points among conservatives, 18 points among Republicans and 12 points among Southerners. There's one group — liberals — among whom unfavorable views of Islam have declined, by 11 points. These findings are supported by the collapse of the market for books dealing with terrorism. Harry Crocker of Regnery, the publisher of such works as Stealth Jihad by Robert Spencer and America Alone by Mark Steyn, says that books on terrorism no longer sell well. The new attitude of the American people goes a long way to explain the failure to drum up a substantial number of protestors to decry the convention of Hizb ut-Tahrir, an Islamic group with espouses terror attacks against Israel and the United States, at the Oak Lawn Hilton Hotel on the outskirts of Chicago. The subject of the gathering was "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Capitalism." The event, according to the Chicago Sun Times, attracted 800 Islamists but less than fifty people showed up to protest. Hilton Oak Lawn General Manager Rick Harmon said Hizb ut-Tahrir (Arabic for "the Party of Liberation") used its own name when it reserved the room for the conference, but the hotel was not aware of the content of the event, which includes lectures entitled "Capitalism is Doomed to Fail," "The Global Rise of Islam," and the "Role of Muslims in America," until after the contract was signed. Harmon said the hotel is open to all kinds of meetings, including presumably gatherings of Muslims who are intent upon the destruction of America and its economic system. Hizb ut-Tahrir, according to Islam expert Walid Phares, offers indoctrination that prepares al Qaeda and other terrorist groups for the jihad against Israel and the United States. It is a global Sunni network. Some prominent members included 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the commander al Qaeda in Iraq; Asif Muhammad Hanif, a British jihadi who blew himself up outside a bar in Tel Aviv, killing four people (including himself) and wounding more than 50; and Omar Bakri Mohammed, a imam currently banned from Britain who praised the 9/11 attacks, raised funds for Hezbollah and Hamas and called for attacks on the Dublin airport where U.S. troops transferred there en route to Iraq. In his book, How the Khilafah Was Destroyed, Sheikh Abdul Qadeem Zalloom, the former global leader of Hizb ut-Tahrir, says anyone who rules by a non-Islamic system should "either retract or be killed ... even if this led to several years of fighting and even if it led to the killing of millions of Muslims and to the martyrdom of millions of believers." Hizb ut-Tahrir's official ruling on the permissibility of hijacking planes says, "If the plane belongs to a country at war with Muslims, like Israel, it is allowed to hijack it, for there is no sanctity for Israel or for the Jews in it." Interestingly for Americans, one of the organization's more recent leaflets, published in March, calls for the declaration of "a state of war against America." Former member Ed Husain, who left the Muslim organization and denounced it in his book The Islamist, says: "The only difference between Islamists from Hizb ut-Tahrir and jihadists, is that the former are waiting for their state and caliph before they commence jihad, while the latter believes the time for jihad is now." Hizb-ut-Tahrir is outlawed in Russia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and numerous Muslim countries (including Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia) that regard it as a radical, subversive, terrorist organization that spreads "hate and violence" and seeks to overthrow their governments. But the group remains off the State Department's terror watch list and remains free to expand its operations throughout our country. Contact Michael Travis at michaelmgr@gmail.com To Go To Top

WILL HAMAS'S NEW "CULTURE WAR" ACKNOWLEDGE ITS HISTORIC TIES TO NAZISM? Posted by LEL, July 28, 2009.

This was written by Alan M. Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. It is archived at http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/07/will-hamass-new-culture-war- acknowledge-its-historic-ties-to-nazism.php

Hamas, the terrorist organization that specializes in targeting civilians, has now decided, according to a New York Times headline, to shift "from rockets to culture war" in an effort to garner public support for its cause. Part of its ongoing public relations campaign is to portray the Israelis as the "new Nazis" and the Palestinians as the "new Jews." In order to bring about this transformation, it must engage in a form of Holocaust denial that erases the historical record of widespread Palestinian complicity with the "old Nazis" in perpetrating the real Holocaust. It has become an important part of the mantra of Hamas supporters that neither the Palestinian people nor its leadership played any role in the Holocaust. Listen to Mohammad Ahmadinejad talking to students at Columbia University: If [the Holocaust] is a reality, we need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it or not. After all, it happened in Europe. The Palestinian people had no role to play in it. So why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price of an event they had nothing to do with?...The Palestinian people didn't commit any crime. They had no role to play in World War II. They were living with the Jewish communities and the Christian communities in peace at the time. The conclusion that is supposed to follow from this "fact" is that the establishment of Israel in the wake of the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people was unfair to the Palestinians. Central to this claim is that neither the Palestinian people nor their leadership bore any responsibility for the Holocaust, and if any reparations are owed the Jewish people, it is from Germany and not from the Palestinians. The propounders of this historical argument suggest that the West created the Jewish state out of guilt over the Holocaust. It might have been understandable if a portion of Germany (or Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, France, Austria, or other collaborator nations) had been allocated for a Jewish homeland — but why Palestine? Palestine, according to this claim, was as much a "victim" as were the Jews. I hear this argument on university campuses around the United States, and even more so in Europe. The truth is that the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler's Holocaust. The official leader of the Palestinians, Haj Amin al-Husseini, spent the war years in Berlin with Hitler, serving as a consultant on the Jewish question. He was taken on a tour of Auschwitz and expressed support for the mass murder of European Jews. He also sought to "solve the problems of the Jewish element in Palestine and other Arab countries" by employing "the same method" being used "in the Axis countries." He would not be satisfied with the Jewish residents of Palestine — many of whom were descendants of Sephardic Jews who had lived there for hundreds, even thousands, of years — remaining as a minority in a Muslim state. Like Hitler, he wanted to be rid of "every last Jew." As Husseini wrote in his memoirs, "Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews. The answer I got was: 'The Jews are yours.'" The mufti was apparently planning to return to Palestine in the event of a German victory and to construct a death camp, modeled after Auschwitz, near Nablus. Husseini incited his pro-Nazi followers with the words "Arise, O sons of Arabia. Fight for your sacred rights. Slaughter Jews wherever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history and religion. That will save our honor." Not only did Husseini exhort his followers to murder the Jews; he also took an active role in trying to bring about that result. For example, in 1944, a German-Arab commando unit, under Husseini's command, parachuted into Palestine and with the intention of poisoning Tel Aviv's wells. Husseini also helped to inspire a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq and helped to organize thousands of Muslims in the Balkans into military units known as Handselar divisions, which carried out atrocities against Yugoslav Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies. After a meeting with Hitler, he recorded the following in his diary: The Mufti: "The Arabs were Germany's natural friends.... They were therefore prepared to cooperate with Germany with all their hearts and stood ready to participate in a war, not only negatively by the commission of acts of sabotage and the instigation of revolutions, but also positively by the formation of an Arab Legion. In this struggle, the Arabs were striving for the independence and the unity of Palestine, Syria and Iraq...." Hitler: "Germany was resolved, step by step, to ask one European nation after the other to solve its Jewish problem, and at the proper time direct a similar appeal to non-European nations as well. Germany's objective would then be solely the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere under the protection of British power. The moment that Germany's tank divisions and air squadrons had made their appearance south of the Caucasus, the public appeal requested by the Grand Mufti could go out to the Arab world." Hitler assured Husseini about how he would be regarded following a Nazi victory and "the destruction of the Jewish element residing in the Arab sphere." In that hour, the mufti would be the most authoritative spokesman for the Arab world. It would then be his task to set off the Arab operations that he had secretly prepared. Husseini's significant contributions to the Holocaust were multifold: first, he pleaded with Hitler to exterminate European Jewry and advised the Nazis on how to do so; second, he visited Auschwitz and urged Eichmann and Himmler to accelerate the pace of the mass murder; third, he personally stopped 4,000 children, accompanied by 500 adults, from leaving Europe and had them sent to Auschwitz and gassed; fourth, he prevented another two thousand Jews from leaving Romania for Palestine and one thousand from leaving Hungary for Palestine, who were subsequently sent to death camps; fifth, he organized the killing of 12,600 Bosnian Jews by Muslims, whom he recruited to the Waffen-SS Nazi-Bosnian division. He was also one of the few non-Germans who was made privy to the Nazi extermination while it was taking place. It was in his official capacity as the leader of the Palestinian people and its official representative that he made his pact with Hitler, spent the war years in Berlin, and worked actively with Eichmann, Himmler, von Ribbentrop, and Hitler himself to "accelerate" the final solution by exterminating the Jews of Europe and laying plans to exterminate the Jews of Palestine. Not only did the Grand Mufti play a significant role in the murder of European Jewry, he sought to replicate the genocide against the Jews in Israel during the war that produced a so-called Nakba. The war started by the Palestinians against the Jews in 1947, and the war started by the Arab states in 1948 against the new state of Israel, were both genocidal wars. Their goal was not merely the ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the area but their total annihilation. The leaders said so and the actions of their subordinates reflected this genocidal goal. They were aided in their efforts by Nazi soldiers — former SS and Gestapo members — who had been given asylum from war crime prosecution in Egypt and who had been recruited by the grand mufti to complete Hitler's work. It is also fair to say that Husseini's pro-Nazi sympathies and support were widespread among his Palestinian followers, who regarded him as a hero even after the war and the disclosure of his role in Nazi atrocities. The notorious photograph of Husseini and Hitler, together in Berlin, was proudly displayed in many Palestinian homes, even after Husseini's activities in the Holocaust became widely known and praised among Palestinians. Husseini is still regarded by many as "the George Washington" of the Palestinian people, and if the Palestinians were to get a state of their own, he would be honored as our founding father is. He was their hero, despite — more likely, because of — his active role in the genocide against the Jewish people, which he openly supported and assisted. According to Husseini's biographer, "Large parts of the Arab world shared [Husseini's] sympathy with Nazi Germany during the Second World War.... Haj Amin's popularity among the Palestinian Arabs and within the Arab states actually increased more than ever during his period with the Nazis." In 1948, the National Palestinian Council elected Husseini as its president, even though he was a wanted war criminal living in exile in Egypt. Indeed, Husseini is still revered today among many Palestinians as a national hero. Yasser Arafat, in an interview conducted in 2002 and reprinted in the Palestinian daily Al-Quds on August 2, 2002, called Husseini "our hero," referring to the Palestinian people. Arafat also boasted of being "one of his troops," even though he knew Husseini was "considered an ally of Nazis." Today many Palestinians in East Jerusalem want to turn his home into a shrine. (Ironically, it is this home that was bought by a Jew to build the controversial Jewish housing development in East Jerusalem.) It is a myth, therefore — another myth perpetrated by Iran's mythmaker-in-chief as well as by Hamas and by many on the hard left who seek to demonize Israel — that the Palestinians played "no role" in the Holocaust. Considering the active support by the Palestinian leadership and masses for the losing side of a genocidal war, it was more than fair for the United Nations to offer them a state of their own on more than half of the arable land of the British mandate. The Palestinians rejected that offer and several since because they wanted there not to be a Jewish state more than they wanted their own state. That was Husseini's position. Hamas still takes that position. Perhaps their new "culture war" will finally cause them to reconsider — and to accept the two state solution.   EDITOR'S NOTE: To call the locals "Palestinians" is incorrect. They never owned or ruled the region the British renamed Palestine. Most of them — or their parents — migrated to the region after 1900. They were of various ethnic groups and owed allegience to the clan and/or Muslim cleric; their commonality was that they spoke Arabic, as least as one of their languages. The "Palestinian people" wasn't invented until 1964. And there never was a Palestinian state or country. Before Israel became a state and was part of Mandated Palestine (Palestine was a ancient name resurrected by the British to name what had been a very small part of the Ottoman Empire), it was the Jews who were called Palestinians. They read the Palestinian Post (now the Jerusalem Post) and played in the Palestinian Philharmonic; and they participated in World War 2 as the Palestine Brigade. To Go To Top

ANGLICAN PRIEST DISGRACES AUTHENTIC CHRISTIANITY Posted by HandsFiasco, July 28, 2009.

Dexter Van Zile, a lifelong Christian, asks what type of god inheres in the so-called peacemaking ministry of Anglican Priest Naim Ateek, founder of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center. Dexter Van Zile is the Christian Media Analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. This article appeared in Jewish World Review. http://www.JewishWorldReview.com

Anglican Priest Naim Ateek is making the rounds in support of his most recent book, A Palestinian Christian Cry for Reconciliation (Orbis, 2008), in which he falsely accuses Israel of perpetrating a "slow and creeping genocide" against Palestinians — who have one of the fastest growing populations in the world. Apparently, leveling false accusations at the Jewish people and their homeland is not enough to get one barred from polite society in 21st century America. So much for history progressing in an upward spiral. In February, Ateek, founder of Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, appeared at churches in Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. And on July 18-20, Ateek appeared at a number of venues in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. In addition to appearing in churches, Ateek appeared for the first time before a congregation of American Jews — at the Kadima House in Seattle. The centerpiece of Ateek's Puget Sound tour was his June 20, 2009 appearance on Weekday, a radio show hosted by Steve Scher and broadcast on KUOW, an NPR station in Seattle. During his radio appearance, Ateek returned to a persistent theme in his writings: the notion that the god described in some of the Hebrew Scriptures is a primitive, violent and territorial god who cares only about Jews. During the interview, during which Scher lobbed softball questions, Ateek described Palestinian liberation theology as a way of helping people understand "how the Bible has been abused by Jewish religious extremists and Christian Zionists [who are] using the Bible against the Palestinians." According to Ateek, "people quote from Genesis that G-d has given the land to the Jewish people. So the land is given by God so they have a divine right to the land and the Palestinians have no rights. They need to go. It is the wrong way of interpreting scripture. Palestinian liberation theology comes to really help people understand that the message of the Bible is not about a god who is a person concerned about a piece of land here or there, but a god of justice, a god of peace, a god of compassion." During the interview, Ateek stated that some books in the Hebrew canon — most notably Daniel and Jonah — offer a critique and an alternative to this "exclusive, bigoted god who says I'm gonna go with you to war, I'm gonna kill your enemies." Scher, who did not raise concerns about Ateek's use of anti-Jewish polemics from the New Testament against the modern state of Israel, also failed to address a central question that needs asking: What type of god is propounded in Ateek's so-called "peacemaking" ministry? It's an obvious question given Ateek's criticism of the exclusive and bullying god that he says Jews and Christian Zionists use to justify Israeli policies. Ateek, who condemns belief in a god that would direct its blessing exclusively toward the Jewish people, propagates the agenda of a god who directs its judgment and anger at Israel, especially its Jewish inhabitants. Ateek does not openly confess allegiance to such a deity — in fact he denies doing so. Nevertheless, his commentary about the Arab-Israeli conflict provides a resting place, an ark, for just such a god. For example, during his appearance on Weekday, Ateek asserted that the "Today the Jewish people are not suffering. They are the oppressors. ... They can be relieved from their suffering if they do justice. I think part of the suffering of the Jewish people, or Israeli, I mean — not Jews I mean because there are still more Jews outside Israel than there are Jews there — they can have greater security. Israel doesn't want peace. That's part of the problem and Israel wants to get rid of the Palestinians and that's unfortunately what has been happening. So Israel can relieve itself from so much suffering if it does justice in that sense." On this score, Ateek accords Israel with the power to unilaterally bring an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict through concessions and peace offers. In Ateek's logic, the fact that Palestinians have engaged in persistent acts of violence against Israel is proof of Israeli intransigence — not Arab rejectionism. Exactly who wants to get rid of whom in the Middle East? For Ateek, Israel's offer at Camp David in the summer of 2000, its acceptance of the Clinton Parameters the following winter, its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and Olmert's 2008 offer to withdraw from 93 percent of the West Bank are meaningless. Despite these and other concessions and withdrawals, Ateek regards violence against Israel as Israel's fault. In sum, nothing Israel does is good enough for the god who animates in Ateek's sermonizing, and very little of what the Palestinians have done wrong is worthy of divine judgment, or even a benign admonition. For example, on October 5, 2000, soon after the beginning of the Second Intifada, when a real peacemaker would be calling for calm and for an end to violence, Ateek issued a statement that portrayed Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount on Sept. 28 as a "violation" and a "desecration" and asserted that "It was right for our Palestinian Muslim brothers and sisters to stand up in the defense of their holiest place, al-Haram al-Sharif, when it was being threatened and desecrated." On its face, "standing up in defense of their holiest place," seems like a pretty benign affirmation of nonviolent action, unless of course one takes into account the fact that five Israelis had been killed by Palestinian violence in the two weeks before Ateek issued this statement. While Ateek gives close scrutiny to the theology of Christian Zionists and Jewish extremists, he gives light treatment to the theology motivating Muslim violence against Jews and the Islamic refusal to accept the notion of a sovereign Jewish state. His painstaking exegesis of the Hebrew scriptures and repeated invocations of Christianity's universalism — which are invariably targeted at Jewish beliefs and policies — testify to a god obsessed and offended by the Jewish refusal to accept Christianity, and silently indifferent to a Muslim intolerance toward Jews. Muslim theology regarding the land and the Jewish people plays a significant, if not dominant, role in fomenting violence against Israel in the Middle East, but neither Ateek nor the group he leads, Sabeel, address these subjects in a meaningful way. One question that Scher could have asked of Ateek is why he spends such a disproportionate amount time condemning Christian Zionists, who have never blown up a bus, and the small number of Jewish settlers whose violence toward Palestinians, while condemnable, does not even come close to the misdeeds perpetrated by groups like Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyr's Brigade against Israelis. The story Naim Ateek tells about the Arab-Israeli conflict, cloaked as it is in the language of Christian peacemaking, attests to the existence of a deaf, dumb and blind god who would use Muslim and Arab violence against Israel as a scourge against the Jewish people. Such a god is not worthy of worship. Contact HandsFiasco at handsfiasco@webtv.net To Go To Top

OBAMA SLAMMED AS 'RACIST' AT JERUSALEM RALLY Posted by Cpocerl, July 28, 2009.

This was written by Aaron Klein and it appeared yesterday in World Net Daily www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.printable&pageId=105173

Jerusalem boys at rally at U.S. consulate in Jerusalem (WND photo) JERUSALEM — President Obama's policies against Jewish construction in eastern Jerusalem and the strategic West Bank were slammed as "racist" today by participants in a rally drawing about 2,000 Israelis in front of the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem. "George Mitchell go home!" yelled protestors in front of the U.S. government building. Mitchell, Obama's envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is here discussing the American administration's call for a halt to all Jewish settlement activity, including natural growth or accommodating the needs of existing Jewish populations in the areas in question. The protest began in front of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's official residence. Marchers then made their way to the U.S. consulate about one block away. "Obama should not be pressing Israel to compromise and freeze building in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem," protest organizer Yaacov Steinberg told WND. "All these steps in the past just brought more Palestinian terror and showed Israeli weakness," said Steinberg, director of a coalition of West Bank Jewish organizations. Speaking at the rally, Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, who heads the prestigious "Nir" Torah seminary in the West Bank city of Kiryat Arba, called Obama a "racist." "How dare he tell the Jews where they can or can't live! The era when Jews were banned from living in different places has ended," Waldman exclaimed. "Obama beware. This insolence will bring about the downfall of the American leadership. Anyone who dares give an order to prevent Israeli life in Jerusalem or anywhere else in the land of Israel is destined to fall," he said. Pinchas Wallerstein, director of the Yesha council of Jewish communities in the West Bank, told the crowds, "This week the American pressure reached new highs that are a shame to democratic societies." Wallerstein was referring to the summoning of Israel's ambassador to Washington last week by the State Department to demand a Jewish construction project in eastern Jerusalem be immediately halted. "It's absolutely an outrageously racist policy," Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, told WND. "Especially in light of how Obama should be sensitive when it comes to anything that would remotely constitute discrimination of people based on ethnicity or religion." Torches at rally at U.S. consulate in Jerusalem last night (WND photo) The construction project at the center of attention, financed by Miami Beach philanthropist Irving Moskowitz, is located just meters from Israel's national police headquarters and other government ministries. It is a few blocks from the country's prestigious Hebrew University, underscoring the centrality of the Jewish real estate being condemned by the U.S. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly rejected the State Department demand, telling a cabinet meeting Sunday that Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem was not a matter up for discussion. "Imagine what would happen if someone were to suggest Jews could not live in or purchase [property] in certain neighborhoods in London, New York, Paris or Rome," he said. "The international community would certainly raise protest. Likewise, we cannot accept such a ruling on East Jerusalem," Netanyahu told ministers. Crowd at rally at U.S. consulate in Jerusalem last night (WND photo) In a statement released to WND, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, long considered one of the most powerful Jewish groups in the U.S., took strong issue with the U.S. demand against Jewish construction in Jerusalem. "We find disturbing the objections raised to the proposed construction of residential units on property that was legally purchased and approved by the appropriate authorities. The area in question houses major Israeli governmental agencies, including the national police headquarters." "The U.S. has in the past and recently raised objections to the removal of illegal structures built by Arabs in eastern Jerusalem even though they were built in violation of zoning and other requirements often on usurped land," read the statement. The group's statement pointed out Moskowitz's housing project formerly was the house of the infamous mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who spent the war years in Berlin as a close ally of Adolf Hitler, aiding and abetting the Nazi extermination of Jews. Al-Husseini was also linked to the 1929 massacre of Jews in Jerusalem and Hebron and to other acts of incitement that resulted in death and destruction in what was then called Palestine. Some Palestinians have expressed a desire to preserve the building as a tribute to Husseini. Historically, there was never any separation between eastern and western Jerusalem. The terminology came after Jordan occupied the eastern section of the city, including the Temple Mount, from 1947 until it used the territory to attack the Jewish state in 1967. Israel reunited Jerusalem when it won the 1967 Six Day War. EDITOR'S NOTE: This is from US 4 Israel (us4israel@gmail.com). The demonstration came just days after Independent Media Research and Analysis (IMRA) published a surprising poll by a prestigious polling company, Maagar Mochot, according to which Israelis regard settling Judea and Samaria as almost as important as the heavily subsidized national enterprise of settling the Negev and Galilee. http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=44698. A huge majority (71:20) of Israelis also agreed with a tongue-in-cheek proposition presented by the poll, according to which Palestinians should be made to freeze settlement in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) if Jews were forced to do so. The poll also found that Israelis strongly prefer Palestinian autonomy over Palestinian statehood — which is the concept strongly promoted by the Obama administration. Contact CPocerl at Cpocerl@aol.com To Go To Top

HRW CONDEMNS IDF DRONES; JERUSALEM HALTS DEMOLITION OF ILLEGAL ARAB HOUSES; REPERCUSSIONS OF OBAMA'S MURKY TALK ABOUT ISLAM Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 28, 2009.

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH CONDEMNS IDF DRONES Human Rights Watch (HRW) held a fundraiser in S. Arabia. The HRW pitch was that it focuses disproportionately on Israel. S. Arabia violates human rights infamously. This sale of HRW bias undermines HRW's ethical pretensions. Exploiting publicity over the timing of the Goldstone [UN] inquiry into Gaza combat, HRW and related organizations issued reports on the subject. HRW condemned yet another weapon usage by the IDF, involving drones. Goldstone and other UN investigatory commissioners had condemned Israel during combat, based on media and HRW, in which he was an official, and other NGO reports. When this was made known, Goldstone's biased conflict of interest was revealed [and his methodology compromised]. He resigned from the HRW board. The condemnation was that Israeli usage of drones inflicted unnecessary casualties. HRW documents only six incidents and 29 alleged civilian deaths. Israeli and P.A. human rights groups allege that 42 drone attacks killed 87 civilians. That is a low level of undesirable casualties for so much combat, especially considering that Hamas put military facilities among civilians. HRW claims that the IDF did not take adequate precautions. How would it know, when it doesn't consult with Israel? HRW based its claim, as usual, on unidentifiable witnesses and researchers. They assert that there was no known military activity in the area warranting Israeli attack. HRW made the same claim in the Lebanon War, despite the overwhelming evidence of military activity. HRW had to retract, then. In this instance, the main witness is an Arab boy whom the Arab NGO, Al Mezan, reported had died weeks before the incident. The Israeli NGOs were not operating in the theatre of operations. Casualty figures by P.A. NGOs, such as the Palestinian Center for Human Rights are notoriously inaccurate. They often include terrorists among the civilian toll. [Makes good propaganda for its side.] An earlier HRW report accused Israel of using white phosphorus improperly as a weapon. The basis was Arab alleged witnesses. A 2006 HRW report into the Gaza beach incident also was based on "Palestinian researchers." Then HRW reviewed IDF evidence. It had to admit that the IDF was not targeting civilians. War is complex, and HRW, which lacks expertise on it, fails to allow for its complexity. It seems determined to criminalize each Israeli weapon. During the 2006 Lebanon War, HRW declared that an Israeli attack at Qana caused massive casualties. Israel suspended combat for a couple of days. Hizbullah was able to re-supply itself at least somewhat in that time. This enabled Hizbullah to fight longer. More war. Later, HRW revised its claim (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/29 from NGO Monitor). Libelous headlines tarnish Israel's reputation. How would Israel defend itself against unidentified or unavailable witnesses it cannot cross-examine or even comment about? HRW depends on P.A. researchers, allied with the terrorists. The P.A., and especially Gaza, is not known for freedom of thought and objectivity. Well, neither should HRW be. HRW routinely accuses Israel of targeting or being careless about civilians. Actually, IDF doctrine is not to target or be careless about civilians, though accidents happen. Arab doctrine is to target civilians and be careless about their own. Nevertheless, HRW hardly pursues real Arab war criminality. By mostly ignoring Hamas war crimes, HRW undermines its own credibility when it fixates on Israel. ISRAEL LETS SEWAGE EQUIPMENT INTO GAZA Israel let equipment into Gaza for repairing a sewage treatment plant. This was in addition to 100 humanitarian trucks [a frequent occurrence, and the almost unrestricted tunnel smuggling from the Sinai]. The Israeli news brief described the sewage officials as under the direction of the Palestinian Authority regime in Ramallah (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/21). Why didn't the U.S. think of dispatching humanitarian aid to Nazi Germany during WWII? The German people were just as supportive of Nazi racial theory, ethnic cleansing, and imperialism as are the Palestinian Arabs, who admire the Nazis, but the Arabs call those policies jihad. Is it humanitarian to help such people, who, over all, support inhumane regimes in barbarism against innocent victims? HOW ISRAEL HANDLED WOULD-BE BLOCKADE BREAKERS A ship from Cyprus was sent with goods to Gaza, for the stated purpose of breaking Israel's partial blockade of Gaza. On board were some prominent people [acting as human shields]. One complained that Israel objects to Hamas' violence, but the ship was a non-violent way to break the blockade. The Israeli Navy warned the ship to turn back. The captain refused. Eventually, the Navy stopped the ship, but agreed to transfer the humanitarian goods to Gaza. Israel explained that anyone having humanitarian goods for Gaza may send them through the regular entry points, in coordination with Israel (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/30). That was tactful. The ships' non-violent way to break the blockade is not a legitimate answer to the blockade. The problem is that unrestricted shipments to Gaza enable Hamas to arm, thereby leading to future increases in violence. Therefore, those prominent passengers who think they are being humanitarian really are supporting warfare with the purpose of genocide. All Hamas has to do is end its Radical Islamic ideology, become civilized, and make peace. JERUSALEM TO HALT MOST DEMOLITION OF ARAB HOUSES Mayor Barkat of Jerusalem said he would halt 70% of the demolitions of illegal Arab houses in eastern Jerusalem. This comes after he clashed with Secretary of State Clinton, who criticized demolitions. Now he cites some vague reason (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/29). Clinton has condemned Israel for legal Jewish building and for demolishing illegal Arab building in eastern Jerusalem. Doubly unfair. Mayor Barkat should not have accepted dictation from a foreign country. He should have told Clinton that Israel has a foreign minister, does the U.S.. A Lighter Touch: Besides reading Alan M. Dershowitz' Contrary to Popular Opinion, I'm reading the Beck Diet Solution, train your brain to Think like a thin person. It's good to have something to read while snacking. FOREIGN MINISTER BARAK FOR TEMPORARY FREEZE Israel's Foreign Min. Barak proposed a temporary freeze on Jewish construction in Judea-Samaria. Cabinet members objected, lest it would become precedent for a permanent freeze. They also object to unilateral Israeli concession (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/29). I think that the objections are wise. The State Dept. and other foreign anti-Zionist agencies strive to turn Israel's conditional or temporary responses into unconditional or permanent responses, calling it precedent. Negotiations could drag out, making the freeze permanent. Unilateral concessions are discriminatory. Why not ask for a freeze on Arab construction? ARAB ARSON AGAINST YITZHAR JEWS IN SAMARIA 500 Jews live in Yitzhar, Samaria, a number of times attacked by neighboring Arabs claiming the Jewish community's land. By violence, claim they it. This time, after setting fire to the Jews' crops, an Arab mob was waiting for the Jews to come to try to put out the fire. The Arabs smote the Jews with stones. One youth suffered an eye injury. Some Jews fought back. Using riot control methods, the Army dispersed the Arab mob (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/30). What is wrong with this story? What is wrong is the Army merely dispersing the Arab mob instead of arresting them and demanding long prison sentences for arson and attempted murder. How does the rest of the media treat such stories? It rarely reports Arab attacks on settlers and Jewish leftist incitement of local Arabs. It may report allegations of Jewish destruction of Arabs' olive trees, usually faked by the Arabs. The media leaves the impression that settlers are the ones out for trouble. The few times that Jews respond to extreme provocation, the media makes them out to be the villains. Is this an example of what to expect in "two democratic states, side-by-side in peace?" REPERCUSSIONS OF OBAMA'S MURKY TALK ABOUT ISLAM In Cairo, Obama sought to improve relations with Islam. He "...praised the Muslim community in the U.S, whose values he said incorporate tenets of Islam." Capitalizing upon that speech, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is distributing 100,000 annotated copies of the Koran to U.S. leaders. This is to "reach out" and educate them about Islam. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) characterizes CAIR as "a product of the Islamic Association for Palestine, and other media have accused it of promoting militant Muslim views. CAIR previously has been funded in part by the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, some of whose former officials recently were convicted for funneling money to terrorist groups." (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/30). To the ADL characterization of CAIR as Radical Islamist, which is a fascist version of Islam, I would add that over the years, I have been reporting CAIR's consistent and constant support for accused terrorists, its false accusations against others, and its officials touting terrorism at conferences. Questions? (1) Which tenets of Islam does the U.S. Muslim community incorporate? Is CAIR part of the U.S. Muslim community? It incorporates the tenets of jihad by terrorism and deception. (2) Can we depend on a Radical Islamic group to annotate the Koran fairly or propagandistically? (3) How much does such a book "educate," compared with Muslim clergymen's radical teachings that hundreds of millions follow, repression of women and minorities, and their widespread imperialist jihad? Don't Americans need a deeper background preparation? CHANGES IN RADICAL ISLAM Under pressure by Hamas, half the leaders of Islamic Jihad want to merge with it. Hamas wants this unity when and if it forms a coalition government with Fatah. The other half of Islamic Jihad finds Hamas insufficiently radical. In Egypt, the government now reserves 40 parliamentary seats for women. The Muslim Brotherhood perceives that as a ruse for diluting its parliamentary delegation. It therefore will run radical female candidates. Muslim Brotherhood youths criticize the leadership for not adapting their ideology to less restrictive, more modern ideas (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/30). The criticism is vague. It usually is reported that way. Real meaning? Radical Muslim organizations tend to have pragmatic factions that make temporary compromises in order the conquer, and absolutist factions that consider it religiously dishonorable to even deal with impure foes. The West tends to get taken in by the pragmatists. Each society has its blind spots. This kind of naivete is the West's blind spot. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 gn Affairs Quarterly raises the question of the future of the free market system. That's what they call our economic system, in which government demanded that businesses issue sub-prime mortgages, and businesses expect government subsidies, government insurance, government bail-out, and government military purchases by congressional district. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

THE WALLENBERG FOUNDATION Posted by Dr. Natalio Wengrower, July 27, 2009.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Background: During World War 2, when the Nazis were rounding up Jews to send them to their deaths, most Western politicians did little to save Jews and high-level bureaucrats intentionally hindered organized rescue efforts. Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, was an outstanding exception. He saved many thousands of Hungarian Jews, by supplying them with protective passports. Read the biography of this courageous man on the website of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

The Wallenberg Foundation is a global-reach educational NGO that spreads all around world the deeds of the Holocaust Rescuers. Visit its website at www.raoulwallenberg.net, The Foundation has branches in New York, Berlin, Jerusalem, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. More than 200 hundred Heads of State and Noble Prize Laurates comprise our Honorary Members Board. Among other initiatives we are now working in the editions of free-access e-books, with no commercial purpose. Please, find below the link to a list of e-books already edited: http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?es/ebooks/ Natalio Wengrower is with the Wallenberg Foundation. Contact Dr. Wengrower at www.raoulwallenberg.net To Go To Top

ISLAM JUST ISN'T INTO US Posted by LEL, July 27, 2009.

This was written by Laura Rosen Cohen, a Toronto freelance writer. It appeared in National Post http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/ 2009/07/27/laura-rosen-cohen-islam-just-isn-t-into-us.aspx

"I have the highest respect for the religion of Islam, and recognize the heroic efforts of many religious leaders in contemporary Iran to stand up to the repressions wrought by the ruling system," says Jewish human rights activist Irwin Cotler. "I refuse to associate these crimes generically with the mullahs of Iran, and I deplore any attempt to do so," he continued in his July 24th letter to the editor. And thus began yet another misguided chapter of the never-ending Jewish and liberal quest for the Islamic world to "like us". Cotler's bizarre statements have little to do with reality. Iran is where religious fervour, led by a religious leader — the Ayatollah Khomeni, brought upon the Islamic revolution. It is religious fervour — inspired by a perverse interpretation of Shiia Islam — that motivates Iran's genocidal leader, with the continued blessings of the religious establishment. It has been said that a definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Certainly, there can be no better explanation for Jews, and particularly liberal Jews to keep trying new ways of currying favour in the eyes of the Islamic world. How many strategies have been tried? Too many to list in one short article. But a few noteworthy projects deserve a mention. In Israel, the Jews have tried to give away "land for peace", and that has failed miserably time and time again. Egypt is a despotic regime, with the fanatic Muslim brotherhood gaining more political ground each passing day. It maintains a frigid and grudging "peace" with Israel and the "peace" with Jordan is only measurably more civil. Israel sends civil aid to disaster zones all over the world, performs open-heart surgeries on Arab babies, gives Arab Israeli citizens full rights under the law, and even treats Palestinian terrorists at Israeli hospitals, but it's still not enough. Israel has Arab members of the Knesset, and despite the terrorist threat implicit in it, successive Israeli leaders continue to commit to the founding of a Palestinian state. But that's still not enough for the Muslim world. In the Jewish diaspora, and under the heavy influence of socialist and Marxist dogma, liberal Jews pour small fortunes into "inter-faith" causes, conferences and dialogues in the hopes of finding "greater understanding" with the Islamic world in general — and in particular with the Palestinians. Dear fellow Jews, what is so hard to understand about "we hate your guts, and will continue to kill and maim you"? Just last week, an "inter-faith" Rabbi, the guest speaker at an ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) conference was shocked ... shocked to hear that one of the guest imams felt that Jews deserved the Holocaust because they turned their backs against Allah. What is so hard to understand about that? Jews continue to support the Liberal party in Canada, and the Democratic party in America, despite the obvious and undeniable evidence that their true friends are on the Christian, Zionist political right. Unfortunately, their commitment to liberalism trumps their commitment to their own people. Here in Canada, the multi-cultural outreach by Jews to Muslim Canadians continues with the Canadian Jewish Congress funding such initiatives as scholarships for Somali Canadians. Where is the reciprocity in these activities? When was the last time you heard about the King Abdullah scholarship for Jews? Or the American Muslim scholarship fund for Jews? Have you ever been to a Jewish conference where a genocide or an individual death of a Muslim person was described, in theological terms, as being justifiable? Have you ever heard a Jew celebrate when a Muslim has been murdered? When is the last time a Jew gleefully beheaded an enemy, video taped it and uploaded it onto YouTube? Jews: get this through your head once and for all. The Islamic world, under its current leadership, is just not into you. Contact LEL at LEL817@yahoo.com. To Go To Top

FROM ISRAEL: FOR THIS TOO, NEVER AGAIN! Posted by Arlene Kushner, July 27, 2009.

From now through Tisha B'Av, which is Thursday, you can watch, online, the movie "Home Game," sponsored by the Friends of Gush Katif. If you have not yet seen it, take an hour to watch it, and then share the URL with others. It may bring you to tears, as it did me when I saw it, or may evoke a stoic rage. It is, without a question, painful viewing. But important viewing. ~~~~~~~~~~ This is the story — provided in the main via video that had been taken by residents — of the expulsion from Gush Katif of 10,000 Jews in August 2005. It is told within the framework of the basketball tournament that the young people of Gush Katif engaged in every summer, and their decision to play their last game, in Netzer Hazani, as the soldiers were literally at their gate to force people to leave. http://wejew.com/media/5249/Home_Game_Online_Movie_ Launch_For_the_Nine_Days/ ~~~~~~~~~~ It's important, first, because it is part of our history. A shameful part, as this operation should never have happened. This is why it is appropriate viewing for the Nine Days of Tisha B'Av: We are taught that we brought the destruction of the Temple — mourned on Tisha B'Av — because of causeless hatred and how we mistreated each other. The lesson must not be lost, especially now. ~~~~~~~~~~ But beyond history, there are very compelling reasons in the here and now to be in touch with this. We need, first, to be reminded of the responsibility we bear for the suffering of the Jews expelled from Gush Katif — some of whom still do not have permanent homes, and many of whom have lost livelihoods and suffered enormous emotional and psychological damage. We are speaking, you must understand, about some of the finest of Israel's citizens, people who were — and to a large degree still are — idealistic and passionately Zionist, religiously observant and hard-working. Netzer Hazani, I am happy to report, has now, finally, re-established itself in a new home. See: http://www.netzerhazani.org/ ~~~~~~~~~~ Then, a powerful lesson must be drawn from this bitter time: Never again! Never should we pull Jews from homes in the Jewish land. Never again should we relinquish Jewish land. We are facing the most horrendous of times, as the world rallies against us and challenges our legitimacy and our right to our land. On a purely pragmatic level: The current government, whatever our discontent with it, should not be weakened from within. For the alternative — a government coalition headed by Tzipi Livni — would be a nightmare and our undoing. It is our task to continually let those in power know that we don't want them to cave, that our backs are stiffened and we expect theirs to be stiffened as well. It is our job to communicate to Prime Minister Netanyahu our on-going expectation that he must stand strong against those who would diminish us and weaken us. Fax: 02-670-5369 (From the US: 011-972-2-670-5369) Phone: 03-610-9898 (From the US: 011-972-3-610-9898) E-mail: pm_eng2@it.pmo.gov.il (underscore after pm) ~~~~~~~~~~ Please, see Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer in the Department of Arabic and a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, on the issue of Israel concessions in Jerusalem. "...the struggle over settlement in Jerusalem is at heart a struggle over Israeli sovereignty in the city, based on 3,000 years of Jewish history in the holy city, long before Washington was the capital of the United States, Paris the capital of France and Cairo the capital of Egypt. Jerusalem, and particularly the area of the Temple, embodies the hopes and is the focus of the prayers of the Jewish people since it went into exile 1,940 years ago. "Zionism is based on the idea of returning to Zion, meaning to Jerusalem, not to Beersheva or Haifa or Jaffa. Every year at this time, during the month of Av, we weep for the destruction of Jerusalem...The prophets of Israel prophesied the salvation of Jerusalem and no other city. "...a concession on Jerusalem or parts of the city constitutes surrender to a baseless Palestinian, Arab and Islamic demand and could endanger both the capital of Israel and the entire Zionist enterprise. Israel must expand and enrich Jewish residence in the historic capital of the Jewish people in order to eliminate once and forever the possibility of partitioning the city. "...Israel should declare for all to see and hear on road signs, in official documents and in the language used by the Broadcasting Authority that the name of its capital is Yerushalayim, not Urshalim and certainly not al-Quds. The Islamic conquest of this country ended with WWI [when the British defeated the Ottoman Empire here] and there is no reason to perpetuate the name that desert tribes gave the eternal city of the Jewish people." Right on! http://imra.org.il/story.php3?id=44796 Kedar also alludes to something else in passing that I had thought about but not put into writing: There is a sort of poetic justice in Jewish housing [i.e., in Sheikh Jarrah] being built on the property that once belonged to the Mufti of Jerusalem, "Haj Amin al-Husseini, who volunteered to recruit tens of thousands of Muslims for the Nazi extermination machine." ~~~~~~~~~~ Thanks to the several people who pointed out to me that I recently referred to George Mitchell as John. (John Mitchell was Nixon's attorney general. As he is deceased, it would be difficult for him to visit Israel now.) Yes, it's George. He arrived here from Syria yesterday, and the tone was all sweetness and light. Netanyahu, at yesterday's Cabinet meetings, declared: "...even within the fabric of friendly relations between allies there are points over which there is not full agreement." I confess readily enough, as I have before, that this tone does not bring comfort to my heart. Rather, I start to wonder what concessions are about to be made by us in order to bring us to a "friendly" relationship with the US. Vigilance is required. ~~~~~~~~~~ But Mitchell's tone was also conciliatory. In his first meeting, which was with Defense Minister Barak, he declared that differences with Israel were "discussions among friends," and "not disputes among adversaries." There was no announcement of a resolution on the settlement issue. ~~~~~~~~~~ Mitchell chose to focus on the issue of a "comprehensive peace." While still in Syria, he had told reporters: "I told President Assad that President Obama is determined to facilitate a truly comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace." And he implied that bringing Israel and Syria back to negotiations was something that was imminent ("near term"). It is certainly something that the US is pushing. Netanyahu, in his recent statement on the subject, said we were prepared for a resumption of talks with Syria, without preconditions on either side. You will remember, however, that Assad has been adamant about the need for us to concede the Golan as a pre-condition to negotiations. At the same time, Netanyahu made it clear that we had no illusions about Syria, explaining that the government: "...had serious doubts as to whether Syria is really committed to making peace with Israel, because it had forged a close alliance with Iran, it continues to arm Hezbollah, and continues to undermine Lebanon's independence. And Damascus, the capital of Syria, continues to serve as a center for Palestinian terror groups. "So I think that if Syria wanted to signal its approach to peace, it could obviously take tangible steps to show a different direction." ~~~~~~~~~~ After the meeting with Barak, Mitchell took off for Cairo, at the request of Mubarak. This was unexpected, as the Mitchell-Mubarak meeting was scheduled for tomorrow. On the face of it, it seems clear that Mubarak wanted to clarify certain things before Mitchell held further meetings here in Israel. And here you have it: When he first arrived here, Mitchell indicated that "I participated in meetings with several Arab leaders, in which we are urging them to take meaningful steps towards normalization as gestures of their own statements that everyone in the region shares the vision of comprehensive peace..." Today, the tone is different, as Mitchell, returned here, said Arab normalization "will come further down the road in the [peace] process." Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League, who is Egyptian, has declared, after meeting with Mitchell: "...the Arabs will not take any step of normalization as a sacrifice for Israel....There will be no Arab steps before Israel stops its policy of settlement building." Perhaps the meeting with Moussa was Mubarak's real purpose in asking Mitchell to come to Cairo. It's all more than a bit wearisome. We face here the core of the problem in what is called the "Arab-Israeli conflict": the inherent Arab hostility to Israel, and refusal to accept her as a full and sovereign partner in the region. The worst thing, apparently, is to appear "weak" in front of other Arab nations with regard to Israel. ~~~~~~~~~~ I quoted Amnon Lord the other day, who said that something positive that has resulted from the recent situation is a rapprochement between Israel and Egypt. He elaborated, referring to "Egypt and Israel hugging each other tightly in the dark." "In the dark," says it all. Egypt would deny any embrace of Israel — clearly IS denying it, as we see with regard to the message delivered to Mitchell. Unless this embrace can happen in the light of the sun, the situation, while perhaps less ominous on some fronts, is far from where it should be. ~~~~~~~~~~ Let us. then, turn our attention for a moment to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who was here earlier today and met with Netanyahu, with whom he discussed several defense and security issues — most notably Iran. The intent was to reassure us — as Gates said the US and Israel saw "eye-to-eye" on Iran, and that diplomatic engagement with Iran would not be open-ended. But it was also to get us to cool it, with regard to plans to attack Iran, so that American diplomacy would have an opportunity to bear fruit. Here he had no success. Barak, who met with Mitchell after Netanyahu had, told him that we were taking no options off the table. "This is our position. We mean it." ~~~~~~~~~~ Gates indicated that Obama is still hoping that Iran will come to the negotiating table — though why he imagines there might be fruitful negotiations with the Iranians totally eludes me — and is looking for an answer to them regarding their willingness to talk with the US by September, when the UN convenes again. Hopping over to Amman, Jordan, Gates enlarged upon the US position, saying that if the Iranian response to talks was negative, the next step would be sanctions with a number of punitive measures, possibly to be undertaken simultaneously. Let's hope so. ~~~~~~~~~~ Please see Barry Rubin's latest piece, "Fatah's power structure spells trouble for peace with Israel." Rubin asks: "Why are Fatah's leaders so rarely discussed? Because to do so immediately shows there isn't going to be any comprehensive peace agreement in this generation and that the designation of Fatah as 'moderate' rests on a rather broad definition of that word... "The end of Abbas's career is in sight. There is no conceivable consensus candidate to become head of Fatah, the PA, and/or the PLO. Equally, there's no leadership willing to make any comprehensive peace agreement with Israel. The Palestinian movement's troubles may get much worse. "How can such huge factors be ignored by those many people and governments in the West acting as if a quick resolution of the conflict is both possible and such a high priority?" http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1248277894938& pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info To Go To Top

TEENAGERS RESCUED FROM TALIBAN SUICIDE TRAINING CAMPS Posted by Cpocerl, July 27, 2009.

This was written by Zahid Hussain, and it appeared in The Times of London http://www.newmediajournal.us/terrorism/07272009a.htm

Murad Ali, one of five schoolboy suicide bombers rescued from a Taliban training camp, looks haggard beyond his 13 years. He was thrilled at first when he was given a gun, but Murad told The Times last week of his ordeal at the hands of the Islamists, who have kidnapped 1,500 children like him to prepare for their fatal missions. Murad was studying in class five in Mingora, the main city in northwest Pakistan's Swat Valley, when the Islamists abducted him and took him to their remote mountain base in Chuprial. Looking drained in his smudged clothes and dirty sandals, he gave a glimpse into the short life that awaits boys who are taken by the Taliban. The next stage of his training included 16 hours a day of physical exercise and psychological indoctrination. "My instructor told me that martyrdom is the biggest reward of Allah," Murad said quietly. Another boy, Abdul Wahab, 15, said that the Taliban lured him to the camp from his studies at a madrassa — Islamic school — in Mingora. "I was told that it was a religious duty of every Muslim to get training to fight the enemies of Islam," he said. He said that he did not appreciate what he would be asked to do. "I panicked when a few days later I was told that I would be getting training for suicide bombing," he said. The Army believes that between 1,200 to 1,500 boys as young as 11 who were trained in Swat to become suicide bombers were recruited after the Pakistani Government signed a peace deal with the Taliban in February, handing over control of the valley to the militants. The agreement broke down after the Taliban started advancing on Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, which led to a military offensive that has all but driven the militants from the region. The boys were rescued after the Taliban were forced to abandon their camps. Many are still missing, however, having been sold to militants in other areas...The Taliban turned to children as potential suicide bombers because they were impressionable, less likely to be detected, and better able to reach their targets. "They are told that the Pakistani Army has become an enemy of Islam, as it is fighting for Christians and Jews," said a senior official involved in the interrogation of potential suicide bombers who have surrendered or been captured. On the day of a planned attack, the designated suicide bomber is taken to a mosque to be congratulated for being chosen by God. "Sometimes he is also heavily drugged before the attack," the official said. The children were told that they should not allow anyone, even their parents, to get in the way of jihad. "You must not hesitate even to kill your parents if they are on the wrong side," said Kurshid Khan, 14, who was selected for training which could have taken him to South Waziristan. The lawless region bordering Afghanistan is controlled by Baitullah Mehsud, the head of Pakistan's Taliban. Contact CPocerl at Cpocerl@aol.com To Go To Top

POLICE EVACUATE AS '11' OUTPOST OPERATION GETS UNDERWAY Posted by Yaacov Levi, July 27, 2009.

This was written by Yehudah Lev Kay and it appeared in Arutz-7 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132596

(IsraelNN.com) Police and IDF forces evacuated 10 youth from the Netzer outpost in Gush Etzion Monday as activists throughout Judea and Samaria began an operation to establish 11 new outposts in defiance of international pressure. At Netzer, which lies between Alon Shvut and Efrat, police and IDF forces came along with the regional commander, Eran Makov, to assure the 10 youth did not go through with their plans to build a structure at the site. "They pushed us around a little bit, cursed at us," said Yair, who was at the evacuation. "But they didn't arrest any of us. We're going back already to build again." At other outposts, the work proceeded more smoothly. Near Ma'ale Michmash, around 30 youth began to build a structure at the new Inbalim outpost, while at Tzuryah, near Avnei Hefetz, organizer Matanya said that hundreds of youth had shown up to build "in defiance of the Americans." The "11" outpost operation was conceived by the Land of Israel Faithful as an answer to international pressure on Israel not to build in Judea and Samaria. It was designed to mirror a similar operation in 1946, when Jewish Zionists built 11 new outposts in the Negev, leading the UN ultimately to recommend that the Negev become part of the Jewish state. The rest of the modern 11 outposts will go up on Tuesday, the second day planned for the operation. In Oz Yonaton, near Kochav Yaakov, Michael said youth would add a second structure alongside the "Obama" hut, which they jokingly named for the U.S. President for "encouraging further settlement in Judea and Samaria." Another new outpost is going up Tuesday near Neriya with the name of Givat Egoz. Youth have inhabited the site for a half a year and police have yet to bother them. They say families are now interested in moving in. "With G-d's help we want to tell the whole world that they cannot tell us what or how to build," said Rachel, the organizer at Givat Egoz. "This is our country, and no one else should interfere." Contact Yaacov Levi at jlevi_us@yahoo.com To Go To Top

LEBANON ON SHAKY GROUND Posted by Olivier Guitta, July 27, 2009.

A wind of optimism blew over Beirut after the recent general elections won by the pro-Western March 14 bloc in an overall serene atmosphere. Thanks to this, Lebanon has been enjoying so far one of its best tourist seasons in a while. But this might be over soon because of the agenda of extremist elements that have been recently reactivated. The first usual suspect that has been involved in recent incidents is the Shiite militia Hezbollah. The party of God has built over the years a state within a state and has beefed up its military capabilities after the war with Israel over the summer of 2006. Hezbollah can boast a much more robust and sophisticated army than the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) has. According to various reports Hezbollah has rebuilt an arsenal of over 40,000 rockets. And this in clear violation of UN resolution 1701 that was passed at the end of the 2006 war and also under the nose of the UNIFIL forces stationed in the south. This issue came to the fore with a bang: indeed on July 14, an arms cache belonging and "actively maintained" by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon blew up. That is the conclusion of a just released UN report. On July 15, a UN investigative team was prevented to physically investigate the matter by individuals that a recent UN report describes as members of Hezbollah. According to that same report, these individuals were seen hauling boxes from the explosion site and intended to destroy evidence. A few days later 14 soldiers of UNIFIL were wounded after Shiite "demonstrators", that happened to be quite well organized, threw stones at them. Interestingly, Hezbollah maintains that the "demonstrators" were just villagers defending their land. Hezbollah MP Ali Fayyad went as far as criticizing UNIFIL for not respecting the specificity of the villages and private property. Naim Kassem, Hezbollah's number 2, also turned around the situation accusing UNIFIL of having made a mistake by trying to enter a house without coordinating with the Lebanese army. That last remark is quite telling since the LAF composed of about 30% of Shiite elements has been suspected by many analysts of leaking information to Hezbollah. This latest incident is just the tip of the iceberg and Hezbollah's active rearming is worrying numerous Western diplomats. A possible worsening of the situation in southern Lebanon is very much in the cards and even though some believe that Syria has no interest in igniting a fire, Tehran, Hezbollah's other major supporter, might have another view. Shiite extremists are not the only ones that have been in the news in Lebanon recently. Sunni extremists linked to Fatah al Islam, a terror group loosely linked to Al Qaeda and that fought the LAF in Nahr el Bared in 2007, were arrested on July 21 by the LAF. This cell was composed of ten members hailing from various Arab countries and one from Greece. The ringleader, a Syrian national, traveled to six Arab countries in 15 days and his group was planning attacks against UNIFIL and Israel. Interestingly this cell was using a billboard advertising agency as cover to spy on UNIFIL forces and LAF as well. Once again Lebanon is used as a fighting ground for extremists of all kinds. Foreign countries are also very much meddling in domestic affairs. For proof, Saudi Arabia and Syria, respectively the main supporters of the March 14 bloc and the March 8 coalition (that includes Hezbollah, the Shiite Amal and the Christians of General Aoun), have not agreed on the composition of a government and therefore everything is at a standstill. It is high time that the Lebanese people can decide of their fate themselves but unfortunately that is just wishful thinking at this point. Olivier Guitta is an Adjunct Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and a foreign affairs and counterterrorism consultant. You can read his latest work at www.thecroissant.com/about.html To Go To Top

THE WORST STALINIST AT THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY Posted by Steven Plaut, July 27, 2009.

This is by Alon ben Shaul and it was published on the IsraCampus website http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/Editorial %20-%20Alon%20Ben%20Shaul%20-%20Yuri%20Pines.htm

Yuri Pines is a Hebrew University professor, who wishes all settlers' homes would be destroyed, including that of Lebanon's IDF hero Major Roi Klein, is a self-confessed anti-Zionist. He is disgusted by "Israeli propaganda" that portrayed Palestinians as terrorists. He justifies the Intifada violence and dreams of its success. He is also a supporter of traitor-spy Azmi Bishara. As a soldier he refused to serve in the territories and called students and lecturers to do the same. "An Israeli soldier in the West Bank is a criminal..." he once said. The Ukraine-born lecturer of Early Imperial Chinese History is a member of the Communist Party and even defends China's record of human rights. Many Israelis may still recall Major Roi Klein who saved his soldiers' life by shielding them from a hand-grenade lobbed at them during the second Lebanon war. Many of them were also shocked when they learned that the High Court ruled that his home in the Settlement of Eli, where his widow and two children live, would be demolished, alongside 11 other homes deemed to be built illegally. But when Yuri Pines (his last name is pronounced like the male sex organ), a Jerusalem associate professor of imperial Chinese History, received an email it which he was asked to add his name to a petition against the demolition, he went ballistic. "I hope that not only his house would be destroyed, but also the entire settlement!" And for a good measure he added, "And that the terrorist-settlers will be dispersed into the four corners of the world." He was using the Hebrew term "mitnahablim," which is a coined word that rhymes with "settlers" but means terrorists. One of the students at his department, who distributed the petition but preferred to maintain his anonymity, was outraged. "He is entitled to his views and could erase the email, but we were shocked by a reaction of an academic whose salary is paid by a public institution." Pines himself was unrepentant. He told Ma'ariv: "This is my position. I replied not as a lecturer, but as a person who holds a political opinion. I am in favor of a complete annihilation of the settlements' project and a return to the Green Line. The Hills Youth are my enemies." Pines is proud of his ideological convictions. When he lived in Kiev, the town of his birth, he did not at first believe Soviet propaganda about Israel. But he was quick to change his mind and "adopted anti-Zionist stands" upon his arrival to his parents' adopted new country. In the early 1970's, at the age of 15, he realized that "much of the Soviet criticism was not based on lies, but had a solid background," as he once claimed on a website called "G21." On the other hand, he claims he was "wise enough" not to be brainwashed by Israeli propaganda. "I was — and remained heretofore — disgusted with official propaganda which portrayed Palestinians as a backward nation incapable of producing anything but coward terrorists." And he went on: "I was even disgusted and astonished by the belief in Jews being the 'chosen people', in the 'eternal Jewish rights' and the need of all Jews to gather in Palestine." In his disgust, the Hebrew University senior lecturer concluded that he must be a member of the worst anti-nationalistic organization in the country and joined the Stalinist Israeli Communist Party. Before he started his military duty he had informed the IDF that he would never serve beyond the Green Line or 1967 border. Pines elaborated: "A French soldier in Algeria, a US soldier in Vietnam, an Israeli soldier in the West Bank or Lebanon may claim that he is serving the country, but in fact he is a criminal, and serves criminal ends." He added that he "would never join forces that shoot demonstrators, and would never perform any other kind of dirty job, such as serving at the checkpoints aimed to prevent Palestinians from moving on to their land..." He obviously does not see any other use for the checkpoints that have foiled so many suicide bombing attempts. "The future of Israel is evidently post-Zionist" As a conscript Pines served six months in military jails and then two more prison terms when he was a reservist. He also refused to participate in the 1982 Lebanon war. He confessed to have demanded longer jail sentences as part of a public opinion stunt, but the IDF avoided the trick and eventually sent him to serve in the Negev, before dropping him from the service role altogether. Pines was a "trouble maker" not only as a soldier, but also as a student. In the 1980's he was twice put on disciplinary probation following his participation in "massive violet protests" and "assaults on security guards," which he organized on Mount Scopus. As a lecturer, he did not miss any opportunity to urge his colleagues and students to follow in his footsteps. He was one of 287 Israeli academics who signed a petition in which they expressed "admiration and support of those of our students and lecturers who refuse to serve as soldiers in the occupied territories." Army service was described by them as "carrying out orders that have no place in a democratic society founded on the sanctity of human life." In other words, the army has nothing to do with preventing Arabs from massacring Jews. In June 2001 he signed a petition in support of arch-traitor Azmi Bishara's infamous speech in Damascus, the same Bishara that expressed his loyalty to the Hizbullah and fled the country following his support of the terror organization during the second Lebanon war. Bishara fed the Hizbullah intelligence information to assist it in shooting rockets at Israeli targets. As a true believer in Bolshevism, Pines accepted unchallenged not only Soviet propaganda, but also the Chinese disinformation. The oppression of Tibet? The persecution of the Falun Gong sect? Human right abuses? Those are all "pure fiction," insists the learned Hebrew University scholar! During the Olympic Games in Beijing last year he wrote an article in Haaretz in which he accused the West of envy. And why? Because China is different, yellow and threatening, above all successful. The critics of China are nothing more but "cynical racists" and "ignoramuses" that spread "half truths" and "unexamined clichés." He even rebuked those who condemn China's assistance of Sudan's actions in Darfur. The real villains are of course the Americans in Iraq and the Israelis in the territories. He adds: "The Americans are white, and therefore are entitled to speak in the name of democracy and Christian compassion. It can not be helped that the Chinese are too different and therefore always guilty." And as for Israel, he has no doubt that its future "is evidently post-Zionist." He believes that it is about time to dismantle the settlements that threaten to cut economic ties with her. All for the "long-term interest of the country." And this is a university professor, promoting Stalinist anti-Zionism, at an Israeli university funded by the Israeli taxpayer... Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. This essay appeared today in the Jewish Press http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/40064 To Go To Top

THE KIPAH ON MY HEAD Posted by Justice for Jonathan Pollard, July 27, 2009.

Not long after I was sentenced to life in prison for my service to the State of Israel, I was interviewed on "60 Minutes," an American television news program. I was escorted to the interview by 2 NSA agents with my hands and legs bound in chains. A moment before they placed me in front of the cameras, the agents removed my chains. They also tried to remove my kipah from my head, by force. I fought to keep my kipah because it is the consummate symbol of my very being. And the agents fought to take it away because it is the ultimate symbol of my very being. They grabbed my kipah and threw it to the ground, threatening to cancel the interview. Left with no choice, against my will, I submitted to the interview without my beloved kipah. The kipah symbolizes everything we believe in as Jews: a) our eternal devotion to the Holy One Blessed Be He, the one true G-d of Israel; b) our unity and mutual responsibility as B'nai Yisrael, the People of Israel; and c) the indivisibility of the Holy Land of Israel, our eternal gift from the Creator of the World. Similarly, wearing a kipah is a sign of a Jew's acceptance of the sovereign yoke of Heaven. The Holy One Blessed Be He is our Help and our Shield forever. My kipah declares that I fear no man, only G-d. Although I have been abandoned for 24 years by the State which I faithfully served and I have been sorely afflicted by those who keep me captive, "I believe with perfect faith" that "I shall not die; I will live! And I shall tell the deeds of HaShem"! Please pray daily, with all your heart and all your soul, for a full healing and for the immediate release of all of Israel's captives and its MIAs, and we are: Ron ben Batya (Arad) Zachariah Shlomo ben Miriam (Baumel) Yekutiel Yehuda Nachman ben Sarah (Katz) Tzvi ben Penina (Feldman) Guy Ben Rina (Chever) Gilead ben Aviva (Shalit) In Japan: Yoel Ze'ev ben Mirel Reesa Chava; Yaacov Yosef ben Rayzl; Yosef ben Eta Rivkah In the USA: Yehonatan ben Malka (Pollard) "And those redeemed by HaShem shall return and will come to Zion rejoicing and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads!" Amain! Ken yihi ratzon! To Go To Top

CLOSE GUANTANAMO BAY; RE-OPEN AUSCHWITZ Posted by Irwin N. Graulich, July 27, 2009.

Hi. Here is my latest article which has stirring in my soul ever since I saw that despicable sign at The Israeli Day Parade. Thanks. Irwin

First they deny The Holocaust. Then, when it suits their agenda, they invoke it. Hard to believe that the above title was a featured poster/sign which was given a prominent display by The New York City Police Department — who even guarded the demonstrators during the Israeli Day Parade on Sunday, May 31st, 2009. Here is the actual proof — http://israeldayparademay312009.shutterfly.com/# Of course we must permit freedom of speech in America. However, where does such freedom end and "screaming 'fire' in a crowded movie theater" begin? Providing these evil protestors with a revered spot on Fifth Avenue and 58th street, where hundreds of thousand of schoolchildren marched by, seems rather outrageous and harmful. Common sense dictates that these radical haters who taunted the parade marchers — young and old, with their heinous message, simply be moved one block west. Or is the purpose of the police force to allow and even encourage incitement? Imagine an equally despicable sign about slavery at an African American parade? No way that such a venomous message would be permitted. Polls show that a majority of Palestinian Arabs and quite a large number of Muslims actually agree with such outrageous sentiments about re-opening Auschwitz. We heard these very same chants during the Gaza War protests. But I thought The Holocaust never really happened. Well, you cannot have it both ways, guys. The world must remember that this renewed Nazi-like propaganda is not hyperbole or an isolated incident, but rather, a recurring theme throughout the Arab Muslim media. And by the way, the only reason that the Arab and Muslim world does not indeed follow through on Hitler's dream, is because it cannot. Every time they attempt to confront Israel, they lose more land, more soldiers and more honor. Israel can make minced meat out of the entire Arab world, just like it did in every war against it. That is a military fact. All Arab countries fear Israel and constantly invoke the excuse that, "Well, Israel is the fourth strongest army in the world" — which it is. Iran would not dare — despite what the skinny little midget with the scruffy beard says daily. In spite of the sick ideologies found on Al Jazeera and heard throughout the rest of radical Muslimania, the world is adamant about Israel giving up most of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. This land grab will accomplish only one goal — the creation of a state at Israel's border that advocates genocide against Jews. I mean is that a joke or what? Wake up Obama, Hillary and George Mitchell. Two state solution — my tuchess!!!! Russia, France and the EU continue their immoral pressure to stop the natural growth of Jewish settlements. With the Obama Administration now jumping aboard the Auschwitz-Birkenau train, the world is enraged at little ol' Israel for building town houses in the West Bank, although they are not bothered by Palestinians building rockets and weaponry. The new American administration just does not get it. So far, Hillary, Barak and George Mitchell have learned absolutely nothing from the words and treatment of America coming out of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan today. What Obama's Middle East policies have neglected to ascertain from history is that if one dismisses Jew hatred as merely a Jewish problem, which was done in 1939 and from 1948 to the present, we make a terrible mistake which will literally "blow up" in our faces. Had the world acted when the enemies of the Jews bombed Israeli buses, bar mitzvah parties, seders, kindergarten classes and pizza shops, we may not have experienced 9/11, the London subway bombings, a Bali nightclub massacre, the deaths inside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, the massive train destruction in Madrid, or the recent Mumbai attacks where almost 500 people were murdered or wounded. Naturally, the terrorists carefully sought out the only 6 Jews in the city, out of a population of 14 million. The rhetoric, the hatred and the threats pour out of the West Bank and Gaza. Virtually every Muslim country has produced the most despicable ideas about Jews and Israel in their newspapers, tv stations and radio broadcasts, making the Nazis look like Boy Scouts. Yet the world has conveniently turned a deaf ear on the anti-semitic, anti-Israel sentiments. Getting tough with Israel is the PC thing to do. After all, building neighborhoods where Jewish children learn ethics and Bible is much worse than Arab neighborhoods where children learn to hate and build suicide bombs. If you think the anti-semitic sign in New York was horrendous or the political cartoons comparing Jews to Nazis and monkeys found in the Arab/Muslim media daily are way over the top, then just listen to the actual words of President Abbas. He recently told the Jordanian newspaper Al-Duster: 1) "I am against an armed struggle against Israel because we can't do it. But in the coming stages, things may change." 2) "We reject the proposal of the Jewishness of the state of Israel..." 3) "I was honored to be the one to shoot the first bullet in 1965. We taught everyone what resistance is..." 4) "I don't demand that Hamas recognize Israel." 5)" IDF counter-terrorist operations in Gaza were worse than The Holocaust." Yet the PA/Fatah is considered moderate, while Likud and Netanyahu are somehow considered extremist, thereby positioning Likud and Hamas as morally equivalent extremists. Good trick! How about this truism — compared to Hamas, Stalin and the communists were moderates. Hamas is in business for one reason, and one reason only — to kill Jews and destroy Israel. That is their raison d'etre. In fact, Likud and Netanyahu are more moderate than any conservative government in the world — and yet they are constantly being attacked as far right. The fact remains that the Arabs could have had their own state in 1948, but they were much more interested in destroying the tiny Jewish one. Well boys, you have to pay a price for such attempts. Arab Palestinians have been given innumerable chances by the Jewish Palestinians to create their own state, torn out of biblical Israel — yet al Husseini (1947), Arafat (2000) and Abbas (2008) all rejected those overly generous offers in order to attempt another Jewish extermination. Well, there cannot be endless chances. Are you kidding? Three strikes and you're out. Israel left Gaza completely in August, 2005 which included evicting Jews from established neighborhoods that had been built out of desert wasteland. Only two days after the evacuation, every Jewish home and every Jewish greenhouse was totally destroyed by the Palestinians in Gaza because, after all, who wants to touch or look at a Jewish made greenhouse. Gaza proceeded to elect a Hamas government, whose major platform was the destruction of Israel, which led to the immediate launching of rockets against Israeli civilian population centers. Hamas knew that their efforts would ultimately lead to a massive Israeli response, culminating in Operation Cast Lead. The Hamas leadership could not have been more pleased, because their strategy had finally worked. For them, the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians — who would be featured on tv and newspapers throughout the world. Al Jazeera and CNN with 24/7 coverage of dead women and children. I mean, how great is that? Imagine the same exact imagery in 1945, showing German women in Dresden sprawled dead amidst the rubble, and babies disfigured — burned to a crisp in Hiroshima. Had Ted Turner's cronies been running the media at that time, the world would be speaking German or Japanese today. When will our political leaders realize the significance of a protest sign that calls for another Holocaust? Israel and Jews are a lighting rod that attracts the worst currents in the world. Jewish hatred eventually becomes American hatred which turns into hatred of all Western democracies. Indeed, they are all part of the same evil hate group. Amazingly, those pathetic socialist countries throughout Europe have learned all the wrong lessons from WWII and The Holocaust. Europeans should have learned that one of the most noble human causes is to fight evil. Instead, they learned that fighting is evil. Once again, they chose to follow the wrong sign. Irwin N. Graulich is a motivational speaker on morality, ethics, religion and politics. He can be reached at irwin.graulich@verizon.net To Go To Top

WHAT COUNTERMISSIONARIES BELIEVE Posted by Shaul and Aviva Ceder, July 27, 2009.

This was written by Penina Taylor and it appeared July 6, 2009 in the Jerusalem Post www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443736586&pagename =JPArticle%2FShowFull The writer, now the director of Shomrei Emet Institute for Countermissionary Studies and the founder of Torah Life Strategies, spent over 17 years in Christian and Messianic outreach and missions before returning to the Jewish faith.

I am completely misunderstood. As a countermissionary, people think that it's my goal in life to make people miserable, to persecute poor Christians living in our country and to tell people what they should believe. Nothing could be further from the truth. People think that a countermissionary's raison d'être is to destroy freedom of religion and to create within Israel a state similar to that of the Muslim countries that surround us, where no one has any freedom to believe anything other than those beliefs held by the thugs who hold power. Again, wrong. Some people think I hate Christians. Wrong also. Believe it or not, the purpose of a countermissionary is ultimately to improve Jewish-Christian relations. As it says in Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall," good fences make good neighbors. By teaching Jews why we are not Christians and by teaching Christians to respect our boundaries, we improve relations between the two faiths. Blurring the lines between the two faiths doesn't serve to bridge the gap caused by fear and misunderstanding; it weakens Judaism and causes Christians to have less respect for the Jewish people. Breaking down the walls breaks down the distinctiveness and the different callings of each faith system, and only fosters more hatred and fear. The purpose of the countermissionary is to strengthen the Jewish people and to teach Christians that we have reasons for choosing to reject their faith. When they can understand and accept this, we can progress to a level of rejecting their faith without rejecting them as people, and the two peoples can live side-by-side in mutual respect and understanding, agreeing to disagree.   WHEN WE say that it should be illegal to proselytize in Israel, we are not saying that a Christian doesn't have the right to believe as he wishes or even to worship God as he sees fit. What we are saying is that a Jew has the right to live in the Jewish state in freedom, without needing to worry about being harassed by someone trying to convince him that his faith is not good enough, that he needs to accept Christianity's concept of God to be able to even have a relationship with God in the first place, or that his child will be convinced to abandon the faith of his forefathers. We are asking the Christian to exercise true friendship. The message we are sending to our Christian friends is this: The Jewish people who live here would like to make a request of you. Please don't proselytize while you are here. If you are truly our friends, you won't. Why? Because friends are friends with no strings attached. We understand that your faith and belief system compels you to share what you believe with all who do not, regardless of their own personal faith or lack thereof.   WE UNDERSTAND that your Bible instructs you to make it a priority to share your faith with the Jewish people, since Jesus was Jewish. Some even say that because of this they owe the Jews a debt of gratitude. But gratitude is best shown with respect to the person on whom it is being bestowed and not with respect to the giver. Please show us that you respect us by not trying to convince us to change our beliefs. We understand that the reason you feel compelled to share your beliefs with us is that your faith teaches that without a belief in Jesus, no one can have a relationship with God. Please remember that the Jewish faith has always taught about having an intimate relationship with God — and it did this thousands of years before Jesus or the New Testament. The vast majority of us are either immigrants or the children and grandchildren of immigrants. We came to this country because we wanted live in a Jewish state. Had we not wanted this, we might have chosen to live elsewhere. Please respect our faith and our feelings and refrain from proselytizing while you are visiting our home. Good fences really do make good neighbors, and countermissionaries really ae misunderstood. We are here to build, not to destroy; to foster greater understanding, not to promote hatred. But we do this only through strengthening Judaism, not by blurring the lines between it and Christianity. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il To Go To Top

LAND REFORM AND LAND POLITICS; WHAT ECONOMIC CRISIS?; INTERNATIONAL LAW AND IDF'S MILITARY PRACTICE Posted by Steven Shamrack, July 27, 2009.

Land Reform and Land Politics. 1. Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin told a cabinet meeting recently that the Palestinian Authority is working secretly to prevent Jewish organisations from buying property in East Jerusalem. 2. An Egyptian sheikh living in Qatar has given Hamas $21 million to buy buildings in eastern Jerusalem where the outlawed terrorist organisation, as well as the Palestinian Authority, is trying to establish a power base Voting for the recent land reform bill had to be cancell ed in the Knesset on Wednesday as even seven government ministers refused to participate in the vote. Most of the Knesset felt this would hand the country over to private speculators and hostile-to-Israel elements. "Why do we want to sell the holy Land of Israel to become another piece of real estate?" said Zevulun Orlev, Jewish Home MK. Jewish Land in Transjordan. The Israel Land Fund, which has bought land and dozens of houses for Jews in predominantly Arab parts of the Jerusalem area, is now eyeing property once owned by Jews in neighbouring Transjordan. Fund chairman Aryeh King told AFP, "There are thousands of Jewish properties in Jordan which were purchased during the Ottoman era and under the British mandate" adding, "We have records of the ownership." (Transjordan was a part of the Palestinian mandate, which was allocated for the Jewish state — Eretz Israel. After the British illegally ceded it to Bedouin refugees from the Saudi peninsula, Jews were forced out!) Food for Thought. by Steven Shamrak No news agency has reported that French President Nicolas Sarkozy supported PM Netanyahu's call that Israel is a state for the Jewish people, but most of them wrote that the French President called on Israel to shut down construction on West Bank settlements. Discriminated against in Jordan without International Condemnation. Jordan has begun revoking the Jordanian citizenship of those people defined by officials as Arabs with roots in Judea and Samaria. The new policy robs thousands of residents of the kingdom of civil services. (Maybe it is also time for Israel to revoke the citizenship of Arabs and let them move to Sinai to build their own independent country!) Enemy Recognised the Value of Israeli Self-hating Media. The Prince of Bahrain, Sheik Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, has called on Arab leaders to talk to the Israeli media to facilitate Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts. Iron Dom Failed — Iran Must be Stopped. Israeli defence officials say three tests in the US of a missile defence system meant to shield Israel from Iranian attack have been aborted over the past week. An upgraded version of the already-deployed Arrow 2 was being tested off the coast of California when communication glitches between the missile and the radar led US defence officials to abort the tests. (The US has been undermining Israel's determination to stop the Iranian nuclear program by promoting a defensive program!) Iran-PA Meeting — Fraternization of the Enemies. The Palestinian Authority's top negotiator Saeb Erekat said he had met Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki a week ago in Egypt. He rejected reports that these were the first such talks, saying the two had been meeting since 2006. Short-sighted Appeasement Does not Work. Israel is planning to remove 23 " illegal outposts" from the West Bank in the course of a single day in response to mounting US demands that it halt all settlement activity. Some 1,200 people will be evacuated. (No international outcry against atrocities, which are committed against Jews!) No Crisis. There is no crisis in relations between Israel and the United States, despite a lingering dispute — which will be settled " soon" — over settlement construction in the West Bank, Israel's new ambassador to Washington announced. (Just damaging to Israel's fake PR campaign, but who cares about the feelings of Jews or the sovereignty of their country! And every little international piglet feels free to dictate to Israel what to do, without any diplomatic sensitivity or restraint!) Lebanon Violating 1701 — UN is Silent. Israel accused Lebanon of violating United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 on Tuesday after the explosion of a Hizbullah arms cache hidden inside a southern Lebanese town. The blast occurred inside the village of Hirbet Selm, some 20 kilometres north of the Israel-Lebanon border. The cache contained dozens of 122mm Katyusha rockets as well as high-powered machine guns." This is a major violation of resolution 1701," one official said. "The weaponry was stored inside a village and is proof of our long-standing claim that Iizbullah uses civilian infrastructure to hide its weaponry." What Economic Crisis? The United States has promised $30 million to rebuild the Palestinian camp of Nahr el-Bared in the north of Lebanon. And the United States will transfer $200 million to the PA to help it cover its budget crisis. (The US has no funds to fix its own infrastructure and health system, but money is always available for sustaining the fake refugees. Why aren't the US tax-payers asking why?) What Peace Process? Almost 50% of Palestinians believe that neither the Fatah nor Hamas is interested in signing a reconciliation accord, according to a study done by the university of Nablus, published by the PA. Quote of the Week: "There is conclusive historical and archaeological evidence that there has been an unbroken Jewish presence in Jerusalem since 438 CE, 200 years before the Arab conquest in 638 C E. The Jewish claim, therefore, is not based on biblical and historical rights alone. Jews have always been permanent residents of the Old City, and since 1820, the Jews constituted the largest single community there." — Rev. Douglas Young, statement by Evangelical Christians in 1971 — Before the age of phony political correctness even the adversaries of Jews admitted the truth. Today they are all silent! International Law and IDF's Military Practice. Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, told a conference in Jerusalem on June 18, 2009: The battlefield — in any kind of war — is a place of confusion and chaos, of fast-moving action. In the type of conflict that the Israeli Defense Forces recently fought in Gaza and in Lebanon, and Britain and America are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, these age-old confusions and complexities are made one hundred times worse by the fighting policies and techniques of the enemy. Islamist fighting groups study the international laws of armed conflict carefully and they understand it well. They know that a British or Israeli commander and his men are bound by international law and the rules of engagement that flow from it. They then do their utmost to exploit what they view as one of their enemy 's main weaknesses. Their very modus operandi is built on the correct assumption that Western armies will normally abide by the rules, while these insurgents employ a deliberate policy of operating consistently outside international law. Civilians and their property are routinely exploited by these groups, in deliberate and flagrant violation of international laws or reasonable norms of civilised behaviour. Protected buildings, mosques, schools, and hospitals are used as strongholds. Legal and proportional responses by a Western army will be deliberately exploited and manipulated in order to produce international outcry and condemnation. Hamas' military capability was deliberately positioned behind the human shield of the civilian population. They also ordered, forced when necessary, men, women and children from their own population to stay put in places they knew were about to be attacked by the IDF. Israel was fighting an enemy that is deliberately trying to sacrifice their own people, deliberately trying to lure you into killing their own innocent civilians. And Hamas, like Hizbullah, is also highly expert at driving the media agenda. They will always have people ready to give interviews condemning Israeli forces for war crimes. They are adept at staging and distorting incidents. When possible the IDF gave at least four hours' notice to civilians to leave areas targeted for attack. The IDF dropped over 900,000 leaflets warning the population of impending attacks to allow them to leave designated areas. The IDF phoned over 30,000 Palestinian households in Gaza, urging them in Arabic to leave homes where Hamas might have stashed weapons or be preparing to fight. Many attack helicopter missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability were cancelled if there was too great a risk of civilian casualties in the area. During the conflict, the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza, even though delivering aid virtually into your enemy 's hands is to the military tactician normally quite unthinkable. By taking these actions the IDF did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Steven Shamrak was involved in the Moscow Zionist movement. He worked as a construction engineer at the Moscow Olympic Games project and as a computer consultant in Australia. He has been publishing an Internet editorial letter about the Arab-Israel conflict since August 2001 and has a website www.shamrak.com. He can be reached by email at StevenShamrak@gmail.com To Go To Top

EUROPE'S ROLE IN THE "PEACE PROCESS"; NEW ISRAELI TACTIC AGAINST ZIONISM; REPORT ON NETANYAHU'S ANTI-ZIONISM Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 27, 2009.

EUROPE'S ROLE IN THE "PEACE PROCESS" Overshadowed in the so-called "peace process" by the US, Europe is trying to regain the limelight by sponsoring official visits and conferences. One in June-July is designated for examining Europe's role. But the conferences do not examine its role. We shall. Europe subsidizes radical NGOs that contradict their stated beneficial or benign goals by invalid Israel-bashing in behalf of the Arab and Durban agendas. These agendas defame Israel as committing apartheid and war crimes. Their purpose is to use those war cries to rope people into ostracizing Israel. Those NGOs will utter whatever would motivate people, true or not. During the Oslo process, Europe turned large sums of money over to Arafat, mistaking him for a moderate. He divided the bounty mostly between foreign bank accounts and terrorism [and hiring people in order to coopt allegiance]. Now, Europe finances "lawfare" against Israeli officials. This is a kind of dirty warfare by judiciary. Thus the current case in Spain by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, is funded by the European Commission, Norway, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and other governments. The EU claims that it finances political NGOs in Israel just for specific projects. Actually, Europeans finance almost the whole operation of those NGOs. These NGOs, such as B'Tselem, Yesh Din, Machsom Watch, Bimkom, Ir Amim, Adalah, and Mossawa, seek to overturn government policies. Rather than "strengthening the forces of moderation," they promote anti-Israel boycotts, proposals to combine Israel with the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), thereby eradicating Jewish sovereignty if not the Jewish people, and "submitting tendentious claims to UN committees." What should the conferences discuss: "How does this happen? Who guides these decisions? Why are European government funds for NGOs used to undermine compromise, mutual acceptance and the two-state solution that Europe claims to support?" [Not that P.A. statehood would be a solution.] If the EU wanted to monitor the NGOs, it is not setup to. "...there is no coordinator or central data source. European transparency regulations are ignored in this area, and no records or protocols are available for NGO allocations under European Commission programs. The names and possible conflicts of interests of the policy-makers are hidden from public scrutiny. Evaluation processes, if any, are secret, making it difficult to explore constructive changes. The E.U. tries not to have its role evaluated. It rejects calls for revaluation. It imposes gag rules or censors documents" (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/29 from Gerald Steinberg, Director of NGO Monitor, in Jerusalem Post). How much of a subversive Israeli Left would there be, without foreign subsidy? How much would that Left be able to give the false impression that they speak for many Israelis? Israelis have found the Left wanting. But the leftist elite is entrenched in the levers of society. U.S. DIPLOMACY RETARDS ARAB REFORMS? U.S. badgering of Israel for concessions to the Arabs gives the Arabs an excuse for postponing further pre-existing commitments. They say they are waiting for Israel to comply. They enjoy U.S. hectoring of Israel (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/29). Worse, the Arabs harden their negotiating position. Now, Abbas refuses to negotiate unless Israel agrees to a complete building freeze in the Territories and in Jerusalem. The Palestinian Authority never has met any significant obligation, nor does it offer to freeze its own building. One hears indignant leftist, media, or foreign governmental demands that Israel negotiate with the P.A.. PM Netanyahu said he is willing to, without pre-conditions. The P.A. has pre-conditions. Why isn't that indignation directed against the P.A., for demanding rather than negotiating? The problem is not lack of negotiations but belligerent Arab intent. The Saudi initiative comprises surrender terms, designed to preclude Israeli survival. NEW ISRAELI TACTIC AGAINST ZIONISM? The government offers to transfer outpost residents into new houses to be built deeper inside older municipalities. Residents decline the offer, perceiving it as a first deceptive step in major Israeli withdrawal. They met all the conditions of legality, just needing a government signature as a formality. The government procrastinates and delays signing final approval. That does not warrant indignation for those residents as being in "illegal" communities or outposts. They went through the proper procedure, which included permission to build. Indignation should be turned against a procrastinating, hostile government. The Migron outpost has a problem. Its 43 families live on a hilltop overlooking the highway to Jerusalem. That is strategically important to national security. Nevertheless, the government threatens to tear it down. "Residents of Migron emphasize that though some of the land on which Migron was founded is officially listed as Arab-owned, these Arabs had never come forward to make their claim, nor had they ever cultivated these lands — until Peace Now sought them out and encouraged them to do so." This led to a court suit (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/29). In that area, land ownership is complex. Some owners didn't register their property, usually for tax evasion. They may have had proxies feign ownership. Cultivation of state land may enable squatters to claim state land legally. Arabs plant or herd livestock on land owned by Jews, then claim the land for themselves. These issues require careful adjudication, not pre-formed opinions. EXCLUSIVE REPORT ON NETANYAHU'S ANTI-ZIONISM A personal source in Israel informed me of an issue and a rally for it not covered by the media. PM Netanyahu is putting land owned by the Jewish National Fund up for sale to the highest bidder. Apparently he did not announce any restrictions on the sale. This means that S. Arabia or its proxies could bid the highest and end up owning much of the land in Israel. Think of the implications for the Jewish state, then! In protest, a rally was called by both the Left and the Right. Many Israeli leftists live on land owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) or enjoy adjoining JNF parks. They don't want it bought out from under them. Right-wingers at the rally found no sympathy from the left-wingers over their living on state land in Judea-Samaria, that might be taken away from them. There wasn't much unity on this issue. In disunity, there is weakness. Each side gets picked off separately. For the Left, the matter was more self-interest than national interest. They care more about retaining their residences, than about alienating parts of the Land of Israel and putting it into enemy hands. In a prescient statement, Rabbi Kahane once said, "If you take Torah out of Zionism, you end up with Dizengoff." He was referring to Dizengoff Square, frequented by secularist Jews who lack Jewish education and a drive for national self-preservation. [The secularist domination of Western Europe is bringing the same self-centeredness and defeatism about defending its own civilization from barbarism.] Netanyahu is said to be making the sale for money. I don't think so. His sale conforms to the leftist ideology expressed in leftist ideological Israeli Court rulings. That ideology is a multiculturalism that supports the culture of an enemy seeking to destroy Jewish sovereignty the Jewish people, and therefore Jewish culture. What a misguided ideology that would invite mass-murder! I believe that this sale is one of Netanyahu's surreptitious anti-Zionist tactics. Another tactic is his compromise proposal to the U.S. to freeze most building in Judea-Samaria, when Israel is not obliged to freeze anything and cannot make peace if land there is held by the enemy. Netanyahu should tell other countries to keep out of Israel's affairs, their obvious hostility giving them no standing. Another objection to the sale is ethical. This land was bought by the Jewish people — I remember the little white collection cans with a blue Star of David. They bought it for Jewish national development, not for the Arabs who even before statehood used terrorism to try to drive Jews out. Large tracts took large sums and brokers skilled at overcoming anti-Jewish restrictions. Most Jews were poor, so the sums had to be accumulated collectively. JNF land belongs to the Jewish people and is not at the disposal of the State except by chicanery. Netanyahu is engaging in land theft. Netanyahu's land sale program is as foolish and fraudulent as the so-called two-state solution. The "two-state solution" proposes an Arab state purged of Jews, and a Jewish state leaving in the million Arabs. If anything is a double standard, that is. Ethnic cleansing is a strange program for the liberals who propose it. The program to sell off JNF land arises from the liberal concept of a state for all its citizens. That is liberalism carried to an extreme. If Israel were a large country at peace, it might make ethical sense. Not being large, encouraging the growth of another nationality within can prevent the Jewish national development for which the Jewish state was reconstituted. Besieged by belligerent Arabs and support without, and subverted by Arabs within and the radical NGOs subsidized by the EU, it is folly to encourage the growth of a vengeful and irredentist nationality. Strengthening the Muslims, who have threatened genocide, is far from ethical. It is suicidal. Does liberalism now stand for Jewish national suicide and physical mass-murder? The sales plan is fraudulent liberalism. Being clever, Netanyahu must know it. Then he must either be anti-Zionist, regardless of his misleading rhetoric and his pejorative label of "hardliner," or he succumbs under pressure. Some hardliner! ISRAELI ARAB SHOPPERS FLOCK TO JENIN Israeli Arabs are flocking to shops in the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), including Jenin, now that Israel has removed many checkpoints. They are boosting the P.A. economy, whose wares are cheaper. The U.S. sought this boost. The shift has dampened the Israeli Arab economy, especially in Jerusalem (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/29). Removing the roadblock to Jericho may let the casino there go back into business. It had been siphoning off Israelis' money — the P.A. doesn't let its own people gamble there — for the benefit of P.A. officials and Israeli partners, including Israeli officials who were supposed to be negotiating in behalf of Israel but looked out for their investment in the casino. Boosting an enemy economy at the expense of one's own seems like a poor way to defend against an enemy dedicated to exterminating one's own people. PM Netanyahu claims that this would prepare the P.A. for peace. No evidence offered for such a risky step. Equally bitter foes in S. Arabia and Kuwait have richer economies. Then what does the economy have to do with their jihad, which is based on their radical view of religion and uses their wealth in its behalf? (Incidentally, the media likes to call the Saudi View "conservative," but its view is covered more precisely by the new term, "Radical Islam." ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE LIMITS When Saddam started a war on Iran, Israeli military intelligence estimated that his forces would overrun Iran's within a couple of weeks. The war lasted eight years, ending in a ceasefire. Such are the limits of military intelligence. Dr. Aaron Lerner points out that similar over-confidence could prompt Israel to cede more strategic depth in return for defense technology http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/29, by Shlomo Gazit, former head of military intelligence) of transitory value. Israel also was caught by surprise in 1973 and had under-estimated Egypt's power to cross the Suez Canal. Better to prepare for the worst. Thus prepared, one can always handle better scenarios. U.S. GRANTING SCHOLARSHIPS TO PALESTINIAN ARABS The U.S. is granting scholarships to Palestinian Arabs so they can learn to help build a state (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/29). They may study how to help destroy the Jewish state, which is the main goal of the Palestinian Authority. That is why they studied bomb-making at an Arab college in Jerusalem. A Lighter Touch: Foreign Affairs Quarterly raises the question of the future of the free market system. That's what they call our economic system, in which government demanded that businesses issue sub-prime mortgages, and businesses expect government subsidies, government insurance, government bail-out, and government military purchases by congressional district. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

GROWTH IN YESHA, OBSTACLE TO US Posted by Arutz-Sheva, July 27, 2009.

The move to Yesha and Jerusalem continues to outstrip growth elsewhere and is a further obstacle to US policy that "settlements are illegitimate." This is called "600,000 Jews in Yesha, Eastern Jerusalem Stymie US Plans" and was written by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu.

There are now more than 600,000 Jews living in Yesha (Judea and Samaria) and eastern neighborhoods of Jerusalem that were restored to the Jewish State in the Six-Day War in 1967 — but which the United States never has recognized as part of Israel. The Obama administration, continuing a change that began last when Condoleezza Rice was Secretary of State, has labeled the neighborhoods, such as Har Homa and Gilo, as "settlements." The number of Jews living in Judea and Samaria alone has crossed 300,000, and the growth rate by the end of the year is likely to reach five percent or more, creating an obstacle to U.S. President Barack Obama's campaign against the communities as "illegitimate." Most of the growth has come in cities, such as Modi'in and Beitar Illit, which generally are lumped with smaller towns and hilltop outposts as "settlements." The figures, issued by the Civil Administration, do not include residents of several outposts. The growth rate in Judea and Samaria, known as Yesha, was 2.3 percent for the first six months of the year, according to the report. However, the growth rate by the end of the year may be more than twice as much because of a traditionally large increase in home sales and rentals during the summer vacation. The move to Judea and Samaria probably would be higher, but American-imposed building restrictions have prevented people from building their own houses. Real estate agents have reported that prices for the remaining empty houses have soared as people race to move into the remaining supply of housing. More Jews also are moving into eastern Jerusalem, where the U.S. has concentrated efforts to impose a building freeze. Approximately 300 families, most of them with several children, are living in several neighborhoods, some of them where Jews owned homes nearly 100 years ago but were expelled by the British during Arab pogroms in the period of the British Mandate. Hundreds of other families were forced to leave the Old City when it fell during the War of Independence in 1948. National Union party chairman MK Yaakov Katz (Ketzaleh) responded to the Civil Administration statistics by calling on every Jewish family to "give birth to an additional child this year as a Zionist response to the decrees of Barack Hussein Obama." Comment on this story To Go To Top

I'M NOT GOING TO BE AT THAT DEMONSTRATION Posted by Batya Medad, July 27, 2009.

I've been asked by a number of people if I'll be at that demonstration against United States interference in Israeli affairs. No, I won't be there. It's not that I'm in favor of America butting in, giving us orders. G-d forbid. Simply, I don't put the blame on America. Israel just has to say: "No!" "Mind your own business!" "We're an independent country and don't need your string-tied help!" Tell the American envoys, ministers, ambassadors etc that we don't have time to talk. I'm willing to demonstrate by the Israeli Prime Minister's Residence and remind him that he was empowered (there's no direct election for PM) by the Israeli citizens to be Israel's Prime Minister, not Obama's "poodle." Especially having been raised and educated in the United States, I have no doubt, no doubt at all that America would cut out the pressure if we sent them packing. The American government has enough trouble with a sinking economy, health care issues and Iraq. They wouldn't fight us if they saw they would lose. Our security is up to us! When we do the right thing, G-d will give us more strength. If we act weak and tired, it will be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Batya Batya Medad lives in Shiloh. She can be reached by email at Shilohmuse@yahoo.com or visit her website http://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/ or go to http://www.shilo.org.il This article is archived at http://shilohmusings.blogspot.com/2009/07/ im-not-going-to-be-at-that.html To Go To Top

CAN 50,000,000 CHRISTIANS BE WRONG? Posted by Dr. Salem, July 26, 2009.

Obama better start thinking about the next election, because if this is any sign, he has already lost it. And Israel may be the easiest of all the nasty problems that he has to deal with. Don '50 million US Christians back Israel' This below is by Sam Greenberg, Jerusalem Post correspondent, and it appeared in The Jerusalem Post. www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1248277886711 &pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

WASHINGTON — Christian supporters of Israel who gathered in Washington last week did not just sit through policy briefings and lobbying sessions; they danced the hora, blew a shofar, sang Hatikva and celebrated all that they love about Israel. Pastor John Hagee Whether repeatedly standing up to cheer for speakers or dancing to Israeli tunes, the over 4,000 animated attendees of the fourth annual Christians United for Israel (CUFI) Washington conference made their passion for the State of Israel absolutely clear. For two days, the participants learned about Israel, its history, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, how to effectively defend Israel, what America's government should do, how to deal with Iran and how to lobby elected officials. On Wednesday participants met with their elected officials in Congress to voice their support for Israel. "We're here to tell you and the people of Israel that there are 50 million Christians in this nation who support you and the State of Israel," said CUFI founder John Hagee to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who joined the conference via satellite. "Your unwavering friendship strengthens us," said Netanyahu, noting that CUFI is helping open a new chapter in Jewish-Christian relations. Within the Jewish community, there has been disagreement over how to deal with this vocal support. The most common concerns expressed are that CUFI supports Israel in order to bring about Jesus's "second coming"; that the organization is too right-wing politically and that allying with a group with controversial views on a range of other issues might hurt the community. In response to The Israel Project's Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi's decision to speak at the CUFI conference, left-wing Israel advocate J Street, on its blog, asked, "Does allying the pro-Israel community further with Pastor John Hagee by appearing at his conference hurt or help [Israel's cause]?" Laszlo Mizrahi said that in her quest to form an effective Israel coalition, she does not rule out allies because of their views on other issues. "The fact that I am speaking at a CUFI event doesn't mean that I endorse every thought all their leaders ever had," she said in an e-mail, echoing the sentiments of other Jewish organizations who cooperate with CUFI on Israel advocacy while setting aside other differences. For their part, CUFI agrees that groups should join it in support of Israel, even of their views on other issues do not line up. Leaders did make clear, however, that CUFI has no conversion goals. As for the "end of days" theory, Western Regional Coordinator Randy Neal said that while some people do believe that the second coming will occur when all the Jews inhabit the land of Israel, "That's not what drives us." "What drives us is the biblical mandate to stand with Israel and the Jewish people," said Neal. Speakers at the conference also acknowledged that the Jewish community is justified in being initially skeptical of Christians suddenly forming a strong coalition in support of Israel. "Christians have brought it on themselves," said Florida Director Pastor Scott Thomas, referencing historical Christian violence towards Jews. Founded in 2006, CUFI now claims over 220,000 followers throughout the US. Recurring themes brought up by most of the conference speakers were the many aspects of Israel's right to exist and expand, a sense that the Obama administration was unfairly pressuring Israel to stop expanding and an urgent need to address Iran. Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, joined in criticizing Obama's Middle East policy. He said he did not believe in Obama's theory that sowing some discord between America and Israel will give America legitimacy to negotiate with Arab states. While CUFI is still confident of its ability to advocate for Israel under the Obama administration and a heavily Democratic Congress, some experts and CUFI leaders expressed concerns that with the current political climate, advocating CUFI's position might become slightly more difficult. However, there was no doubt that Congress remains a strong ally of Israel. "Support for Israel in America I think has been so strong largely because Americans have been so pro-Israel, and we dare not let that erode," CUFI Executive Director David Brog said. To continue advocating for Israel, CUFI's newest frontiers are establishing CUFI chapters on college campuses and pioneering the first CUFI trip to Poland and Israel, to take place this year. "We want to broaden our base in three ways: We want to broaden it theologically, demographically, and politically," Brog said. At the Night to Honor Israel, Sen. Joseph Lieberman was given the Defender of Israel Award. "This [convention] is a miracle," said Lieberman, who has previously spoken at the conference. "It is all of you... who are the most important defenders of Israel." Ambassador to the US Michael Oren and Tourism Minister Stas Meseznikov expressed similar sentiments in their remarks. Israel is also trying to reach out to the Christian community, establishing the Prime Minister's Task Force on Global Christian Relationships, on which Hagee will serve. Contact Drsalem@drsalemsmiles.coom To Go To Top

BIBI KEEPS STRONG Posted by Susana K-M, July 26, 2009.

Netanyahu Tells Obama All Of Jerusalem Is Open To Jews President Obama's campaign to take control of Jerusalem from the State of Israel intensified over the weekend. Michael Oren, Israel's Ambassador to the United States was summoned by the Obama administration and told that Israel must stop building in Jerusalem Jewish homes in what is wrongfully called East Jerusalem. The administration disturbed the Jewish Sabbath to deliver this order because the lame duck President of the Palestinian Authority had asked them to stop Jewish people from moving into parts of Jerusalem. In the past, Israel would respond to an American request like this with quiet acquiescence. But this time, Israel's Prime Minister, speaking on behalf of his coalition and his country set down a new course for relations between Israel and the United States of Barak Obama. Netanyahu said, "There is no prohibition against Arab residents buying apartments in the west of the city and there is no prohibition barring the city's Jewish residents from buying or building in the east of the city. That is the policy of an open city that is not divided." He continued,"We cannot accept the notion that Jews will not have the right to buy apartments specifically in Jerusalem. I can only imagine what would happen if they were forbidden from purchasing apartments in New York or London: there would be an international outcry. This has always been Israel's policy and this is the policy of the current government." Netanyahu also stated that Jerusalem is the "unified capital of the Jewish people, and sovereignty over it is indisputable." We applaud Netanyahu and his government for setting the record straight. Send the Prime Minister an email supporting him in this decision. While we have been warning that Obama would move against Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem we are saddened that he has taken this course. Once again we urge you get as many people as you can to sign the united Jerusalem petition. It is the best way to keep informed about the battle for Jerusalem and to learn about ways you can help defend the capital of the Jewish people. Below: in One Jerusalem, Obama Clarifies: Israel Is The Problem Not The Palestinians http://www.onejerusalem.org/2009/07/ obama-clarifies-jerusalem-sett.php

President Obama invited a very select group of Jewish leaders to the White House. Like all his events, Obama made sure that his supporters dominated the room. Flanked by staffers Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama overloaded the guest list with left leaning American Jews. Groups like Peace Now, The National Jewish Democrat Council, and J Street, all of whom oppose the the elected government of Benjamin Netanyahu, were included among the typical "major Jewish organizations." Obama made sure that groups supporting the right wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu were a distinct minority. From a few published reports and other sources, One Jerusalem has pieced together a picture of what took place at this meeting. In short, Obama made it clear that he feels Israel must be pushed to make a deal with the Palestinians — which means that Obama is planning to force Israel to compromise on Jerusalem, settlements, the West Bank, and possibly the right of return. He will not be dissuaded by facts on the ground (more on this later), and he sees a moral equivalency between the plight of the Palestinians and the needs of the State of Israel. When Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Major Organizations made the case that progress on the Palestinian front comes when there is "no daylight" between the policies of the United States and Israel, Obama responded that despite overwhelming support by President Bush no progress was made. When Hoenlein pointed out that under Bush, Israel took the momentous step of withdrawing from Gaza (One Jerusalem opposed this action) and previously under other friendly Administrations went the extra mile, like adopting The Road Map, Obama refused to let these facts change his mind. Our friend Rick Richman (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/ richman/73141) does a superb job responding to Obama: The following would be my summary of the progress over the past eight years — which Obama apparently ignored in his response to the group: After the Palestinians rejected an offer of a state at Camp David in 2000, rejected the Clinton Parameters in 2001, and conducted a terror war against Israeli civilians from September 2000-2002, Israel nevertheless agreed in 2003 to the "Performance-Based Roadmap" for the creation of a Palestinian state, despite reservations about the manner in which that plan would actually be implemented. In 2003 and thereafter, Israel ceased all settlement activity — as it understood that Phase I Roadmap obligation (no new settlements; no building outside settlement boundaries; no financial incentives for Israelis to move to settlements) — and believed American officials agreed with its interpretation of that obligation. In 2004, after the Palestinian Authority failed to meet its own Phase I Roadmap obligation (sustained efforts to dismantle terrorist groups and infrastructure), Israel nevertheless proposed to dismantle every existing settlement in Gaza (not just "outposts"), remove every Israeli soldier, and turn over the entire area to the Palestinian Authority — in exchange for a written American commitment to defensible borders and retention of the major settlement blocs necessary to insure them. In 2005, after receiving the American commitment, Israel proceeded to carry out the Gaza disengagement, despite the political and social upheaval within Israel it caused, including the break-up of the ruling party and nationwide demonstrations, and — at State Department insistence — further dismantled four settlements (not just "outposts") in the West Bank as well, to demonstrate the disengagement would be "Gaza First," not "Gaza Last." In 2006, after the Palestinians elected their premier terrorist group to control their government, Israelis nevertheless re-elected Kadima on a platform of "convergence" (the new name for withdrawal from the West Bank), and would have carried it out but for the attacks by Hamas from Gaza and Hezbollah from Lebanon that caused two wars and finally convinced Israelis further withdrawals were insane. In 2007, despite the Palestinian failure to carry out its Phase I dismantlement obligation, and its categorical rejection of Phase II (a state with provisional sovereignty before Phase III final status negotiations), Israel agreed to proceed immediately to final status negotiations once again under the "Annapolis Process." Throughout 2008, Israel negotiated with its "peace partner" under the accelerated process, and offered 100 percent of the West Bank (after land swaps) for a state, with concessions on other major issues, all of which were rejected. During this eight-year period, the Palestinian concessions (aka reciprocal "progress") can be enumerated more briefly: zero. But Obama reiterated his commitment to forcing Israel to give Palestinians what they want. In other words he does not want to be deterred from his prejudices by the facts. One Jerusalem has been warning Israel's supporters that the Obama Administration is dead set on using all its power to force Israel to capitulate even if it means dividing Jerusalem and weakening its defenses. We must continue to recruit people in the campaign to defend Israel and Jerusalem. Signing our Jerusalem petition is a sure fire way to stay informed about important news that you will probably not get anywhere else and to learn insider analysis. As Obama's troubles at home multiply, look for him to show leadership by beating up on Israel. We need to be prepared to fight back. Contact Susana K-M at suanema@gmail.com To Go To Top

MARCH TO BEDOUIN CITY TO DOCUMENT ILLEGAL CONSTRUCTION Posted by Hillel Fendel, July 26, 2009.

Tracking Illegal Bedouin Outposts

Dozens of nationalist activists made their way to the Bedouin city of Rahat in the Negev on Sunday, with the goal of documenting the rampant illegal construction there and demanding that the government put a stop to it. Rahat, population 44,000, is located north of Be'er Sheva and Ofakim — the only Bedouin community in Israel to have city status. Hundreds of local Israeli-Arab residents warned the Jews not to arrive in the city, threatening to throw rocks and shoes. In at least one case broadcast on Army Radio, a Bedouin resident said that activist Baruch Marzel would receive a "bullet in the head" if he arrives. The march was headed by MK Dr. Michael Ben-Ari (National Union), Marzel, and Itamar Ben-Gvir of Hevron. The police managed to create a large buffer zone between the Jews and Bedouin, who flew black flags, chanted "Death to Marzel," and threw rocks. No one was hurt other than one policeman who was hit by a rock. MK Ben-Ari said, "We are here to direct the spotlights of Israel at one of our worst failures in recent years. Instead of taking care of this major land theft and rampant law-breaking, the authorities prefer to hide their head in the sand and ignore what's going on. Beinish is busy trying to destroy [fallen Lebanon war he Roi Klein's house [in an outpost in Eli in Shomro as well as homes in Haresha that were lawfully built and that Defense Minister Ehud Barak refuses to approve! Here in the Negev there are thousands of illegal outposts and a complete takeover of land, and no one says a word. We want the lights of the law to shine here as well." Ben-Gvir made the following announcement on the bus traveling to Rahat: "We are going to Rahat as a tracking team to check the illegal construction in Rahat. Unfortunately, the rule of law in Rahat is in danger. We feel the severity of the ongoing illegal Bedouin construction in the south, and we are coming to tell them that they are not in charge. Whoever has cameras, we ask that you please document what you see, and we will use these photos, as well as other evidence collected by others in Rahat and all over the south, to flood the Supreme Court with a series of petitions against illegal construction and lawbreakers." "Our message is that there must be one law for all," Ben-Gvir continued. "The government, [Chief Justi Dorit Beinisch, and the leftists all want to enforce the law in Hevron and Migron — and they are welcome to do so, but we demand that it also be enforced in Rahat, and in Umm el-Fahm, and in all the illegal Bedouin outposts in the Negev — no matter what the Islamic Movement says or does. We want to see if Dorit Beinisch will come out in her pajamas to issue orders against the Bedouin, or does she do so only against the Jews in Hevron and elsewhere." 170,000 and Growing The Bedouin population in the Negev is estimated at close to 170,000 and growing. Half of them live in Rahat and six other towns that were built for them, and the remainder live throughout the Negev in various illegal encampments. Hillel Fendel is Senior News Editor for Arutz-Sheva (www.Israel National News.com). To Go To Top

11 NEW YESHA OUTPOSTS 'IN DEFIANCE OF INTERNATIONAL PRESSURE' Posted by Yehudah Lev Kay, July 26, 2009.

Nationalist activists in Judea and Samaria (Yesha) plan on establishing 11 new outposts on Monday and Tuesday this week. They say the move is in defiance of international pressure to freeze construction in Yesha, and hearkens to Zionist history in 1946, when Jews set up 11 outposts in the Negev in defiance of the British Mandate. "The nations of the world don't want us here," say flyers publicizing the 11 new outposts. "We will answer by strengthening our ties to the Land of Israel and building new communities." The flyers urge activists to participate in founding the new neighborhoods. The 11 new neighborhoods are to be established as follows: Inbalim (Bells) — next to Maaleh Michmash in Binyamin Oz Yonatan (Jonathan's Might) — near Kochav Yaakov in Binyamin Givat Egoz (Nut Hill) — near Talmon in Binyamin Tzurya (The Rock of G-d) — near Avnei Hefetz in Samaria Mitzpe Avichai (Avichai's Lookout) — near Kiryat Arba/Hevron Netzer (Stem) — near Efrat in Gush Etzion Reches Sela (Boulder Cliff) — south of Shechem in Samaria Gat Yosef (Joseph's Winepress) — south of Shechem in Samaria Nofei Yarden (Jordan Horizons) — near Shilo in Samaria Maalot Hevron (Hevron Heights) — near Hevron Havat HaRo'im (Shepherds' Farm) — near Susya in Judea "We call on the entire public to come and support the new communities," said Daphna Ronen, a member of the Land of Israel Faithful, which is organizing the new outposts. "We are sending a strong message to the people of Israel and the people of the world that we love the land and we are here to stay." The 11 outposts are meant to mirror the 11 Negev communities Zionist activists set up in 1946 in defiance of the British Mandate, which had recommended earlier in the year that most of the Negev be partitioned to an Arab state. Overnight, the activists managed to change the situation on the ground in the Negev, and the UN ultimately recommended in 1948 that the Negev be included as part of the Jewish state. Most of the 11 are now flourishing communities. "Just as then, so it is now," the flyer reads. "Building new communities throughout Judea and Samaria is the only way we can return the State of Israel to being independent, flourishing and growing, protect our national interests, and stand up to international pressure." Yehudah Lev Kay writes for Arutz-7 (www.Israelnn.com). To Go To Top

OBAMA DOES NOT RECOGNIZE JERUSALEM AS THE CAPITOL OF ISRAEL Posted by Cpocerl, July 26, 2009.

This article below is entitled "PM must learn from past leaders, defy US Administration" and it was written by Yoram Ettinger. It appeared as an opinion piece in Ynet News http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/ CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3750386,00.html

Twenty five towns in the United States, from Massachusetts to Oregon, bear the name of Jerusalem — Salem. This is a reflection of the unique bonds that exist between the USA — since the 17th century Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers — and the Jewish capital, land, history and religion. The US Congress — the most authentic representative of the American People — has passed a series of bills and resolutions reaffirming the role of Jerusalem as the indivisible capital of the Jewish State and the appropriate site for the US embassy in Israel. US constituents and their representatives on Capitol Hill are aware that 3,000 years before President Obama entered the White House, and 2,770 years before the US gained its independence, King David entered the City of Jerusalem — the Heart of the Jewish People. However, notwithstanding his speech at the 2009 AIPAC Conference, Obama wishes to repartition Jerusalem, to prohibit free Jewish construction and entice Arab construction there. Obama does not recognize pre-1967 Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish State. In 1949, at the end of the War of Independence, the US Administration, Europe and the UN exerted brutal pressure on Prime Minister Ben Gurion to refrain from declaring Jerusalem as the capital, to accept the internationalization of the city, and to abstain from establishing facts on the ground. They also leaned on Israel to "end the occupation of the Negev" and absorb and compensate the 1948 Arab refugees. Ben Gurion's response was immediate and appropriate. He declared Jerusalem the capital of the Jewish State, relocated government departments and agencies to Jerusalem, expanded construction all the way to the ceasefire lines, directed a massive number of Olim (immigrants) to Jerusalem and upgraded the transportation infrastructure to the city. Ben Gurion's determination and defiance clarified to the US that neither Jerusalem nor the Negev was subject to negotiation. It accorded Jerusalem the space required for security and development for the next generation. In 1967, the US Administration and the international community threatened Prime Minister Eshkol that the reunification of Jerusalem, and any construction beyond the 1949 ceasefire line, would undermine severely Israel's global standing. Eshkol replied firmly by annexing the Old City, the eastern suburbs and substantial land reserves and built the Ramat Eshkol neighborhood (beyond the ceasefire lines.) In 1970-1972, Prime Minister Golda Meir defied the (Secretary of State) Rogers Plan, which called for Israel's retreat to the pre-1967 lines and for the transfer of the Old City to the auspices of the three religions. She laid the groundwork for a series of satellite neighborhoods around Jerusalem (beyond the "Green Line"): Neve Ya'akov, Gilo, Ramot Alon and French Hill. These neighborhoods provided Jerusalem with the land required for development until today. Dramatic expansion needed In 2009, President Obama is exerting psychological pressure on Israel to repartition Jerusalem, which would rob the city of essential land reserves. This land constitutes the prerequisite for the dramatic enhancement of Jerusalem's transportation, residential and industrial infrastructures, which are critical for the transformation of Jerusalem from a city of net Jewish emigration to a city of net Jewish immigration. An appropriate fast-track-response to Obama — which would be aimed at attracting entrepreneurs, job-creation, affordable housing, as well as providing Jerusalem with the developmental space for future generations should include: Upgrading "Begin Road" to a "Jerusalem Loop" Expanding freeways (to Jerusalem) 1 and 443 Building freeway 45 to the coastal plain Fast railroad to Jerusalem Completion of light rail system in Jerusalem Construction of an international airport Traditional and high-tech industrial zones Residential construction zones Fast roads connecting new zones Such dramatic enhancement of infrastructure requires an equally dramatic expansion of Jerusalem's city limit: eastward to the Dead Sea, Herodion and Mt. Ba'al Hazor, westward to Modi'in and Kirayt Sefer and southward to Beitar Ilit and Gush Etzion. The battle over Jerusalem necessitates that the Jewish State join forces with the US public and its representatives in the House and Senate. This is the time to resurrect the 1999 initiative — which was co-sponsored by 84 Senators — to relocate the US embassy to Jerusalem. This is the time to encourage Israel's friends on the Hill, and especially the Chairmen of the Congressional and Senatorial campaign committees, to revisit bills and resolutions, which highlighted Jerusalem's indivisibility as the capital of Israel. Jerusalem's growth requires — as it did during Ben Gurion's, Eshkol's and Golda's terms — a defiance of the US Administration. On the other hand, succumbing to Obama's pressure would exacerbate Jewish emigration from Jerusalem, subjecting the Jewish capital to its worst security and demographic threats since 1967. Contact CPocerl at Cpocerl@aol.com To Go To Top

ARIZONA MUSLIM FAMILY DISOWNS 8 YR OLD DAUGHTER BECAUSE SHE WAS GANG RAPED Posted by CPocerl, July 26, 2009.

Islamist apologists insist Islam is a religion of peace...is it a kind and forgiving religion for this 8-year old girl? And how is this not child abandonment? Time for some pro-active legislation in Arizona! This is a AFP news item about a gang rape by young boys of an 8-year old girl in Phoenix, Arizona's Liberian community.

One of four boys charged with raping an eight-year-old Muslim girl in Arizona last week will be prosecuted as an adult. The details of the case have shocked local officials and provoked outrage across the United States after the parents of the young victim disowned her on grounds she had "shamed" her family. Officers responding to screams from an empty shed in an apartment complex on July 16 found the partially-clothed girl and four boys aged 9 to 14 running away. The four boys had lured the girl into the shed with chewing gum. They held her down and took turns raping her for about 10 to 15 minutes, according to Phoenix police. The girl's parents shocked officers when they said she had brought shame to the family and did not want her back. "This is a deeply disturbing case that has gripped our community," Maricopa County lawyer Andrew Thomas said. "Our office will seek justice for the young victim in this heartrending situation." The girl is now in the custody of Arizona Child Protective Services. No charges will be filed against the parents, police said. "They didn't abandon the child," Phoenix police sergeant Andy Hill said. "They committed no crime. They just didn't support the child, which led to CPS coming over there." The oldest boy, a 14 year-old, will be tried as an adult on charges of kidnapping and sexual assault. The other three boys — aged 9, 10, and 13 — were charged as juveniles with sexual assault and kidnapping. "We've had young people who have been victims of sexual assault, but the thing that distinguishes this is the age of the victim, the age of the suspects and the response of the parents," Sergeant Hill said. More information at youtube.com/watch?v=e0fztc28-5w&feature=related Contact CPocerl at Cpocerl@aol.com To Go To Top

SUPERVISOR OF THE TANTORA MASSACRE FABRICATION AFFAIR PROMOTED TO FULL PROFESSOR Posted by Steven Plaut, July 26, 2009.

"Affirmative Action" at the University of Haifa: Supervisor of the Tantora Massacre Fabrication Affair promoted to Full Professor The University of Haifa just decided to promote Prof. Kais Firro to the rank of full professor, despite the fact that Firro has very few academic publications to his record. Firro is best known for having been the formal thesis advisor to the anti-Israel extremist Teddy Katz, in which the thesis fabricated an imaginary "massacre" of Arabs in the village of Tantora by the Alexandroni battalion of the Palmach during Israel's War of Independence. Katz later admitted in court that the allegation was a fabrication. For details, see this: http://weeklystandard.com/check.asp?idArticle=99&r=jjldm While the malicious Ilan Pappe, back then on the faculty of the University of Haifa in political science, has generally been assumed to be the driving force behind the fabrication, Kais Firro officially supervised and approved the thesis and gave it a grade of 97. The University later revoked Katz' degree and refused to recognize the thesis. Firro is a radical anti-Israel Druse, who has published anti-Israel propaganda in the Journal of Palestine Studies, a PLO-run journal, including an article entitled "Druse and the Nakba." His "academic" publication record consists of two books about the Druse and two books about Lebanon. He has a very small number of articles appearing in academic journals, although has quite a few that appear in anti-Israel propaganda magazines like the Journal of Palestine Studies. Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. This essay appeared today in the Jewish Press http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/40064 To Go To Top

WHAT THE WEST BANK ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE Posted by Avodah, July 25, 2009.

This is by Michael J, Totten and it appeared in Commentary www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/totten/73851

Last week, the New York Times published an article about "signs of hope" in the West Bank (and in the city of Nablus in particular) that refreshingly breaks with the standard narrative of Palestinian desperation and misery. The Israeli military recently closed down its checkpoint into the city, along with other checkpoints elsewhere in the territories. The economy is growing instead of contracting. Downtown is full of shoppers. Islamist scolds have backed off. Police make sure passengers have fastened their seat belts. It sounds like Nablus has more or less become a normal Middle East city. Earlier this year in Jerusalem, Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh told me how much the West Bank surprises visitors now. "The other day," he said, "someone came for the first time ever to this part of the world, and he called me and asked me to take him to Ramallah. So I drove him to downtown Ramallah, and we stopped there. The man was shocked. He said, 'Where are the refugee camps? Where are the mud houses? Where's the poverty?' I said, 'Why are you asking me these questions?' He said, 'I'm shocked. Look how nice it is.' " Ramallah skyline I laughed out loud because I had a similar experience myself three years ago before the recent improvements. I didn't expect to see "mud houses." As far as I know, no one has ever reported the existence of "mud houses" in Ramallah. The usual Palestinian narrative, though, seems to encourage some people's vivid imaginations. But I was still startled by what Ramallah actually looked like. I expected to see, and to write about, squalid living conditions. I had already seen the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and the awfulness of those places is hard to describe. I figured Ramallah wouldn't be that bad, but I didn't expect it to look so much better than lots of cities, and not just refugee camps, that I've seen in the region. It was in early 2006, shortly after Hamas won the election, when I took a taxi from the Qalandia checkpoint outside Jerusalem to Ramallah with a Palestinian man named Sufian. Here, in part, is what I wrote at the time: I stepped out into a surprisingly pleasant urban environment. "No offense, Sufian, but this city is a lot nicer than I expected," I said. "Ramallah is beautiful," he said with pride. I didn't think it was beautiful, exactly, but it did not look even remotely like the Third World war zone it's reputed to be. I noticed no visible poverty once we left the squalor around the checkpoint. I was, however, warned by Israelis that Ramallah and Bethlehem are much nicer than the rest of the West Bank and need to be judged accordingly. [...] Ramallah is also in much better physical condition than the parts of Lebanon ruled by Hezbollah, even though Ramallah has experienced war a lot more recently. In fact, Ramallah is in better condition than any Shia region of Lebanon whether it's ruled by Hezbollah or not. The only Sunni part of Lebanon that looks nicer than Ramallah is West Beirut. Ramallah didn't have the glitz of Beirut or the French-Arab Mediterranean charm of a city like Tunis. But it beat the pants off Cairo, one of the biggest tourist destinations in the whole Arab world. It looked a lot like Amman — an Arab city with a pretty good reputation. It was so much nicer than Baghdad, it's pointless to even make the comparison. I have not visited Gaza, even though I've tried twice, but I have looked inside from the Israeli side of the border. What I could see didn't look pretty. I'm inclined to take more seriously the reports of misery and deprivation in there. Still, here is a photo of Gaza. Here is another. I'm not sure when they were taken. If Gaza is indeed a gruesome place now, it wasn't always that way. (Hamas and its wars can't have done the place too many favors.) According to the New York Times, though, the West Bank in general is much nicer now than it was even when I saw it. Not only Bethlehem and Ramallah but also Nablus is now said to be doing okay. Draw whatever political conclusions you want. I'm not sure what to make of it. My colleague Max Boot was with me in Jerusalem earlier this year when Toameh told us about the reporter who was stunned by the distinct lack of misery he expected to see. Boot asked Toameh if better economic conditions meant better political conditions. Toameh said, "No." That was six months ago. He might have been wrong, and what he said might no longer be true. The New York Times does note that Fatah is trusted more now than Hamas — for whatever that's worth. Either way, reports of the West Bank's lax security measures and economic improvement are more common these days than they were. It's refreshing to see foreign correspondents describe the place as it is instead of as the desperately impoverished Israeli-ruled prison it's reputed to be. Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com and visit his website: http://am-yisrael-blog.blogspot.com/ To Go To Top

LENIENCY FOR BARBARIANS Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, July 25, 2009.

This is by Véronique Chemla and it appeared July 17, 2009 in Front Page Magazine http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35608 Véronique Chemla is a Paris-based investigative journalist. She holds the Diploma and a diploma (DEA) in 20th Century History of the Institute of Political Studies of Paris (Sciences Po). She writes articles for FrontPage Magazine, American Thinker, Guysen International News and L'Arche. Email her at veroniquechemla@orange.fr.

On July 13, 2009, French Minister of Justice Michèlle Alliot-Marie asked the Parquet (a panel of magistrates under her authority, authorized to request penal sanctions in defence of the general welfare) to appeal 14 of the 25 sentences pronounced on July 10 against members of the Gang of Barbarian on trial for the anti-Semitic murder of Ilan Halimi. Those 14 sentences are lighter than the sanctions recommended by the Avocat general [roughly equivalent to the state's attorney or public prosecutor]. On July 17, the Parquet announced it had appealed sentences for four more Gang members. Maître Francois-Pascal Gery, counsel for Gang ringleader Youssouf Fofana, the convicted killer of Ilan Halimi, said that his client was appealing his life sentence. Last week, fearing light sentences, several French Jewish organisations called for a gathering before the Justice Ministry. After the verdict was announced, they asked the Minister to appeal. According to the French legal system, only the Parquet and the defendants can appeal penal sanctions. Plaintiffs are only allowed to appeal for civil damages. On July 13, at 7 pm, several hundred people, most of them Jewish, gathered peacefully on a side street leading to Place Vendôme, where they were kept at a distance from the Ministry. They thanked the Minister for her decision and called for "Justice for Ilan." Then a delegation composed of Jewish community leaders and Patrick Lozèls President of CRAN (umbrella group of Black organizations) met with one advisor of the Minister of Justice. They emphasized the importance of holding the appeals trial in open court, with access to the media and the public, so that it would serve its pedagogical purpose. The trial held this spring covered several attempted kidnappings in addition to Ilan Halimi's murder. They all had the same modus operandi. In December 2005, Gang of Barbarians chief Youssouf Fofana asked Alexandra S. to lure Michael Douieb, a Jewish music producer. On January 5, 2006 she met Mr Douieb and asked him to drive her "home" to a building in the Parisian banlieue of Arcueil, where Jean-Christophe S and Youssouf Fofana were waiting for him. They beat Douieb with iron bars while Youssouf Fofana shouted: 'Dirty Jew, croak, you filthy kike! Neighbours, who heard Douieb shouting, reacted and his assailants fled. Marc K., a young Jewish salesman, was lured by "Léa" (Audrey). He was wary and did not answer her messages. Ilan Halimi, a young Jewish salesman aged 23, was lured by "Yalda" and kidnapped on January 20, 2006. He was held by the Gang and tortured for 24 days in an apartment, then in a basement in Bagneux, a banlieue south of Paris near Arcueil. Youssouf Fofana asked the modest Halimi family for a high ransom, because he was convinced that Jews have money and stick together. No ransom was given. Youssouf Fofana stabbed Ilan Halimi and set him in fire on February 13, 2009, near the Sainte-Genevièlve-des-Bois train station (Parisian suburb). Ilan Halimi was found naked, with burns over 80% of his body. He died during the transfer to the hospital. Ilan's mother Ruth Halimi co-authored with Emilie Frèlche an account of the ordeal — 24 jours, la vérité sur la mort d'Ilan Halimi (24 Days, The Truth about Ilan Halimi's Death) — in which she severely criticizes the tragic errors of the French police, including the refusal to admit the anti-Semitic motive of kidnappers. The trial started on April 30, 2009 before the Paris Juvenile Criminal Court. Because two of the defendants were under 18 in February 2006, all of the defendants were tried together, behind closed doors (huis clos). Journalists and the public were not allowed to attend the hearings. French Jewry expected a lot from that trial, since it has faced a dramatic wave of anti-Semitic acts since the Intifada II; the most severe crimes were the 2003 murder of Sebastien Selam and the murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006. Since he was arrested in 2006, Youssouf Fofana has dismissed more than 30 lawyers. During the trial, he rejected all four of his lawyers, including Isabelle Coutant-Peyre — who is married to the terrorist "Carlos" — because he suspected her to be Jewish! The presiding judge, her assistants, and the jury — 5 women, 4 men — retired to deliberate. Jurors' names are chosen at random on electoral lists. The verdict was publically pronounced on July 10, 2009, during Shabbat...probably to reduce the number of Jewish spectators and their reactions. Youssouf Fofana was sentenced to life imprisonment, with no possibility of parole for 22 years. 24 accomplices were sentenced from 18 years in prison to six months suspended, and two accomplices were acquitted. While hearing his sanction, Youssouf Fofana smiled and applauded. The defendants' lawyers were satisfied because the Court "did not make an example." Ilan Halimi's family was represented by a famous lawyer Maître Francis Szpiner[1]. On July 10, Maître Szpiner expressed satisfaction that the Court had acknowledged that Ilan Halimi's murder was anti-Semite and sentenced Youssouf Fofana to the most severe penal sanction. Nevertheless, he deplored the lenient sentences pronounced for a dozen accomplices who played essential roles as the "lure," jailers, and torturers. He invited the Ministry to appeal those sentences. Some facts may explain that verdict. The Court wanted to judge a case, not a phenomenon. Jurors were impressed by the distinction, established by the Avocat Général in the course of the hearings, between two types of anti-Semitism. Fofana had numerous accomplices, and they represent members of Black Blanc Beur France (diversity). Maybe jurors wondered if their own children might be influenced by someone like Youssouf Fofana. The trial revealed the Islamization of France: some Gang members had converted to Islam when teen-agers and attended the same Salafist Mosquee as Youssouf Fofana. "This trial is also the trial of our society," wrote Richard Prasquier, the president of the French Jewish umbrella organization CRIF. Maître Muriel Ouaknine-Melki, who represented Mr Douieb, deplored: "Youssouf Fofana answered questions about his murder of Ilan Halimi without expressing any regret. It was painful to hear such barbaric behaviour. Philippe Bilger, the Avocat general [roughly equivalent to the state's attorney or public prosecutor] asked him: 'Don't you think that by your act you made anti-Semitism odious?' All the lawyers for the plaintiffs were indignant. Maître Szpiner asked Mr Bilger: 'Is there an anti-Semitism that is not odious?' The Avocat général answered: 'No,' but his answer was confused. And that is the problem. And I started to bring out any form of anti-Semitism among the defendants. One of the accomplices answered my question that, four or five times a day, she heard 'Ne mange pas comme un jeuf!' (Don't eat like a Jew), which means 'Don't eat like you're stingy!' And she was not shocked hearing those words." Moreover, Maître Muriel Ouaknine-Melki stigmatizes the Avocat general Philippe Bilger's réquisitoire (recommendations to the jury) that "distinguished a violent anti-Semitism represented by Youssouf Fofana and a 'trivial' anti-Semitism represented by his accomplices. But there are not two kinds of anti-Semitism, one which is tolerable and the other unacceptable. Any form of anti-Semitism is violent." Many of the sanctions recommended by the Avocat general were lighter than what would be expected. Maître Muriel Ouaknine-Melki wonders about the appropriateness of Philippe Bilger's interview in the weekly magazine Paris-Match a few days before the verdict was pronounced. Philippe Bilger evoked his father who "was sentenced at the Liberation of France to 10 years forced labour for collaboration with the enemy." He dismissed "intellectuals who try to pass for Sartre when they are nothing more than essayists of the fleeting moment, masters of flattery, and blind to the universal. I'm thinking of Alain Minc, Jacques Attali, Max Gallo, André Glucksmann. And of course Bernard-Henri Lévy." All but Gallo are Jewish. Maître Francis Szpiner deplored: "In the mind of the Juvenile Criminal Court presided by Judge Nadia Ajjan and the Avocat general Philippe Bilger, the motive of anti-Semitism only applied to Youssouf Fofana. It was not attributed to his accomplices." Richard Prasquier, cited in the July 17 edition of the online daily Mediapart, comments: "It may be that some people see anti-Semitism every where. But others, like Philippe Bilger, minimize it. Maybe that is Philippe Bilger's way of seeing things — he underplays anti-Semitism. That's what is troubling about Mr Bilger...that's what arouses suspicion." Two major Magistrate's Unions criticized the Minister of Justice's decision. They argued that it was a political act. They were dubious about the interest of a new trial, which might again be held behind closed doors (huis clos). However, on July 8, 2009, Deputies François Baroin and Jack Lang registered a motion for legislation that would give the Juvenile Criminal Court the option to decide whether hearings should be public or not. The proposed measure will be voted at the Parliamentary session this fall. The Ministry was also criticized for yielding to alleged pressures from a [Jewish] community seeking revenge. On July 16, Minister of Justice Michèlle Alliot-Marie justified her decision by referring to "the interests of society and keeping the peace". Maître Francis Szpiner insists that the Minister of Justice simply exercised her right to appeal, as the defendants would have appealed if they had been dissatisfied by the judgement. Furthermore, Magistrate and writer Denis Salas told the Catholic daily La Croix: "Plaintiffs have asked for reforms of penal law more and more frequently in recent years. After young Karine's death, French legislators created "a real life imprisonment." La Croix concluded that the Halimi family's request to political authorities for a new trial and revision of the rules for huis clos can be seen as another step in reform of penal law. (Special thanks to NP) [1] Maître Szpiner has represented SOS Attacks, an organization that defended victims of terror, as well as France 2 and Charles Enderlin in the "al-Dura controversy" before the Court of Appeal against Media-Ratings Director Philippe Karsenty in 2008. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com To Go To Top

THE OBAMA STRATEGY, REPLACE JEWISH INFLUENCE WITH MUSLIM INFLUENCE Posted by Ted Belman, July 25, 2009.

A number of times I have identified this strategy in less exact terms. In yesterday's article Obama wants to end the legacy I got more specific. "Obama wants to destroy the Israel Lobby as defined by Measheimer and Walt. He want's to sever the relationship that has existed between the American people and Israel." This article really spells it out. Chilling. It is entitled "Obama's Strategy" and is by Shalom Freedman. It appeared in Arutz-7. In an insightful article on his FresnoZionism.org website, the political commentator Vic Rosenthal argues that the Obama Administration has, in effect, denied the Israeli government freedom of operation within areas taken in the 1967 Six-Day War. It has — without yet forcing a withdrawal — contracted Israel back into the '67 lines. This step is in accord with the major strategic operating principle of the Obama Administration in regard to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, the Jewish world and the Muslim one. The Administration's aim is to contract Israeli power and presence in the Middle East, and at the same time to contract the political strength of the Jewish people in the United States and the world. The corollary of that is his will and effort to increase, first of all, Palestinian Arab power in the Holy Land and, secondly, Islamic strength and confidence not only in the Middle East, but within the United States also. There have been many signs and much evidence of this. In Israel itself, the United States is questioning and making problems for every small move the Israeli government makes. At the same time, the US is working on building a Palestinian military force under General Dayton which might well turn against Israel and its civilian population — as previous forces they built have done. The United States has worked toward free Palestinian movement within Judea and Samaria, and is pressuring Israel to surrender more and more territory to Fatah-run forces. In regard to the Jewish-Islamic power balance, President Barack Obama was the first president to mention Muslim-Americans as a significant force in American life in his inaugural speech. He not only did this, but also subverted the Jews' traditional place and mentioned the Muslims immediately after the Christians. President Obama has also spoken of seven million Muslims in the United States, a questionable demographic figure, but one larger than the five and one-half million Jews. In his famous Cairo speech, Obama promised to bring more and more Muslim students to the United States. Apparently, his belief is that this group, once in the United States, will become more amenable to democratic values and promoters of American-style freedom — rather than promoters of the jihadist ideology so many Muslim students already advocate on US campuses. President Obama does not appear to be prejudiced against Jews as individuals. A disproportionate number of Jews have significant roles in his Administration. Obama is a self-made meritocrat who achieved what he has through his own remarkable abilities. He is a person who always looks for those outstanding individuals who can help him in his work. However, on the issue of the global communal roles of Jews and Muslims, Obama is influenced not only by his personal background, but by the relative strengths, demographically and politically, of the two groups. There are, after all, over fifty Islamic nations clamoring for the disappearance, or at least contraction, of Israel and one small Jewish State striving to preserve and develop its ancestral homeland. The shift he has made and the trend he has adopted is in accord with the advice given by many of his "realist" and anti-Israel, left-wing political appointees. Obama wants a smaller, more docile Israel and a less influential, smaller Jewish community. The "peace" he envisions is one in which Israel's existence is accepted and tolerated by those more powerful than it. Those who are aware of Jewish history — and, in fact, general Middle Eastern history — cannot be as optimistic as Obama about the survival of Israel should his scenario be realized. What he doesn't mention is this news item AMERICAN THINK TANK: REMOVE JERUSALEM FROM ISRAELI SOVEREIGNTY "Without resolution of Jerusalem, peace could not be achieved," said Michael Bell regarding the city's importance to any resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Wednesday at the Center for American Progress. "It's fitting that we should be here discussing Jerusalem at the same time President Obama is visiting Riyadh and Cairo as part of his effort to bring a new urgency to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and to begin a new chapter on U.S. relations with the Muslim world," said DeLeon. Its competing ethnic, religious, and cultural claims are central to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and those claims are the reason why the city is essential to any workable peace plan. The study concluded that as part of a two-state solution with Jerusalem as the capital of both states, Israel and the future Palestinian state could establish a "special regime" that would charge a third-party international administrator with managing the Old City. You can see how this fits into Obama's strategy. In my 2006 article "The Conspiracy to Shrink Israel" I extract from a conversation Henry Kissinger had in 1975 with an Iraqi diplomat. "Kissinger: I think, when we look at history, that when Israel was created in 1948, I don't think anyone understood it. It originated in American domestic politics. It was far away and little understood. So it was not an American design to get a bastion of imperialism in the area. It was much less complicated: And I would say that until 1973 the Jewish community had enormous influence. It is only in the last two years, as a result of the policy we are pursuing, that it has changed, We don't need Israel for influence in the Arab world. On the contrary, Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world We can't negotiate about the existence of Israel but we can reduce its size to historical proportions. I don't agree Israel is a permanent threat. How can a nation of three million be a permanent threat? They have a technical advantage now. But it is inconceivable that peoples with wealth and skill and the tradition of the Arabs won't develop the capacity that is needed. So I think in ten to fifteen years Israel will be like Lebanon — struggling for existence, with no influence in the Arab world. You mentioned new weapons. But they will not be delivered in the foreseeable future. All we agreed to is to study it, and we agreed to no deliveries out of current stocks. So many of these things won't be produced until 1980, and we have not agreed to deliver them then. If the issue is the existence of Israe1, we can't cooperate. But if the issue is more normal borders, we can cooperate. Aide: Your Excellency, do you think a settlement would come through the Palestinians in the area? 'How do you read it? Is it in your power to create such a thing? Kissinger: Not in 1976. I have to be perfectly frank with you. I think the Palestinian identity has to be recognized in some form. But we need the thoughtful cooperation of the Arabs. It will take a year or a year and to do it, and will be a tremendous fight. An evolution is already taking place. Aide: You think it will be part of a solution? Kissinger: It has to be. No solution is possible without it. But the domestic situation is becoming favorable. More and more questions are being asked in Congress favorable to the Palestinians. This has always been the policy and goal of the US government. Obama is just trying to make it happen sooner rather than later. Ted Belman is a Canadian lawyer who recently made aliyah and now lives in Jerusalem. He is editor of the IsraPundit.com website, an activist pro-Israel website. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com To Go To Top

THE VISION CONCERNING THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL Posted by Jacob Gur, July 25, 2009.

The following letter entitled THE VISION was delivered To the WhiteHouse, To the 440 members of theCongress, To the 100 Senators: To President Hadjj Barack el-Hussein Obama. To the future Presidents of the U.S.A. To the Knesset in Jerusalem, the eternal Capital of the Land of Israel Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs XXIX:18)

I beseech you, do not support the doomed-to-fail road map for Israel; Israel is a distinguished long-established sovereign State, before the so-called quartet countries subsisted. Do not pressure Israel to harbor in its Land — hardly visible on the world's Atlas — Arab murderers who pledge to annihilate it. As I am writing, 10 young Yeshiva students were murdered by Arab thugs in Jerusalem, in the same Yeshiva I studied. Do not take part in committing a crime Against the Children of Israel. Blot out the plot. Don't let history judge you and compare the USA to the Roman heathens And to the Eevil British Empire-masters of slavery-who perpetrated the African/American Slave-Holocaust. They Occupied and enslaved Colonies over the globe, and viciously blockaded the shores of Israel against the children of Israel Who struggled to escape from the European Diaspora, and return to their homeland. Thus, Britain enabled Hitler's Henchmen and European Hooligans exterminating more than six million of the children of Israel in 33 mass-production Death camps, and in countless death ditches. But take heed: After the terrible Holocaust the Children of Israel liberated The Land of Israel with the precious blood of Holocaust survivors, and with the blood of more than 35,000 of our parents, Siblings, sons and daughters. We rebuilt and purified our desecrated Land, and as per Jeremiah 31: 17 — thy children [came back] to their own Land. Soon we shall purify Mount Moriya and restore the TEMPLE* in Accordance with our Law — the TORAH. We shall tolerate no more Holocausts against our people. Today we have the Proficiency, capacity, and constitutional rights to eradicate the Arab murderers from the Land of Israel, practically the Same as the USA is actually doing now, not just in America from sea to shinning sea, but thousands miles across the ocean The USA invaded 2 (two) Arab countries with massive military forces by air, sea and land, in order to punish/avoid terrible 9/11's — which are still on the horizon. The USA, thus far sacrificed more than 4,500 of its sons, and over 35,000 wounded, and maimed. Untold bereaved American families and trillions of tax payer's funds drained — all in order to punish and eradicate Arab perpetrators of heinous crimes against humanity. Do not heed to the corrupt U.N., to the ungrateful so called E.U., whom the U.S. rescued from Hitler, or to the U.S. Jimmy Carters the ardent followers of the notorious father Coughlin and Gerald Smith. We shall drive out the Arab murderers the same as the freedom fighters in the IRGUN and LECHI drove out the British/Nazi oppressor from the Land of Israel, and opened the gates of the Land of Israel for the Children of Israel from the Diaspora. Do not repeat the blunder of former Presidents' ill advisors leaving the Iraqi butcher Saddam Hussein at large. Wipe out Bin-Ladens' thugs, the despicable Al-Qaida and the Taliban to avoid severe nine elevens on innocent human beings of the days to come — because they will come. Unfortunately, the present Israeli regime caused enormous blood shed by caving in to Arab murderers, to the corrupt United Nations, to the hostile Europeans, and to pseudo friends in the U.S. This regime shall ultimately be removed from power, and brought to justice. Those responsible for banishing children of Israel from their Land will be Severely punished — a Paradigm for the future Generations. Let's peruse verbatim the declaration of President Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd President 1801-1809. President Jefferson is the Author of the Declaration of Independence, and the architect of the United States Constitution: "The Children of Israel are the sacred beings who have brought down from heaven the everlasting FIRE, which has Illuminated with IT the entire world — IT IS the religious source, the spring and the fountain out of which the rest of the Peoples have drawn their beliefs and religion." Visit YAD V'SHEM in Jerusalem and like President George W Bush, your heart will fall in faint. Morons of the present regime, who coincided to divide Jerusalem the eternal capital of the Land of Israel — shall be punished and be remembered in shame and everlasting contempt. In conclusion: We shall never rely on miracles, on pseudo allies, or wait just to retaliate; we shall preempt, and destroy the Hitlers/Hamans of today, and the Hitlers/Hamans clad in Arab dress of the days to come — because they will come — as we, IRGUN Freedom fighters have destroyed Saddam's nuclear installations to rubble, in spite of the fury of the corrupt UN, the EU and ironically also our "Friends" the USA, joined them and condemned Israel. What a disgrace! In the final analysis: The blood-stained world shall at no time see an Arab state in Eretz-Yisrael. The Revelation of the Law at Mount Sinai. SHAVUOT 6, Sivan 5769 The first Temple was built by King Solomon 480 years after the Children of Israel came out of Egypt(950BC)It was destroyed by the Heathen Nebuchadnezzar in 580BC. He looted the treasures from the Temple and enslaved Children of Israel — known as the Babylonian Diaspora. The second Temple was destroyed by the barbarian Roman heathens in 70A.D. after 2 brutal wars. They invaded Jerusalem, looted, the Temple, enslaved and banished Children of Israel from their Land. At that time there was no Islam, Muhammad was not programmed yet, nor the myth of 72 pending virgins for Arab suicide bombers...Even the United States of America, the so-called New World — was not yet discovered — But we the children of Israel existed and survived millenniums of persecutions and Holocausts in the blood-stained world. Jacob Gur, a Talmudic scholar, a former commander in the IRGUN. He was tortured and was almost executed by the evil British regime. Ultimately they exiled him from the Land of Israel. Jacob Gur is the author of The Enemy Within, Fear Factors, and The Five Chapters. Contact him by email at Jacob@jackgur.com and visit his website at www.jackgur.com To Go To Top

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S GREAT PYRAMID SCHEME: The Two-State Solution as Final Solution Posted by Rav Dov Fischer, July 24, 2009.

LOGOS Upper Left:     FATAH LOGO Upper Right:   HAMAS LOGO Lower Left:     PLO (ENGLISH) LOGO Lower Right:   PLO (ARABIC) LOGO Note that all four logos below has a map of the entire pre-1967 Israel plus "West Bank," Gaza and Golan. The PLO (English) icon map is red; the others are in green. The Two-State Solution is indeed the most immoral suggestion of them all. It is a lie built on a foundation of mendacity. And, with it now having been sanctified in the President's Cairo Speech in Egypt, it can be termed The Grand Pyramid Scheme. Back in President Barack Obama's America, the laws on the books clearly prohibit people from telling African Americans that, "sorry, you can't live in this neighborhood." Does anyone doubt that Justice Sotomayor would uphold those laws? The Bigotry of Banning Jews from Living in a Region Imagine how many American communities over the years could have resolved their racial issues simply by agreeing that Blacks need to be removed completely from "White neighborhoods," and Whites removed from "Black neighborhoods." Maybe James von Brunn would not have gone on a shooting rampage at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum if there were a compromise agreement that Jews may not establish residential communities in or near Washington, D.C. Separate but equal. Quite a concept! Only, that's a racist concept. Part of America's greatness is that we evolved as a society over two centuries to reject that concept. See, e.g., Brown v. Board of Educ. of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686 (1954), overruling Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537; 16 S. Ct. 1138 (1896). Similarly, we are appalled by the bigotry in the Middle Ages and into the 1940s marked by governments segregating Jews from communities in Germany, Poland, Austria, or Hungary — say, to relocate them into their own ghettoes. And it is equally bigoted today to advocate a public policy that forcibly would segregate Jews from communities in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") or anywhere else in Israel. But that bigotry — what else can it rightly be called? — ironically defines the Obama Administration's Mideast program, now being pushed hard by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and being sold to American Jews in private meetings with the President's Jewish chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. It is a policy aimed at ethnically cleansing Jews out of a region in the world, rendering it Judenrein. And it is a policy whose moral failing further is eroded by the colossal transformation of historical fact into hysterical fiction unfolding before our very eyes. "Palestine" Is Another Name for Israel, and That Entirety Is the Land that "Palestinian Arabs" Want for Their "Palestine" Country — Not a "West Bank" Without a Name The "West Bank" is not the west bank of anything. There is no waterway, ocean, sea, or river in Hebron or Tekoah or Karnei Shomron or Ariel. Nor in Shiloh, Maaleh Adumim, Beitar, Shechem, Gush Etzyon, or Beit Lechem (Bethlehem). The nomenclature is fallacious, itself reflecting history's great cover-up: There is no such thing as an "Arab Palestinian Homeland." That land always has been Jewish, except when it was up for grabs like a basketball "jump ball." The Arabs never came down with that ball to put it into play. There is no "Palestinian people," and the only "Palestine" that ever existed was synonymous with the Jewish homeland that later was renamed "Israel." Rent a copy of the movie "Exodus." Listen dispassionately to the dialogue. Don't take sides. Just listen for definitions. The British, fairly or unfairly, are depicted as the bad guys in the movie, trying to keep the Jews out of "Palestine." Paul Newman is trying to get the Jews into "Palestine." Everyone watching the movie perceives that "Palestine" is a name that refers synonymously with "Israel." Thus, what we seem to have here is a failure to communicate. It could not be simpler: For the past two thousand years, since the Romans renamed the land as they expelled and exiled its Jews, "Israel" always was "Palestine," and "Palestine" always was "Israel." There never ever was an Arab Palestine entity. Who, after all, ever was its leader? Try to name any leader who ever in history led the sovereign "Palestinian Arab" people of "Arab Palestine." What year was it founded? What was the name of its capital city — any capital city? Where is the drawing or photograph of its seat of government, or the place where its governmental leader lived? What was the name of its currency? Whose face, what slogan was on that currency? When did it fall? In which Olympic Games did it compete? Which issue of Encyclopedia Britannica had an entry for its government? Can anyone answer any one of these questions? Anyone? Anyone? Consider this way: The American city of Palestine, Texas was founded in 1846. It was so named in honor of an early settler there, Daniel Parker, who hailed from Palestine, Illinois. That Palestine was chartered in 1811. It drew its name in 1678 from the French explorer, Jean LaMotte, who looked at the land and named it "Palestine" because it reminded him of the Biblical Promised Land of the Jews, flowing with milk and honey. No one associated "Palestine" with the Arab community, not even in the 1600s. Rather, the name was associated with the Jews and their Biblical Promised Land. The same with Palestine, Arkansas and East Palestine, Ohio. The "West Bank" is a ridiculous name for a land that has fewer ocean-front properties than Arizona. The "West Bank" of what? Hebron is not on the west bank of the Jordan. Nor is Shechem. Nor Bethlehem. Nor Karnei Shomron, Maaleh Adumim, Ariel, Beit El, Tekoah, nor so many others. It would sooner make sense to rename New Jersey or Arkansas "the West Bank" (Hudson River, Mississippi River). But those territories have names of their own, reflecting a real history of people who named the land. The Arabs call that section of Palestine/Israel the "West Bank" because, despite 1500 years' time for Islam to leave its mark on the region and more than two millennia of Mideast word-play, the Arabs have no other name for the land. What country — what people — has no name for its own land? And they cannot bear to call it by the names it always has borne: "Samaria" and "Judea." Not that the Arab world has problems with using other Biblical names — Lebanon, Tyre, Sidon, Damascus, Bethlehem. They just cannot use that one — Yehudah, Shomron — because once they find themselves compelled to justify their terrorism on grounds that "we Palestinians have the eternal right to return to our eternal home, the great Arab country of Yehudah/Judea," the jig is up. For decades, from its founding in December 1932 until two years after Israel's 1948 sovereignty was established, the Jewish newspaper in Israel for Anglophones was the "Palestine Post"; it was not re-named "The Jerusalem Post" until 1950. Jewish people in the 1930s and 1940s had blue charity boxes on their kitchen counters to raise money for the "Jewish National Fund for Palestine," and the Bergson-Merlin "American League for a Free Palestine" raised money for Menachem Begin's Irgun. When the PLO — the Palestine Liberation Organization — was founded in 1964 to Liberate Palestine, they were then holding the "West Bank" (under Jordan occupation) and Gaza (Egypt occupation), but their effort to Liberate Palestine did not include throwing Jordanian babies out of windows or killing Egyptian athletes in a passionate drive to return to their olive trees in Bethlehem. The history of 1964-1967 clearly demonstrates that they did not care about Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"). Rather, they wanted then what they want now: Tel Aviv and Haifa and all Jerusalem. That is what "PLO" meant in 1964 when they were founded to "liberate Palestine." "Palestinian Refugee Camps" and Logo Images Now Worn by Their Terror Groups Remind That the Goal Remains Now As When the "P.L.O. — Palestine Liberation Organization" was founded in 1964: to "Liberate Palestine" by Conquering and Destroying Israel The "West Bank" and Gaza were theirs for the taking in 1964. But they did not want it. The PLO's founder, Ahmed Shukairy, and Yasser Arafat his successor wanted pre-1967 Israel. To this day, the logo on their stationery and on their respective terrorist uniforms is that of pre-1967 Israel. "Palestine" in the "West Bank" only? Two states? It is such a fabrication, such a lie. Just look at the facts on their ground: Understand that they have built "Palestinian Refugee Camps" in Jenin, in the "West Bank." How can a real people ("Palestinians") in their own real land ("Palestine") living under their own government (the "Palestine Authority") be dwelling in "refugee camps" in their own land? Similarly, how can they have Palestine "refugee camps" in Gaza, now that the land is under sovereign Hamas control? These actual open facts on the ground evidence the mendacity, the lies, stuff, and nonsense. Webster says that a "refugee" is "one who, in times of persecution or political commotion, flees to a foreign power or country for safety; as, the French refugees who left France after the revocation of the edict of Nantes." Merriam-Webster, in pertinent part, says that a "refugee" is "an individual who has left his or her native country and is unwilling or unable to return to it . ..." So: are these Arabs residing in Jenin and Gaza "refugee camps" indeed refugees — these "Palestinians" living in the "West Bank" and Gaza under the "Palestinian Authority"? If so, from where do those "Palestinian" refugees originally hail? If the "West Bank" and Gaza are not the "homeland" to which they yearn so that they someday may be "liberated" from their "refugee" status — well, where is their "homeland"? The answer could not be more clear and manifest: In the "West Bank" and Gaza they are "refugees." The "West Bank" is not their home, they know it, and they evidence it. They want Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Jerusalem. That is the home they ultimately seek, in their effort inexorably to destroy Israel. And that is the reason that no "Palestinian" leader can utter the words: "Yes, in any final peace agreement, we will recognize the land set aside for Israel as a Jewish nation-state." And no amount of Jew-to-Jew lobbying by Rahm Emanuel can change the facts. Rather, the integrity of the Jewish American community is compromised by the insult and patronizing attitude that presupposes a community can be influenced to act against its own interest merely by sending it an emissary who presents himself as "one of our own." In Black America, there is a sad history of Caucasian carpetbaggers working through the quintessential "Uncle Tom." We do not need an "Uncle Rahm." Zionism Humanely Avoided the Moral Failings of America — the Greatest Beacon of Freedom Ever Created — by Seeking to Build Fraternally Alongside Landed Neighbors Rather than to Force-and-Death-March Them into "Reservations" of Internal Exile In America, we do have a variation on "internal refugee camps." They are called "Indian reservations" or "reservations for Native Americans," and they reflect not only adversely but deeply shamefully on those who put them there: American governments like that of the Andrew Jackson Administration, whose Government adopted and implemented terrible, horrible crimes of conscience against the Native Americans. This country's highest elected leaders, in full and open view, at some point 150-200 years ago made a chilling determination that has been swept from the American national conscience and institutional memory: For the United States, founded inexorably as a White European settler polity, to survive and flourish, with its borders open to new immigrants from around the world, there would need to be a complete and forcible uprooting and expulsion of the native American population — "Indian Removal." For example, "it will relieve the whole state of Mississippi, and the western part of Alabama, of Indian occupancy, and enable those States to advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power. It will separate the Indians from immediate contact with settlements of Whites ... enable them to pursue happiness in their own way, and under their own rude institutions ... and perhaps cause them gradually, under the protection of the Government, and through the influence of good counsels, to cast off their savage habits, and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community." Consequently, Native Americans were uprooted from Florida, from North Carolina, from Georgia, from states that many Americans today cannot imagine housed Native Americans. Their land was forcibly seized. Treaties and land contracts with them were breached notoriously and brazenly, torn up unilaterally, and they were forced on Hitler-like mass death marches to places "reserved" for them. This really happened in America. America did this, implemented in the open by our highest echelons and without mercy, to displace and uproot the Native American population. It is deeply painful to visit the "Trail of Tears". Or to learn certain details of the Second Seminole War. There are monuments all along the miles and miles where the Native Americans walked their death marches. And they were resettled into reservations with such sops as permission to run casino gambling free from government interference. That is what America did after our Government determined that, to create the kind of country envisioned by the Founding Fathers — a country that truly has emerged in history as the greatest and most kind, benevolent, and charitable country that people ever have created, with the greatest respect and love for freedom and decency that any society ever has registered — "those people had to go." In all, by the time the U.S. federal government had ended "allotment" in 1934, that policy had cost Native Americans at least 90 million acres of their land, two-thirds of the land they had owned half a century earlier. Kenneth H. Bobroff, "Retelling Allotment: Indian Property Rights and the Myth of Common Ownership," 54 Vanderbilt L. Rev. 1559, 1561 & n.5 (2001) (citing OFFICE OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, DEP'T OF THE INTERIOR, INDIAN LAND TENURE, ECONOMIC STATUS AND POPULATION TRENDS 6 (1935)). Today we compound the shame by designating our Native Americans as mascots for our sports teams: Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins, Florida State Seminoles, Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Black Hawks. But Israel never did that. As Jews lived in a land that was and has been our patrimony for 3,000 years, we engaged Arabs as neighbors. We engaged the Arab community with respect. We desired to build with them. So we encouraged their participation in our society, in our government, in our Parliament. Yes, Israel would be a Jewish nation-state, in a world that already recognizes more than twenty Arab states. There are so many Arab countries, even with names like United Arab Emirates, that they even have an Arab League. And for us, as Jews, there is one country to which we trace our heritage and legacy. Until 1948 it was called "Palestine," and "Palestine" was renamed "Israel" when the country became independent. Only One Jewish Homeland: Passionately Loved Without Interruption and Yearned-for Through 2,000 Years of Exile This land of "Palestine" or "Israel" always has been the Jewish homeland. For 2,000 years — from the time that the ancient Roman Empire conquered Jerusalem, expelled Jews from the Land, and re-named the land "Palestina" to eradicate its Jewish character in the popular memory — to this day we have continued praying three times daily for a return to Palestine/Israel. We fasted several times every year in tearful memory of events that led to Jews being exiled from the land 2,600 years ago by the Babylonians and again 2,000 years ago by the ancient Romans. We adopted customs, at the core of our Jewish identity, to remember Palestine/Israel. So, in all our prayers these past 2,000 years, we have faced Palestine/Israel during our prayers. We literally coordinate our synagogue architecture to assure that we pray facing Palestine/Israel. In America, we pray facing East, and in Russia we pray facing West. In Africa, we pray facing North. At all our weddings for these past 2,000 years, the groom breaks a glass under the wedding canopy in memory of the destruction of the Holy Temple in East Jerusalem and the exile from Palestine/Israel. When we visit someone whose relative has died, we console the mourner with our hopeful prayer: "May [G-d], the One Who is in Every Place, console you among the rest [of us], who mourn for [the fall 2,000 years ago] of Zion and Jerusalem." As we dance with the bride and groom, we sing — as we have sung for 2,000 years — "There yet again will be heard in cities throughout Judea and in the streets of Jerusalem the sounds of rejoicing and sounds of happiness, the sound of the groom and the sound of the bride." For 2,000 years we have taken a day out of our lives each summer to mourn for the fall of Jerusalem: devoting the night and day to reciting tearful lamentations, fasting, crying, dimming our lights for much of the day, refusing to sit comfortably on chairs but instead sitting on the floor or overturned chairs. For 2,000 years we have left partially unpainted a section of every home in which we have lived, partially incomplete to remind us that East Jerusalem, with her Temple destroyed, is partially incomplete. Even after our every meal, we have recited a prayer for 2,000 years asking that G-d restore and rebuild Jerusalem. Do Americans — the deepest, most patriotic of my countrymen — know the precise day on which the British burned down the White House during the Madison Administration in the course of the War of 1812? The Temple in Jerusalem was burned on the Ninth Day of Av. How do we Americans commemorate that incineration of the White House? Jews have never forgotten the eternal connection with the Land of Israel. And Jews continued living in that land. In 1929, Arab marauders still were perpetrating massacres, trying to remove Jews, for once and for all, from the City of Hebron, the City where our Biblical ancestors — Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Leah — lie interred at the Cave of Makhpelah. New waves of Arab massacres from 1936-1939 sought to drive Jews out of Shechem/Nablus. Within half a century, Jews were back. Again. In an Era of Mass Population Exchanges, the Arab World Hatefully Drove out 700,000 Jews and Confiscated All Their Property and Assets, Even as Israelis Pleaded with Their Arab Neighbors to Remain and Build a New Western Democracy Together And yet, as a Jewish State was coming into being, we sought to live in peace with Arabs living there. Jews in Israel still seek to live in peace with them. Even as they forcibly expelled as many as 700,000 Jews from the various and respective Arab lands, lands like Yemen and Morocco, Syria and Iraq — driving them out, confiscating their land and portable property, confiscating their liquid assets, driving them into exile between the late 1930s and early 1950s — Israel was pleading with landed Arabs to remain within her borders, to remain and live side-by-side in peace. Maybe many of those Arab residents would have remained behind if leaders of the invading Arab armies did not impel them to leave, to abandon their homes, essentially to get the heck out of the darned way during the planned extermination of the nascent Jewish State, as the Arab legions marched on Palestine/pre-Israel to drive the "Jews into the sea." Many Arabs did indeed flee, as a result. They opted to get out of the way. Not as many Arabs left Israel as the number of Jews who forcibly were driven out of the Arab lands at the time. But many left. Perhaps 400,000. Perhaps more. And the vast majority of those who chose to leave departed not from Gaza nor from the "West Bank" but from the core of Israel itself. That is why they do not perceive a "Palestine homeland" in the "West Bank" or Gaza as their home, as a resolution of anything. It would be like telling someone who fled France, for one reason or another, that he will be "restored" to a "home" in neighboring Germany. Imagine your own situation: you have been forced out of your home, perhaps by a force majeure, in Teaneck, New Jersey or Brooklyn, New York — and your insurance company offers you a replacement home in Boise, Idaho or Butte, Montana. Is that "good enough" a replacement, given that it all is in the same country? So, how does a "home" in Berlin restore exile from Paris? And how does a "home" in Bethlehem restore a perceived exile from Tel Aviv or Haifa? Those questions' answers are the reasons that the logo of the uniform is what it is, why the "refugee camps" are where they are, and why the "Two-State Solution" fails by ignoring the reality that "Palestinian Arabs" cannot accept Tel Aviv, Haifa, and West Jerusalem as "Jewish." Those Arabs who left Israel could have stayed. The Jews asked them to stay. Unlike the 700,000 Jews who were driven into exile from homes in Arab lands, those Arabs were not driven out. Unlike Native Americans, they were not driven off their lands. And unlike other exiles, they were put into concentration environments — Arab "refugee camps" — by their own people. While the nascent State of Israel gamely was constructing a home and frantically was working to absorb the huge influx of landless, destitute Jewish exiles and refugees from Arab lands, the Arab world was building concentration camps and reservations for their own people, fellow Arabs, where those emigres would languish. Half a century later, while the Jewish refugees from Arab lands have seen their children become doctors and computer programmers, world leaders, attorneys, business moguls, plumbers, contractors, entertainment executives, and anything else out there, the children of those Arab emigres have become the victims of the world's most heinous example of cynical self-hatred. They remain in "refugee camps" that are historical anomalies and today are thoroughly anachronistic. They remain on international welfare, under the rubric of a cynically anti-Jewish United Nations agency, the "United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East" (UNRWA), which runs the camps and their schools, and has a vested interest — namely, preserving their own existence, preserving their own continued employment and pay checks, preserving their jobs — in perpetuating the historical crime of refusing to let the residents be absorbed into their local environments. During the last century, the world has seen so many tragically painful "population exchanges" play themselves out on the world stage. Greek ethnics were forced out of Bulgaria and into Greece, while Bulgarian ethnics were forced from Greece into Bulgaria. In 1922, under the League of Nations, 1.25 million Greek Orthodox ethnics were transferred from Turkey, and half a million Moslems were transferred reciprocally to Turkey from Greece. Fridtjof Nansen, the guy who oversaw the population exchange, was awarded the 1922 Nobel Peace Prize for his effort. In 1940, under the Treaty of Craiova, there was a massive population exchange: 80,000 Romanian ethnics were forced into Bulgaria, and 65,000 Bulgarian ethnics forced out of Romania. After World War II, between 14-16 million ethnic Germans were transferred out of Central and Eastern Europe, and into Germany. Poland and the Soviet Union exchanged populations: between 1944 and 1946, some 2 million people, Polish ethnics sent to Poland from the Ukraine and Ukrainians sent out of Poland, were transferred. More than 5 million Hindus and Sikhs were forced to India from the regions that became Pakistan, and more than 6 million Moslems were pushed out of India and into Pakistan. The Cynicism of the Fabricated "Palestinian Refugee Problem"... Where are the languishing Bulgarian refugee camps? Greek refugee camps? Romanian refugee camps? Polish refugee camps? German refugee camps? Ukrainian refugee camps? Hindu/Sikh refugee camps? Where are the Bosnian Moslem refugee camps? Why is there no massive international welfare apparatus in the rubric of a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for the [Bulgarian/ Greek/ Romanian/ Polish/ German/ Ukrainian/ Hindu/ Sikh/ Bosnian/ Vietnamese/ Cambodian/ Rwandan/ Darfur] refugees? How is it that no one even thinks to ask? And is it comprehensible that, at a time of national economic challenge within America, the United States funds more than one fourth the cost of this nonsense to the tune of nearly $100 million annually? By contrast, Saudi Arabia funds less than one percent ($2.5 million), and Kuwait less than that. Can there be anything that evidences more forcefully how cynical this entire mendacity is? The OPEC oil cartel raises our oil costs to the point of disrupting our national economy, and we responsively fund a massive, multi-national welfare infrastructure for those of their people whom they, unique among all countries into which emigrants have sought haven, have confined to concentration centers for more than half a century. What people holds and concentrates its own brothers and sisters in "refugee camps" for half a century and more? And, to make matters more bizarre, these people in the UNRWA "Palestinian refugee camps" are the descendants of those who departed their homes voluntarily, gambling that their departure would facilitate the Arab Legions' rapid success in obliterating the Jewish presence from the face of the earth, driving the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, it was their leading spiritual leader of the time — Haj Amin el-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — who overtly and demonstratively allied the pan-Arab cause with Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. Yet, people who have persecuted the Berber minority of Algeria, the Coptic Christian minority of Egypt, the Bahai minority of Iran, Christians in Saudi Arabia — even enslaving Black Christians in the Sudan — would have the temerity to equate Zionism with racism and to compare Zionists to Nazis. There are nations and peoples who, over the centuries, have ventured into Africa and forcibly expatriated tens of thousands of Black Africans to become slaves in theirs and others' countries on other continents. But in all the world, in all of human history, Israel is the only country that ever expended national human and financial resources, risking her citizens' lives in daring midnight sorties and dangerous trans-continental rescue missions, aimed at liberating tens of thousands of Black Africans from persecution and bringing them out of Africa, out from slavery and into freedom. ... And the Cynicism of Imposing on Israel a "Two State Solution" in the Face of America's Long-Term Commitments and Repeated Promises to a Time-Tested Friend and Ally So what "Two-State Solution" are President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Mr. Emanuel talking about? The irony is that this pressure from President Obama and Secretary Clinton comes at a time when not a single prominent political leader on the Israeli political scene even advocates building new Jewish communities ("settlements") in Judea and Samaria. There rarely before has been a more pliable Israeli government. All Bibi Netanyahu advocates, minimalistic and inadequate though it be, is the right for Jews to expand within a legal community for natural increase. And even that now is to be proscribed, despite understandings with the prior American President and his Administration that America would respect that Israeli right if Israel would agree to abandon Gaza and pursue other parts of the ill-conceived "Road Map" structured by former President George W. Bush and his foreign affairs expert, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. So Israel ceded Gaza, and the Road Map played out by extending all of democracy's virtues to the now-liberated Gazans. Freed to vote their hearts' content, they elected into office the worst terrorist goons freely elected to a democracy's high office since the National Socialists got out the vote in 1933 Germany. Hamas refuses to recognize Israel, refuses to live in peace with Israel, and refuses to recognize prior signed treaties with Israel. Now, President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and Mr. Emanuel emulate Hamas in one of the three critical immoralities: they unilaterally abandon America's prior policy and refuse to abide by America's understanding of the past that, if Israel compromises by ceding Gaza, she nevertheless may expand already established communities in Judea-Samaria to allow for natural increase. For a team with the demonstrated ability to pull isolated passages from the Quran, it would be instructive to refresh consciences by recalling a few passages of the agreements that President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon reached, with the exchanges amplified between their respective advisors Condoleezza Rice and Dov Weisglas. America expressly contracted in writing to recognize the new post-1949 and post-1967 realities: namely, that Israel now has major population centers in areas in Judea and Samaria, and therefore there will be no returning to the 1967 borders. Nor does anyone else in the Judea-Samaria ("West Bank") region have a better, more legitimate claim to the land than does Israel. Mexico has a better claim to California and Texas than the terrorists of Fatah and Hamas have to Judea and Samaria. At least Mexico can tell you the years they were sovereign there, the Mexican governmental leaders who oversaw the land, the currency they circulated there, and the years that Mexico lost sovereignty over their land in California and Texas. Pressuring Israel to Abandon Her Security While Turning a Blind Eye, Deaf Ear, and Silent Tongue Towards a Concerted Vitriolic Hate Campaign Against Jews That Has Poisoned Children's Minds and Adults' Hearts Through the Next Generation, Even as the Hate Campaign Materially Has Breached and Thus Has Rendered Void and Nugatory Every Israel-Arab Treaty There is more, so much more. America expressly contracted — in writing — that, if Israel were to cede Gaza, America would require that Abbas and his "Palestinian Authority" stop the hate-filled anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incitement among the population he leads: the hate-filled TV telecasts, the hate-filled radio broadcasts, the hate-filled summer camps, the newspapers of hate and their crossword puzzles of hate, the school textbooks of hate. Yet the hate continues unabated. Even teaching hate to the youngest of children. There is no comment or condemnation by President Obama or Secretary Clinton, and Rahm Emanuel continues unabated as point man for selling the "Two-State Solution" to American Jewish groups. No Israeli relinquishing of land to Mahmoud Abbas or Hamas will bring anything but more Jewish suffering and more Jewish vulnerability, as the weapons Hamas placed in Gaza to ruin life in Israel's South (Sderot, Ashdod, Ashkelon) and the weapons Hezbollah placed in South Lebanon to reach into Israel's northern coastal plain (Haifa, Hadera) next aim to bring the cities of Tel Aviv under rocket fire exposure from Samaria and Jerusalem from Judea. This is the reality on the ground — so different from the effort painted by propagandists to score points. Just as so much is confused about the everyday physical interface between Israelis and Arabs living in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"). Understandably, when a foreign visitor sees long lines of "West Bank" Arabs waiting to be permitted through Israeli security check points to enter pre-1967 Israel, the delay seems curious. "Why does Israel subject them to such intense inspection?" the visitor wonders. "How terrible the life under 'occupation!'" Well, a closer look reveals that terrorists — with a proven record of bringing mass murder — cross through those borders, too. Some are armed with body explosives. Others carry minuscule portions of explosives that, when combined with other minuscule items smuggled by other terror couriers in their cell, have caused horrific tragedy in the past. And that is the reason for the security fence and the long, long, slow, slow lines at that fence. The fence was built to reduce the carnage. Indeed, upon reflection, is the experience of body inspections at that border all that different from the way that America treats aliens coming across our southern border? Or through our airports? To get into a domestic flight, even American citizens are expected to remove all their metal items — even keys, pens, nickels, even a dime. And even octogenarian travelers — every single one of them — have to remove their shoes for inspection. And elderly people with heart pacemakers have to subject themselves to individualized security checking, full-body wanding. As do people who have had metal splints or rods inserted into their limbs during surgery. Meanwhile, in Israel, every Jewish Israeli must subject himself to inspection regularly throughout each day. Israelis must open their bags and purses for inspection, and submit to metal-detector body searches every time they enter a bank or post office, pick up a bottle of milk at the supermarket, enter a mall or train station, or visit a hospital or medical clinic. Young Israeli men and women are frisked closely and methodically before they enter nightclubs. These daily "humiliations" extend to body searches at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and even when attending regular synagogue services. Similarly, Jewish schoolchildren in Israel are surrounded by perimeter fences, with armed guards at schoolyard gates. By contrast, Arab schools and villages do not require such fences. Guards are not required at Arab shops, cafes, restaurants, movie theaters, wedding halls or schools. Arabs in the "West Bank" do not need armed guards to accompany their every school trip or youth movement hike — because they are not targets of terrorism. Thus, the claim that Israel treats Arabs unfairly when slowly securing the safety as people enter pre-1967 Israel from the "West Bank" is mendacious. Israel is fair and reasonable to them — why else would they be lining up, seeking entry? (One does not see Jews lining up to enter Libya or Syria.) The Facts on the Ground: Every Israeli Retreat Has Invited Anti-West Arab Terrorists to Arm and Militarize, Rain Unprecedented Destruction, and Launch New Deadly Battle Fronts of Rocket Fire at Israeli Cities That Previously Had Been Secure In Israel, there are Orthodox religionists who debate with Jewish secularists whether Jews ever, under any circumstances, may depart from land that G-d promised in the Torah to the Jewish Patriarchs. That is a debate that fascinates and engages religionists (in whose number I am counted). "Realists," by contrast, simply need to look at the facts on the ground: Israel ceded land in Southern Lebanon in return for promises of peace. Instead, Hezbollah seized the region and has turned it into a rocket-firing gallery aimed at Israel. Israel ceded land in Gaza in return for promises of peace. Instead, Hamas seized the region and has turned it into a rocket-firing gallery aimed at Israel. Every single fact on the ground evidences that any Israeli cession to Abbas in Judea or Samaria will create a new front of incessant rocket barrage, and will add yet another rabidly anti-American, anti-West polity in the Middle East, which will arm itself and be armed by Iran and her cohorts. If Israel retreats from any land in Judea or Samaria, it first will fall into the hands of Mahmoud Abbas, who lived a life as Arafat's Number Two (ancient history?), denies there was a Holocaust as described by Western historians (recent history?), and who explicitly rejects the notion that Israel can be called a "Jewish State" (this week's history). And he and his Fatah terrorists are the least of the problem because they already are out-polled among their residents by Hamas, who won the last election — freedom, democracy, as promised under the Road Map's vision — and who transparently are bent on destroying Israel (as well as Abbas himself). The Grand "Two-State" Pyramid Scheme should remain in Cairo and at the Pyramids. The "Two-State Solution" is nothing but another term for a "Final Solution." We Jews do not do so well with Final Solutions.   Rabbi Dov Fischer is with the Young Israel of Orange County (YIOC), in Irvine, California. YIOC conducts a full range of Shabbat services, Jewish-study and Torah classes, Jewish social programs and celebrations, and a part-time yeshiva for teen boys to deal with the crisis in teen Jewish education in Irvine and Orange County. Rabbi Fischer writes: "This article may be copied and distributed all you like as long as: (i) attribution is given to this website [either www.ravfischer.com or www.rabbidov.com] as its source, and (ii) no editing or other modification is done to the article in any way." This article is archived at http://rabbidov.com/twostate.htm To Go To Top

PERSIAN HEROES AND WESTERN TREACHERY Posted by Jared Israel, July 24, 2009.

As Iran's nightmare rulers continue to beat, 'arrest' (i.e., kidnap), torture and murder the truly heroic participants in Iran's Democratic Revolution (see videos below), the Western leaders who bombed Yugoslavia over phony stories of imaginary Serbian terror do nothing about the all-to-real Iranian clerical Fascist terror, with Obama-Clinton leading the pack by begging Ahmadinejad to meet with them, thus effectively puffing up this swaggering Mussolini-remake. To help understand why, I urge you to read the 2003 TENC article, "How Iran & the West Planned Islamism for Afghanistan." It includes important, buried news about the powerful IDLO (International Development Law Organization), an inter-governmental body that designs and trains people for legal systems in so-called developing nations, and which is controlled by the E.U. (especially Italy) and the U.S. The TENC article reports that the IDLO hosted a December 2002 meeting in Rome, mainly of foreign ministry officials and Islamist jurists, including three from Iran's clerical regime. The purpose? To plan a Shar'ia constitution for Afghanistan, that is, a constitution that requires the government to adhere to Islamic law. The meeting was fully reported on the IDLO website and covered by Associated Press, ANSA (the Italian wire service), and other wire services, but searching the Lexis-Nexis media archives, we found that, with the exception of an entirely uninformative piece in the BBC (it managed not to mention either the IDLO, Iran or the Islamist jurists!) no English, German, Italian, Spanish or French-language media picked up this story, and that's including so-called alternative media. It was big news, but the silence was deafening. Big news, including this AP report on the consensus of this meeting attended by foreign ministry delegations from the most powerful states in the world: "The conclusions of that meeting were that Islamic law has 'all the elements that are really required to underpin a human rights agenda and a modern state agenda which are completely compatible with international standards,' said William Loris, director-general of the International Development Law Organization, which trains lawyers and judges in developing countries." — "Karzai Pledges Equal Justice for All at Conference on Reforming Judiciary," Associated Press, December 19, 2002 [1] So in countries condescendingly (and often ludicrously) described as 'emerging' or 'developing,' Shar'ia is all they need; so says the IDLO of Rome. The Italian foreign ministry, which has been overall in charge of creating the Afghan Shar'ia system, hosted another Afghanistan conference in Rome in July 2007. The Bush administration delegation was headed by Richard A. Boucher, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs. The Ahmadinejad-Khamenei delegation was headed by Mehdi Safari, the Islamic Republic's Deputy Foreign Minister for Asia, Pacific and Commonwealth of Independent States. In a speech to the conference, Safari embraced what the so-called international community is doing in Afghanistan and — I hope you are sitting — the rule of law: [Excerpt from Islamic Republic of Iran representative's speech starts here] We [i.e., the Iranian regime — J.I.] hope this gathering will lead to further cooperation between the international community and the government of Afghanistan for institutionalizing the full rule of law there. We believe that the holding of [this] international conference on Afghanistan provides solutions for the Afghan people and will pave the way for the realization of their goals and objectives. [...] Excellencies, Iran, as an active and responsible neighbor of Afghanistan, has availed the opportunities provided by [the] international community to support Afghanistan, and allocated $560 million for the reconstruction process in that country. The effects of Iran's contribution in Afghanistan, particularly in the Western areas of that country, are very evident. [My emphasis — J.I.] — Speech at the "Conference on the Rule of [Shar'ia] Law in Afghanistan," by Mehdi Safari, Deputy Foreign Minister, Islamic Republic of Iran, July 2-3, 2007, Rome [2] [Excerpt from Islamic Republic of Iran representative's speech ends here] Notice that speaking to his peers, with virtually no chance that his words will be reported by the media, this Ahmadinejad-Khamenei representative shuns the propaganda attacks that create the public impression of intense hostility between Iran, on the one side, and the U.S. and European leaders, on the other. I believe these mutual attacks are staged for dramatic effect, just like the theatrical denunciations one sees in wrestling matches on U.S. TV, to give people someone to root for while hiding cooperation. Supporting my view, we see that, out of the public view, Deputy Foreign Minister Safari is deferential to the Great Satans, welcoming their invasion of a neighbor, their establishment of what is manifestly an imposed government, their imposition of a Shar'ia legal system (that's the "rule of law," so dear to the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei regime), and, in oiliest tones, anticipates that the international takeover "will pave the way for the realization of their goals and objectives." My translation: 'By imposing Shar'ia (thus outflanking the many Afghan secularists), by punishing the unruly Taliban so that they will submit to control from Tehran, and by permitting the Iranian mullahs a free hand in Afghanistan, the international community has performed splendidly, just as when they eliminated the mullahs' deadly enemy, Saddam Hussein. For which services the mullahs most graciously exclaim: Thank you, o wondrous beings! Anything else you can do for us, just let us know!' Why has the 'international community' welcomed Iran into Afghanistan, when, obviously, the Iranian mullahs have the goals of crushing anyone who resists Islamist rule and of establishing regional hegemony, goals already partly achieved in Iraq, thanks to the Western invasion? Why, unless either: A) The U.S. and European governments (and the Vatican, which basically runs the Italian government) get involved in massively expensive invasions and embrace clerical-Fascist states (i.e., Iran) without giving a thought to the consequences, or — B) The U.S. and European governments (and the Vatican) are perfectly aware of the obvious consequences but want these consequences, want the Iranian mullahs to achieve hegemony in southwest Asia. Now why would the establishment want that? Because they consider Iranian-style Islamism, which ruthlessly suppresses critical thought and all secular organizing (for example, by trade unionists), and which disseminates the mind-rotting 'theory' that 'the evil Jews' run the world, as excellent for controlling and suppressing potentially rebellious populations in Muslim-majority countries. Could this be why Prof. Brzezinski's star pupil Barack Obama has talked out of both sides of his mouth about the struggle in Iran, saying that he regretted all violence but that the U.S. did not have observers on the ground so he couldn't be sure what had happened, while legitimizing Ahmadinejad by begging him to meet with the U.S., and this while the Iranian clerical Fascists were murdering more and more people? Did Obama and Clinton bet that the mullah-thugs would be able quickly to silence the Iranian people and that people in the West would quickly lose interest? If so Obama and Clinton have lost their bet. What are they going to do now? Persian Heroes The two videos below, filmed spontaneously by ordinary Iranians, provide an intimate look at the forces contending in Iran. In the first, we see Basij militiamen beating two captured protesters in a parking garage, then apparently shooting one. Filmed at deadly risk to the filmers, the militiamen are seen clubbing their helpless captives casually, without apparent emotion, just as if they were machines. They are just rubble inside. Watching them, please recall Hillary Clinton's equally machine-like statement of June 29th: "There is not yet a final outcome of the process that they're [i.e., Iranian leaders — J.I.] engaged in internally to demonstrate to their own people the credibility of the electoral process that has just been completed." — Secretary Clinton on Iran during Remarks at Daily Press Briefing, June 29, 2009, at http://www.usembassy.org.uk/iran019.html [3] To display the video, please go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OsqAMnhsN0 The "final outcome of the process." The second video shows students at Kashan Universty, about 300 km south of Tehran, conducting a protest in their school. We don't have the slogans translated (help appreciated!), but the song they sing for the first half of the video is "Yar-e Dabestani-e Man" ("My elementary schoolmate"), written by Mansour Tehrani for his 1980 film "Az Faryad Ta Terror" ("From Cry to Assassination"): Translation: "My elementary schoolmate You are with me and along side me When the cane is wielded over our heads You cry and howl with me Engraved are the names of you and me On this black board The scars of the lashes of tyranny Have stayed on our bodies Our desolate and uncultured wilderness With all of its shrubbery being but weeds Be it good or bad Dead are people's hearts My hands and your hands have to tear down this curtain Who other than me and you will find the cures to our suffering?" To display the video, please go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sRGGXfGUqI Footnotes and Further Reading [1] Footnote: To read this AP dispatch, go to page 2 of "Press Clippings on IDLO Afghanistan Roundtable & MFA Conference Rome, December 2002," at http://www.idlo.int/DOCNews/ AFGHANISTAN_PRESS_ARTICLES.PDF The program of the 2002 IDLO conference, including a list of participants, can be read on the IDLO website at http://www.idlo.int/DOCNews/ AFGHANISTAN_ROUNDTABLE_PROG.PDF [2] A streaming video of Mehdi Safari's speech at the 2007 conference can be seen at http://www.rolafghanistan.esteri.it/ video/IRAN.wmv For additional information on the 2007 "Conference on the Rule of [Shar'ia] Law in Afghanistan," go to the Italian foreign ministry website at http://www.rolafghanistan.esteri.it/ConferenceRol Italy is "the lead nation in the reconstruction of the Afghan justice system, operating in the field through the Italian Justice Project Office (IJPO) created in 2003." http://www.rolafghanistan.esteri.it/ConferenceRol/ .../Cooperazione+culturale/ [3] To view a video of Hillary Clinton's "Remarks at the Top of the Daily Press Briefing" of June 29, 2009, go to http://www.state.gov/video/?videoid=27986004001 (Clinton's statement on Iran starts at 9:39). This article is available at www.tenc.net and is archived at http://emperors-clothes.com/terrorandtreachery.htm To receive the TENC Newsletter, contact join-emperorsclothes@pr2.netatlantic.com To Go To Top

HAS HELL FROZEN OVER RE NY TIMES AND FRIEDMAN? Posted by David Meir-Levi, July 24, 2009.

Sh'lom Y'all, Has hell frozen over? This is the first time in the past 9 years that I have been following it, that the NY Times deals honestly with some aspect of the dire threat posed by Islamofascist Jihad to our civilization. Not comprehensively, not analytically, and not with even a hint of alarmist vocabulary, but at least honestly. Same re the Friedman article. Praising the military? Condemning the Taliban in honest terminology regarding their psychotic misogynistic pathology? I wonder if the NY Times and Friedman are experiencing a learning curve. This is more than just a hypothetical question. If the NY Times is acknowledging the real dangers, and reporting on FBI concerns, then it is easier to convince those who distrust alternate media sources by using the NY Times. (from the Thomas Friedman article at the bottom of this email): It is no accident, Mortenson noted, that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 350 schools in Pakistan, of which about 80 percent are schools for girls. This valley, controlled by Tajik fighters, is secure, but down south in Helmand Province, where the worst fighting is today, the deputy minister of education said that Taliban extremists have shut 75 of the 228 schools in the last year. This is the real war of ideas. The Taliban want public mosques, not public schools. The Muslim militants recruit among the illiterate and impoverished in society, so the more of them the better, said Mortenson. David ML (1) "Radical Islamists Slip Easily Into Kenya" by Jeffrey Gettleman, July 22, 2009, NYTimes, (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/world/africa/ 22shabab.html? emc=eta1&pagewanted=print). (2) "Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No" by Thomas L. Friedman, July 19, 2009, NYTimes, (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/opinion/ 19friedman.html?emc=eta1&pagewanted=print) (3) "A Call to Jihad, Answered in America" by Andrea Elliott, July 12, 2009, NYTimes, (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/us/ 12somalis.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print) (1) and (2) are available on the New York Times website. (3) is posted below.

MINNEAPOLIS — The Carlson School of Management rises from the asphalt like a monument to capitalist ambition. Stock prices race across an electronic ticker near a sleek entrance and the atrium soars skyward, as if lifting the aspirations of its students. The school's plucky motto is "Nowhere but here." For a group of students who often met at the school, on the University of Minnesota campus, those words seemed especially fitting. They had fled Somalia as small boys, escaping a catastrophic civil war. They came of age as refugees in Minneapolis, embracing basketball and the prom, hip-hop and the Mall of America. By the time they reached college, their dreams seemed within grasp: one planned to become a doctor; another, an entrepreneur. But last year, in a study room on the first floor of Carlson, the men turned their energies to a different enterprise. "Why are we sitting around in America, doing nothing for our people?" one of the men, Mohamoud Hassan, a skinny 23-year-old engineering major, pressed his friends. In November, Mr. Hassan and two other students dropped out of college and left for Somalia, the homeland they barely knew. Word soon spread that they had joined the Shabaab, a militant Islamist group aligned with Al Qaeda that is fighting to overthrow the fragile Somali government. The students are among more than 20 young Americans who are the focus of what may be the most significant domestic terrorism investigation since Sept. 11. One of the men, Shirwa Ahmed, blew himself up in Somalia in October, becoming the first known American suicide bomber. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert M. Mueller, has said Mr. Ahmed was "radicalized in his hometown in Minnesota." An examination by The New York Times, based on interviews with close friends and relatives of the men, law enforcement officials and lawyers, as well as access to live phone calls and Facebook messages between the men and their friends in the United States, reveals how a far-flung jihadist movement found a foothold in America's heartland. The men appear to have been motivated by a complex mix of politics and faith, and their communications show how some are trying to recruit other young Americans to their cause. The case represents the largest group of American citizens suspected of joining an extremist movement affiliated with Al Qaeda. Although friends say the men have never thought of carrying out attacks in the United States, F.B.I. officials worry that with their training, ideology and American passports, there is a real danger that they could. "This case is unlike anything we have encountered," said Ralph S. Boelter, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s Minneapolis office, which is leading the investigation. Most of the men are Somali refugees who left the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul in two waves, starting in late 2007. While religious devotion may have predisposed them to sympathize with the Islamist cause in Somalia, it took a major geopolitical event — the Ethiopian invasion of their homeland in 2006 — to spur them to join what they saw as a legitimate resistance movement, said friends of the men. For many of the men, the path to Somalia offered something personal as well — a sense of adventure, purpose and even renewal. In the first wave of Somalis who left were men whose uprooted lives resembled those of immigrants in Europe who have joined the jihad. They faced barriers of race and class, religion and language. Mr. Ahmed, the 26-year-old suicide bomber, struggled at community colleges before dropping out. His friend Zakaria Maruf, 30, fell in with a violent street gang and later stocked shelves at a Wal-Mart. If failure had shadowed this first group of men, the young Minnesotans who followed them to Somalia were succeeding in America. Mr. Hassan, the engineering student, was a rising star in his college community. Another of the men was a pre-med student who had once set his sights on an internship at the Mayo Clinic. They did not leave the United States for a lack of opportunity, their friends said; if anything, they seemed driven by unfulfilled ambition. "Now they feel important," said one friend, who remains in contact with the men and, like others, would only speak anonymously because of the investigation. The case has forced federal agents and terrorism analysts to rethink some of their most basic assumptions about the vulnerability of Muslim immigrants in the United States to the lure of militant Islam. For years, it seemed that "homegrown" terrorism was largely a problem in European countries like Britain and France, where Muslim immigrants had failed to prosper economically or integrate culturally. By contrast, experts believed that the successful assimilation of foreign-born Muslims in the United States had largely immunized them from the appeal of radical ideologies. The story of the Twin Cities men does not lend itself to facile categorizations. They make up a minuscule percentage of their Somali-American community, and it is unclear whether their transformation reflects any broader trend. Nor are they especially representative of the wider Muslim immigrant population, which has enjoyed a stable and largely middle-class existence. Even among the world's jihadists, the young men from Minneapolis are something of an exception: in their instant messages and cellphone calls, they seem caught between inner-city America and the badlands of Africa, pining for Starbucks one day, extolling the virtues of camel's milk and Islamic fundamentalism the next. "Allah will never change the situation of a people unless they change themselves," Mr. Hassan, the engineering student, wrote in a Facebook message he posted on April 15. "Take a sec and think about your situation deeply. What change do you need to make?" Generation of Refugees Shirwa Ahmed climbed the worn, concrete steps of Roosevelt High School on his first day as a freshman in September 1996. A slim boy with a watchful gaze, he was one of hundreds of Somali teenagers who had landed at the school in southeastern Minneapolis. Some had never seen a drinking fountain. Others did not know how to hold a pencil, recalled the school's principal, Bruce Gilman. They carried unspeakable traumas. A number of the students had witnessed their parents being killed. "It's almost unimaginable what some of these kids went through," Mr. Gilman said. The country they had fled, on the eastern tip of Africa, was embroiled in a civil war that had left it without a functioning government since 1991. The anarchy reached American televisions two years later, when warlords shot down two Black Hawk helicopters, killing 18 United States soldiers. By then, tens of thousands of Somalis had died and a mass exodus had begun. A generation of Somalis grew up in the overcrowded refugee camps of northern Kenya, where malaria, scorpion infestations and hunger took their toll. Tales of America sustained them. Clean water was said to flow freely in kitchens, and simple jobs like plucking chickens paid handsomely. Proof came in the cash sent by a first wave of refugees who had arrived in the United States in the early 1990s. Minneapolis, with its robust social services and steady supply of unskilled jobs, quickly became the capital of their North American diaspora. When they ended their shifts as cabdrivers or janitors, many Somalis retreated from American life. They had transformed a blighted stretch near the Mississippi River into a Little Mogadishu, commandeering a grim collection of cinderblock buildings known as the Towers — a onetime fictional residence of the heroine of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." They cut their hair at Somali barber shops, prayed at Somali mosques and organized themselves along the same clan lines that had divided them for decades, calling on tribal elders to settle family disputes and community rifts. If the adults kept their distance from American culture, their children had little choice but to dive in. At Roosevelt, Mr. Ahmed was a quick study. He memorized Ice Cube's lyrics. He practiced for hours on neighborhood basketball courts. He took note of the clothing and vernacular of his African-American classmates, emulating what he could. His pants sagged, but never too much. He spoke of "homeboys" and used the "n" word, but gave careful regard to the school's rules. When a classmate's purse was stolen, it was Mr. Ahmed who dutifully turned in the thief. Much as he tried, he failed to fit in. You're not black, his peers taunted. Go back to Africa. Somali and African-American students clashed frequently at the school, but Mr. Ahmed seemed ill-suited to the fight. Taciturn by nature, he recoiled at the taunts, his close friend Nicole Hartford said. "How can they be mad at me for looking like them?" she recalled him saying. "We're from the same place." Even as Mr. Ahmed met rejection at school, he faced disapproval from relatives, who complained that he was mixing with "ghetto people," Ms. Hartford recalled. It was a classic conundrum for young Somalis: how to be one thing at school and another at home. Developments in the homeland, followed obsessively by the adults, held little interest among teenagers. They rolled their eyes at the older men known as "the sitting warriors," who debated clan politics with such gusto at one Starbucks that the staff bought a decibel meter to ensure that the noise did not rise above legal limits. Yet young men like Mr. Ahmed remained tethered to Somalia by the remittances they were pressed to send. After school every day, he joined a stream of teenagers headed for the airport, where he pushed passengers in wheelchairs. He sent half of his income to Somalia, to "relatives we don't even know," his friend Nimco Ahmed said. The war had torn families apart, and fathers were in short supply. Somali boys struggled most visibly. The financial strain on families like Mr. Ahmed's, which was headed by an older sister, proved staggering. Of the estimated 100,000 Somalis in the United States, more than 60 percent live in poverty, according to recent census data. After graduating from high school in 2000, Mr. Ahmed seemed to flounder, taking community college classes while working odd jobs, friends said. But he had done better than many peers, who turned to crime and gangs like Murda Squad and Rough Tough Somalis. At the root of the problem was a "crisis of belonging," said Mohamud Galony, a science tutor who was friends with Mr. Ahmed and is the uncle of another boy who left. Young Somalis had been raised to honor their families' tribes, yet felt disconnected from them. "They want to belong, but who do they belong to?" said Mr. Galony, 23. By 2004, Mr. Ahmed had found a new circle of friends. These religious young men, pegged as "born-agains" or "fundis," set themselves apart by their dress. Their trousers had gone from sagging to short, emulating the Prophet Muhammad, who was said to have kept his clothes from touching the ground. Perhaps none of Mr. Ahmed's contemporaries had undergone a transformation like that of Zakaria Maruf. A short boy prone to fits of rage, Mr. Maruf began running afoul of the law at the age of 14. For a time, he fell in with the Hot Boyz, a violent street gang. He seemed to crave recognition. Known on the basketball court as Zak, he was a mediocre athlete, but he pushed himself harder than anyone else, recalled his coach, Ahmed Dahir. Mr. Maruf threw himself into Islam with the same intensity, becoming a fixture at a mosque near the Towers, where he mastered the call to prayer. "He had an ego the size of Minnesota," one fellow mosque member said. "It was, 'Look at me.' " Mr. Ahmed and Mr. Maruf were sometimes seen preaching to kids on the street, offering their own lives as examples of reform. Yet they continued to struggle. Mr. Maruf's criminal record had foiled his search for a job. When he proposed to a young woman in 2005, her parents scoffed, one friend recalled. They did not want their daughter winding up "on welfare," they told Mr. Maruf, who worked at a Wal-Mart. "They think that life is about money and material things, but watch what that will do for them," Mr. Maruf told the friend one afternoon, sitting slumped at the mosque. He seemed to be searching for a clean slate. Both he and Mr. Ahmed would find it thousands of miles away. A Political Awakening In 2006, an Islamist movement swept through Somalia and seized control, giving the country its first taste of peace in a generation. The group, known as the Islamic Courts Union, promised to end 15 years of internecine violence by uniting Somalia's clans under the banner of Islam. Key ports were reopened, and order was restored to the capital, Mogadishu. In Washington, officials of the Bush administration saw a threat to East African stability. Hard-line factions of the Courts were thought to be sheltering Qaeda operatives and had declared a jihad against neighboring Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian country. In December 2006, Ethiopian troops crossed the border and routed the Islamist forces with intelligence support from the United States, beginning a two-year occupation. These events triggered a political awakening among young Somalis in Minneapolis. They had long viewed their homeland's problems as hopelessly clan-based, but the Ethiopian campaign simplified things. Here was an external enemy against which young Somalis could unite. Spurred by a newfound sense of nationalism, college students distributed T-shirts emblazoned with the Somali flag and held demonstrations during a frigid Minnesota winter. The protests took on a religious dimension as well. While the United States had defended the Ethiopian invasion as a front in the global war on terrorism, many Somalis saw it as a Christian crusade into a Muslim land. They were outraged at reports of Ethiopian troops raping Somali women, looting mosques and killing civilians. If the Ethiopians were seen as infidel invaders, an insurgent group known as the Shabaab — "youth," in Arabic — was emerging as "freedom fighters." In its online propaganda, the Shabaab conflated nationalist sentiments with religious ideology, following a tactic honed by Al Qaeda. The Shabaab began releasing videos portraying Somalia's struggle as part of a global movement to defend Islam and restore its rule. Foreign recruits were promised "victory or martyrdom" for enlisting. Several American converts to Islam joined up. The recruitment of the Twin Cities men can be traced to a group of Somali immigrants from Northern Europe and other countries who, in 2005, traveled to Somalia to fight with the Islamist movement, a senior law enforcement official said. A handful of those men later went to Minneapolis, the official said, and helped persuade the first large group from the Twin Cities to leave for Somalia starting in late 2007. That first wave consisted of men in their 20s and 30s who had been fixtures at the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, the largest Somali mosque in Minneapolis. They included an emergency medical technician, a former waiter, a car-rental employee and Shirwa Ahmed, the onetime Roosevelt student who now wore a thick beard and silk gown. That fall, Mr. Ahmed announced to friends that he was moving to the Middle East to study Islam. After he left for Saudi Arabia to make hajj, the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca, his nephew wrote to a friend, "My uncle is a changed man." The following spring, Zakaria Maruf, the former gang member, vanished. Shortly after his disappearance, two teenage boys walked into a travel agency near the Towers, clutching their Somali passports, recalled Abia Ali, an accountant at the agency. Ms. Ali recognized the boys from the mosque and suspected that they planned to follow Mr. Maruf to Somalia. She warned the mosque's leaders, who alerted the boys' parents and then summoned a meeting with the mosque's young members. "All this talk of the movement must stop," the imam, Sheikh Abdirahman Sheikh Omar Ahmed, recalled telling the crowd. "Focus on your life here. If you become a doctor or an engineer, you can help your country. Over there you will be a dead body on the street." In the audience were several young men who would soon disappear. 'Our Best Kids' If the first men who left for Somalia had struggled to find their place in America, the boys to follow were "our best kids," in the words of one uncle. Mohamoud Hassan outdid most of his peers at Roosevelt High School in 2006, becoming one of the few Somali boys to make it to college that year. He stood out at the University of Minnesota. Answering to the nickname Snake, the tall, lanky freshman wore a black cotton beret and a pencil-thin moustache. Women found him clownishly charming, occasionally giving in to his pleas for their "digits." The engineering major tried to cultivate a more serious image, writing poetry, debating politics and poring through "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," his friend Hindia Ali recalled. Even his closest friends found Mr. Hassan an enigma. He had come to the United States without parents or siblings and looked after his ailing grandmother in a dim apartment in the Towers. He longed to return to his homeland, both to experience it for himself and to rebuild it. It was a common obsession among his friends. "It's just this missing piece of us," his friend Ruqia Mohamed said. After the Ethiopian invasion, a circle of listeners sometimes gathered around Mr. Hassan at the Coffman student center. Mr. Hassan, then the vice president of the Minnesota Somali Student Union, defended the occupation, posting an essay on Facebook assailing the insurgents as "a handful of thugs." But over time, he began to see things differently. Mr. Hassan's interest in the Islamist movement dovetailed with his own religious transformation, friends said. In the fall of 2007 he began downloading sermons onto his iPod and soon was attending the Abubakar mosque. By then, Mr. Hassan had become upset by the reports of rapes in Somalia and set out to learn more about the insurgency, one friend recalled. He began talking of joining the movement as early as February 2008, around the same time that a friend from the mosque — Mr. Maruf, the former gang member — left for Somalia. "I wanted to go, so I got to know him," Mr. Hassan said in a recent telephone conversation from Somalia with a Minneapolis friend. That May, he was incensed by a United States military air strike that killed Aden Hashi Ayro, a leader of the Shabaab, along with at least 10 civilians. "How dare they?" Mr. Hassan demanded one afternoon at the student center. "Who is the terrorist?" Mr. Hassan and another university student searched the Internet for jihadist videos and chat rooms, the friend said. They listened to "Constants on the Path to Jihad," lectures by the Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is suspected of inciting Muslims in the West to violence. While Somali nationalism had initially driven the men, a friend said, their cause eventually took on a religious cast. They became convinced that Somalia's years of bloodshed were punishment from God for straying from Islam, the friend said. The answer was to restore the Caliphate, or Islamic rule. "They saw it as their duty to go and fight," the friend said. "If it was just nationalism, they could give money. But religion convinced them to sacrifice their whole life." Over the next few months, the men communicated frequently with Zakaria Maruf, who was then in southern Somalia trying to recruit men in Minneapolis to join him, said a senior law enforcement official and a lawyer, Stephen L. Smith, who represents one of the men Mr. Maruf approached. Mr. Maruf reached out through listservs and conference calls arranged by a teenage boy who distributed 800 numbers and passwords so people could listen in. Mr. Maruf had little trouble finding an audience for his pitch in the Twin Cities; he had shuttled boys from the Abubakar mosque to basketball games, and a recording of his call to prayer was a ring tone on the cellphones of young Somalis. In his calls, listeners heard him boast that he had gotten married, had a child and become a governor for the Shabaab. The onetime stock boy with a criminal record was now a figure of authority, if one believed his claims. "He was the 'I'll take you to the battlefield' person," one acquaintance said. Despite all the spirited talk of the jihad, Mohamoud Hassan, the engineering student, seemed to waver, friends recalled. The tipping point, one said, may have come that September when a close friend was shot dead outside a youth center — the fifth slaying of a young Somali in the Twin Cities in a year. "I used to think that death only happens to old people," Mr. Hassan told his friend Ruqia Mohamed. "But he was young — my age. I guess I could die tomorrow." Mr. Hassan began spending much of his time with a small group of men that included a pre-med student, an electrical engineering student, a white 27-year-old convert and a pesky 17-year-old Roosevelt senior. The boy, known as Little Bashir, had memorized the Koran and talked of going to Harvard. The men acted secretive, friends recalled, meeting alone in a study room at the Carlson building, where Mr. Hassan and the pre-med student worked as uniformed security personnel. In late October, the group visited University Travel Services, near the Towers, accompanied by an older man with a gray beard who introduced himself as their uncle, the manager of the agency said in an interview. The "uncle" explained that the men wanted to buy tickets to Somalia, and were waiting for passports. Soon after, the young men returned by themselves and paid cash for their tickets, roughly $1,800 apiece, the manager said. They left on different days to avoid drawing attention, a friend said. Mr. Hassan drove to Chicago, where he boarded a plane to Dubai on Nov. 1, according to an itinerary obtained by The Times. By the eve of the United States presidential election three days later, all of the men were gone. Training for Jihad As word spread in Minneapolis that a new group of men had disappeared, another piece of jarring news came from Somalia: Shirwa Ahmed had blown himself up. On Oct. 29, 2008, he drove a car packed with explosives into a government compound in Puntland, a region of northern Somalia. The bombing was among five attacks that day coordinated by the Shabaab, which left more than 20 people dead in the group's campaign to eliminate enemies and show their might. The F.B.I. investigated and sent Mr. Ahmed's remains to Minneapolis in November. By then, Mr. Hassan and his friends were journeying in the opposite direction. A close friend said the men were met by Zakaria Maruf, the recruiter, and taken to the southern port city of Merka, where they stayed in a "welcoming house" run by a Somali woman whom the men called Mama. By January, most of the men were at a training camp in southern Somalia, following a strict routine that Mr. Hassan and others described to their Minneapolis friends in phone calls. They woke before dawn to pray and study the Koran. They engaged in rigorous training, running obstacle courses and learning to make bombs. As foreign recruits, they received special treatment. These mujahideen slept in a different bunker and were considered to have a higher status, the friend said. Mr. Hassan was struck by the diversity of the fighters, who included Chechnyans and converts from Europe. "I am looking out into the field and I see so many different colors," Mr. Hassan told the friend by phone. If becoming a jihadist usually means parting with life in the West, the men from Minneapolis soon broke with tradition. They frequently communicated with dozens of friends in the United States whom one acquaintance described as "the homeys they left behind." Two friends showed The Times the Facebook communications of four of the men, including one whose profile picture was, until recently, of Osama bin Laden. One exchange on Facebook distilled the push and pull: "'Sup dawg," one of the men wrote to a friend in late December. "Bring yourself over here" to "M-town," the message continued, where the men carry "all types of guns." "I ain't goin' over there man," the young man answered. "Dats the same reason we came 2 America Locco." Mr. Hassan and the others claimed to be enjoying their adventure. They had grown up hearing tales about the winding Shabelle River in southern Somalia and the rich taste of camel milk. When they finally swam in the river and drank the milk, they called their friends in Minneapolis, their voices dreamy. The men seemed to revel in their new identity as fighters. One day in March, Mr. Hassan's friend the pre-med student was talking on the phone with someone in Minneapolis when he opened fire with his AK-47. He was checking "to see if it worked," the person recalled him saying. But there were cracks in the men's bravado. While on a boat headed to a Shabaab stronghold in the south, the high school student known as Little Bashir began vomiting so violently that he lost his glasses, his mother said in an interview. After he told her this by phone, she fetched his prescription and read it to him, hoping he would somehow find an optometrist. It was hard to imagine this 17-year-old — a frail, bookish boy who had delighted in calculus — making his way through war-ravaged Somalia, friends of his said. "I doubt that he could even pick up a handgun," said Mr. Galony, who had tutored the boy in chemistry. If the others seemed hardier, they still had moments of weakness. They missed movies and basketball, deodorant and boxer shorts, they told friends back home. One of the men, who suffered from heartburn, asked if anyone could send him a box of Tums by DHL. Their longing for life in America came and went. They encountered more serious challenges in Somalia. By the time some of them entered training, the Shabaab was fast losing popularity. The Ethiopian troops had pulled out, making way for a new Somali president, Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed, the same man who had once led the Islamist movement to which the Shabaab formerly belonged. "Some of them wondered who they were fighting," one friend said. The jihadists' conversations with their Minneapolis friends sometimes turned testy. Two of the friends said in interviews that they, like many Somalis, had become sharply critical of the Shabaab. The group has carried out beheadings, amputations and the fatal stoning of a 13-year-old rape victim. In April, the Shabaab fired several mortar rounds at a plane carrying Representative Donald M. Payne, a New Jersey Democrat who was leaving Somalia after meeting with the president. "What, are y'all retarded?" one of Mr. Maruf's friends, a college student, chided him in a phone call. "He's our only friend in Congress." "You have been brainwashed by the media," Mr. Maruf shot back. Later, the student thought back on the conversation. "Sometimes they will talk and you're like, Are you trying to prove this to me or to yourself?" she said. "They have this inner struggle." An Inquiry Intensifies Ralph S. Boelter had a robust résumé by the time he took over the F.B.I.'s Minneapolis office in early 2007. He had worked on white-collar crimes in Boston and violent gangs in Los Angeles. He had investigated the leak of the C.I.A. officer Valerie Wilson's identity. Returning to the Midwest put Mr. Boelter, a square-jawed Wisconsin native, back on familiar ground. But less than two years later, he found himself tasked with one of the most complex terrorism cases since Sept. 11. "Never did I imagine that I would step into this here," Mr. Boelter said one recent afternoon. In the years since the Sept. 11 attacks, Somalis had remained largely under the law enforcement radar while other Muslim immigrants — primarily Arabs and South Asians — experienced the brunt of the raids and scrutiny. While federal investigators had tracked the movements of American recruits to the Shabaab since at least early 2008, the F.B.I.'s case did not swing into high gear until after Shirwa Ahmed's suicide attack that fall. Investigators in Minneapolis approached Somalis on the street, in their homes, at the Abubakar mosque and on the University of Minnesota campus. Brandishing photographs, the agents asked questions about community figures like the imam of the mosque and its youth director. As the inquiry wore on, community leaders say, more than 50 people were subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in Minneapolis and another jury was convened in San Diego. In April, F.B.I. agents raided three Somali money wiring businesses in Minneapolis. By then, the investigation had expanded to smaller Somali communities in Boston; Seattle; Portland, Me.; and Columbus, Ohio. Somalis in Minneapolis, by turns frightened and intrigued by the inquiry, came up with a Somali code name for the F.B.I. agents in their midst: Fadumo Bashir Ismael. Mr. Boelter tried to counter the negative attention by appearing on Somali television and radio, encouraging people to cooperate with investigators. Yet he has revealed little about the case itself. The scope and intensity of the investigation, he said, is merely commensurate to the danger posed by the men. "If American citizens are joining the Shabaab, the potential threat domestically is serious," Mr. Boelter said. "I think they could be commissioned to come back. Or they could do it on their own because they are philosophically aligned with the Shabaab or Al Qaeda." Senior Qaeda leaders have aggressively promoted Somalia as the latest destination for foreign fighters, said Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism consultant who frequently works for the government. In recent months, a small number of Qaeda operatives have reportedly sought sanctuary there. Analysts find the alliance troubling because Al Qaeda has long sought recruits with American and European passports who can cross borders more freely, said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at Georgetown University who studies terrorism. There are indications that three Twin Cities men have returned, possibly after defecting from the Shabaab. A friend of the men still in Somalia said they had no thought of attacking America. "Why would I do that?" the friend recalled the pre-med student, Adbisalan Ali, saying on the phone last spring. "My mom could be walking down the street." The central question driving the F.B.I. investigation is whether United States citizens have provided material support to the Shabaab, either in the form of personnel or money. Three local acquaintances of Mr. Maruf, the recruiter, sent him small amounts of money at his request, according to one of the friends and a lawyer for the others. It is not known how the young men who followed him to Somalia paid for their trips. Two of the teenage boys were seen knocking on doors at the Towers last summer, asking for donations for "an orphanage." The full dimensions of the recruitment effort also remain unclear. A close friend of several of the men described the process as "a chain of friendship" in which one group encouraged the next. "They want to bring people they are close with because they need that familiarity," the friend said. "They created their own little America in Somalia." The manager of University Travel Services said that since November, he had turned away at least 20 men looking to buy tickets to Somalia, adding that the requests had slowed considerably. Meanwhile, some Somali parents in the Twin Cities have taken to hiding their sons' passports. The tension in the community has turned inward at times. Last March, the uncle of Burhan Hassan, the boy known as Little Bashir, testified at a Congressional hearing on the case that the mosque had been "brainwashing" the young men and had possibly raised money for the Shabaab. The mosque's leaders denied this, in turn accusing the family and others of shirking responsibility for their own children. "That's their obligation, to know where their kids are going," said Omar Hurre, the mosque's executive director. A Struggle to Understand For many older Somalis in Minnesota, the deepest mystery is why so many young refugees would risk their lives and futures to return to a country that their parents struggled to leave. The mother of Burhan Hassan had been trying to persuade him to escape to the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, said the uncle, Osman Ahmed. The boy had been calling from Somalia, telling her that he was "fine" and that he missed her cooking. "There is no future for me in America anymore," she recalled him telling her. "If I come back they'll send me to Guantánamo." But he finally agreed to leave, and in late May his mother wired him about $800, Mr. Ahmed said. Ten days later, on June 5, she picked up the telephone to learn that her son was dead. He had been shot in the head, a stranger on the phone told Mr. Hassan's mother. Some of the boy's relatives suspect that he was killed to prevent him from cooperating with the American investigation. F.B.I. officials have declined to confirm Mr. Hassan's death. Months have passed since the older members of his group completed their training in Somalia. Lately, they seem "hardened" and at times radical, a Minneapolis friend said. During one call, the friend asked Mohamoud Hassan, the engineering student, what it was like to kill people. He told of getting "an adrenaline rush," the friend recalled, and joked that he and his friends compared "body counts." Two weeks ago, they spoke again and the conversation turned to the killing of Little Bashir. One of the men had referred to his passing as "martyrdom" in a recent Facebook posting. Mr. Hassan seemed to agree. "Allah knows how to pick," he said. "The family's feeling sad, but we're feeling happy for him." Ramla Bile contributed reporting from Minneapolis and Margot Williams from New York. David Meir-Levi is an American-born Israeli, currently living in Palo Alto. His expertise is in Near Eastern studies and the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is Director of Peace and Education at Israel Peace Initiative (www.ipi-usa.org). Contact him at david_meirlevi@hotmail.com To Go To Top

SAUDI INITIATIVE — BASED ON FLOODING ISRAEL WITH ARAB REFUGEES FROM 1948 — ALONG WITH THEIR DESCENDENTS Posted by David Bedein, July 24, 2009.

The question is: Does PM Netanyahu not know this?

This week, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu praised the nation of Bahrain for endorsing the Saudi Peace Initiative, also known as the Arab League's Peace Initiative, which the Israel Prime Minister characterized as a step to peace and reconciliation with the state and people of Israel. THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE, WRITTEN ONE WEEK AFTER THE SAUDI INITIATIVE WAS SPAWNED, CLARIFIES THAT THE SAUDI INITIATIVE IS BASED ON FLOODING ISRAEL WITH 4 MILLION ARAB REFUGEES AND THEIR DESCENDENTS The question is: Does PM Netanyahu not know this? In this article published in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz,[1] Professor Itamar Rabinovich — president of Tel-Aviv University, former Israeli ambassador to the United States (1993-96), chief Israeli negotiator with Syria during the premiership of Yitzhak Rabin, a prominent figure of the Israeli peace camp, and renown expert on the history of the Middle East — explains the advantages and drawbacks of the Saudi initiative. Following are excerpts from the article: "The Beirut Summit" Vs. The Arab Summit Resolutions "The events of the past few days have given rise to a strange and embarrassing situation. In theory, the Arab world has adopted the peace plan put forward by Saudi Arabia, and has presented an attractive formula for the final resolution of the conflict, while Israel has not responded concretely and continues to be caught up in the cycle of violence." "In fact, things are more complex. For example, the relatively flexible formula on the right of return issue that was in the statement read out by Arab League secretary-general, Amr Moussa, was neutralized by the explicit demand for the right of return that appeared in a parallel announcement, the 'Beirut Statement,' read out by the foreign minister of Lebanon." "From a point of departure holding that the present confrontation does not have a military solution and that the only way out is a political settlement, it is important to understand how the Saudi initiative evolved into what is now officially known as the 'Arab peace initiative' and to understand the advantages and drawbacks of this development." "When the Saudi initiative was first made public, it had two clear advantages. It bore a positive character (for the first time a country like Saudi Arabia adopted the idea of normalization with Israel) and it was clear and simple — full normalization in return for full withdrawal. At the same time, some serious questions arose. How was a simplistic formula to be turned into a political plan? Would the plan obtain an Arab consensus? And if so, how could the new political and diplomatic horizon be used to break out of the cycle of violence?" The Syrian Interpretation: No True Normalization "A hint of things to come appeared in Syria's reaction, which closed ranks with Lebanon and came out against the Saudi initiative. Immediately afterward, President Bashar Assad was invited to visit Saudi Arabia, and at the conclusion of his visit we were told Syria had adopted the Saudi peace initiative after being assured that the Israeli withdrawal to the borders of 1967 would be interpreted according to Damascus's conception." "However, the communique issued by Syria showed that it also had another condition — implementing the [Palestinian] 'right of return.' This exemplified the internal contradiction that was built into the continuation of the Saudi move." "In order to obtain the support of the rest of the Arab world, the simplistic formula had to be waived and restrictive conditions added. The introduction of the 'right of return' as a limiting condition on behalf of Syria deprived the Saudi initiative of the revolutionary innovation that it may have contained and adapted it to the Arab world's traditional line: no solution bearing a 'final' character should be agreed to, rather an opening must always be left in order to prevent true normalization." "This duality was inserted into the resolutions of the Beirut summit. In a joint press conference with the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Lebanon, Amr Moussa read out the text of 'the Saudi peace initiative, which is henceforth known as the Arab peace initiative.' The Council of the Arab League adds two demands to the Saudi proposal that the Arab states will establish normal relations with Israel in return for full withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Those two demands are withdrawal from lands that Israel 'still occupies in South Lebanon,' and a just and agreed solution to the refugee problem on the basis of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948. If Israel agrees to these terms, the Arab states will consider this to be the end of the conflict and will establish normal relations with Israel." The Arabs Add More Conditions "However, along with this statement, the summit conference published a concluding statement that emphasized, among other points, that Israel must allow the Palestinians to achieve all their rights, including the guarantee for the [Palestinian] 'right of return' of the Palestinian refugees on the basis of legitimate international resolutions and on the basis of principles of international law including General Assembly Resolution 194. The Arab leaders also emphasized their support for Lebanon to use all legitimate means in regard to the liberation of its territory from Israeli occupation up to the recognized international border, and they asserted that peace and security in the region mandate that Israel affiliate itself with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and open its nuclear facilities to international supervision." "If Moussa's statement is amenable to interpretation as showing a certain flexibility in relation to the 'right of return,' this was eliminated by the traditional formula on the 'right of return' that was included in the summit's concluding statement." "The demand for nuclear disarmament and for Israel to be subjected to international supervision is a well-known Egyptian and Syrian position, which in 1995 was used by Egypt to stop the normalization process. The position taken by the Arab summit on the Lebanon issue effectively permits the border to be heated up by Hezbollah." "In other words, if the Arab summit brandished normalization and the 'end of the conflict' with one hand, the other hand held up the familiar formulations, which enable the struggle to continue even after an agreement is obtained..." Footnote [1] Ha'aretz, April 7, 2002. David Bedein is Bureau Chief, Israel Resource News Agency. (http://Israelbehindthenews.com). He is president of Center for Near East Policy Research. Contact him by email at media@actcom.co.il This article is archived at http://israelbehindthenews.com/bin/ content.cgi?ID=3678&q=1 To Go To Top

BEING TAKEN FOR A RIDE Posted by Bert Prelutsky, July 24, 2009.

The other day, I received an e-mail from a lady who let me know she was in the habit of forwarding my articles to her daughter who's away at college. Apparently, she felt I could provide the young woman with an antidote to her left-wing professors. I wished her luck, but I didn't hold out much hope. After all, by this time, the young coed has been immersed in public education for 13 or 14 years. Let a child be raised by wolves and you shouldn't be too surprised if, upon being rescued, his table manners leave something to be desired. I'm not engaging in hyperbole when I say that I'd sooner send a youngster to Florida during hurricane season than to most colleges. As I see it, he or she has a very good chance of surviving the hurricanes. Their hair might get mussed, but at least their brains wouldn't be scrambled. Frankly, I'm surprised that there are any young conservatives left in America. They deserve to be on the list of endangered species. Considering the amount of pressure they face from peers and professors, I am in awe of those with the gumption to stand their ground. If the nation's Founding Fathers came back to life, I believe they'd recognize them as the progeny of those Americans they last saw hurling tea into Boston Harbor, fighting at Lexington and freezing at Valley Forge. However, I also believe that after taking a good look at America today, they'd shake their heads and wonder how, after such a glorious beginning, we'd wound up in this pitiful condition. How did we go from George Washington to Barack Obama in, historically speaking, the blink of an eye; from the man who refused to be king to the man who would be czar?   SPEAKING OF OBAMA, the White House is trying to convince us that the recent date night that took him and the missus to New York, along with his usual entourage, cost the taxpayers a mere $24,000. That's supposed to be the total amount of the roundtrip flight, the two helicopter rides, the limo, dinner and the show. Fat chance. My brother-in-law in Michigan had a heart attack last year. His heart must be working just fine now because it didn't stop when he got the bill for the 50-mile helicopter ride to the hospital. It was $12,000, and that was one-way, and without a squad of Secret Service agents riding shotgun. I guess the good news for those of us who had to pay the freight is that Obama's mother-in-law is still hanging around the White House, so he probably didn't have to spring for a babysitter. But next time he and Michelle want to step out, I wish he'd just ask for the car keys and 20 bucks for burgers and a couple of cokes. On a more serious front, I sincerely hope that when the president goes in for his annual check-up, the doctors at Bethesda will do a brain scan. Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran. Burt Prelutsky is author of "Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco (A Hollywood Right-Winger Comes Out of the Closet)." He has been a humor columnist (L.A. Times), a movie reviewer (Los Angeles magazine), a freelancer (NY Times, TV Guide, Modern Maturity, Sports Illustrated, Washington Times, etc.) and written for TV (several movies, plus episodes of MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, McMillan & Wife, Dragnet, Diagnosis Murder, etc., etc.) Contact him by email at burtprelutsky@aol.com To Go To Top

TANGLED WEB OF JEWISH OWNERSHIP IN 'ARAB' AREAS Posted by Point of No Return, July 24, 2009.

The stench of hypocrisy is rising from the current furor surrounding US objections to the redevelopment by a Jewish owner of the Shepherd hotel — once itself owned by the pro-Nazi Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini — in the 'Arab' Sheikh Jarrah district of Jerusalem. Jewish construction is seen as an obstacle to peace; burgeoning Arab construction in Jerusalem (much of it illegal) is not. You only have to read Justus Reid Weiner's research exposing the construction boom in thousands of Arab units in Jerusalem, much of it lavishly funded by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and the Palestinian Authority, to understand that peace is not the issue. On the contrary, over the last several years, the Arabs have been engaged in a political and demographic race for control of Jerusalem. To the US government and the European Union, everything is black-and-white: in their eyes west Jerusalem is 'Jewish', and east Jerusalem, where Israeli sovereignty is not recognised under international law, remains 'Arab'. In truth, this simplistic view ignores the fact that the eastern part of Jerusalem only became Jew-free when the thousands of Jewish inhabitants were 'ethnically cleansed' from the old city in 1948, scores of synagogues destroyed and cemeteries desecrated during 19 years of Jordanian occupation. The city was reunited when the eastern side of the city was recaptured and annexed in 1967 by Israel. The issue of land ownership in Jerusalem is far more complex than the Obama administration and the EU would have us believe. Mount Scopus — the original site of the Hebrew university campus and the Hadassah hospital — remained a Jewish enclave in Jordanian-controlled territory. It is also a little known fact that hundreds of thousands of Arab squatters in 'Arab east Jerusalem' live on land still owned by the Jewish National Fund. The JNF purchased hundreds of individual parcels of land in and around Jerusalem during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Some ended up under Jordanian control. In 1948, on one of these parcels the UN built the Kalandia refugee camp, seizing the land without permission from the owners, the JNF. As Gil Zohar explained in his 2007 Jerusalem Post piece other parcels of land in 'Arab' east Jerusalem were cut off from their Iraqi and Iranian Jewish owners after they came under Jordanian rule. In total 145,976 dunams* of Jewish land is said to have come under Jordanian control. ((Jewish property claims against Arab countries by Michael Fischbach, p 85). Another 16,684.421 dunams of Jewish land in the rural West Bank — including the Gush Etzion settlements, land between Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarm, and in Bethlehem and Hebron — were seized by the Jordanians after 1948. The Golan Heights are almost universally considered 'Syrian' territory and yet the JNF lays claim to 73,974 dunams in southern Syria (op cit, p36). The earliest purchase was made in the 1880s. On the macro-level, it is estimated that Jews living in Arab countries owned some 100,000 sq km of deeded property, equivalent to four or five times the size of Israel. Many cities in the 'Arab' Middle East and North Africa had large Jewish populations. Baghdad was a quarter Jewish. When over 90 per cent of Iraq's Jews left for Israel in 1950 — 51, property seized by the Iraqi government included three hospitals, 19 Jewish schools, 31 synagogues and two cemeteries. In Egypt mansions belonging to wealthy Jewish families became embassies, residences and public institutions. Jihan Sadat still lives in a mansion once owned by the Castro family, and president Mubarak reputedly has the use of a villa owned by the Smouha family. The international community gets into a huff when Jerusalem property once owned by Arabs is legally bought by Jews. Across the Arab world, Jewish property has been abandoned, sequestered or sold well below market value as Jews left in haste or were driven out. The West is sanctioning the principle that the Arab world must be Jew-free (Arab states have almost succeeded in this task, having banished 97 percent of their Jewish population). The takeover of millions of dollars' worth of Jewish homes, shops, offices and communal property by Arabs has never been considered provocative or an 'obstacle to peace'. Double standard, anyone?   UPDATE: (with thanks Lily) : the irony that the Shepherd hotel in Jerusalem should have been owned by a man committed to making the Middle East Judenrein has not been lost on Avigdor Lieberman who has ordered a photo of al-Husseini meeting Hitler to be disseminated by the Israeli foreign ministry. [*] 1 dunam= 1,000 sq. metres Visit the Point of No Return Website at http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com This article is archived at http://jewishrefugees.blogspot.com/2009/07/ tangled-web-of-jewish-ownership-in-arab.html To Go To Top

PALESTINIAN RIGHTS: A WARNING Posted by LEL, July 24, 2009.

This article was written by Joel B. Pollak, a recent Harvard Law graduate and the author of Don't Tell Me Words Don't Matter: How Rhetoric Won the 2008 Presidential Election. http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/ palestinian_rights_a_warning.html

A grave injustice is being committed against the Palestinian people — perhaps among the greatest in their history. Thousands are being systematically robbed of their citizenship, made stateless once more by a hard-hearted government that pays lip service to peace and the two-state solution, but which seems determined to undermine both. Israel? No — the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, the monarchy that occupied the West Bank from 1948 to 1967 and which has long had an uneasy relationship with its Palestinian majority. Now, cynically claiming that it has the Palestinians' best interests at heart, the regime of King Abdullah II has begun removing the citizenship of Palestinians with roots in the West Bank. Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads: (1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality. The Jordanian policy is a clear violation of these fundamental rights. Thus far, it has been met with protest in Amman and mild complaint from the Jordanian media. Yet the rest of the world has been silent. That includes the world's leading human rights organizations. As of this writing, the front page of Amnesty International's website features an appeal for Israel to cooperate with the UN's "independent" fact-finding mission on Gaza, but nothing on Jordan. Human Rights Watch, which recently bashed Israel for the benefit of donors in Saudi Arabia, has yet to react. The official explanation given for the decision to revoke the citizenship of Jordanians of Palestinian origin is that Jordan wants to send a signal to the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu: Jordan will not allow Israel to "resettle" Palestinians in Jordan. Never mind that the people who are losing their citizenship were "resettled" in Jordan decades ago. It seems probable that the real motive of the Jordanian decision is to entrench the control of the Hashemite monarchy to stave off demands for democratic reform. The rise of democracy in Iraq and the recent protests in the streets of Tehran have created new expectations that the region's autocrats are desperate to subdue. So, too, with Jordan. Though it is among the more liberal Arab states and enjoys both peace with Israel and free trade with the U.S., the monarchy is fragile. Its decision to strip Palestinians of their citizenship puts the peace process at risk by creating the false expectation that Israel will absorb millions of Palestinians currently outside its borders. Yet that is a risk the monarchy seems prepared to take to protect itself. The Kingdom's decision may be also regarded as a response to President Barack Obama's new Middle East policy. Emboldened by Obama's harsh approach to Israel and his meek support for democratic movements in the region, Jordan has taken the opportunity to restore "stability," using Palestinians once again as the political pawns of the Arab world. Neither Obama nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — voluble in recent days on the need for Israeli concessions and "self-reflection" — has criticized Jordan, though the U.S. has a great deal of leverage there. The Palestinian diaspora, so quick to protest when Israel defends itself against Hamas terror, is nowhere to be seen. When Netanyahu appointed Avigdor Lieberman as his foreign minister, there was global alarm. Lieberman was already notorious for his radical and reprehensible suggestion in 2004 that Israel might one day strip its Arab citizens of their citizenship. Yet now Jordan has begun to do exactly that, and the world has encouraged it through stark indifference. The issue ought to be an urgent priority for the UN Human Rights Council. Ironically, Jordan was re-elected to a seat on the council in May — the same election that saw the U.S. join the council as well. If U.S. membership is to mean anything more than a legitimization of the council's anti-Israel bias, it must raise the issue of Palestinians in Jordan before the council's next session opens in September. Until then, this episode serves as a reminder not only of the casual disregard of Palestinian human rights in the Arab world, and the anti-Israel bias of much of the human rights community, but also of the risks of subjecting American prerogatives to the judgment of international institutions run by countries that violate at home what they try to enforce abroad. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, prevents the government from depriving any American of his or her citizenship. Theoretically, Jordanian citizens enjoy constitutional rights of their own, but the Jordanian constitution begins its section on rights with a disclaimer: "Jordanian Nationality shall be defined by law." For the Palestinians of Jordan, their country's leadership in the UN Human Rights Council and subscription to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are of little use or comfort against the arbitrary powers of their government and the passivity of the international community. As the U.S. takes its seat on the council, theirs is a sobering example, and a warning worth remembering. Contact LEL at LEL817@yahoo.com. To Go To Top

BORN IN SWEDEN BUT NEEDING INTERPRETERS IN COURT Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, July 24, 2009.

This was written by Baron Bodissey and comes from the Gates of Vienna website http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/07/ strangers-in-strange-land.html#readfurther

Cultural Enrichment News When this unpleasant story first surfaced, I wasn't certain that it was an example of cultural enrichment. Since all the reports came from the Swedish media, they were at pains to make sure that the reader had no clue as to the ethnicity of the participants. However, since then the facts have emerged, and now the father is on trial. This is the most significant sentence in The Local article: "Despite the fact that the children are born in Sweden, two of them needed interpreters in court." These boys are 17 and 18 years old, and were born in Sweden. But they don't speak Swedish. Their older sister, however, has grit: despite never having gone to school, she was determined to learn Swedish, and she did. The father is blaming everything on the mother, which means that he must be desperate, because it is shameful and humiliating for any Muslim man to acknowledge that his wife controls the household. He can expect to be an object of ridicule among his fellow Muslim prison inmates. Thus does Sweden reap the rich harvest of Multiculturalism, more than two decades after the seeds were sown: Children Tell of 'Hell' Under Abusive Father Three children of a father accused of abusing and imprisoning his family spoke out on Thursday as the trial of the 58-year-old kicked off in Uppsala in eastern Sweden. Despite the fact that the children are born in Sweden, two of them needed interpreters in court. They testified about abuse, fear and never having attended school. The father warned of the dangers of Swedish society, telling his children they would be raped and lobotomized and that all Swedes were racists. "If all the children in Sweden were lobotomized, why are they so happy?" recalled one of the daughters, according to the Aftonbladet newspaper. — — — — Between September 2003 and March 2004, the children were confined to the family's apartment, never leaving the dwelling once, according to public prosecutor Johan Strömbäck. Three of the children have sought compensation totaling 148,000 kronor ($20,000) for deprivation of liberty (frihetsberövande), including missing out on their education. During a morning court hearing, three of the man's four children testified about their experience while confined by their dominating father, who is a native of Iran. The 17-year-old son related how he peered out of the bathroom window and watched other children play, thinking that "we want to go to school, we want to live like other children." "It was hell, it's impossible to describe. If I think about it, my entire soul quakes," he said. His brother, who is a year older, described how he spent long periods crying and crying, and talked about his desire to go and play football with other children. But he wasn't allowed to go outside, or to have any friends. "We always got to play the quiet game," explained one of the sons, according to the Upsala Nya Tidning (UNT) newspaper. "I remember one time when I was horsing around loudly and he took me to another room and forced a glass jar filled with pepper in my mouth." Both brothers needed the assistance of an interpreter, but their 22-year-old sister testified in clear Swedish. She said that she had to fight to learn the language, despite the fact that she was born in Sweden, just like her brothers. She explained that she clearly remembered how smug her father was when he learned that children who were not residing in Sweden were exempt from compulsory school attendance. "He has deprived us of our rights as Swedish citizens," the daughter said. "I've never attended school, either in Iran or in Sweden. Not one single minute." The children's mother also testified during the emotionally charged hearing. "They don't know what the inside of a school, or a classroom, or a bank looks like," she said. "I sometimes felt like he had control our breathing." Shortly after her husband's arrest on June 27th, the woman filed for divorce, citing that the man had abused her and the children for 20 some years. She has also requested that she be given sole custody of the two children who are still under 18. The youngest child, a 16-year-old daughter was treated differently than the others, and doesn't believe she was deprived of her freedom. Prosecutors were delayed in bringing charges against the man after uncertainties arose regarding his identify. According to the original indictment, the father is listed as being 68-years-old, but according to Strömbäck he is actually a decade younger. "He says himself that a mistake was made in the translation of his original documents," the lawyer said. When the 58-year-old man took the stand in the afternoon, he denied all the accusations against him, claiming his wife and children were lying. He said his children had made up their stories out of fear of their mother. "She's taken over the whole family and controls their lives, not me," he said. He claimed that his wife was a "fundamentalist" and wanted to send the children to schools in Iran run by mullahs. The father also refuted accusations that he had beaten his children. "I'm against violence, it's the mother who is violent," he said. "She does what she wants in the name of Islam." He said his children did in fact attend school in Iran and that there are diplomas to prove it at the country's education ministry. However, the 58-year-old was unable to produce any diplomas in court. According to him, the children's mother forbade them from attending school in Sweden. "They want to make me look like a monster," he said. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com To Go To Top

NPR OR AL-JAZEERA? Posted by Truth Provider, July 24, 2009.

Dear friends, Within a few hours yesterday (July 23, 2009), NPR carried three stories reported from Israel, all three infested with lies, biases and historic inaccuracies. There can only be one conclusion: NPR has adopted a deliberate anti-Israel policy and has decided to serve as a propaganda vehicle for the Arab cause. 1) NAQBA: In this 5pm segment, NPR discussed the inclusion of the term "naqba" (catastrophe in Arabic) in Israeli school study books. The Arabs use the term to describe the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. The former Israeli Minister of Education, Yuli Tamir, serving in Ehud Olmert's government, a woman with strong leftist socialist views, decided to include the term in the study books. The current Minister of Education has decided, correctly, to remove the term. The NPR segment began with Robert Siegel announcing that in 1948 millions Palestinian, yes, he said millions, became refugees. The true number is around 700,000 refugees. Siegel did not mention that at the same time, similar number of Jewish people were expelled from Arab countries, thus they had their own "Naqba.". By the mid-1950s all these Jewish refugees were absorbed, integrated and settled in Israel while the Arab countries continued to encarcerate their brethren in refugee camps until this very day. The so called "Naqba" was therefore perpetuated by the Arabs themselves and there is no reason on earth why Israeli study books should mention it from the Arab point of view without a full explanation of the entire truth. Only Arabs were interviewed by NPR for the story which was completely one-sided. 2) ROAD SIGNS: Immediately following the "Naqba" segment, yet another slanted story was aired. This time about the decision of the new Israeli Minister of Transportation to change Israeli road signs to their Hebrew pronouncaition. Israeli road signs are in three languages, Hebrew, English and Arabic. Each language uses the respective name. For instance, on the road sign to Jerusalem the Hebrew calls the city Yerushalayim, the English calls it Jerusalem and the Arabic calls it El Quds. Israel is the the country of the Jewish people and its official language is Hebrew. There is no reason on earth why road signs should have foreign pronouncaitions of cities. Nowhere in the world will you find any road signs allowing foreign names. Even in America cities and locations with Hebrew names are pronounced in Hebrew (Mount Pisgah for instance, not Mount Summit). Yerushalayim is the Hebrew for Jerusalem. It should be written as such phonetically in English and in Arabic. In the segment, an Arab lady was interviewed. She complained that the Israeli government is deliberately wiping off the Arabic names as they appear in the Islamic holy scriptures. Again, the NPR correspondent failed to confront the woman with the truth. In the Koran the name El QUDS (Jerusalem) does not appear even once!!! Many countries are in the process of changing locations and cities to their original historic names, Mombai instead of Bombay, etc. Yet, NPR, again interviewing only Arabs and presenting only the Arab view, took offence at the Minister's dcision. Now, pray tell me, what has this to do with NPR to begin with? Don't they have other stories to tell from Israel? 3) GALILEE LANDS: Later at night, yet another story from Israel, this time about lands in the Galilee in northern Israel. We hear a lot about demolition of Jewish homes and communities in Judea and Samaria. What we do not hear about is the demolition in Israel of houses built illegally (without permits) by Jews and Arabs. In fact, in order not to create a rift, the Israeli authorities for year have demolished mostly illegally built Jewish constructions and refrained from demolishing Arab homes. The trouble is that the Arabs got used to building illegal homes with impunity. Because of the inactivity by previous Israeli governments which failed to enforce the law, the problem has grown to enormous proportions particularly in the Galilee, where Arabs are grabbing public lands and are practically building a state within a state. No government anywhere in the world would allow such behavior. I heard it from a Jewish farmer in the Galilee who told me how his private lands are encrouched by his Arab neighbours. He needs to be on daily guard because the Israeli police does nothing to protect him and his legal rights. Finally, the new Israeli government has decided to do something about it. Mind you, nothing is done in Israel without a court order. All sides can appear and plead their case. None of this was told on NPR. We only heard the Arab side. Yet another crying Arab was interviewed, whose house was demolished. He was not even asked by the NPR correspondent if he built his house without a proper permit. Friends, as I said, NPR is now an American Al Jazeera. I shall not be surprised when it is revealed that NPR receives massive donations from Arab sources. If this is the case, why do decent Americans continue to contribute to this biased organization? Your Truth Provider, Yuval. Yuval Zaliouk writes the Truth Provider columns. To subscribe, send an email to ynz@netvision.net.il To Go To Top

NEW CONSTRUCTION FROZEN IN JUDEA-SAMARIA; WESTERN OVERTURES TO HAMAS; ISRAEL LOSING SUPPORT ON U.S. CAMPUSES Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 24, 2009.

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY STREET CRIME DOWN Now that the buildup of Palestinian Authority (P.A.) police cities has ended anarchy there, business is picking up fast. Rising with it is popularity of Fatah. Hamas, by contrast, is kept under partial embargo, so it loses prestige. The U.S. is pleased with the improvement, because Abbas "favors a two-state solution." PM Netanyahu wants to help the P.A. economy in Judea-Samaria, contending that this would make a basis for diplomatic conflict resolution. Arabs complained about remaining Israeli restrictions, such as not letting the P.A. have another telephone frequency, which would promote competition and lower prices. An Israeli general attributes increased P.A. street security to Israel's picking off terrorists and recent P.A. fighting to ward off a Hamas coup. The U.S. claims it is training P.A. forces for the fight (Ethan Bronner, NY Times, 7/17). While the U.S. gives credit to P.A. police for fighting Hamas, the P.A. released a first wave of Hamas detainees (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/29) If Abbas favors a "two-state solution," he would have stopped teaching his people that Israel, itself, is "occupied," and he would have accepted Olmert's generous Territorial offer. He is an unrepentant jihadist. He and the U.S. seek to whittle Israel down into defenselessness. If Israel and the U.S. want the P.A. to defeat Hamas, they wouldn't give hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza, much of which goes to paying Hamas salaries. Some hawk, Netanyahu is! His reputation is a handle for castigating him even while he moves towards the positions of his critics. They did that to Bush, too. The Arabs and the NY Times deny Israel credit. Israel paid its P.A. enemy hundreds of millions, but the Arabs just complain. The Times and the State Dept., demanded that Israel help the P.A. economy by dismantling checkpoints. Israel dismantled most, but Israel's critics begrudge acknowledgment. The U.S. equates P.A. street order with fighting terrorism. How insincere! Can't trust those diplomats. However, Fatah itself is a terrorist organization and boasts of it in front of Abbas. The pretense is that this temporary show of Arab responsibility should be rewarded with a state. Order is only one requirement for statehood. What Fatah would do with a state, based on its history and ideology, is make war. NETANYAHU WARNED AGAINST DEALS WITH HAMAS Two Kadima Party officials warned Israeli PM Netanyahu against making a deal with Hamas, except for prisoner exchange. Ex-Foreign Minister Livni said such negotiations contradict Netanyahu's campaign promise. They would legitimize Hamas, a terrorist organization wanting to conquer Israel. They might help shoehorn Hamas into a coalition regime with Fatah, further legitimizing Hamas (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/28). I agree in general, but find Israeli prisoner deals lopsided against Israel and likely to cause more kidnapping. They pose the additional problem of releasing many terrorists. Livni is a poor one to offer advice. Her policy of defeatism failed, but she doesn't realize it. She stands out, along with Netanyahu, for warning, when out of office, what they do, when in it. Campaign promises not to negotiate with terrorists have been violated for years. Israel is too inhibited to use sufficient force in dealing with terrorists. Despite the anti-Zionist outcry over Israeli resistance to terrorist aggression, Israel rations its military response. Livni mistakenly assumes that Fatah is a moderate alternative to Hamas. It isn't. Fatah is just as jihadist, though less restrictive internally. Why differentiate between the two terrorist groups? Appeasement-minded ideologues want to pretend that they can make peace with Fatah by means of anti-Zionist concessions. This is a scam, like most politics. Things are not what they seem. NEW CONSTRUCTION FROZEN IN JUDEA-SAMARIA Israel's Minister of Housing Atlas reports that since the Netanyahu regime formed, the Defense Minister has not approved any Jewish building in the Territories. This is an unannounced, informal freeze (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/28). Politics in Israel and in the U.S. are underhanded. While Israeli diplomats somewhat defend Jews' building rights, Israel clandestinely curbs those rights. When the U.S. demands that Israel curb Israeli Jews' building rights, it knows that Israel has curbed most of those rights. Israel's major concession, however, is not enough for the West. It wants full surrender. It wants Israel not so much humiliated as on the way to withdrawal from the communities. Hence it opposes their reinforcement with "natural growth" within existing building limits. Hence it labels Jerusalem as a "settlement," despite abut 3,000 years of a Jewish presence. Israel should learn to say none of your business. Again, things are not what they seem. WESTERN OVERTURES TO HAMAS "The American government and the European Union are making efforts to include Hamas in a broader diplomatic effort that would include a long-term cease-fire with Israel, reconciliation among Palestinian factions and support for renewed negotiations with Israel on the basis of the Arab peace initiative." "...the U.S. is following the Hamas stance and hopes that the group will alter its views and adopt a two-state solution." "Meanwhile, four senior Republican and Democratic figures, including former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James Baker, called on President Barack Obama to initiate a dialogue with Hamas without delay. Speaking during interviews organized by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, Baker said that just like the U.S. found a way to begin dialogue with the PLO, it must do so with Hamas. Baker noted that it is impossible to make peace with people if you are unwilling to talk with them." (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/28). That is diplomatic camouflage. What do they really mean? Should the Arabs, who have been making and militarily losing wars against Israel for decades, now set the terms for ending it? The Saudi initiative is not for peace but for crippling Israeli defense. This would start wars and end Jewish sovereignty. Western diplomats pretend otherwise, because they are anti-Zionist, appeasement-minded, or want to seem to have accomplished something. Baker and Carter are so anti-Zionist, that their praise for Obama would shame him, if he were any better than they. Politicians with posture, without conscience. The so-called two-state solution is less drastic, but more of the same. Setting up a terrorist state run by Fatah or Hamas would give terrorists the sovereign right to import heavy arms for a major war. The sad fact is that the Arabs are far from willing to end jihad and really make peace. Reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah either would enable Hamas to defeat Fatah or both to jointly defeat Israel. Naïve to expect Hamas to mellow. They like to murder in the name of their faith. Their religious view has not reformed. A long-term truce is what Islamic ideology endorses for preparation for war. For their opponents, a truce means renewed war later, when the Muslims have become stronger. Nothing in it for the opponents. Baker erroneously depicts U.S. reconciliation with the PLO as positive. That was billions of dollars, thousands of Israeli casualties, and thousands of Christian refugees earlier. Now, anti-American terrorists run both parts of the Palestinian Authority. They oppress their people and indoctrinate them in religious bigotry and violence. This was one of the worst among many blunders by the State Dept.. This is true, given the precarious state of a declining Western civilization under assault by leftist multi-culturalism and Islamic jihad. Baker isn't even right in his notion that one must talk with people to make peace. Some conflicts die out without negotiation. Some negotiations, as with Communists and Radical Muslims, complement their war effort. The West fails to detect the jihadist preference for struggle over peace. This is an ideological conflict, but the U.S. fails to tackle Radical Muslim ideology and Europe has become demoralized about its own ideology. When the recalcitrant party finally wants peace, or it is beaten into submitting to one, negotiations rapidly conclude the pre-existing desire for peace. For decades, the Arabs have been negotiating while becoming more indoctrinated in belligerence. The West is seeking some combination of pressure, Israeli defeatism, and masked language that would paint Israel into a corner while the diplomats would declare success. This kind of thing happened before — Hitler negotiated; Hitler made peace pacts; Hitler broke them. Same with jihadists. This is simple, but too hard for most Westerners to understand. Western overtures to Hamas vindicate Hamas recalcitrants. ISRAEL LOSING SUPPORT ON AMERICAN CAMPUSES Surveys show that Israel or its policy is losing support on U.S. campuses. One explanation is that Israel, having a strong army, no longer is seen as underdog. Dr. Aaron Lerner noted that the survey result has been disseminated for decades (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/29). It has been. I think this is a long-term trend, still continuing. American Jews now know less about their history, being more assimilated into a know-nothing American culture. Organizations such as the Zionist Organization of America and StandWithUs, have campus affiliates to provide information resources to Jewish students. Many campuses now are dominated by leftist-oriented political correctness, which is anti-Israel. Campuses have large numbers of Muslims, who try to intimidate dissent with threats of violence. Some are on the faculty, pursuing jihad in the classroom via propaganda, as do many leftists, nominal Jews among them. There is a tendency to sympathize with underdogs. This sympathy might make sense in sports, but war is no sport. One side in the Arab-Israel conflict wants to conquer or exterminate the other. That is evil, whether the Muslim Arabs are the underdog or not. But are they the underdog? No. Most of Israel's wars were much closer than most people realize. It wouldn't take much for Israel to lose, especially if, as world diplomacy is striving to get Israel to do, it concedes more strategic territory. Iran and other enemies are developing weapons of mass-destruction without serious international hindrance despite their record of having used such weapons and their threat to incinerate Israel. Islam is patient; Israel lacks long-range, Jewish strategy. Egypt has a military equal to Israel's. Jordan and S. Arabia have smaller but modern forces. Israel is beset with self-doubt and a fifth column that, together with foreign public opinion, makes Israel's military almost useless in the kinds of warfare facing it lately. The Arabs have almost all the Muslim governments behind them. They control UN voting and influence other governments. The U.S. prevents Israel's military victories from translating into diplomatic ones that might end jihad. If Israel loses, the Muslims would murder the Jews; if the Arabs lose, the U.S. rearms them. There is a growing international movement to ostracize Israel, despite the one-way bigotry emanating from its Arab adversaries. The stage is being set for the world to silently approve of another Holocaust. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

CHRISTIAN ZIONIST PARLEY: DON'T PRESSURE ISRAEL Posted by Barbara Sommer, July 24, 2009.

This was written by Eric Fingerhut http://jta.org/news/article/2009/07/23/1006730/ cufi-conference-brings-criticism-of-obama-administration

Pastor John Hagee, with U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) standing behind him, at the Christians United for Israel conference in Washington on July 21, 2009 rapped the Obama administration for "putting pressure on the wrong people," referring to Israel. (Christians United for Israel) WASHINGTON (JTA) — While criticism of President Obama's demand for an Israeli settlement freeze has been relatively muted among U.S. Jewish organizations, this week's Christians United for Israel conference here provided the opportunity for some prominent Jews and Christians to level some public complaints. Far and away the most forceful came from U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.), one of the more hard-line Democrats in Congress. Berkley told the group of Christian Zionists on Tuesday that "to pin the peace process" on the settlement issue "is absolutely foolhardy." "To publicly dress down the State of Israel is a huge mistake," she said to a huge ovation from the 4,000 delegates at the group's fourth annual conference. CUFI founder and chairman Pastor John Hagee also weighed in when he introduced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who appeared via satellite Tuesday to speak to the crowd. Hagee told Netanyahu that "50 million Christians" support "Israel's sovereign right to grow and develop the settlements of Israel as you see fit and not yield to the pressure of the United States government." (The prime minister did not address the settlement dispute.) A few hours after Netanyahu's speech, Hagee reiterated his criticism of the Obama administration, although he refrained from identifying the president by name. "America is singling out Israel" in the Middle East, the pastor said. "Despite all of the risks Israel has taken for peace, our government is pressuring Israel to take more risks. Hello Congress, we're putting pressure on the wrong people here. You want to get tough, get tough with the terrorists, not the only democracy in the Middle East." Hagee and his organization have been a source of much debate in recent years. AIPAC and some other Jewish organizations have embraced their efforts to create an Evangelical Christian pro-Israel lobby. But some critics complain that CUFI supporters hold ultra-conservative views on abortion, gay rights and church-state separation, and fear the organization could end up working to oppose Israeli peace moves. (CUFI leaders insist they would never work against the decisions of the elected government.) During the presidential campaign last year, Republican nominee John McCain accepted an endorsement from Hagee, but later renounced it after revelations regarding past comments made by the pastor, including his claim that the Holocaust was divine punishment. Hagee offered explanations for several of the most incendiary comments and denied claims that he was anti-Catholic, and several of his Jewish allies firmly rejected efforts to paint him as anti-Semitic. While McCain eventually distanced himself from Hagee, CUFI's Jewish allies have stood by him and the organization. Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, attended this year's event. Hoenlein pointed to the administration's request that Israel not proceed with the construction of 20 apartments in the Sheik Jarrah neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem, and asked why Obama's people haven't told Palestinians to take down "illegal structures" in the city, but "legal structures are a problem." U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who accepted CUFI's Defender of Israel Award on Tuesday evening, appeared to offer some criticism of the Obama policy, although it was much gentler. "The chief obstacle to peace in the Middle East is not Israelis living on the West Bank but the regime in Tehran," he said. The banquet Tuesday night also included greetings from the new Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, a speech from Jewish radio talk show host Dennis Prager and a muscial performance by Dudu Fisher. A number of delegates at one point danced the hora during the singing of "Hava Nagila." *** Some dovish activists and organizations have expressed concerns for years about CUFI possibly opposing the policies of the Israeli government, but these days several Jewish groups on the left are doing just that — and it's CUFI telling the White House not to pressure Israel. On Wednesday, CUFI delegates took that message to Capitol Hill. The delegates told their members of Congress that they should not "pressure" the Jewish state but respect "Israel's democratically elected government" and "work with them," said CUFI Executive Director David Brog. Brog said CUFI would not be specifically addressing the settlement issue, but added that it was worried that recent pressure on Israel over settlements could "extend to territorial concessions" as well. The message is that the United States should respect Israel's wishes if it wants to be more "cautious," said Brog, because "Israel has demonstrated it will make painful concessions for peace," but the Palestinians and the Arab world have not. "Israel is a sovereign state," said CUFI Florida state director Scott Thomas, senior pastor at Without Walls Central in Lakeland, Fla. "We'd like to see the pressure off our ally" and on others in the Middle East. CUFI delegates also asked for congressional support on two pieces of Iran-related legislation: the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, which would impose sanctions on companies that help Iran import or produce refined petroleum, and the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act, which authorizes state and local governments to divest from companies investing in Iran's energy sector and protects fund managers who divest from lawsuits. *** The fact that thousands of Christians had come to Washington motivated solely by their love for Israel is a key sign of the "changing" relationship between Jews and Christians, Netanyahu said during his remarks. "For centuries, the relationship between Christians and Jews was marked by conflict rather than partnership and friendship," the Israeli leader said. "But this is changing. A new chapter in the relationship between us is now being written." "Today millions of Christians stand with Israel because they stand for freedom, millions of Christians stand with Israel because they stand for truth, millions of Christians stand with Israel because they want to see a genuine peace in the Holy Land," said Netanyahu, who received a thunderous standing ovation when he initially appeared on the video screen. Hoenlein also noted that relationship in a fiery speech to the conference. He said he was there to fulfill the religious principle of Hakarat Hatov, "recognizing the good, recognizing those who stand up for us." Comparisons drawn between 1939 and the present, which some have made in recent years because of the threat of Iran to the Jewish state, are inaccurate because there are now "tens of millions of Christians who will not be silent and stand with the State of Israel," Hoenlein said to a standing ovation. Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, founder and president of The Israel Project advocacy group, sounded a similar theme after taking part Monday in a panel discussion at the CUFI gathering titled "Committed to Israel's Destruction: Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas." "The fact that I am speaking at a CUFI event doesn't mean that I endorse every thought all their leaders ever had, or that I expect them to endorse everything we have said or ever done," Mizrahi told JTA. "I do, however, appreciate that 3,000 Americans have come to Washington to stand with Israel." Still, many in the Jewish community remain wary of allying with Christians on Israel — something that CUFI leader Thomas said he understood. "I'd be a bit leery and questioning myself," he said. "We're trying to reverse a history of anti-Semitism and replacement theology. "We're going to continue to keep the hand extended," Thomas added, and hopefully Jews will realize it is "genuine." Thomas also reiterated what CUFI leaders have emphasized repeatedly — that their support of Israel is not related to Christian eschatology which says Israel has a central role in bringing about the second coming of Jesus Christ. That has nothing to do with their backing of the Jewish state, they say, because there is nothing they can do to speed up that process. "This is not apocalyptic," Thomas said. "We don't control future events." Thomas said his support is based in Genesis, which in Chapter 12 states that God will bless those who blesses the Jews and curses those who curse the Jews, and said that his Christian faith couldn't exist without the foundation of Judaism. *** Although he didn't go into details about what he meant, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told CUFI that U.S. policies in the Middle East must be "firmly grounded" in Judeo-Christian principles. "Reaching out to the Muslim world may help in creating an environment for peace in the Middle East, but we must insist as Americans that our policies be firmly grounded in the beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which this country was founded," said Cantor, the House minority whip and the only Jewish Republican in Congress. *** Apparently unhappy with some of the media coverage of their organization in previous years, Christians United For Israel didn't allow reporters to roam the Washington Convention Center talking to delegates during the conference, and the media was escorted from the press room to the halls where conference events took place. And just in case delegates happened to meet up with anyone from the media outside the convention hall, they were urged to avoid them by conservative Christian activist Gary Bauer, who was moderating a panel discussion on Tuesday afternoon. "Try hard to resist the temptation," he told the crowd of 4,000. "These folks are not really on our side" and "want to make Israel look bad." CUFI officials did arrange interviews with pre-selected delegates per media request. *** Berkley marveled at the reception she received. After insisting that the wish of some for the "elimination" of the State of Israel would never happen, the Jewish Nevada Democrat received a standing ovation. "If I wasn't so Jewish," she quipped, "I'd think about converting right now." *** The Weekly Standard's executive editor, Fred Barnes, also spoke Tuesday afternoon, declaring that his publication was "the most pro-Israel magazine" in the United States. Contact Barbara Sommer at lsommer_1_98@yahoo.com To Go To Top

PRE-SHABBAT BRIEFS Posted by Arlene Kushner, July 24, 2009.

The big guns are being sent. Coming here in the week ahead are US Med-East envoy John Mitchell, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, US National Security Advisor James Jones with some 10 members of his staff, and — the most recent addition to this group, and from our perspective the most desirable — Dennis Ross. They are not, as I understand it, coming as one entourage — although clearly it's not accident that they will all be arriving in the same week. There will be separate discussions, the topics being mainly settlements and Iran. This is being represented as something positive — an enhanced communication between the two countries. ~~~~~~~~~~ Netanyahu, being Netanyahu, found it necessary yesterday to make what is perhaps best described as a "conciliatory" statement (another adjective that fleetingly occurred to me is "nauseating"), in advance of these visits, concerning the fact that Israel "value[s] efforts of Arab states to advance peace initiatives," and believes the "spirit of reconciliation" expressed in their approach may lead to a regional peace, etc. etc. Please keep in mind, as you read this, what I wrote yesterday regarding the intransigence of the Saudis with regard to making gestures towards Israel. The Saudi plan is non-negotiable and requires us to move back to pre-67 lines, take in "refugees," and all the rest. Yesterday Netanyahu for the first time expressed interest in this plan, but only if it is NOT a final, non-negotiable offer. But they're not going to soften and he certainly knows it. So this is game-playing for appearances to a large extent. ~~~~~~~~~~ This statement doesn't mean he will necessarily cave in any particular way (although he might), so much as it indicates a desire to tell them, "See, I'm on board." This is his style. At any rate, it is, once again, appropriate to let him know that we absolutely want him to stand strong and not cave. Please, take the time to do this: Fax: 02-670-5369 (From the US: 011-972-2-670-5369) Phone: 03-610-9898 (From the US: 011-972-3-610-9898) E-mail: pm_eng2@it.pmo.gov.il (underscore after pm) ~~~~~~~~~~ I make the observation here that Obama's very rigid stance and unreasonable demands on us have made it more difficult for Netanyahu to appear to cave. We cannot count on a continuation of this situation (even though it IS likely to continue) as a way of ensuring that our rights will be protected. We need to know, quite simply, that we have leaders who will protect us. ~~~~~~~~~~ Please see this article by Amnon Lord, editor of Makor Rishon. He provides an excellent analysis regarding the dynamics between Obama and Netanyahu. http://bitterlemons-international.org/inside.php?id=1146 Lord writes that the one positive that may come out of this is a rapprochement between Israel and Egypt, who share common concerns. I note in passing, for whatever it's worth, that the Netanyahu statement yesterday was made at the home of the Egyptian ambassador to Israel. ~~~~~~~~~~ I want to simply mention here that Jordan is in the process of revoking the Jordanian citizenship of certain Palestinians. This is a complex issue with a considerable history, and I would like to return to this when time allows. His motive appears to be a response to efforts to construct Jordan as the Palestinian state, which, of course, with its 70% Palestinian population and its original status as part of the Mandate for Palestine, it is. ~~~~~~~~~~ Please see the following with regard to polls that reflect Israeli wariness with notions of a Palestinian state, trust of the PA and all the rest. http://imra.org.il/story.php3?id=44698 http://imra.org.il/story.php3?id=44699 Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info To Go To Top

SENSIBLE Posted by Susana K-M, July 24, 2009.

This was written by Rachel Raskin-Zrihen.

DATELINE CALIFORNIA — The border city of Cynicville on Thursday voted to ban Latinos from living in a six-square-block area of town. The move seeks to end decades of controversy over allegations that Latinos are practicing "ethnic cleansing" against the city's non-Latino population, which has, nevertheless, grown exponentially since before such reports began circulating. Plan proponents argue they're fed up with Latinos buying and building homes for themselves in neighborhoods in which non-Latinos have lived for generations and claim for their own. Non-Latinos and their supporters also continue defending the long-standing practice of periodically anonymously hurling Molotov cocktails into Latino neighborhoods as part of their resistance strategy. Many worldwide regularly criticize Latino reaction to the sometimes deadly attacks, and a recent poll suggests 90 percent of respondents favor creating Latino-free zones in Cynicville and elsewhere to eliminate the escalating violence. OK, now before you go off and organize a massive protest, let me assure you the above account is fictional. No one is suggesting Latino-free neighborhoods in California, despite the illegal immigration controversy and the proximity of Mexico and the rest of Latin America as potential ethnically appropriate living areas for that particular group. It's meant to illustrate how ugly such a suggestion would be, and I think most people get it. Until you substitute the word "Jewish" or "Israeli" for "Latino," and "disputed territories" for "Cynicville," that is, and, suddenly, the whole thing makes perfect sense to a whole slew of folks who would never stand for it otherwise. I don't get it. This ongoing issue, which is heating up as President Obama's increasing pressure on Israel to stop building housing in parts of Jerusalem "claimed" by the Palestinian Arabs for a future state, threatens to turn reason on its ear in the same way Anti-Semitism always does. I have several questions about this widely-shared stance. If I claim Paris for my summer home, do I get to have it? What's wrong with housing being built? I mean, is there such a thing as "Jewish apartments" — as in the apartments themselves having some sort of religious or ethnic affiliation that could contaminate any non-Jew who moved in? And what's wrong with Jews living anywhere they want to, just like everybody else? I'm fairly certain there is nowhere in Israel where Arabs are prohibited from living. Such a thing would be huge international news that would surely draw righteously indignant calls for the immediate dismantling of the "Zionist entity." What it looks like to me, and someone please correct me if I'm wrong, is that most of the world recognizes the idea of an Arab-free Israel as racist, but views the concept of a Jew-free Palestine as somehow essential. Why is that? How can that be justified? It strikes me as exactly the same thing, yet it keeps being presented as somehow different. And just looking at it from a realistic, factual viewpoint, there are more than 20 Arab countries, several of which surround Israel — Jordan comes immediately to mind — where Palestinian Arabs could live under Arab rule, if that's what they want. But there is no other Jewish country. No place else Jews can live under Jewish rule. And no place else on the planet that contains the several-thousand-year history of the Jewish people in its bricks and mortar, in its soil and in its very air. If there is some other explanation besides outright anti-Semitism for this strange, otherwise inexplicable phenomenon, I'd like to know what it is. Contact Susana K-M at suanema@gmail.com To Go To Top

HAREIDI (ORTHODOX) FAMILY ABUSED BY COPS IN FRANKFURT AIRPORT Posted by Sonia Nusenbaum, July 23, 2009.

Read this article in regards to this traumatic Nazi-like experience by a beautiful Hareidi (Jewishly observant) family at Frankfurt Airport in Germany. Perhaps a Moslem's apparently very comfortable in his skin in Germany. My understanding from posts following a related article on http://www.vosizneias.com is that it is not an isolated event. There are other Jews going to Israel from France with a stop over in Germany with similar experiences to relate. I wonder what action Frankfurt airport's personnel if not police dept will take in response to complaints? There was only one witness to what occurred and that witness is willing to testify. — Sonia

Parisians Michael and Devorah Sitbon were heading to Eretz Yisrael, making a stop-over in Germany. Their experience is one that will leave emotional scars for a long time to come. German diplomatic officials have received an official complaint, promising the allegations will be investigated. Apparently one of the German border police spat on Devorah's Israeli passport, and the couple accompanied by their four young children were threatened, humiliated and targeted with racial epithets. Michael, 28, explains the incident was extremely painful, adding Devorah, 27, is a grandchild of survivors. He added the stopover in Herman was strictly due to financial consideration — it was simply the cheapest ticket they could find Michael goes on to explain that once the border policeman saw the Israeli passport, he spat on it and then their troubles began. Realizing they had only a short time to make their connecting flight, the policeman detained them, deciding to check each child against the passport photo, traumatizing all the children ranging in ages from 4 weeks to 4-years-old. The parents had to pick each child up next to the passport photo, and while holding the child, the guard made sounds mimicking gunfire. The couple did land in Israel on Friday morning, and they reported the incident to the German Embassy in Israel. Michael adds that they are no stranger to anti-Semitism living in France, but the ordeal they endured in the Frankfurt Airport was on a level they never experienced in their lives. They said they hope to never set foot in Germany again. To Go To Top

FROM ISRAEL: IT DOESN'T END Posted by Arlene Kushner, July 23, 2009.

First things first. I am on call. My daughter-in-law should — please G-d — be delivering within the week, and when she does it is my job to be with the other children. So...if I disappear quite suddenly, you will understand that this is the reason why. Priorities. My grandchildren keep me sane, warm my heart, make me laugh, and provide a key motivation for everything I do. ~~~~~~~~~~ There are things we would hope would end: things that should end because they are foolish or dangerous. And yet they are promoted anyway. One of those "things" is the current policy of Obama with regard to pushing for the establishment of a Palestinian state and a "two-state solution." You've certainly read often enough here why this is unacceptable policy — an infringement of our legitimate rights, and neither an intelligent nor viable policy. But none of this stops Obama. His approach is bad news from beginning to end, and yet he persists. I provide here a consideration of various aspects of the overall situation — none remotely positive. ~~~~~~~~~~ Laura Rozen, writing in "Foreign Policy" less than a week ago, took another look at Obama's trip to Saudi Arabia — where he met with the Saudi King Abdullah at his horse ranch — after his Cairo speech in early June. Rozen cites sources that say the meeting did not go well from Obama's perspective. According to one source, the goal of the visit was moving the Saudis toward a show of a reciprocal gesture to Israel. The author cited University of Vermont Saudi expert F. Gregory Gause, who said, "I can't imagine Obama pressing the Israelis on settlements without expecting the Arabs to do something. He is pushing the Israelis, but he wants to show that in pushing them, it's also bringing the Arabs closer [to peace with Israel]. He wants the Saudis to make some gesture to make it easier for the Israelis to stop settlements. "And my reading of the Saudis, is they are not interested." Chas Freeman, cited by Rozen, agrees. Remember Freeman, who finally withdrew from consideration for a US intelligence post because of his connections to the Saudis? We can assume he knows them. They're not interested in gestures, says Freeman. For them there is nothing to negotiate. They made their stand with the 2002 "peace plan." If the Israelis and the PA work out a final deal, then there will be normalization. If not, there is nothing. "Washington has repeatedly misunderstood or been deluded about the Saudis..." So, when Obama was in Riyadh, he got, as David Makovsky of the National Institute for Near East Policy put it, "the back of their hand." According to one unnamed former US official cited in this piece: "The more time goes by, the more the Saudi meeting was a watershed event. It was the first time that President Obama as a senator, candidate, or president was not able to get almost anything or any movement using his personal power of persuasion." http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com:80/posts/2009/07/17/ revisiting_obamas_riyadh_meeting ~~~~~~~~~~ Last week, Secretary of State Clinton said in a speech that: "Progress toward peace cannot be the responsibility of the United States — or Israel — alone. Ending the conflict requires action on all sides.... Arab states have a responsibility to support the Palestinian Authority with words and deeds, to take steps to improve relations with Israel..." Makovsky says this is "a kind of recalibration of the Obama administration's approach....When the secretary of state says she needs [Arab states'] help in word and deed and that the Arab peace initiative is just a beginning and there is much more to do, this administration is trying to resist easy characterizations that they are only leaning on one side." But resisting characterizations is one thing, and producing results is something else. And what the Obama administration envisions here is simply not going to happen. ~~~~~~~~~~ Things are not exactly going swimmingly with regard to the PA itself, either. Tony Karn, writing in Time, said the other day that: "PA leader Mahmoud Abbas's political weakness has effectively neutered him as an effective peace interlocutor. He is engaged in an epic power struggle with Hamas, which not only controls Gaza but also is the ruling party of the democratically elected Palestinian legislature. And his influence is waning even in his own Fatah organization. It has become conventional wisdom internationally that no credible peace process is possible without the consent of Hamas." ~~~~~~~~~~ But let's carry this further. Just today, Khaled Abu Toameh, reporting in the Post, said that Rafik Natsheh, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, and a close associate of Abbas, has declared, in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, that "Fatah does not recognize Israel's right to exist, nor have we ever asked others to do so." A clarification is in order. Fatah, the party of Arafat and of Abbas, is the major constituent element of the PLO. It was the PLO, considered the official voice of Palestinian Arabs, that negotiated Oslo with Israel. The Palestinian Authority was established as a interim administrative body by virtue of Oslo agreements. It is commonly understood, and it is myth, that with Oslo the PLO had recognized Israel's right to exist. Arafat had written a letter saying that offending clauses in the PLO charter that called for Israel's elimination would be removed. But what actually happened is that a committee to do this was established and then it never met. In addition to which, Arafat signed the documents of the Oslo Accords but they were then never formally ratified by the PLO. All of this is without taking into consideration that Fatah has its own charter that calls for Israel's elimination. We're dealing here with the nonsense — recently verbalized by Mohammad Dahlan — that Fatah as a constituent element of the PLO did not necessarily itself endorse what the PLO did. This was the line Dahlan used to Hamas, saying it could join a unity government whose officers would recognize Israel, but Hamas itself would not have to. Says Natsheh now, "All these reports about recognizing Israel are false. It's all media nonsense." http://www.jpost.com:80/servlet/Satellite?cid= 1248277865155&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull And this is the "negotiating partner" with whom Obama expects Israel to "make peace." Why let reality get in the way of what he imagines can be done? ~~~~~~~~~~ Fatah expects to hold its first general assembly in twenty years on August 4, in Bethlehem. Maybe. There are some objecting to the locale, in "occupied" territory (as Israel would have control over who entered for the conference). And then there is concern that Hamas will not let members of Fatah in Gaza out in order to attend. If this happens, the conference will be cancelled. Natsheh says that calls now to get Fatah to drop the reference to armed struggle from its charter will come to nothing: Fatah will retain its commitment to the option of pursuing "all forms" of armed struggle against Israel. ~~~~~~~~~~ Add to all of the above an announcement that indicates the PA is continuing to identify with/honor terrorists. This is at the heart of the incitement issue. Issa Qaraqi, recently appointed PA prisoners affairs minister, has announced that streets in PA-controlled areas of Judea and Samaria are going to be named for some 100 Palestinians serving terms of 20 years or more in Israeli jails. This is part of the PA's expression of "solidarity" with Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The fact that they are focusing on the "martyrs" with lengthy sentences means we are talking about people who killed Israelis or participated in terror attacks. "This is the legitimate right of the Palestinians," he declared. "We have the honor and duty to honor our prisoners in recognition of their sacrifices and steadfastness in Israeli prisons." http://imra.org.il/story.php3?id=44692 And so, my American friends, please send this link to your elected representatives in Congress. Tell them you object to the Obama administration pushing Israel to negotiate with the PA when it behaves this way. For your Congresspersons: http://www.house.gov/house/ MemberWWW_by_State.shtml For your Senators: http://www.senate.gov/general/ contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm And, while you're at it, cull a few lines from this and write a brief, factual letter to the editor of your local paper, protesting as well. Make noise, please! This is just one more in a series of outrages. ~~~~~~~~~~ If anything, the Obama policy on Iran is even worse. On Tuesday, Sec. Clinton, in Bangkok, said: "We want Iran to calculate what I think is a fair assessment: that if the United States extends a defense umbrella over the region, if we do even more to develop the military capacity of those (allies) in the Gulf, it is unlikely that Iran will be any stronger or safer." The implied message here, to Iran, is not to think it will dominate the area if it acquires nuclear weapons. But that also implies a willingness to accept a nuclear Iran, that would be somehow contained. Israel — in particular Dan Meridor, Minister for Secret Services — has expressed dissatisfaction with this position. "Now, we don't need to deal with the assumption that Iran will attain nuclear weapons but to prevent this." ~~~~~~~~~~ At least the US is moving to secure tight monitoring by 10 uranium-rich nations with regard to sales of uranium to Iran, which will likely have depleted its own supplies by 2010. Israel will be cooperating in this effort. ~~~~~~~~~~ Here in Israel, we are continuing to hold tight with regard to pressures being put upon us. The fact of the matter is that Obama, in pushing on us to stop building of a housing complex for Jews in eastern Jerusalem simply stiffened a good many backs and garnered additional support for our rights. Our claim to Jerusalem is a sensitive matter. Worthy of note is a statement by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which represents 52 groups: "The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has long advocated and supported the unity of Jerusalem, the capital of the State of Israel. As such, we believe that legal construction by residents of the city should be allowed. We find disturbing the objections raised to the proposed construction of residential units (in eastern Jerusalem) on property that was legally purchased and approved by the appropriate authorities..." This was released by Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman and Alan Solow, Chairman. While Hoenlein was reported as having challenged Obama statements during his meeting with leaders of 14 Jewish organizations, Solow, a Chicago supporter of Obama, promoted that meeting. But now Obama has gone too far even for him. ~~~~~~~~~~ But look how the pressure escalates: Israel's ambassador to France, Daniel Shek, was called into France's foreign ministry offices today for a meeting with the ministry's political director. According to a ministry spokesman, he was told: "An immediate freeze in settlements, including in east Jerusalem, is indispensable for preserving the two-state solution and allowing the resumption of negotiations." The gall of these people is unmitigated, and we must, we must continue to stand strong. Why is it "indispensable for allowing the resumption of negotiations"? Because Abbas, relying on the pro-Arab tilt of US policy, has said so. The French foreign ministry, you will note, isn't contacting the PA and saying, "What is it with you guys? You want negotiations? Cool your demands. You negotiated with Israel last year, even though there was building going on in settlements." As has been pointed out before, Obama's positions have been counterproductive to his stated goal of promoting negotiations for peace. ~~~~~~~~~~ This leads us to an excellent column, "Listen to the Left," by Evelyn Gordon. Says Gordon: "When even hard-core Israeli leftists are speaking out against Obama, left-of-center American Jews can no longer pretend there is no problem." One problem of concern to leftists here is the fact that, according to Aluf Benn, "Obama never tried to communicate with the Israeli public. [He] spoke to Arabs and Muslims, but not Israelis. His neglect increased fears that we do not have a friend in the White House." Then there was 'the administration's pathetic attempt to deny the existence of understandings on settlement construction. It was possible to accuse Israel of violating its promises, or to say that the policy had changed, and explain why, but not to lie." On top of all of this, according to Benn, "the more time passes, the more it appears that the demand to freeze settlement construction was meant to demonstrate a distancing from Israel. [Obama has turned a settlement freeze] into a matter of honor [and] when the argument is about who is stronger instead of the real issue, anyone who urges Netanyahu to give in to Obama will be accused of being unpatriotic. And the Israeli left does not want to be backed into that corner." ~~~~~~~~~~ Columnist Yoel Marcus then added his observation that "there is something naive, not to say infuriating about his policy of dialogue and about the whistle stops he has chosen in his travels regarding our issue. He spoke in Turkey, he spoke in Egypt, he appeared before students in Saudi Arabia, Paris, England, Ghana and Australia. "Even there the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was mentioned...The only place he hasn't been is Israel. He has spoke about us, but not to us." (emphasis added) Finally, wrote Marcus, "Obama assumed he did a great thing when he spoke in Cairo about the Jewish people's suffering in the Holocaust, [the] implied distortion that we deserve a state because of the Holocaust [is] infuriating. "As a leader who aspires to solve the problems of the world through dialogue, we expect him to come to Israel and declare here courageously, before the entire world, that our connection to this land began long before the Israeli-Arab conflict and the Holocaust, that 4,000 years ago, Jews already stood on the ground where he is now standing." http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1248277865525 &pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull ~~~~~~~~~~ "The Good News Corner" A delegation of five Muslim doctors from Senegal came to Jerusalem recently for a week long training seminar on a special technique in circumcision — a clamp method developed by Israeli doctors — because studies show that circumcision reduces by 65% the chances of being infected by AIDS. This seminar is part of a major cooperative effort — an Israeli civilian initiative — that will involve eight Israeli hospitals, and the health ministry and national medical association of Senegal. Israel had previously sent three teams of doctors to Swaziland to teach these techniques, which are not well known there, as part of an experimental project. (The bad news is that when the organizers of this program approached Arab medical organizations and invited their staff to attend, they were met with refusal.) Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info To Go To Top

MUSLIM ACTIVISTS BLOCKED JEWS FROM MOVING IN Posted by Barbara Sommer, July 23, 2009.

This was written by Aaron Klein for World Net Daily http://www.worldnet daily.com/ index.php? pageId=104724

JERUSALEM — In a nearly unprecedented move, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party this week worked in an official capacity to block an attempt by Jews to move into a home in Jerusalem. The incident took place just days after the U.S. protested a legal Jewish construction project in Jerusalem and Fatah showed a newfound boldness to solidify an Arab hold of the city. The Palestinians claim eastern sections of Jerusalem as their future capital. "We are permitted to resist any existing illegal settlement activity whether it's in Jerusalem or anywhere else," Dmitri Ziliani, a spokesman for the Jerusalem section of Fatah, told WND. According to Israeli law, however, the PA cannot officially act in Jerusalem, although Israeli police this week did not arrest the Fatah activists. On Tuesday, Ziliani and about a dozen Fatah activists, including PA Minister for Jerusalem Affairs Hatem Abdul Qader, holed themselves up inside a home in the Sheik Jarra neighborhood of eastern Jerusalem to block an attempt by Jews to move into the house. The home was originally Jewish, but its occupants were chased out during countrywide anti-Jewish Arab riots in 1929. Arabs then squatted on the property, with one family, the Hejazi family, becoming the de facto occupants until recently. Jewish groups say they legally purchased the property from the Hejazi family but that following Fatah pressure the family denied selling it back to the Jews despite documentation and even video evidence showing the sale went through. Fatah the past few months has executed four Arabs for selling land to Jews. The case is being disputed by the Arab family in an appeals court, although one court, whose ruling is legally binding, ruled in favor of the Jews. Those Jews showed up at the property Tuesday, backed up by Israeli police, only to find the Fatah activists inside. Ziliani told WND it was not the first time Fatah acted in Jerusalem the past few weeks to thwart Jews from moving into homes in the city. "There has been more than one house in the past four to five weeks where groups of settlers tried to break in to the house and form a new reality on the ground. We resisted and will continue to act," Ziliani said. Fatah is not the only agency actively working to thwart Jewish residency in eastern sections of Jerusalem. The State Department last weekend summoned Israel's ambassador to Washington to demand a Jewish construction project in eastern Jerusalem be immediately halted, it has been confirmed. The Obama administration has called for a halt to Jewish construction in eastern Jerusalem and the strategic West Bank in line with Palestinian claims on eastern Jerusalem as a future capital, even though the city was never a part of any Palestinian entity. The construction project at the center of attention, financed by Miami Beach philanthropist Irving Moskowitz, is located just meters from Israel's national police headquarters and other government ministries. It is a few blocks from the country's prestigious Hebrew University, underscoring the centrality of the Jewish real estate being condemned by the U.S. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly rejected the State Department demand, telling a cabinet meeting Sunday that Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem was not a matter up for discussion. "Imagine what would happen if someone were to suggest Jews could not live in or purchase [property] in certain neighborhoods in London, New York, Paris or Rome," he said. "The international community would certainly raise protest. Likewise, we cannot accept such a ruling on East Jerusalem," Netanyahu told ministers. Historically, there was never any separation between eastern and western Jerusalem. The terminology came after Jordan occupied the eastern section of the city, including the Temple Mount, from 1947 until it used the territory to attack the Jewish state in 1967. Israel reunited Jerusalem when it won the 1967 Six Day War. While the U.S. strongly protests any Jewish construction in eastern Jerusalem, it has been actively aiding Palestinians building illegally on Jewish-owned land in eastern sections of the city, WND has exposed. Contact Barbara Sommer at lsommer_1_98@yahoo.com To Go To Top

J STREET SEEMS TO SPEND ALMOST ALL OF ITS RESOURCES BASHING SUPPORTERS OF ISRAEL Posted by Chuck Brooks, July 23, 2009.

This was written by James Kirchick and entitled "The Obama Lobby." It was published yesterday in the Forward http://forward.com/articles/110371/. James Kirchick is an assistant editor at The New Republic.

When the self-described "pro-Israel, pro-peace" group J Street was founded over a year ago, many in the Jewish community predicted that it would have little to no influence in the shaping of American foreign policy. While American Jews are indeed overwhelmingly left-of-center in their political orientation, they also happen to hold rather hawkish views on Israel. A 2007 American Jewish Committee survey found that the overwhelming majority of American Jews believes that Israel "cannot achieve peace with a Hamas-led, Palestinian government" and that "the goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel" — views sharply at odds with J Street's support for engagement with Hamas and its tendency to accuse Israel of hindering the peace process. J Street's moral relativism was on full display in its reaction to last year's Operation Cast Lead. None other than Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Reform movement and one of America's most prominent liberal Jewish leaders, admonished the organization in these very pages, describing its denunciation of Israel's military operation against Hamas as "very wrong" and "deeply distressing." Despite its claims, J Street does not represent mainstream Jewish opinion in this country, let alone in Israel, where the Jewish population was nearly unanimous in its support for Cast Lead. Yet notwithstanding the Jewish community's rejection of J Street's vision, the organization seems to have garnered the support of the most important constituency of all: the Obama administration. On July 13, J Street's executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, joined a select group of Jewish leaders for a White House meeting with President Obama. The purpose of the meeting was to smooth over tensions that have emerged between the pro-Israel community and the administration, tensions sparked by the latter's propensity for publicly pressuring and criticizing Israel. It is in the execution of this strategic gambit — forcing Israel to do things that its leaders and populace do not want — that J Street will prove to be of great value to Obama. Both Obama and J Street have fixated upon the subject of settlements. Both seem to believe that a settlement freeze holds the key to unlocking Middle East — if not global — peace. In their analysis, only American pressure can lead to a solution, as the Israelis are too hidebound and paranoid to understand what is in their own best interest. (Indeed, Obama reportedly told the assembled Jewish leaders that Israel needs "to engage in serious self-reflection" — something at which our president, as the author of not one but two memoirs, can claim not inconsiderable expertise.) Who keeps preventing the full flowering of the necessary American leadership? In the J Street narrative, it's establishment Jewish organizations, which distort American foreign policy by shielding Israel from pressure that would otherwise lead to peace. And who better to counter the influence of the so-called "Israel Lobby" than other Jews? J Street and the constellation of far-left "pro-Israel" organizations put a kosher stamp of approval on Obama's bizarre hectoring and moral equivalence. By casting Israel as the obstructionist, as the "drunk" driver whose car keys need to be taken away (as Ben-Ami put it in one of his more candid moments), Obama will have a free hand to compel the parties to the peace table. And once gathered there, another Oslo accord can be forced upon a recalcitrant Israel (whereupon the disastrous consequences of that agreement — the erection of terrorist infrastructure, a deterioration of the Palestinian economy, deepening mutual distrust — will be repeated). To this end, J Street seems to spend almost all of its resources bashing supporters of Israel. Those who disagree with the organization's positions are routinely denounced as "right-wing" or "extremist." Rather than draw attention to the murderous antisemitism, terrorism and impending nuclear-armed theocracy that Israel must confront, J Street prefers to churn out countless blog posts, press releases and op-eds denouncing the people who it believes are the real impediments to peace: stalwart defenders of Israel like Pastor John Hagee, Senator Joe Lieberman and former House speaker Newt Gingrich. At the same time, the organization goes out of its way to defend those whose support for the Jewish state is dubious at best. In recent months, J Street has adopted an obscure freshman congresswoman from Maryland, Donna Edwards, as a cause célèlbre. In January, after the conclusion of Cast Lead, Edwards was one of a handful of representatives to vote "present" on a resolution expressing support for Israel's right to defend itself. When local Jewish leaders rightly criticized her, J Street raised $15,000 for Edwards in a matter of hours. Ben-Ami issued a defiant statement declaring, "This is exactly how — for decades — established pro-Israel groups have enforced right-wing message discipline on Israel in Congress." (Notice the labeling of a resolution introduced by Nancy Pelosi and supported by 390 members of Congress as "right-wing.") The effect of J Street's backing of figures like Edwards will be the emboldening of Israel's critics (who, like the Obama administration, will always be able to point to J Street to validate their "pro-Israel" bona fides) and the weakening of the strong, bipartisan support that the Jewish state has always enjoyed in Congress. A Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll released last month found that only 46% of registered voters believe that Israel is committed to peace, down from 66% right before Obama took office. Furthermore, only 44% believe America should support Israel, down from 71% a year before. It's impossible to isolate a single cause for this decline in sympathy for Israel, but surely the change in tone from the White House has played a substantial role. Even more distressing is that ostensibly "pro-Israel" activists are aiding and abetting this dark transformation in public attitudes. Contact Chuck Brooks at chetz18@aol.com To Go To Top

OBAMA DEMANDS ISRAEL BREAK INTL. LAW; NETANYAHU ASSERTS ISRAELI INDEPENDENCE; COURT FINDS JEWS DIDN'T TAKE ARABS' LAND Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 23, 2009.

Since Obama's supporters believe in international agreements, his Administration tries to make Israel seem in violation of them. Israel isn't. The agreements it made with the U.S. are not binding treaties, but understandings. Obama wants to evade the U.S. promises in those understandings, and demand no specific compliance by the Arabs, which is supposed to precede Israeli compliance, but hold Israel to its promises that were based on the U.S. promises. The Roadmap is not binding. Israel is under no obligation to halt any construction. Even if the Geneva Convention applied to the Territories, it prohibits states from transferring populations into foreign countries, not individuals from moving into Territories that are not countries and not foreign; rather, they are unallocated parts of the Palestine Mandate, to which Israel is paramount heir. Israel did sign the 1976 International Convention for Civil and Political Rights, which bars religious and national discrimination. Therefore Israel is legally obliged to allow Jews to build in the Territories and in Israel. The Roadmap violates that international law. In effect, Obama is demanding that Israel break international law. p>Another Obama violation is of a binding Security Council resolution,1373, and of U.S. law prohibiting the financing of terrorism. The U.S. transfers hundreds of millions of dollars to Gaza, controlled by Hamas, a recognized terrorist organization, which siphons off much of that money. P.A. Prime Minister Fayad admitted that U.S. funds pay the salaries of Hamas terrorists. The U.S. also demands that Israel violate 1373 by facilitating commerce from Gaza, transferring cash to Hamas-controlled banks, and let into Gaza dual use materials. The U.S. is pressing the P.A. to incorporate Hamas into its government, a severely criminal proposal. [Actually, the PLo is terrorist, too.] The Administration also aids Hizbullah terrorists. During the war with Israel, the Lebanese Army aided Hizbullah. The Lebanese Army has kept UNIFIL from stopping Hizbullah rearmament. Since then, Hizbullah gained greater influence over the Lebanese Army. Nevertheless, the Administration gives arms to the Lebanese Army. On a lesser matter, the Administration violated the 2008 US Foreign Operations Bill, barring U.S. aid "for the purpose of recognizing or otherwise honoring individuals who commit or have committed acts of terrorism." The U.S. is financing a P.A. computer center named to honor a Fatah terrorist who murdered 37 Israelis (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/26 from Caroline Glick). Pinchas Wallerstein, head of the Yesha Council, might have been referring to Pres. Obama, when he referred to the type of person "who has the erasure of Zionist settlement in Judea and Samaria at the top of his political agenda — and is only adopting legal terminology to decorate himself with" Israelis (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/28). Let the Obama administration cease its phony criticism of Israel on grounds of legality and ethics, as it reneges on U.S. promises to Israel and as it supports terrorists! Here is a non-partisan approach to Presidential illegality. Let us indict: (1) Bill Clinton, for the war crime of indiscriminately bombing Serbian civilians; (2) George W. Bush, for the possible war crime of endorsing torture of prisoners; and (3) Barak Obama, for aiding terrorism. Since those terrorists are anti-American, Obama may have done the most harm to the U.S.. ISRAELI UNIVERSITY CONFERENCES ON INTIFADA Tel Aviv University recently held one of the frequent one-sided conferences on relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The agenda is entirely about Arab complaints and not at all about Jewish suffering. The organizers' notion of balance is to have Jewish anti-Zionists [or self-haters] along with Arab anti-Zionists and Communists. The participants do not acknowledge an Israeli right to self-defense. In academic terminology, they engage in Israel-bashing. The latest conference took up psychological damage to Arabs in the Territories and Israeli troops serving there. The agenda omits psychological damage to Israelis from: (1) Thousands of rockets fired at them by genocidal Islamo-fascists; (2) Being attacked by suicide bombers and snipers; (3) Having to devote much time to active reserve duty, to defend against terrorists; (4) Holocaust deniers who demand mass-extermination of living Jews; and (5) Frequent claims that Jews drink the blood of gentile children (Prof. Steven Plaut, 6/26). The conference agenda, notated by Prof. Plaut, proved his claims about the Israel-bashing monopoly of the speakers and their topics. U.P.I. WAR SCARE OVER CAPTURE OF ISRAELI SPIES Lebanon has arrested 40 people who allegedly spied for Israel both at a high level and in depth. If true, this would be severe blow to Israeli intelligence but also reveals a severe weakness in Hizbullah. Israel did have excellent intelligence it put to swift use in the recent war with Hizbullah. The U.P.I. asserts that both sides feel vulnerable now, Israel for having lost spies, and Hizbullah for wondering how many are left and what Israel knows. It claims that both sides want to strike at the other, over this, especially Israel, because it is headed by PM Netanyahu, called a "hawk." Meanwhile, Netanyahu called for negotiations with Syria, and Syria said that if the result is not to give it the Golan, it would take it by force (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/27). Evidence for this U.P.I. war scare? None. U.P.I. makes the common mistake and anti-Israel defamation of calling Netanyahu a hawk, as if he wants war. The evidence indicates otherwise. The Arabs are hawks. Abbas threatens war, too. PM NETANYAHU FINALLY ASSERTS ISRAELI INDEPENDENCE "Netanyahu said he told Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi during his visit to Rome last week that 'we do not want others to tell us how to run our lives in Israel." (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/28). Will he tell it to the U.S.? And will he tell it more forcefully? A Lighter Touch: The Senate introduced the Produce-Safety, Label Truth Bill. It would require produce distributors to label every piece of produce with a point-of-origin code and a designation whether organic. Print must be large enough to be visible with a magnifying glass, in strong light. Every piece! Remember, a bunch of grapes has about 70 grapes or pieces. IRAN'S RESPONSE TO OBAMA'S CRITICISM President Obama's mild criticism of Iran's repression was "consider looking at the families of those who've been beaten or shot or detained." Iran's President Ahmadinejad replied with another blow to Obama's attempt to settle differences civilly by threatening, "If you continue your meddlesome stance," "the Iranian nation's response will be crushing and regret-inducing." He called the U.S. President's criticism of his crackdown on dissidents "unconventional, abnormal and discourteous." (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/28). The discourtesy was by Admadinejad's threats. The U.S. often speaks up for democracy and humaneness, Obama less than Bush, but both came to support the Palestinian Arab terrorists, who are both undemocratic and inhumane. The terrorist idea of democracy is have one election. If they win, keep power and oppress the people. If they lose, seize power and oppress the people. Their idea of humaneness is to execute residents who alert Israel to a pending attack on its civilians. COURT FINDS JEWS DIDN'T TAKE ARABS' LAND The Israeli newspaper, Maariv accused the Jews of Maale Rehav'am, in Judea-Samaria, of having built its 30 houses on private land belonging to Palestinian Arabs. That community is one of those which Obama demands the Jews vacate. The Jewish community sued the newspaper for libel. The Court found that the Jews did not take Arabs' land. It fined the newspaper a few thousand dollars and ordered it to apologize publicly. No major media carried the story exonerating the settlers (Prof. Steven Plaut, 6/28). The media left the false notion in people's minds. OVERLOOKED CLAIM OF JEWS TO JUDEA-SAMARIA People contend that the Jews have a lesser claim to Judea-Samaria, because they didn't live there before 1967. Not true. They did live there, at Hebron and other places. Decades of pogroms ethnically cleansed them and barred them. The pogroms were less successful in Jerusalem. Britain barred Jewish development of the Transjordanian province, in order to accommodate Arab refugees from S. Arabia (Prof. Steven Plaut, 6/28). Britain illegally shut off Jewish immigration west of the Jordan River, too, but invited in Arabs. Shall the basis of barring Jewish "settlements" in the cradle of Jewish civilization be Arab ethnic cleansing of Jews? ISRAEL INVENTS BETTER SOLAR POWER Israel has invented the first modular solar power generator. Unlike existing types, when one module breaks down, the rest continue generating power. Modularity makes it simple to meet varying power needs for smaller and larger and growing towns — just add more modules. The system super-heats air, which then turns turbines, which generate electricity (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/26). This is another of many Israeli innovations of benefit to mankind, which I report as an offset to the usual one-sided publicity against Israel. Why do you suppose that Israel rarely gets credit or public notice for such innovation? HAMAS REPEATING HIZBULLAH SCAM ON PRISONERS A few years ago, Hizbullah and Israel arranged a lopsided prisoner exchange — a couple of Jews for hundreds of Arabs. Evidence was strong that the Jewish prisoners were deceased. The Israeli media ignored the evidence. It wasn't until the corpses were returned, that the Israeli public learned they had been duped. The incident demonstrated the media's unscrupulousness in behalf of its appeasement of the Arabs, and the government's folly. It seems to be happening all over again with Hamas. Hamas officials are being cagey about whether its Israeli prisoner is alive. Israeli officials are not asking and insisting. In any case, Hamas may be making suckers out of Israel, again (Dr. Aaron Lerner, http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/28. The media fails to point out the immorality of Hamas trying to get terrorists released. If Israel followed Judaism, it would not release one for hundreds, who surely would perpetrate more kidnapping and murder. Israel repeats its mistakes, because the Left is too imbued with the politics and ideology of appeasement to adequately admit mistakes and re-evaluate their ideology. They do not study the enemy's ideology, but incorrectly assume that the enemy thinks like themselves. Arabs do that with some of their accusations against Israel, incorrectly assuming that Israel must be doing the wrongful deeds that they would do if they could. When vicious Radical Muslim organizations find that they can pry their members out of Israeli prisons by offering dead Israelis, they are likely to kill them. Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

KNESSET SUB COMMITTEE TOURS SHOMRON OUTPOSTS Posted by David Ha'ivri, July 23, 2009.

Editor's Note: The Dry Bones cartoon was not part of the original article.

Knesset Members Zev Elkin, Tzipi Chatubeli, Michael Ben Ari and Gidon Ezra held session of the Knesset sub committee on security in Yehuda and Shomron today while touring Jewish communities in Shomron that have been classified as un-authorized outposts in 2005 Sasson report. The fact finding tour hosted by Shomron regional council head Gershon Mesika was made in-order to allow Israeli law makers to evaluate conditions of Shomron communities which Israel's ministry of defense has announced that it will take action against. Gidon Ezra of the Kadima party was a lone voice among follow Mks he expressed his agreement that Israel should restrict building in communities such as Rechlim and Nofi Nechmia and that he doesn't think that moving people from one community in the Shomron to another is wise because eventually they will need to be moved again. Other officials said that the government must revise the Sasson report and find ways to approve communities established after 2001. committee head MK Zev Elkin pointed out that the Sasson report was never officially authorized by the government of Israel and has no official standing. MK Chatubeli said that arrangements must be made to give legal standing to existing communities, She stated that the majority of the communities in question are located on state owned land and technically can be appoved. MK Ben Ari said that in the few cases like Migron in which part of the land is owned by individual Arabs, that those owners can be compensated, but that the Jewish communities dare not be moved under any circumstances. Shomron regional head Gershon Mesika told the visiting parliamentarians that the government must not stand in the way of growing communities who are developing. He asked that educational institutions be left out of the political debate and stated that because of the freeze on building in the region there is a large lack in classrooms in area's elementary schools. As for threats of forced removal of residents and demolition of Jewish homes Mesika said that the people of the Shomron will not copy the response of the people of Gush Katif and that an assault on our communities will not be met with love and kisses. "forced expulsion of Jews from their home in Shomron will be met with real opposition and will lead to grave consequences". David Ha'ivri director of the Shomron Liaison Office said "The State of Israel prides itself for being a western democracy. Why is it then that the State shows a blind eye to structures built throughout the country by Arabs who make no effort to apply for registration. All of the said "illegal" Jewish homes on the hills of Judea and Samaria have been registered and applied for building permits and could be approved in a minute by Ehud Barak who refrains from doing so due to his own political agenda. You would expect left wing liberals to speak out against racial discrimination. But it the case of Jews they seem to feel that doing so is fine." David Ha'ivri is Director, The Shomron Liaison Office. From USA: Phone 1-512-961-7059. From Israel: Phone 052-607-1690. Website: www.yeshuv.org To Go To Top

JERUSALEM HEARTBURN Posted by Saul Goldman, July 22, 2009.

This was written by David Hazony and it appeared July 20, 2009 in CommentaryMagazine.com.

We knew it would come to this. Over the weekend, the Obama administration showed just how radical the shift in U.S. policy toward Israel has been. It has demanded that the Israeli government withdraw the municipal approval of a building project in the Eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The land that houses the old, run-down Shepherd Hotel, which is to be replaced by an apartment building, was lawfully purchased by Jews. No matter: That part of town is seen by Washington as a "settlement." Today, U.S. officials made it even clearer when they reportedly told both sides that they see no difference between Eastern Jerusalem and rogue settler outposts in the middle of the West Bank. Understandably, the Israeli government has rejected the directive, and some reports suggest that the Israelis may have deliberately leaked the demand, for it plays to Netanyahu's image as standing tall against American pressure. Washington has a longstanding tradition of doublespeak when dealing with Jerusalem. On the one hand, Obama himself couldn't help but declare his commitment (subsequently retracted) to a unified Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty while campaigning for office — and he even promised to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv, which is not the capital by any definition of the term, to Jerusalem. At the same time, he is not the first presidential candidate to make that promise, nor the first one to forget about it when in office, in the process ignoring the express will of Congress. It's those pesky State Department folks, you see, who keep advising successive presidents that now is not the right time. For 60 years, Israel's executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government have found their seat in Jerusalem, and Israel's "closest ally" still keeps its embassy by the beach. At least we Jerusalemites don't have to worry about all those diplomat vehicles taking our precious parking spots. It gets weirder. As I have pointed out before, the United States does not appear to recognize Israeli sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem — West or East. A federal-court ruling earlier this month underscores the simple fact that any American citizen born in Jerusalem, regardless of where he lives, gets a U.S. passport with the country listed as simply "Jerusalem." U.S. citizens living in Jerusalem cannot get help at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv; they are directed to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, which answers directly to Washington, rather than to the embassy. Again, this stuff has been going on for a long time. It begins with a fundamental attitude on the part of successive American administrations, really dating back to the 1947 UN partition plan putting the city under "universal" governance. The point is, the reasoning goes, we don't fully see the logic in giving Israel full sovereignty of Jerusalem. It's not just about placating the Arabs, although that's a big part of it; it is, after all, a city of international importance. Why should only Israel have it? So in the interest of fostering a constructive dialogue with an American diplomatic universe that seems to have no interest whatever in Israel's position on the subject, I'd like to toss out a few brief reminders. Israel should have Jerusalem, first of all, because it already does. Jews have been a majority of the city consecutively since the middle of the 19th century. There is no issue here of occupation, of a Jewish minority displacing Palestinians in their land. Over the past century and a half, the city was divided for 19 years by an accident of war, split between Israel and Jordan, neither of which occupations having earned international recognition; and then it was reunited. Thus was born the infamous and irrelevant "Green Line," something that today exists on maps only. The Jordanians cleansed the eastern city of its Jews and burned down its synagogues. Then the Jews came back in 1967 and gave the city a greater degree of not only economic success but also religious, cultural, and political freedom than it has ever enjoyed under any of the different Muslim, Christian, and pagan regimes that preceded them. Consider, by contrast, the treatment of Jewish holy sites under Palestinian rule: Joseph's Tomb, for example, was immediately set on fire, as were all the synagogues of the Gaza Strip. At the risk of "prejudicing" the outcome of negotiations through the employment of argument, why on earth should it not be Israel's? Israel should have Jerusalem because it is more important to Jews than it is to Muslims (or Christians, or anyone else). This may sound vaguely discriminatory or religionist or unpopularly theological or just unfunny, but the fact is that there is a difference between the "most important" holy city and the "third most important" city that is far more than quantitative. This is the geographical heart of biblical Israel, the focus of its golden age of David and Solomon, the political-messianic-metahistorical dream focus of three millennia of Jewish prayer. This is the heart of everything, and that heart beats not on Herzl Boulevard or Jaffa Road by the Central Bus Station but in Eastern Jerusalem, at the site where the First and Second Temples stood for about a thousand years before the glorious Romans burned them down. Israel should have Jerusalem because there is no practical way to divide the city that would satisfy both sides. Never mind the bizarre MTA-subway-style map that would ensue, intertwining all the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods in the city. The real problem is that Israelis and Palestinians have totally irreconcilable views as to how such a division would work in practice — a difference so wide as to make the entire endeavor a pipe dream. Israelis see any separation as similar to the one Israel has with Egypt and Jordan: a full border, with strict crossings and a fundamental divorce of economic life. This is essential to any deal — the entire idea of giving up land in exchange for peace comes with the heavy baggage of decades of terror attacks. But such a separation, we have been told repeatedly, is anathema to the Palestinians themselves, who rely heavily on Israeli jobs for their living and see any real separation a form of "siege" — turning their territory into a "prison." (If you don't believe this, ask yourself how the Gazans would react if Israel were to lift the sea and air restrictions on the Strip: Would they say "we are now free" or "we are still under siege"?) This problem is little discussed but will become a deal breaker the moment anyone starts talking seriously about borders or dividing the city. Jerusalem is not just a consensus issue in Israel but also a deeply personal one. There is no erasing the thousands of years of yearning for Jerusalem in Jewish texts, nor the heart-wrenching failure of Jewish forces to capture East Jerusalem in 1948, nor the national catharsis of its reunification in the Six Day War, nor over four decades of astonishing development and construction and tourism and flourishing of religious life for all faiths since then. The idea that now, suddenly, a new American president, speaking of "settlements," will change this reality is not simply offensive and alienating to Israelis only but also to Jews the world over. Rather than recognize his failure in the Middle East so far, Obama is exacerbating it. Israelis do not like to be bullied, and this is far more likely to steel the Israeli public's resolve against American pressure than weaken it. Contact Saul Goldman at gold7910@bellsouth.net To Go To Top

JEWISH EYES BEHIND MUSLIM VEILS: OUR DAUGHTERS AND SISTERS IMPRISONED BY ARAB MEN Posted by Shaul Ceder, July 22, 2009.

Our Daughters and Sisters Imprisoned by Arab Men This was written by Braha Bender and it appeared June 17, 2009 in Hamodia.

This leaves me shaken. It keeps me up at night. Two nights I have not been able to fall asleep, visions of what I just heard dancing in my head. She is out there, alone and helpless. She is our sister. She is a Jew. And she is suffering. Most of us are not aware of this tragedy. But she is desperate for our help, desperate to get back her life. The life her Arab husband has stolen from her. One Less Jew It doesn't begin with abuse. Arab-Israeli men begin pursuing Israeli women by befriending them. Often the men are driven by their dreams of taking over the Jewish State. The obliteration of the Jewish people is their goal, and capturing one Jewish girl means one less Jew to worry about when the revolution comes. One less Jew in the world. First the Arab tricks the girl into trusting him by giving her gifts, chocolates and money. Then he convinces her to marry him and move with him to his native Arab village. Then he locks her in the house, and the beatings begin. The Jewish women stolen away in this manner are madeto serve as slaves for the entire Arab family. Rebbetzin Rachel Baraness of The Jerusalem House took it upon herself to care about and help these Jewish daughters. Eighteen years ago Rebbetzin Baraness met a Jewish girl with black and blue bruises all over her neck. She asked where the marks came from and learned about the nightmare of Jewish women married to Arabs who live in their villages where their lives become worse than being in a prison camp. She learned that trying to escape these tyrants puts them at risk of death, and that risk becomes much greater if they try to leave with their children. She learned that these women had often lost touch with their families; many had lost the contact with their families, or their families were clueless as to how to cope with the magnitude of their trauma. She learned that these young women needed a home to escape to. First one, then the next, then the next came to live in the widowed Rebbetzin Baraness's home. Soon the need for a larger facility demanded further financial support. The aid of the Charity of Light Fund was enlisted. The Jerusalem House, a shelter facility for Jewish girls and women escaping Arab men, was born. No Immunity Who is the girl who is crying from pain? Whose face do you see? Do you see your neighbor's daughter's face? Do you see the face of the Bais Yaakov girl in the supermarket? Of course not. You assume that this can't happen in our circles. But what about the frum girl who naively responded to the young Arab boy who delivered the family groceries from the supermarket every week? She didn't mean anything... she was just being polite... but he ensnared her. What about the seminary student who walked by a construction site and attracted the attention of the Arab construction workers there? Consider a typical supermarket. Aren't the majority of the workers Israeli girls working alongside Arabs? Daily favors, compliments, and gifts have swallowed up the common sense of some good girls. Many Arabs are actively pursuing Israeli girls right now as you read this article. Since the founding of the State of Israel, more than 3,000 Israeli girls have lo aleinu succumbed and "converted" to Islam and married Arab men via the Muslim courts. Not all of them are from impoverished or dysfunctional homes. A recent Jerusalem House resident had met the Arab she married at her job. Rebbetzin Baraness and other Jerusalem House staff hold lectures for the sake of educating the public about the dangers young Arabs represent to their girls. Parents must warn their daughters. Rescue Operations "In all my years in the field I have never seen a Jewish girl [in] a relationship with an Arab where he did not ... [abuse] her," says Reb Levi Chazen. "Rescuing a Jewish girl from an Arab village means risking your life" to save a life. Reb Levi Chazen is financial manager and staff member of the Jerusalem House. One girl was the daughter of a Jewish woman married to an Arab man. When the daughter began asking too many questions about her Jewish heritage, the men of the family locked her in an attic. Beatings and starvation were just the beginning. When her mother found out that the girls' brothers were planning to murder her within a few days, she managed to smuggle the information to her daughter in the attic. That night, realizing she had nothing to lose, the young Jewish girl jumped out of the attic window and fell three stories to the concrete below. She lost all her teeth and broke her jaw, but, with the kindness of Hashem, her arms and legs were functional enough for her to escape from the Arab village. The now homeless girl was living on a park bench when someone began to speak with her, found out her story, and sent her to The Jerusalem House. She had no money, no water to shower, no clothes but the filthy rags on her back. She knew no one. She was hungry. Her jaw was broken and she had no teeth. Jerusalem House took this girl in, cared for her, fed her, provided a clean place to live and medical care. If it hadn't been for the Jerusalem House, where would this girl be today? "I Made a Mistake" Saving a Jew from an Israeli Arab village is life-threatening, and the new military borders between Palestinian territories and Israel make rescue missions that much harder. However, the drive to survive can overcome even military barriers. Israeli soldiers at a military base bordering a Palestinian governed Arab village recognized a certain middle-aged Arab woman, wearing the traditional chador, head covered by a scarf wrapped tightly around her face and neck. Every day, at the same exact time, this woman would walk outside the village lugging a big bag of trash, and toss it in a garbage dump outside the village boundaries. Every day she would inch closer and closer to the military base, until one day she threw a rock at the soldiers. Before returning her aggression, the Jewish soldiers noticed a note wrapped around the rock. "I made a mistake," it said. "I am a Jew but I married an Arab. Save me." The note explained that she was rarely allowed outside the house. Could they please help her? They devised a plan to rescue her, and the soldiers brought her to The Jerusalem House. Her gratitude and relief knew no bounds. Unhappy Ending The Jerusalem House's success rate is approximately 85%. Unfortunately, there are some unhappy endings. One Jewish woman who turned to The Jerusalem House for help explained that she had been married to an Arab man for decades. They had met in Israel and she had soon "converted" to Islam and moved to live with him in Shechem. However, as her Arab husband was about to be exiled from the country due to his terrorist activities, the couple moved to Jordan and left two teenage daughters behind, in Israel. The Jewish woman got back to Israel with her son on the pretense that she was coming to visit her daughters. Once inside the country, she turned to the Jerusalem House for shelter. The shelter is only for women without children. For the women who do manage to escape with their children, the Jerusalem House provides safe houses around the country where, shrouded in anonymity, their furious Arab husbands cannot find them. An apartment like this was provided to the woman and her son who had escaped from their terrorist husband and father in Jordan. They were well on their way to a new life. But one day Jerusalem House staff members found the apartment empty. "They didn't even leave a note," says Reb Levi Chazen dryly. Why did they leave? Had their suffering affected them so thoroughly that they believed they were not worth saving? Rehabilitation The rehabilitation process at the Jerusalem House involves counseling, psychiatric treatment if needed, and provision for the girl's physical needs including clothing, food, toiletries, and everything else. "These girls arrive with nothing," Rebbetzin Baraness explains. "They have no clothing, no money. They've been beaten. They're broken people. They're entirely helpless." But caring and love can change a great deal. Sometimes in the middle of the night, someone just needs to talk. She's feeling depressed or frightened. Perhaps she is remembering her terrible life as an abused wife and wonders if she can ever be normal. Rebbetzin Baraness is a straight-talking, unpretentious woman. She quietly describes the love and warmth she lavishes on the girls every day. It's simple, really. Love heals. Treatment and understanding and safety heal. Group support heals. Rebbetzin Baraness also provides the girls with the skills to eventually lead an independent life of their own. "I don't let them sink," she says. The Jerusalem House provides some courses in basic skills the girls may lack. The girls are given many Torah shiurim. They have not lived a Torah life or kept mitzvos in a long time, if ever, and need to learn. "The girls respect me when they see me keeping Shabbos, so they keep it as well," Rebbetzin Baraness explains."And the new girls who come to the shelter have the older girls as role models as well." Rebbetzin Baraness has married off about 700 of "her girls" to bnei Torah over the past 18 years and isn't planning on stopping any time soon. New Beginnings As we speak about the important rescue-and-rehabili tate work being done, Rebbetzin Baraness and Reb Levi Chazen tell me that a Jerusalem House wedding is scheduled to take place that night. "This girl came to us after being in and out of mental hospitals ten times. She had met an Arab in Eilat," Rebbetzin Baraness says. "He 'converted' her to Islam, married her and took her to live with his family. They enslaved her and beat her. She did not know how to escape." Managing to escape from the Arab village after many months, the girl admitted herself to a mental hospital, hoping that the facility could protect her from the fury of her Arab captors who sought to kidnap her and take her back to keep working for them. "The husbands always come looking. We keep them [hidden] until the search has ended. It takes months," says Reb Chazen. But the girl was not mentally ill (though she was traumatized), so the mental hospital soon discharged the girl into the custody of a sister who did not know how to cope with the traumatized young woman. The sister sent the girl back to the mental hospital. The cycle repeated itself until the sister turned to Rebbetzin Baraness, begging her to take care of her sister. That was a year and a half ago. The Jerusalem House team of professionals and the love of Rebbetzin Baraness took effect quickly. "Tonight she will be marrying a ben Torah," I was told. Thanks to the Jerusalem House, another life is saved. Thank G-d the Jerusalem House was there for her — and so many others. Mitzvas Pidyon Shevuim The Jerusalem House is the only shelter for Jewish women battered by Arabs in the world today. Yad L'Achim works in conjunction with the Jerusalem House as Yad L'Achim does not have any shelter facilities. Once they have rescued an Israeli girl from an Arab village, they send her to the Jerusalem House. But the Jerusalem House can only afford to shelter 25 young women at a time. "It really is just a matter of money. If we could double our shelter space today, there would be 60, 70 girls knocking on our door by tonight," Reb Levi Chazen says. Harav Ovadiah Yoseph and many other Gedolim strongly endorse the Jerusalem House. Perhaps if the need were known, it would be filled. You can help these girls right now by making a donation through PayPal at http://www.thejerusalemhouse.com. Donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law. The Jerusalem Education Fund, Inc. is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. The Jerusalem House has been endorsed by Chief Rabbis Ovadia Yosef, Mordechai Eliyahu and Avraham Shapira z"l. Their individual endorsements can be read at http://www.thejerusalemhouse.com and donations can be made by mail to The Jerusalem Education Fund, Inc., 45 East City Line Avenue, PMB 352, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004-2421. To save a Jewish girl's life and the lives of her children, please call Reb Levi Chazen at 972-52-300-3293 or e-mail levi@thestoryofhope.org Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il To Go To Top

SAMSON BLINDED: THE MIRACLE OF FLEEING ARABS; ISRAELI ARABS: FROM TERROR TO SECURITY Posted by Shaul Ceder, July 22, 2009.

Samson Blinded has posted new items. You may comment on them at http://samsonblinded.org/blog/ the-miracle-of-fleeing-arabs.htm and http://samsonblinded.org/blog/ israeli-palestinians-from-terror-to-security.htm

The Miracle Of Fleeing Arabs The 1947 partition of Palestine left the Jewish state with a 40 percent Arab population. Miraculously, the Arabs took off. Their flight started almost a year before the conscious Jewish policy of expelling the fifth column. Unlike in the previous periods of civil unrest, Arabs fled the country rather than temporarily moving into the hills. They fled without a hope of return, for they took their animals and belongings, and wouldn't have realistically expected their villages to remain intact. Israeli leaders draw attention to the isolated calls by Arab leaders for the villagers to flee, ostensibly to clear the area for Arab military operations. No Arab villager would buy such nonsense. All of them understood that the Syrians and Jordanians wanted their emptied land. God performs miracles without violating the laws of nature (that's why there are atheists), and so the Arab flight was prompted by decades of unrest, a crumbling patriarchal society, a closed economy, spiraling clashes with Jews, loss of traditional leadership, and fear. Most Palestinian leaders argued against fleeing the country, but the peasants were of a different opinion. Jews, for their part, slowly switched to Plan D, attacking first the Arab villages, most of which — willingly or not — housed militias, and eventually cleansing the land of Arabs to gain a contiguous Jewish state. Out of hopelessness and fear of retaliation, the majority of Arabs fled Israel in two waves: amid the clashes before the proclamation of Israeli independence, and after the Jews had won the war. Much smaller numbers of Arabs fled during the war itself. The near-absence of Arab flight from Galilee demonstrates that Jews did not plan to evict them; Arabs fled only the zones of intense conflict, rather than the entire Jewish state. Arabs that remained in Galilee developed into a demographical time bomb, and created an Arab majority in many parts of the Jewish state. Despite the huge influx of Jews since 1948, the Arab population of Israel continued to rise, from 10-19 percent to 34 percent among the Israeli young today. In order to create a Jewish state, Jews had no choice but to make the Arabs go. Jewish actions followed the cruel logic of war and state-building, nowhere more clear than in Dir Yassin. That village, like many others, had an implicit non-belligerency agreement with Jewish settlements, but eventually succumbed to Arab guerrillas and bandits. Many villagers from Dir Yassin joined the bandits, and raided Jewish caravans to Jerusalem and the settlements. Pervasive ownership of firearms, the Islamic sanction of robbery, unemployment, and the youth bulge assured the village's militancy. In the attack on Dir Yassin, Haganah forces shelled the village while Irgun and Lehi fighters stormed it, naturally being unable to discriminate between the full-blown militants and armed teenagers. Some women were also caught in the fighting. Testifying to the fierceness of the battle rather than an atrocity, Irgun subsequently paraded the survivors from Dir Yassin through Jerusalem and sent them into the city's Arab sector. Arab propaganda, however, made the operation into a massacre and frightened many Arabs into fleeing. In terms of killed-for-fled efficiency, Dir Yassin stands out as a brilliant example of good military practice. In PR terms, Dir Yassin became a disaster for Israel for a single reason: Jews admitted it as such. No Palestinian talks about the Egyptian forces of Ibrahim Pasha or the British razing the Arab towns, though the Egyptian atrocities and British cruelties far exceeded Dir Yassin, Kfar Qasem, and all other infamous points of Jewish-Arab clashes. People complain of the things it makes sense to complain of. The Egyptians and the British offered Palestinians no opportunity to vent their grievances, but Jews were receptive to the enemy's cries — and got more cries in return. Israeli Arabs: From Terror To Security A very small part of the Israeli Arab population is actively involved in terrorism, but not many are required. A handful of terrorists can disrupt the life of a small state. So far, the immense intelligence networks of Israeli security services intercept almost all the terrorists' attempts, but the entire network will go down as soon as the Arabs develop some basic counterintelligence capabilities. When the PLO was butchering Israeli informants in the 1970s, the intelligence networks quickly evaporated. Israel's successes in intercepting terrorists stem mostly from the tacit and overt cooperation of the terrorist bosses. They have grown rich and lazy, no longer want to fight Israel, and only need to show their supporters some ongoing activity. They welcome Israeli interception of terrorist attacks, as they don't want to endanger themselves by allowing the confrontation to spiral. The most dangerous Palestinians are the silent and contented ones. They consume massive Israeli subsidies, disregard Israeli law (tax evasion, grand theft, illegal construction), enjoy mind-boggling preferences (draft exemption), and breed to become a democratic majority. The number of Arabs in Israel increased by a factor of eleven since 1948. The moderate Arabs fool the Jews that they "only" want equality. But what makes a state Jewish if Arabs and Jews are equal there? True equality presupposes that the Law of Return applies to Jews and Arabs alike, that both (or neither) are mentioned in the national anthem. If Arabs constitute a third of Israel's young, then the flag of Israel should be one-third Islamic green. If Arabs are equal, they should be allowed ministerial portfolios and assignments in the Ministry of Defense and Shabak, and they should receive their part of Jewish donations to Israel. And indeed, Arabs now receive part of the Israeli Bonds purchased by the common Jews in America. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il To Go To Top

SOROS-BACKED THINK TANK ISSUES ADVICE ON NEUTRALIZING SETTLERS Posted by Lee Caplan, July 22, 2009.

This was written by Gil Ronen and it appeared today in Arutz-7 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132515

(Israelnationalnews.com) The International Crisis Group, an investigative think tank connected to billionaire George Soros, has issued a report on the current influence of the religious Zionist movement and ways in which its opposition to further Israeli retreats can be overcome. Soros, who was a major contributor to Barack Obama's presidential campaign and who is vehemently opposed to the "Israel lobby" in the United States, is a member of the Crisis Group's executive committee. After conducting extensive research in Israel, including dozens of interviews with Jewish leaders, senior and junior officials, rabbis, military men, residents of Judea and Samaria and many others, the group's analysts concluded that the government needs to "rein in" the "settlerment enterprise" and stop showing "lenience toward anti-Palestinian violence or hateful incitement, especially with a religious content." However, they also note that Israel's religious right has "deep roots," and that "even its most militant expression cannot be dealt with exclusively through confrontation." Advocating what some may see as a divide-and-rule approach to the religious Zionists, the report's authors believe that the religious right's opposition to further Israeli pullouts can be minimized if an agreement reached between Israel and Arabs marks exactly where the border between Israel and the PA will pass, thus making it clear which communities can keep on growing and which are on the chopping block. The report also warns of a drift by ultra-orthodox Jews towards nationalistic positions, and recommends that the United States and other "foreign actors" attempt to woo ultra-Orthodox parties like Shas and United Torah Judaism by involving them in the diplomatic process. Early compensation The group suggests that "an early evacuation compensation package for Jews in Judea and Samaria could help persuade some settlers to leave voluntarily, narrowing the problem to a smaller group," whereas "for those who value their attachment to the land over their attachment to the state, efforts could be made to examine how and under what conditions they might live under Palestinian rule and the extent to which Palestinians might accept them." The report also suggests that "unlike what happened with the Gaza disengagement, the government could start early planning for settler relocation by building alternative homes inside Israel proper." It claimed that "the 2005 disengagement from Gaza went remarkably smoothly" but made no reference to police forces' separating babies from their mothers and did not offer any comment on the government's failure to fully carry out promises to help the expulsion victims re-establish their homes and find work. Serious snoopers While the report does not list its authors by name, it is known that one of them is Crisis Group senior analyst Nicolas Pelham, a former veteran BBC correspondent and an expert on Arab affairs, who has been conducting extensive research in Israel in recent years. Nicolas Pelham (Crisis Group) The group prides itself on being "the leading independent, non-partisan source of analysis and advice to governments and inter-governmental bodies worldwide on the prevention and resolution of violent conflicts." The group's analysts have left few stones unturned in their quest to understand the history, ideology and personal makeup of the religious-Zionist movement. Judging by the quotes that appear in their report, they have received some form of cooperation from dozens of interviewees, including an unnamed former head of the Shin Bet; Rabbi Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba; Religious Affairs Minister Yaakov Margi; Motti Karpel, Editor of Nekuda; former MK Benny Elon; Yesha Council head Danny Dayan; Yitzhak Pindrus, who is described as an "ultra-orthodox deputy mayor of Jerusalem and close adviser to Rabbi El-Yashiv [sic]"; an "ultra-orthodox chief administrator" at "Tel Tzion settlement"; an "ultra-orthodox settler and reserve soldier" at "Adam settlement"; a "Lubavitch Torah college lecturer" at "Immanuel settlement"; a "Torah college teacher" at Mea Shearim; a municipal official at Modiin Illit; Edah Haredis representatives at Mea Shearim; a Torah college teacher at Nachliel; residents of Amona, Migron and Maskiyot and numerous others. According to the secretary of a religious seed group in central Israel, a researcher for the group went so far as to disguise himself as a religious Jew in order to enter a seed group's synagogue in Ramle. Contact Lee Caplan at leescaplan@yahoo.com To Go To Top

NETANYAHU'S FALSE NOTION OF DEMILITARIZED STATE; ISRAEL'S SUPREME COURT ANTI-ZIONIST?; ISRAEL'S FALL-BACK ARGUMENT ON JUDEA-SAMARIA Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 22, 2009.

PM OLMERT'S UNKNOWN PROPOSAL ON JERUSALEM In 2008, PM Olmert showed Palestinian Authority (P.A.) head Abbas a map offering the P.A. 93.5 — 93.7% of Yesha, a land swap of 5.8%, a safe-passage corridor from Gaza to Judea-Samaria, a small refugee-return as a "humanitarian gesture," and Jerusalem outside Israeli sovereignty and run by Saudis, Jordanians, Israelis, the P.A., and Americans. This is typical of the half-baked ideas that Israeli leaders call plans. These ideas benefit Israel's enemies and not Israel. 'Israeli leaders and media fail regularly to evaluate or even note the consequences. The consequences of this idea would be dire. The same was true of the Olmert-Sharon expulsion of Jews from Gaza [and the Olmert-Livni ceasefire in Lebanon that let Hizbullah build a mightier force of rockets]. Consider Jerusalem. Olmert's idea was a prescription for a sovereignty vacuum quite possibly leading to another war of attrition and then a regional war (www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/26). When Jerusalem was divided, before 1967, the Jordanian sector sniped at the Jews. A tiny state under siege would be unwise to reduce its size further, in behalf of sworn enemies (S. Arabia, Jordan, and Fatah/Hamas) and unstated enemies (the State Dept.). To cede sovereignty over its own capital would be folly. You can imagine how the Arabs and State Dept. would treat Jewish worship and construction! After all, S. Arabia remains in a state of war with Israel! It would set precedent to admit some Arabs in as returned refugees. Actually, most of the refugees died out. These would be just their descendants of mostly fairly recent immigrant families. Many so-called refugees claimed that status only for welfare benefits. The original refugees left almost entirely voluntarily or under Arab orders, after having attempted to exterminate the Jews. And then the Arab states expelled their Jews. Israel doesn't owe Arab refugee families anything, certainly not to let them back in to join Israeli Arabs and P.A. Arabs and foreign allies in the continuing struggle to conquer Israel. Nevertheless, the State Dept. would argue that Israel's acceptance of some refugee descendants admitted the justness of the Arab case for immigration to Israel. Israel would not be admitting that. But the State Dept. is not honest, it is biased. So are most other governments. They would insist that what Olmert meant as a one-time "goodwill" gesture is precedent. They would demand more and more entry for Arabs who were brought up to hate Israel and the Jewish people. The flow of Arabs would be in the wrong direction for Jewish national security and for peace. Another reason for finding these ideas half-baked is their untested and actually disproved assumption that they bring goodwill. The appeasement-minded Israeli leaders' proposed goodwill is genuine. Unfortunatelly, Muslim Arabs don't think like that. They are hard bargainers. They think in terms of what they have to do to conquer. They are, after all, in what they deem a holy war. They may accept offers that make Israel weaker and themselves stronger, in preparation for the next showdown. They consider Israeli offers as weakness. They feel this vindicates the justness of their own cause, and they become more incited. Finding their enemy weak, Muslim Arabs press for more concessions. So does the State Dept.. Therefore, those concessions create ill will and are destabilizing. It is rather late in jihad for Israel and the West still not to understand Arab and Radical Islamic culture. Leftist Israeli leaders, who proposed or approved of goodwill concessions to the Arabs, fail to review the results of those concessions. Instead of learning that they don't work, they propose variations on the same theme. Repeating mistakes is not intelligent. Those objections to the plan are in addition to the overall objection that the areas involved should fall under Jewish sovereignty; leave to the Arabs their own countries. NETANYAHU'S FALSE NOTION OF DEMILITARIZED STATE MK Eldad raised this further issue. First, PM Netanyahu was pathetic to announce in principle the right of another people to set up a state within the Jewish homeland. Second, his notion that demilitarization can be imposed upon a state was tried before. It failed. It was tried in Germany, after WWI. Germany secretly arranged with the USSR in 1922 for military training in the Soviet Union and for arms supply in surreptitious ways. World War II ensued. Incidentally, Walter Rathenau, the Weimar Republic's Foreign Minister who helped sponsor the secret pact, was Jewish. MK Eldad wouldn't put it past appeasement-minded Jews to help a Palestinian Authority (P.A.) state circumvent military restrictions (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/26). The P.A. evades all its agreements now, including military restrictions. Once sovereign, it would have eager foreign help. Israel would be roundly condemned if it tried to enforce the restrictions. In the earlier case, France wanted to reverse Germany's most blatant violation, fortification of the Rhineland, but Britain threatened it with war, if it did. Let Israel not repeat that sad history! For more on Netanyahu's view, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel- Conflict-Examiner~y2009m7d14-Netanyahu-on- Palestinian-Arab-sovereignty IRANIAN OPPRESSION, ARAB THUGS, & ISRAEL Iranians abroad demonstrate against the oppressive regime at home. The émigrés seem united in this. They implore Israel for technological help, as against government jamming of their broadcasts. Demonstrators in Iran have captured some regime-paid thugs, and found that they are Arabs from Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, presumably from Hizbullah and Hamas. Demonstrators claim that the regime has slain hundreds. It pursues wounded ones into hospitals (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/26). The regime has many thousands of Revolutionary Guards. Why import thugs? Perhaps because the regime is paranoid, as you would see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner~y2009m7d13- The-meaning-of-Iranian-protests A Lighter Touch: A politician is someone who stands up for what he does not believe in. WHY IS U.S., NOT ARABS, NEGOTIATING WITH ISRAEL? A journalist asked State Dept. spokesman Philip Crowley, isn't the problem a need for a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, not between Israel and the U.S. over settlements? (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/26.) Answers: (1) The Arabs won't compromise, so the U.S. tries to wrest concessions from Israel and then boast it is "closing the gap." This becomes a vicious cycle, especially as the Arabs raise new demands. (2) The State Dept. and Pres. Obama are anti-Zionist. I think that as the U.S. declines and loses influence, our Presidents try harder to pressure Israel for a phony peace agreement that the Presidents can boast of as a success, in the short run. For more on the U.S. not being an honest broker, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict -Examiner~y2009m7d7-Example-of-US-unreliability-with-Israel IS ISRAEL'S SUPREME COURT ANTI-ZIONIST? Retired Israeli Supreme Court chief justice Aharon Barak related his views about Zionism. He thinks that Israel should be a Jewish state in that Jews have priority in immigrating. Then he used the same term as Israeli Arabs and others opposed to Israel being a Jewish state, for what happens once those immigrants arrive. He said then Israel should be a democratic "state for all its citizens." "Barak also criticized Israel's presence in Judea and Samaria as an 'occupation,' and said the Israeli presence there leads to human rights offenses and racism elsewhere in Israel." Reversing the ethnic groups in the cruel expression with which the Arabs announced their military goal in the 1948 and 1967 wars, Barak claimed that most Israelis now want to throw Israeli "Arabs into the sea." Critics in Knesset said this speech proves that an anti-Zionist agenda has taken over the Supreme Court (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/26). Does Barak really care about human rights and racism? "Barak's presence on the Supreme Court produced anti-democratic restrictions to freedom of speech and to the trashing of any form of checks and balances on the court's 'activism,' and led to an explosion in anti-Jewish racism by Israeli Arabs and Jewish leftists." (Prof. Steven Plaut, 6/28). Informed readers recognize that the terms Barak used are code words that sound respectable as a cover for an ethnic agenda. I think he maligns Israelis, and that the major problem is human rights offenses against the Jews by the Palestinian Authority and Israel. Why doesn't he recognize some of it? The speech does not prove that the Court injects its personal bias into its rulings. The rulings do prove it. Barak admitted it when he defended basing his rulings on "enlightened opinion," meaning his own opinion. My articles have cited the undemocratic nature of the Court, being a self-appointed body, lacking separation of powers and not ruling on the basis of Israeli law. Without Constitutional limits, the Court, indulges excessively in personal opinion favoring the Arabs and hampering Jewish rights. Israel often is not a state of its Jewish citizens. For an example of oppression of Jewish rights, see here: www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner ~y2009m7d16-Police-arrest-proArab-anarchists-near-Bat-Ayin Anti-Jewish bias is in Israeli universities, too. For an example, see here: www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel- Conflict-Examiner~y2009m7d14-University-of-Haifa- against-Jewish-students ISRAEL'S FALL-BACK ARGUMENT ON JUDEA-SAMARIA Israel is attempting a fall-back argument to persuade the U.S. government to let the Jews build to accommodate the natural growth of the resident population of Judea-Samaria, but not bring in more people from the State of Israel. The argument has to do with the small numbers of people involved and their minimal effect upon the Territories as a whole. The facts back the argument. Israel's natural grown argument, however, falls on deaf ears and hard hearts. It becomes haggling. [This after all is an era of unfriendliness towards the Jewish people, fear of the Radical Muslims, and U.S. lies about previous agreements.] In focusing narrowly on natural growth, Israel forfeits its broader rights. The broader rights are the better case. "Natural growth" is a fall-back argument. This argument is unwise, like the storekeeper who argues that his investment in the store entitles him to remain in it. If he doesn't affirm and prove his ownership rights to the whole building, what good would be sympathy, if any, for his investment in a store in a building someone else, uncontested, claims to own? Thus Israel's fall-back argument not only implicitly concedes its case to the Territories, but also to Israel, itself. The only difference between Jews developing the State of Israel and the Territories is an insignificant armistice line between them. That line was set up because the Arabs rejected the League of Nations' attempt to correct the historic injustice done [in part by the Muslim Arabs] to the Jewish people. The Arabs started wars over it, ending at one point at that Green Line armistice point. If the Jews don't have a right to the eastern side of the armistice line, what right have they to the western side? What is the Jewish people's broad, underlying claim to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza? "One might expect more national pride and a clearer, more lucid statement [than 'natural growth'] from a government that believes Judea and Samaria are inseparable parts of the historic homeland, and at the very least sees the 'settlement blocs' as an inseparable part of the State of Israel in any final status accord." [So is the Golan.] Simon Maccabaeus, the Chanukah hero commemorated for helping to liberate Judea and Judaism from Greek rule from Syria, said, "We have neither taken other men's land, neither do we hold that which is other men's: but the inheritance of our fathers, which was for some time unjustly possessed by our enemies." There are "...historic, religious, legal and sentimental links that bind the people of Israel with Hebron and Beit El" in the territories..." Jews "...are not occupiers in our own country and that there are Jews for whom this land is holy, just as it is holy to Palestinians — Jews whose connection to these pieces of land are bound by love, the Bible, tradition, nature and beauty." The Jewish people rejoined their surviving kinsmen in the Land of Israel, part of which became the State of Israel, on the basis of having a right to do so, not on the basis of national security (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/26 from Nadav Shragai of Haaretz). Study the historical documents leading to implementation of modern Zionism! These include the Balfour Declaration, the WWI peace accords, the Palestine Mandate, the Geneva conventions, the UN Charter, and the Bible. Study the commentaries about them by experts in international law, such as Dr. Paul Riebenfeld. The Palestine Mandate recognized the Jewish people's pre-existing rights to their country on both sides of the Jordan River and their right to settle closely on the land. How many partitions of their country must the Jewish people suffer in behalf of a nation whose states exceed the area of the United States of America? In behalf of a nation whose pressure on Britain got Britain to bar Palestine to millions of Jews whom Hitler at first was willing to let out of Europe, but murdered when the Arabs, Britain and the rest of the world barred most? If this were a just world, security would be a valid argument. Another partition of the Jewish people's homeland not only would violate the Jewish people's rights, it would cede secure borders to the Arab nation that, now in a religious fervor, would commit another Holocaust. U.S. diplomacy would bring not only injustice, but millions of murders. What American should want that? Religious claims are delicate if not subjective. There are some general misunderstandings about them we should clarify. The main Islamic claim to the Land of Israel is that it once conquered it, so it is entitled to it. That argument is based upon a hegemonic view of religious entitlement, with a foundation of imperialism. Ponder that. I have seen quotations from Islamic scholars, conveniently forgotten by our contemporaries, acknowledging that the Holy Land belongs to the Jewish people. Same for Jerusalem. Same for the Temple Mount. Even the holiness of the Temple Mount to Islam is based upon one interpretation denied by many Islamic scholars, and that is not logical — since the Quran refers not to "Jerusalem" but to the "furthest mosque" that Muhammad visited in a dream when there were no mosques in Jerusalem. So long as Israel allows other religions access to their holy places, which it does, and so long as the Muslim Arabs deny access, as they try to do in Jerusalem, Hebron, Joseph's Tomb, and Rachel's Tomb, the Muslims cannot in fairness base a political claim to Jerusalem on religion. Many people, including Jews, hear without comment Muslim religious claims to the Land of Israel. These same people scorn Jewish religious claims to the land of Israel. My next sentence is not judging the rival claims. Why the double standard in accepting as a procedure for claiming territory a Muslim religious case, but rejecting as a procedure for claiming territory a Jewish religious case? Earlier articles discussed migrations, wars, and other factors. As for U.S. foreign policy, it is intrusive and abusive. That is just what Democrats suspected of Bush. Actually, that is steady State Dept. policy against Zionism. Israel should tell the U.S. to busy itself with reversing its decline and certainly not assist the jihadists to gain more power and have a triumph to boost recruitment. The trouble with Netanyahu's defense is it is on the defensive. He pleads with frosty powers to be reasonable, he's not doing too much for them to complain about. A better defense is: (1) Show that the other side is criminal and undeserving; and (2) Affirm one's full national rights so clearly and proudly, that the U.S. would have to back off. Make it seem not personal but nevertheless uninformed or vicious of the U.S. to interfere with Israel. To see how much the Palestinian Arabs would claim, if they could, see here: www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-I srael-Conflict-Examiner~y2009m7d21-Palestinian- Authority-claims-the-Wailing-Wall Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

DAYEINU! THE JEWISH PEOPLE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS OPPRESSION Posted by Aryeh Zelasko, July 22, 2009.

This is a bit of progress but like so much that comes out of the Dati "camp" it is half hearted and doomed to failure. Once again the burden of action and responsibility is foisted on the youth. All of us, today and not tomorrow, must pick up a telephone and call our soldier sons and make it clear to them that we expect them to remain loyal to their mission, namely, the defense of the people and the land, and not, Heaven forbid, participation in the destruction of settlements and the handing over of portions of the homeland to the Arab enemy. Why not call our husbands, wives, friends and relatives who work for the Government and tell them to resign their jobs? Bring the whole rotten system to a grinding halt. For those who are too frighten to resign, let them go on sick leave or whatever. Furthermore, instead of focusing on the limited but important issue of Yeshah, focus on the entire country. Netanyahu has betrayed the nation. Insist on his resignation and new elections. Accept only one outcome, Netanyahu's resignation and new elections. As long as the adults in the Dati "camp" hide behind their children and expect them to bear the brunt of this struggle, there can be no chance of success. When the sons will see their fathers fighting, they will not have to be told what to do. This article below was written by Nadia Matar of Women In Green. It is called "A Tale of Two Border Patrol Policemen and Seven Settlers."

Yesterday the Arutz 7 web site had a film in which we see two Border Patrol policemen attacking a Jewish demonstrator, from the lovers of Eretz Israel camp, and sadistically abusing him. According to most of the responses to the report, the public was shocked by the Border Patrol violence. I, however, am no longer surprised by any police violence. I was shocked by something that, in my humble opinion, is more serious: by the inaction and lack of response by the seven Jews, settlers, who stood by,still, to what was happening and did not step in. I must point out that they did — politely — express their protest: "Hey, stop abusing him," "What's going on here," "Enough," but they did not physically intervene. This scene reminds me of the old sad joke about the eight Jews who are walking around in Europe and two non-Jews come towards them. One Jew asks the others: "Oy vey, what will we do? We are eight and they are two! Let's run away!" I want to ask the young men who are seen in the film, who were present during the sadistic abuse of their friends: Master of the Universe! In the film you look at least 18 years old. Strong youth, who might even have undergone some krav maga (self-defense) training. Why didn't you defend your friend? According to the film, you could easily have overpowered the two Border Patrol policemen, and taken their hands off your friend's face, so they would at least have stopped choking him! I know that they filled all your heads not to raise a hand against a policeman or soldier, but they meant to say that we should not initiate violence. Here, this was a case of self-defense, against an attack. Anyone who defends himself against police violence, or any other kind of violence, is not violent, but is simply defending himself or his fellow. Obviously, it is important to film and document the event, so that the police will not be able to concoct a fake case of "assaulting a police officer." I wouldn't have made anything of this, if such scenarios didn't repeat themselves over and over again. The picture presented by the film reminds me of the fury I felt when I watched a recording of the events of Amona, in which we see a policeman enter a room and bring down his club again, again, and yet again on dozens of the people sitting on the floor in the room. My initial anger was naturally directed against the policeman, but after a few seconds I said to myself: Master of the Universe! How is it that, of the dozens of young men in the room, a few didn't get up, to take the club away from the policeman's hands! And if the reports are correct, that all the young folks there were handcuffed, to prove their being nonviolent, then they should have gotten up on their feet and used their feet until the policeman stopped raining down blows on them. This isn't violence, this is self-defense. Thetime has come to look at the conduct of our public in light of the attacks against us. The late Adir Zik always said that a considerable part of our public is sick with the "second-rate" disease. That is, it suffers from feelings of inferiority to the secular-leftist public. Others would say that we learn baseless love too extremely, so that we have lost the ability to be angry with those who do us injustice. Yet others will say that the genes of the galut (exile) are still embedded within us. Whatever the reason, the time has come to stop the policy of turning the other cheek. No more hugging a soldier or policemen who comes to destroy our home, and we won't let a violent policeman carry out his designs without defending ourselves. Does this mean that we have to be violent? Should we act like our ultra-Orthodox brothers? Many have said that if we had struggled over every house in Gush Katif like the ultra-Orthodox behaved this week after the mother's arrest, we would still be in Gush Katif. Possibly. But what can we do ... our public isn't capable of that, and perhaps that's all for the best. Our strength lies elsewhere: the way for our camp to stop the expulsion decrees is (1) nonparticipation by our soldiers in the destruction mission, certainly not in the innermost circle, but not even in the outermost one. The mission of destroying the outposts cannot be implemented without the army. Thank God, there are tens of thousands of young men from our camp in the army. All of us, today and not tomorrow, must pick up a telephone and call our soldier sons and make it clear to them that we expect them to remain loyal to their mission, namely, the defense of the people and the land, and not, Heaven forbid, participation in the destruction of settlements and the handing over of portions of the homeland to the Arab enemy. (2) A nonviolent, but mass, struggle: our camp numbers hundreds of thousands of Jews loyal to Eretz Israel who understand that the destruction of 23 outposts is the first phase of the destruction of the entire settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria. If and when we will have to defend the outposts, it must be clear to us all that we are not going to work, we are not going to study in the yeshivah or the girls' mikhlalah (seminary), but we are taking to the streets and going to the outposts in our masses, sitting in on the main roads and preventing the security forces from reaching their target. If necessary, we will remain a day, two days, or even a week. This isn't a demonstration. This is a battle, a battle for the private and national home. These two principles would have saved Gush Katif and northern Samaria. Unfortunately, they were not put into practice, because of rabbis who opposed refusing orders and leaders who organized bombastic two-hour demonstrations at the Western Wall and in Malkhei Yisrael Square, but were incapable of leading a true struggle. Now is the time to correct the mistakes that were made in 2005. This is even more actual and urgent today, when we were informed of the preparations by the IDF and the Border Patrol for the destruction of 23 outposts. For the young people who were seen in the film and all other youth, the time has come to participate in courses in krav maga and self-defense. Not in order to be violent, Heaven forbid, but for the reasons of self-defense, mutual responsibility, and the defense of Eretz Israel. Aryeh Zelasko lives in Beitar Illit, south of Jerusalem. He is Director of Sales and Marketing of Israel Visit (www.israelvisit.co.il) which provides information and an internet buying facility for American visitors to Israel. He writes, "Stop complaining and fight back! Here's how: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/7702 and http://www.nfc.co.il/Archive/003-D-27449-00.html?tag=04-32-31 Have a nice day." To Go To Top

US REJECTS, JEWISH GROUPS SUPPORT NETANYAHU'S JERUSALEM STATEMENTS Posted by Arutz-7, July 21, 2009.

This was written by Zalman Nelson.

Support for PM's Jerusalem Stand The battle of words over Jewish rights to build and purchase homes in Jerusalem continued Monday and Tuesday with statements from the U.S. State Department and prominent Jewish groups. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley told members of the media that the U.S. continues to oppose Israeli construction in eastern Jerusalem, but he added that the Jewish state's rejection of American demands is not a new issue. "We have made our views known to Israel. Our views are not new either, that this kind of construction is the type of thing that should be — is the type of issue that should be subject to permanent status negotiations, and that we are concerned that unilateral actions taken by the Israelis or the Palestinians cannot prejudge the outcome of these negotiations," Crowley said. He noted that the State Department is "working hard through George Mitchell and others to create conditions so that you can have a resumption of negotiations that would lead the parties to address these final status issues." Crowley confirmed that U.S. special envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell will be in the region later this week. The recent tension began when Israel's Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren was urgently summoned to the State Department over the weekend to hear that Israel must stop a private construction project at the site of the Jewish-owned Shepherd Hotel in eastern Jerusalem. Rejecting American officials' demand to halt the project, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that Jewish residents of Jerusalem, the capital of Israel and the Jewish people, can purchase homes in any area of the city just like Arab residents can. "Jerusalem is not included in discussions with the U.S. about a settlement freeze," he said. "This is the policy of an open city, an undivided city that has no divisions according to religion or national affiliation." Orthodox Groups Praise Netanyahu Prime Minister Netanyahu's comments and his stated position on the future of Jerusalem earned him commendation Monday from the National Council of Young Israel (NCYI), a coordinating agency for Orthodox congregations in the U.S. and Canada. "It is essential that we tell the Israeli government that we support them and stand together with them in their effort to protect the Jewish homeland," NCYI President Shlomo Mostofsky said in a press statement. "Prime Minister Netanyahu needs to know that hundreds of thousands of American Jews and countless friends of Israel wholeheartedly endorse the idea that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel." He praised the prime minister's "unequivocal declaration that Jerusalem's sovereignty is not in dispute, and that Israel will not bow to external pressure that attempts to dictate Israeli policy on Jerusalem," said Mostofsky, who urged American Jews to contact the Israeli Embassy to voice their support for Netanyahu's position on Jerusalem. The Orthodox Union (OU) Jewish umbrella organization joined NCYI in supporting Netanyahu and rejecting U.S. pressures. "The Orthodox Union disagrees with the position of the United States that, like Jewish settlement activities in other areas of Judea and Samaria, Israel must not permit new Jewish residency or construction is eastern sections of Jerusalem. We remain partners with you... for the continued preservation of Jerusalem's unity as the Jewish people's holy and eternal capital." In a statement, the OU pledged to "continue our commitment to Israel and Jerusalem through our service programs at our Israel Center in Jerusalem and through our advocacy for Israel's interests in Washington, DC." The Shepherd Hotel property has been owned by Dr. Irving Moskowitz since 1985. The Land of Israel activist has built other projects in eastern Jerusalem as well, most notably the Maaleh HaZeitim neighborhood in what local Arabs have dubbed Ras el-Amud, below and to the south of the Temple Mount. To Go To Top

JEWS TO RECLAIM LAND IN JORDAN? Posted by Maayana Miskin, July 21, 2009.

This appeared today in Arutz-7. The Israel Land Fund, a group dedicated to restoring Jewish property in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, is reportedly looking east. According to AFP, the organization plans to begin buying historically Jewish properties in Jordan as well. Many Jews purchased land in what is now Jordan during the British Mandate, when such land was seen primarily as part of the greater Land of Israel. In 1946 Jordan declared independence as an Arab, Muslim country. Two years later, the state of Israel declared independence, and Jordan's rulers confiscated Jewish-owned land in their own country for state use. Israel Land Fund chairman Aryeh King told AFP that his organization has proof that thousands of properties in present-day Jordan were historically Jewish, adding, "We have records of the ownership." The plan is in its early stages, and no properties in Jordan have been bought to date. Purchasing would likely take place with the help of Jews in Europe, King said, as Israelis are prohibited from buying land in Jordan under Jordanian law. The same Jordanian law is enforced by the Palestinian Authority, which views the sale of land to Jews or Israelis as a capital offense. The Land Fund manages to circumvent PA law by buying land through middlemen. In many cases, the group also helps Arab sellers to flee the country in order to avoid PA retribution. Jewish properties bought or reclaimed by the Israel Land Fund in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria are guarded and used to build homes for Jewish activists. It was not clear what would be done with property reclaimed in Jordan. AFP noted that if the plan were to succeed, it could cause anger in Jordan, where anti-Israel sentiment runs high despite a 1994 peace treaty. Maayan Miskin is a writer for Arutz-7 (www.Israelnn.com). To Go To Top

ISRAEL THE BEAUTIFUL: THE CAROB TREE ATOP MT. ARBEL Posted by Yehoshua Halevi, July 21, 2009.

The Carob Tree atop Mt. Arbel in the Galilee   This is one of Yehoshua Halevi's Golden Light Images. Yehoshua Halevi writes: "HOW I GOT THE SHOT: Some years ago, health food proponents tried to promote carob as an alternative to chocolate. From a nutritional standpoint, carob may in fact out-duel chocolate, but I never fell for this gastronomical ruse and stood by my favorite sweet. It wasn't until years later that I encountered my first carob tree, which is native to Israel and grows widely in the warm, Mediterranean climate. This particular tree sits upon the rocky plateau of Mount Arbel in the Galilee, growing alone among the rocks and a few grassy weeds. It is known simply as "The Carob Tree," with a short trail by the same name leading to it from the parking lot. Summer is a difficult season to photograph in any locale, but especially in two-season climates where months without rain leave the landscape dusty and parched. I arrived late in the afternoon looking for a broad shot of the Kinneret from atop Mt. Arbel's lofty cliffs, but found this shot the moment I walked past the tree and looked back toward the setting sun. I positioned myself so the bottom set of rocks, aglow with afternoon light, formed a triangle at the base of the photo. The lines forming the two sides of this triangle combine with its peak to lead the viewer straight to the subject and also form two additional triangles whose peaks all meet at the base of the tree. Even though I was shooting directly into the sun, I managed to avoid what would have been a formless silhouette of the tree's crown, which is lit by the light reflecting off the rocks. I may not appreciate the carob fruit, but I do admire this tree's ability to take root and thrive in such an austere location. Contact Yehoshua Halevi by email at smile@goldenlightimages.com and visit his website: http://www.goldenlightimages.com. Reproductions of his work as cards, calenders and posters may be purchased at http://www.cafepress.com/halevi18 To Go To Top

OBAMA'S "USEFUL IDIOTS" Posted by LEL, July 21, 2009.

This was written by Matthew M. Hausman and appeared on Israpundit http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=15497

The intellectual swords have been drawn. Jewish conservatives and independents have openly questioned Jewish liberals' commitment to Israel in light of their continued support for Barack Obama, who is hostile to Israel even as he apologizes to the Arab-Muslim world for the sins allegedly committed against it by the West. Sixty-seven years ago, many Jewish organizations remained silent as the Holocaust unfolded and refused to lobby Franklin D. Roosevelt to act. But as cowardly or misguided as their conduct was, it did not involve affirmative lobbying on behalf of German interests or values. The Jewish liberal establishment today openly criticizes Israel's right to self-defense, uncritically accepts the Palestinian national myth, supports the demand for a freeze on settlements, belittles the threat of a nuclear Iran, and condones the historical revisionism underlying Mr. Obama's Middle East policies. Unlike the Jewish establishment's failure during Holocaust, the conduct of today's liberal elite actually empowers Israel's enemies, and thus threatens the safety and security of the Jewish People in Israel and in Diaspora. During last year's presidential campaign, liberal Jews mobilized to market Mr. Obama as safe for Israel and good for the Jews despite his known associations with antisemitic and anti-Israel zealots (e.g., Jeremiah Wright and Rashid Kalidi) throughout his political career. There was no way to rationalize away his troubling associations, but his liberal and left-wing advocates were secure in the knowledge that most Jews would vote Democratic anyway. Thus, despite a few window-dressing remarks here and there about America's special relationship with Israel, they never really called on Mr. Obama to acquit himself. His actions immediately after the election quickly validated his critics' concerns. Even before taking office, for example, he sent Robert Malley as a special envoy to the Middle East to meet with representatives of the Syrian and Egyptian governments — the same Robert Malley who had met with members of Hamas on behalf of Mr. Obama during the campaign. Malley's vitriolic track record concerning Israel and his published sympathies for Hamas and Hezbollah were well known and should have generated serious questions among President Obama's Jewish supporters. Instead, mainstream liberals were silent and left-wing ideologues actually praised the President for showing "even-handedness." Mr. Obama continued down this troubling path after his swearing in. Perhaps indicative of his views on the Middle East, he tabbed Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, despite Freeman's history as a shill for the Saudi government and — like Malley — an apologist for Hamas and Hezbollah. When his nomination was torpedoed, President Obama stood by while left-wing partisans invoked Walt and Mearsheimer and blamed the mythical Jewish lobby for sullying Freeman's reputation. Thereafter, Mr. Obama consistently and publicly blamed Israel for the failure of the peace process while routinely refusing to hold the Arab world accountable for rejecting Israel's right to exist and promoting terrorism. Even more alarming, Mr. Obama validated Iran's claimed need for a nuclear program, openly courted despots, dictators and antisemitic regimes, and endorsed the so-called Saudi peace initiative, which is simply a thinly disguised prescription for Israel's demise. And yet the majority of his liberal supporters failed to challenge him or even suggest that his acts and omissions might be signaling a significant change in American foreign policy. Some even continue to promote the President's troubling foreign policies actively and uncritically. Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler, for example, has made several trips to Jerusalem recently to lobby for a moratorium on settlement construction, despite his reputation as a strong supporter of Israel. However, for some, the façade finally began to crack after Mr. Obama's speech in Cairo, where he distorted Jewish history, regurgitated the propaganda myth that Israel was a European invention foisted upon the Arabs, falsely blamed Israel and the so-called settlements for stalling the peace process, and ignored the long history Arab colonialism, intransigence, rejectionism and antisemitism. His speech was obsequious to the point of embarrassment. Finally, some of his Jewish supporters began to question his motives and intentions with regard to Israel. But even as some liberals finally began asking the right questions, many others grew ever shriller in their defense of Mr. Obama, arguing that that we owe him the benefit of the doubt, with no regard for his anti-Israel credentials or the increasing litany of words and deeds evidencing his bias. In his Jerusalem Post blog, for example, Allan Dershowitz articulated his continuing belief in Mr. Obama, arguing among other things that, despite some "troubling" remarks in Cairo, his policies — and indeed those of the Democratic Party — are best for Israel. However, this position is simply not tenable in light of the plain substance of the Cairo speech, a point driven home by Spectator and Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips in her written response to Professor Dershowitz's column. Among other things, Ms. Phillips questioned how an intelligent person and self-proclaimed supporter of Israel could defend Mr. Obama without critically analyzing his very public comments and actions. This criticism is validated by, among other things, the President's insulting snub of Israel's prime minister in Washington, his near pathological focus on the "settlements," and his implication that Israel must curb its population growth. The sparring between Professor Dershowitz and Ms. Phillips continued in the press and has crystallized the essential element of the debate: namely, that Jewish liberals support Mr. Obama not because of his views on Israel, but because he represents a secular liberal agenda that they support. Their affinity for Mr. Obama has absolutely nothing to do with his policies on Israel and the Middle East. Concern for Israel and traditional Jewish values is only incidental to the vast liberal mainstream. Israel is not a primary issue for many liberals, and is even considered an embarrassment by the political left, whose gut response to affirmations of Jewish values and history is to reject them, adopt the narrative of Israel's critics and opponents, and condemn Israel automatically, unquestioningly, and without hesitation. In contrast, Jewish political conservatives and independents are more willing to distinguish transient political issues from core Jewish values, including support for Israel and for her preservation as a Jewish state. Jews who do not identify as liberal are more vocal both in their support of Israel and their discomfort with the President's clear acceptance of the Arab narrative, his consistent public flogging of Israel over "settlement expansion," and his deafening silence regarding Arab-Muslim culpability for terrorism, rejection of Israel, and the continued state of war. Unfortunately, the liberal Jewish mainstream does not seem to have learned from history, and comparisons with the Jewish supporters of Franklin D. Roosevelt are as apt as they are striking. Like Mr. Obama today, President Roosevelt had many Jewish allies who advocated his political programs with an almost religious fervor. In fact, Roosevelt appointed a number of Jews to government posts, or relied on them as trusted advisors, including the financier Bernard Baruch, Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, presidential speech writer Samuel Rosenman, and Congressman Sol Bloom, then Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And yet, when it came to standing up for the Jews of Europe, Roosevelt did not want to get involved and did not seem to care for Jews who did. A stark example of Roosevelt's indifference to the Jewish suffering in Europe was his acceptance of a report by his special envoy to the Middle East, Lt. Col. Harold Hoskins, who called for a censure of Zionist "propaganda," which he claimed would upset the Arabs and derail the American war effort. Of course, much of this "propaganda" consisted of publicizing the extermination of European Jewry and the need for policy-based rescue efforts. The report was supported by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who advocated a do-nothing attitude with respect to stopping the genocide or organizing efforts to save the victims. Some well-placed Jews, including Sol Bloom and Samuel Rosenman, reportedly endorsed the Hoskins report. Based on this report, administration officials met with Jewish movie moguls and requested that they not produce any movies about the plight of the Jews in Europe, which they claimed would be injurious to Jewish and American interests. Hollywood caved and all such movies were shelved. When news of the genocide gathered momentum, some Jewish spokesmen, such as the Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise, did the administration's bidding and attempted to minimize or discredit the reports and keep the Jewish community from mobilizing, causing a "distraction" to the war effort, and embarrassing Roosevelt. Moreover, many of Roosevelt's Jewish political allies attempted to paint those Jews who openly lobbied on behalf of their brethren in Europe as obstreperous rabble rousers, often undercutting their lobbying and advocacy efforts. In one well-known instance, for example, Jewish supporters of Roosevelt undermined the efforts of the Aggudat ha-Rabbonim, which organized the "Rabbis' March on Washington" in 1943. The march was conceived by Hillel Kook, a/k/a Peter Bergson, and involved some 400 Orthodox rabbis, including Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who would become one of the most respected rabbinical authorities of the 20th Century. On the advice of some of his Jewish advisors and prominent Jewish Democrats, Roosevelt refused to meet with the group. These rabbis were Orthodox and many were immigrants, and they did not look like their assimilated, secular brethren who had worked hard at cultivating their American appearances and their social and political credentials. Like a vapor in the night, Roosevelt slipped away through the backdoor of the White House to avoid facing the rabbis. Even more blatant were the attempts to undercut the Bergson Group, led by Kook and screenwriter Ben Hecht, who wrote and produced the traveling pageant entitled, "We Shall Never Die." Despite post-war revisionist claims to the contrary, the Final Solution was in fact common knowledge in the United States in 1942, and the Bergson Group conceived the show to publicize the plight of European Jewry and stimulate a national call to action. The pageant was first staged at Madison Square Garden in New York and thereafter travelled to other major American cities, including Washington, where it was seen by Eleanor Roosevelt. Rabbi Wise, the American Jewish Committee, and other Jewish establishment organizations attempted to suppress the show, and the AJC even requested the IRS to investigate the group's finances. But Kook and Hecht were intrepid. The show was credited with finally inducing Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board in 1944, although he still opposed unlimited immigration to the United States and British administered Palestine, and its efforts were largely viewed as too little, too late. The question troubling to many historians is what motivated Rabbi Wise, the AJC, and other Jewish citizens and organizations, to oppose organized efforts by Jews to save Jews at a time when the failure to act meant certain death. One of the uncomfortable answers is that saving foreign Jews was not a priority for Roosevelt. While Roosevelt certainly seems to have tolerated acculturated Jews who looked like "normal" Americans and supported his political agenda, he seems to have had little use for those who looked and acted like Old World stereotypes. Or he may simply have felt no kinship and, accordingly, no moral responsibility. Unfortunately, many of "his" Jews may have felt the same way, falling prey to the Diaspora mentality that has always caused certain elements of the Jewish population to reject their own and identify with external values, and even with their oppressors. Or it could be that they deluded themselves for political reasons into thinking that supporting the President's war effort was the best way to save the Jews of Europe. Is there a difference between the Jews who blindly supported Roosevelt and those who support Mr. Obama and his destructive foreign policy today? As morally ambiguous as the actions of Rabbi Wise, the AJC and others may have been, they were arguably not actively aiding or abetting the Axis powers or strengthening Germany's ability to perpetrate genocide. Moreover, Israel did not yet exist, and many saw the United States as the Jews' greatest chance for salvation. Thus, although they may have convinced themselves that supporting Roosevelt, and by extension the war effort, afforded the best opportunity for saving European Jewry, they were not intentionally taking actions to empower those who sought to exterminate the Jewish People. Moreover, they were not supporting a president who actively sought dialogue with murderous regimes or who was attempting to appease governments that threatened or engaged in genocide. In contrast, Mr. Obama fawningly courts an Arab world that openly seeks the destruction of Israel and the Jewish People, and actually lends credence to the Arabs' unhistorical claims and polemical grievances. This President also continues to seek dialogue with an Iranian regime that has specifically stated its intent to "wipe Israel off the map." Thus, Jews who support Mr. Obama are directly supporting policies that compromise the safety and security of Jews in Israel and in Diaspora. Moreover, left-wing Jews who act as apologists or actively advocate for the Arab cause, who support Hezbollah and Hamas, and who belittle the threat of a nuclear Iran, are directly bolstering regimes that have sworn to destroy Israel. The obstructionist efforts of Roosevelt's Jewish political allies, their failure to lobby Roosevelt to act in defense of the Jews of Europe, and their opposition to a boycott of Nazi Germany before the war certainly cost Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Although the standard justification by these progressives was that they intended to assist the war effort and thereby save Jewish lives, such explanations were recognized as hollow rationalizations by many others, including the Bergson Group, the Aggudat ha-Rabbonim, and American followers of Zeev Jabotinsky. Rationalizations aside, the conduct was clearly indefensible. Yet, it is difficult to imagine that even the most rabidly assimilationist Jewish organizations of Roosevelt's day would have knowingly supported or facilitated Germany's efforts to carry out the Final Solution. In contrast, today's liberal apologists and left-wing extremists adopt positions that give succor to Israel's enemies, and continue to support a foreign policy that is clearly prepared to offer up Israel as a sacrificial lamb. Similar to their progressive forebears who slavishly supported Roosevelt without critical scrutiny, many of today's liberal and left-wing activists claim that they are actually acting in the Israel's best interests when they support demands for a freeze on settlements, lobby for the creation of a Palestinian state, view the Arab "right of return" and the division of Jerusalem as legitimate items for discussion, or argue that Israel should be a bi-national state instead of a Jewish one. In order to claim that such advocacy is in Israel's best interests, those who make the argument must supplant real history with political propaganda. They must ignore that Islam has always considered Jews as monkeys and pigs, treated them as a subjugated people within their own land, and that any land incorporated into dar al-Islam (the world of Islam) through conquest can never go back to its "infidel" owners. They must likewise ignore the years of Arab rejectionism that preceded Israel's declaration of statehood and the existence of any "settlements." They must also ignore the Arab-initiated wars of extermination, that Palestinian peoplehood was a myth created in the 1960s as a tool to challenge the legitimacy of Israel, and that there was never a country called Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. Finally, they must ignore the continuing history of Arab incitement, as reflected in the Palestinian Charters (whether those of the PLO or Hamas), which call for Israel's destruction and reject any permanent peace with Israel. These facts are difficult to ignore, however, and those Jews who do so must either be ignorant or naïve in the hope that the Arabs don't really mean what they say. But such hope requires that a fairly significant leap of faith be imposed upon Israel, which having been required to defend herself from annihilation since her modern rebirth, is far better qualified to determine what risks she is willing to take. Then, there are those left-wing Jews who know the history but simply do not care, or who really don't want Israel to survive as a Jewish state. Their motivation is not borne of some naïve belief that everybody can learn to live together in mutual respect. Rather, they simply do not want Israel — or traditional Judaism — to continue to exist. They condemn Jewish nationalism and the Jewish belief in a biblical birthright as obstacles to peace, and yet refuse to condemn the unhistorical myth of the Palestinian people and the religious basis for Muslim antisemitism and rejection of Israel. It seems absurd that Jewish leftists could support Islamic regimes while vilifying the Jews' rightful, historical claims; or that they could condemn Jewish religious beliefs while validating Islamic religious intolerance. Vladimir Lenin was said to have coined the term "useful idiots" to refer to vocal communist sympathizers in the West. The Soviets used these people to spread the word, but regarded them contemptuously for their willingness to be manipulated. One could credibly apply the term to liberals and leftists who support Islamists in their war against Israel, but who are nevertheless considered Jewish infidels worthy only of contempt. Thus, there is a difference between today's liberal and left-wing polity and the progressives of Roosevelt's era. While it cannot be denied that progressive behavior during the World War II was reprehensible, it did not take the form of active support of Nazi Germany or the Axis Powers. Moreover, the United States was actually engaged in a war against Germany, and her success would clearly benefit any Jews who happened to be left alive. In contrast, by engaging and legitimizing the Arab-Muslim opponents of Israel, the Jewish left affirmatively facilitates the advancement of an agenda that is hostile to Jewish interests, and in its extreme manifestations condones extermination. Moreover, in undermining the Israeli nationalists, today's left-wing would weaken Israel without any objective proof that the Arabs truly want to negotiate a permanent peace that recognizes Israeli or Jewish sovereignty. These are acts of commission that go much further than the acts of many progressives during Roosevelt's time. In this age of instant information, it is inconceivable that any Jewish political groups could claim that their actions are borne of ignorance. Therefore, the ultimate question facing those who knowingly undercut Israel is how far they are willing to go for the sake of a political agenda that has historically ostracized and abandoned Jews who remain true to themselves and their values. How far indeed? Contact LEL at LEL817@yahoo.com. To Go To Top

A NEW LESSON FOR ISRAEL FROM KING ABDULLAH Posted by Cooperberg, Gary M., July 21, 2009.

B"sd It never fails to amaze me to see how our enemies consistently demonstrate examples of self respect which Israel dare not emulate... because we have no self respect. King Abdullah, of the alleged Kingdom of Jordan, reacting to Israeli statements that Jordan is Palestine, has begun to revoke Jordanian citizenship of so called "Palestinians" living in his country, which is about 70% of the population. By so doing the King hopes to maintain the "Jordanian" character of his country and prevent the so called "Palestinians" from ever taking over. He also seeks to reinforce the goal of building a new PLO state on Israeli soil. Rather than be upset at this new move, the Israeli government can and should emulate it. We should use this new precedent as justification to strip all alleged "Palestinians" living in Israel of their Israeli citizenship. Following the example of the King, we need not expel anyone just yet, rather permit them to continue living in their homes as long as they adhere to Israeli law. They would simply lose Israeli citizenship and thus not be able to vote or run for office. This would preserve the Jewish character of the state of Israel and prevent the ever-growing Arab population from democratically turning Israel into Palestine. This is truly identical to the motivations of King Abdallah! Of course, in addition, it is vital that we incorporate Judea, Samaria and Gaza as part and parcel of the Jewish State. Thus, if the so called Palestinians wish to build a new state, let them do it in Tunis or Saudi Arabia... never on Jewish soil. Of course no Knesset Member has the courage to introduce such a bill as it would immediately find him labeled a racist. Yet now we have the example of our best peace partner, King Abdallah, who has already enacted such a law and is beginning to implement it. Certainly he is not a racist. I urge everyone to write letters, faxes and emails to the Prime Minister of Israel and all Members of Knesset pointing out this very incredible opportunity to save the state of Israel from self destruction via democracy. Project Shofar is dedicated to spreading these truths wherever it is possible to do so. It is sounding the alarm, to Jew and Gentile alike,to open our eyes to the G‑dly process that is presently underway, and work to support it. We dare not stand idly on the sidelines. If you would like to support the concepts espoused by the Voice from Hebron, and the physical work of Project Shofar, see here to make a donation. Or, you can send a tax deductible contribution to: Project Shofar, Inc. — P.O. Box 181191 — Casselberry, FL 32718 Thank you for your support of Project Shofar! Contact Gary Cooperberg by email at gary@projectshofar.org and visit the website: http://www.projectshofar.org A Voice from Hebron by Gary M. Cooperberg P.O. Box 1444, Kiryat Arba-Hebron, Israel 90100 Tel. 972-2-996-3761 — Fax 972-2-996-1778 To Go To Top

UNDER ISRAELI RULE, PALESTINIANS PROSPER Posted by David Meir-Levi, July 21, 2009.

If you encounter someone who harbours the illusion that Israel is oppressing the Palestinians, remind them that: from 1855-1947, when the Zionist endeavour was expanding, and investing millions of dollars (in those days that was money) into reclaiming swamps and irrigating the desert in "Palestine", the Arab population grew almost 400%, as did the area's GDP, industrial infra-structure, ports, and other signs of very good and improving economic health....in large part due to the Zionist endeavour and all of the economic improvements and modernization that Zionist Jews (and the British) brought to "Palestine". From 1947 till today, the Arab poplation of Israel (Arab Israelis who have Israeli citizenship) has grown almost ten-fold; and those Arab Isaelis enjoy more freedoms, democracy, education, economic opportunities, health, longevity, professional opportunities, etc...than the Arabs of any other country in the Middle east (and in fact, than do the populations of many other countries in the entire world). From 1967 to 1994, when Israel had complete political sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the economy skyrocketted at c 7% per year with some years as high as 13%, the Arab population almost quadrupled, infant mortality plummetted, longevity increased, rates of literacy grew by leaps and bounds, tourism skyrocketted, 7 universities sprang up (some thanks to Jewish and Israeli money) where only 3 teacher training colleges had been before, Israel brought the infrastructure in to the 20th century, employment was almost 100% as as many as 300,000 West Bank and Gaza Strip Arabs crossed the green line daily to work in pre-67 Israel, and there was almost no terrorism and none of the defensive efforts of the IDF which today, in response to Arab terrorism, so harshly crimp normal day to day life for the Arabs of the West Bank. All of this came to an end when Arafat took over in 1994. By 2004 the GDP of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was less than 1/10 of what it had been in 1993. UN reports testify to the Palesstinian territories' economic desolation, drop in population, spread of poverty, recurrence of illnessess (especially in children) not seen since before WW2, huge rise in unemployment, all thanks to Arafat's thugocracy and his terror war against Israel. Now, after 15 years of Arafat's rule and Abbas' rule, Hamas has been isolated in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank terrorists are unable to launch attacks thanks to the defensive barrier and are mostly holed up and hidden thanks to the IDF's RE-occupation (the occupation ended with the Oslo Accords in 1993) of the area. And what has this RENEWED military occupation of the West Bank brought to the Palestinians? read articles #2 and #3 below. Note their provenance....not Israel-friendly sources. And note article #1....The settlements are not the problem. Israel's sovereignty over the West Bank is not the problem. When Israel is in control, the Palestinians prosper. There is no "brutal occupation". There is no "harsh repression". Now put these articles together — include also Robert Fulford's article, below: The problem is the fact that there is no Palestinian leadership capable of negotiation with Israel, and that there is one and only one thing that the fragmented and fratricidal Palestinian leadership agrees upon: the destruction of Israel. Write Obama a letter and point this out to him. His pressure on Israel to freeze settlements is not just counter-productive.....it is dangerous and harmful to Palestinian and Israeli interests, and to US interests as well. David ML

1.) "Breathing life back into Nablus" By Heather Sharp BBC News, Nablus http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/middle_east/8154007.stm?ad=1 July 17, 2009 from slicing up knefi, the sticky cheese-based dessert for which his home town of Nablus is famed. Two years ago the northern West Bank town was a stronghold of armed Palestinian militant groups. And just three months ago, the six Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints that had ringed it for nine years had all but killed its economic life. Most residents could leave only by two routes — on foot or through checkpoints which often had long queues. Israel says its system of closures and checkpoints in the West Bank is necessary to stop potential suicide bombers and other attackers, but many Palestinians have long viewed it as a form of collective punishment. International efforts to boost the Palestinian Authority security forces have already borne fruit in Jenin, which saw movement restrictions eased last year. And in recent weeks, Israel has deemed security gains sufficient for it to take what it describes as the "calculated risk" of removing and easing many key roadblocks and checkpoints across the West Bank. Cars now drive within a few minutes through Hawarra, Nablus's main checkpoint; the other roads in and out of the city have reopened. Headscarved women pick through piles of shoes and bags as Arabic pop plays from loudspeakers on the newly bustling streets. A cinema opened its doors in the city last month for the first time in 20 years. Dozens of busloads of Israeli-Arabs have been coming to shop on Saturdays since April, when Israel began allowing them to cross the West Bank barrier from northern Israel, one day a week. Political graffiti and posters of militants that have died are being replaced with signs saying "Welcome to Nablus, the economic capital". Palestinian policemen are enforcing new seat belt laws. Change is possible' In a complex perched on a rubble-strewn hill outside the town centre, Tony Blair, Middle East envoy for the international community and former British PM, toured the gleaming tiled floors of the Nablus Hyatt this week. "We didn't bring the swimming trunks," he quipped by the new hotel's large, pristine pool. Tasked with improving the economic situation in the West Bank, he has pushed hard for the removal of the checkpoints. "Two years ago, I couldn't have come here, there were militia in the streets," he said. "There's still massive amount to do, but providing we keep building on the security and the economics, and then we add to that a credible political negotiation, what Nablus shows is that change is possible." Suleiman Daifi, a member of the hotel's board, says the $3.1m that a group of local figures ploughed into the facility was a "very dangerous investment". The complex opened in April and is not yet covering its costs. But the management say the removal of the checkpoints and Israeli-Arab visitors have boosted business 20-30%. Israel's new, right-leaning prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has made much of the phrase "economic peace". In opposition, he used it to refer to plans to boost economic activity in the West Bank as he did not consider the Palestinians, split between the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority and Hamas, ready. Since coming to office, and under pressure from US President Barack Obama to kick-start peace talks, he has advocated political negotiations alongside economic measures. But while he reluctantly backed the principle of a demilitarised Palestinian state, he has issued the new demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state, and refuses to freeze all settlement activity. Mr Daifi said he believes the peace process is "stuck". "I think economic peace is a joke," he said. "The economy will not be sustainable if there is not a sustainable political situation." Mr Blair said he believes American efforts will lead to the relaunch of a "credible" peace process "in the next few weeks, next few months". 'Root of the problem' On Wednesday, the IMF issued an unusually upbeat economic forecast for the West Bank, predicting 7% growth — but only if Israel continues to ease restrictions. But Essam al-Qudu, who has to travel all over the West Bank as manager of a company which installs security systems, said there is no guarantee the checkpoints will even stay open. He says there is already a "different atmosphere" in Nablus. But he remembers the short-lived wave of optimism and freedom of movement in the wake of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, which gave way to heavy closures as the second Palestinian intifada or uprising broke out in 2000. "Netanyahu wants to concentrate on the economic situation — as if all Arabs become rich they will forget the political issue... that's wrong." "The main root of the problem is the political situation — an independent state for us," he said. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/8154007.stm Published: 2009/07/17 06:35:17 GMT 2.) "Signs of Hope Emerge in the West Bank " By Ethan Bronner New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/world/middleeast/ 17westbank.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print July 17, 2009 NABLUS, West Bank — The first movie theater to operate in this Palestinian city in two decades opened its doors in late June. Palestinian policemen standing beneath new traffic lights are checking cars for seat belt violations. One-month-old parking meters are filling with the coins of shoppers. Music stores are blasting love songs into the street, and no nationalist or Islamist scold is forcing them to stop. "You don't appreciate the value of law and order until you lose it," Rashid al-Sakhel, the owner of a carpet store, said as he stood in his doorway surveying the small wonder of bustling streets on a sunny morning. "For the past eight years, a 10-year-old boy could order a strike and we would all close. Now nobody can threaten us." For the first time since the second Palestinian uprising broke out in late 2000, leading to terrorist bombings and fierce Israeli countermeasures, a sense of personal security and economic potential is spreading across the West Bank as the Palestinian Authority's security forces enter their second year of consolidating order. The International Monetary Fund is about to issue its first upbeat report in years for the West Bank, forecasting a 7 percent growth rate for 2009. Car sales in 2008 were double those of 2007. Construction on the first new Palestinian town in decades, for 40,000, will begin early next year north of Ramallah. In Jenin, a seven-story store called Herbawi Home Furnishings has opened, containing the latest espresso machines. Two weeks ago, the Israeli military shut its obtrusive nine-year-old checkpoint at the entrance to this city, part of a series of reductions in security measures. Whether all this can last and lead to the consolidation of political power for the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah, as the Obama administration hopes, remains unclear. But a recent opinion poll in the West Bank and Gaza by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, a Palestinian news agency, found that Fatah was seen as far more trustworthy than Hamas — 35 percent versus 19 percent — a significant shift from the organization's poll in January, when Hamas appeared to be at least as trustworthy. "Two years ago I couldn't have even gone to Nablus," said Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who serves as international envoy to the Palestinians, after a smooth visit this week. "Security is greatly improved, and the economy is doing much better. Now we need to move to the next stage: politics." The aim of American and European policy is to stitch Palestinian politics back together by strengthening the Palestinian Authority under the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, which favors a two-state solution with Israel, while weakening the Islamists of Hamas, who rule in Gaza. Fatah says it will hold its first general congress in 20 years in early August to build on its successes, but it remains unclear if the meeting will take place. The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it shares the goal of helping Mr. Abbas, which is why it is seeking to improve West Bank economic conditions as a platform for moving to a political discussion. The Palestinians worry that the political discussion will never arrive and say the Israelis are doing far too little to ease the occupation. Still, they point with pride to the many changes in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the Israeli-led economic siege of Gaza continues, letting in only humanitarian goods. That sets the desired contrast between the territories into sharp relief but causes enormous suffering and anger. Asked to explain why the West Bank's fortunes were shifting, a top Israeli general began his narrative with a chart showing 410 Israelis killed by Palestinians in 2002, and 4 in 2008. "We destroyed the terrorist groups through three things — intelligence, the barrier and freedom of action by our men," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity in keeping with military rules. "We sent our troops into every marketplace and every house, staying tightly focused on getting the bad guys." But he added that the 2006 legislative electoral victory by Hamas, followed by its violent takeover of Gaza in 2007, led Mr. Abbas to fight Hamas. Palestinian troops have been training in Jordan under American sponsorship. There are now several thousand men trained in that way, and their skills, along with those of the European-trained police force here, have made a huge difference. An important element in making the Palestinian force effective, American and Israeli officials say, was taking young Palestinian men out of the ancestral grips of their villages and tribal clans and training them abroad, turning them into soldiers loyal to units and commanders. The Israeli general said that in the past year and a half, Israeli and Palestinian forces had shot at each other only twice, and in each case there was a meeting to restore trust. Speaking of the seriousness of the Palestinians, he added, "Twice in recent months we have been amazed." The first time was during Israel's military invasion of Gaza when Palestinian police officers kept the West Bank calm during protests. The second was in June when the security forces clashed twice with Hamas men in the city of Qalqilya, fighting to the death. The Israelis have pulled their forces to the outskirts of four cities, greatly reduced the number of permanent checkpoints and promised to help industry develop. They say the Palestinians now need courts, prisons and trained judges. Mr. Blair agreed but said there was much more Israel should do, like ending the growth of settlements and taking away dirt mounds and other barriers. In addition, he said, Israel should allow greater Palestinian development in the 60 percent of the West Bank it fully controls. Palestinian business leaders are incensed at the Israeli limitations. Paltel, which operates the only Palestinian cellphone company, says Israel will not permit it to place its towers on the land it controls. That forces Palestinian customers to pay roaming charges for many calls, and allows Israeli cellphone companies to offer lower rates. For more than a year, Israel has promised to free a second frequency so that a competitor to Paltel can provide cellphone service, but it has not yet done so. This leaves the Palestinians skeptical. "I fail to see any indications that Israel wants to help the Palestinian economy," Abdel-Malik al-Jaber, vice chairman of Paltel, said. Still, his company has invested millions in the past year in call centers and customer service because of the increased security and disposable income. As Nader Elawy, manager of Cinema City, the new movie theater here, put it: "We now have law and order. You can really feel the change." David Meir-Levi is an American-born Israeli, currently living in Palo Alto. His expertise is in Near Eastern studies and the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is Director of Peace and Education at Israel Peace Initiative (www.ipi-usa.org). Contact him at david_meirlevi@hotmail.com To Go To Top

DO NOT DESTROY OUTPOSTS. PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU — URGENT!!! Posted by Buddy Macy, July 21, 2009.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, NO!!!!! The destruction of the 23 "illegal outposts" would be an assault upon Israel's sovereignty and would contradict her moral, legal, historical and religious rights to all of the land west of the Jordan River. In addition, as one who studied history to learn its practical lessons, you should know that the act of appeasement would only motivate Israel's enemies to expect MORE...and to fight for it. I urge you in the strongest of terms to NOT commit this anti-Jewish act of treason and extreme weakness. Most sincerely, Buddy Macy 973-785-0057 This is an excerpt from: "IDF planning to evacuate all outposts in one day" By Yoel Marcus ** For the complete article, go to http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101796.html

Amid the increased tension between the United States and Israel surrounding construction in the settlements, the Israel Defense Forces is drafting a plan to evacuate 23 illegal outposts in one day. The IDF is now conducting preparations to forcibly evacuate 23 illegal outposts in one day. The plan was formulated by the security establishment, with the knowledge of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu...... Police on Monday evacuated three illegal structures in various outposts...... Contact Buddy Macy by email at vegibud@gmail.com To Go To Top

TALIBAN BUYING CHILDREN FOR SUICIDE BOMBERS Posted by Shaul and Aviva Ceder, July 21, 2009.

This was written by Sara A. Carter and it appeared July 2, 2009 in Washington Times

REALITY: Suspected of being a would-be suicide bomber, Salman Khan, 14, was arrested last month in Pakistan. The use of children in war is not unusual in the region. Pakistan's top Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, is buying children as young as 7 to serve as suicide bombers in the growing spate of attacks against Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. targets, U.S. Defense Department and Pakistani officials say. A Pakistani official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the topic, said the going price for child bombers was $7,000 to $14,000 — huge sums in Pakistan, where per-capita income is about $2,600 a year. "[Mehsud] has turned suicide bombing into a production output, not unlike [the way] Toyota outputs cars," a U.S. Defense Department official told reporters recently. He spoke on the condition that he not be named because of ongoing intelligence efforts to catch Mehsud, a prime target for a U.S. and Pakistani anti-Taliban campaign. An apparent U.S. effort to kill Mehsud last week failed. On Sunday, the Pakistani government offered a reward of about $615,300 for information leading to the capture of Mehsud, dead or alive. The U.S. State Department has offered a bounty of $5 million for Mehsud, who is thought to be hiding in the tribal areas near the Afghan border. Suicide bombings have become frequent in Pakistan in the past year, including high-profile attacks on hotels frequented by Westerners, as well as on Pakistani police and military installations. There has also been a spate of such attacks directed at U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan. The U.S. official said the price depends on how quickly the bomber is needed and how close the child is expected to get to the target. "[Mehsud] produces these suicide bombers, which are sold or bartered, which can be used by [Afghan Taliban leader Mullah] Omar's Taliban or ... other groups," the U.S. official said. In some cases, he said, the children are kidnapped and then sold to Mehsud. Using child suicide bombers "is the grim reality of the Taliban Frankenstein that now threatens to overwhelm the Pakistani state," said Bruce Riedel, a Brookings Institution scholar who chaired a review of Pakistan-Afghanistan strategy for President Obama. Efforts to reach a spokesman for Mehsud were not successful. The use of children in war is not unusual in Afghanistan or the tribal regions of Pakistan. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, many pre-adolescent boys became mujahedeen or freedom fighters. There is a different cultural perspective here about the age at which a boy becomes a man, said Sher, a former Afghan freedom fighter who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect himself against Taliban retribution. "Fighting is not the issue," Sher, who took up arms against the Russians at age 13, told The Washington Times by phone. "What is unusual is making these young fighters into suicide bombers," he said. "That was not common in Afghanistan, not even in the past. These children are brainwashed to believe things that are not even true. It is a crime against God." In other conflicts, such as that between Israel and the Palestinians, suicide bombers are generally older, at least in their late teens or early 20s. Suicide attacks mounted by Mehsud have killed prominent officials and politicians, including former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and hundreds of civilians. The attacks have begun to shift sentiment among Pakistanis against the Taliban. The government has mounted an offensive to clear militants from areas close to the capital, Islamabad, although Pakistani authorities have failed to catch local Taliban leaders. Pakistani officials have said their next target is the rugged region along the Afghan border where al Qaeda and the Taliban fled after U.S.-led forces toppled the Afghan Taliban government in Kabul in 2001. Last week, Mehsud narrowly escaped a U.S. drone attack that killed approximately 80 people who were attending a funeral in South Waziristan in Pakistan's tribal region. U.S. officials were watching the funeral by video feed from the drone, which flew high above the scene, concealed by clouds. The drone strike was the closest the U.S. had come to killing Mehsud in the past year, U.S. officials said. Pakistani officials told The Times that Taliban commander Qari Hussain, who was a close aide to Mehsud, was killed in the attack. Hussein was one of the main trainers and recruiters of suicide bombers, a Pakistani government official said. "He was a very important figure to Mehsud," said the official, who asked to remain anonymous because of the nature of his work. "However, Mehsud escaped the attack. Believe me, there will be no tears for Mehsud in Pakistan when he is killed." The Taliban is a formidable enemy to the Pakistani people and government, Mr. Riedel said. He said the Pakistani government's current military strategy against Mehsud is promising, but only time will tell whether it will succeed. A second U.S. Defense Department official with expertise regarding the Taliban told reporters that al Qaeda and other Pakistani militant groups created by the Pakistani government to fight rival India have helped Mehsud stage suicide attacks. The official, who also asked not to be named because of the nature of his work, said there had been a "convergence" of militants based in the tribal areas "supplemented, financed, probably trained, inculcated, by al Qaeda elements" and also "Punjab-based Pakistani terrorist groups." "It's the relationship between the three elements that is producing effective suicide bombers and sustaining a suicide-bomb campaign inside Pakistan," the official said. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il To Go To Top

AMMAN BEGINS STRIPPING STATE'S PALESTINIANS OF CITIZENSHIP Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, July 21, 2009.

This should bring the most important question NOW to the table..... About that place in Palestine called Jordan. in fact, Queen Rania — as a so called Palestinian, young Queen Rania's position ... is therefore now also questionable. After all, the majority of Jordanians are in FACT what they call themselves PALESTINIANS. Unless we once start to accept: there is No such a Nation as Palestinians. Lets be honest They never existed in History.... EVER. There has never been an established Palestinian government.... EVER. When was there ever an ancient Palestinian nation? I would like serious answers to this question. What was the Palestinian culture and language? What was their government? (Arafat was an Egyptian born in Cairo.) The Arab-Palestinian national movement didn't come about until 1964. Who were their leaders? Why was no Palestinian state created while Israel was under Islamic rule? Or in 636 A.D. when Arabs marauders came through? From Israel's inception some 3250 yrs ago, many have come and gone. So tell me where the Palestinians fit in this history? There has never been an established Palestinian government. Indeed, the word Palestine was first used by the Romans and is not even an Arab word. The Arabs came into Israel during the Babylonian Exile and again after the Roman Period, but they never were a nation or had a national identity in Palestine, and there was never a written record of the Palestinians as ever having been a nation prior to the re-establishment of the Jewish State of Israel. Their only national identity is vis-a-vis that of the Jewish State since Great Britain arbitrarily and illegally chopped out 78% of Mandated Palestine — destined to be the Jewish State — and put it administratively under control of the Hashmites. So they got their got their identity. (Hell bend over.) It's not a nation; it's a region.... Named ironically by a foreign power ... into something invented.... by those WHO were after only one issue ... POWER! The current debate on the inevitable future of the Palestinian Nation seems to ignore one simple fact: Palestine has no past and was never a sovereign nation. The closest thing the Palestinian people have to a history is that there was once a British Colony from which they had stolen their modern name. This historical fact leaves the so-called Palestinians with a far more blundering claim to Israel than illegal Mexican immigrants would have to the United States. Any one who glances at the history books can see that the Palestinian people have no past prior to 1948. But what do you call 2 million or so people who don't seem to be citizens of any known state? They certainly are not citizens of the Jewish state, even if some of them currently live under Israeli rule, and I cant see many Arab nations running to adopt a population that routinely burns American flags and fires automatic weapons during funerals of what they call martyrs but what residens of the free world call terrorists. So, more important than the question "where is their past", is the question "Where is their future"? Not in my back yard, I hope. The article below was written by Khaled Abu Toameh and it appeared in the Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443863400& pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull

Jordanian authorities have started revoking the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians living in Jordan to avoid a situation in which they would be "resettled" permanently in the kingdom, Jordanian and Palestinian officials revealed on Monday. The new measure has increased tensions between Jordanians and Palestinians, who make up around 70 percent of the kingdom's population. The tensions reached their peak over the weekend when tens of thousands of fans of Jordan's Al-Faisali soccer team chanted slogans condemning Palestinians as traitors and collaborators with Israel. Al-Faisali was playing the rival Wihdat soccer team, made up of Jordanian-Palestinians, in the Jordanian town of Zarqa. Anti-riot policemen had to interfere to stop the Jordanian fans from lynching the Wihdat team members and their fans, eyewitnesses reported. They said the Jordanian fans of Al-Faisali hurled empty bottles and fireworks at the Palestinian players and their supporters. Reports in a number of Jordanian newspapers said that the Jordanian fans also chanted anti-Palestinian slogans and cursed Palestine, the PLO, Jerusalem and the Aksa Mosque. Prince Ali bin Hussein, chairman of Jordan's National Football Association, strongly condemned the racist slurs chanted by the Jordanian fans, saying those responsible would be severely punished. Baker al-Udwan, director of Al-Faisali team, also condemned the behavior of his team's supporters. He said that a minority of "outcasts" and "corrupt" elements were behind the embarrassing verbal and physical assault on the Palestinian soccer players and their fans. "We condemn this uncivilized demeanor and welcome any step that would result in the elimination of this tiny group of parasites," he said. Tarek Khoury, chairman of the Wihdat team, instructed his players to abandon the field as soon as the Jordanian fans started hurling abuse against Palestinians and the Aksa Mosque. Palestinians said that the confrontation with the Jordanians was yet another indication of increased tensions between the two sides. "Many Palestinians living in Jordan are convinced that the Jordanian authorities are trying to squeeze them out," said Ismail Jaber, a West Bank lawyer who has been living in the kingdom for nearly 20 years. "There is growing discontent and uncertainty among Palestinians here." He and other Palestinians said that Jordanians' "hostile" attitude toward them had escalated after the rise to power of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu earlier this year. Several Jordanian government officials, they said, are convinced that Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman are secretly working toward turning Jordan into a Palestinian state. As a preemptive measure, the Jordanian authorities recently began revoking the citizenship of thousands of Palestinians, leaving many of them in a state of panic and uncertainty regarding the future. The Jordanians have justified the latest measure by arguing that it's aimed at avoiding a situation in which the Palestinians would ever be prevented from returning to their original homes inside Israel. Since 1988, when the late King Hussein cut off his country's administrative and legal ties with the West Bank, the Jordanian authorities have been working toward "disengaging" from the Palestinians under the pretext of preserving their national identity. That decision, said Jordan's Interior Minister Nayef al-Kadi, was taken at the request of the PLO and the Arab world to consolidate the status of the PLO as the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. "Our goal is to prevent Israel from emptying the Palestinian territories of their original inhabitants," the minister explained, confirming that the kingdom had begun revoking the citizenship of Palestinians. "We should be thanked for taking this measure," he said. "We are fulfilling our national duty because Israel wants to expel the Palestinians from their homeland." Kadi said that, despite the new policy, Palestinians would be permitted to retain their status as residents of the kingdom by holding "yellow ID cards" that are issued to those who have families and homes in the West Bank. He said that Palestinians working for the Palestinian Authority or the PLO were among those who have had their Jordanian passports taken from them, in addition to anyone who did not serve in the Jordanian army. The Jordanian minister said that the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank had been notified of the decision to revoke the Jordanian citizenship of Palestinians. A PA official in Ramallah expressed deep concern over Jordan's latest move and said that it would only worsen the conditions of Palestinians living in the kingdom. The official said that PA President Mahmoud Abbas raised the issue with King Abdullah II on a number of occasions, but the Jordanians have refused to retract. Asked by the London-based Al-Hayat daily where the Palestinians should go after they lose their Jordanian passports, the minister replied: "We're not expelling anyone, nor are we revoking the citizenship of Jordanian nationals. We are only correcting the mistake that was created after Jordan's disengagement from the West Bank [in 1988]. We want to highlight the true identity and nationality of every person." Kadi claimed that the kingdom was seeking, through the new measure, to thwart an Israeli "plot" to transfer more Palestinians to Jordan with the hope of replacing it with a Palestinian state. "We insist that Jordan is not Palestine, just as Palestine is not Jordan," he stressed. "We will continue to help the Palestinians hold on to their Palestinian identity by pursuing the implementation of the 1988 disengagement plan from the West Bank." Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com To Go To Top

STOLEN LAND Posted by David Frankfurter, July 21, 2009.

I agree with the EU funded, anti-Israel organization MIFTAH. NGO-monitor reveals that MIFTAH fabricates evidence against Israel. They are "a political lobbying group which — despite claiming to be non-partisan — is extremely politicized, uses Durban strategy rhetoric, characterizes terrorists as "activists" and "freedom fighters," and promotes political campaigns." So how can I agree with them? They say that "Mideast Peace Can't Be Built on Stolen Land". So with all the racist hoo-hah trying to stop Jews from building on legitimately purchased land in our own capital, let me ask MIFTAH to please start campaigning for the return of ALL the stolen lands over the 1967 armistice lines — starting with Jerusalem and its surrounds. For example the Palestinian "refugee camp" of Qalandiya, stolen from its legitimate Jewish owners by none other than the venerable UN. Or the other hundreds and hundreds of acres in Jerusalem specifically earmarked for Jewish settlement at the time of its legal and legitimate purchase from its original owners by the Jewish National Fund, permanently usurped by Jordan when they invaded Israel, now closely built with illegal Arab-occupied structures. Read about it at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/122078 Maybe the first "illegal settlement" that the IDF should be called to vacate is the one first built — the UNRWA office in Qalandiya. As usual, please post your comments here http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/119033.html. I read them all. David David Frankfurter is a business consultant, corporate executive and writer who frequently comments on the Middle East. To subscribe to his 'Letter from Israel', email him at david.frankfurter@iname.com. Or go to http://www.livejournal.com/users/dfrankfurter/ To Go To Top

FATAH COMPETES WITH HAMAS; PA CLAIMS WESTERN WALL; ISRAELI MEDIA'S KEY OMISSION ON ARAB PRISONER; SUDAN FLOGS WOMEN WEARING PANTS Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 21, 2009.

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY SECRET POLICE Like the STASI secret police in the former East Germany, the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) secret police recruit widely. They enroll taxi drivers, street vendors and others, in exchange not prosecuting their violations of license regulations. The secret police and officials' bodyguards treat their own people arrogantly and elicit bribes. The P.A. secret police complained that Israeli removal of the checkpoint to Jericho leaves them more checking to do, themselves (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/25 from Bassem Eid, head of Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group). Fewer P.A. Arab problems are due to Israel's presence than to its absence. Here is a more favorable view of how the P.A. police operate: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d16-Israeli-border-police-training-in-human-rights HOW FATAH COMPETES WITH HAMAS Fatah presented some skits before its leaders, to illustrate superiority to Hamas. "Significantly, the competition between Fatah and Hamas supporters is based not on who has built more Palestinian infrastructures, nor on who has promoted peace, but rather on who can take credit for more terror." In the skit, Hamas boasts of having kidnapped an Israeli soldier, but Fatah surpasses it by having "arrested" two Israeli reservists in Ramallah in 2000. In fact, Fatah lynched the pair, and the skit shows one of the killers showing the crowd his bloodied hands (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/25 from Palestinian Media Watch). The lynch mob savagely cut them to pieces and paraded what was left. Abhorrent! The head of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, Abbas, was present. He did not chide the players for boasting of their terrorism against Israel (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/26). What does that tell you about Abbas, about his people, and about their supposed yearning for peace? For more on Hamas-Fatah rivalry, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d16-Palestinian-Authority-accuses-Hamas PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY POLICE TO OPERATE AT NIGHT The Palestinian Authority (P.A.) and Israel arranged that the P.A. police would operate in some of their cities at night. Up to now, they didn't. Israel raided those cities to capture and kill terrorists whom the P.A. left alone. Night operations would enable the P.A. to keep better order. The IDF retains its overall responsibility for security. If it learns of imminent terror attacks, it would enter those cities to stop them (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/25). In other news, Abbas scoffed at Israel for not making a firm commitment to stay out of those cities. But if the IDF did, Abbas could let terrorism grow. Unclear is whether, at night, his forces would apprehend terrorists. I think not, or they already would have been doing so in daytime. For a broader view on P.A. defense, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d2-Whaet-kind-of-defense-for-Palestinian-Arabs ISRAELI RELEASE OF TERRORIST PRISONERS The Almagor Terrorist Victims Association [whose leaders I've met] report that Israel released 6,912 terrorists from 1993 — 1999. Of them, 854 resumed terrorism, killing 123 Israelis. From 2002 — 2006, released terrorists killed another 177 Israelis. Although it is important to strive to free Israelis kidnapped by terrorist organizations, massive release of terrorists enables them to claim many more victims. It isn't worth it (Morton A. Klein, Zionist Organization of America, 7/16). Sometimes hundreds of Arab prisoners were released as if it would earn goodwill from the Palestinian Authority (P.A.). The P.A. demanded more releases, and complained as if release were a right, regardless of what the convicts had done and how much their crimes violated P.A. agreements. Releases also taught the Arabs to attempt more kidnappings, as a way to retrieve more prisoners. There is no evidence of Arab goodwill being earned. Jihad does not "forgive" infidels for good behavior. The jihadist ideology has a religious imperative for conquest by any means. Westerners should not expect Radical or other Muslims to act on the basis of Western premises. Islam has its own values. Sometimes hundreds of Arab prisoners were released in exchange for one or two Israelis, living or dead. Results were similar. In accepting corpses, Israel encouraged murder. Remember the Western movies, in which the bounty hunter tells a prisoner wanted dead or alive that he may as well kill the fugitive, to avoid resistance! The movies may be fiction, but were true to life about that. PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY CLAIMS THE WAILING WALL Mohamed Sobeih, chief Palestinian Authority (P.A.) delegate to the Arab League, told reporters that the Wailing Wall belongs to al-Aqsa Mosque, which belongs to Muslims (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/26). Arabic often does not get translated into idiomatic English. Sometimes it is flowery, often it is cagey. It relies upon Muslim audiences understanding their history and culture, to derive full meaning from what sounds in English innocuous and incorrect. What did Sobeih really mean? He did not explain who built that wall. It was built by the ancient Judeans, or Jews, as the western retaining wall for the Temple. Sobeih really was claiming the Wall, the way the P.A. and Islam does the whole Temple Mount, and other Jewish holy sites, as exclusively Muslim sites. They would not want to admit to the more egalitarian and tolerant Americans that the faith they profess is exclusivist. It is almost a free-for-all in claiming Jewish-Israeli land. For more on that, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m6d30-US-asks-Israel-to-cede-Golan-Heights-too IDF WITHDRAWAL FROM PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY CITIES We reported before on Israel's dismantling most checkpoints and withdrawing troops from four Palestinian Authority (P.A.) cities. These actions have occurred before. Each time, terrorists get through. An estimated thousand Israelis lost their lives as a result. The removal of checkpoints compounds the blunder in leaving security to the P.A., because the P.A. lets terrorists out, and the lack of checkpoints lets terrorists through. Another part of the arrangement is that Israel, assuming that the P.A. wants to fight terrorism, will identify wanted terrorists and their locations to the P.A.. When this happened before, the P.A. warned the terrorists off or took them into protective custody (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/25) and murdered informants. The theory is that this time, with U.S. training, the P.A. will fight terrorists. Since the P.A. has not used its opportunities to fight terrorism last week, why should it be expected to this week? Why four P.A. cities, instead of trying out one? If the P.A. arrested and imprisoned for two years 500 terrorists from one city, it would have some credibility for demanding a chance in more cities. Can't evaluate IDF withdrawal from P.A. cities without considering IDF removal of roadblocks, so please see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d17-US-got-Israel-to-remove-most-checkpoints ISRAELI TV'S KEY OMISSION ON ARAB PRISONER Israeli TV channel 2 featured the mother of an Arab prisoner of Israel, serving multiple life sentences. She baked a cake for him and for Hamas' Israeli prisoner, Shalit, as a mother who hopes these sons would be released soon. The presentation omitted the reason her son was serving life sentences. Israel does not sentence many prisoners to life. Terrorists convicted of attempted murder get only a few years jail time [if not released under some lopsided trade, one Israeli for hundreds of Arabs]. The Israeli courts fail to recognize that attempted murder merely was less efficient that actual murder, so they release attempted murderers after a few years, giving them, now more experienced, an opportunity to try again. Many do. Some succeed. Apparently the TV executives felt that if they informed the public of the reason for the Arab's life term, the morally relative, sentimental equating of the two prisoners would collapse out of absurdity, no sympathy for the Arab prisoner gained (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/25). "June 25, 2007: Nearly two years after the kidnapping, the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem issued a statement saying, 'International humanitarian law absolutely prohibits taking and holding a person by force in order to compel the enemy to meet certain demands, while threatening to harm or kill the person if the demands are not met.'" (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/25) The terrorists' imprisonment was deserved, Shalit's was not. To equate them is unethical. Shalit was kidnapped despite peace agreements. He is held under inhumane conditions; the Arabs are not. Arab prisoners had excessive privileges, which they abused to foster terrorism, inducing a counter-reaction. Want an idea of what P.A. TV is like? see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d3-Palestinian-Arab-hateTV PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY RELEASING MANY HAMAS MEN The Palestinian Authority (P.A.) released 40 Hamas prisoners. It pledged to release hundreds more, to offer reconciliation to Hamas (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/25). So much for P.A. police fighting terrorism! The P.A. has returned to what was called a "revolving door" policy on terrorist prisoners. What has the State Dept. to say about that, as it demands that Israel rely upon the P.A. to fight terrorism? SUDAN FLOGS WOMEN WHO WEAR PANTS Sudan has "public order police," who enforce Islamic law in public places. In a Khartoum café, those police arrested 13 women for wearing trousers. On the spot, the police publicly flogged 10 women. The penalty can be up to 40 lashes. One of the women is appealing (NY Times, 7/14, A11). That is what European women have to look forward to, as their liberal immigration and welfare policies and their disinclination to bear children let Muslims become a higher proportion of the population and radicalize. Whipping is barbaric — sadism is no answer to narcissism. I think that Sudan's theology is neurotic. But shouldn't New York women wear something longer than underwear? How about trousers? Women object to being regarded for their bodies, but dress to distract with them. I don't think that my opinion should be incorporated into a dress code, however, the issue is personal, as is vulgarity. To see how reform is impeded by the Muslim government's opposition to it, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d2-Muslim-regimes-oppose-Human-Rights- Commission-on-women MOFAZ PLAN FOR ARAB STATE WITH TEMPORARY BORDERS Kadima Party leader MK Mofaz proposes establishing a Palestinian Arab state in the Territories with temporary borders. Final borders would be negotiated later. If the Cabinet adopts his plan, he would try to lead his Party into the Cabinet (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/26). Details? None. Anticipate endless negotiation, border warfare, and uncertainty for those at the edges, without security. That is, Arab sovereignty would enable the Palestinian Authority state to build up terrorist forces and let them through. How would Israel get back land it gave up? The plan has no stated purpose, though neither does any other plan for Arab statehood. These plans enable jihadists to strike Israel, consolidate territory, and threaten new areas. The lip service to democracy that proponents often give, by saying that the Arab state should be democratic, is self-delusion if not deception, since jihadists are anti-democratic. If the jihadists had democracy, they still could oppress and invade. Israeli politicians propose without thinking things through. U.S. politicians propose without the media thinking plans through. For another example of failing to think ideas through, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- \Examiner~y2009m7d16-Israeli-view-of-putting-Arab-peacekeepers-into-Gaza Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

A PAUSE FOR SERIOUS SELF-REFLECTION Posted by Barbara Taverna, July 20, 2009.

This was written by Jonathan Tobin and it appeared yesterday in the Jerusalem Post (http://www.jpost. com /servlet/Satellite? cid= 1246443851701&pagename= JPArticle% 2FShowFull). Jonathan Tobin is executive editor of Commentary magazine and a contributor to its blog Contentions at www.commentarymagazine.com. jtobin@commentaryma gazine.com

When US President Barack Obama met with 15 representatives of American Jewish organizations on July 13, Haaretz reported that he told them that he wanted to help Israel achieve peace but that if they were to benefit from his well-intentioned counsel, Israelis must "engage in serious self-reflection. " The breathtaking condescension toward the Jewish state that this remark betrays, as well as the implicit dismissal of the last 16 years of Middle East history, says a lot about Obama and the direction in which American foreign policy is heading. The fact that Israel has already gone through several periods of serious self-reflection and made costly sacrifices in terms not only of territory but in blood has no significance for the president. Here a just a few items that the president seems to think don't matter in assessing the situation: The failure of a generation of peacemaking including the Oslo Accords and the successor agreements associated with that process, the 2000 Camp David summit, the second intifada, the withdrawal from Gaza, the subsequent use of that territory as a terror base and the failed attempt just last year to get the Palestinian Authority to take yes for an answer on statehood for its people. All have apparently been swept down the White House memory hole. In the age of Obama, like a fundamentalist religion that dates all events as being either before or after a divine revelation, that which occurred prior to his election is meaningless by definition. Rather than play down his penchant for quarreling with Israel, Obama is proud of it. Indeed, he asserts that such conduct is actually a virtue, since his hammering of Israel is merely "honest talk" that should be interpreted as the highest form of friendship. Obama's obsession with picking a fight about growth in Jewish settlements in the territories is a classic misdirection play. The US had already agreed that calls for settlement freezes couldn't apply to those communities that it had acknowledged Israel would keep in any peace agreement, let alone in Jerusalem. But Obama has repudiated that pledge partly out of his determination that he must invalidate everything his predecessor did, and partly because settlements are a useful cudgel with which beat Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest of the government Israelis elected only a few months after Obama's own victory.   EVEN MORE important, the entire premise upon which his demand for Israeli reflection is based is false. So long as both the supposedly more moderate Palestinian Authority and the extremist Hamas movement that governs Gaza have no interest in peace on even the most generous terms that Jerusalem can offer — a detail upon which the PA's leaders have been quite explicit — Obama's pressure ploy is pointless. Though Obama speaks to Jewish groups of equal pressure on the Arabs, everything that the administration has done and said in its short time in office makes it clear that the president's sole target is the government in Jerusalem, not the terrorists running Gaza or the corrupt Fatah functionaries in Ramallah. Taken together with his appeasement of the Arab and Muslim world as reflected in his Cairo speech and a feckless policy of engagement on Iran that continues to extend legitimacy to a regime that has already forfeited its credibility with its own people, one would think that Obama would be in trouble with his Jewish supporters. Though there have been rumblings from some Jewish leaders that expressed worries about Obama's attitude to Israel, the passive response to the downgrading of the alliance with Israel cannot be denied. There are those who believe that the continued support for Obama can be traced to a lack of enthusiasm on the part of most American Jews for Israel's current government and settlements, though others go so far as to say that it also shows a general lack of interest in, let alone support for Israel, among liberal Jews. It is true that unlike the Israeli Left which has been completely marginalized by the Palestinians' rejection of peace, the Jewish Left in the US is currently riding high. The spectacle of the small J Street lobby — a group that exposed its extreme nature last December when it opposed Israeli military efforts to stop missile attacks on its southern towns from Gaza — strutting into the White House alongside representatives of large mainstream groups illustrates the new political reality of Washington in 2009. But the overwhelming majority of American Jews who voted for Obama last year did not back him because they anticipated that he would pick pointless fights with Israel to advance a peace process that Palestinians scorn. Most did so because they are partisan Democrats and share his views on domestic issues. But there is no way that he would have won as much as three-quarters of the Jewish vote had not most believed him when he claimed he was a supporter of Israel. Contrary to the boasts of the left and the fears of the right, most Jewish Democrats still care deeply about Israel.   IN RESPONSE to writers like myself who have called for Democrats to speak truth to power and hold Obama accountable for his policies, some of those who vouched for Obama during last year's campaign have said that the president's offenses are not yet egregious enough to warrant a rebuke. Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, a man whose long and honorable record of support for Israel is beyond question, attempted to defend Obama's positions in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal and then later in responses to critiques of it. He continues to believe that having a popular liberal Democratic president who claims to be a supporter of Israel is good for the Jews even if some of his policies are open to question. But Dershowitz's half-hearted apologias betray a worry that perhaps he was fooled by the president's campaign promises. Jewish Democrats don't have to jump to the Republicans. If, as Dershowitz avows, pro-Israel Democrats have influence on the administration, then let them use it before things get even worse. It is worth recalling that in 2002, when statements by secretary of state Colin Powell made it appear as if a Republican administration was taking a similarly "evenhanded" approach to Israel's attempts to defend itself against a Palestinian campaign of suicide attacks, conservative evangelicals were not slow to act. This group, as integral to George W. Bush's coalition as Jews are to Obama's, deluged the White House with calls for strong support for Israel and got results. Had a Republican done and said the same things that Obama has in the last six months who can doubt that he and other Democrats would be demanding that Jewish Republicans repudiate their party's leader? The question remains what will be the tipping point for Jewish Democrats at which it will be impossible for them to go on pretending that they did not elect the most hostile president to Israel since the first George Bush? If the current trend continues without a strong negative reaction from Jewish Democrats who raised money for Obama and voted for him, then we are entitled to ask why they are either silent or rationalizing a policy that they know is wrong. Contact Barbara Taverna at bltaverna@yahoo.com To Go To Top

FRANCE BLACKS OUT NEWS OF MUSLIM VIOLENCE Posted by Amil Imani, July 20, 2009.

This comes from Atlas Shrugs http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/

And so it begins again. On July 8 I reported here that once again the Muslims have taken to rampaging, destroying and setting alight the streets of France. The media has abetted the fifth column with cowardly silence. As if the state mandate on a media blackout will make this escalation go away. But this is not just in Europe; the same dhimmi submission in the media is rife in America. What better example than this week's piece in Newsweek: Why fears of a Muslim takeover are all wrong. Craven. This is from "Blackout: Violence in France" in Brussels Journal. The French Interior Ministry has issued orders to the prefects not to communicate to the media the crime statistics for the nights of July 13-15. The cartoon at the top shows Marianne, the woman symbolizing the French Republic, watching the "official" weather report: "More sun tomorrow" it says, as it pours outside. Le Monde has a long article about the news blackout: [...] Only the figures for the night of July 13-14 were published: "Some 500 vehicles" were burned, the worst ever recorded for the eve of the national holiday. Despite repeated requests to the Interior Ministry, and the DGPN [similar to the FBI], no figures were forthcoming for the night of July 14-15. These orders have been strictly applied. The different prefectures contacted by Le Monde refused to respond, citing "ministerial instructions." Regional news media reported the same problem. The daily La Provence issued an unofficial report that was much less favorable than 2008: 41 cars and a day-care center in Marseilles burned. [...] Other local papers describe the same problems. In Reims, the daily L'Union denounces the attitude of the authorities: "Yesterday morning, every journalist who came, even for the smallest piece of news, to the firemen, or gendarmes or police, heard the same answer: 'No fires'. In fact, the truth is quite different. Some of those we questioned admitted under their breath: 'We cannot say anything about the fires. We have received orders." In Lyons, the daily Le Progrèls reports the same blackout: "Orders not to speak on the radio were given to firemen, gendarmes and police." In previous years the radio network Europe 1 had systematically called the prefectures to verify the official counts. On January 1, 2008, the DGPN reported 372 burnt cars for New Year's Eve vs 746 reported by Europe 1. Finally the ministry of the interior admitted that there had been 878 fires. "Instructions" given to the prefectures henceforth forbid this type of verification. Some bits of news have leaked through. An article at the conservative blog François Desouche (based on a report in the newspaper Le Parisien) describes the use of firecrackers against the police, in the suburb of Tremblay-en-France, department of Seine-Saint-Denis. This was the second time in a few weeks that police on patrol were drawn to a group of youths. Masked by their clothing they threw firecrackers and rocks at the police. Also, in the city of Evry, four or five large packs of firecrackers were stolen by a group of hooded individuals who broke into the fair grounds thanks to the inadequate number of guards. Agnèls Moutet-Lamy, the spokesman for the Socialist mayor made light of the event: "That can always happen. There's nothing to worry about." However, Jean-Charles Béraud, an expert in pyrotechnics, stated that firecrackers "can become a monstrously dangerous weapon. A mortar can be propelled 120 meters and create an explosion 80 meters in diameter. It can kill someone. Even one large firecracker can rip apart a hand." Using the daily La Provence as its source, another article at François Desouche relates the violence in Marseilles on the night of July 14: A fire ravaged 5 hectares close to residences. Two helicopters pouring water on the fire and a fierce battle waged by the marine firemen were needed to bring the fire under control. A day-care center was partially burned. A row of cypress trees bordering a nursery school went up in smoke. One individual was arrested as he threw rockets on the marine firemen who had come to put out a trash can fire. Fires were set in the four corners of one neighborhood, while trash cans and cars burned in others, notably with the help of Molotov cocktails. While the firemen went on one call after the other, the police fell into what appears to be an ambush. Bullets were fired at them and diverse projectiles were thrown in their direction. One policeman was slightly injured by a rock. The anti-crime brigade arrested one individual in possession of a 22-caliber rifle.   EDITOR'S NOTE: The shifting demography contributes to white timidity in France as in the rest of Europe. To see the changes in population proportionality between Europeans and their Muslim immigrants, see this video.   Amil Imani is an Iranian-born American citizen and pro-democracy activist residing in the United States of America. Imani is a columnist, literary translator, novelist and an essayist who has been writing and speaking out for the struggling people of his native land, Iran. He and his family escaped Iran after the radical Islamic revolution. To Go To Top

BURIED BY THE TIMES: THE HOLOCAUST AND AMERICA'S MOST IMPORTANT NEWSPAPER Posted by Sonia Nusenbaum, July 20, 2009.

This was written by George Jochnowitz, A version of this review appeared in the March/April 2006 issue of Jewish Currents. This is a review of the book Buried by the Times by Laurel Leff. (Cambridge U Press, 2005, xxi+426 pages, $29 hardcover).

Jewish secularism did not exist for Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times from 1935 until his semi-retirement in 1961. Time and again, Laurel Leff makes Sulzberger's position explicit: "Being Jewish was solely a religious, not a racial or ethnic orientation, he maintained, that carried no special obligation to help fellow Jews." (13). Sulzberger never asked himself whether there would have been a special obligation to help Jews had he felt that being Jewish was a racial or ethnic orientation He would have said no in any event. But what about helping fellow human beings? Sulzberger maintained that Jews were exactly like everyone else. (12) Shouldn't one help anyone who is in danger? Sulzberger probably would have agreed. Unfortunately, another factor was at work. He was afraid of an anti-Semitic backlash. Anti-Semites make a number of charges against Jews. One of them is vulgarity, something Sulzberger worried about, as he wrote in 1930: "A vulgar Christian is merely someone who does not concern me — a vulgar Jew is a direct charge upon me. I am being judged with him according to the standards of my fellow Americans." (23) There were accusations even more serious than vulgarity. Some were obviously false, like the charge that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make matzos. Others were clearly true, like the assertion that Jews owned influential newspapers, in particular, The New York Times. Vulgarity and influence are two very different charges. Jewish anti-Semites tend to focus on vulgarity. Walter Lippman, who was not connected with The New York Times, was a Jewish anti-Semite. In 1922, he said, "The rich and vulgar and pretentious Jews of our big American cities ... are the real fountain of anti-Semitism.... You cannot build up a decent civilization among people who, when they are at last, after centuries of denial, free to go to the land and cleanse their bodies, now huddle together in a steam-heated slum" cited in Ronald Steel's Walter Lippman and the American Century. How one can be rich and vulgar and pretentious and reside in a slum is not explained. Perhaps he considered Central Park West a slum. Lippman did not take his own advice and go to the land to cleanse his body. Nor did he ever praise the socialist kibbutzniks who did so. Lippman's analysis reflects not only prejudice but stupidity, something I find quite hard to understand. I remember, when I was a student in Paris in 1958, joining other Americans studying at the Sorbonne at a sidewalk café and reading Lippman's columns aloud to each other from the International Herald Tribune. We admired his intelligence, his clarity, the accuracy of his analysis. It was a shock to learn about his shallow fear of being taken for a vulgar Jew who lived in an apartment with steam heat. Anti-Semites who are not Jewish typically consider Jews a threat and so focus on Jewish power. Influence is not the same thing as power; indeed, having a great deal of influence and very little power is a dangerous situation. Arthur Hays Sulzberger knew this. Had the Times been really powerful, instead of merely influential, Sulzberger might very well have tried to save more Jews. There was a Jew whom Sulzberger saved. Her name was Bertha Sulzberger, a 68-year-old distant cousin related by marriage. She was one of many refugees from Germany living in a camp in France "with not enough water and practically without food supply," as reported by the Times. (86) Many of these refugees already had American visas, but the American consulate in Stuttgart, where many of the visas had been obtained, would not release their papers, and so they had to go through the process again, as reported in the Times. (88) The Times reported the story but never questioned the fact that American consulates in Europe were making it extremely difficult for people to get visas and for people who already had visas to be able to use them. France's Vichy government wanted the refugees to leave and go to America, but Secretary of State Cordell Hull said that it couldn't accept them because "no distinctions shall be made between refugees on grounds of race, nationality or religion." Leff tells us, "In an editorial — the only one that addressed the plight of Jews in France although it never referred to Jews — the Times defended the State Department's position." (92) Sulzberger, in the meantime, had $2,000 deposited in a bank in Havana, and a Cuban visa for Bertha was issued. Unfortunately for Bertha, the visa was issued in Lisbon, and the nearest port was Marseilles, and there were months more of red tape. When Bertha received her papers, there was a new problem. "The State Department had instructed its diplomatic and consular officers to deny visas to anyone who had parents, children, a spouse, or siblings living in territories controlled by Germany, Italy, or Russia." (97) Once again, the Times editorially defended this needless, cruel position. Bertha, luckily, no longer had living relatives in any of these countries and so was allowed to enter Cuba and eventually got to the United States. How awful that one was "lucky" not to have any more living relatives in Europe during World War II. Bertha's son, Fritz Sulzberger, who had come to the United States before his mother's internment and eventual rescue, wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times complaining about the fact that Jews refugees from Germany were being considered enemy aliens: "But who are these aliens? Were they not the first victims of Hitlerism? Did they not lose home, profession, friends and everything which makes life worth living through the brutality of Hitler Germany ... Will they never find rest?" Arthur did not publish his cousin's letter, feeling it not be wise to publish such a letter from "a man who is not yet a citizen." (100-101) Unlike Walter Lippman, Arthur Hays Sulzberger was not a Jewish anti-Semite. Instead, he was both stupid and frightened. Lippman was an intelligent man who only became stupid when he had to explain and defend his inherently stupid prejudice. Sulzberger, on the other hand, was too stupid to know that it is not true that Jews are simply people who believe in the Jewish religion. He didn't know about anthropology and sociology, which were less a part of common discourse in his day than in ours. Perhaps he had never heard of Joseph Arthur Gobineau (1816-1882), who wrote that only the Aryan "race" possessed the supreme human virtues, or of Wilhelm Marr (1818-1904), who introduced the term "anti-Semitism" since he felt that Jews should be hated no matter what their religion. But he had certainly heard of Hitler, who was determined to exterminate Jewish atheists and Christians of Jewish descent. Still, he thought that Jews should not be singled out for rescue despite the fact that they had been singled out for persecution. Doing so would be adopting Hitler's view that religion is not what defines Jews as Jews. Sulzberger was stupid enough to think that rescuing people from racism was the same thing as espousing racism. And Sulzberger was scared. He was not able to think that it was morally acceptable to own an influential newspaper and to use it to save lives if the lives in questions were those of one's own people. That would be crossing the barrier between influence and power. Jews were hated because they were viewed as powerful, and Sulzberger was afraid of being hated. He was afraid that if his power saved Jews, all Jews would be hated even more than before. Of course, if Jews had really been powerful, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened. Could The New York Times have saved more Jews? We can never be sure. Would government policies about issuing visas and forcing Jews go reapply in distant cities have been changed if — say — the Times had not waited for two months to report the massacre at Babi Yar and had not described the victims as "no fewer than 50,000 Russians and Ukrainians"? The Times was being misleading. The victims were Russians and Ukrainians, of course, but they were killed because they were Jews and because Jews were being exterminated, not because they were enemy nationals who happened to get in the way. Would the public have sympathized with the Jews or turned against them? We know that after the knowledge of Hitler's policies became more widespread, in particular, after the Eichmann trial in 1961-62, sympathy for the Jews and horror at what the Nazis had done increased. In fact, today anti-Semites often feel they have to deny that the Holocaust took place. One incident is described in which publicity almost helped. A group of 232 rabbis had visas to go to Latin America but had to travel through the United States. Their passports had been forged and the State Department declared them invalid. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau felt the rabbis should be allowed to escape nevertheless. He contacted Sulzberger, who would not help. He then got in touch with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, who leaked the story to Washington columnist Drew Pearson. Pearson broadcast the story on his radio program, and the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, gave in and recognized the visas. It was too late; the rabbis had been shipped to the death camps. (261-62) If Sulzberger had acted, if the story had appeared earlier, 232 lives might have been saved. Sumner Welles, who tried to publicize what was happening to the Jews and to save them, was himself a victim of prejudice. He was gay. A scandal broke, but the press did not dare report it because people did not speak of homosexuality in those days. Welles resigned because of the combination of the lurking scandal and his rivalry with Secretary Cordell Hull. Thus, two different taboos worked against rescuing Hitler's victims: being pro-Jewish in the case of Sulzberger and being gay in the case of Welles. On March 20, 1944, the German Army marched into Hungary, where there were still 800,000 Jews. President Roosevelt, after much prodding, issued a statement condemning "one of the blackest crimes in all history ... the wholesale systematic murder of the Jews of Europe." (267) The next day, Roosevelt's statement appeared on the front page of the Times. The Office of War Information beamed broadcasts to Hungary and elsewhere "urging citizens not to participate in the persecution of Jews and to record the names of those who did." (279) Apparently it worked, at least for a while. In July, the Hungarians stopped deporting Jews. Then the Germans moved into Budapest in late August and started the deportations again. The hiatus made a difference. The Nazis never quite finished the job of taking the Jews of Budapest to Auschwitz. The United States was able to save some of the Jews of Budapest by threatening the perpetrators. This was in 1944, when millions had already been killed. Could the United States have acted in other ways? Primo Levi, in the chapter called "Cerium" of his wonderful set of memoirs The Periodic Table, writes that he and his fellow prisoners were delighted when the allies bombed the chemical plants at Auschwitz because they knew the raids were directed against the Nazis and not the prisoners. If the chemical plants could be bombed, why not the crematoria and the gas chambers? Why not the railroad lines leading to the camp? What if there had been more publicity? What if the Times had featured news about the extermination of the Jews? Would American policy have been different? The Times, as a matter of fact, ran very many stories about what we now call the Holocaust. They were almost never on page 1, the editorial page, or the Week in Review. They hardly ever mentioned the word "Jew." Leff writes, "In fact, from September 1939 through May 1945, the Times published 1,186 stories about what was happening to the Jews of Europe, or an average of 17 stories per month." (2) I was four when America entered the war and eight when it was over. I knew that my father, who had a brother and four sisters living in Krakow, never expected to see them again. I knew that one of my cousins, Zygmunt, had gotten out of Poland and was alive in the Soviet Union. He wrote letters to my parents, at first in Polish, and then when I was old enough to write to him myself, letters to them and to me in English, which he knew quite well. He now lives in Israel and we still correspond, by e-mail, in English. If I, a child, knew, why didn't everybody? But then, my parents and I hadn't gotten our information from the Times. Repeating and featuring a story makes a great deal of difference. How many people know about the massacre of between 500,000 and one million communists in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966? Very few. How do I know? I read it in the Times long ago. The news was there, but it wasn't featured and wasn't reported often enough. How many people know about the starvation of between 30 and 60 million people in China between 1959 and 1961? Not many, although the information is available and has appeared in articles and books, among them Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker. If the citizens of Nepal knew about the famine, the Maoist movement there would have no support. If the citizens of China knew that the famine was caused by Chairman Mao's policies during the Great Leap Forward and not by a natural disaster, China would have a different government today. The Times still could run op-eds and magazine articles about this famine. The news would then get to China. After the war was over, Arthur Hays Sulzberger was still a frightened fool. Leff writes, "He ended his membership in the old Spanish and Portuguese synagogue his forefathers founded because the congregation sang Hatikva at a gathering, and resigned as a trustee of Emanu-El." (328) A distant relative of the Ochs family, Sulzberger's in-laws, named Elsbet Midas Gerst, had written an account of her family's flight to Holland, her years there, her capture, her 10-day train ride to Auschwitz without food or toilet facilities, and her rescue by the Soviet Army. No other complete telling of the World War II experiences of a single person had been published at that time. Other Ochs relatives sent this to Sulzberger, who forwarded it to the magazine editor with a note saying, "You will be interested in this, although I don't suppose there is any news value in it." (318) That was the end of that. Leff's summary of Gerst's account (294-95) suggests that a copy still exists. The Times could still run it in the magazine section. Perhaps some other publication (Jewish Currents?) could ask for a copy and print it. Today, genocide is taking place in Darfur, but the Holocaust is over. However, there are people calling for the extermination of the Jews. One of them is the leader of Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, who, according to WorldNetDaily (October 23, 2002), has said "if they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide." The same Nasrallah, according to a report in The New York Sun by Pranay Gupte, spits on the ground when he mentions Jews (March 14, 2005). We are not told what he does when he is indoors. Now that Syrian forces have left Lebanon, Hezbollah may possibly become an important player in the government. The Times did not write about Nasrallah's calls for genocide in the past, but if it turns out that he gains power, his views on the subject of Jews are quite important. A report in the Jewish Week on February 4, 2005 by its Washington correspondent, James D, Besser, says that a delegation of students from a Presbyterian seminary in San Francisco met with Hezbollah leaders in last June. The Presbyterian Church has decided to divest its holdings in companies doing business with Israel — not China or Saudi Arabia or Sudan — meaning they consider Israel the worst country on earth. The Times has given little attention to this issue. Perhaps a change has taken place. An editorial on April 22, 2005, entitled "Crosses, Crescents and Stars" refers to the fact that Israel is the only nation on earth that may not join the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The issue is in the news because the American Red Cross is exerting pressure to end Israel's isolation. But maybe there is another reason for the appearance of this editorial. Could it be a response to Laurel Leff's book? To Go To Top

THEATER OF THE ABSURD Posted by Frankfurter, David, July 20, 2009.

Dear Friends, Four items caught my attention in today's newsbag: 1. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. the terrorist Abu Mazen) accused Israel of trying to "Judaicize" East Jerusalem.[1] Excuse me! Why is it that the PA controlled Waqf won't let Jews even move their lips in case they might pray at the edge of the Temple Mount? Exactly who is trying to push their religion and wipe out someone else's? In which cities in the world is it illegal for the adherents of a particular religion to purchase land or live? Friends, the answer is not Israel. I believe that it is only the Arab world (including the Palestinian Authority) that is allowed to practice such racist apartheid practices. 2. And pushing this Palestinian racism with even the most absurd of arguments is the British consulate,[2]which doesn't seem to have shed its anti-Semitic and pro-Arab tendencies from the days of the British Mandate over Palestine. In objecting to a Jewish owned hotel venture in East Jerusalem, "The U.K. envoys also expressed concern that construction activity so close to the consulate could lead to an intelligence leak." I guess they are not worried by Arab neighbours — but being close to Jews might make their limited brains fall out. 3. And at last something sensible. No wonder it didn't make it to the mainstream media. Israeli officials took a step on behalf of captive IDF soldier Gilad Shalit,[3] preventing 15 French diplomatic officials accompanied by Jerusalem consular officials from entering Gaza, where they hoped to take part in Bastille Day festivities. A source stated that Israel cannot permit them to celebrate a day of freedom while Gilad Shalit, who also has French citizenship, remains hostage to Hamas terrorists, now in his fourth year of captivity. 4. Who killed Yasser Arafat? Every good Palestinian can believe his government controlled press. The Israelis are responsible for everything bad in the world, no? Palestinian Media Watch[4] reports that there is new competition for the coveted title of Mr Evil. Seems that PLO leader (and PFLP terrorist) Ahmad Jibril told the secret that everyone has been whispering since Arafat got ill. He claims concrete evidence that jolly Yasser had AIDS, and that's what killed him. The official PA position is, of course that the "cursed [Jewish] apes and pigs" of Israel poisoned Arafat, with permission of the US together with French medical co-conspirators. Al-Jazeera chimes in with the latest conspiracy theory that Mahmoud Abbas was the perpetrator. Who cares, you ask? The interesting thing is that the PA, which has "no power" to stop the racist anti-Jewish, anti-Israel and pro-terror incitement on its state controlled media, was able to immediately ban Al-Jazeera from the Palestinian Authority airwaves for its incitement against the hard done-by Abu Mazen. Footnotes 1. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101542.html 2. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101385.html 3. http://www.theyeshivaworld.com/article.php?p=36958 4. http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=1082 David Frankfurter is a business consultant, corporate executive and writer who frequently comments on the Middle East. To subscribe to his 'Letter from Israel', email him at david.frankfurter@iname.com. Or go to http://www.livejournal.com/users/dfrankfurter/ To Go To Top

GOOD NEWS ABOUT ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS Posted by Paul Lademain, July 20, 2009.

Here is the latest (below) from TIP (the Israel Project). What we gathered from their email was support for yet another "two state" solution — which entirely ignores the past "two state solution" of 1948 that resulted in the loss of 90% of the promised Jewish Palestine when a large chunk of land long promised to the Jews was handed to the Hashemite Islamics in order to create the new state of Jordan. We are the Secular Christians for Zion and we oppose any more "piecing away" of Israel for ANY reason. We say: "No more 'piecing away' for peace" and "Restore Jewish Palestine from the ocean to the sea the way Israel (aka: Jewish Palestine) was originally promised and intended to be." We blame the Brit Foreign Office for making a mess out of the Middle East and then using Brit propaganda and the Saudis and Carter and the Clintons to shuck blame for British stupidity onto the Israelis, whose leadership under Peres, foolishly rushed in to accept the blame. We support Joseph Farah and we say his latest article (May 19, 2009) says it all and says it right. Contact Paul Lademain by email at lademain@verizon.net To Go To Top

ORWELLIAN DISTORTIONS REGARDING ISRAEL & IRAN Posted by AFSI, July 20, 2009.

In the Orwellian world in which we live, one still cannot follow the logic of the latest information on "permission" being given to Israel to attack Iran's nuclear holdings. Iran threatens the entire world, not just Israel, with its build-up of nuclear power. Any attack by Iran would drastically affect the oil producing countries of the Middle East, as well as the security and economies of Europe, America, and the world. Instead of providing assistance to Israel for having the will and skill to prevent Iran from accomplishing its nuclear goals, the world leaders will "allow" Israel to do the dirty clean-up work for them in exchange for "painful concessions." These concessions might mean removing 300,000 Jews from their homes in Judea and Samaria. They might also include dividing Jerusalem in order to satisfy the hunger of the Arab leaders seeking "peace" with Israel. In other words, in order for Israel to have the privilege of putting its soldiers and civilians on the firing line in order to remove Iran's nuclear threat, Israel must uproot its citizens and reduce the size of its country to an indefensible nine mile wide swath of land. Can this be tolerated? Alert your Congressional representatives to the absurdity and dangers of this situation. Action: Contact Congressman Gary Ackerman, Chairman of the Middle East and South Asia subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee: 202-225-5021 Contact Congressman Howard Berman — Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Comm. 202-225-5021 Contact: Congressman Dan Burton, Ranking Member of the ME & SA subcommittee of the HFAC: 202-226-8467 Contact: Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Comm. — 202-226-8467 Americans For a Safe Israel/AFSI is a pro-active pro-Israel advocacy group. AFSI may be contacted by mail at 1623 Third Ave., Suite 205, New York, N.Y. 10128 (Tel: 212-828-2424; Fax: 212-828-1717); by email at afsi@rcn.com; or by accessing its website: www.afsi.org. Helen Freedman is Executive Director. To Go To Top

2 MOVIES; OBAMA IRAN POLICY COLLAPSING; NEW ISRAEL FUND NOT PRO-ISRAEL; US JEWS VS ISRAELIS ON OBAMA Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 20, 2009.

MOVIE REVIEWS: IRAQ WAR; U.S. JEWS I saw two movies that should interest you. One was a documentary, "Yoo Hoo Mrs. Goldberg." It portrayed the writer-actress of American's first and high-quality sit-com. Although antisemitism pervaded America then, this program was the most popular one, appealing to all ethnic groups, because of its heart-warming portrayal of family life. Audiences didn't mind Mrs. Goldberg's Jewish accent, neighbors and observation of some Jewish ritual. The program helped bring Americans together. That's the best of America. The other movie, "The Hurt Locker," showed daily suspense in the war in Iraq. I ask veterans to comment on my review, because my military service did not involve combat. U.S. troops in Iraq constantly faced ambush from guerrillas posing as civilians. The enemy set off bombs that killed many of their own people. Horrible! The GIs were capable and brave. We owe them a debt. Some risked their lives for particular Iraqis, but one officer seemed to deny a civilian medical treatment. I did not care for the troops' culture of drinking, smoking, and punching each other for fun. The emotional stress laid on soldiers in long and repeated tours of combat may be blamed on the chief executives, Congresses, and media through the Clinton and second Bush administrations, for reducing the military and not restoring troop levels, and then making war with inadequate resources. That was unfair to the regular and reserve troops. It seemed to me that G.I. units should have had Iraqi troops with them for training, to help save their own country, and to translate. I think the U.S. troops took too many chances with the population. Shouldn't the Iraqi and U.S. governments have worked out a code of conduct, whereby the population would have been instructed beforehand to follow troops' orders immediately or be shot if potentially a menace? Someone advancing despite orders to halt, someone too slow to lay down his weapon, someone on a cell phone near the bomb squad as it approaches a roadside bomb — tell them once, tell them twice, then shoot. Otherwise, the guerillas abuse soldiers' humanitarian instincts, and kill them. One problem with that recommendation is that local populations are quicker to resent collateral damage by foreign troops than intended damage by troops of their own ethnicity. Another problem is that Americans second-guess our troops too critically. During the Vietnam War, I was appalled by the carpet-bombing of Hanoi civilian areas, destroying villages commandeered by Vietcong, "in order to save them," etc.. Having forgotten such mass-casualties of the past, Americans make too much of the relatively minor collateral damage now, for which I commend the Pentagon. I hope the new rule, to verify intelligence again shortly before bombing a suspected enemy hideout, helps. There was international hysteria about Israeli troops in Gaza. Nevertheless, they didn't use artillery, and didn't demolish cities. They fought only where enemy forces were. The took many measures to minimize civilian casualties. I think that the IDF took too many chances in recent wars, going beyond the requirements of international law, thereby incurring unnecessary casualties. (For reports on combat in Gaza, start by clicking here: www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner ~y2009m5d14-Did-Israel-harm-civilians-in-Gaza-unnecessarily UN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS ABANDONS CONGO After 15 years, the UN Council Human Rights has stopped monitoring abuses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. What is the situation in the Congo? Congo "...security forces continued to act with impunity throughout the year, committing many serious abuses including unlawful killings, disappearances, torture, and rape. Security forces also engaged in arbitrary arrests and detention. Harsh and life-threatening conditions in prison and detention facilities, prolonged pretrial detention, lack of an independent and effective judiciary, and arbitrary interference with privacy, family, and home also remained serious problems. Security forces retained child soldiers and compelled forced labor by civilians. Members of the security forces also continued to abuse and threaten journalists, contributing to a decline in freedom of the press...Discrimination against women and ethnic minorities, trafficking in persons, child labor, and lack of protection of workers' rights continued to be pervasive throughout the country...Armed groups continued to commit numerous, serious abuses — some of which may have constituted war crimes — including unlawful killings, disappearances, and torture. They also recruited and retained child soldiers, compelled forced labor, and committed widespread crimes of sexual violence and other possible war crimes." The Council assigned a special rapporteur assigned to the Congo in 1994. In 2004, the UN downgraded that post to "independent expert." In 2008, it abolished that post, but considered Congo abuses in closed session. Now the Council decided to disregard Congo abuses. The Council President ordered members not to discuss in public the decision or material about the Congo. The same session that spent one minute on the Congo, to make that decision, spent six hours on "human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories," i.e., Israel-bashing (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/24 from EYEonthe UN). There is no "Palestine" now. UN behavior demonstrates disinterest in human rights, interest in Israel-bashing. UN and human rights NGO declarations about Israel are a cover for bias. To see other difficulties with the UN Human Rights Committee, click here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d2-Muslim-regimes-oppose-Human-Rights- Commission-on-women OBAMA POLICY ON IRAN COLLAPSING President Obama withheld even his tepid remarks about Iranian popular protests and brutal government reaction, until Congress made caustic remarks about it. Obama's policy of conciliation is collapsing, as Iran's regime loses legitimacy and it [and N. Korea] reacts over-defiantly (Israel Resource Review, 7/15). Standard Islamic and dictatorial reactions treat foreign conciliation as weakness. For more on Obma policy logic, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d2-Obama-logic-on-foreign-policy- health-care-etc P.S. to Readers: On Protocol The Examiner seeks high-quality discussion. That is difficult over the anonymous Internet. Also, people of some other cultures may not understand the Western way of intellectual debate. Let us have real debate and not personal accusations and general name-calling. Each article must be limited in size and scope. It can not repeat what is in all the earlier articles, so as to be a full history. Therefore, let comments stick to the sub-topic, i.e., to the content of the article, and not accuse the writer of bias because this sub-topic out of his 500 articles on the Examiner since April didn't cover the whole gamut of Zionism! It would not be proper, in a discussion on, say, prisoner release, to counter with, in 1920 the Zionists stole Arab land (which, by they way, they purchased). If you treat your marriage that way, as when one spouse asks, "I'd like you to do more housework," and the other counters with, "And you let the children over-indulge in sweets," you'll need a divorce lawyer. This is not the forum for irrelevant tit-for-tat, which is the way some people argue. Not here, please! JEWS DONATE UNWITTINGLY TO ANTI-ZIONIST CHARITY The New Israel Fund (NIF) presents itself as Pro-Israel, emphasizing its subsidy of Ethiopian immigrants [and abused women]. However, most of its subsidies go to Israeli-Arab NGOs that claim to be non-political, but "openly and unabashedly dedicate themselves to removing the Jewish character of the state of Israel" and taking Jerusalem away from Israel. These organizations falsely accuse Israel of massacre, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and intentionally killing journalists. They use the funds to promote anti-Zionist propaganda, and claim that the Israeli Hebrew media encourage killing and destruction. Some Jews have learned who are the beneficiaries of the NIF, but donate unwittingly to it. You see, they donate to their local Jewish federations, some of which, in turn make grants to NIF. Foundations that make grants to the NIF include: "Ford Foundation, grant organizations such as the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation and the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, as well as various Jewish communal federations such as the Jewish Federation in New York, the Durham-Chapel Hill Federation and the Jewish Federation of Grand Rapids." (David Bedein & Samuel Sokol, Israel Resource Review, 6/24. The source asked the NIF press office for comment on the article, but it declined.) IDF NEW TECHNOLOGY PERMITS SABBATH OBSERVANCE The IDF is developing and installing devices with automatic timers and other features than enable religiously observant soldiers to enter gates or have food cooked on the Sabbath without violating religious strictures against working on the Sabbath (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/25). For instances of IDF bias against religious Jews, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d10-IDF-shows-antireligious-bias For a broader picture of changing religion, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d13-The-evolution-of-God PM NETANYAHU SEEKS COMPROMISE ON SETTLEMENTS PM Netanyahu was in Europe, trying to get support from European officials for some compromise on settlements. He was seeking their approval to exempt from a construction freeze to allow natural growth. They refused (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/25). Why doesn't he tell them that he sees no reason for any freeze on Jewish building, while the Palestinian Arabs continue to build illegally on a large scale, contrary to their Oslo agreements. He should match that with an observation about their fairness when they demand that Jews vacate from the P.A. but not that Arabs vacate from Israel. I think he bends over backward to be too reasonable, whereas they are anti-Zionist and unreasonable. For more on Netanyahu's position on Arab sovereignty, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d14-Netanyahu-on-Palestinian-Arab-sovereignty BRIBE WAY THROUGH GAZA BORDER TO EGYPT? Two Egyptian police officers were arrested for accepting $5,000 each to let Gaza Arabs through the border into Egypt (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 7/15 from Maan News). Egypt denies that arms are smuggled into Gaza, although periodically it makes a show of destroying a few tunnels out of hundreds and confiscating some arms. It was thought that the smuggling goes on because officials believe in it, extort from it, or fear Bedouin resentment if Egypt does something about it. This is the first evidence I recall of border bribery. For other problems with Israeli dependence upon Arabs for security, see here: www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner ~y2009m7d1-Gen-Dayton-getting-funds-to-build- Palestinian-Arab-army JEWISH AMERICAN AND ISRAELI OPINION OF OBAMA Do Jews consider President Obama pro-Israel? 79% of American Jews do. 6% of Israeli Jews do. Israeli disenchantment with Obama cuts across political lines. Who is right? Israelis prove Obama's hostility by his comparing the Palestinian Arab [terrorist] struggle against Israel with the legitimate S. African and U.S. slave struggle. They also cite his false claim that Israel got its legitimacy from the Holocaust, whereas they know the Zionist movement won world recognition well before it. [If not for the Holocaust, in which the Arabs pressured Britain to bar Jews, millions of Jews would have survived and found haven in the Palestine Mandate, and won statehood earlier. The Soviets also held back hundreds of thousands of agriculturally trained Zionists.] "Obama's great success in maintaining support among American Jews owes much to the fact that most American Jews do not pick up the same messages from Obama's statements as do Israeli Jews. Whereas Israeli Jews recognize that it is morally obscene, strategically suicidal and historically inaccurate to suggest that Israel has no rights to Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and that Jews have no right to live there, American Jews do not intuitively understand this to be the case. Consequently, while Israeli Jews recognize Obama's calls for a total freeze in Jewish construction in these areas as inherently hostile, most American Jews do not." "Beyond this, for the past 15 years, Holocaust education — more so than Zionist education or Jewish religious education — has become the hallmark of American Jewish identity. As a consequence, American Jews may not see anything objectionable in Obama's inference that Israel owes its existence to the Holocaust." It would take a major educational effort to enlighten U.S. Jewry. Even then, their waning solidarity with Israel, now no greater than that of Americans as a whole, may inhibit their reaction to Obama's propaganda. On the other hand, they and Americans as a whole, support Israel much more than they do the Palestinian Arabs (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/25 from Caroline Glick). So much for the Arab notion of religious solidarity among Jews! For a further idea of democracy's weakness against misconceptions of a popular President, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d17-Obama-and-the-media Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

NETANYAHU: ISRAEL RULE OVER JERUSALEM NOT UP FOR DISCUSSION Posted by LEL, July 19, 2009.

This was written by Barak Ravid Haaretz correspondent. It is archived at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101192.html

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel's sovereignty over Jerusalem was not a matter up for discussion. The prime minister's comments came after the U.S. State Department told Israeli envoy Michael Oren that Israel must halt a construction project in East Jerusalem. Netanyahu told ministers at the weekly cabinet meeting that Jerusalem is the united capital of Israel and that all citizens are allowed to purchase property in any part of the city they choose. "Imagine what would happen if someone were to suggest Jews could not live or purchase [property] in certain neighborhoods in London, New York, Paris or Rome," he said. "The international community would certainly raise protest. Likewise, we cannot accept such a ruling on East Jerusalem," Netanyahu told ministers. This is the policy of an open city, he said, and Israel would not accept a stance that counters that civil right. "Israeli Arabs are not forbidden from buying houses in west Jerusalem and Jews must be granted the same right in the eastern part of the city," he added. The State Department summoned Oren over the weekend to advise him that the project developed by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz should not go ahead, according to both Israel Radio and Army Radio. Moskowitz, an influential supporter of Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, purchased the Shepherd Hotel in 1985 and plans to tear it down and build housing units in its place. The hotel is located near a government compound that includes several government ministries and the national police headquarters. In response to the request, Oren told the State Department that Israeli construction in East Jerusalem was no different than in any other part of the country. Jerusalem could not be considered along the same lines as settlements, he said, adding that Israel would not accede to this demand. Contact LEL at LEL817@yahoo.com. To Go To Top

RECLAIMING JEWISH PROPERTY IN JERUSALEM Posted by Yaacov Levi, July 19, 2009.

This was written by Hillel Fendel and it appeared in Arutz-7 (www.IsraelNN.com).

(IsraelNN.com) With the Obama administration turning the corkscrews upon Israeli sovereignty in its capital, the spotlight focuses once again on the growing Jewish presence in neighborhoods such as Shimon HaTzaddik. Arab squatters face eviction this week. The U.S. State Department has made an unprecedented demand upon its ally Israel to stop lawful construction in its capital — specifically, at a property owned by activist Dr. Irving Moskowitz in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The municipal housing plan calls for the site of the Shepherd Hotel to become a 20-unit apartment complex. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other government ministers have categorically rebuffed the American ultimatum, as did Ambassador Michael Oren when he was called to the State Department to hear the U.S. demand. Arabs in Shimon HaTzaddik Face Eviction Just below the hotel, seven Jewish families and an all-day Torah-study program, known as a Kollel, are trying to renew the old Jewish neighborhood of Shimon HaTzaddik. Several Arab families that have squatted on the property since Jordan took control of eastern Jerusalem in 1948 continue to refuse to leave — and face possible eviction this week. The area, where Simon the Just and elders of the Sanhedrin were buried over 2,000 years ago, was a thriving Jewish community from 1895 until 1948, when it was evacuated by the British army during the Arab riots preceding the War of Independence. When Israel returned to all of Jerusalem in 1967, Arabs were living there — and appeared to be heading for Jewish obsolescence. However, one day in 1998, a young man named Yair Lieberman happened on the site, looking for the grave of Simon the Just — and found one of four synagogues that had been in operation there several decades earlier. The inscription above the door clearly identifies the synagogue, and the hollow where the Holy Ark had been was also clear to the eye. Amazingly, the Arab living next door had just completed digging foundations, planning to annex the synagogue structure to his own home. Just in time, Lieberman informed then-MK Benny Elon of his find. Elon contacted the official owners of the property, the Jerusalem Community Council, and they authorized to take over the property in its name. Elon arrived with several dozen activists, and not without Arab opposition and even violence, they ultimately succeeded in renewing the synagogue's Jewish past. Today, a Kollel operates on the site, and seven Jewish families live there. Some 20 Arab families live there as well, and have been faced with several eviction orders — most of which have been resisted in one way or another. This week, the date set by a court two months ago for an eviction, Israeli justice will be tested once again: Will the homes be emptied to make room for the Jewish owners to move in or not? Contact Yaacov Levi by email at jlevi_us@yahoo.com To Go To Top

MURDER, HE SAID: PALESTINIAN POLITICS FRAGMENTS FURTHER Posted by Barry Rubin, July 19, 2009.

Reality keeps impinging on the four main illusions regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the ideas that: peace is possible in the not-distant future; that there's a Palestinian negotiating partner which wants a two-state solution; that there's a serious Palestinian negotiating partner capable of reaching and implementing an agreement; and that the failure to end the conflict is due to Israel. Now we may be at the start of another Palestinian implosion, this time in Fatah, the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the PLO, the less-important but still existing Palestinian political umbrella group. The latest development is a very public feud between Fatah leader and long-time PLO "foreign minister" Farouq Qaddumi, and PLO and PA head Mahmoud Abbas. With the word "moderate" endlessly — and exaggeratedly — applied to Fatah, it is easy to forget that the group's perennial most popular leader is Qaddumi, a man who opposed and still openly opposes the Oslo agreement and a two-state solution. Given this opposition, Qaddumi, unlike many other Fatah leaders, long refused to move to Gaza or the West Bank. It should be stressed, however, that Qaddumi could probably — if a conflict broke out — muster more support in the organization than the bureaucratic and uncharismatic Abbas. Indeed, the only real asset Abbas has is the Western aid which subsidizes the PA and, indirectly, Fatah and the PLO. Qaddumi has now accused Abbas of murdering former PLO, PA, and Fatah leader Yasir Arafat, in partnership with Israel no less! Of course, Israel is often blamed for this even by supposedly "moderate" Palestinian leaders or intellectuals aligned with Abbas. The truth is that Arafat, who was always in poor health and never exactly a physical fitness fanatic, received poor medical care, further delayed by the movement's refusal to deal with the reality of his illness. Let's pause here for a moment. If Palestinian leaders lie about each other so shamelessly, shouldn't Western journalists, politicians, and human rights' groups consider how much more of an incentive they have to lie about Israel? Israel is accused of all sorts of misdeeds based on statements by Palestinians who view such lies as part of their propaganda effort. Shouldn't that be taken into account and such claims discounted without hard proof? Let's return, however, to the Palestinian political action. Why this feud between the two top non-Islamist Palestinian leaders? 1. Western observers think peace processes are one-way streets but fail to understand that the closer successful negotiations might appear, the more determined are extremists to wreck it. In other words — it isn't really paradoxical — even the potential prospect of diplomatic progress raised the level of violence and conflict. In this case, the new feud is in part a response to U.S. efforts to heat up the process by those who want to ensure the conflict doesn't end. 2. Abbas is perceived as becoming too close to America and there's fear of the PA and Fatah becoming U.S. satellites. A key factor here is U.S. training of Palestinian security forces. Fatah isn't a movement so much as it is a militia; the PA is not so much a government as it is an assembly of gunmen. If the United States seems to gain influence over the security forces, militants believe it could get control of the movement. Many in the movement want to sabotage this efort. Remember these are people who have spent decades hating and mistrusting America. (Arafat used to lead meetings in a rousing version of a little ditty entitled, "America is the head of the snake.") 3. Qaddumi has always been Syria's man. Syria keeps insisting that it is the key to stabilizing Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinians, Arab-Israeli peace, contacts with Iran, and just about everything else. The Syrians want to assert its own influence over the movement and ensure the United States doesn't get too much. (And since Syria also sponsors Hamas one can see what that would lead.) 4. Finally but most significantly, the battle to be the next PLO leader has just begun. Abbas is not in good health. Will he really last more than a year? Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is a Western-backed bureaucrat with no base of his own. Qaddumi is too old. There is no leading candidate, or even candidates, for the top job. But within the next year they will emerge. Each one will have a faction behind him. And don't forget that each of these candidates will also be thinking about whether he wants to fight Hamas or get its backing in the battle for leadership. In August, Fatah is supposed to hold a general congress, but these meetings are often postponed. Internal elections have been repeatedly postponed. Indeed, the reelection of the PA's leader has also been postponed, in part due to the fact that the PA can't control elections in the Gaza Strip and cannot be entirely sure it would defeat Hamas on the West Bank. Palestinian politics, in short, are in a gigantic mess. They aren't going to get better for a long time and might get worse. The PA and Fatah could descend into anarchy, or an even more radical leadership could emerge, putting its priority on an alliance with Hamas. Western aid and hope of Western diplomatic support (not for a compromise peace but to make Israel give the Palestinians whatever they want with no reciprocity or compromise on their part), keeps people talking about a "two-state" solution in English. But they are chomping at the bit to demand openly that all of Israel become part of Palestine. They already do it in Arabic every day. And these are the leaders and the group and the regime that U.S. and European policy depend on to make the tough compromises needed for peace with Israel? These are the shaky leaders and unstable organizations which much of the world is rushing to give control over a state? To paraphrase what they say in the movies' legal declaimers: Any coincidence between the dominant Western analyses and actual Palestinian politics is purely coincidental. Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley). To read and subscribe to MERIA, GLORIA articles, or to order books, go to http://www.gloria-center.org This article is archived at www.gloria-center.org/Gloria/2009/06/ palestinian-politics-fragments.html To Go To Top

JEWISH GROUPS SHOULD HAVE TOLD OBAMA — SETTLEMENT ISSUE CAMOUFLAGES REAL ISSUES: ARAB TERRORISM, INCITEMENT AND ISRAEL'S LEGITIMACY Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, July 19, 2009.

President Obama invited a small group of Jewish organizations to the White House for a meeting on Monday, July 13 to discuss the increasing concern and fear of American Jews of Obama's hostile policies toward Israel while making no serious demands of the Palestinian Arabs. Media reports about the meeting were numerous. The media reports included the following: "Jewish leaders left their meeting with President Obama — 'glowing'.it became clear.the bulk of the organized Jewish community is in full support of his peace efforts including the demand for a complete freeze of Jewish settlements.the meeting yielded a broad understanding that the administration's decision to take its dispute with Israel to the public will not be challenged by American Jews." "I believe the President got the impression that there is broad support within the community for his policies, and some differences on the tactical level," said Rabbi Steven Wernick, Executive Vice President of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union For Reform Judaism, said in the meeting that expanding settlements was not in the interest of Israel, of the US or of American Jews. 'Nobody in the room questioned it' Yoffie said of the response of the other Jewish leaders in attendance. 'Not one person in the room said to the President, "You're wrong on that." Obama's statement that he would not avoid public disagreements with Israel went unchallenged.' Another article reported, "there was concern about an imbalance in pressures placed on Israel as opposed to on the Palestinians and the Arab States.the President indicated he had a sensitivity to the perception of that imbalance and had to work harder to correct that perception.the 2 leaders of AIPAC asked friendly questions about Saudi Arabia and Iran.no one took issue with Obama's fractured history of the Middle East.Obama told Jewish leaders at the White House that Israel would need to engage in serious self-reflection." Media reports also discussed who was not invited: "Some of Obama's loudest critics — the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).were among the notable absences from the list of those invited to the White House". The White House was careful to exclude Jewish leaders it deemed too inimical to the President's Mideast agenda. While J Street and American Friends of Peace Now were welcomed at the White House, Team Obama conspicuously snubbed far more dedicated supporters of Israel — Morton Klein, President of the ZOA. The JTA speculated that Klein may have been boycotted by Obama because the ZOA President recently said Obama could turn out to be the 'most hostile' US President in Washington relations with Jerusalem. Morton Klein has also been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and most of the Jewish media criticizing President Obama's policies toward Israel. But one would think that Obama, who of all people is a stout exponent of engaging some of the world's harshest critics of US policy, would want to accord the same courtesy to Morton Klein, whose views of the administration are nowhere near as denunciatory as the invectives directed against Obama by Iran's Ahmadinejad and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Yet Morton Klein was kept out of the way at a safe political distance. It does not seem like Peter Bergson was present at the White House with leaders of 14 Jewish organizations. The meeting appeared to be a scripted minuet in conflict avoidance made easier by excluding ZOA who has been openly-critical of the President's stance..why did not any of the organizations invited for the sit-down with the President this week object to the exclusion of the ZOA from the meeting. ZOA and its leader Morton Klein would have been pretty direct with the President, if allowed to speak." Absent from the table were those organizations who questioned the President's policies regarding Israel. No ZOA, no JINSA, no CAMERA. Groups supporting the right of Jews to live in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria were not invited. The President invited 16 leaders but excluded the strongly pro-Israel Zionist Organization of America. Influential groups were left off the guest list. This meeting was an attempt to confront the growing concern about his policy toward the beleaguered Jewish state. Obviously the President had decided not to seriously debate the issues at the gathering since ZOA was locked out of the meeting." Even a DRY BONES cartoon was written about ZOA's exclusion. ZOA President Morton A. Klein said, "The ZOA was deeply disappointed and troubled that the Jewish groups did not make clear that the issue of settlements has nothing to do with attaining a real peace agreement and both distracts and camouflages the real basis for why the peace process has failed. Whether 300,000 or 325,000 Jews live on only 3% of the land in Judea and Samaria has virtually nothing to do with preventing peace. Preventing peace, it should have been made clear to Obama, is the Palestinian Authority's refusal to arrest anti-Israel terrorists; refusal to outlaw terrorist groups; end incitement to hatred and violence against Jews and Israel in their schools, media, and speeches; their continuing to glorify terrorists by naming schools, streets, sports teams, and computer centers after them; disseminating heroic posters of suicide bombers throughout Arab towns; excluding Israel from their maps; Abbas' Fatah party's new emblem showing all of Israel covered with an Arab headdress, next to a large rifle, with Arafat in the middle; and not accepting and teaching the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state. All of these actions are required in virtually every signed agreement from Oslo to Wye to the Road Map. "We need a major public conversation about the anti-peace, pro-terror actions of the Palestinian Authority — not whether Jews should be allowed to move into Ariel, Maaleh Adumim, or eastern Jerusalem. But the participants, representing American Jewry, acted as if Obama's policy of not allowing the moving of one additional Jew into eastern Jerusalem, Judea or Samaria is fine. They should have argued for the right of Jews to live in these territories It is utterly racist and anti-Semitic to insist that Jews cannot build within the borders (we're not even talking outside the borders) to their own communities in Judea and Samaria, whereas Arabs can build everywhere, including within Israel itself. Quite apart from Israel's own historical, legal and religious claims to the territory, this land was also earmarked by the League of Nations in 1922 for the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland. In 1967, Judea and Samaria were captured by Israel from Jordan, an illegal occupier from 1948 to 1967 whose annexation of the territory was recognized by only two countries and which in 1988 renounced its claims to the territory. In short, this is unallocated territory under international law. "Why cannot 300,000 Jews live among 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria while 1.2 million Arabs live among 6 million Jews in Israel? No peace can be built on the notion that the biblical, historical and religious heartland of the Jewish people or any territory for that matter, must be judenrein. Remember, Jews come from the historic area known as Judea. We Jews are Judeans. 'Jew' is a contraction of the term 'Judean.' How absurd to suggest Jews cannot live from whence we came. Would anyone dare propose that Arabs cannot live in Arabia? Until the late 60's-early 70's the term Palestinian meant Jew. Everyone understood that the area of "Palestine" was the Jewish homeland which the Jews were banished 2000 years ago when the Romans changed the name from Israel to Palestine after the Jews' arch enemy the Philistines. Yet the Jews had always maintained a presence there including a majority within Jerusalem itself. There was never a country named Palestine — it simply became a desert-like region. The first Jewish newspaper there was called the Palestine Post and the first Jewish orchestra, the Palestine Orchestra. Even Paul Newman who played the Jew, Ari Ben-Canaan, in the movie "Exodus" called himself a "Palestinian" which he explained is a native born Sabra. "The Leaders should have pointed out that there are a billion or more people throughout the world who are Bible believers (including President Obama) who believe the many biblical statements from G-d giving the Land of Israel to the Jewish people. These statements appear throughout Genesis and Exodus. The reason this Land, throughout history, has been called the 'Promised Land' is precisely because G-d promised this Land to the Jews in the Bible. Even secular Jews maintain this connection to the Land on the basis of the Bible. It is notable that David Ben-Gurion once stated to a British Royal Commission that the 'Bible is our mandate.' If it weren't, perhaps a Jewish state would now exist in Uganda, or somewhere else, or not at all. "The Leaders should also have pointed out that It is significant that a majority of the Israeli public has supported Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's repudiation to this point of President Barack Obama's demand that Israel freeze all Jewish construction and growth in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem by 56 percent to 37 percent. It has also opposed Netanyahu acceding to Obama's reported demand that Israel abandon the settlement blocs as part of an agreement with the Palestinians by 51 percent to 34 percent. "We, at ZOA, were very surprised that the Jewish leaders there emphasized that the problem was 'perception' more than substance. The reason there's an accurate 'perception' of Obama's hostility to Israel is because his policies are, in fact, hostile to Israel and accommodating to the Arabs unjust demands and false claims. "When President Obama said that there was no progress during the Bush years, even though there "was no 'daylight' between President Bush and Israel," the leaders should have said that's simply because the Palestinian Arabs did not stop terrorism or incitement. Obama should have been reminded that the Israelis gave away half of Judea & Samaria, all of Gaza, and even made offers to give away 97% of Judea & Samaria and establish a state. But Abbas and the Palestinians never took yes for an answer. "The ZOA also regrets that this opportunity was not used to take issue with Obama's anti-Israel Cairo speech which supported false Palestinian claims. They should have corrected him on his false claim that Palestinian Arabs were displaced by Israel in 1948; that Palestinian Arabs have been suffering trying to establish their own state for 60 years; that Jerusalem isn't secure for Muslims and Christians; that there are seven million Muslims in America; that Palestinian suffering was equivalent to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust (meaning the Israeli Jews are like Nazis); that Palestinian suffering is equivalent to Black suffering during South African apartheid and slavery in America. The leaders should have taken issue with his never using the term "terrorism" and instead using the Palestinian euphemism for 'resistance'. "We also regret that the issue of fulfilling US law by moving our embassy to Jerusalem was not mentioned as our appropriate demand for an undivided Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty. "But President Obama's lack of support for Israel and embrace of the Arabs' position should not surprise us. After all, Obama was a 22 year member of a church whose Pastor regularly condemned Israel and supported Palestinians; he gave his church $25,000 for many years and called his hateful pastor a 'great man' and 'my mentor'; he himself made speeches saying Hamas and Hezbollah have legitimate claims; his close friends included harsh haters of Israel like Professor Rashid Khalidi and Ali Abuneinah — not to mention his closest friends in the Senate include Chuck Hegel and Richard Lugar who are harsh critics of Israel; and he attended the Israel and Jew basher Louis Farrakhan's million man march. "We should have asked the President why is he going around the world apologizing for America's having dictated to foreign countries what to do, yet the President continues to publicly make demands of what Israel must do. "With respect to ZOA and other like-minded groups not being invited to this meeting, we were told that President Obama and those around him were not pleased with our criticism of his Israel policies. But we thought Obama said that friends should be able to criticize each other as he does Israel. We thought he has repeatedly said he wants to listen to other people's ideas even if they differ from his — and will adopt them if they're good. "We find it sadly ironic that President Obama publicly supports negotiating with and engaging evil enemies of America like Iran and Venezuela, but was unwilling to engage at this face-to-face meeting with pro-Israel organizations that disagree with him. This is an inappropriate position that Obama is taking especially in light of the fact that the Zionist Organization of America is not only the oldest pro-Israel group in the United States and a Charter member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations — but the ZOA has been right in their analysis of every issue. We opposed Oslo as likely leading to nowhere but disaster; we said Arafat was still a terrorist after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993; we predicted the Gaza Withdrawal would lead to more missiles against Israel and further tragedy; and we predicted, based on his record, that Abbas would not be a reliable and motivated peace partner. Those invited did not take these same correct positions that ZOA took. ZOA is also among the most quoted and published Jewish groups in the US today. As the Wall Street Journal has said, "ZOA is the most credible advocate for Israel in the United States today." The Jerusalem Post added, "The ZOA is one of the most important and influential Jewish groups in the US today." While congressional leaders like Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) said, "What the ZOA does is to speak the truth even when the truth is inconvenient to various powers-that-be." And Republican Minority Whip Congressman Eric Cantor (R-VA) said, "The ZOA is the moral compass for all of us in Congress as far as US relationships in the Middle East are concerned." "But ZOA will continue our work as rational centrists and speak out on issues based on the facts and not on hopes and dreams. "An important opportunity was lost at this meeting. We hope, in the future, that Jewish organizations will make our concerns and beliefs more clearly known and understood." Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com To Go To Top

RABBI KAHANE: "SO EASY TO FORGET" Posted by Herb and Miki Sunshine, July 19, 2009.

This was written by Rabbi Meir Kahane and it appeared in the New York Times, June 16, 1975. His essays are distributed by Barbara Ginsberg, who writes: "Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at: barhow@netvision.net.il " They are also available at http:/www.barbaraginsberg.blogspot.com

Time is always on the side of the tenacious. Conversely, it is the enemy of the weary and pushes tired men into the search for compromises that are often more the product of despair than of common sense. This is precisely what is occurring today in Eretz Yisroel, the Land of Israel. Eight years after 2.6 million Jews were saved from extinction, and less than two years after the near-catastrophic Yom Kippur war, larger and larger numbers of those who were almost slaughtered seek to return again to the moment of truth. Forgotten is the insanity of ments from Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Baghdad and Fatah. Forgotten are the pledges to throw us into the sea, wash Tel Aviv clean with Jewish blood and eliminate the "gangsterstate" of Israel. Forgotten are the insanity of borders that saw the coastal strip with its million Jews under the guns of Arab armies just miles away. Forgotten are our own projections of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians dead. Forgotten are the borders that saw settlements on the plain lying naked beneath the Golan Syrian guns; the Sinai with its Egyptian armada within spitting distance of our cities. But most often forgotten are the hatred, the solemn pledges of extermination, the school textbooks with their poisonous venom, the days of May and early June, 1967, when the mobs were lashing about in an agony of anticipation of the great Jihad, about to begin. What were the demands in those days when there were no June 5, 1967 borders to which to return? What were the Arabs marching to war about then? Forgotten is the reality of Arab refusal to recognize an Israel that is even one dunam square. Forgotten is the never-changing reality of Hebronism. What is Hebronism? It is the Arab policy of extermination of the Jew who seeks to live in his own land. It is the reality of that summer day of 1929 that saw Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in the streets, homes and shops of Jewish Hebron. Hebronism is the Arab policy that would be the rule for us every Monday and Thursday could our enemies only accomplish it. We are inundated with all kinds of illusions and elusions. Let us return this land or that and we will have peace. Let us not dare to settle Jews in Eretz Yisroel lest it anger the Arabs and jeopardize peace. Let us recognize the existence of a Palestine people, for that will bring peace. Let us reach peace and brotherhood with the Arabs by territorial concessions and by giving them electricity and indoor toilets. What kind of a Jew believes that he can buy Arab national pride with an indoor toilet? What Jew does not, after all these years, recognize that the Arab will not compromise on that which he considers to be his land, and who views every Jewish kindness as a weakness to be exploited? Our enemy, in the long run, is weariness. It is against this that we must struggle, against the weariness that rises to a crescendo with the frustrating cry of : When will it finally end? Only weak people surrender to time. Strong and tenacious people know that there may never be an end to the struggle and the sacrifice but they also look about and see what their refusal to surrender has accomplished. There is now a state — and today a big one — in much of our Eretz Yisroel; a Jewish state with nearly three million souls and many more to come. None of this would have come about had we listened to the intellectual precursors of our modern-day "doves." In the name of peace there would be no Jewish state; in the name of morality there would be no free Jewish nation. Eretz Yisroel, the Land of the Jewish people exists. Perhaps peace will come some day, but until that time let us not listen to delusions. Strength, tenacity and trust in G-d; this and this alone assures Jewish survival. Herb Sunshine is a lawyer, qualified to practice in U.S.A. and Israel. He and his wife Miki live in Jerusalem. Contact them by email at sunshine.h@012.net.il To Go To Top

'I WED IRANIAN GIRLS BEFORE THEIR EXECUTION' Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, July 19, 2009.

This was written by Sabina Amidi and it appeared in the Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443842931& pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Iranian women protest in Teheran [file] In a shocking and unprecedented interview, directly exposing the inhumanity of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's religious regime in Iran, a serving member of the paramilitary Basiji militia has told this reporter of his role in suppressing opposition street protests in recent weeks. Iranian women protest in... He has also detailed aspects of his earlier service in the force, including his enforced participation in the rape of young Iranian girls prior to their execution. The interview took place by telephone, and on condition of anonymity. It was arranged by a reliable source whose identity can also not be revealed. Founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 as a "people's militia," the volunteer Basiji force is subordinate to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and intensely loyal to Khomeini's successor, Khamenei. The Basiji member, who is married with children, spoke soon after his release by the Iranian authorities from detention. He had been held for the "crime" of having set free two Iranian teenagers — a 13-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl — who had been arrested during the disturbances that have followed the disputed June presidential elections. "There have been many other police and members of the security forces arrested because they have shown leniency toward the protesters out on the streets, or released them from custody without consulting our superiors," he said. He pinned the blame for much of the most ruthless violence employed by the Iranian security apparatus against opposition protesters on what he called "imported security forces" — recruits, as young as 14 and 15, he said, who have been brought from small villages into the bigger cities where the protests have been centered. "Fourteen and 15-year old boys are given so much power, which I am sorry to say they have abused," he said. "These kids do anything they please — forcing people to empty out their wallets, taking whatever they want from stores without paying, and touching young women inappropriately. The girls are so frightened that they remain quiet and let them do what they want." These youngsters, and other "plainclothes vigilantes," were committing most of the crimes in the names of the regime, he said. Asked about his own role in the brutal crackdowns on the protesters, whether he had been beaten demonstrators and whether he regretted his actions, he answered evasively. "I did not attack any of the rioters — and even if I had, it is my duty to follow orders," he began. "I don't have any regrets," he went on, "except for when I worked as a prison guard during my adolescence." Explaining how he had come to join the volunteer Basiji forces, he said his mother had taken him to them. When he was 16, "my mother took me to a Basiji station and begged them to take me under their wing because I had no one and nothing foreseeable in my future. My father was martyred during the war in Iraq and she did not want me to get hooked on drugs and become a street thug. I had no choice," he said. He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so "impressed my superiors" that, at 18, "I was given the 'honor' to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death." In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard — essentially raped by her "husband." "I regret that, even though the marriages were legal," he said. Why the regret, if the marriages were "legal?" "Because," he went on, "I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die. "I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over," he said. "I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her." Returning to the events of the last few weeks, and his decision to set free the two teenage detainees, he said he "honestly" did not know why he had released them, a decision that led to his own arrest, "but I think it was because they were so young. They looked like children and I knew what would happen to them if they weren't released." He said that while a man is deemed "responsible for his own actions at 13, for a woman it is 9," and that it was freeing the 15-year-old girl that "really got me in trouble. "I was not mistreated or really interrogated while being detained," he said. "I was put in a tiny room and left alone. It was hard being isolated, so I spent most of my time praying and thinking about my wife and kids." EDITOR'S NOTE: This is so incredible a story that I checked for confirmation. The first two was posted recently on http://iran.whyweprotest.net/news-current-events/ 16097-islamic-republic-rape-6.html. The last two are from earlier postings, well before this story appeared. 1. By "Persian Pride." In the Islamic law it is illegal to execute a virgin girl. That is true, HOWEVER no where in the Islamic law does it say a virgin girl should be raped before being executed. The law that says it is illegal to execute a girl if she is a virgin is there to protect the girl. These bastards are rapists and criminals, pure and simple. This has nothing to do with Islam, it is all on this criminal regime. The hatred should be directed at the bastards running Iran, not Islam. 2. By Unregistered There is NO law in Islam or in Iran that it is illegal to execute a virgin (boy or girl). It is illegal to prosecute or punish (that includes execution) someone before they are baligh (puberty). As usual people cant seem to separate fact from rumours. 3. By Berkana. October 12, 2007 http://digg.com/world_news/ The_execution_of_a_teenage_girl_hung_for_being_raped In Iran, it's illegal to execute virgin girls. Do you know what they do to remedy this? The court turn a blind eye as the guards rape a virgin accused of a capital crime. Then they hang her, having made it legal to execute her. 4. From Book Review: "Caskets and Rape: The Prison in Iran's Islamic Republic" by Chahla Chafiq From Aljadid, a Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts http://www.aljadid.com/reviews/0942tarabishi.html Vol 9, Nos. 42/43 (Winter/Spring 2003) Cited by http://ElderofZiyon.blogspot.com/2009/07 /iranians-rape-virgin-girls-before.html It remains to be said that the fate of women in the prisons of the Iranian Islamic Revolution is worse than the fate of men. It is not necessarily because women are less resistant and less tolerant to torture, but because women are considered from the theological perspective of the Iranian regime to be an element of seduction, and their bodies a place of evil and impurity. The torture of a woman's body may take the form of rape. Despite the necessity of secrecy that imposes itself in these cases, some women political prisoners have dared to speak up in their memoirs about the torture and rape they were subjected to. However most of the women either were not given the chance to talk or have chosen not to talk. In fact, raped women were often executed. A woman's rape is frequently the last act that precedes her execution. This is explained by the rule in Iranian political prisons that the sentence of execution cannot be carried out if the woman is a virgin. Since there is a theological belief that if a woman dies a virgin she will go to heaven, the politically active virgin is forced to "marry" before her execution and thus to insure she will go to hell. She is forced to "marry" the hangman who will carry out her execution.. This marriage is conducted as a legitimate and official contract which includes, among other things, an estimated dowry. This "dowry" is subsequently paid to the family of the victim; it simultaneously becomes the equivalent of an official notification that she was executed. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com To Go To Top

NETANYAHU REJECTS US DEMAND TO CANCEL EAST JERUSALEM HOUSING PROJECT Posted by Avodah, July 19, 2009.

This DEBKAFile Special Report is archived at http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=6186

Netanyahu: Take Jerusalem off the table Opening the weekly cabinet session Sunday, July 19, Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu sharply rejected the US State Department demand handed to Israeli ambassador Michael Oran to put a stop to construction work at the Shepherd's Hotel site in Jerusalem. The abandoned hotel is located between the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and Mount Scopus, where the Hebrew University and Hadassah are situated. Netanyahu stressed the issue of construction in Jerusalem, capital of Israel and the Jewish people, is not open to discussion. Hundreds of Arab residents have purchased apartments in the west of the city without difficulty, he pointed out, and there is no bar on Jews buying or building on the eastern side. Building permits are issued by city authorities for Jews and Arabs alike in the open, undivided city of Jerusalem, said Netanyahu. The Shepherd's Hotel site originally belonged to the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini and his heirs turned it into a hotel in the years between 1948 and 1967 when Jews were forbidden to set foot in Jerusalem. In the 1980s, the Husseinis sold the site to American businessman Irwin Moskowitz who intends building a Jewish housing estate there. DEBKAFile's political sources add: The left-wing Meretz party leader Haim Oron predictably supported the US demand issued in response to a protest from Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas. This circular process has become a regular feature of US-Israeli relations, usually beginning with left-wing Israeli activists "alerting" the US administration to Jewish construction activity on the West Bank and Jerusalem in order to trigger a Palestinian complaint and invoke American pressure on the Israeli government. Moskowitz has devoted himself to purchasing land from Palestinians in east Jerusalem for the construction of Jewish neighborhoods. Likewise, Jewish neighborhoods abutting on east Jerusalem and the West Bank, such as French Hill and Pisgat Zeev, have in recent years attracted a growing number of Palestinians apartment purchasers. Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com and visit his website: http://am-yisrael-blog.blogspot.com/ To Go To Top

FROM ISRAEL: GOOD MOVE, BARACK! Posted by Arlene Kushner, July 19, 2009.

Well, old Barack Hussein has finally done it. This megalomaniac who thinks he controls everything has gone too far: In the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, there is a compound that was legally purchased by American businessman Irving Moskowitz in 1985. All papers are in order. The site originally belonged to the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Nazi collaborator and mentor of Yasser Arafat, and later became the Shepherd hotel. Plans now are to replace the hotel with a housing complex of some 20 to 30 apartments, to be purchased by Jewish families. But Mahmoud Abbas was disturbed about these plans, because this would "shift the demographic balance" in the city. Which is to say that he covets eastern Jerusalem and wants to see it stay predominantly Arab. (Clarification: It is predominantly Arab not because this was the historical situation, but because Jordan rendered the area Judenrein from 1949-67.) ~~~~~~~~~~ Reports are that Abbas complained to the Americans. And what happens when Abbas protests? Seems that the American president jumps. Michael Oren, our ambassador to the US, was summoned to the State Department and told that the Obama administration wanted us to stop the building. "Nothing doing," Oren told them. What's important here is that, no only will we refuse, but that PM Netanyahu was reportedly incensed about this, saying that Obama had "crossed a red line." The issue here is very clear: Jerusalem united is undisputedly our sovereign capital. Jews are allowed to build, and live, anywhere in the city. "This has always been Israel's policy and this is the policy of the current government," declared the prime minister. "...There is no prohibition against Arab residents buying apartments in the west of the city and there is no prohibition barring the city's Jewish residents from buying or building in the east of the city. That is the policy of an open city that is not divided." ~~~~~~~~~~ In a press conference today, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman called this demand "odd": "Thousands of Arab families build houses in Jerusalem, in the [primarily Jewish] neighborhoods of Neve Yaakov and French Hill, and I've never heard any comment on the matter from the United States or Europe. I'm trying to put this delicately: It would be very strange if Jews were discriminated against in Jerusalem of all places, especially in light of the fact that it is not an isolated site; this is the heart of the city, very close to the Government Compound and Israel Police Headquarters." Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein said, "A demand to cease construction in a neighborhood situated only several meters from the Hebrew University proves how dangerous it is to be dragged into a debate on settlement freeze, which will lead us to a total demand to freeze our normal lives throughout the entire State of Israel." ~~~~~~~~~~ I would like to imagine — it may be hoping too much, but perhaps not — that this will stiffen the backs of our government officials more broadly with regard to American demands. For it can be seen that there is no end, and no respect for our rights. There will always be another demand. ~~~~~~~~~~ The municipality of Jerusalem also weighed in on this issue, with a statement that reflects a principle of enormous significance: "The Local Planning Committee of the Jerusalem Municipality operates according to equal criteria for all issues of construction permits, without regard to race, creed, gender, religion, or national identity of the resident or property owner." Imagine if we tried to prevent Arabs from building legally in the city. It seems that the world finds this acceptable only where Jews are concerned. And the Palestinians deign to refer to Israel as apartheid?? ~~~~~~~~~~ We can readily extrapolate from this issue to the broader issue of building in Jewish communities beyond the Green Line, as well. Picture the furor that would ensue if we said that in Judea and Samaria no Arab could add to his house, and no Arab city could build a nursery school. But to attempt to impose this on Jews? Hey, that's another story. We're dealing here with essential human rights., and the notion that they can be selectively withheld. ~~~~~~~~~~ Perhaps in line with this thinking, spokespeople for our government have decided not to use the term "natural growth" any more, with regard to why building is needed in settlements. Instead, the term "normal life" will be used with regard to the need for continued construction. I rather like the explanation of Herb Keinon in the Post: "If Israel [were to eventually agree] to a freeze except for "natural growth," then if anyone moved to a home in a settlement who was not a returning son or daughter, or was not born there, then Israel could be accused of lying, since this type of movement is migration and not natural growth. "However, 'normal life' would seem to allow for the occasional family moving across the Green Line, because what is normal life if not some people moving in, and others moving out?" ~~~~~~~~~~ It should be mentioned here that former PM Ehud Olmert has finally made a statement — in an op-ed in the Washington Post that appeared Friday — with regard to our understanding with the US on settlements. Of course there was a US-Israeli understanding, he says. The criteria he describes are much as we've heard from other sources: construction would be within current borders, no new land would be allocated or confiscated for settlement construction, no new settlements would be constructed, and there would be no provision of economic incentives to promote settlement growth. Wrote Olmert: "during the run-up to Annapolis and in meetings there [in 2007], I elaborated to the US administration and the Palestinian leadership that Israel would continue to build in the settlements according to the above criteria. "Let me be clear. Without those understandings, the Annapolis process would not have taken on any form. Therefore, the focus on settlement construction now is not useful." Interestingly, in line with the new phraseology adopted by the government — and purely coincidentally, I'm sure — Olmert wrote that the understandings created "a proper balance to allow essential elements of stability and normality for Israelis living in settlements..." ~~~~~~~~~~ Apparently pleased with Obama's response on the building in eastern Jerusalem, PA prime minister Salam Fayyad has again appealed to him to "come up with a plan and a timetable for its application that will...put an end to Jewish settlements and Israeli offensives, and lead to serious negotiations." ~~~~~~~~~~ PA negotiator Saeb Erekat has declared that Netanyahu is "hampering peace" by supporting Jewish housing in eastern Jerusalem. There is no middle ground, he said — there can be building in settlements (eastern Jerusalem being a "settlement" by the PA definition) or there can be negotiations, but not both. ~~~~~~~~~~ I am quite certain that Erekat's statements carry less than no weight here, especially as the prime minister's office has registered outrage at a recent meeting Erekat had in Sharm el-Sheikh with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, saying it stands in stark contrast to the Palestinian refusal to negotiate with the Netanyahu government. Said spokesman Mark Regev, "It appears...that [the Palestinians] have no qualms and place no pre-conditions upon dialogue with the most extreme and violent enemies of peace." ~~~~~~~~~~ Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin, in a report to the Cabinet today, said that Hamas has moved from the military to the political arena in an attempt to undermine PA president Mahmoud Abbas. Meanwhile, Egypt has set a new deadline of August 25, for a unity agreement between Fatah and Hamas. They never give up, do they? How many times now have I written that Egyptian negotiators had thrown up their hands in despair and cancelled further efforts to achieve that unity government? ~~~~~~~~~~ Diskin further reported that the Palestinians were increasing their activities in eastern Jerusalem in order to enhance their presence in the city. He said that there is ongoing, clandestine PA activity in eastern Jerusalem meant to stop Jews from buying land in the area. Arab land brokers who sell property to Jews are persecuted, prosecuted, and sometimes even sentenced to death. Hamas, added Diskin, has been working get a foothold in the Jerusalem. The Muslim Brotherhood's senior cleric, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, has allotted $21 million for the purchase of property in the city in order to establish a Hamas infrastructure. Most troubling. Diligence is essential. ~~~~~~~~~~ Two very fine articles I recommend: "Self-exiled by guilt," by Sarah Honig deals with a slip made by Mahmoud Abbas on July 6, which puts the lie to his claim that he a "refugee" and was driven from his home in Sfat by Israeli troops. Seems he and his family left voluntarily: "People were motivated to run away... They feared retribution from Zionist terrorist organizations — particularly from the Sfat ones. Those of us from Sfat especially feared that the Jews harbored old desires to avenge what happened during the 1929 uprising. This was in the memory of our families and parents... They realized the balance of forces was shifting and therefore the whole town was abandoned on the basis of this rationale — saving our lives and our belongings." The 1929 uprising? A pogrom in which 21 Jews were butchered by Arabs, in action instigated by the Jerusalem Mufti (the very same one who once owned the property upon which Jews will now have homes). Please, read this painful story, and this important piece of history. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1246443837339& pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull ~~~~~~~~~~ And then this very perceptive piece by Abraham Miller, "For Liberal Jews, Obama is the Messiah." http://pajamasmedia.com:80/blog/ for-liberal-jews-obama-is-the-messiah/ (Thanks, Dianne E.) ~~~~~~~~~~ "The Good News Corner" All over the world, bee colonies are collapsing, thus endangering agricultural production. An Israeli company, Beeologics, has developed a medication, Remember, that helps to strengthen the resistance of bee colonies to the virus that causes the collapse. Successful trials in the US on millions of bees show that besides combating the virus, the medication increases the longevity of bees and increases honey production. __________ What is known as "drug on drug interaction" can kill: You take one drug prescribed by a doctor and buy another over the counter. Or you have different doctors that prescribe different medications. While each is safe standing alone, sometimes in combination the drugs can have harmful or even lethal affects. An Israeli company RX-DrugOn has now developed a way to handle this potential problem: The DrugOnCard, a smart card that will be able to be presented each time a drug is purchased, will carry complete information about what you are taking. It comes with a pre-installed (and regularly updated) database of potentially dangerous drug interactions, and will alert the pharmacist if a problem is detected. _________ The desert rhubarb, Rheum palaestinum, a rare plant found only in Israel and neaby Jordan, is believed to be the only one in the world that is self-irrigating. Its broad leaves have grooves and channels that funnel minute amounts of rainwater directly to the roots of the plant. It can collect up to 16 times more water than other plants growing in the same arid environment. In addition, the water that is funneled goes 10 times deeper into the sand than rain that lands directly on the sand. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info To Go To Top

THE PALESTINIANS' MAN IN JERUSALEM Posted by Avodah, July 19, 2009.

This was written by Robert Fulford and it appeared July 11, 2009 at National Post. Contact him by email at robert.fulford@utoronto.ca

The clouds that normally obscure events in the Middle East start to recede when Khaled Abu Toameh begins talking about the future of Palestinians and Israelis. This relationship, the key to his future life as an Israeli Arab, has been the subject of his journalism for more than two decades. What he's learned contradicts beliefs held by much of the world, and differs sharply from what we expect from someone with his background. He was in Toronto this week, talking to a few journalists. He's a Muslim-Arab, son of an Israeli-Arab father and a Palestinian-Arab mother. When he was studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he went to work for Al-Fajr ( "The Dawn"), the Palestine Liberation Organization newspaper. He left when he realized it would never print anything but propaganda. Hoping to be a real journalist, he began working with foreign reporters covering Israel. Eventually, he produced TV documentaries and wrote for Britain's Sunday Times and other papers. For the last eight years, he's been the Jerusalem Post's specialist in Arab affairs. "I am an Arab Muslim and the only place I can write honestly is in a Jewish newspaper," he says. Other Arab journalists envy his freedom. He believes the so-called "peace process," begun with the Oslo Accords of 1993, has been a tragic failure and holds little promise of success. Over 16 years, the peace process has brought war — and plenty of it. It has disillusioned both Arabs and Jews — Arabs because they haven't acquired the independence and honest self-government they wanted, Jews because security has become more elusive than it was two decades ago. Even so, the United States and others believe the virtue of the peace process is self-evident. The Palestinians are now divided between two bloodthirsty sects — Fatah, which holds fragile power in the West Bank, and Hamas, which controls Gaza. Their conflict has cost nearly 2,000 Palestinian lives and shows no sign of abating. At the moment, Fatah has 900 alleged Hamas operatives imprisoned in the West Bank without charge. Some of them may well be Hamas sympathizers, Abu Toameh says, some not. In any case, Fatah has arrested them mainly to show foreign governments that it is "cracking down." Fatah, of course, is considered the "moderate" Palestinian force, as opposed to radical Hamas. Abu Toameh thinks neither of them could be called moderate by any sensible Arabic speaker. Fatah makes moderate sounds in English but in Arabic sounds as anti-Semitic and anti-American as Hamas. Abu Toameh sees no moderates on either side. Both factions suppress moderate opinion wherever it raises its head, which is apparently not often. "This is not a power struggle between good guys and bad guys," he said in a recent speech. "It is a struggle between bad guys and bad guys." He wishes they were fighting over what would be best for Palestinians. "But they're only fighting over money and power." The West spends a fortune propping up Fatah, in return for its relatively benign rhetoric. But Fatah remains unpopular. West Bank Arabs take its corruption for granted and now suspect that it's controlled as well as backed by the Americans. Anyone who listens to Abu Toameh has to consider that U. S. President Barack Obama is now part of the problem. Great fortunes stolen by Fatah officials are only occasionally reported in the West. When Abu Toameh first suggested foreign journalists tell this story, he was asked by some of them if he was paid by the Jewish lobby. Other reporters explained that information on Palestinian corruption simply didn't fit into the stories their editors wanted, about Palestinians oppressed by Israelis. Most of the world believes, often with passionate intensity, that Jewish settlements on land claimed by Arabs limits the chances for peace. Abu Toameh disagrees. "I wish the settlements were the problem," he says, because it can be solved by the Israelis. If settlements were the problem, he argues, then Gaza would now be at peace. After all, the Israelis pulled out in 2005. But the result has been war — war among the Palestinians, war with Israel. "The real obstacle to peace is not a Jew building a settlement but the failure of the Palestinians to have a government. Is there a partner on the Palestinian side for peace talks? No." What is to be done? He thinks Israel should simply wait until the Palestinians stop killing each other and create a credible political entity that can make a deal. Peace will then become possible. Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com and visit his website: http://am-yisrael-blog.blogspot.com/ To Go To Top

TARIQ RAMADAN 'LAPDOG TO THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD' WINS US APPEALS COURT DECISION Posted by Jerry Gordon, July 18, 2009.

Tariq Ramadan, Swiss grandson of Hassan al-Banna Professor Tariq Ramadan, Swiss citizen and grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al Banna won a rversal yesterday by the US Second Circuit Court in Manhattan of a lower court decision barring his entry to the US to take up a tenured position at the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Center for International Peace studies in South Bend Indiana. The ACLU and other allies on the academic left in America mounted a legal defense to lift the bar against his Visa preventing him coming to the US. The State Department barred Ramadan from entry in 2004, in large measure, because he had written a check for $1,336 to a charity affiliated with Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization. In the interim, Ramadan is the author of "Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation" and other works extolling the doctrine of European Islam, a code word for the Islamization of Eurabia. Nidra Poller, ex-Pat American writer in Paris, wrote me this morning with this trenchant comment: "not that particularly to lapdogs to the Muslim Brotherhood! Is there no limit?" My colleague at the New English Review, Rebecca Bynum, noted this in her Iconoclast post on this mind numbing court decision: Professor Ramadan had said in an affidavit that he was not aware of any connections between the charity, Association de Secours Palestinien, and terrorism, and that he believed the organization was involved in legitimate humanitarian projects. In its ruling on Friday, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held unanimously that the government was required to "confront Ramadan with the allegation against him and afford him the subsequent opportunity to demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that he did not know, and reasonably should not have known, that the recipient of his contributions was a terrorist organization." Do we assume that Judge Sotomayor, presently going through US Senate Confirmation hearings, participated in this ruling? Ramadan knew what he was doing when he wrote the check to Hamas. After all he's the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan al Banna, of which Hamas is an affiliate. Then there were the thousands of taped Friday sermons distributed by the Islamist publishing house,Tawhid, that this taqiyyah artist flooded French Mosques with Muslim Brotherhood hate cant and rhetoric. This is a travesty of justice. Now, we suppose that Ramadan can travel to the US and take up physically his tenured position at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana and send the same Muslim Brotherhood tapes to radical Mosques, here. Ramadan and his 'double speak"about European Islam has been exposed in a book, "Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan" by author Caroline Fourest. Fourest noted this about Ramadan: When speaking to a Muslim audience, in particular young Muslim under his guidance, Tariq Ramdan, never criticizes Hassan al-Banna or the Muslim Brotherhood in any way. He does, of course, emphasize certain aspects, but he remains true to the doctrine of the Brotherhood and the Brotherhood leader is clearly identified as the model to be imitated....Far from expressing any reservations about the fanaticism that is an integral part of Al-Banna's ideology, he accuses those who point out the unsavory aspects of his political and family heritage of conspuracy and post-colonial racism. Contact Jerry Gordon at jerry_gordon38@yahoo.com. This appeared on the Iconoclast website and Israpundit http://www.israpundit.com/2008/?p=15428 To Go To Top

VEILED THREAT Posted by Olivier Guitta, July 18, 2009.

In his speech in Cairo, President Obama mentioned no less than three times the headscarf sometimes worn by Muslim women. Each time, his purpose was to stress "the right of women and girls to wear the hijab" — but never their right not to wear it. It was as if it had never occurred to the president that this sartorial practice could be anything but wholly voluntary. The French, whose 2004 ban on the hijab and other religious attire in public schools Obama was indirectly criticizing, are more attuned to the use of the headscarf as an instrument of domination by religious extremists. It was Muslim women seeking relief from pressure to cover themselves whose complaints led ultimately to the French ban. Now the issue has cropped up again in the form of a call, endorsed by French president Nicolas Sarkozy, to ban the total veiling of the face. It all started in mid-June when André Gérin, the Communist mayor of Vénissieux, a suburb of Lyon, who is also a member of the National Assembly, proposed a parliamentary commission to investigate the burqa (an outer garment covering a woman from head to toe) and the niqab (which veils the whole face except the eyes) as oppressive to women. His resolution stated: A woman wearing a burqa or a niqab is in a state of unbearable isolation, exclusion, and humiliation. Her very existence is denied. The sight of these imprisoned women is intolerable when it comes to us from Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or other Arab countries. It is totally unacceptable on the soil of the French Republic. A few days later, in a historic address to parliament, Sarkozy said the burqa is not "welcome in France." This "is not a religious issue," the president said, "but rather a question of freedom and of women's dignity." Neither the burqa nor the niqab is common in France, but their precise incidence is unknown. According to Gérin, more than 100 women in Vénissieux (which has a population of 60,000) wear the burqa. About a dozen of the 200 or so marriages solemnized each year at the town hall are problematic for officials because the husband refuses to allow his wife to remove her covering. One local official recounted that a man covered his wife's picture on her ID because he did not want the clerk to see her face. According to Abdelali Mamoun, an imam in Guyancourt, near Paris, the number of "ninja women" — the slang term for women in burqas or niqabs — is growing exponentially. Of the Islamists who are behind this trend he said, "Even if they are not jihadists, they hate the West, they spit on the kuffars, the infidels, but they take advantage of all the French social services instead of settling in a Muslim land as dictated by their doctrine. Their duplicity hurts French Muslims." Not everyone agrees. A young Moroccan woman named Faiza, who had moved to France in 2000 with her new husband and who wears a niqab, became something of a celebrity in June 2008, when the authorities refused to grant her French citizenship. The reason: Her "radical practice of her religion" produces "behavior incompatible with the essential values of the French community, especially the principle of equality of the sexes." Interestingly, Faiza does not come from a highly religious family; she adopted an Islamist way of life only after arriving in France. Still, her husband couldn't see what was so shocking about the niqab. "We, too, are shocked by certain things," he said, "fags living together openly, couples that don't get married, half-naked women in the streets." He and Faiza tried to emigrate to their dream country, Saudi Arabia, but gave up in the face of bureaucratic complications. Still, they keep in touch with a Saudi "religious adviser" who gives them guidance for everyday life. Fadela Amara, secretary of state for urban policies and former president of a feminist organization defending Muslim women, Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither whores, nor submissives), has urged the banning of the burqa. Said Amara, herself a Muslim, "The burqa confiscates a woman's existence. By and large, those who wear it are victims. ... I favor banning this coffin for women's basic liberties. ... The burqa is proof of the presence of Muslim fundamentalists on our soil and of the politicization of Islam." Some women on the left, whether Greens or Socialists, respond that a ban would solve nothing and would result in some Muslim women's being totally sequestered in their homes. To which Amara responds, "Freedom is not negotiable. I would ask those who oppose the proposal to try wearing a burqa." Because of her outspoken position, Amara has received death threats, and two men have been arrested. Indeed, even conservative Muslims are not exempt from the wrath of the extremists. One imam close to the French branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the UOIF (Union des Organisations Islamiques de France), was recently assaulted by two radicals for failing to defend Muslims with sufficient vigor on a TV talk show. The imam had clearly stated he opposed banning the burqa and had sharply criticized secularism. But that was not enough for his assailants, who insisted he should have actually endorsed the burqa. Of the major Muslim organizations in France, the UOIF comes closest to doing so: It acknowledges that some religious leaders call for the wearing of the burqa. While other groups note that such covering is not required by the Koran, none goes so far as to condemn the burqa. Interestingly, all the Muslim organizations agree that the state should not get involved in the issue. The president of the French Muslim Council said he was shocked by the debate, which he regarded as stigmatizing Islam. As for French Muslims generally, a large majority of them are secular and therefore are not represented by the organizations participating in the French Muslim Council. Most do not expect women to wear even the hijab, much less to cover their faces. For now, the matter is in the hands of the 32-member parliamentary commission created by Gérin's resolution, which is due to report its findings on the burqa and the niqab in January 2010. It is surprising that the issue has generated so much controversy, considering that others in Europe have paved the way. In Holland, face coverings are forbidden in schools and public transportation; in Sweden, Italy, Luxembourg, and some Belgian cities, the burqa is banned. The Arab media, especially the Saudi press, have provided obsessive daily coverage of these developments. Every commentator concludes that France is a dreadful, bigoted place. One column in Al Riyadh depicted France as a land of Crusaders propagating an ideology of racism and hatred of Islam and the Koran. To prove his point, the columnist noted that the French government had been harassing "its good citizen" Roger Garaudy, an infamous Holocaust denier who converted to Islam. The writer took comfort only in the thought that this France won't be around much longer, since it will have a Muslim majority by 2050. Olivier Guitta is an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a foreign affairs and counterterrorism consultant. To Go To Top

IF PA'S ABBAS CAN CLOSE AL-JAZEERA FOR "INCITEMENT," WHY DOESN'T HE CLOSE PA MEDIA FOR ANTI-JEWISH INCITEMENT Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, July 18, 2009.

This is a News Release by ZOA. Contact Morton A. Klein at: 917-974-8795 or 212-481-1500

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), has learnt that Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas has shut down within the PA Al-Jazeera, a major media that is not under his control, for "incitement" against him and the PA. That being the case, why has not Abbas closed down PA media, which he completely controls, for incitement against Jews and Israel, as required by required under the signed Oslo agreements and the 2003 Roadmap peace plan? Al-Jazeera, the most popular network of choice among Palestinians, was shut down on Abbas' orders for committing "incitement" after it aired comments on July 14 by senior Fatah member and PLO foreign minister Farouk Kaddoumi who accused Abbas personally of involvement in an alleged plot to kill Yasser Arafat. The Palestinian Information Ministry said in a statement, "Al-Jazeera has always dedicated a wide portion of its broadcasts to incitement against the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority" and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said yesterday that he commissioned PA Attorney General Ahmed Al-Mughni to take the legal procedures necessary to prosecute Al-Jazeera ('PA shuts down Al-Jazeera's West Bank offices,' Maan News Agency, July 15, 2009). www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=212107 PA media regularly glorifies terrorists and terrorism against Israel and commits incitement to hatred and murder against Jews and Israel: Palestinian Authority (PA) Minister of Prisoners, Ashraf al-Ajrami praised PA forces on PA TV for terrorism against Israelis: "Now they [Hamas] are speaking [disparagingly] about the PA's security forces, calling them] 'Dayton Forces.' These [security] forces paid the heavy price in the second Intifada, both as Shahids [Martyrs] and as prisoners. The greatest number of prisoners is from the security forces sector. They are the ones who bore arms and carried out the greatest and most important operations [terror attacks] against the Israeli occupation — and especially against soldiers, and some of the most famous operations [terror attacks] in the West Bank — Ein-Arik, Wadi Al-Haramiyeh, Sorda, and others. These were carried out by the heroes of the Palestinian security forces, who protected the homeland and the national interest, while Hamas merely looked on for many months before embarking [on terrorist attacks]." (Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, 'PA boasts of past terror attacks by security forces,' Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) Bulletin, July 7, 2009). PA TV broadcast an event in which Fatah bragged of committing more terrorist acts against Israelis than Hamas. The broadcast included a mock debate between Fatah and Hamas partisans in which the savage October 2000 murder and mutilation of two Israeli reservists by a frenzied mob of Palestinians was celebrated and lauded as an example of national pride and duty. (The two Israelis — Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami — had unintentionally entered PA-controlled Ramallah and were arrested by PA police before a murderous mob seized them, brutally murdered them, threw them from the second floor police station window to a savage throng below that proceeded to tear their bodies apart and mutilate them beyond recognition. While the picture of a Palestinian celebrating the killing by waving his bloody hands to the mob horrified the world, the murder remains a source of pride for Fatah) (Maayana Miskin, 'Abbas's Fatah Brags About Anti-Israel Terror,' Israel National News, June 26, 2009). PA newspaper falsely accuses Israel of medical experimentation on Palestinians: "The method employed by the Israeli Occupation in which they [are] instigating slow death ... doctors in Israeli prison clinics use the prisoners as guinea pigs for clinical drug testing under the pretense of 'treatment.'" (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 6, 2008). "Many of the male and female inmates received injections from needles they had not seen before, and which caused their hair and facial hair to fall out permanently ... others lost their sanity, or their mental condition is constantly deteriorating... and some are suffering from infertility" (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 4, 2008). "The doctors in these prison clinics are using the prisoners as guinea pigs for clinical testing of drugs and treatment-methods." (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, July 3, 2008), translations courtesy of 'Palestinian Authority Libel: Prisoners are used for Nazi-like medical experiments,' Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), July 9, 2008). ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, "It would be hilarious were it not so serious that the PA, when it finds allegations against it aired in the Arabic media to be 'incitement,' it is able to act immediately to shut down the media. This is now clearly the case, even when the media outlet in question is Al Jazeera, the most popular cable network in the PA and throughout much of the Arab and Muslim worlds. "Conversely, when the PA-controlled media broadcast toxic and vile anti-Jewish and pro-terror propaganda, the PA, which is committed under several agreements to outlaw such media, does nothing and permits it to continue in sowing poisonous seeds of hatred throughout Palestinian society. "For years, apologists for Abbas, the PA and the Palestinians generally have often used the argument that the PA is too weak to enforce its own commitments to end incitement or risk a confrontation with Palestinian society over the issue. Yet, however, weak the PA may be, it is evidently well up to the task of shuttering media outlets that merely air allegations against the PA. Yet, when it comes to its own controlled media, we are apparently expected to believe that it lacks the power to control what is broadcast. "The absurd and provably false apologia and indulgence for continuing Palestinian incitement to hatred and murder against Israel and Jews must end, both because it is a poisonous phenomenon in itself which fuels terrorism and conflict and because it is a basic PA obligation under signed agreements. Until this occurs, there should be no negotiations or even talk of rewards or concessions to the PA." Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com To Go To Top

A CASE STUDY IN U.N. HYPOCRISY Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, July 18, 2009.

This was written by Hillel Neuer and Marissa Cramer and it appeared today in National Post of Canada. www.nationalpost.com/related/links/story.html?id=1799595&p=2 Hillel Neuer is executive director of UN Watch, and Marissa Cramer is a Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fellow at UN Watch.

Last week, not for the first time, the world witnessed state-sanctioned violence against protesters in Iran and China. Yet the United Nations was instead focused on Israel, due to unprecedented hearings held by a UN inquiry into the Gaza conflict of six months ago. This was precisely the goal of the body that organized the inquiry, the discredited UN Human Rights Council. The inquiry's lead investigator is former international prosecutor Justice Richard Goldstone. From the beginning, the terms of his mandate have been unclear. The original council resolution in January began by finding Israel guilty of "massive violations," and then created a "fact-finding mission" to support its pre-determined conclusion. At the Human Rights Council, where tyrannies are the majority, such upside-down justice is the norm. Goldstone, however, claims that he accepted the task — which had been rejected by former UN rights chief Mary Robinson — only after the council president expanded the examination to include both sides. In contrast to the original mandate, Goldstone speaks only of "alleged" violations. In other words, he is trying to conduct a genuine inquiry despite having been appointed to a farcical one. It's a tricky feat. When the inquiry last week invited not only Palestinians to speak, but Israeli victims as well, Goldstone introduced something new to the UN. He deserves particular credit for inviting Noam Shalit, father of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held incommunicado by Hamas since 2006, and denied access to the Red Cross. Yet whatever balance Goldstone may bring, the inherent problem with his mission is that it plays into the collective strategy of the council's repressive regimes, which is to cover up abuses in places such as Iran, China, Pakistan, Russia, Egypt and Zimbabwe — all ignored this year — and instead shine a permanent spotlight on Israel. Consider the council's sense of "proportionality": More than three-quarters of all its condemnatory resolutions have been against one country — Israel — as well as five out of its nine emergency sessions on country situations. As a permanent feature of every regular session, it has one agenda item for violations around the world, and another specifically on Israel. Except for a handful of censures of North Korea and Burma, the world body has virtually ignored the UN's 191 other member states. But didn't the council in May hold a session on Sri Lanka? Yes, but one that actually praised the government, instead of holding it accountable. Comparing the UN session on Sri Lanka with the January session against Israel, the one that created Goldstone's mission, is illustrative of the double standards that plague the 47-nation council. At first glance, the conflicts this year in Israel and Sri Lanka appear similar. In the backdrop of territorial disputes, both countries fought terrorist groups that target civilians and use them as human shields, and in both cases, innocent civilians became casualties. But if one examines their actual conduct, the two cases are different. First, according to the Times of London, the death toll of civilians in Sri Lanka is more than 20,000. By contrast, even according to Palestinian figures, the toll in Gaza was approximately 1,000 — meaning that Sri Lanka killed over 20 times more civilians. Second, Israel undertook extensive measures to prevent harming civilians while fighting in a densely-populated region, using leaflets and personal telephone calls to warn civilians to seek shelter. According to British Colonel Richard Kemp, no military in history had ever taken greater precautions. Sri Lanka, by contrast, never claimed to do any of this. And while Israel made humanitarian pauses every day, Sri Lanka failed to do so, and shelled civilians trapped in its self-proclaimed "no-fire zones." Third, while Sri Lanka cracked down on journalists and doctors who dared to publicize the government's actions against civilians, Israel tolerated vehement criticism every day in newspapers, the Knesset and from pro-Palestinian NGOs. In sum, the war-time actions by Sri Lanka were far worse than Israel's. Yet at the council, it was Israel that got slammed and Sri Lanka praised. Though a minority of well-intended democracies forced the council to debate Sri Lanka, the repressive majority determined the outcome. With no shame, they adopted a resolution written by Sri Lanka itself, lauding "the continued commitment of Sri Lanka to the promotion and protection of all human rights." Despite calls for an inquiry into violations by High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, Sri Lanka was completely left off the hook. The lesson from the Sri Lanka session should not go ignored by Justice Goldstone: The road to harmful council resolutions is paved with good intentions. Even if his mission presents a somewhat balanced report — and that does not mean equating a terrorist group that deliberately targets civilians with a democracy that seeks to defend itself while avoiding such casualties — it is unclear what the council would do with it. Nothing will prevent the majority of Islamic states and their allies from endorsing the inevitable sections on Israeli criminality while ignoring the rest. One thing is certain: Justice Goldstone's mission has already served the council's rulers by keeping the spotlight where they want it, and by lending the wayward institution, and particularly its handling of Israel, a credibility it most assuredly does not deserve. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com To Go To Top

DC FLASH MOBS FOR SOLIDARITY Posted by Carrie Devorah, July 17, 2009.

A notice on a door glass on 19th Street is worthwhile passing forward. Greg Maziarz, property manager for 1145 19th street warned tenants and passerbys of FLASH MOBS. Maziarz was passing forward information provided to him by MPDC, the Metropolitan Police Department. " Flash mobs could potentially disprupt traffic, entery/exit from train stations and businesses. American student activists from across Washington DC will gather for flash mobs in solidarity with Iranian students, pronounced Project Nur, the student led initiative of the American Islamic Congress. On Friday July 17, students will gather at Union Station and then proceed to various DC locations for the flash mob gatherings. A flash mob is an electronically organized event that creates the appearance of a seemingly random gathering of people. Participants gather and perform an unusial action for a brief moment then quickly disperse." The flash mob locations and times were stated on the memorandum issued by REIT Management and Research LLC, property management division. The point of notice here is NOT this particular FLASH MOB expectation but the model now being used by protesters to attack and disperse in seemingly spontaneous but in fact planned demonstrations initiated and disseminated electronically through technology — ie. but not limited to youtube, twitter, etc. In New York, a similar event in Central Park was called WILDING. Today is is called FLASH MOB. Take note from a planning perspective and take note from a security perspective. This is how to stay secure — publicly share information disseminated by police. This notice was taped to the building door by the building's pro active Special Security Officer. Carrie Devorah is a freelance photographer. Contact her at carriedev@gmail.com To Go To Top

TERRORISTS CONFIRM JULIA'S THEORY ABOUT THE LINK BETWEEN THE ENVIRONMENT AGENDA AND TERROR Posted by Shaul and Aviva Ceder, July 17, 2009.

This was written by Julia Gorin and it appeared July 14, 2009 on Gorin's website http://www.juliagorin.com/wordpress/

As I've written repeatedly, this whole enviro doomsday and global warming nonsense is the bogeyman that scared leftists and inept governments which have already surrendered to Islam use to distract from real threats. So here, finally (in May), we have a Muslim leader encouraging precisely this kind of sublimation: 'Climate Change' Is the Terrorist the U.S. Should Be Fighting, Muslim Leader Says The Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, and on Monday, the agency held the first of two hearings to hear what the public thinks of its finding. Among the dozens of people offering comments on Monday, one Muslim leader claimed that the war on terror is "really a euphemism" for the battle to control the world's oil supply. Imam Johari Abdul-Malik, the director of outreach at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Virginia and the head of government relations for the Muslim Alliance of North America, told EPA officials his comments might be upsetting to some. "I believe sometimes the war on terror is really a euphemism for the wars for oil and natural gas," Abdul-Malik said at the all-day comment session held at EPA headquarters in Arlington. "Maybe if it were the Hindus who had oil under their feet there would be Hindu fundamentalists and extremists." Abdul-Malik called for the creation of new sources of energy that are clean and renewable: "America has the opportunity once again to lead — to lead the world against the new terror, climate change." Abdul-Malik said. The EPA's finding that greenhouse gases "endanger the public health and welfare of current and future generations" — as stated in the Federal Register on Friday — paves the way for the agency to regulate pollution under the Clean Air Act, without waiting for Congress to pass "global warming" legislation.Some of the speakers at Monday's hearing urged the EPA to act quickly, even before Congress does. Now, here comes blaming a scapegoat for the non-existent threat, the bogeyman: At a midday press conference, environmental activists and two members of Congress blamed former President George W. Bush and the oil and gas industries for the alleged global warming crisis. At the same time, they heaped praise on the Obama administration.(Rep. Jim) Moran (D-VA) praise[d] the Obama administration for finally recognizing "the importance of global warming" and for being "ready to use EPA the way it was intended to be used." Indeed, the EPA was meant to break the U.S. economy. So that these socialists can turn around and say, "See? We told you capitalism doesn't work!" An old but wise email that I've kept explains this whole thing: You wonder why people fear white supremacists more than Islamofascists, La Raza, etc. Liberals tend to be cowards who are always afraid of the wrong things. They are afraid of our president, the Patriot Act, hearing the name of God or Jesus, and global warming. They are afraid of their food, their appliances and their medications. They want to reassure themselves that the big, bad man in the room is some Christian white guy, like John Ashcroft, because deep down they know he poses no real threat. Freud called it displacement. Leftists are too scared to be scared of the right things. And so they create less scary things to be scared of. And what they were too scared to fear at that comment session at EPA headquarters — but the one thing truly worth fearing — was the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the Muslim leader. The Muslim leader directing them to focus their attention on the environment so the caliphate can proceed unhindered. Contact Shaul and Aviva Ceder at ceder@netvision.net.il To Go To Top

EUROPEANS FUNDING 'BREAKING THE SILENCE' Posted by Daily Alert, July 17, 2009.

This was written by Yaakov Katz and Herb Keinon and it appeared in the Jerusalem Post

A day after releasing a damning report on Operation Cast Lead, and amid accusations that it is operating without transparency, the group Breaking the Silence on Thursday presented The Jerusalem Post with its donor list for the year 2008, which included several European governments. IDF troops escorting Palestinians arrested during operations in the Gaza Strip. (Photo: AP) On Wednesday, Breaking the Silence released a report including testimonies from 26 unnamed soldiers who participated in the campaign and which claimed that the IDF used Gazans as human shields, improperly fired incendiary white phosphorous shells over civilian areas and used overwhelming firepower that caused needless deaths and destruction. On Thursday, military sources and NGO Monitor — a Jerusalem-based research organization — raised suspicions regarding Breaking the Silence's setup as a nonprofit limited company and not an amuta, or nonprofit organization. The difference is that an amuta is required by law to publicly declare the identity of its donors. A limited company is not always required to do so. "From our work, going through the files of dozens of Israeli nonprofits, we feel that groups like this that are not listed [as an amuta] raises a lot of red flags," said Prof. Gerald Steinberg, the head of NGO Monitor. In response to the claims, Breaking the Silence presented the Post with its donor list for 2008. The British Embassy in Tel Aviv gave the organization NIS 226,589; the Dutch Embassy donated €19,999; and the European Union gave Breaking the Silence €43,514. The NGO also received funding from the New Israel Fund amounting to NIS 229,949. In 2007, Breaking the Silence received a total of NIS 500,000, and in 2008 it managed to raise NIS 1.5 million. "We have nothing to hide," said Yehuda Shaul, one of the heads of Breaking the Silence. "We are open to complete transparency and are prepared to share this information with the public." The 110-page report, which included videotaped testimonies in which soldiers' faces were blurred out, did not represent a cross-section of the army. Rather, they were troops who had approached the group or were reached through acquaintances of NGO members. Two were junior officers and the rest were enlisted personnel. Many questioned the overwhelming use of force. One soldier said the army used weapons such as mortars and white phosphorous "to show off its strength." Another soldier said white phosphorus artillery shells were used to ignite a house suspected of housing munitions. "The house went up in flames," he said. In response to the IDF Spokesman's assertion that Breaking the Silence did not submit the report prior to its publication, Shaul said he sent the report to the IDF via e-mail 24 hours before it was published. A senior IDF officer responded that even if the report was sent 24 hours before publication that would not have been enough time to properly investigate the findings. "It appears to us that the organization's real motive was to slander the IDF and not to initiate a thorough investigation," the officer said. "If it had wanted to allow for a real investigation it would have given us the identities of the soldiers, the location where the alleged crimes took place and other identifying parameters." Shaul rejected this assertion as well and said the report included unit names as well as most of the locations. One senior security official noted the Breaking the Silence report came fast on the heels of highly critical reports issued earlier this month by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross, giving the impression that the groups were coordinating the timing of their reports to "magnify their impact." The Breaking the Silence report was for the most part based on hearsay and rumor, and not facts, the senior security official said. Meanwhile, reports that Human Rights Watch used its work against Israel, and its withstanding "pro-Israel pressure groups" as a selling point to solicit funds in Saudi Arabia, are creating waves in the blogosphere, with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic monthly asking HRW's executive director Ken Roth in an e-mail exchange if this was indeed what the group did in Riyadh in May. "Did your staff person attempt to raise funds in Saudi Arabia by advertising your organization's opposition to the pro-Israel lobby?" Goldberg asked Roth, in the exchange that he posted on his blog Wednesday. "That's certainly part of the story," Roth responded. "We report on Israel. "Its supporters fight back with lies and deception. It wasn't a pitch against the Israel lobby per se. Our standard shpiel is to describe our work in the region. Telling the Israel story — part of that pitch — is in part telling about the lies and obfuscation that are inevitably thrown our way." According to an article that appeared in May in the Saudi English-language newspaper The Arab News, a delegation of senior members of HRW were in Saudi Arabia and were commended at a dinner attended by prominent members of Saudi society, human rights activists and dignitaries, for work on Gaza and the Middle East as a whole. According to the newspaper, HRW presented a documentary and spoke on the report it had compiled "on Israel violating human rights and international law" during the Gaza operation. "Human Rights Watch provided the international community with evidence of Israel using white phosphorus and launching systematic destructive attacks on civilian targets. Pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations have strongly resisted the report and tried to discredit it," Sarah Leah Whitson, director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa Division, was quoted in the Saudi paper as saying. Roth admitted to Goldberg that the dinner included people connected to the government, including "a guy from the national human rights commission," which is a government body, and "someone from the Shura Council." The Shura Council is Saudi Arabia's state-appointed religious leadership, a council which, as Goldberg pointed out, oversees, on behalf of the monarchy, the imposition in the kingdom of the strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islamic law. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's spokesman Mark Regev said in response that "Human Rights Watch has admitted conducting a fund-raiser in Saudi Arabia with the Saudi elite, with representatives of different branches of the Saudi government in the room. They also admitted that they have used their criticism of Israel as a fund-raising tool in dealing with Arab audiences. "Surely this fundamentally undermines the objectivity and the credibility that all too many in the past have attached to their reports." Regev's comments come two days after the Prime Minister's Office said Jerusalem would begin waging a more aggressive battle against NGOs it deems biased against Israel. The Daily Alert is sponsored by Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and prepared by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA). To subscribe to their free daily alerts, send an email to daily@www.dailyalert.jcpa.org To Go To Top

U.S. AGREES TO RESETTLE PALESTINIANS DISPLACED BY IRAQ WAR Posted by Barbara Taverna, July 17, 2009.

This was written by Miriam Jordan. It appeared in Wall Street Journal http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124778007172153909.html?mod= googlenews_wsj# Contact Miriam Jordan at miriam.jordan@wsj.com

The U.S. agreed to resettle 1,350 Palestinians displaced by fighting in Iraq, marking the largest resettlement ever of Palestinian refugees in the nation. The decision appears to signal a shift in Washington's previous position against resettling Palestinians out of concern about the potential impact on U.S. relations with Israel and the Arab world. The resettlement, which is slated to begin this fall, is likely to illicit strong reactions from people on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A State Department spokesman said the U.S. is responding to an appeal from the United Nations' refugee agency, UNHCR, which has been providing assistance to some 3,000 Palestinians stuck in three makeshift camps in the desert in the Syrian-Iraqi border region. Middle Eastern scholars and refugee experts believe Washington felt pressured to help solve the humanitarian crisis created by the U.S.-led invasion. Some of the Palestinians have lived in the camps for more than three years. "These particular Palestinians are a fallout from the Iraq War," said George Bisharat, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law, who specializes in Middle Eastern law. "The Obama administration had to take some responsibility for the consequences of the invasion." However, resettling such a large number of Palestinians in the U.S. is a potentially volatile issue. Many Arab countries interpreted President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo last month as an attempt to put U.S. relations with Islamic nations on a new course and dissipate the strain that characterized ties during the Bush administration. They see the offer of accepting Palestinian refugees as an early sign of a new openness. Meanwhile, some supporters of Israel are concerned that the resettlement might alter the U.S.'s approach toward Israel. Ziad Asali, president of the American Task Force on Palestine, a Washington advocacy group, applauded the U.S. decision, calling it "a significant step ... consistent with the new U.S. message of accommodation and finding solutions with the Muslim world." However, Mr. Asali cautioned that it is bound to irk Palestinian and Arab leaders who interpret U.S. willingness to resettle Palestinians — which comes with full rights such as citizenship down the road — as "a conspiracy to liquidate the Palestinian refugee issue." With the exception of Jordan, no country in the Middle East has granted citizenship to Palestinian refugees. Many Arab countries believe that fully integrating large numbers of Palestinian refugees would undercut their demand for an independent state. At least one pro-Israel group in the U.S. deems it a mistake to absorb the Palestinian Iraqis, who were welcomed by Saddam Hussein and regarded as loyal supporters of his regime. "We don't think that Washington should be bringing in a group of people who we know were publicly and consistently hostile to the United States and its closest ally, Israel," said Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America. An Israeli government spokesman said that "Israel has no official position on this internal American issue." Like other refugees, the Palestinians will be resettled across the U.S., based on where resettlement agencies partnering with the U.S. government decide housing and job opportunities are available. Refugees who have relatives in the U.S. are likely to be settled near their families. Palestinians moved to Iraq after Arab-Israeli conflicts in 1948 and 1967, and following the Gulf War in 1991. The community grew to nearly 35,000. "Saddam Hussein made a point of using Palestinian refugees to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause," said Bill Frelick, refugee-policy director at Human Rights Watch in Washington. The preferential treatment bred resentment among many Iraqis. After Baghdad fell to U.S.-led forces in 2003, Palestinians became a target for harassment and violence, including bombings and murder. A particular point of contention had been the government's provision of subsidized housing for Palestinians, often at the expense of mostly Shiite landlords who received little rent from the government in return. After Mr. Hussein was deposed, many landlords evicted their Palestinian tenants, who are mainly Sunni Muslims. Driven out of Baghdad and other cities, the Palestinians tried to flee to neighboring Syria and Jordan, which already host hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. When those countries blocked their entry, the displaced Palestinians sought refuge in camps that lack basic infrastructure and jeopardize their health and safety, said Mr. Frelick. In October, the UNHCR issued an appeal to countries traditionally open to resettlement for urgent action after fruitless calls for help from humanitarian organizations. "It is priority that all these camps close by the end of the year because conditions are not sustainable," said Tim Irwin, a UNHCR spokesman in Washington. The U.S. committed to absorb the largest number of Iraqi Palestinians. Sweden, the Netherlands and the U.K. also joined the effort, he said. So far, 24 Palestinian refugees have been resettled in the U.S. The remainder are expected to arrive by early 2010. Contact Barbara Taverna at bltaverna@yahoo.com To Go To Top

SQUADDIES SPEAK OUT ON GAZA SMEARS Posted by Simon McIlwaine, July 17, 2009.

This is entitled "IDF Soldiers Give Testimonies To Counter Gaza War Crimes Claims." It was written by Cnaan Liphshiz and it appeared in Haaretz http://www.standwithus.com/app/iNews/view_n.asp?ID=1117

A newly released collection of anonymous accusations of alleged human rights abuses by Israeli soldiers in Gaza has prompted reservists who served there to deliver signed, on-camera counter- testimonies about Palestinian terrorists' use of Gazans as human shields. The dozen English-language testimonies were delivered in response to a report by Breaking the Silence, an organization which says it is attempting to collect accounts by Israel Defense Soldiers in order to expose "moral corruption" within the IDF, as explained in the movement's Website. The accusations were made by anonymous people who said they were reserves soldiers, and whose faces were blurred in filmed talks. Some recounted hearing from other soldiers that the IDF used Palestinians as human shields during Operation Cast Lead in January. Others said they recalled destroying Palestinian property.   "WE CAME UPON AN AMBULANCE FROM A LOCAL CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL," Pinchas Sanderson from Jerusalem recounted in an American accent in his counter-testimony. The 29-year-old U.S.-born student is one of three native English-speakers who appear on the new website www.soldiersspeakoutout.com. "It was suspicious because there was a very old lady in the ambulance of a children's hospital. Inside we found three RPG rocket launchers," he said. "We couldn?t believe someone would use an ambulance to move them." Johannesburg-born Jeremy Lipshitz, 24, recounted in a South African accent how his unit discovered a Hezbollah hideout in Lebanon but was ordered to hold fire. Lipshitz, a reserves Intelligence Corps field combatant who settled in Ra'anana after making aliyah six years ago, said it was because the terrorists were using civilians as human shields." Shane Goodson, a 23-year-old reserves paratrooper from Herzliya who in 2005 also came to Israel from South Africa, Pretoria, described how the IDF is made up of "ordinary Israelis with families, jobs and a respect for family values." Another testimony by an Israeli-born commando soldier talks about him ordering his soldiers to clean up a Palestinian home after they were in it, and how they collected items from their own food parcels from home and gave them to the family. The SoldiersSpeakOut group, which encourages soldiers to send in their filmed testimonies via the video sharing site Youtube, describes itself as "a grassroots movement that wants to show the voices of real Israelis." The new movement is supported by the international Israel-advocacy group StandWithUs, which specializes in high-tech quick response projects in English to what is perceives as anti-Israel bias. "Breaking the Silence are misleading in their name and their aim," remarks U.K.-born StandWithUs Israel Director Michael Dickson. "There is no silence to break. Israeli society is open, democratic and self critical. This one-sided and shoddy report fails to stress the context of the war as a battle against Hamas terrorists hiding behind civilians." "All testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence are by combat soldiers whose names and full details are known and documented by the organization," said Ran Goldstein, a spokesperson for Breaking the Silence. "We do not reveal their details as per their request." Goldstein said the organization encourages any soldier to come forth with their testimony, be it for Breaking the Silence or for Soldiers Speak Out. "But violent reactions to testimonies, such as we've seen from the army, are not acceptable," he added. Dickson added that Breaking the Silence "omits names, ranks and facts" and the fact that the group receives funding from the EU and the British Embassy in Tel Aviv "merits investigation." Goldstein said is response that all donations to his nonprofit are "transparent and available for inspection." "THE IDF HAS BEEN ACCUSED OF MANY THINGS..." Soldiers Speak Out Hear the real voices of Israeli Soldiers http://www.soldiersspeakout.com/ The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has over 700,000 citizen soldiers and reservists who are expected to live up to the IDF's ethical standards. In any army, some soldiers violate the rules of combat. In the IDF, all alleged violations are investigated, and offenders are punished. Yet today, there is an attempt to defame the IDF through allegations that there were instances of misconduct during Israel's Gaza operation. The accusionations are based on unverified hearsay, and are proving to be false. Many IDF soldiers feel a deep sense of injustice at how some are misrepresenting them and the IDF. We want to tell you, the public, about our personal experiences. Listen to our stories on this site. Hear OUR stories. go here. NEW IDF ALLEGATIONS 'BREAKING THE SILENCE' REPORT New testimonials have been added to Soldiers Speak Out, a website that features eye witness accounts from IDF Soldiers JERUSALEM (July 15, 2009) — A wave of IDF soldiers have come forward to video their positive, eye-witness testimony to www.soldiersspeakout.com, outraged by a report recently released by 'Breaking the Silence', which alleges misconduct by IDF soldiers during Operation cast lead towards Palestinian civilians. READ here. SOLDIERS SPEAK OUT AGAINST NEW UNSUBSTANTIATED ALLEGATIONS IN RESPONSE TO Breaking The Silence' Report, NEW TESTIMONIALS HAVE BEEN ADDED TO SOLDIERSSPEAKOUT, A WEBSITE THAT FEATURES EYE WITNESS ACCOUNTS FROM IDF SOLDIERS SOLDIERS REQUESTED THAT STANDWITHUS LAUNCH WWW.SOLDIERSSPEAKOUT.COM TO SHARE THEIR PERSONAL AND POSITIVE COMBAT EXPERIENCES WITH THE WORLD "Breaking the Silence are breaking the rules for any kind of serious reporting" JERUSALEM (July 15, 2009) — A wave of IDF soldiers have come forward to video their positive, eye-witness testimony to www.soldiersspeakout.com, outraged by a report recently released by 'Breaking the Silence', which alleges misconduct by IDF soldiers during Operation cast lead towards Palestinian civilians. StandWithUs, an international education organization, created the website at the request of IDF members in its student programs who felt compelled to speak out. www.soldierspeakout.comcontains testimonials from soldiers who share their personal, positive and humanitarian experiences of serving in the IDF. (This independent initiative is not coordinated with either the IDF or the Israeli Government.) "Breaking the Silence is breaking the rules for any kind of serious reporting", said Michael Dickson, Israel director of StandWithUs, "They are a fringe group with a political agenda who have collected anonymous 'testimony,' the majority of which is based on hearsay and rumor. One account is from a soldier not even present at the time of the alleged grievance. In contrast, the soldiers featured on soldiersspeakout.com give testimony on camera without their face blurred and from their own personal experience." Explains Roz Rothstein, international director of StandWithUs, "we created this website because a few isolated allegations from 'anti-war' Israeli soldiers are being used to defame the IDF. Yet the IDF has over 700,000 citizen soldiers and reservists — thousands of whom served in Gaza — who try to live up to its high ethical standards. To slander an IDF campaign on the basis of the anonymous reports of around 0.2% of those serving at the time is ridiculous." The soldiers talk both about the challenges of facing a terrorist enemy that embedded itself with civilians for protection and about their determination to keep to the army's moral code of conduct in this situation. Idan, who served in an elite Givati unit, talks about his ordering of his soldiers to clean up a Palestinian home after they were in it and how they collected items from their own food parcels from home and left it for the family. Lior, a combat soldier in the Gaza campaign, recounts instances of seeing individuals who they suspected were terrorists, but they were not sure so they did not shoot. Another soldier, Yaron, concurs, telling of the order he and his comrades were given to avoid civilian casualties. Noam, an officer in the Givati unit discusses how many booby-trapped houses they faced and how the bombs would have killed both IDF soldiers and Palestinian civilians had they not been disarmed. The new footage on www.soldiersspeakout.com joins other testimony in which soldiers share experiences rarely told by the international media. Nina, a 25 year-old IDF medic who served in Gaza, recounts how she and other IDF soldiers treated wounded Palestinian men, women and children and arranged for them to be flown to Israeli hospitals for medical care. She explains that IDF medics are taught not to see nationality, but rather to treat the wounded with the severest injuries first, even if they are terrorists. Amir, a military reserve paramedic in the Givati unit in Gaza, confirms Nina's account. "I was present when injured Palestinians were flown out by IDF chopper to Israeli hospitals. Imagine the cost of that helicopter, but we believe that human life is of the highest value — their identity doesn't matter." Amir's video relates how he helped a pregnant Palestinian woman in labor while he was searching for terrorists in Gaza. "Breaking the Silence are misleading in their name and their aim," remarks Dickson, "There is no silence to break. Israel is an open and democratic society that regularly investigates its own actions, but this one-sided and shoddy report fails to stress the context of the war — a battle against Hamas terrorists hiding behind civilians and it omits names, ranks and facts about soldiers and their stories. That this one-sided group receive funding from both the EU and the British Embassy in Tel Aviv deserves to be investigated." The Soldiers Speak Out website is at www.soldiersspeakout.com The soldiers are prepared to conduct interviews by request — Please email mdickson@standwithus.com StandWithUs, an international, non-profit Israel education organization, hosts speakers and conferences, offers website resources and creates brochures and materials about Israel that are distributed globally. Based in Los Angeles, the organization has offices across the U.S. and in Israel and the UK. SWU was founded in 2001 in response to the public's need and desire for mainstream information about the Arab-Israeli conflict. StandWithUsCampus helps college students challenge anti-Israel bias. www.standwithus.comand www.standwithuscampus.comand http://www.standwithus.co.il Simon McIlwaine is with Anglican Friends of Israel (www.anglicanfriendsofisrael.com). Contact him at Simon.McIlwaine@ormerods.co.uk To Go To Top

OBAMA & THE MEDIA; STATUS OF SMALLER TERRORIST GROUPS IN GAZA; US OVERCOMES US TECHNICAL OBJECTIONS; CHURCHES/ENVOY ATTACKED IN IRAQ Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 16, 2009.

OBAMA & THE MEDIA "In free societies, the media's primary responsibilities are to report current events to the public, place those events into an historical context to enable the public to understand how and why they occurred, and to present the public with the options for going forward. It is due to the media's historic role in maintaining and cultivating an informed discussion and debate about current affairs that they became known as democracy's watchdog. When media organs fail to fulfill their basic responsibilities, they degenerate quickly into democracy's undertaker." An uninformed public can't make wise decisions. U.S. Presidents also should stand up for what is right. Obama does not. Nevertheless, the media genuflect to him. While masses of Iranians risked their lives to protest against their dictatorship, Obama hedged and dithered for eight days. Finally he produced a statement too mild to encourage the masses. He did not make us proud. Nevertheless, the media fall all over themselves with praise for him as responsible for all world progress since his election. They illogically credit his non-encouragement with encouraging the protestors. They illogically credit his signal that he would not help Lebanese independence with defeating Hizbullah. The media ignored the Christian Lebanese leader's warning against Hizbullah and the accompanying solid Christian vote. When N. Korea tested a long-range missile, Obama slashed anti-missile defense. His appeasement encourages their increasing defiance. The media called a UN inspection plan for N. Korean shipping a great victory, without informing us that the program lacks enforcement. [Obama does have to be careful not to give regimes an excuse to blame problems on U.S. interference.] The NY Times reported Ayatollah Khamenei's sermon against the protestors without mentioning his attributing the protests to Zionist agents and "his long rant against the US for the FBI's 1993 raid on David Koresh's Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas." Had the Times done so, readers would understand "just how demented Khamenei's views of the world are, they might come to the conclusion that Obama's intense desire to sit down with him, and his constant pandering to Iran's 'supreme leader' are ill-advised and counterproductive." They might conclude we cannot reconcile with an Ayatollah "who calls Americans 'morons' and...chants 'Death to America,' Death to Britain' and 'Death to Israel.'" ABC is devoting five programs to Obama's medical care proposals, none to opponents' responses, and denying them advertising time, too. Censorship? Obama has abandoned the U.S. role of leadership. He may be becoming an international laughing stock (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/23 from Caroline Glick). Let him abandon the U.S. role of bullying, including bullying of Israel. He also should stop appeasing international bullies, such as Khamenei. For more on Obama's Iran policy, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d13-The-meaning-of-Iranian-protests STATUS OF SMALLER TERRORIST GROUPS IN GAZA The damage that Israel inflicted on Hamas' military structure was expected to enable the smaller, Salafist terrorist groups to evade Hamas supervision and expand their membership and activities. Didn't happen. They fragmented more, and are less effective (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/24 from MEMRI). To understand more about the relationship between Hamas and Fatah, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d13-Fatah-against-Hamas-what-does-it-mean U.S., ISRAELI, INDIAN HEALTH RESEARCHERS UNITE At the initiative of Yeshiva University in New York, its public health researchers will engage in joint projects with researchers from the University of Haifa and from India. All three parties believe that this combination will give them insight into international health problems. Yeshiva U. considers this project further indication of the inappropriateness of internationally boycotting Israeli universities (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/24). ISRAEL RETURNS TO TRADITIONAL PEDAGOGY The Singapore model of pedagogy, in which pupils memorize syllables and words, has done poorly in the early grades in Israel. Israel is reverting to the traditional, successful method of teaching Talmud Torah. For example, at age 5, they start teaching Torah, or the Hebrew Bible. At age 10, they teach the Mishna, or commentaries on the Bible [at least in religious schools]. You see, at a tender age, children learn more emotionally, knowledge and skills. Later, they are able to learn more cognitively, and understand comparisons and opposites, in which the commentaries specialize. The Hebrew elementary school method of teaching reading includes more joy, singing, repetition, re-reading, and interaction between student and class. To facilitate this, the seating is in a semi-circle facing the teacher (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/24). A country of immigrants must make learning the language and culture easy. But education is more complicated than most people realize. Politics and ego interfere. Israeli public schools have lax discipline. Education reform in the U.S. often overlooks the curriculum, so that if the country were to succeed in teaching the students to read, write, and count, there remains the question of whether those students are prepared to be good citizens and sensible parents and consumers. For a broader view of Israeli education, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d7-Israels-greatest-weakness-Jewish-education ISRAEL OVERCOMES U.S. TECHNICAL OBJECTIONS Israel wants to buy the latest U.S. fighter plane, but the U.S. had three major technical objections to how Israel would manage the aircraft. Israel overcame those objections. Price remains undetermined. "Israel has argued that due to operational requirements, it needs to have the ability to repair damaged or broken computer systems in 'real time' and cannot wait for a computer system to be sent to Europe for repairs in the middle of a war." The U.S. has consented to letting Israel maintain the aircraft, itself. Israel proposed a way satisfactory to the Pentagon for Israel to install some of its own communications and electronic warfare software, without Israel having access to top-secret, proprietary software in the main on-board computer (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/24). It was tempting to read into initial U.S. objections a political motive. For other news on U.S. arms for Israel, see here: www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner ~y2009m6d19-US-gives-Egypt-helicopters-denies-them-to-Israel U.S. GOT ISRAEL TO REMOVE MOST CHECKPOINTS Security in Judea-Samaria improved. Then Israel acceded to U.S. demands to remove checkpoints. It took down 60% of them, so far this year. Israel also is vetting Palestinian Authority (P.A.) businessmen and giving them cards enabling them to enter Israel on business. Advocates of checkpoint removal credit P.A. forces for the improvement in security. Opponents do not. They credit IDF raids and P.A. pre-emptive and self-defense against Hamas, which may be temporary. Israeli security officials note that terrorists' motives have not abated. They consider removal of checkpoints irresponsible (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/24). It's political and due to U.S. pressure. All too often, the removal of checkpoints has been exploited by terrorists, who struck through or where the checkpoint had been erected to thwart previous terrorist attack. Should Israel remove checkpoints, in view of polls like this: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d6-Poll-of-Palestinian-Arabs-on-terrorism "CHURCHES & ENVOY ATTACKED IN IRAQ" Five Christian churches were bombed in Baghdad. Several deaths, more wounded, property damaged. Muslims were hurt too. One of those Muslim victims lamented that the terrorists don't care whom else they hurt besides their victims. "Christians, a beleaguered minority in an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, have routinely faced sectarian attacks, forcing many to flee the country. The bombings on Sunday, though, appeared to be one of the largest single coordinated assaults against churches and Christians in Baghdad." (Steven Lee Myers, NY Times, 7/13, A4.) Radical Islam in action. And not that the victims deserve it. Muslims are finding that that the Radical Muslims in their midst, despite having strict morality in certain respects, are most evil, even depraved. The ends do not justify the means, and the means shame the ends. There is further evidence of the centuries-long but more recently increased pressure to expel the former Christian majority from the Mideast. But when it happens in the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), anti-Zionists falsely blame it on Israel. The accusers of Israel don't cite incidents or means by which Israel, is supposed to exert this influence, which is not in Israel's interest. Many incidents have been reported of the PLO and Hamas exerting such influence. Isn't that a damning indictment, "Christians, a beleaguered minority in an overwhelmingly Muslim nation"? Why should they be beleaguered? If religious domination is so important to the Muslim majority, that enough of them persecute Christians to force Christians out, why the reluctance to recognize the same intolerance behind the Arab-Israel conflict, carried on with antisemitic preaching, such as "the Jews are descendants of apes and pigs?" ITALY ON ISRAEL-ARAB NEGOTIATIONS Italy's Foreign Minister Frattini urged PM Netanyahu to open negotiations with Palestinian Authority head Abbas. He must have forgotten that it was Abbas who refused to open negotiations with Netanyahu (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/24), and that Netanyahu offered to negotiate with Abbas without preconditions. Abbas has preconditions, a.k.a. non-negotiation demands. To see Egypt's plan, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d15-Egypt-proposes-GazaIsrael-deal Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

CHUTZPAH: HOW WEST BANK JEWS ARE DEFYING OBAMA — NAME NEW HOUSING PROJECT IN BIBLICAL TERRITORY AFTER PRESIDENT Posted by HandsFiasco, July 16, 2009.

This was written by Aaron Klein and appeared today in World Net Daily http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?pageId=104088

Activists here have launched a campaign using Barack Obama's name to construct Jewish housing projects on West Bank hilltops in defiance of the U.S. president's demands for a halt to all Jewish building in the strategic territory. "Mr. President, your policy that aims to destroy the Jewish communities of Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem will no longer go unchallenged," states a press release from the Obama Hilltop Project. "We aim to rally the worldwide pro-Israel community to support the rebirth of these communities and counter your unjust, illegal policies." The goal is to increase the Jewish presence in the West Bank, beginning with the re-establishment of the town of Homesh, which was one of four Jewish communities evacuated by Israel during the country's 2005 retreat from the Gaza Strip. Critics pointed out the West Bank evacuations served no practical purpose other than to send a signal to West Bank Jews they might be next on the chopping block. Homesh was not taken over by the Palestinians, and the Israeli army continued to operate there. Indeed, the Israeli court system recently has ruled Jews can still be present in Homesh, leading to the establishment there of a Torah center. Now activists are looking for donations of any amount to help them expand Homesh, including a new hilltop community to be named after Obama. Those making online donations are being encouraged to also send a formal letter to Obama making the White House aware of the effort to support Jewish growth in the West Bank. The letter states: "Mr. President, your current foreign policy contradicts the most sacred values of the Jewish Nation. It is written in our holy Torah, 'The Lord your God will bring you into the land that your ancestors possessed, and you will possess it; he will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors." (Deuteronomy, 26:3-5). Good people throughout the world will continue to support Jewish building and growth in all parts of our sacred land of Israel." The effort is being supported by multiple organizations, including Shalom International, the Jewish community of Hebron and the Homesh First Movement. "We are aware of the fact that Obama is very interested in the issue of our presence in Judea and Samaria. So we will call a hilltop there in the name of Obama in his honor," David Ha'Ivri, a spokesman for the West Bank's regional Jewish council, told WND. The Obama administration recently demanded Israel halt all settlement activity, including natural growth, in apparent abrogation of a deal made by President Bush to allow for natural growth. The deal was forged just prior to Israel's 2005 retreat from the Gaza Strip. It was confirmed by Sharon aide Dov Weissglas in 2005 and in a Wall Street Journal column last week by Elliott Abrams, a former deputy national security adviser to Bush who reportedly negotiated the arrangement. The deal was in line with an official letter from Bush the year before stating Israel cannot be expected to withdraw from the entire West Bank and that the Jewish state would retain major settlement blocs there. The West Bank borders major Israeli cities and is within rocket-firing range of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Israel's international airport. Military strategists long have estimated Israel must maintain the West Bank to defend itself from any ground invasion. Terrorist groups have warned if Israel withdraws, they will launch rockets from the West Bank into Israeli cities. Many villages in the West Bank, which Israelis commonly refer to as the "biblical heartland," are mentioned throughout the Torah. The book of Genesis says Abraham entered Israel at Shechem (Nablus) and received God's promise of land for his offspring. He later was buried in Hebron. The nearby town of Beit El, anciently called Bethel, meaning "house of God," is where Scripture says the patriarch Jacob slept on a stone pillow and dreamed of angels ascending and descending a stairway to heaven. In that dream, God spoke directly to Jacob and reaffirmed the promise of territory. And in Exodus, the holy tabernacle rested in Shiloh, believed to be the first area the ancient Israelites settled after fleeing Egypt. Contact HandsFiasco at handsfiasco@webtv.net To Go To Top

URGENT ACTION ALERT — PRESIDENT OBAMA, END THE PEACE DECEPTION Posted by UCI, July 16, 2009.

President Obama is currently pressuring Israel toward peace negotiations with Palestinian Authority Chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, while ignoring Fatah-led PA intentional deception to use "peace negotiations" as a stepping stone to conquer all of Israel — in line with their June 9, 1974 Plan of Phases set forth in Cairo, Egypt. This Urgent Action Alert would request that President Obama demand the Palestinian Authority rescind their public statements (in Arabic) made by public officials on Palestinian TV. As recently as July 7, 2009, Kifah Radaydeh, Fatah Regional Committee member, Jerusalem, said, "Peace is a means; and the goal is Palestine." How can Israel be expected to negotiate with people who openly confess they are using peace deceptively toward their goal of the destruction of Israel? Their commitments are only intended to fool the international community in order to gain financial assistance. click here to sign and send this letter immediately. We hope you agree with this letter. You may make whatever changes you like. It is addressed directly to President Obama. Copies will automatically be sent to Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Clinton. The Obama Administration must hear from us! To President Barack Obama, Palestinian Authority officials need to be held accountable. Their often-stated agenda is blatantly publicized in Arab media and translated into English for all Americans to read. Fortunately their words are documented. Verbatim translation is provided by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). It is incumbent upon United States and international decision-makers to understand exactly what the parties to "peace" are saying in Arabic. President Obama, please note the following direct quotes of the Fatah leaders of the Palestinian Authority: 1. [PA TV July 7, 2009] Kifah Radaydeh, Fatah Regional Committee member, Jerusalem, "Fatah is facing a challenge, because [Fatah] says that we perceive peace as one of the strategies, but we say that all forms of the struggle exist, and we do not rule out the possibility of the armed struggle or any other struggle. The struggle exists in all its forms, on the basis of what we are capable of at a given time, and according to what seems right. What exactly do we want? It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; and the goal is Palestine. I do not negotiate in order to achieve peace. I negotiate for Palestine, in order to achieve a state." http://youtube.com/watch?v=Qc-7GK6F4RI [Note: When Fatah refers to "Palestine", it is routinely referring to all of Israel — as shown on all official emblems and PA maps.] 2. [http://www.fateh.ps] The Fatah flag still shows the map of Israel under rifles. The same symbol appears on the Fatah website (see right) and other official Fatah publications. 3. [PA TV, Aug. 25 2008] Fatah MP Najat Abu-Bakr said in a PA TV interview last year that Fatah's goal remains the destruction of Israel, but that their political plan is to focus on the West Bank and Gaza Strip: "It doesn't mean that we don't want the 1948 borders [all of Israel]...but our current political program is to say that we want the 1967 borders." http://youtube.com/watch?v=xw-JZ5u0Oi4 4. [PA TV, August 2007-June 7, 2009, dozens of times] A PA TV educational documentary broadcast monthly since 2007 includes the following words denying the existence of Israel: "Another section in Palestine which is the Palestinian coast that spreads along the [Mediterranean] sea, from... Ashkelon in the south, until Haifa, in the Carmel Mountains. Haifa is a well-known Palestinian port. [Haifa] enjoyed a high status among Arabs and Palestinians especially before it fell to the 'occupation' [Israel] in 1948. ... Jaffa, an ancient coastal city, is the bride of the sea, and Palestine's gateway to the world." http://youtube.com/watch?v=TMw755MDJ5k 5. [PA TV March 17, 2009] Muhammad Dahlan, senior PA official, recently stressed that Fatah adamantly refuses to recognize Israel, and that the Palestinian Authority is used for recognition and to have better standing internationally in order to receive foreign aid: "I want to say for the thousandth time, in my own name and in the name of all of my fellow members of the Fatah movement: We do not demand that the Hamas movement recognize Israel. On the contrary, we demand of the Hamas movement not to recognize Israel, because the Fatah movement does not recognize Israel, even today... It's required of the government but not of Hamas; it's required of the government but not of the Fatah, so that this government will be able to offer the necessary assistance, to carry out the necessary reconstruction, to offer assistance to the sick, to bring relief to needy families... This can be dealt with [only] by a government that has relations with the international community, one that is acceptable to the international community, in order that we can work together and benefit from the international community." http://youtube.com/watch?v=iTQ5CNYLoXE [Please note, this verbiage is a confession to deception on an international level.] President Obama, I ask that you publicly denounce the deceptive Fatah / Palestinian Authority agenda. We must confront the fact that the Palestinian Authority is using peace as a pretense to force concessions from Israel and the international community with an ultimate goal of the destruction of Israel. Please demand transparency and truth in both English and Arabic. The first step is that the Fatah-led PA acknowledge Israel as a sovereign Jewish state before the PA can begin any reasonable negotiations for peace. Respectfully, Click here to sign and send this letter immediately. UCI — The Unity Coalition for Israel (http://www.israelunitycoalition.org) — is "the largest worldwide coalition of Jewish and Christian organizations, with more than 200 groups representing millions of people dedicated to Israel. Though we have many different backgrounds, we have one common goal: A Safe and Secure Israel." "Israel is not just a Jewish issue. Millions of Christians resolutely endorse the principle of peace with security for the state of Israel. Because we work closely together and speak with a united voice, our message is being heard!" To Go To Top

SPIRITUALITY: THE MACCABIAH'S RIPPLE EFFECT. INSPIRATIONAL. A TRUE STORY. Posted by Susana K-M, July 16, 2009.

For one Hungarian family, being Jewish was a curse. Then basketball changed everything. The writer, Talia Carner, is a novelist living in New York. She has just completed her fourth novel, Jerusalem Maiden. Visit her online at www.TaliaCarner.com.

When she crawled out of the cellar, she was forever fearful of being a Jew. Susan Horvath was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of faces of murdered children who exposed her family's buried secret. She could have been one of them. Standing rooted to the floor in the Children's Memorial in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem, Susan could not control her sobbing. All her life, her mother had denied any connection to these children by denying her Judaism. Her mother had broken the curse that was the Jews' lot in Hungary. Susan's son, Josef, was raised with no knowledge to the family's Jewish past. How could Susan have ever imagined that he would lead her here to confront her mother's suppressed history? Jewish Rumblings Josef Horvath, age 24 and 6-foot-6, was playing in the Hungarian basketball league when someone asked him whether he wanted to play in the 1993 Maccabiah games. "It would be two weeks of fun," they said. A dormant connection to Jews rumbled at the back of his mind. He had heard that his maternal grandmother, Aranka Lowinger, had been born Jewish and that all her eight siblings married Jews. But he also learned that as World War II raged, the "lucky ones" among them were first crowded into the Budapest ghetto; the less lucky were sent directly to Baden Baden concentration camp. Aranka, the only one in her family married to a non-Jew — and isolated from her family — hid in a cellar throughout the war. In 1942 she gave birth to her daughter, Susan. By the time Aranka crawled out of the cellar, she was forever claustrophobic of small spaces and fearful of being a Jew. She discovered that all but one sister had been murdered. She wished to forget it all, to disassociate herself from anything that would ever again make her a victim of such hatred, from anything that would threaten her infant daughter with the fate of the Jews. She wished for a new, just world. Enter the Communists, the allies who fought the Nazis, her family's persecutors. The Communists offered a vision of a fair and impartial world, one which she was grateful to embrace. In the coming years, Aranka raised Susan to share her belief in the Communist ideology and secularism. Years later, when Susan decided to marry a non-Jew, Aranka supported her choice that would further obliterate track-marks that might surface one day and bring disaster. Fall of Communism Until Josef was 18 years old, there had never been a discussion of anything Jewish in his household. A chance visit to the Jewish cemetery in Budapest made him wonder for the first time about the Jews of his city — past and present — and about his grandmother's deceased family. He was sickened by the notion of the dozens of cousins he could have had; Aranka's only sister to survive the war was no longer alive. A rumor that one sister, once believed dead, was now living in Israel could not be verified from behind the Iron Curtain that isolated Hungary under Communist rule. The synagogue's strange, foreign language left him perplexed. As a student at the university at Budapest, Josef found himself drawn to fellow students who identified themselves as Jews and he began to read about Jewish history. Once, he ventured into a synagogue, but the strange, foreign language left him perplexed, only emphasizing the divide between himself and the Jews. In 1992, when asked to play in the Maccabiah Games the following year, that stirring of interest mixed with his sense of Jewishness, and finally his sense of adventure and youthful curiosity propelled him to go. Nothing had prepared him for the experience of marching into the Ramat Gan stadium in a sea of Jews. And here he was, a part of a historical turning point, as 1993 was the first time Hungary participated in the Maccabiah Games after the fall of Communism. Seventy athletes marched under the Hungarian flag — all Jewish, all proud. Within days, competing against Jews of all nations, Josef was seized by a transformative sensation of coming home. While he dribbled the basketball, an important piece of himself clicked into place. His spirit soared higher than any scored basket. Back home after the Games, the basketball team decided to stay together in the Hungarian League. More significantly, as Josef played, socialized and toured with his Jewish teammates, he found himself soaking up knowledge. Bonded to his new friends by the Maccabiah experience, he no longer felt awkward returning to the synagogue for Shabbat services. Late-Life Brit Soon, the then-chairman of the Maccabi Hungary, Andras Bleyer, recognized Josef's leadership skills and began assigning him official roles, including attending the yearly Maccabi World Union Plenum in Israel. In 1998, Josef was elected as the chairman of the 100-year-old Maccabi Hungary Fencing and Athletic Club. The organization, insular under Communism, "had neither fencing nor athletic programs," Josef quips, his brown eyes twinkling. But it was this assignment that made him feel he was finally reclaiming his "Jewish soul." His powerful transformation had to be matched by the final act of accepting the covenant with his new-found people. In 2000, at age 32, Josef had a Brit Milah, circumcision. "In one week, I was all better," he comforts those who wince at the idea. "And I was so much more complete." While building a career as a civil construction engineer and a consultant to Israeli investors in Budapest, Josef searched for a soul-mate. He found his match in Henriette, a lively woman whose inner strength and commitment to establishing a Jewish home equaled his own. But the family's tale of lost-and-found Judaism did not end here. Josef's sister, Judith, was 18 months older and a runner. She had no interest in her brother's process of reclaiming his Jewish heritage, when, in 2001 she was diagnosed with advanced thyroid cancer. The disfiguring surgery removed glands and tissues from chin to collar bone. Six months later, in remission from cancer, Judith accepted Josef's suggestion to begin training as a long-distance runner for the 2005 Maccabiah Games. As she started practicing 5 to 15K tracks, she started asking questions, and soon joined Josef for Friday night services at the synagogue. Before long, Shabbat dinner at the Horvath family became a festive ritual that also included Josef's father, a non-Jew who watched with amusement and respect as his children sang and prayed over a feast of Jewish delicacies. In 2003, for the first time in her life, Josef's mother, Susan, attended a Passover Seder at the Jewish Community Center in Budapest. Yet she could not shake her apprehensions. She was frightened of this new path her children followed, vulnerable to unimagined persecution and suffering that has too frequently been the lot of the Jews. The following year, when Josef's wife gave birth to their first son, Aron, she objected when Josef decided to mark Aron — and possibly doom him — with circumcision. Little Aron did receive a Brit Milah on the traditional eighth day. "At the right age," Josef remarks. Walking Tall In 2005, Susan's phone rang. The young woman from Israel identified herself as Julie, the daughter of Aranka's sister whose whereabouts had dissolved into the miasma of the family's tragic demise. Unable to resist meeting her only cousin, the following year Susan braced herself for emotions she had always kept under wraps and joined Josef and Henriette for the annual Maccabi Congress in Israel. She met Julie and her Argentina-born husband and three Israeli-born children. Neither spoke Hungarian, but the bond was instantaneous and clear. Susan and they belong to the same clan. She watched one evening as her son Josef strutted with little Aron perching on his shoulders. The boy's wide, grayish-blue eyes were full of wonder at a world in which he would grow walking tall as his father did at that moment, a confident and secure Jew. At Yad Vashem, she finally faced the horrors of her mother's life. It was on the following day, during Susan's visit to Yad Vashem, that she journeyed into a dark tunnel of history and to a world lost to her in more ways than she could count. For the first time she faced the horrors of her mother's life — and her mother's choices. On the bus ride back to Tel Aviv, salty tears were still lodged in Susan's throat as she stared out the window at the strange land of rocks and low shrubs, of bluish mountains framed by pine groves. This was a land where her ancestors' presence forced itself back into her life. To ignore her family history had ceased to be an option: her daughter Judith wore a large Star of David necklace resting against her neck scar, representing the faith she believed had saved her life. Today, as Josef prepares to bring the Hungarian team to Israel for the 18th Maccabiah in July 2009, Susan watches with trepidation as anti-Semitism is on the rise in Hungary, an alarming prelude to the annihilating force that she and her mother always feared. But having been to Israel, Susan's fear for the fate of her Jewish grandchildren has abated. For Jews around the world, the thriving Land of Israel is a bastion of promise and hope. Contact Susana K-M at suanema@gmail.com To Go To Top

CANADIAN MEDIA EAGER TO PICK UP FLAWED ANTI-ISRAEL REPORT Posted by Honest Reporting Canada, July 16, 2009.

Will the media ever learn? In March 2009, Ha'aretz published a story alleging "war crimes" and serious ethical failures on the part of the IDF in Gaza. Predictably, many international media outlets repeated the allegations without bothering to do any rudimentary checks. Subsequently, it was revealed that the soldiers' testimonies were based on nothing more than rumours and hearsay, causing acute embarrassment to Ha'aretz and serving up a salutary lesson for those media outlets that reproduced such shoddy journalism. Now, Israeli non-governmental organization Breaking the Silence has published a new report reliant upon testimonials from soldiers who served in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. Once again, allegations of "war crimes" and misdemeanours are based on second-hand evidence and hearsay. Defending the IDF operation against charges including the use of human shields, Golani Brigade commander Col. Avi Peled stated that one of the soldiers who testified in the report was not even in the field at the time: "He told his commander about a week [during] which he wasn't even in the field. He reported about what he heard happened." The IDF has issued an initial response to Breaking the Silence that can be viewed on the Canada-Israel Committee's blog by clicking here. NGO Monitor's Dan Kosky points to the Breaking the Silence report's central problems — flawed methodology and absence of any reasonable research standards (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/15/ israel-army-breaking-silence): "By Breaking the Silence's own admission, the allegations are comprised of "the testimony of around 30 combatants" — a fraction of the thousands of Israeli combat troops deployed during the Gaza conflict. This extremely narrow and presumably hand-picked sample is an absurd basis on which to pass judgment, and even these limited testimonies were entirely unverifiable. All statements are anonymous, and so-called "evidence" is further compromised by the absence of any details of where and when alleged incidents occurred. Consequently, were the report intended to prompt the IDF to investigate individual allegations, Breaking the Silence has made this impossible." Once again, Canadian and international media outlets rushed to publish a story from another flawed source. While the Toronto Star gleefully pushed the story to its front page in yesterday's edition, the Globe & Mail featured a special report from freelancer Orly Halpern on page 10. Other Canadian media also covered the story, including: CBC.ca, CBC Newsworld, CBC Around the World, CBC Radio's The World This Hour (Listen Here) and The Current, CTV.ca, CTV Newsnet, Global National, City TV International, Toronto Sun, Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, Le Devoir, Montreal Gazette, Waterloo Record, Hamilton Spectator, Le Nouvelliste, London Free Press, Radio-Canada radio (Listen Here), Radio-Canada.ca, Radio-Canada's Le Telejournal, and Halifax's Chronicle Herald. The Globe & Mail's Orly Halpern even wrote on her personal Twitter page: "I'm reading a really moving report which I will be writing about for the Globe and Mail. It makes me sick to my stomach." This statement begs the following question: Can an objective and balanced story emerge when emotions rather than facts are the driving force? With this in mind, Halpern's report was marred by many missing facts. Unlike the CBC's and Toronto Star's reports, Halpern failed to mention why Israel carried out "Operation Cast Lead," which was designed to prevent Palestinian terrorists from firing rockets into southern Israel. No mention was made that Hamas has been accused of war crimes by Israel along with several human rights organizations. Also missing from the report was any reference that there were Israeli casualties in the war. Again in contrast to the CBC and the Star, the Globe's report only described the Palestinian casualties from the 22-day conflict. Even more remarkable though was that Israel's adversary in the conflict, Hamas, was not even mentioned in this report! Furthermore, Halpern's statement that "Israel destroyed more than 3,000 homes and damaged some 20,000 others — in some cases entire neighbourhoods were razed" lacked any attribution. While this may be a claim made by Amnesty International, Ms. Halpern presented this statement as fact, whereas in reality it would be almost impossible to determine who was responsible for the destruction and damage of the homes given Hamas' booby-traps, secondary explosions, etc. Commendably though, CTV Newsnet (Watch Here) allowed Israeli spokesmen Yigal Palmor over 6-minutes to rebut the allegations made by Breaking the Silence. While Toronto Star reporter Oakland Ross noted that "Israel insists its armed forces took heroic measures to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza" and that "Last month, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Col. Richard Kemp, told a Jerusalem audience the IDF did more to safeguard the welfare of civilians during Operation Cast Lead "than any other army in the history of warfare." How You Can Make A Difference: Breaking the Silence has succeeded in gaining the international publicity that it sought. Many media outlets, most notably the Globe & Mail, have demonstrated their propensity to uncritically publish unverifiable accounts from non-governmental organizations that feed their own unquestioning narrative of Israel and the IDF. Please send your considered comments to the Globe and Mail at: letters@globeandmail.com and refer to Orly Halpern's July 15 report entitled "Report reveals deadly Israeli actions in Gaza" citing some of the many deficiencies we pointed out. Honest Reporting monitors the media for inaccuracy and unfairness in how they report the news about Israel. Ther website address is http://www.honestreporting.com. Contact them by email at action@honestreporting.com To Go To Top

RABBI STEVEN WERNICK REFLECTS ON MEETING WITH PRESIDENT OBAMA Posted by Gerald A. Honigman, July 16, 2009.

 The rabbi below, like too many Jews, while meaning well, unfortunately still has his head stuck in the sand like an ostrich and kvels at the idea that a President invited him to the White House...But for what reason were these particular Jews invited???? To give a Jewish stamp of approval to what Obama has in store for Israel — which should have been obvious long before the election to anyone who truly had his senses working — which 78% of American Jews proved they didn't. Do the volumes of disturbing evidence need to be rehashed yet again? If so, let me know... The settlement issue is intimately tied to Israel's future borders — not its pre-'67 9-15-mile wide Auschwitz/armistice lines existence. Now, please read these two editorials by myself for necessary background and then the JTA recent report carefully and see what the story and linkage is between UNSC Resol.242 and the settlements...That's what the fight with Obama and the others will be largely about...Forward this to others if ya think they'll read it in order to give them a broader perspective about what this fight over the settlements is really all about. http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2009/6/article20.htm http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/5221 http://jta.org/news/article/2009/07/13/1006510/ obama-gets-jewish-support-on-peace-push-questions-about-style Below is an article by Joanne Palmer about Rabbi Wernick's visit to he White House. This is the introduction. Shalom, Chevre, For those involved in Conservative Jewish Education, it consistently behooves us to remind our constituents, teachers, families and students about the tenets and values of Conservative Judaism. For this reason, it is such an an honor that our new executive vice president, Rabbi Steven C. Wernick, was among those invited to the White House on July 13 to represent United Synagogue and share with the president what our Movement stands for. Joanne Palmer, United Synagogue's outstanding Communications Director has provided the following press release to help us understand the depth and importance of this important meeting. And even more compelling, both below and attached you will find the official United Synagogue statement on both foreign and domestic positions. I'm sure you will find it to be extremely informative and helpful as you continue to serve as both educator and role model for your schools and congregations. Attached is a Word document format of the statement that Rabbi Wernick shared with President Obama. Please scroll down for the complete background, as well as links to articles posted by the various news agencies. Our thanks to Joanne Palmer for this informative article, and to Rabbi Wernick for so thoughtfully representing us.

Rabbi Steven C. Wernick, who has just become executive vice president and CEO of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, was among the 16 national Jewish leaders invited to the White House on July 13 for a candid conversation with President Barack Obama about the issues most important to the President and the American Jewish community. Subjects included the economy, the environment, healthcare, and poverty, but the focus was on foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. President Obama stressed that his commitment to Israel is deep and true; his posture with Israel is no tougher than with the Palestinians and both will benefit equally from peace in the region. "President Obama asked us to understand that although we might eventually have some disagreements about tactics and strategy — and of course tactics and strategy are very important — he wanted to reassure us that his administration has not and is not and will not jeopardize Israel 's security," Rabbi Wernick said. "Whatever approaches they take to these issues are done with the very best of good faith for what they believe is in the best interest of Israel, of the region, and of the United States. "I was honored to have been included in the meeting," Rabbi Wernick said. "I think the fact that the president of the United States invites these conversations, and really listens to us, is extraordinary, and a testament to our democracy. I believe that President Obama enjoys broad support in the Jewish community, both politically and personally. And I am heartened to know that President Obama sees the Conservative movement as one of the anchors of the Jewish community." At the meeting, Rabbi Wernick gave one of President Obama's aides a document describing United Synagogue's positions on foreign and domestic issues. As the document, which you can find below, shows, the White House and United Synagogue are in close agreement on a number of issues. Rabbi Wernick was quoted in an article in the L. A. Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg- obama-jews14-2009jul14,0,1886892.story); one sent by Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/politicsNews/ idUSTRE56D0BD20090714), one sent by AP (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ ALeqM5jrdSaQ2vd-WGTD_86aHvyHVysjpAD99DS0N00), and one by the Washington Post/Newsweek (http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/godingovernment/ 009/07/obama_meets_with_jewish_leaders.html#more) Gerald A. Honigman, a Florida educator, has created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, has lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and has publicly debated Arab spokesmen. His articles and op-eds have been published in both the print media and on websites. Contact him at honigman6@msn.com or go to his website: http://geraldahonigman.com/blog.php To Go To Top

FROM ISRAEL: IT'S NOT PRETTY Posted by Arlene Kushner, July 16, 2009.

In fact, a good deal of what I'm going to write about here is downright ugly, if not totally obscene. According to The Times (London) a deal is being worked out in which an Israeli strike on Iran would be facilitated by the international community in return for Israeli concessions on settlements and "peace negotiations." Don't know if it's true or not, but the first thing that ran through my mind, quite honestly, was that this might, after all, be the quid pro quo that Netanyahu has hinted at — when he has suggested that he might make decisions he otherwise would not because in these "extraordinary times" he must consider our security first. The next thing that I thought was that this, if true, is both obscene and insane. And a few other unmentionable things to boot. (Note to Dick: My "exasperation" is REALLY showing now.) Is the world doing us a favor to "allow" us to attack Iran? It is Israel that will be doing the world a favor, as the whole world, starting with Obama, has proven itself to be craven, and breathtakingly, narrow-mindedly self-serving, with regard to Iran. ~~~~~~~~~~ I'm no military strategist, and I cannot, in the end, make informed judgments as to how much would be gained with regard to international support for our efforts. It could be that this support would provide critical elements that might seriously improve our ability to achieve military success. But from my gut, as a non-military strategist, I have the desire to see us tell the world where to get off. One thing does seem to be the case: We're preparing to hit Iran. Whether it turns out we actually do or not, we are getting ready. There are hints, and various articles afloat, that suggest that things are simmering still inside of Iran and the position of the mullahs is not what it was just a short time ago. So there is just a tiny, tiny sense that we don't know yet how this will play out. (Sandra?) ~~~~~~~~~~ Back to Obama. With all I wrote about that meeting, and the diligence I devoted to giving an accurate picture, I ended up omitting one piece of information that had leaked early: As Barak Ravid wrote in Ha'aretz: "Obama told the leaders that he wants to help Israel overcome its demographic problem by reaching an agreement on a two-state solution, but that in order to do so, Israel would need "to engage in serious self-reflection." He's pushing us in order to "help" us? Right... The condescension of his tone. The insult of it! And the idea of the least self-reflective of men (he doesn't need to self-reflect, for he's perfect) saying this to Jews, who are the most self-reflective of people — neurotically, agonizingly so. It's a parody, really. ~~~~~~~~~~ And yet, in spite of this, the American Jewish Committee put out a statement (thanks to all who sent it) by Jason Isaacson, its director of government and international affairs, who was at the Obama meeting: "The President could not have been clearer that his primary motivation in seeking to re-energize an Israeli-Palestinian peace process is Israel's long-term security." In my humble opinion, Jason Isaacson should hang his head in shame. How could he possibly believe this, when it's clear how Obama is courting the Arab/Muslim world? Isaacson also said: "Nor could he have been clearer in the priority he assigns to building international unity against Iran's drive for nuclear weapons capability." And here we have the hint of the "link" between our concessions and "building international unity." Apparently this is all right with Isaacson. If this is a representative sample of American Jewish "leadership" than American Jews are in even more trouble than I thought. ~~~~~~~~~~ Barak Ravid has written another article about Obama, this one concerning the "peace plan" that he is expected to be unveiling soon. It will provide a "framework" for negotiations, and a "binding timetable," in order to obligate the parties to make progress. Been there. Done that. Didn't he notice that this was sort of what Bush had in mind? It ain't gonna work. How do you, from the outside "bind" two parties to make an agreement by a certain date when they cannot come to terms? But here's where it gets a bit vague: "A senior Western diplomat" says the US is only interested in pursuing this after the settlement issue and the matter of pro-Israel gestures from the Arab states are resolved. Remember, I wrote about this: What we seem to be seeing is that if we don't resolve the settlement issue with Obama, then he won't pressure us with a timetable. ~~~~~~~~~~ Sounds crazy, of course, but what this means is that he needs to know first that there's a certain amount of readiness to offer concessions, for he realizes that otherwise his plan is dead in the water. But his plan is dead in the water anyway. Let's follow this a bit. There has been talk about some sort of "compromise" with us with regard to allowing us to complete housing construction in Judea and Samaria that has already been contracted or begun. Ravid says that the US shifted its position on a total freeze partly because of a recognition that it's not possible. But there is also another reason: "...the refusal on the part of the moderate Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, to make significant normalization gestures toward Israel. In all probability, when the Americans understood that in any event they would not obtain substantial gestures from the Arabs, they decided to reach a compromise with Israel." Well, then. US diplomats are eager to show there is "achievement" in the "process" by getting us to compromise on the housing issue. But it apparently doesn't occur to them that if the Arabs won't agree to any steps toward normalization, they are also not going to move towards "peace." www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1100581.html ~~~~~~~~~~ As obscene as anything I'm writing about today is this, and it's more difficult because it's a source of internal shame: Major Roi Klein died three years ago in the Second Lebanon war, the noblest of heroes. He threw himself on a hand grenade, thereby absorbing the impact of its explosion into his own body and saving the soldiers under his command. The epitome of all that is selfless, his last words (as befits a believing Jew) were "Shema Yisrael." The State posthumously awarded him the Medal of Valor. Here you see Roi with his family: His widow and children live in the Hayovel neighborhood of the community of Eli, near Ariel, in Samaria, about 30 minutes from Jerusalem. This neighborhood has received government services for more than a decade, but never was fully "authorized." Peace Now and Yesh Din, two anti-Zionist organizations on the far left, took themselves to the High Court with the claim that 11 houses in the Hayovel neighborhood were on Arab-owned land. According to local residents, part of one house, only, extends onto Arab land, and the rest were built on state land. Claims are often made and sometimes verification is not as easy as it should be. (There have been other Peace Now charges that were later demonstrated to be false.) At any rate, the Court ruled with Peace Now. Eleven houses in Eli are due to be destroyed. One of them is the Klein home. This is simply wrong, wrong, wrong. Sometimes it's an issue of human decency, and not legality. This is how the State treats the widow of a genuine hero? ~~~~~~~~~~ Following the ruling, the Land of Israel Legal Forum sent an appeal to Defense Minister Ehud Barak, asking him to honor Major Klein by authorizing his family's home as legal. "Will your hand, as that responsible for destroying the home of this hero of Israel, not tremble as you sign the demolition order?" asked Forum chairman Nachi Eyal. "If there remains any significance to 'our duty to the fallen' — now is the time to prove it." The letter said: "With your signature, you could turn his home 'legal,' but you refuse... The law does not require you to destroy the home of a hero of Israel who gave his life for his people. If there is any legal way to prevent this travesty, you must make use of it." Please, see this site for a petition to sign, to save the Klein house: Click here. 100,000 signatures are being sought — about 30,000 have been secured so far. It's in Hebrew. Scroll down to the form. The first field is for your complete name (and it will accept it in English) and the third is for your city. Both are required. (The second, for your age, is optional.) Then hit the Hebrew word "chatimah" (signature) which is in red, at an angle on the form, to register your name on the petition. ~~~~~~~~~~ I'm reading reports of major fires raging in the hills outside of Jerusalem. Haven't seen it with my own eyes yet, but will undoubtedly be deeply saddened when I do. These wooded hills outside of Jerusalem are so beautiful, and the trees so valued. Arson is strongly suspected. Firefighters from all over the country have been called in. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info To Go To Top

SCREAM, MUSLIM WOMEN! Posted by Judith A. Klinghoffer, July 16, 2009.

Here we go again. The justly dreaded Saudi "morality" police, enthusiastically supported by the country's interior minister, recently acquitted by the courts for causing the death of "four youths in a car accident after chasing them on suspicion of being with unrelated women." For in Saudi Arabia, to be accused of being in the company of unrelated men, amounts to a death sentence: Saudi Arabia's religious police are being blamed for the death of two sisters who were murdered in what is known as an 'honor killing' by their brother after the sisters were arrested for allegedly mixing with unrelated men.The Society for Defending Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia said the religious police arrested the two sisters, aged 19 and 21, thus putting their lives in danger. Their brother shot them to death in front of their father when they left a women's shelter in Riyadh on July 5, according to Saudi news reports. The practice known as honor killing is a daily occurrence in Saudi Arabia. The incidents are staged to look like a suicide or an accident, Wajeha Huweidar, a Saudi women's rights activist told The Media Line. ... "I think the religious police had a big role in this crime and many other crimes," said Huweidar. "When a woman gets arrested for mingling with a non-male relative, that means her life is ended. She gets to go to a prison or to a women's shelter and her family will not come to pick her up. The Saudi male guardianship system doesn't allow women to be released without the presence of their male guardian." Violence against Muslim women continues a pace as the list of crimes collected by in the recent bulletin of the oppression of women makes clear. And it merely covers the last, unexceptional, few weeks. And just so that you, as I was first tempted to be, are not encourage by the very existence of an outspoken Saudi activist like Wajeha Huweidar note that she has been prevented from leaving the country because she did not have permission from her guardian. Yes, women need such permission even to have elective surgery. HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson asserts that it is time to get real: The Saudi government is saying one thing to the Human Rights Council in Geneva but doing another thing inside the kingdom.It needs to stop requiring adult women to seek permission from men, not just pretend to stop it. This is the brutal reality behind the American and French presidents argument over Muslim female headgear, as absurd as it may seem. Non Muslims groups, such as Hassidic Jews and Amish Christians, may have dress codes but those abandoning them are not risking violent retribution. In other words, when Barack Obama chooses to be silent on dishonor murder and vocal on the Burka, he takes the side of the oppressors and there is no use pretending otherwise. Moreover, his pretense has consequences. It is a small wonder that the Afghani president dared world opinion by signing a bill which Legalizes Rape and Starvation of Women: This week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed legislation which among other things, allows Afghan men to starve their wives if they refuse to have sex with them. The measure was an amendment to a law which have husbands the right to force themselves on their wives, if they did not consent. Some NATO countries (not the U.S.!) have threatened to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan as a result of the measure... The new law has touched-off riots in the streets of Kabul, as hundreds of women protested the law which would be unthinkable in a civilized society. However, groups of men from Kabul's largest Shia madrassa also took to the streets and attacked the women. The event has been completely ignored by the American press. Well, the American press is too busy following in Obama's footsteps to disrespect anything any Muslim leader or cleric says or does. In other words, Muslim women, like the Iranian people, are on their own even when it comes to moral support. And, just so that we make no mistake, Muslim women are in danger in the West too as demonstrated by dishonor murders in such places as Texas, New York or Malmo, Sweden. Oh, yes, there are "good news" from Saudi Arabia. Hence, only 3 eyewitness are needed for a rape conviction instead of four! That should make conviction easier, don't you think?! Contact Judith Apter Klinghoffer by email at jklinghoff@aol.com To Go To Top

A TIGER'S TALE Posted by Fred Reifenberg

Contact Fred Reifenberg by email at freify@netvision.net.il Go to to see more of his graphic art at http://ainhod.blogspot.com/ To Go To Top

ISRAELI VIEW OF ARAB PEACEKEEPERS IN GAZA; OBAMA ADMIN APOLOGIZES TO DURBAN II; EU AND ISRAEL SIGN COOPERATION AGREEMENT Posted by Richard H. Shulman, July 16, 2009.

ISRAELI VIEW OF ARAB PEACEKEEPERS IN GAZA Dr. Aaron Lerner, head of IMRA, asked the opinion of Prof. Yaacov Bar Siman Tov of the Hebrew University Dept. International Relations about the proposal to send foreign Arab peacekeepers in Gaza. The professor approves, following the example of an international force in Lebanon. He thinks it kept Hizbullah from renewing warfare. Dr. Lerner wondered how successful UNIFIL was, inasmuch as Hizbullah amassed about 30,000 missiles under its nose. The professor acknowledged that the foreign troops could become human shields and might not prevent arms smuggling into Gaza (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/21). PM Netanyahu said that the measures for demilitarizing southern Lebanon and Gaza did not work (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/22). One can't say UNIFIL prevented combat. First Hizbullah had to rearm, and UNIFIL's presence kept Israel from preventing that prerequisite for major combat. When Iran gives Hizbullah the signal to fire the rockets, would UNIFIL stop it? Some people think that the Arab view is omitted by the major media and by me (see http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d14-Arab-view-neglected-by-column) But how much of the Israeli views just reported make it into the major media? PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY ACCUSES HAMAS The Palestinian Authority's (P.A.) official newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, accused Hamas of money-smuggling via women and patients traveling abroad for treatment. If true, this would further justify Israeli checkpoints (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/22 from Palestinian Media Watch). The P.A. accuses Hamas of more specific and more severe misbehavior than it accused Israelis of. To see a P.A. reason to fear Hamas, click here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d15-Fatah-fugitive-from-Gaza-asks-Israeli-asylum POLICE ARREST PRO-ARAB ANARCHISTS NEAR BAT AYIN Bat Ayin is the Jewish community in Judea-Samaria where an Arab terrorist came, murdered one boy, and tried to murder another [but was fought off]. A week later, Arab threw stones at Jews having a religious ceremony there. People from that community later started building a synagogue on state land on a nearby hill, from which Arabs would monitor Jewish movement below. The Jews are harassed almost daily by the increasingly present foreign anarchists, Israeli leftists, and Arabs. Seven anarchists were arrested for trying to provoke a fight with resident Jews (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/21). Such stories rarely hit the major media, interested just in possible settler violence. To see more on who is targeted with violence, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d14-Settler-leaders-targeted ISRAELI BORDER POLICE TRAINING IN HUMAN RIGHTS Arab groups were scheduled to instruct Israeli border police on the human rights of Arabs they may encounter. On hearing of that, Orit Strook, head of the ]Jewish] Organization for Human Rights in Judea and Samaria, secured an appointment from the head of the Border Police to instruct border police on the human rights of Jews they may encounter as they demolish outposts http://www.israelnationalnews.com/ — Arutz-7, 6/22). For more on Israeli need for human rights training in treatment of Jews, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d14-University-of-Haifa-against-Jewish-students LEFT'S REACTION TO TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE A few days after the massacre in China, civil rights attorney Alan Dershowitz had his associate telephone prominent American leftists noticeably vocal about civil rights violations in democracies. Most claimed to be unavailable for comment. None would condemn China for shooting or running over hundreds of students. This included Noam Chomsky, professed champion of underdogs, and the late William Kunstler, who wouldn't condemn a supposedly "socialist" regime. No condemnation came from the Nation, National Lawyer's Guild, Guardian, other Marxist weeklies, and the PLO. The same democracy-bashing leftist groups also were silent about Saddam's poison-gassing of Kurdish civilians, mass-executions in Syria, and Iranian mass-murder of Bahai. They don't care about justice, just about ideology. Their pretended interest in human rights is phony, one-sided. The test of good faith humanitarianism is to object to atrocities by every side. The test of good faith upholding of free speech is to defend it for all sides (Alan M. Dershowitz, Contrary to Popular Opinion, 2002). For more on Dershowitz' views of censorship and self-censorship, see here: www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner~ y2009m7d14-Alan-Dershowitz-against-censoring-Vanessa-Redgrave OBAMA ADMINISTRATION APOLOGIZES TO DURBAN II The Durban II conference by the UN's Human Rights Commission ran as anticipated. The opening speech was an antisemitic speech by Iran's President, to which the Secretary-General sat through without objecting. The product was one-sided and exclusively anti-Israel resolutions. The Obama Administration apologized for not having attended and thanked delegations for working to improve the results. However, one can see that the results add to bigotry (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/22 from EyeOnTheUN). The Commission is counter-productive. Durban II owes the apology. Obama should apologize for apologizing to bigots. He is too appeasement-minded, not a defender of decency. To read about Obama already having upset U.S. Jewry, though they are quiet about it, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d6-Obama-upsets-US-Jews For a skeptical view of humanitarian organizations, see here: www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner ~y2009m7d10-Amnesty-International-says-Hamas-and- srael-did-war-crimes ISRAEL RECONSIDERING ITS SALES OF DRONES TO RUSSIA Russia signed a contract to purchase Israeli drones. Then it admitted that it was buying the few just to learn the technology for building its own. Therefore, Israel is reconsidering that sale (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/22 from Jerusalem Post). To see what Russia does with its arms development, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict-Examiner ~y2009m6d22-Russia-offers-Palestinian-Authority-armored-vehicles E.U. AND ISRAEL SIGN COOPERATION AGREEMENT The Israel and European Commission were to sign on to economic cooperation (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/22). This was the agreement that the E.U. threatened to withhold unless Israel adopted E.U. policy towards the Territories. Israel budged but didn't concede. ARAB WOMAN HEADS ISRAELI HOSPITAL DEPT. "Dr. Suheir Assady is the first Muslim woman to" head a large hospital department in Israel" and one of the few in Mideast. This is the Nephrology Dept. of Rambam Hospital in Haifa. She has impressive qualifications and goals (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/23). For problems in Arab-Jewish coexistence in Israel, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d13-Coexistence-in-Jaffa-and-Nazareth IRAN DEMONSTRATES DOUBLE STANDARD AGAINST ISRAEL If ever an issue demonstrates the world's double standard against Israel, it is the non-reaction to violent oppression in Iran. The world has little to say, as the Ayatollah's goons murder Iranians demonstrating peacefully for democracy. Obama, who has so much to say against Israeli settlements, practically ignored the Iranian murders. The human rights organizations, which seize upon false accusations against Israel, ignore the irrefutable carnage in Iran (Israel Resources Review, 7/13 from Ben Caspit & Ben Dror-Yemeni of Maariv, 6/22). The double standard is against Israel, but not particularly in favor of Muslims, who are the major victims in these Iranian police state tactics. I would like Muslims abroad to deny that Islam condones the methods of Iran's theocracy and to affirm their opposition to the oppression there. To read about Iran's crazy accusations, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m7d7-Iranian-accusations-against-Bahai-and-BBC STATUS QUO EGYPT Renowned Egyptian Scientist Farouq Al-Baz laments that his once great country fails to reform. It grows just in population and builds over agricultural land, while the "Asian tigers" far surpass it (http://www.imra.org.il/ — Independent Media Research & Analysis, 6/23 from MEMRI). It also grows in military might, thanks to U.S. taxpayers. For a bit on what to expect from Egypt, see here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY-Israel-Conflict- Examiner~y2009m6d29-US-seeks-Egypts-help Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com and visit his website: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-7095-NY- Israel-Conflict-Examiner/x-7 To Go To Top

ALL STRIINGS ATTACHED — ENTERING JORDAN Posted by Moshe Feiglin, July 16, 2009.

"We will pass over armed before the LORD into the land of Canaan, and the possession of our inheritance shall remain with us beyond the Jordan.And Moses gave unto them, to the children of Gad, and to the children of Reuben, and unto the half-tribe of Manasseh the son of Joseph, the kingdom of Sihon king of the Amorites, and the kingdom of Og king of Bashan, the land, according to the cities thereof with their borders, even the cities of the land round about." (From this week's Torah portion, Matot, Numbers 32:32-33) Once again this week, Israeli tourists were denied entry to Jordan because they had tefillin (phylacteries) in their luggage. Tourists who look too religious, even if they do not have Jewish religious items in their bags — are not allowed to enter the Hashemite kingdom. "We do this for the safety of the tourists," the Jordanian government justifies itself. In other words, while we have signed a peace treaty with you, for which we received a huge amount of territory in the Aravah, a steady stream of water at the expense of dehydrated Israel, civilian flights in Israeli skies, profitable tourism and more — that didn't really reflect the feelings of the Jordanian "nation." Deep down, the Jordanians do not want peace with you. They want to eliminate you. By the way, in Jordan, it is still a capital offense to sell land to a Jew. The Jordanians seem to remember the Torah verses that include both banks of the Jordan River within the boundaries of Israel. The Jews prefer to forget. Ze'ev Jabotinsky's movement, Beitar, has already officially deleted its founder's claim to both banks of the Jordan from its platform. But believing Jews cannot delete verses from the Torah. That is why the Jordanians fear G-d fearing Jews. The Jordan tourism issue is amazingly similar to the Temple Mount tourism issue. At the entrance to Judaism's most holy place, a strange differentiation is made between religious looking Jews or those Jews with religious articles in their bags and between Jews who do not look religious at all. The first group is delayed, their religious articles are confiscated and they are closely scrutinized while they are on the Temple Mount. The "normal" group enters the Mount with no delay and nobody pays them much attention. Both the Jordanian and Israeli authorities are onto something. Deep in their subconscious, they understand the spiritual bond between the Nation of Israel and its entire land, with the focus on the Temple Mount. They think that it is just the "religious" who express this bond, and they do what they can to disconnect the two. Jew haters outside Israel are not concerned by religious Jews who have no connection to their land — just look at Achmadinijad and the Satmers. Jew haters in Israel are not concerned by Israelis who have no connection to their religion. But when we will have Jewish leadership that will attach all those strings — a complete nation with complete faith in a complete land — the Jew haters of the world will really have something to worry about! Shabbat Shalom, Moshe Feiglin Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) is a group of people inside the Likud party who want to see Israel adopt a more Jewish character. Moshe Feiglin, its cofounder, has emphatically said he does not want a theocracy, but he does want a State based on Jewish values. The Manhigut Yehudit website address is http://www.manhigut.org. To learn more about Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) and to read their plan for Israel's future, visit www.jewishisrael.org. Or contact Shmuel Sackett, International Director (516) 330-4922 (cell) To Go To Top

JEWISH-ISRAELI VILLAGES AND TOWNS IN JUDEA AND SAMARIA ARE LEGAL OR ILLEGAL? Posted by Nurit Greenger, July 15, 2009.

For everyone's attention: Are the Jewish-Israeli villages and towns in Judea and Samaria legal or illegal? For once and for all we put the record straight! Way too often we hear that the 'settlements programme' that followed the 1967 occupation of Judea and Samaria, an area many still elect to call the 'West Bank' so it sounds or appears to be a foreign territory and not part of the Land of Israel are regarded by most international bodies as a serious violation of international law. Many writers, commentators, media broadcasters, officials in many countries, anti-Israel activists, whether organizations or individuals, and people who simply lack the basic and correct facts and knowledge insinuate that this view is based on the interpretation of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention as well as a series of UN Security Council resolutions' that deem the settlements to be illegal. Personally I do not think that a Jew making his home in Judea of Samaria is an illegal act. But who am I to doubt the 'pundits' and their claim it is? So I presented this long overdue question to Eli Hertz of http://mythsandfacts.org/ who is número uno expert in this filed and here is the result that we all need to know and recite to those culprits who argue that homes of Jews built or are about to be built in Judea, Samaria and ['East'] Jerusalem are illegal. Eli Hertz divided the topic into two parts: 1. 'Geneva Convention' — Article 49 2. Legal occupation These two points will answer the legal aspects of Jews' right to settle in any place, meaning any place between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.   1. 'GENEVA CONVENTION' — ARTICLE 49 The term "occupied territory," which appears in the Fourth Geneva Conventions, originated as a result of the Nazi occupation of Europe. Though it has become common parlance to describe the West Bank and Gaza as "occupied territories," there is no legal basis for using this term in connection to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Background: The language of Article 49 was crafted in the wake of World War II and the Nazi occupation — an occupation that led to a war of aggression in which Nazi Germany attacked its neighbors with impunity, committing a host of atrocities against civilian populations, including deportation and displacement of local populations in occupied Europe. Millions were sent to forced labor camps and those of particular ethnic origin, most notably the Jews, were sent to their deaths in the gas chambers. The drafters of Article 49 were concerned with preventing future genocide against humanity. Using the Geneva Convention to describe the situation in Israel is ironic since Israel customarily follows international humanitarian law without being told or forced to do so by outside authorities. Even a cursory look at the West Bank and Gaza will show that Article 49 is clearly inapplicable. But that has not stopped critics and enemies of Israel, including members of the UN and organs such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) from using the Geneva Convention as a weapon against Israel even when statements by authoritative analysts, scholars and drafters of the document contradict everything said by those who distort history for politically motivated reasons. What do legal experts, scholars and world-respected expert say in reference to Article 49's applicability and relevance to the Israeli-Arab conflict? Article 49, Paragraph 1 prohibits: "... Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country ..." Israel does not forcibly and arbitrarily deported or transferred innocent "protected" Arab-'Palestinians' from the 'Territories' into areas within the 1967 Green Line. Occasional deportation of individuals to "any other country" is based solely on security matters and is permissible under Paragraph 2 of the Article. As to the use of the term "occupied territory" — "... from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power ..." Professor Julius Stone,[i] a leading authority on the Law of Nations, categorically rejected the use of the term 'occupied territory' to describe the territories controlled by Israel on the following counts: First, Article 49 relates to the invasion of sovereign states and is inapplicable because the West Bank did not and does not belong to any other state; legally, it is "unallocated territory." Second, the drafting history of Article 49 [Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War] — that is, preventing "genocidal objectives" must be taken into account. Those conditions do not exist in the Israeli case. Third, settlement of Jews in the West Bank is voluntary and does not displace local inhabitants. Moreover, Stone asserted: that "no serious dilution (much less extinction) of native populations" [exits]; rather "a dramatic improvement in the economic situation of the [local Palestinian] inhabitants since 1967 [has occurred]." Article 49, Paragraph 5 — is of a particular interest. The "Occupying Power" may not " ... detain protected persons in an area particularly exposed to the dangers of war ..." It is worth pointing out the reality on the ground. Local Palestinian terrorists — bomb makers and other unlawful, hostile and deadly combatants are operating from within the civil population designated by this Article as "Protected persons" causing death and misery to their own 'brethren.' Article 49 Paragraph 6 — Arab opposition to Jewish settlements is based on the last paragraph of Article 49. The "Occupying Power" may not "... deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies." Professor Eugene V. Rostow, a drafter of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and international law expert, concludes that the Convention is not applicable to Israel's legal position and notes: "The opposition to Jewish settlements in the West Bank also relied on a legal argument — that such settlements violated the Fourth Geneva Convention forbidding the occupying power from transferring its own citizens into the occupied territories. How that Convention could apply to Jews who already had a legal right, protected by Article 80 of the United Nations Charter, to live in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, was never explained." Rostow reminds us that: The Mandates of the League of Nations have a special status in international law. They are considered to be trusts, indeed 'sacred trusts.'.... A trust does not end because the trustee dies [or] resigns. ... UN Article 80 was specifically created in 1945 to protect the Jewish right of settlement in Palestine under the mandate against erosion in a world of ambitious states. The legal rights of settlements survived the British withdrawal in 1948. Rostow states: "This paragraph of Article 80, commonly known as 'The Palestine Article,' was debated and passed with the problem of the Palestine Mandate very much in mind." Several leading indicator demonstrate that Palestinians (when not engaged in hostilities) are better off under Israeli control than under their 'brethren' in neighboring Arab states. Palestinians' standard of living continued to rise steadily in the early 1980s but dropped sharply under corrupt self-rule that was a consequence of the Oslo Accords, plummeting to an all-time low since September 2000 when Palestinians again opted for armed conflict. The infant mortality rate of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is far lower than the rate in most of the rest of the Arab world. In the West Bank, for example, the infant mortality rate was 21 for every one thousand births, while in Egypt it is 59 and in Saudi Arabia it is 58 per thousand births respectively. The data imply that the same Palestinian Arabs enjoy human rights superior to their brethren in most Arab countries. 2. LEGAL OCCUPATION The "Mandate for Palestine," an historical League of Nations document, laid down the Jewish legal right to settle anywhere in western Palestine, a 10,000-square-mile area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, an entitlement unaltered in international law and valid to this day. The legally binding document was conferred on April 24, 1920, at the San Remo Conference, and its terms outlined in the Treaty of Sèlvres on August 10, 1920. The Mandate's terms were finalized and unanimously approved on July 24, 1922, by the Council of the League of Nations, which was comprised at that time of 51 countries,[iv] and became operational on September 29, 1923. The "Mandate for Palestine" was not a naive vision, briefly embraced by the international community in blissful unawareness of Arab opposition to the very notion of Jewish historical rights in Palestine. The Mandate weathered the test of time: On April 18, 1946, when the League of Nations was dissolved and its assets and duties transferred to the United Nations, the international community, in essence, reaffirmed the validity of this international accord and reconfirmed that the terms for a Jewish national home were the will of the international community, a "sacred trust" — despite the fact that by then it was patently clear that the Arabs opposed a Jewish national home, no matter what the form. Many seem to confuse the "Mandate for Palestine" [The Trust], with the British Mandate [The Trustee]. The "Mandate for Palestine" is a League of Nations document that laid down the Jewish legal rights in Palestine. The British Mandate, on the other hand, was entrusted by the League of Nations with the responsibility to administrate the area delineated by the "Mandate for Palestine." Great Britain [i.e., the Mandatory and Trustee] did turn over its responsibility to the United Nations as of May 14, 1948. However, the legal force of the League of Nations' "Mandate for Palestine" [i.e., The Trust] was not terminated with the end of the British Mandate. Rather, the Trust was transferred over to the United Nations. Eli Hertz From now on, when anyone tells you or you read that it is illegal for a Jew to settle in Judea, Samaria and [East] Jerusalem you tell this anti-Semite the following: The "Mandate for Palestine," — The Trust — is valid and holds all the power of international law to this very moment. This historical and most important document the League of Nations issued, laid down the Jewish legal right to settle anywhere in western Palestine, a 10,000-square-mile area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jews are law abiding people. Since that this entitlement to settle anywhere in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has not been altered in international law and is valid to this day, a Jew who wants to build his home and settle in this area remains a [international] law abiding person thus cannot and must not be stopped by anyone, even if that person in the United States of American President, whose political agenda and motivational reasons are based on lies, deception and revision of Jewish history. Let us stay on course with the truth not myth and lies! With kind regards, Nurit Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog: http://ngthinker.typepad.com To Go To Top

TWO STATES FOR TWO PEOPLES: A FUTURISTIC GUEST LECTURE Posted by Steven Plaut, July 15, 2009.

Date: November 2, 2068 Place: Edward Said University, Paris, Islamic Republic of Northern Gaul. Subject: Notes from the Special Guest Lecture today in the course "History of the Middle East," by visiting professor Osama bin Levy. I would like to thank all of you — men, women, cyborgs — for attending my lecture this evening, despite the leak in the metrodome over the city that is allowing in some rain. I hope you did not have too much trouble finding parking for your personal commuter rocket devices in the university guest space station. I have been asked to sum up for you an era of Middle East history that took place before most of you were born, though it is fully documented in the standard knowledge chips you all have dangling from your rocket ignition keychains. It is truly difficult for those of us alive today to understand the depth of foolishness that led to the demise of the state of Israel earlier in the 21st century. But I wish to remind you that the events took place back when humans still lived in the most primitive conditions, operating mechanical computers with screens rather than bio-thinking supplementals; when humans drove those suicidal machines called automobiles and crashed into one another. Israeli political leaders, journalists and academics had for years infected the nation with a bizarre disease called Acute Settlerphobia, or AS. The plague of AS was inculcated with such massive determination that few in the country were able to immunize themselves against its mind-freezing symptoms. Those infected became mentally paralyzed, incapable of contemplating any solution to life's problems which did not include the idea that the settlers were responsible for all terrestrial problems. So you see, the temptation to adopt the "Two States for Two Peoples" solution was based not only on overwhelming international pressure but on the insistence of Israel's own political and intellectual elites that this formula would put an end to the Middle East conflict once and for all. There were, of course, plenty of reasons for skepticism. Israel had just a few years before abandoned the Gaza Strip, removing all of its soldiers and civilians. The result was the launching of thousands of rockets and countless other terror attacks against Israel by the Gaza Palestinians. Clearly an intelligent being or even an average cyborg should have understood that Gaza was serving as an illustration of what Israel could expect from any further territorial capitulation. But the leaders of Israel kept repeating what the Americans, Europeans, and others were chanting in global unison. They kept saying that no one could really knew what the Palestinians would do with their new state under the "Two States for Two Peoples" formulation until they got it. By repeating endlessly the hope that maybe the Palestinians would morph into civilized neighbors once they had their own state, and that anyway there was no alternative but to give the idea a try, Israel's opinion shapers eventually snookered the masses into into agreeing to "Two States for Two Peoples." Exactly 14 minutes after "Two States for Two Peoples" was implemented, the state of Palestine opened up a barrage with tens of thousands of rocket launchers, mortars and other low-tech means of warfare still being used by armies back in the early 21st century. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were nearly obliterated. Following the massive rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — attacks that (naturally) were completely unexpected by Israel's political establishment and chattering classes — came the final blow from Palestine. Masses of troops and volunteers from other Muslim states, especially Iran and Pakistan, who'd flooded into Palestine to defend it from the Israeli aggressors, were on the march. Large groups of Palestinian infiltrators attacked what was left of Israel near Netanya, cutting all north-south highways and dividing the country in half. Thousands of Jews living in isolated towns and communities in the Galilee were lynched by members of the Galilee Liberation Front, their beheaded corpses left alongside the roads. Palestinian rocket crews had earlier shut down Israeli airports, and missile barrages had made Israeli sea ports too dangerous for any ships to enter. So there was no escape for the Jews. Remaining pockets of Jewish resistance were placed under siege, their residents starved into submission. (Kibbutz members under siege were so desperate, they were actually reduced to eating kosher food.) To the very last, nearly all Israeli politicians insisted that the turn of events was completely unexpected and could not have been foreseen by anyone. Shortly after Israel was completely overrun, U.S. President Al Franken and French Prime Minister Abu Jihad announced that Two States had at last been achieved for Two Peoples — the Palestinian and Jordanian peoples. They appealed to countries around the world to allow the surviving Jewish refugees from the dead Zionist entity to enter their countries, but only Micronesia acquiesced. Next week's guest lecture will be on the history of the now extinct Christian community of Europe. Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. This essay appeared today in the Jewish Press http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/40064 To Go To Top