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"DEFENSE SHMEFENSE" -- HOW NOT TO COMBAT PALESTINIAN TERRORISM
Posted by Yoram Ettinger, May 31, 2007. |
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This essay was published in Makor Rishon Daily, May 27, 2007. |
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The more entrenched is the defensive state of Israeli mind -- as has been the case since the 1993 Oslo Accord -- the more intensified is Palestinian terrorism. The defensive world view on one hand and the "No Military Solution to Terrorism" on the other hand, have eroded Israel's steadfastness, have revolutionized the potential of Palestinian terrorism and have advanced its step-by-step strategy to annihilate the Jewish State:
The "Oslo Legacy" and its derivatives -- from the Hebron Accord through Wye Accord, the flight from South Lebanon, Camp David II, "Disengagement", Lebanon War II and "Convergence" -- have transformed "fortifications and defense", "Separation", "Containment", "Low Intensity Warfare", "Back to 1949 Lines" and the recruitment of counter-terrorism subcontractors (Egypt, Jordan, Arafat/Abu Mazen, international forces) into key battle tactics against Palestinian terrorism. Such tactics dismiss the option of bringing the enemy to submission, and therefore add fuel -- not water -- to the fire of terrorism. Instead of defending Israeli citizens, the "defense-fortification-separation" tactic has been employed, in order to rescue the "Oslo-Separation" theory from an extremely costly collapse: Over 2,000 Israelis murdered since 1993, compared with 250 murdered during 15 years preceding Oslo; a multi-billion dollar cost of homeland security measures; severe erosion of Israel's confidence in its cause and in its capability to confront its enemies; undermining Israel's posture of deterrence in the Middle East and in the US. The sealing of windows with sand sacks and the erection of a series of protective walls, did not stop the 2000-1 Palestinian sniping at Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood. In fact, it energized Palestinian terrorists and enabled them to improve their terrorist capabilities. The sniping was totally aborted -- and overall Palestinian terrorism was curtailed by 90% -- when Israel's military took over the Palestinian breeding ground of terrorism in Beit Jallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Ramallah, Jenin, Nablus and other major towns in Judea & Samaria. Israeli military re-engagement with these areas -- rather than the Fence or the Wall -- reasserted Israel's initiative in the battle against Palestinian terrorism. Upgrading the defensive/security features of bus stops, restaurants, coffee shops, synagogues, kindergartens, schools and residential areas in the Kassam-plagued Sderot, Ashqelon and the West Negev Kibbutzim -- and tomorrow probably in Ashdod, Kfar Saba, Hadera and Ben Gurion Airport -- provides a short term false sense of security, but plays into the hands of terrorists. The focus on defense, fortifications and retreat has signaled Israel's abandonment of the victory option. Rather than destroying the infrastructure and capabilities of Palestinian terrorism, the focus on defense has reflected co-existence with terrorism. The addiction to defense, the belief that "Restrain Is Strength", and the subordination of the war on terrorism to international public opinion, have been by-products of the false assumptions that "we've tried everything" and that "There's no military solution to terrorism". Such false assumptions mirror battle fatigue, which is non-existent among other countries fighting terrorism: India, Turkey, Thailand, Australia, Germany, Russia, France, Italy, Egypt, Algeria, etc. Fourteen years of unprecedented terrorism -- since Oslo -- have made it clear that there is no political solution to Palestinian terrorism, that the Palestinian Authority is a non-compromising enemy and not a partner for peace, that "Disengagement/Separation" upgrades terrorist capabilities, that an effective military action must be comprehensive, decisive and disproportionate and that international public opinion is never saturated with Israeli concessions. Instead of relying on defense, deterrence, retaliation and on surgical, sporadic and limited offensive initiatives, Israel should adopt the tactics of pre-emption, prevention and comprehensive/sustained offense, aimed at uprooting terrorist infrastructure and capabilities (ideologically, educationally, politically, logistically and operationally). Rather than retreating toward the 1949 Green Lines, Israel should take charge of the breeding ground and the home-base of terrorism, which would enhance Israel's power of deterrence, human-intelligence and interception capabilities. It would reduce Palestinian capabilities to conduct hate-education, to incite, to recruit, to train, to manufacture and smuggle terrorist and military hardware, to plan, to maneuver and to perpetrate terrorist activities. Thus, it would chop Palestinian terrorism by 90%! Rather than defend against Palestinian terrorists, Israel should decimate the potential and actual capabilities of Palestinian terrorists. Will Israel's military operations in Gaza constitute another derivative of the suicidal Oslo State Of Mind, or will it be a milestone on the road to reclaim the pre-Oslo Israeli posture as the role-model of deterrence, defiance of odds, determination, gumption and counter-terrorism, which paved the road to the 1948 Declaration of Independence, the 1967 Six Day War, the 1976 Entebbe Jonathan Operation and the 1981 bombing of Saddam's nuclear reactor? 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 And visit his website: http://yoramettinger.newsnet.co.il. |
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PEERING THROUGH A GLASS HALF-FULL, DARKLY
Posted by UCI, May 31, 2007. |
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This was written by Kathleen Parker. It was published on www.Townhall.com. She is a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group. |
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What a relief to read in a new Pew Research Center study that Muslims in America are "largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims and Westerners around the world." Phew. Praise Allah. No more worries. On the other hand, the study's findings may depend on how you define "largely." Here's another way of putting the Pew results: While a majority of older U.S. Muslims have largely assimilated, more than a few younger Muslims think suicide bombings are justified. Having trouble remembering where you put those pompoms? Stick around. Despite the upbeat treatment of the Pew study -- and headlines that conveyed a positive message -- the devil in the details is less reassuring. In fact, the survey found that though a majority of the 1,050 surveyed (a fraction of the Pew's estimated 2.35 million Muslims in this country) are prospering, a significant minority are not assimilating and sympathize with radical Islam. There is good news among the survey results, to be sure, especially if you're Muslim. In classically American fashion, 71 percent think that one can get ahead by working hard and 78 percent report being happy. In delightful news, those who report being happiest are young Muslims ages 18-29, who also comprise 30 percent of the total U.S. Muslim population. In less happy news, these young Muslims are also more accepting of Islamist extremism. Add to that disconcerting note the following: Sixty percent of the young group consider themselves Muslim first, American second. Among all young Muslims, 26 percent think that suicide bombings are justified often, sometimes or rarely. Another 5 percent said they "don't know" or refused to answer. Don't know? To kill civilians or not to kill civilians is not a tricky question. If 26 percent are fine with suicide bombing and another 5 percent probably are, then we may reasonably conclude that 31 percent of young American Muslims -- or roughly 219,000 -- support murdering innocents in the name of Islam. Peachy. Given that 9/11 was a supersized suicide bombing, it would seem we have a problem. In another finding of Muslim American disconnect, fewer than half of all American Muslims believe that Arabs engineered the 9/11 attacks. Another third expressed no opinion or refused to answer. That means that the vast majority of Muslims in America think ... what? That the U.S. attacked itself? That Israel did it? While a majority of Muslims of all ages view al-Qaeda "very unfavorably" (58 percent), an alarming number seem to be ambivalent. A whopping 27 percent said they didn't know how they felt toward the terrorist organization or refused to answer the question. An immigrant population that does not recognize the enemy of its adopted country cannot be said to have assimilated. Nevertheless, the Pew study authors tell us that compared to Europe, we're in good shape. Yes, sure, "there is somewhat more acceptance of Islamic extremism in some segments of the U.S. Muslim public than others," concede the authors." ... Nonetheless, absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low, especially when compared with Muslims around the world." In other words, presumably, we should be grateful that only 200,000 or so local Muslims support terrorism. In Europe, where many young Muslims are unemployed and alienated, things are much worse. True, but seldom does America measure success according to a things-could-be-worse standard. Not so great is bad enough for reasoned alarm. All of the study's conclusions depend, meanwhile, on whether one trusts its population figures, which Pew warns should be interpreted with caution. Since this was a telephone survey using only landlines -- and given that 48 percent of Americans age 18-29 use cells phones exclusively -- the number of young Muslims could be much higher than estimated. The truth is, no one knows how many Muslims live in the U.S. because the Census Bureau doesn't ask about religious identity. Muslim organizations put the figure at closer to 7 million based on mosque attendance. If there are 7 million Muslims in the U.S., 30 percent of whom are young, 31 percent of whom do not forswear suicide bombings, then that could mean that as many as 651,000 young Muslim Americans sympathize with radical Islam and terrorism. All things considered, it may be too soon to celebrate Muslim assimilation. Let's do hold the fireworks. 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!" |
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THE LONDON REVIEW OF HEZBOLLAH
Posted by Aramy, May 31, 2007. |
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This article was written by Eugene Goodheart and it appeared in
Dissent
http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=733 Eugene Goodheart is Edythe Macy Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Brandeis University. He is the author of many books of literary and cultural criticism as well as a memoir, Confessions of a Secular Jew. |
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Critics, mostly though not exclusively European, who hammer away at Israeli misbehavior often show no concern about the dangers that beset Israel. Their one-sided animus verges on scandal. Criticism of Israeli behavior may be justified, but it loses credit when it is not balanced by an unequivocal repudiation of the rhetoric and actions of Islamic fundamentalists: Holocaust denial, fantasies of genocidal anti-Semitism, the elimination of the state of Israel, suicide bombings, and indiscriminate killing of civilians. The London Review of Books is an egregious instance of this one-sidedness. Almost every issue contains several articles devoted to attacks on Israel, and the target is not simply the governing party, but the whole spectrum of Israeli political life. Absent from the columns of the Review are the injustices and cruelties of political Islam. In an article by Charles Glass, Lebanon's Hezbollah is eulogized for its capacity to learn from mistakes, its decency in treating prisoners, "its refusal to murder collaborators," its intelligent use of "car bombs, ambushes, small rockets and suicide bombers." Glass speaks of Hezbollah's uncompromising political program, of which he apparently approves, without mentioning that at its core is the destruction of Israel. Any two-state solution requires a capacity and willingness to compromise, but compromise is anathema to Hezbollah. He claims that the movement had "jettisoned its early rhetoric about making Lebanon an Islamic republic, and [now] spoke of Christians, Muslims and Druze living in harmony." Missing from this article (in the August 17, 2006, issue) is any reference to its anti-Semitism. In a letter to LRB printed in the September 7, 2006, issue, I pointed out that Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, is not simply a resistance fighter, he is also an anti-Semite with genocidal fantasies. I cited the following statements attributed to him: "If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide." "They [the Jews] are a cancer which is liable to spread at any moment." I also noted that the name "Party of God," should worry anyone of enlightened, democratic persuasion, but does not seem to bother Glass. (Would he be equally indulgent of the religious fanatics in Israel who assert their divine right to Greater Israel?) Parties of God, wherever they are to be found, mean tyranny should they ever acquire power. In the article, Glass mentions the fact that he had been kidnapped by Hezbollah at a Syrian checkpoint. Wanting to prove that the movement was independent of Syrian control, he writes that when "Syria insisted that I be released to show that Syrian control of Lebanon could not be flouted [,] Hezbollah, unfortunately, ignored the request." What virtue! In my letter, I wondered whether he had not succumbed to Stockholm syndrome. His response, printed in the October 5, 2006, issue, focused on the anti-Semitic statements attributed to Nasrallah, which he dismissed as fabrications, "circulated widely on neo-conservative web sites." Whatever the agenda of the Web sites, the original source of the statements, as Glass's letter makes clear, is "an article by Badih Chayban in Beirut's English-language Daily Star in 23 October 2002." The newspaper sympathizes with Palestinian aspirations and is critical of American neoconservatism. Glass reports that the managing editor of the Star has "faith in neither the accuracy of the translation (from Arabic to English) nor of the agenda of the translator [Chayban]." The editor in chief of the paper refers to Chayban as "a reporter and briefly local desk sub," who did not interview Nasrallah. Glass does not explain why, given its misgivings about the reporter, the Star would choose to publish Chayban's article, nor does he say what Chayban's agenda was, leaving it to the reader to assume that the agenda was somehow linked to neoconservatism, therefore discrediting the attribution of the statements to Nasrallah. The source of one of the quotations was a Web site of the Israeli government and therefore not to be trusted. To clinch the argument, Glass cites a spokeswoman for Hezbollah who denies that such statements were ever made. I wrote back to the LRB, first noting that in invoking the nefarious neocons as the vehicles of fabrication, Glass reminded me of the apologists for the Soviet Union who denied the existence of anti-Semitism in their beloved country, because the reports of its existence came from the bourgeois press. I challenged the LRB to make a disinterested effort to determine whether these statements were fabrications. Its animus against Israel was clear and bad enough; a willingness to indulge anti-Semitism, a much more serious matter. If they are not fabrications, the journal has a moral obligation to say so and to repudiate the kind of article that Glass has written. While waiting for a reply, I decided to look into the literature on Hezbollah, and what I found left no doubt about its view of the Jews. Here is Nasrallah in one of his diatribes against Israel: "If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli."[1] Quoted in Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion, University of Michigan Press, 2001, p. 170. Original source, televised interview, Muhammad Fnayash. Wuhhat Nazar Future Television (FTV, July 2, 1997). Naim Qassem, the deputy secretary general of Hezbollah, author of Inside Hezbollah, which Charles Glass cites for its humane view of how collaborators with Israel should be treated, has this to say: "The history of the Jews has proven that, regardless of the Zionist proposal, they are a people who are evil in their ideas" (Quoted in Saad-Ghorayeb, p. 174; original source, Abbas al-Mussawi, Amiru' l-Zakira, Dhu al-Hujja 1406). Hezbollah's denial of the existence of the Holocaust takes many forms. "The Jews have never been able to prove the existence of the infamous gas chambers." Only "160,000 civilians died [and this was] as a result of US bombing of Germany." Jews collaborated with the Nazis in killing their brethren: "From what we know about the Jews, their tricks and their deception, we do not think it unlikely that they partook in the planning of the Holocaust." Saad-Ghorayeb, the source of these quotes, is a Briton of Muslim Lebanese extraction, who is sympathetic to Hezbollah. "As a Lebanese, I was appalled by the apparent ease with which this movement was accused of sundry terrorist activities by Western journalists and policy-makers, and on their insistence on referring to its guerrilla fighters, who were practicing their legitimate right to resist a foreign occupation, as terrorists." She writes favorably of Hezbollah' s political evolution in Lebanese society, so there is no reason to doubt the scholarly accuracy of her representation of the movement's unreconstructed view of Israel and the Jews. (As I write this, I am pleased to see a letter to the LRB from the distinguished lawyer and literary scholar Anthony Julius, citing Saad-Ghorayeb as evidence for Hezbollah's anti-Judaism. Julius invited Glass to confirm the implication of his response to my letter that I am wrong in attributing anti-Semitism to Hezbollah and to comment on the "material assembled by Saad-Ghorayeb." So far there has been no reply from Glass, nor any statement from the editors on the matter.) Unlike Bernard Lewis, Saad-Ghorayeb characterizes Hezbollah's view of the Jews as anti-Judaism rather than anti-Semitism. She contends that unlike Christian anti-Semitism, the radical Islamic animus against Jews, which has its source in the Koran, is not racialist. And yet she speaks of the "scriptural basis" of Hezbollah's depiction of the Jews as a people "whose blood [a racialist trope] is full of enmity towards mankind." In any event, it is not clear to me that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism makes any practical difference. What is interesting is that Saad-Ghorayeb sees Hezbollah' s animus against Jewry as not deriving from its anti-Zionism (Lewis's view), but from a deeper source: its inveterate hostility to Judaism. The enemies of the movement are Jews who adhere to Judaism and to Zionism, which, Hezbollah believes, has its source in Judaism, despite the existence of secular Zionists. Because they believe that Jews who have no commitment either to Judaism or Zionism are a negligible constituency, they have no inhibitions about demonizing Jewry as a whole. Saad-Ghorayeb cites passage after passage demonstrating Hezbollah's hatred of Judaism and its desire for its disappearance. The movement arose as a reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, but its hostility is not confined to Israel and its supporters. Can we then take seriously Glass's benign view that the movement, in becoming "a sophisticated and successful political party . . . [has] jettisoned its early rhetoric about making Lebanon an Islamic Republic," and now speaks "of Christians, Muslims and Druze living in harmony"? Apparently the Jews, having no place in this harmony, will simply disappear. Alas, Charles Glass appears to be either ignorant about his subject or writing in bad faith. He is an example of moral obtuseness or callousness (it is hard to find the right word for it) in what has become an influential view among a group of American and European intellectuals. The moral logic of this view goes something like this. Israel is militarily powerful, supported by the United States, the most powerful nation in the world. Its adversaries in the Islamic world are weak, and when one measures the relative devastations caused by confrontations between the powerful and the weak, the burden of guilt falls on the most powerful. Whatever violence or cruelties issue from the weak are then morally justified by weakness. Here is Glass again: "Like Israel's previous enemies, Hezbollah relies on the weapons of the weak: car bombs, ambushes, occasional flurries or small rockets and suicide bombers. The difference is that it uses them intelligently, in conjunction with an uncompromising programme." Glass says nothing about the devastation caused by weapons of the weak. He ignores the fact that the strength of "the weak" lies in elusiveness, in the capacity to hide behind the civilian population, and in the code of martyrdom. In placing a lower valuation on human life than does the adversary, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups have a distinct strategic advantage. How do you deter a person willing to die for his cause from committing an act of violence? What, one might ask, is accomplished by the glib and unthinking support of the use of "the weapons of the weak"? Sympathy for terrorist groups only encourages war-perpetuating intransigence on both sides. Has Israel been guilty of the use of disproportionate use of military power? I believe it has and should be held to account. Israeli power has been a response to the provocations of "the weapons of the weak," and the response has too often been destructive and self-destructive in its excesses. In its recent incursion in Lebanon, it has achieved a result similar to our misadventure in Iraq: a large number of civilian casualties, widespread devastation of the land, burgeoning resentment from a large portion of the Lebanese population that had been angered by Hezbollah's provocations. Israel failed to achieve its aims at great cost to Lebanon and to itself. But then the question arises, "What should be the appropriate response to suicide bombings and Katyusha rockets?" There is no easy answer to this. But it is a mark of callous indifference to the fate of a country, indeed of one's own country, when another contributor to the London Review of Books, Yitzhak Laor, chastises two of Israel's most prominent critics of their own government, Amos Oz and David Grossman, for asserting the right of Israel to respond to violence against it. Grossman, for example, writes, "There is no justification for the large-scale violence that Hezbollah unleashed this week, from Lebanese territory, on dozens of peaceful Israeli villages, towns and cities. No country in the world could remain silent and abandon its citizens when its neighbor strikes without provocation." To which Laor replies irrelevantly, "We can bomb, but if they respond they are responsible for both their suffering and ours" (LRB, August 17, 2006, p. 11). What would Laor advise as a response to such an attack? He does not say. Apparently, all that is required is for Israel to flagellate itself for what it has inflicted on others. Let us say that Israel did not respond to provocations. Would that change Hezbollah's behavior toward Israel? Not if, as Glass tells us, its program is uncompromising. Nothing that Israel can offer the Palestinians short of its self-eradication will satisfy Hezbollah. Indeed, it has even expressed a preference for a hard-line, Likud-led government to that of the Labor Party -- for that would justify its intransigence. The movement has a long view. "Even if hundreds of years pass by, Israel's existence will continue to be an illegal existence" (Saad-Ghorayeb, p. 135). It is hard to fathom what sympathy for Hezbollah by critics of Israel like Glass and Laor can accomplish in the way of achieving a peaceful solution to the conflict. On the contrary, they would seem only to foster a hardening of attitudes on all sides. In all the talk about the asymmetry between powerful Israel and its weak adversaries, what is overlooked is the asymmetry that strongly favors its adversaries. Israel has only one war to lose for its existence to come to an end. Its adversaries, miserable as their condition is, can survive war after war. In its one-sided obsession with Israeli transgressions, the London Review of Books, offering no constructive advice for ending the conflict, contributes to its perpetuation by supporting one side of the intransigence. Its indulgence of a virulently anti-Semitic movement is simply shameful. Footnotes 1.) Quoted in Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion, University of Michigan Press, 2001, p. 170. Original source, televised interview, Muhammad Fnayash. Wuhhat Nazar Future Television (FTV, July 2, 1997). Contact Aramy by email at aramy964gmail.com |
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'STATE SAYS MY SON NOT KASSAM VICTIM'
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 31, 2007. |
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This was written by Jerusalem Post Staff and it is archived at
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The 11th victim of Kassam rocket fire died of wounds he received last week, Israel Radio revealed Thursday morning. Thirteen-year-old Chai Shalom suffered from cerebral palsy, and was deaf, mute, and confined in a wheel-chair. He was hospitalized after a rocket landed next to a bus transporting him and three other disabled children. According to the report, all four children were wounded by the force of the blast. The driver of the bus fainted and Shalom's caretaker alerted his father. The boy died last week in Soroka Hospital after his condition worsened. His father asked that Shalom be recognized as a terror victim and was denied because his particular incident had not been reported. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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A CALL FOR ACTION AGAINST OCCUPATION FROM THE ISRAEL PROFESSORS FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 31, 2007. |
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We, Israeli professors for justice and peace, do hereby appeal to researchers, academics, scholars, and teachers in Israel and throughout the world to take a firm and clear stand against continuing occupation and denial of rights. We are of course referring to the continuing occupation of territories by Britain in which Britain clearly has no right to be. We demand that all British universities be boycotted and all academics at those universities be boycotted until these same people and institutions come out clearly and openly in favor of immediate unconditional removal of all British occupation from these territories. We demand a moratorium on all funding of academic research in Britain by sources for funding everywhere and divestment from Britain in all its forms. Unlike Israel's "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the latter of which is not occupied any longer in any way, which has lasted a mere 40 years, but Britain's occupations of territories has lasted centuries. Take for example the clearly illegal British occupation of Gibraltar. There Britain maintains an illegal settlement in open defiance of all international accepted standards of legitimacy and concepts of national rights. Moreover, Britain has placed there an illegal security fence that prevents non-British nationals from entering Gibraltar. This apartheid fence is a human rights atrocity and must be torn down at once. And until it is, the entire world should divest from Britain and boycott British universities. Then there are those clearly illegal British settlements constructed on occupied Argentinian territory in the Falkland Islands. What clearer example is there of the continuing colonial aggression of white European imperialism against the Third World?! But Britain's illegal settlements have also been constructed elsewhere. Britain continues to maintain settlements on the Channel Islands that obviously belong to France. While it is true that Britain earlier ended its occupation of Hong Kong and India, that is no excuse for its settlements elsewhere. After all, Israel ended its occupation of Sinai but that has not stopped the British University and College Union, representing more than 120,000 college-level educators, from voting May 30 to pass a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli academics and universities as well as a moratorium on European Union funding of Israeli research. And what about Britain's occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. True, Afghanistan and Iraq were terrorist enclaves, but since when does THAT serve as legitimization of dispatch of occupation forces? British professors clearly do not think that Israel has any right to use force against terrorists attacking its population, so why should British forces do so! Of course the very worst cases of illegal British occupation of the territories of The Other are in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. These are occupations imposed upon those oppressed population by force of arms. And in Ireland, the occupation produced genocidal levels of mortality. These occupations have lasted for centuries! The moral indifference by British academics to these continued barbarous occupations and to the denial of self-determination for Scots, Welsh, and the Northern Irish is clearly as unforgivable as the failure of some academics in apartheid South Africa to speak out against abuses there. Moreover, Britain itself is a racist apartheid society. Not only the Welsh, but Moslems, blacks, and Asians suffer from discrimination and disadvantage inside Britain. Their wages are lower than those of white Englishmen and they face discrimination in housing! British universities have failed to redress these inequalities. If divestment from South Africa was justified, how much more so must it be in THIS case. In fact, 27 British professors have ENDORSED our calls for imposing an international boycott of their own universities! These courageous heroic souls must be supported! We have sat in silence for much too long. The time has come. Please join us in calling for an open-ended boycott of British academics and universities until all these cases of occupation are ended! Israeli Professors for Justice and Peace
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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il |
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BLOOD MONEY
Posted by David Frankfurter, May 31, 2007. |
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Dear Friends, Finally, a way has been found to relieve Palestinian financial isolation and suffering. New arrangements, authorized by the US, have been found to pay Palestinian Authority salaries. Money is to be deposited with the PLO and channeled via "moderate" Palestinian leaders, represented by Fatah party leader President Mahmoud Abbas and the independent Finance Minister, Salam Fayyad. The mechanism is designed to avoid funding terrorism or dreaded "extremists" (represented by the Hamas government) who reject a two-State solution. Reuters reports that the US initiative is already bearing fruit, with over $80 million in international aid from Arab countries and Europe starting to flow. In fact, "Fayyad was expected to receive enough money through the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) account to pay government workers, including members of the security forces, at least half of their normal monthly wages later this week." So let's do a double check. I invite you to read the following extracts from the Palestinian National Charter -- the official PLO doctrine. Decide for yourself if this seems to be a "moderate" organisation which accepts a two state solution and rejects violence and terrorism. Article 2: Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit. 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/ |
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RICE, ISRAEL, SYRIA, FANTASY AND REALITY
Posted by Robert Spencer, May 31, 2007. |
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"Israeli officials are unsure" whether Assad could actually "deliver a deal." And Rice says that a Palestinian state must come first. Both the Israelis and the Secretary of State are, quite simply, not dealing with reality. The public discourse about Islamic jihad and the challenge we're facing has been dominated by fantasy since 9/11 and before that, and if anything, the fog is thicker now than ever. In reality, a Palestinian state won't bring peace, because it will not only not herald an end to Palestinian demands, but will only embolden the jihadists to continue to press for the destruction of Israel altogether -- and provide them a platform for doing so. Evidently no one takes the Hamas Charter seriously except Hamas. But does Syria present a viable alternative for peace? As we have noted here many times, although Syria is a relatively secular state, and Assad is not an orthodox Muslim, it is a foremost base for jihad activities and the advancement of Islamic supremacism. And now The Truth About Syria, an excellent new book by Barry Rubin of MERIA and the GLORIA Center, exposes the full scope of Syria's activities on behalf of the jihad. Rubin explains how Assad and his father have kept themselves in power by bringing together jihadism and Arab nationalism in Damascus -- and the hollowness of the arguments that contend that those two forces are and ever shall be irreconcilably opposed. Taking a long historical view, Rubin notes that the "window of opportunity" many have seen over the years for an accord between Israel and Syria -- and which Israeli officials seem to be seeing again today -- is actually for Damascus nothing more than a "window of weakness," Israeli weakness, which the Syrians will exploit for everything they can get. He lists fifteen cogent reasons why Syria will never make peace with Israel, and enters into peace talks never intending to complete them. And of course there is much more involved than just Israel when it comes to Syria. The Assad regime is also deeply involved in jihad activities in Iraq, and is working closely with Iran and jihad terror groups such as Hizballah. As such, with or without Nancy Pelosi and her naive and counterproductive overtures, Syria cannot be ignored. Rubin explores all of this and more, not from the standpoint of fashionable politically correct fantasies, but from a realistic evaluation of Syria and the Assad regime on its own terms. If Rice and the Israelis read this book -- and the Hamas Charter -- they might be able to embark on the road to policies that were actually viable to protect both Israel and the U.S. from the global jihadists, rather than embroiling us yet again in a round of futile and deceptive peace talks that will, ultimately, only advance the jihadist cause. "Rice Cautions Israel on Syria: 'No Substitute' for Peace With Palestinians, Secretary Says" by Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post (thanks to Sr. Soph): BERLIN, May 29 -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday cautioned against a growing sentiment in Israel to pursue peace with Syria instead of with warring Palestinian factions, saying there is "no substitute" for creating a Palestinian state. This was posted May 30, 2007 on the Jihad Watch website and is
archived at |
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SDEROT IS US; "QASSAMS SHMASSAM'S"
Posted by Janet Lehr, May 31, 2007. |
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1>SDEROT IS US
Every night, Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal tours his city, checking the number of houses with lights on. Last week the number of lights dropped each evening. On the eve of Shavuot it reached a nadir. Whole apartment blocks stood empty. On the street where Moyal himself lives only a few residents remained. At its height, Sderot had a population of 24,000, the exhausted mayor says. In recent years, when the Qassam attacks mounted, the number fell to about 20,000. But now, with the refugees whom Hamas chased out being scattered throughout the country, no more than 10,000 people remain in the city. And suddenly the feeling is that perhaps it has really happened: Perhaps Sderot has been broken. But Sderot has still not been broken. If the rocket attacks cease, most people will return. Without security, without hope, without happiness - a depressing return to no-choice. So the basic fact remains: Sderot 2007 is a city that seems cursed. A frontier city with no home front. A frontier city with no aura of heroism. A frontier city that the government should protect, but isn't protecting. A frontier city that the nation should be standing behind, but is not. A frontier city abandoned by the center of the country. It should not have been like this. Sderot is not Gush Katif. There is no debate. On the contrary: Sderot is a "Green Line" city. Sderot is a post-withdrawal city. Sderot is the righteous Israeli city after the occupation. Sderot is the future. Indeed, it is the litmus test that will teach us in real time what we can expect in the future when we withdraw completely. This being the case, Sderot should have been the apple of the eye of all those preaching withdrawal in the past, and of everyone who still believes in withdrawal. Sderot should have been the city of peace writers and peace singers and peace industrialists. A "peace now" city. A city of Israeli solidarity. A city of mutual responsibility. A city where strong Israelis stand together with Israelis who are less strong in the face of Islamic zealotry. All this is not happening. Bank Hapoalim is funding the new emergency center there. But the large sum needed to renovate the city's shelters was raised by American evangelical Christians. The major community work in the city is being done by Hanan Porat. Yitzhak Mordechai is working in Sderot, and Arcadi Gaydamak is amusing himself there in the absence of the center of the country. Enlightened, satiated Israel is not standing with all its strength behind Sderot. The attack on Sderot is a strategic attack on peace. It is an attack on the two-state solution. If the attack succeeds, there will be no chance of any future withdrawal. If the attack succeeds, the occupation will be perpetuated. Therefore, before the great political decision is made on how to act in Gaza, a moral decision has to be made about Sderot. Sderot must become the national project of the current period. Its residents cannot be expected to confront the Qassams alone. In the face of buses removing people from the city, buses of supporters must set out for it. In the face of the economic collapse of Sderot should come an unprecedented economic embrace of it by government and nongovernment bodies alike. At the same time, it should be made clear that there is one law for Sderot and Tzahala: A Qassam on Sderot is like a Qassam on Kikar Hamedina. The insensitivity has got to stop. Sderot has to be defined as the Israeli front line. The struggle for the city should be viewed as both a struggle for Israeli sovereignty and as a symbol of the responsibility of Israelis for each other. Sderot is us, all of us. We rise and fall with Sderot. 2>No solutions to Qassams?
Only tough military action can bring Palestinians to realization their lives will improve only if they rid themselves of leaders who believe terror will destroy us One of the principal objectives of creating a Jewish state was to bring an end to 2000 years of Jewish powerlessness. Indeed, Israel today is recognized as a Middle East superpower. Yet our government stands impotent as missiles rain down on its territory and a border town is in the process of being evacuated, its inhabitants being transformed into refugees in their own land. The die was cast when our government initially failed to take resolute deterrent action when the first Qassams were launched from the Gaza Strip. The world, and much of Israel too, became conditioned to the routine of missiles crashing down on Israeli citizens. In fact, until recently, our leaders had a habit of downplaying the Qassams as a "low-grade" threat, exemplified by the cynical Shimon Peres retort "Qassams Shmassam's" in response to appeals for action from Sderot residents. Clearly the government would never have so casually dismissed complaints and displayed such restraint had the missiles had been targeted towards Ramat Aviv. Yet there is every probability that in the near future the range of the missiles will be extended, and Ashkelon and other more centrally located cities will become targets. And who knows, Rabin Square might one day also be within range. It is immoral and even obscene for our government to consciously delay tough responses against such aggression. What will it take to compel it to go over to the offensive - a missile strike on a kindergarten, on a hospital or a key infrastructure? Only a miracle has averted a calamity to date. It is even more outrageous when we hear the mantra "There is no answer to Qassam attacks". The long-suffering citizens in Sderot are effectively being told by their government to stoically adjust their lifestyles to a regime of daily "Russian roulette" missile attacks or get out. In the absence of a more potent pre emptive action, our emboldened enemies are gearing themselves to intensify their onslaughts as soon as they are satisfied that their offensive and defensive infrastructure has reached its peak. Last summer's Hezbollah imbroglio also demonstrated that the longer we wait, the worse the ultimate confrontation is likely to be, especially if future battles take place simultaneously on three fronts: Gaza, West Bank, South Lebanon (and possibly also Syria). Painful questions It is not surprising then, that for the first time, some Israelis have begun asking themselves painful questions about the long - term future of the country. Before considering the various options that a responsible government should have implemented long ago, we should note that four axioms of classic Israeli strategy are currently being breached. 1. The IDF responsibility to protect its civilians, even at the price of painful casualties. What should now be done? Clearly a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza may ultimately be deemed necessary as a last option. But in the interim, there are calibrated responses that should be implemented immediately. We must proclaim to the world that as of now we intend to respond as would any other nation whose citizens are under missile attack. We will endeavor to continue minimizing innocent civilian loss of life but we have resolved that if terrorists oblige us to choose between the lives of our citizens and those of Palestinians we will defend our own, irrespective of the consequences. Netanyahu is correct in urging that in the wake of each individual missile attack, we should increasingly cut off electricity, fuel and water to the Palestinians and close border crossings. Will this harm innocent civilians? Yes. But it is surely high time for us to cease supplying services to neighbors whose leaders authorize missile attacks against us. We may also be obliged to temporarily occupy slabs of Gaza territory to foil rocket attacks on border areas, including locations formerly inhabited by settlers before the disastrous unilateral disengagement. In all likelihood we would also need to regain control of the Philadelphi corridor in order to contain the flow of lethal Iranian armaments pouring across the border. Targeted assassinations should be intensified against those orchestrating the attacks including political leaders. We must even reconsider renewing artillery bombardment of locations from which missile attacks are initiated. As in all likelihood this will again incur civilian casualties and impact on the Palestinian infrastructure, we will undoubtedly be accused of responding "disproportionately". However proportionality is a philosophical concept and cannot be a prime consideration when endeavoring to create deterrence to offset unprovoked military attacks on civilians which are effectively acts of war. As to morality, even setting aside comparisons to the behavior of other countries, there comes a point in a confrontation where one says "Enough is enough". That point has now been passed. In war a government must be motivated by one objective: to protect its civilians and minimize its military casualties. That must override public relations images. It would be consistent with international law, common sense, and morality. The message to the Palestinians is neither brutal nor heartless. It is very simple and constructive: Stop directing missiles on our civilians or your civilians may also be harmed. In fact, a tough Israeli response could actually encourage Palestinians to bring pressure to bear on their leaders and may in the long run even save Palestinian lives. We should avoid entering into any new fake truces which merely enable our enemies to regroup and prepare themselves for more intensive attacks at a time of their choosing. That applies especially when the Palestinian leaders openly boast that their non-negotiable objective remains to kill "the descendants of apes and pigs", and they constantly renew their irrevocable determination never to deviate from their commitment to destroy the Jewish state. We must also dispel the illusion that negotiations with Jihadists can bear fruit. There has never been a single example of Islamic fundamentalists reaching an accord on the basis of negotiations or concessions. Likewise retreats and withdrawals under fire have consistently emboldened Jihadists into intensifying violence and have merely served as a prescription for greater future conflagrations. Only tough military action can deter the terrorists and hopefully bring Palestinians to the realization that their bitter lives will only improve if they rid themselves of leaders who remain obsessed with the belief that violence and terror will destroy us. The writer chairs the Diaspora-Israel relations committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and is a veteran international Jewish leader and can be reached on ileibler@netvison.net.il Janet Lehr is editor/publisher of a daily e-mail called "Israel Lives." She can be contacted at israellives@gmail.com |
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WANT TO VOLUNTEER? SDEROT'S RESIDENTS NEED YOU
Posted by Avodah, May 31, 2007. |
| This was published in Ynet News. |
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During the past weeks, the relentless rocket fire on Sderot has made the lives of its residents insufferable. To ease their distress -- and show your support -- we invite you to volunteer in the town "The reports in the media do not portray an accurate picture of the reality of life in Sderot," said Dror Marsha, the town's volunteer coordinator. "We deal with constant stress and anxiety, knowing that a rocket might fall on us at any given moment. Daily routine is at a standstill. Yet, the hardest thing we face is the feeling we were abandoned. We know people around the world care about us and follow the events, but the thing we need most is a feeling of solidarity, the human touch." Since the situation in Sderot deteriorated, Marsha hasn't stopped running around town, trying to alleviate fears, support and help the elderly who are particularly vulnerable, hug the traumatized children and move the disabled to shelters away from the town. Yet, he is the first to admit that as time goes by, he too needs help. "Our job turned into 100 percent emergency care," he said. "All of us, social workers, education and welfare professionals, guides in the youth centers, and psychologists deal with nothing but emergencies. The continued attacks expose us to problems we were not aware of. We want to help but don't have the time." To assist them, and to express solidarity and support the residents, Ynet and "Ruach Tova" organization invite you to volunteer. No need for professional experience or a long-term commitment. It's enough to visit a family, assist an elderly citizen with grocery shopping, or play with the children, to prove to the residents they are not alone. Following is a list of available volunteer projects in Sderot. Surely, you'll find one that fits you: Home visits: Help those who fear leaving their house with grocery shopping, talk and listen to the people, show your support. Elderly citizens: Help with chores, food and medicine shopping, support lonely people and alert the authorities in cases of emergency. People with special needs and the disabled: There are about 1,500 people with special needs in Sderot. They need help with chores and would appreciate a visit. Manning Sderot's 24 hours emergency center: Pinpointing needs, directing requests for assistance to the municipality and the welfare department. Homes damaged by the rockets: Owners of homes that were hit by rockets have to clear the rubble themselves. Being there with them will help them deal with the situation and will be a great practical help. Children: The children of Sderot suffer from anxiety and stress emphasized, in many instances, by their parents' distress. Distract them, even for an hour, by playing with them or reading a story to them. Preparing shelters: There are 22 shelters in Sderot but only two are operational. The rest must be fixed and cleaned so they could be used. Want to help? Email: info@ruachtova.org and "Ruach Tova " staff will contact you. For further information call: 1-700-505-202 Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com |
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WHAT TO DO WITH ISRAEL'S ARABS?; A "SURGE" OF HOPE
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 31, 2007. |
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As I've noted several times, Hillel Halkin starts most of his NY Sun Op.-Eds. on a agreeable level, but almost invariably turns it into a poor rationalization for ceding territory to the Arabs. On 5/15, he points out that much of the land annexed to Jerusalem has large numbers of Arabs and no particular historical value. Give those up, he suggests. He assuages concerns of religious and nationalist Jews by adding that such areas do not contain the historical areas in the Old City. Then he comes up with a new argument for giving away the most historically and religiously significant area in the Old City, the Temple Mount. He admits it is 'a sacred Jewish site.' He should say it is the 'most sacred Jewish site.' It also is holy to Christianity, for which he expresses no consideration. He then contends that it is holiest to Muslims. 'If Israel is ever to arrive at an understanding with the Muslim world, this will have to be one that places the Temple Mount ' as in any case is de facto even today ' in Muslim hands.' He regrets the decision of several dozen Orthodox rabbis to permit Jews to ascend the Temple Mount. To partly hang his case on the peg of de facto Muslim control is the old ploy of citing one improper appeasement as precedent and justification for another. Two wrongs do not make a right. To argue that Jerusalem means more to Islam than to Judaism is to distort the history of Jerusalem, Judaism, and Islam that Mr. Halkin writes about elsewhere with familiarity. The city's history shows it central to Judaism, whose Bible mentions it hundreds of times, and peripheral to Islam, whose Koran does not mention it at all. If it weren't for the tendency of sentimental but strategically foolish people to try to equate differing religions in the hope of making them seem harmonious, we would not have been subject to years of false statements about the city being equally holy to the three faiths. Halkin goes further, in claiming more interest on the part of Islam. Historically, the Muslims offered and sometimes gave Jerusalem it to people of other faiths. In periods not inflamed by active jihad, they have acknowledged the city and the whole country as properly that of the Jews. When the Muslims don't have Jerusalem, or are in a particularly active rivalry with the other faiths, then they want it. Hence, Arafat made a fuss over it. Was his fuss sincere or did he claim religious entitlement just as a tactic for cutting the sacred ground out from under the Jewish state. Without Jerusalem, there isn't as much justification for a Jewish state. Surely Halkin knows that! He also must know that the prospect of Judaism 'coming to an understanding with Islam,' whose central thesis is that once Islam conquered an area, it must retain it, etc., is practically nil. Rather, Islam forces us to fight back for survival. Since Israel manages the Temple Mount considerately for Muslims, Muslims don't need to control it. They exert their de facto control to bar Jews. They wouldn't respect Jews who submit to Islamic dominance, which is to say, injustice. HIZBULLAH BOASTS The head of Hizbullah boasted that his organization now has tens of thousands of rockets, compared with the 12,000 before the last war. He also mocked Israel's claims that the war pushed them northward and the armistice has kept them there. He asserted that Hizbullah has its men in their villages on the border. That would deny the supposed wartime gains claimed by PM Olmert (IMRA, 5/14) and Foreign Min. Livni. END OF HATE-FESTS AT UNIVERSITIES? Al Awda is an Islamist organization whose events are co-sponsored by various groups that support Hamas and its terrorism, etc. Al Awda and the like have been using public universities' free or low-cost facilities and availability of student audiences to stage hate campaigns against the US and Israel as if an academic event. Most college administrations have gone along with it. Finally, Rutgers barred one such event and now UC Riverside set reasonable standards. Although university facilities are public ones, previous Al Awda 'conventions' restricted entry to approved persons, had Islamist 'security guards' follow and harass reporters and whoever took notes or asked questions, and prohibited cameras and recorders that might show outsiders Islamist hatred. This time, UC Riverside did not allow religious or ideological grounds for refusing entry, provided campus guards, and allowed cameras and recorders. Unable to control the event totally, and faced with public scrutiny, Al Awda turned to private rental. The latest convention was to train and set strategy for illegally boycotting US and Jewish Israeli businesses and to help Hamas destroy Israel. Al Awda's motto, 'from the river to the sea,' reflects its goal of Muslim control over Israel. Al Awda attributed the change in venue to the university's setting new fees amounting to thousands of dollars (if so, the report above should have mentioned it), a requirement that Zionists be allowed to attend (what is this world coming to?), and permission for people to film the event which Al Awda calls 'intimidation' (IMRA, 5/15 from Stop the ISM Team). They didn't say why it intimidates them. Could it be that public scrutiny would inhibit their usual exhortations to murder? THE SURGE IS SURGING Al-Qaeda overplayed its hand. They no longer can bribe tribal leaders. All over Iraq, now, tribal leaders are turning on al-Qaeda and working with US forces to defeat it. This cooperation is in its early stages (Eli Lake, NY Sun, 5/14, p.1). 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 richardshulman5verizon.net |
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PA GLOATS OVER ISRAELIS' FEAR OF MISSILES
Posted by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, May 31, 2007. |
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Portraying Israeli civilians as weak and cowardly is part of a pattern by Hamas and Fatah Palestinian Authority figures. As Qassam rocket strikes continue in the Israeli city of Sderot, Hamas gloats over the fear among the city's residents. The front page of the Hamas-controlled official paper, Al-Risalah, flaunts a photo of Israeli civilians in Sderot hiding under a car during a rocket strike. A large caption over the photo reads "Fleeing from Qassam." The related article includes another photo of a crying Israeli woman in shock after a rocket attack, with the caption, "A settler cries in Sderot moments after a rocket strike by the resistance." Note that all Israelis, even within the 1967 borders, are presented as "settlers" -- a term Palestinians use to denote illegitimacy of Israel's existence. The following is an excerpt from the article: Headline: "The resistance threatened for more: Al-Qassam rockets devastate settlements and force its residents to leave" The pride and the gloating expressed by Hamas, seeing Israeli civilians as weak and afraid, continue the pattern of similar sentiments expressed by previous Palestinian leaders. Ahmad Yassin, founder and former head of Hamas, said in 2004: "Sharon said yesterday that 'Nezarim [Israeli town in Gaza Strip] is [like] Tel Aviv.' Today he says: 'The day is near when we will leave Gaza.' That's it, it's lost, Tel Aviv is gone. They are defeated, they have no words left... When this process will end, they will become a state with no ability, helpless. They established a state to protect the Jews from death and murder. If death and murder chase them in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Netanya and everywhere among them, then they will say: 'What am I doing here? I founded a state to protect me from death, and if death chases me, I want to flee and go back to Europe and America." [broadcast on Al-Aqsa TV, March 2007] About 2,500 out of Sderot's 20,000 residents have left the city -- there was no official evacuation -- due to persistent rocket attacks. Palestinians have fired 1,600 rockets since Israel left the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Itamar Marcus is director of PMW -- Palestinian Media Watch --
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FREE MUSLIMS, ISRAEL, SUICIDE BOMBINGS AND HOW TO END THE SCOURGE
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 31, 2007. |
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TO: webmaster@freemuslims.com Dear Mr. Kamal, Thank you for your very elicidating analysis of suicide bombings in the context of Muslim theology. I most sincerely hope that many Muslims world-wide read it and appreciate the insightfulness of your critique. I do indeed think that it is an excellent idea to educate that 20% of American Muslims who are unclear as to the deeply evil and nihilistic nature of suicide bombings. The questions that I must raise regarding your article, however, fall in to two categories: 1.) Just who will do this educating, how, where and when? As I recall, the majority of mosques in the USA are funded and run by Wahhabi forces based in Saudi Arabia. These mosques and their associated madaras seem to have no intention of supporting the kind of education that you are recommending. Their leaders, and the leaders of other Muslim high-profile and very active organizations such as CAIR and WAMY and MSU are all very supportive of el-qaeda and Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran. They are not likely to take upon themselves the mantle of the enlightened education that you recommend. Who then, are the '....Muslim leaders (who) must use theological arguments to discredit and condemn those who selectively justify suicide bombings...'? And how many of these leaders are indeed willing to agree that '.....suicide bombings are wrong in all instances and (that).....they must include the 'I' word (Israel).'? Sentiment against Israel is so strong, so vituprative, so extreme, in so much of Muslim society world-wide that I cannot help but wonder not only who will be willing to teach that suicide bombings in Israel are wrong...but also,who of that 20% in need of education will listen. A good case in point is the anti-Israel hate-fest-week of hate-speech and hate-teach and hate-preach at the U. C. Irvine campus. Young, Muslim, seemingly Americanized and westernized and moderate students, intelligent enough to get in to college, enthusiastically buy in to the mindless and irrational (bordering on psychotic in my opinion) hatred that eternalizes the Arab-Israel conflict and nihilistically denies any possibility for peace, except the destruction of Israel and the genocide of its Jews. So, where will these moderate Muslim teachers teach? Where will they preach? Who will pay them to do this teaching? How will they attract students to their classes? And how will they rebut, combat, and defeat the teachings of the more high-profile and seemingly main-stream (and apparently very well funded) more extremist Muslim associations and organizations which demand more suicide bombings and more terrorist jihad until the ''West is won'' and the long-awaited dream of Allah's supremacy over the entire world is finally realized? Your idea sounds wonderful in theory, and I applaud you for publishig it. But how can it be put in to practise in the real American Muslim world where, while 80% may be nice loyal honest sincere law-abiding hard-working productive moderate Americans, the ruling and influencial and high-profile Muslim institutions are dominated by extremist terrorist jihadist Islamo-fascist forces? 2.) And speaking of putting your idea in to practise: I have written before about the impact that serious social action against Muslim extremism and its state supporters is likely to make. Such actions as described below were taken in the 1970s by Jewish leaders on behalf of imprisoned Soviet Jewry, and had a very strong effect upon the Soviet Union, such that millions of Jews were allowed to leave. These types of actions do work. Have you given any thought to such very pragmatic, and quite do-able, activities such as: a.) dozens, scores, hundreds or maybe even thousands of Muslims demonstrating in front of the embassys of Libya, Syria, Arabia, Iran, or in front of the sub-consular office of the Palestinian Authority....demanding the end to terrorism...all terrorism, world wide....and thus, too, an end to jihad as it is currently practised by Muslim terrorists. All of these ('a' through 'h') are consistent with the religious ideology that you adumbrate in your essay below. They would most certainly be a very effective pragmatic application of your idea to the real world of that misguided 20% of young American Muslims today, who desperately need guidance and education in to the humanitarian values of the west which are wholeheartedly embraced and shared by the radiant face of Islam. Your thoughts? David Meir-Levi |
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Subject: American Muslims, Israel, and Suicide Bombings
A recent survey by the Pew Research Center about American Muslims was received favorably by many Muslims and apprehensively by many non-Muslims. The surveys revealed that more than 80% of American Muslims blend comfortably into American society and that they have a broad willingness to adopt American customs, work ethics and are generally optimistic about America. It also revealed an American Muslim population that is religious, diverse, socially conservative and politically liberal. Nearly eight in ten U.S. Muslims say they are either happy or 'very happy.' They believe Muslims coming to the United States should try to adopt American customs rather than separating from the larger society. The study also revealed that two percent of young Muslims under 30 believe that suicide bombings to defend their religion can often be justified while 13 percent of those under 30 believe that suicide attacks to defend their religion can sometimes be justified. Moreover, the study revealed that five percent expressed 'even somewhat favorable' opinions of al-Qaida. Not surprisingly, some Muslims and many non-Muslims were concerned by this revelation. The New York Post went as far as editorializing 'TIME BOMBS IN OUR MIDST.' So why do many American Muslims appear less concerned with the minority and instead are focusing on the 87% of Muslims who condemn suicide bombings? One reason is that many Muslim groups feel vindicated or affirmed since they have always asserted that the majority of American Muslims assimilate easily, are law abiding, and peace loving. Moreover, Muslim groups believe that those who recognize exceptions to Islam's prohibition against suicide do not pose an immanent threat because those young people were responding to a theoretical question about the emotional issue of protecting their religion. Muslim groups argue that those who justify suicide bombings are incorrectly interpreting Islam and that they can be reeducated about the issue of suicide bombings. Assuming Muslim groups are correct in their analysis of the poll, and they maybe, one must ask why is it that there are any Muslims who would justify suicide bombings in the name of Islam when Islam has always had a clear prohibition against suicide? The answer is that the minority of Muslims who justify suicide bombings evolved from a recent trend in which some Islamic political movements and leaders began sending mixed messages about the use of suicide military operations. Over the last 20 years, some Muslim leaders have sanctioned suicide military operations when they believed that a particular cause is just but rejected suicide as un-Islamic in other instances. To get around the Koran's prohibition against suicide some Islamic leaders repackaged suicide bombings by calling them martyrdom operations and argued that such tactics are similar to 'a mission impossible,' that has been used by modern militaries for centuries. Moreover, they argue that in a war where the 'oppressor' possesses superior military capabilities, martyrdom operations are essential. Further, they argue that since the goal of the Muslim soldier is not to kill himself but to defend himself against an enemy who is trying to kill him or steal his property, martyrdom operations do not constitute suicide. These arguments were given prominence in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by prominent Islamic personalities who provided moral cover for HAMAS in its use of suicide bombings against Israel based on Israel's alleged persecution of the Palestinians and Israel's military superiority. So what to do now? For the benefit of the American Muslim communities and the world at large, Muslim leaders must use theological arguments to discredit and condemn those who selectively justify suicide bombings. It is dangerous to argue that suicide bombings are wrong in most instances and justify them when the intended target is seen as an oppressor. All evidence indicates that those who commit suicide military operations believe that they are fighting for a just cause. If societies made exceptions for the select use of suicide when the target is an 'oppressor' then other groups may want an exception for their 'just cause' or 'oppressor' who maybe a Muslim. Muslim religious leaders must be making clear that suicide bombings are wrong in all instances and when they do they must include the 'I' word (Israel). This is important because most Muslims are passionate about the belief that Israel is an oppressor and it is because of these deep emotions about Israel that Muslim leaders must specifically mention Israel by name when condemning suicide bombings. 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 |
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OLMERT DITHERS
Posted by Paul Lademain, May 31, 2007. |
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... while Israeli civilians die at the hands of hostile forces. Why does Olmert hesitate? Is it because he's a cocktail-swilling jet-setter? Or is it because the old boy cannot defend Israeli civilians because he is still searching for a magic word for the arab invaders? Does he say they are Hamas? Or is this too narrow? Or not quite true? "Maybe al Qaeda is involved? So How can I say these arabs are Hamas? Maybe I should call them "hostile forces?" O Dear! Now the poor old boy has to choose: "Let's see ... how do I choose? Right! Call a meeting. But first, gotta call and tell the Egyptians that I am going to first hold a meeting. Then maybe in the meanwhile the shelling will stop. Ooopsy, the Arabs just killed another Israeli. Now I gotta start all over again. What should I call them? I cannot order the IDF to retaliate unless I can find a name for these arabs ..." Poor Israel. Their leadership. So talkative. So enfeebled by a compulsion to find just the right word to use for their enemy. Jeez. Any Irishman would have destroyed every Gaza Arab the instant an Arab lobbed a rocket into Israel; an Irishman or a Turk wouldn't hesitate to make the arab civilians pay with their lives for harboring the treacherous Islamics. An Irishman would save his people reflexively--no talk, no babbling, no knishing, no groveling, no weeping, no analysis-paralysis. And that is why the UN exploits Jews ... because Jews "exercise restraint" when bullied and humiliated and spit upon, and especially because the loudest fools amongst them aspire to be saviors of the very same people who are determined to exterminate them. Contact Paul Lademain at lademain@verizon.net |
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U.S. AL QAEDA LEADER LISTS DEMANDS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 31, 2007. |
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There seems to be a lot of momentum right now to negotiate our way out of war.
Today we got the reaction to all this talk from Adam Gadahn, a California-born convert to Islam who is the public face of Al Qaeda in the U.S. He said on an Internet videotape that unless we meet Al Qaeda's demands we will "experience things which will make you forget about the horrors of September 11th, Afghanistan and Iraq, and Virginia Tech." He then listed Al Qaeda's demands that included removing every U.S. soldier from any Muslim land, ending all support for Israel, banning all American Jews from leaving the U.S. to live in Israel, the release of all Muslim prisoners held by us or anyone else, etc, etc, etc. If anyone believes that answering these demands would end the war with Islamofascism, they are naïve. Iran's "president" has already demanded that we convert to Islam or die. And how long would it be before they demanded we turn American Jews over to the jihadists? If we think this challenge can be solved by diplomats instead of
warriors, we have a dark future ahead.
Are We Prepared? Two incidents have come to light that seriously question our post-9/11 level of preparation. The first is dominating the news today: How did a man with an extremely virulent form of drug-resistant tuberculosis manage to get on two trans-Atlantic flights and enter the country by car from Canada? The government has now issued its first quarantine order in more than 40 years, and health officials all over the world are rushing to track down and test more than 100 passengers and crew. The man reportedly had been ordered not to fly, but he disputes that. But this incident clearly has implications for the debate on border control and the war against Islamofascism, which leads to the second item. An article in today's Washington Times follows up on the disturbing events that occurred on 2004 Northwest Airlines Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles involving 13 Middle Eastern men traveling on expired visas, which were renewed in spite of background checks that turned up positive hits on eight of the men in the FBI's database. After years of denying the events and even launching character attacks against the passengers who spoke up, there is now an official report stating that there was in fact a dry run on Flight 327 probing our security. But why did the government try to deny it in the first place and impugn the character of its own citizens in the process? As conservatives, we are skeptical of big government because it breeds bureaucracy, and bureaucracy inevitably makes things worse. But the one area where government is necessary is national defense, and here is more evidence of bureaucratic incompetence. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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FROM ISRAEL: NONSENSE
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 31, 2007. |
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May 31, 2007
"Nonsense" In Hebrew it's called shtuyote, and that is what I'm seeing. But it's hardly benign nonsense -- it's a patently ridiculous way of handling things that leads to risks for our nation. Olmert is seeking a way to stop the launching of Kassams into Israeli territory without taking the strong defensive measures that are actually required to do this. His latest gambit is to suggest that there's interest in the Arab League "peace plan," but that we can't talk about it until the Kassams stop. Said Olmert yesterday, in a meeting with four Congressmen: "We see a tangible change in the Arab position by virtue of the fact that 22 Arab countries are looking for a way to make peace with Israel, not war." But, he indicated, it was impossible to hold serious negotiations on this while the Kassams were flying. Does he really believe that 22 Arab nations want to make peace with Israel? Does he not see that what they are offering is not "peace" but an agreement that would weaken Israel substantially -- that they are simply seeking to do us in without the war? Remember, the Arab League plan calls for us to withdraw to the untenable pre-67 borders, which means surrendering Judea & Samaria and every community there, eastern Jerusalem with the Kotel and the Temple Mount, and the Golan Heights, and taking in Palestinian Arab "refugees" as well. Even if this were modified somewhat (something the Arabs said they wouldn't do: it was "take it or leave it"), it is unlikely that modifications would be sufficient to make this acceptable. So that's the first thing wrong with what Olmert seems to be suggesting. ~~~~~~~~~~ But it's only the first thing: There is also the issue of whether the Arab League could stop the Kassams even if they tried to. Egypt, which feels threatened by the Gaza unrest, has been remarkably unsuccessful in effecting changes. Those shooting the Kassams don't want to see peace with Israel. Why would they cooperate with something that ostensibly leads in that direction? The nations supporting the terrorists in Gaza -- Iran and Syria -- who would command some attention, don't want to see peace here either. ~~~~~~~~~~ And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is the tendency of the Olmert government to rely on the international community in one context or another, to do our defensive work for us. Time was when we defended ourselves. Anything less is a disaster. For we become a vulnerable vassal state, without independent deterrent power. I return time and again to the example of what happened in Lebanon: Instead of continuing with strength to seriously weaken or take out Hezbollah, we opted for "the diplomatic option" a la Tzipi Livni, and hoped that UNIFIL would prevent smuggling of arms from Syria, block return of Hezbollah to the south of Lebanon, etc. Ha! (See more on this below.) ~~~~~~~~~~ Olmert is avoiding a ground operation, in spite of the fact that the Kassams are still coming and persons as knowledgeable as Gen. Moshe Ya'alon say it is essential -- that only ground forces can do what needs to be done in cleaning out the terrorist infrastructure. But even without doing that, there are a great many things that might be done to show additional toughness on our part. MK Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beitenu) has now made a few suggestions: Declare Gaza a hostile entity and isolate it, allowing it no contact with Judea and Samaria. Refuse all contact with Abbas. Deny all visitor rights to the Palestinians in prison in Israel (did you know that their families visit them regularly?) until Shalit is released. Refuse to use Ashdod as a port for receiving materials destined for Gaza or shipping out materials from Gaza. And so forth. We won't do these things, because the world will scream "humanitarian crisis," blaming us rather than Hamas for the problems that would ensue. Last time we did a major operation into Gaza -- when Shalit was kidnapped -- we hit a major transformer there, so that the flow of electric power to the people was reduced (not stopped entirely). The carrying on by the Palestinians, as well as UNRWA, was considerable. I know from IDF contacts that the degree of emergency was considerable exaggerated. Olmert worries about being seen as the "bad guy." He does not withstand international pressure well. ~~~~~~~~~~ So where does that leave us? Resembling sitting ducks. In 1970, the Palestinians in Jordan, where the PLO was headquartered under Arafat, tried to take over the country. King Hussein massacred thousands and then drove many more from the country. No international uproar. This was only Arabs killing Arabs. The uproar is saved for every miniscule action that Israel takes against Arabs. What country in the world would tolerate what we are dealing with now, without mounting a major action? This inability to forcefully defend ourselves is most worrisome -- indicative of a sick mentality, lacking in national self-esteem. Are there innocent Palestinian Arabs in Gaza? Certainly. And we bend over backwards to avoid damaging them. But in war it happens that innocents are sometimes hurt. Preventing their produce from leaving via Ashdod to be sold elsewhere would be small potatoes compared, say, with carpet bombing of their villages or other wholesale aggressive actions we never take. Our innocents in Sderot and surrounding areas are certainly hurting, and it is our responsibility to protect them. ~~~~~~~~~~ Ultimately, however, this is not just about stopping the Kassams. It's important to realize this. It's about deterrence power and the way our enemies perceive us. If we are weak here, they gear up to hit us in other ways, convinced that we are vulnerable and can be defeated. Weakness here puts us at further existential risk. We cannot afford weakness. ~~~~~~~~~~ Here's what we face from the world: The Quartet -- the US, the UN, the EU, and Russia -- met in Berlin yesterday to discuss the situation in the Middle East. This morning they released a statement. Yes, they condemned the Kassam attacks and said Shalit should be released -- none of which makes a particle of difference to those launching Kassams and holding Shalit. However, they said Israel must use restraint in responding to Kassam attacks, so that civilians are not hurt and there would not be "damage to civilian infrastructure." Now, I put it to you: The terrorists deliberately shoot from civilian areas. They don't care about civilian damage. How are we supposed to respond without ever damaging "civilian infrastructure"? The members of Hamas must be laughing their heads off at this. And there's more: The Quartet registered concern about that fact that we have arrested several Hamas members of the PA government, whom our government says have terrorist connections. And they think we should be releasing customs tax funds we are holding, so that the Palestinian economy can improve. In other words, business as usual -- without even economic repercussions -- for the PA, even while the Kassams continue. ~~~~~~~~~~ Putting it bluntly, Condoleezza Rice makes me sick to my stomach. My patience with putting it more politely has worn thin. Speaking today in Vienna, she said that she sees hopeful signs for progress in forging peace here. The two-state solution, she said, was "one of the centerpieces" of our [i.e., US] policy. The way she sees it, this is a "time of opportunity." If she were an ordinary citizen, and not secretary of state, and made statements as out of touch with reality as this within a different context, her mental stability might be questioned. Need I say it again? That the PA is growing ever more radical and intransigent, and wants Israel destroyed, and has no intention of genuinely forging peace with Israel? ~~~~~~~~~~ Rice also recently made a comment about possible Israeli-Syrian negotiations, suggesting they were premature and saying that "There's no substitute for trying to get to the place where the Palestinians finally have their state." But this leads to consideration of what's going on with the possibility of Israeli negotiations with Syria. The US -- with Rice at the forefront -- has sent out mixed signals in this regard. Syria was thoroughly ostracized by the US for a time, and the message was firm that they prefer we have nothing to do with this member of the axis of terrorist-supporting regimes; there was particular hostility to Syria in the US because of terrorists hitting US soldiers in Iraq who had come out of Syria. But of recent there's been a softening of this position on the part of the US, with some mixed messages being sent out. Earlier this month, Rice met with Syrian foreign minister, Wallid Mua'alem, in Egypt. This subtle shift was followed by a hint of a possible policy shift here in Israel. Until very recently, Olmert was adamant that Syria wanted a peace process (to take the heat off ) and not peace, and that there would be no negotiations. But now, according to The Jerusalem Post, Olmert has sent a third party, who remains unidentified, to check out what Syria would offer, while Olmert's spokesperson, Miri Eisen, has now said that Olmert has always indicated that he is "in favor of peace with Syria." Reportedly, Olmert would require Syria to cut ties with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran as a pre-condition to negotiations, so negotiations are not likely to start tomorrow. ~~~~~~~~~~ When news of a possible shift in the Israeli position emerged, there were two suggestions as to why this might be happening. One, as mentioned above, was the reduced opposition by the US to contact with Syria, as evidenced by Rice's meeting with Mual'alem. And two was -- are you ready? -- the fact that the possibility for a negotiated settlement with the PA was dim now and we cannot stagnate, so we need to move on another front. Here is a stunning example of dangerous shtuyote: The idea that even if neither party is genuinely interested in peace, we have to move ahead negotiating somewhere, so as to not be doing nothing. ~~~~~~~~~~ Olmert just the other day explained to the Knesset that he doesn't have to resign over the Lebanon war because it wasn't really a failure, as Hezbollah was moved out of south Lebanon. Well, Shaul Mofaz (Kadima), formerly defense minister and now minister of transportation, has countered the claims of the head of his party in an interview on Israel Radio. Hezbollah has essentially returned to the strength it had before the war, he says, and we should not be deceived by an apparent absence of positions in the south of Lebanon. They are digging underground, and are close to the Israeli border. ~~~~~~~~~~ With all of the talk about maybe peace here, maybe peace there, we are in the midst of a schizoid situation. The Home Front command, it has been announced, is going to be preparing the public for all out war. ~~~~~~~~~~ Norway has resume direct aid to the PA, and will be providing $10 million. ~~~~~~~~~~ Britain is the worst. Because of the laxness of restrictions and a politically correct mind-set, it is the European country most infiltrated by radical Muslims. Baroness Caroline Cox and Dr. John Marks, who co-authored The West, Islam, and Islamism, are currently attending a conference at Bar Ilan University, and were interviewed by Ynet. According to Cox, "Britain has become a base for training and teaching militant Islam," and moderate Muslims who speak out face threats. As evidence of the degree of radical Muslim infiltration in Britain, Cox shared the case of Salah Idris, whose Sudanese pharmaceutical factory was destroyed by the US in the late 1990s because it was linked with al-Qaeda. Idris is today a shareholder in two high-tech security firms that provide security for the British parliament, UK military bases, and 11 nuclear installations. "When we brought this matter to the attention of the authorities, we were told there was no cause for concern." According to Marks, textbooks being used in Saudi-funded Muslim schools in Britain utilize the "same anti-Semitic texts based on the Koran that you find in Palestinian Hamas schools." Of particular concern is the assessment by Cox that British educational institutions have been infiltrated, and that college campuses are key sites for recruitment. These experts believe that British citizens who are radical Muslims present a security threat to Israel, and, of course, also to Great Britain, where it is likely only a matter of time before there is another terrorist attack. Time is running out. Will Britain wake up before it's too late? And will the rest of the western world, including the US, draw lessons from this situation? ~~~~~~~~~~ Given the above, is it any wonder that every Monday and Thursday another group in Britain takes a stand against Israel? On Wednesday, the University and College Union of Great Britain -- which represents 120,000 British college teachers -- asked members to "consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions" and endorsed the idea of a boycott. This was not an actual boycott, but rather a recommendation that individual members consider boycotting. The fallout from this has been considerable. Now the largest labor union in Britain, UNISON, is threatening to boycott Israeli products, with a vote to take place in mid-June. Attempts are being made now to avert this, as it would also mean that British union pension funds would no longer invest in Israel. ~~~~~~~~~~ The wheeling and dealing is considerable, but no word yet on who will support whom (Ayalon or Barak) in the Labor party run-off. ~~~~~~~~~~ Oh joy. Olmert and Abbas will be meeting next week, somewhere in a PA area (presumably but not necessarily Ramallah). This is the first meeting they will have had since April, even though they were, in accordance with an agreement with Rice, supposed to meet every two weeks. This is bad news because on June 19 Olmert is invited to the White House, where bi-lateral ties and other issues will be discussed. Guaranteed. Guaranteed. Olmert will be forthcoming with Abbas so as to come to Bush with evidence of his efforts for "peace." To show he's a good guy. Remember that in a recent press conference Bush led with comments about Palestinian suffering because of roadblocks. As I said, Oh joy. Arlene Kushner is Senior Research Associate, Center for Near East Policy Research, Beit Agron International Press Center, Jerusalem, Israel. Contact her at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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SHAME ON THE LEFT AND ITS VICIOUS HATRED OF ISRAEL
Posted by Simon McIlwaine, May 31, 2007. |
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This article is by Leo McKinstry; it appeared today in the Daily Express |
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ANTI-RACISM is supposed to be one of the guiding principles of our society, preventing discrimination on the grounds of ethnic origin or nationality. Yet it is a bizarre paradox of modern Britain that there is now a climate of increasing hostility towards Jews, particularly in those Left-wing intellectual circles which otherwise make a fetish of their concern for racial sensitivities. Dressed up as criticism of the state of Israel, anti-Semitism is becoming not just tolerated but even fashionable in some of our civic institutions, including the universities and parts of the media. Thanks to the Left's neurotic hatred of Israel, we now have the extraordinary sight of self-styled liberal campaigners launching McCarthyite witch-hunts against anyone deemed to have Israeli connections, as in this week's debate at the University and College Union's annual conference at Bourne-mouth calling for a boycott of all Israeli academic institutions. Respect for democracy, individual rights and freedom of speech are being crushed beneath the juggernaut of shrill indignation. What is particularly disturbing is the way opposition to the Jewish state descends into vicious antagonism against Jews themselves, as shown by this sickening recent outburst from writer Pamela Hardyment, a member of the National Union of Journalists, which in April voted to boycott Israeli goods. Explaining her support for the NUJ's stance, Ms Hardyment described Israel as "a wonderful Nazi-like killing machine backed by the world's richest Jews". Then, like some lunatic from the far-Right, she referred to the "so-called Holocaust" before concluding: "Shame on all Jews, may your lives be cursed." Such words could have come straight from Hitler or the most fervent supporter of Osama Bin Laden. But Ms Hardyment is hardly unique. This sort of seething resentment can be found throughout the Left, whether in demands that Israel be treated as a pariah state or in connivance at anti-Semitic propaganda. Typical of this approach was the opinion of Ulster poet and darling of the BBC Tom Paulin, who once argued that "Jewish settlers in Israel should be shot dead. They are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them." Yet Paulin would no doubt be outraged if some English extremist uttered the same sentiments about radical Muslims settling in Britain. One of the most nauseating rhetorical devices used by hysterical campaigners such as Paulin and Hardyment is to draw an analogy between the Nazi regime and the modern government of Israel. Such a link is not only historically absurd, since Israel is by far the most democratic and liberal country in the Middle East, but it is also offensive because it demonises the Jews and devalues the horror of the Holocaust. The pretence that Israel's actions in its own defence against Islamic terrorists are somehow the equivalent of Nazi Germany's gas chambers is a lie worthy of Dr Goebbels himself. And the tragedy is that this continual assault on Israel has led to a rise in anti-Semitism in Britain, much of it fuelled by Islamic radicals. In 2006 there were 594 anti-Semitic race-hate incidents in this country, a 31 per cent rise on 2005 and the highest total since records began in 1984. I should perhaps stress that I do not come from a Jewish family. Like Tom Paulin, I hail from the Belfast middle-class. But I have been repelled by the anti-Semitism - disguised as support for the Palestinians - of parts of the British Left. I first became aware of this nasty phenomenon when, in 1985, I attended the annual conference of the National Union of Students at Blackpool. There I was appalled to hear delegates calling for a ban on student Jewish societies, on the grounds that because such groups supported the state of Israel they were essentially fascistic in nature. Yet, more than 20 years later, this sort of intolerance is no longer confined to the student debating floor. It now exists in large swathes of education, the press and the arts. The boycott of Israel by academics was started by Professor Stephen Rose of the Open University, like Paulin another BBC favourite, who told his colleagues that "you have no right to treat Israel as if it were a normal state". The boycott is now so widespread that, in one grotesque incident, an Israeli PhD student had his application for Oxford initially rejected purely because he had served in his country's army. The professor dealing with the case, Andrew Wilkie, said he had "a huge problem with Israelis taking the moral high ground from their appalling treatment in the Holocaust and then inflicting gross human rights abuses on Palestinians". Professor Wilkie would not have dreamt of turning down a Zim-babwean because of Mugabe's tyranny, or a Chinese applicant because of his own opposition to the occupation of Tibet. This is what is so contemptible about the intellectuals' fixation with Israel. They are guilty of the most bizarre double standards. While they scream about the Jewish state, they remain silent about human rights abuses carried out by brutal regimes across the world. And it is ironic that, on the day the lecturers debated a boycott of Israel, they also voted to refuse to co-operate with any attempt to crack down on radical Islam on campuses, claiming such a move would be an infringement of free speech. Given some of the lecturers' enthusiasm for silencing Israeli opinion such a position is laughable in its hypocrisy. United by anti-Semitism, the bigots of the academic Left and Muslim fundamentalism are destroying freedom of thought in this country. Contact Simon McIlwaine at Simon.McIlwaine@ormerods.co.uk or visit the website at: www.anglicansforisrael.com |
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40 YEARS OF "OCCUPATION" MYTHS
Posted by Gerald M. Steinberg, May 31, 2007. |
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This appeared in Jewish News (UK) and is archived at http://faculty.biu.ac.il/~steing/occupation_myths.pdf |
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While Israel celebrates 40 years of a reunited Jerusalem and what many still see as a miraculous victory that reversed Nasser's threat to "push the Jews into the sea", the Palestinians are celebrating 40 years of "occupation" slogans. This rhetoric has provided them with a political victory that has significantly offset the defeat of the Arab armies on the battlefield. And by erasing everything that came before the 1967 war, including the years of warfare, terror following the violent Arab rejection of the 1947 UN partition resolution, Israel's enemies have managed to rewrite history. This "victory" on the battlefront of narratives and public relations that fuels the various boycott campaigns that are being conducted, particularly by British trade unions. The obsessive anti-Israel and often anti-semitic leaders of this movement would have no doubt found other reasons to wave war against Israel, even if there were no occupation. But the distorted images of myths have also convinced uninformed journalists, academics, diplomats, etc. that Israel is to blame. And this is where the real damage is done. The myth that the "occupation" is the cause of the conflict, rather than a symptom and consequence, is also spread by powerful political organizations that exploit the rhetoric of humanitarian assistance and human rights. As documented by NGO Monitor, the radicals that control Christian Aid, War on Want, Human Rights Watch, etc., have worked closely with their Palestinian counterparts to promote the false claim that the "occupation" is the cause of the conflict, rather than a symptom. Just last week, Amnesty International issued its annual report covering 2006, in which the biased and often false claims regarding Israel were repeated. Despite the rocket attacks from Gaza, the continuing terror, and the warfare between Hamas and Fatah, Palestinians are patronizingly portrayed as victims of Israel. Furthermore, this political warfare is often justified through use of a small group of Israeli who also promote the myth that "if only we were better to the Palestinians, and ended the occupation, we would have peace". Funded generously by European taxpayers and churches, various political and quasi-academic nongovernmental groups are sponsoring one-sided conferences and symposia on these topics. But for the vast majority of Israeli, the era of simplistic slogans and wishful thinking ended with the catastrophic collapse to the "Oslo peace process", and the terror campaign in which over 1000 people were murdered. Until the Palestinians and the world accept Israel as a Jewish state, with the "secure and recognized borders" pledged in UN Resolution 242 that followed the 1967 war, the options are limited. Gerald M. Steinberg is a professor at Bar Ilan University and Executive Director, NGO Monitor. |
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MCMASTER U. IN HAMILTON IS SUING DR.PAUL WILLIAMS. WHY?
Posted by Michael Travis, May 31, 2007. |
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This was posted today by Ted Belman on the IsraPundit website.
McMaster U. in Hamilton is suing Dr.Paul Williams. Why? Because he was investigating Islamic terrorists at McMaster.
For reporting these findings, Dr. Williams has been sued by McMaster University for $4 million plus punitive damages. Dr. Williams refuses to be intimidated, and indeed welcomes the lawsuit because this will give him access to all of McMaster's records through the legal process of discovery and he will be able to expose what he believes could well be the nerve center for Osama's "American Hiroshima" project to blow up ten American cities with suitcase nukes. Please contribute to The Dr Paul Williams Defense Fund. This is called "Terror cell suspects in court" and it appeared May 29, 2007 in the Hamilton Spectator. |
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Two men, with ties to McMaster University who are accused of being part of a so-called homegrown terror cell, made a brief court appearance with their adult co-accused yesterday in Brampton. Ahmad Ghany and Saad Gaya are among 14 adults and four youths arrested last year and alleged to be part of a group plotting to bomb several targets in southern Ontario. The adults in the case were supposed to start a preliminary hearing, but it was put over until Monday, June 4. Ghany is out on bail but Gaya is in jail. The proceedings are covered by a publication ban. A courtroom in the Brampton courthouse has been adapted to include space for more than a dozen lawyers and extra space for the accused. Gaya, a first-year McMaster student when he was arrested, is accused of planning to cause an explosion which could cause bodily harm or death, and doing so in association with a terrorist group. Ghany, who has been living under virtual house arrest, is charged with being a member of a terrorist group and receiving terrorist training. Ghany graduated from Health Sciences at McMaster. Contact Michael Travis at michaelmgr@gmail.com |
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UCU MEMBERS WHO VOTED TO BOYCOTT ISRAELI ACADEMICS
Posted by Naomi Ragen, May 31, 2007. |
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Friends, Many of you have asked for contact information for UCU (University and College Union) members who voted to boycott Israeli academics. Below, the names, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of the regional and local heads of the union. Feel free to express your opinions to them, keeping in mind that not everyone on this list voted in favor of this resolution. Sally Hunt, joint general secretary, for example, has stated that she voted against it. Israel's Minister of Immigration and Absorption has called upon Jews to refrain from making contributions to British institutions of higher learning. I say, why just Jews? I call upon all those who are committed to justice, freedom and truth to give their contributions to academic institutions which stand firmly behind academic freedom and cultural cooperation, and which are not tainted by racism and anti-Semitism. Unfortunately, UCU members, and the institutions that employ and nuture them, are guilty until proven innocent. Let's hear something outloud from Cambridge and Oxford, etc. removing themselves from this shameful calumny. Until then, silence is acquiescence. Naomi UCU head office
UCU head office: Britannia Street
UCU head office: Egmont House
Membership
Press
Sally Hunt
Paul Mackney
Joint presidents
Barry Lovejoy
Malcolm Keight
Matt Waddup
Roger Kline
Paul Cottrell
Paula Lanning
Annette Dalchow
Bernadette Newman
*David Bleiman
* Mary Cooper
* Sue Davis
* Russell Escritt
* Brian Everett
* Colin Gledhill
* Jenny Golden
* Barry Johnson
* Adrian Jones
* Barry Jones
* Jim McCracken
* Jim McKeown
* Martin Machon
* Elizabeth Martins
* Ben Monks
* Martyn Moss
* Iain Owens
* John Perry
* Chris Powell
* Nick Varney
Naomi Ragen is an American-born novelist and journalist who lives in Jerusalem. She can be contacted at www.naomiragen.com, where you can subscribe to her newsletter. |
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POLL: ISRAELIS FINISHED WITH WITHDRAWALS
Posted by Ezra Halevi, May 31, 2007. |
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A poll carried out by the Knesset channel found a majority of Israelis want no more withdrawals from parts of the Land of Israel -- not even for "real peace." The poll, conducted by the Dahaf Institute for the Knesset Channel -- found that even in the case of a what was termed a "real peace deal," 68 percent of Israelis would not agree to withdraw from the Golan Heights, 53 percent from Judea and Samaria and 86 percent from the Western Wall. Just two weeks ago, former coalition chairman MK Avigdor Yitzchaki (Kadima) brought a bill requiring a referendum prior to any withdrawals from Jerusalem or the Golan Heights through its first reading, despite the opposition of the government, Meretz and Arab parties. The poll sought to examine how Israelis would vote in such a referendum. A minority of 46 percent favored surrendering most of Judea and Samaria for a "real peace." 65 percent oppose any unilateral withdrawals from Judea and Samaria. 28 percent said they would support it. Only eight percent believe that the government is able to reach a peace agreement with Syria, opposed to 86 percent against. Asked whether the lands conquered in the 1967 Six Day War improved Israel's security situation, 51 percent said it did and 29 percent said it worsened it. A representative sample of five hundred Israeli adults took part in the survey. Ezra HaLevi is a writer for Arutz Sheva |
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JIHADIST ISLAM NURTURES TICKING TIME BOMBS
Posted by Lawrence Uniglicht, May 30, 2007. |
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When will a collective somnambulistic civilized world rub fairy dust from its eyes, then begin shutting down House of Saud, for one, financed Wahhabi madrassas, mosques, kindred spirit institutions and training camps, infecting the planetary landscape anywhere and everywhere, as plentiful as camel dung? If root causes are not attacked, there is no chance to vanquish an atavistic enemy weaned on horrific ideas and ideals. It boggles the mind that the world's one superpower, led by an administration joined at the hip to OPEC's head honcho regime, albeit guarantor of Uncle Sam's petrodollar, is yet to see the Arabic writing on the wall, thus not willing to assert itself, reading the riot act to Saudi royalty, insisting on a zero tolerance policy for bankrolling the education of infidel obsessed terrorists. Furthermore, might British academics, immersed in their anti-Semitic yearly ritual, again pondering whether to boycott Israeli colleagues, in solidarity with so-called Palestinians, instead do something useful by insisting their own government shut down Wahhabi spirited mosques, infecting Britain's shantytown landscape, offering advanced degrees in homicide/suicide martyrdom, or is a London bombing memory jogger needed? It is easy for Western nations to disrespect Israel, labeling her an occupier, an apartheid state, even refusing to attend a ceremony commemorating the 40th anniversary of Jerusalem's unification. Israel, alas, does not supply the world with oil, dwarfing the fact she supplies the world disproportionately with advanced technology and Nobel laureates. But is doing what is easy wise? Is sucking up to Israel/Jew bashing Islamic oil pushers, predisposed to financing the education of as well as harboring terrorists, in the best interests of a civilized world? Might harder choices, perhaps imperiling the flow of fossil fuel, in the long term prove ever wiser? That answer should be obvious! Lawrence Uniglicht is a career civil servant, working for the Social Security Administration. He advocates for the State of Israel with an American perspective. He writes, "Advocating for the disrespected underdog has been my passion, no doubt Israel falls into that category." Contact him by email at larose@snip.net |
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SANITY AND SURVIVAL: JENIN COMES TO LEBANON. SO WHERE IS THE OUTCRY?
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 30, 2007. |
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The article below is of great significance for our understanding of the true dynamics of the Arab-Israel conflict. Since the advent of Zionism as a movement, c. 130 years ago, an estimated 60,000 Arabs have been killed by Jews and (since 1948) by Israelis. This number is an estimate of Arabs killed in Israel's defensive wars, as well as those killed when they mounted terror attacks, and civilian casualties. Almost all of these Arabs were armed Arabs engaged in armed conflict against Israel, where the Arab side was the aggressor. Of that number, about 6,000 thousand were Palestinians, most of whom were armed terrorists killed in the process of committing, or preparing to commit, terror attacks against Israeli civilians, or in Israeli reprisals for such attacks. Yet these 6,000 are the ''martyred heroes'' of Arab media (and some western media) whose deaths are considered proof of Israel's hatred of, and intent to genocide, the Palestinian people who number somewhere around 9,000,000 (c. 3,000,000 in Israel and c. 6,000,000 in the Palestinian Diaspora). And for the deaths of these 6,000, Israel is excoriated as the world's worst oppressor criminal terrorist state. YET.... Since 1994, more Palestinians have been killed by Palestinians under the rule of Arafat and Hamas than have been killed by Israel. Both the media and the Arab world are silent. Recently, the civil war in Gaza has claimed hundreds of civilians on both sides, including innocent children murdered as they sat in the back seat of their father's car. Both the media and the Arab world are silent. And now, during the Hezbollah and Fatah-el-Islam fighting in Lebanon, the carnage of Arab against Arab is horrendous....and both the media and the Arab world are silent. AND HISTORICALLY..... Since 1948, somewhere between 12 million to 20 million Muslims have been killed by Muslims, in endless wars between Muslim states and within Muslim states around the world. The one single individual who can be credited with killing more Muslims than any other person in the entire world, and across all of world history.....is none other than Saddam Hussein, the Muslim Arab tyrannical dictator of Iraq (c. 1,300,000 Muslims killed during his 32-year reign of terror...including c. 800,000 on both sides in the 8-year Iran-Iraq war). Yet, across the entire Muslim world, Saddam is adulated and mourned as a great Arab leader, a modern-day Saladin, a hero. World wide, and across the entire Arab and Muslim world, there is no acrimony, not even any critique, for the tens of millions killed in Muslim vs. Muslim wars. There is no condemnation of Saddam as the butcher of Shi'ites, the mass-murderer of Kurds. There is not even a critical word to be heard anywhere in the Muslim world for the mind-bogglingly obscene child-abuse of the Iranian army's Basiji: the thousands of hapless helpless 10- to 14-year-old boys drafted into Iranian military service and deployed to clear minefields in the Iran-Iraq war, by walking through the mine-fields!(*); or the child-abuse raised to the level of public policy in the Palestinian Authority as a Mickey Mouse surrogate teaches 5-year olds that they must eternally hate Jews and kill Israels and fight for Islam's domination of the entire world. But there is endless acrimony against Israel for its successful defensive actions; and there is endless acrimony against the USA for its retaliatory defensive and pre-emptive wars against Islamofascist terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq. Apparently, the death of Muslims matters to Muslim leaders only when caused by Jews or Americans. This appalling fact of history bespeaks an abysmal moral failure in Islamic society: an inability to challenge evil within the society, and an all too eager willingness to blame others, especially Jews (and in latter day times, Americans) for that evil. The cause of the Arab-Israel conflict is not Israeli repression of Palestinians -- the Lebanese and Egyptians have done far worse to their Palestinians, and without the need to defend themselves against the endless terror war that Palestinian terrorists have waged against Israel. The cause of the Arab-Israel conflict is not any fictional hatred that Israelis bear toward Palestinians -- the Lebanese and Iraqis harbor a truly frothing and fomenting hatred of Palestinians, as do Kuwaitis and Saudis, and without ever having been at the receiving end of a Palestinian suicide bomber. The cause of the Arab-Israel conflict is this obvious, but unmentionable in polite society, abysmal moral failure of Muslim society. No matter what the cause, no matter how great the cost, no matter how horrible the Muslim suffering, never take responsibility for Muslim crimes. Never acknowledge the essentially apartheid nature of Islamic religious discrimination against Jews and Christians. And never allow a Jew to have authority. This is religiously legislated apartheid, politically legitimized Jew-hatred. That apartheid, that hatred, is the cause of the conflict and the reason for its having become the longest war in world history. The article below was written by Jonathan Kay and it appeared
yesterday in the National Post (Canada)
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Last week, the Lebanese army attacked a squalid Palestinian refugee camp that's become infested with Islamist suicide terrorists and guerilla fighters. On May 20, government troops surrounded the camp, with tanks and artillery pieces shelling it at close range. Army snipers gunned down anything that moved. At least 18 civilians were killed, and dozens more injured. Water and electricity were cut off. By week's end, much of the camp had been turned into deserted rubble. Thousands of terrified residents fleeing the camp reported harrowing stories of famished, parched families trapped in their basements. How did the rest of the world react? The Arab League quickly condemned 'the criminal and terrorist acts carried out by the terrorist group known as Fatah al-Islam,' and vowed to 'give its full support to the efforts of the army and the Lebanese government.' EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana also condemned Fatah al-Islam, and declared Europe's 'support' for Lebanon. And the UN Security Council called the actions of Fatah al-Islam 'an unacceptable attack' on Lebanon's sovereignty. As for the Western media, most outlets ignored the story following the first flurry of news reports. At this point, please indulge me by re-reading the first paragraph of this column -- except this time, substitute the world 'Israeli' for 'Lebanese' in the first sentence. Let's imagine what the world's reaction would be if the ongoing siege were taking place in Gaza or the West Bank instead of the Nahr al Bared refugee camp on the outskirts of Tripoli, Lebanon. First of all, a flood of foreign journalists would descend on the camp to document Israel's cruelty and barbarism, and the story would remain front page news to this day. Al-Jazeera would be a 24/7 montage of grieving mothers swearing revenge on the Zionist butchers, and rumours would swirl of mass graves and poison gas. The Arab League, EU and United Nations would condemn Israeli aggression -- as would the editorial board of The New York Times. The Independent would dispatch Robert Fisk to embed with Fatah al-Islam. And the newspaper's cartoonist, Dave Brown, would produce another award-winning rendition of his signature theme: Jews eating Palestinian babies. Actually, we don't need to speculate: What I have just written is exactly what happened when the Israeli army invaded the Jenin refugee camp to root out terrorists in April, 2002, a battle that was similar in scale to this month's siege at Nahr al Bared. (At Jenin, 52 refugee camp residents were killed -- most of them gunmen, according to Human Rights Watch. At Nahr al Bared, the figure is 45 and climbing.) The main difference between the two sieges is that Israel's army put its troops at far greater risk by invading Jenin with infantry -- whereas the less humane Lebanese army has simply pummelled Nahr al Bared with explosives from a distance. Jews apparently care a lot more about saving Palestinian civilians than do Lebanese soldiers. For years, we have been told that Palestinian suffering and 'humiliation' is at the root of the Middle East conflict, as well as the Western-Muslim clash of civilizations more generally. This is nonsense: The 200,000-plus Palestinian refugees who live in Lebanese camps are treated worse than dogs -- with no access to decent schools or good jobs -- and no one in the Arab world cares a whit. In fact, many Arabs seem to embrace the same blind anti-Palestinian hatred of which Israel is typically accused. When Lebanese armoured personnel carriers rolled through Tripoli on May 20, they got a standing ovation from local residents. 'We wish the government would destroy the whole camp and the rest of the camps,' one local told The New York Times. 'Nothing good comes out of the Palestinians.' Just as Lebanon's stew of eternally warring Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Hezbollah terrorists and militarized clans serves as a Mediterranean microcosm for the political dysfunction of the Arab world, this month's events capture perfectly the utter cynicism of the Islamic world's trumped up vilification of Israel, and the West as a whole. As with the Muslim- on-Muslim slaughter in Darfur, Iraq, Pakistan, Gaza and a dozen other hot spots, the siege at Nahr al Bared shows that what inflames 'the Muslim street' (for lack of a better cliche) isn't Muslim suffering, but the relatively tiny fraction thereof that jihadi propagandists and their Western apologists can lay at the feet of Jews and Christians. Muslim blood apparently comes cheap -- but only when it's drawn by other Muslims. 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 |
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THE ECONOMIST IS WRONG
Posted by Daily Alert, May 30, 2007. |
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Six Day War had significant positive effects and is not a 'wasted victory' as The Economist argued "Israel's Wasted Victory," this is the headline of The Economist's editorial marking 40 years since the Six Day War. The Economist boasts a circulation of more than one million copies and its readership comprises members of the world's financial, political and cultural elites. The articles written by its authors (the majority of which go unsigned) are perceived as God's words. "The Economist says" -- is a ruling that goes unchallenged in many circles. Nonetheless, in describing the Six Day War as a "Pyrrhic victory" and "a calamity for the Jewish state no less than for its neighbors," The Economist is making a grave mistake. The Six Day War changed the course of history for the better, ensured Israel's existence and convinced the Arabs to come to terms with it. Thanks to Israel's full and shining victory, the rulers of the Arab states relinquished their vision of eliminating Israel, and by lack of choice engaged in dialogue based on the concept of "land for peace." In his book The Six Day War, historian Michael Oren wrote that events in the Middle East, which until 1967 only culminated ahead of the conflict, could have moved towards peace even after the war. He added that diplomatic breakthroughs considered unrealistic became almost commonplace after the war. In November of that year, the UN Security Council passed resolution 242, which since then has constituted a cornerstone for every diplomatic effort in the region including the recent Saudi Initiative. Resolution 242 called for "just and lasting peace" between Arabs and Jews; Israel endorsed it immediately. It took Egypt another decade to internalize 242 and to sign a peace agreement with Israel in exchange for return of the Sinai. The maturation process took Jordan an additional 20 years. Syria announced its willingness to sign a full normalization agreement with Israel in January 2000. Here is therefore, a basic fact: Due to Israel's military victory in June 1967, Israel was accepted by the Arab world as a legitimate "Jewish State" entitled to exist within peaceful borders, land that until then was deemed Zionist occupation. Hubristic folly Somehow, The Economist manages to ignore these developments and minimizes their significance. The editorial focuses on Israeli-Palestinian relations. Israel, wrote The Economist, "embarked on its hubristic folly of annexing the Arab half of Jerusalem and -- in defiance of law, demography and common sense -- planting Jewish settlements in all the occupied territories to secure a Greater Israel." And "When, decades later, Egypt and Jordan did make peace with Israel, the Palestinians did not recover Gaza and the West Bank." The Palestinians did not recover Gaza and the West Bank? Until 1967, Gaza and the West Bank were territories administered by Egypt and Jordan. It may well be assumed that that the Jordanian regime would not have permitted Palestinian refugees, their children and grandchildren to realize their national sovereignty in Gaza and the West Bank and to establish the Palestinian state there. As to criticism regarding Israel's acts of annexation and settlement since 1967, large parts of the Israeli population share these sentiments, including the author of this article. Under the charismatic and destructive influence of Moshe Dayan, at the end of the Six Day War the government chose to prevent Palestinian autonomy, oppressed Palestinian rights and subjugated the Palestinian workforce to the interests of Israeli employers. This is indeed "hubristic folly." But is it only ours? The "Land for Peace" movement immediately challenged the Greater Israel movement, and they divided Israeli society from within. Not Palestinian society. Palestinians prefer 'state of no state' It should be said unabashedly: Had the Palestinians really wanted a state of their own it would have been established long ago; even Israel's excessive military might would not have sufficed in preventing its establishment within some type of border. Yet the Palestinians prefer a state of "no state," no responsibility, no commitments and no solution, alongside ongoing terror. Generation after generation, Palestinian nationalism has excelled in denouncement. Had Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres not unwillingly dragged the PLO leadership to the Oslo Accords in 1993 it would not have initiated a thing by itself. The Economist is very wrong. For Israel, the victory of 1967 was not wasted. Israel's population grew from 2.6 million to 7.1 million, 2 million of whom were new immigrants. The Gross National Product grew by 630 percent. Real per capita product, the benchmark for measuring economic development, grew by 163 percent and last year crossed the $21,000 mark. The average standard of living in Israel is only 22 percent lower than in Britain; on the eve of the Six Day War there was a 44 percent gap. And The Economist has often noted Israel's information technology achievements. Among Palestinians, however, the situation has deteriorated drastically. Are we to blame? Yes, it is our fault as well as theirs. Two states for two peoples: If this vision was wasted, it was not so because of the Six Day War, but despite it. And if it is realized, it will be another outcome of the Arab plan's defeat in June 1967. 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 |
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WE HAVEN'T LEARNED MUCH FROM PAST MISTAKES AND INTELLIGENCE FAILURES, HAVE WE?
Posted by Jeff Epstein, May 30, 2007. |
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Our current state of affairs certainly begs the question as to whether we can really afford to ignore costly lessons from history. One would think that we learned something from the murderous attack launched against us during the predawn hours of December 7th, 1941. The first wave of 181 warplanes departed from six Japanese carriers to strike our fleet at Pearl Harbor and surrounding military airfields. At 7:00AM, the incoming squadrons appeared on the screens of the Army radar station at Opana. News of the steady-bearing "contacts" was immediately relayed up through the chain of command. However, senior officers falsely attributed those sightings to the anticipated echoes of returning American planes and never sounded the appropriate alarms -- a costly assumption that contributed to the death toll of some 2400 servicemen. Six decades later, three commercial airliners were commandeered by militant Islamist deviants and flown into their intended targets resulting in the deaths of 3000 innocent Americans. Once again, our nation was caught off-guard and paid a hefty price for underestimating an adversary's resolve and capacity to do us grievous harm. One could reasonably argue that we haven't learned much from past mistakes and intelligence failures. America is currently engaged in a deadly war that has the potential to last for decades and cost millions of innocent lives. Most experts agree that a far more deadly attack is imminent -- a catastrophic strike involving a combination of tactical nuclear and/or radiological "dirty" weapons. Yet, Washington refuses to take legitimate actions to secure our homeland -- that is, to properly identify the enemy, seal our borders and inoculate a number of terrorist-front groups that freely operate on our soil; subversive organizations that seek our destruction, spread seeds of hatred, fundraise for the enemy, support international acts of terrorism, recruit thousands of disgruntled "home-growns" and prepare scores of their followers to perpetrate acts of violence. Of greater concern is the administration's failure to come clean with the American people regarding numerous terrorist hits that we have already suffered -- attacks both leading up to and following 9/11. For unknown reasons, Federal law enforcement agencies continue to misrepresent barbaric acts of violence as being anything other than Islamist-inspired -- a reckless policy that, in the long run, will only cost more lives. There's no legitimate reason to hide the truth from our citizenry while blood hemorrhages in various locations across America. An educated, vigilant society will only make our shopping malls, highways, houses of worship, college campuses and federal buildings safer to visit. Additionally, surviving family members deserve to know what really happened to their loves ones. While in a holding pattern awaiting the unthinkable -- news of simultaneous nuclear detonations occurring in major U.S Cities -- our State Department is reaching out to those same terrorist-host nations that are conspiring to exterminate us. If that isn't enough, the Department of Education is in the process of opening twenty Arabic-teaching schools for Muslim students across America, Kansas City International Airport recently installed foot baths to accommodate Muslim travelers and several federal agencies (including the FBI and TSA) have contracted with CAIR (a terror-friendly Islamic advocacy group) to provide sensitivity training to their field agents and employees. For a variety of reasons, neither can we expect the truth to flow from mainstream media channels. In fact, issues concerning national security and terrorism are typically subordinated to far more important topics like the regeneration of Britney Spear's hair follicles, Rosie O'Donnell's personal self-destruction and paternity testing for Anna Nicole's orphaned infant child. Just how many more innocent adults and children have to perish before America comes to its senses regarding this very "Real" and menacing threat? According to our nation's leading counter-terrorism experts, it's far later in the game than most folks realize, for the enemy has accomplished much in terms of their infiltration and entrenchment on our soil. These radical Islamist barbarians truly believe that America is their's for the taking. They're convinced that their imperialistic drive to conquer our nation is far stronger than our willingness to fight for what's rightfully ours. Unfortunately, they're probably right since just a scant few of us are willing to make the necessary sacrifices to resist these cretins at any cost. Their victory would mean the end of the United States and the end of the free world as we know it. To them, it is not about politics, it is about religion, a radical religion where the law allows for beheadings, stoning and maiming; a radical religion that uses terror as its tool of choice to keep the masses in line. America's Truth Forum, a non-partisan, non-profit (501(c) 3) organization, is committed to bringing the truth about the threat of radical Islam to the American people. The government won't do it. The media won't do it. That leaves us. There isn't a better time to draw a line in the sand, take a stand and be heard. For three years, America's Truth Forum has been recognized as being on the very cutting edge -- a leader in this struggle to awaken our citizenry to militant Islam's menacing threat. Our ability to continue the fight and confront this evil in earnest greatly depends upon outside support. We need your generous help. America's Truth Forum, in conjunction with Basics Project, will be hosting another educational symposium that will bring together the most important voices on the subject of Islamofascism. This critical event, the third in a national series, has been scheduled for October and will feature world-renown speakers with extensive knowledge and first-hand experience. If plans hold, the event will not only prove most provocative but will generate substantial media attention. In order to make this most crucial event happen, we need your financial support. We are firmly committed to the task of bringing the truth about the threat that Islamofascism poses to the American people to the American people. Let's not allow Washington to continue ignoring history and repeating costly mistakes. Please help us to help America and support this most righteous cause. Please either visit our site at http://www.americastruthforum.com/donations.htm and contribute via the Paypal link or forward your donation to: America's Truth Forum
Where the battle against the aggressive totalitarianism of Islamofascism is concerned, it is well past the time to act. If we allow politics to infiltrate the process of disseminating fact-based information -- the truth -- about the lethal foe we face we risk repeating the mistakes made in the waning days of Vietnam only this time the genocide may very well happen to us...on American soil. Failure is not an option. To quote Winston Churchill: "If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves." Respectfully, Jeffrey Epstein, President
Jeff Epstein is President of American Truth Forum, an organization committed to bringing the truth about the threat of radical Islam to the American people. |
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BRITISH UNIVERSITY LECTURERS: BOYCOTT ISRAEL'S ACADEMICS
Posted by Naomi Ragen, May 30, 2007. |
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Friends, The UCU, which represents Britain's university lecturers, has passed a resolution asking its members to weigh the moral consequences of a connection with Israel's academic insitutions in light of the situation in the territories. It also called upon the European Union to consider stopping the funding of all research and development projects in Israel. The vote of the 250 member organization was 158 in favor, 99 opposed, with 8 abstentions. It stopped short of calling for an outright boycott because that is illegal. Although this resolution does not involve the insititutions of higher learning themselves, it nevertheless sets a precedent. For a long time, British journals have been quietly boycotting Israeli academics, insisting on removing the name of Israeli institutions from academic papers, for example, as a condition to publication. I think the time has come for academics all over the world to consider a boycott of British lecturers. I'm sure there are many professors and lecturers on my list who would be able to help. We should publicize the names of the 158 lecturers who voted in favor of this, and make sure that they are not invited, their papers aren't published, and that the institutions of higher learning that employ them find it increasingly difficult to find funding for their research, academic cooperation and cultural exchanges. Anti-semites in academia should not get a free pass. Anyone on my list who can help with this, let me know. Naomi Naomi Ragen is an American-born novelist and journalist who lives in Jerusalem. She can be contacted at www.naomiragen.com, where you can subscribe to her newsletter. |
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ABBAS AND DAHLAN DEALT MORTAL BLOW BY BARGHOUTI: THERE GOES YOUR FOREIGN POLICY
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 30, 2007. |
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Dear Mr. President, Do you subscribe to DEBKA.com? If not, you should. and so should the CIA. Does the CIA know about this turn-around in the PA territories? If they subscribed to DEBKA.com they would. I think that you had better tell Secretary Rice as well. This Fatah defection to Hamas means the utter and complete and dismal and irredeemable failure of her foreign policy in Israel. Fatah is just about destroyed, Abbas is powerless, and Hamas has won the hearts and minds of just about everyone in the PA territories. So....there is absolutely no sense to pressuring Israel for more concessions, or more restraint. there is absolutely nothing to be gained by pressuring Olmert to meet with Abbas. Abbas was doomed after the Mecca accords....I told you that, way back when. Now he is just plain old dead meat. Have you read the Hamas charter? It is clear...no treaties, no negotiations, no recognition, no nothing...just wipe out the Jews, and then start on the Christians ... and then...Islam uber Alles. But don't forget the bigger picture. El-Qaeda groups and el-Qaeda spin-offs and el-Qaeda wannabbees are mulitplying like rabbits in the Middle East, from Algeria and Tunis and Morocco to Egypt and Sinai and Yemen and Jordan and Lebanon and, of course Syria and Iraq. As one Israeli secret service operative said just the other day...'every day there is a new terrorist movement popping up somewhere in the Middle East.' Hamas is now funded by Iran. so Hezbollah and Hamas are now allies...and they probably coordinated their plans. they share the same goals and the same motivations. Iran wants to lead the world in what President Akhmedi-Nejad thinks is the single most important thing that believing Muslims can do....kill Jews, destroy Israel. Iran used to work in tandem with el-qaeda. Now they are competitors....to see who can kill the most infidels....and they both want to start with Israel. So I think we can take Hamas at its word....now that it has control of the west bank, we can expect terrorism and qassams and longer range rockets from there, just as we see coming from Gaza. so, why did so many fatah terrorists, formerly loyal to Arafat and then to his heir Abbas, all of a sudden jump ship and join Hamas? Well, one cannot know the hearts and minds of others....but it seems to me that one very good reason might be that they are convinced that Hamas is going to win the civil war....and they are convinced that Iran is really able, and going, to take out Israel one way or another. that is a really bad sign for us (a much worse sign for israel, but bad for us too). Do you want to win the war we are currently fighting against Islamofascist terrorism? First step....support your only ally in the middle east!! David Meir-Levi
This below was posted by Ted Belman and it appeared today on the
IsraPundit website: |
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DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources report exclusively Palestinian Fatah-al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades group splits, with 40 percent defecting to Hamas [US strategy is an abject failure] The breakaway Fatah rebel group based in the West Bank has turned its back on Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and his senior adviser Mohammed Dahlan and established a separate suicide terrorist militia. Called the Martyr Abu Amar (Yasser Arafat) Brigades, the rebel group's new commanders are Hamas Gaza operatives Hussein Hijaz and Abu Hilas (Abu Maher). They also take orders, as well as explosive supplies and funds, from the Lebanese Hizballah. DEBKAfile quotes Israeli military and intelligence sources as rating this split as extremely dangerous. It affords Hamas a prime strategic asset for escalating its violent campaign against Israel. Hamas managed in the middle of its factional war with Fatah to infiltrate the opposition's West Bank strongholds and persuade a large faction to secede from the Fatah group and establish a Hamas- controlled militia. Israel did not prevent this happening. The result, our counter-terror experts report, is a Hamas launching pad on the West Bank, previously controlled by Fatah, for a mass suicide bombing offensive against central Israel, projected by the Iran-backed Hamas as the next stage of its missile campaign from Gaza. The new Martyr Abu Amar Brigades have been given orders to gear up to stage multiple suicide truck bombings, Iraq style, in Israel's main cities. This week, Israeli military and undercover units fanned out across the West Bank to hunt down and capture Fatah defectors to the new Hamas-backed militia. Sunday, May 27, they captured Khaled Shawish, who was important enough in the Fatah terrorist hierarchy to hide for years in the Palestinian Authority compound in Ramallah, after engineering numerous terrorist attacks, including the Dec. 31, 2000 murder of Binyamin and Talia Kahane. Recently, he was involved in shooting attacks in the West Bank. Monday, the brother of Zakariah Zubeidi, the notorious Fatah commander of Jenin, was picked up. He had been acting as intermediary between the al Aqsa Brigades and the rebels; a leading Fatah defector was killed in a village near Jenin. Tuesday, Israel forces detained Jamil Tirawi in Nablus. He is the son of Tawfiq Tirawi, Arafat's faithful lieutenant, who was a co-founder of the al Aqsa Brigades, Fatah's suicide strike force. The revolt against Abu Mazen and Dahlan, instigated by Hamas and backed by Hizballah, is spreading. The influential Fatah-Tanzim terrorist leader, Marwan Barghouti, has endorsed the defection from his Israel cell, where he is serving six life sentences for murdering Israeli civilians in terrorist attacks. Another supporter is Jibril Rajoub, former preventive security chief on the West Bank, and rival of Dahlan. The Fatah mutiny has awarded Hamas strike force and terrorist networks stretching from Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip to Jenin in the northern West Bank. It is described by Israeli security sources as the gravest terrorist threat Israel has faced since its 2002 Defensive Wall operation broke Arafat's terrorist infrastructure. Abu Mazen's rule has never been in greater peril. Israeli prime minister could not have chosen a more unfortunate moment to yield to Washington's pressure and announce talks next week with Abbas. All the Palestinian leader needs now is a meeting with Ehud Olmert as he battles for authority over his increasingly radicalized and mutinous Fatah . 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 |
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PUBLIC FIGURES EXPRESS REGRET FOR DISENGAGEMENT
Posted by Ezra HaLevi, May 30, 2007. |
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(IsraelNN.com) The Yesha Council of Judea, Samaria and Gaza communities has published a collection of statements by public figures who supported or helped implement the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and northern Samaria and have since expressed regret. The following are some of the statements: Maj.-Gen (ret.) Yiftah Ron-Tal, IDF ground forces commander at the
time of the Disengagement: In the year preceding the Disengagement,
the army trained mostly for dismantling communities, and that
prevented it from preparedness for the war in Lebanon. The training
for the Disengagement not only prevented preparedness for such a war,
but dragged it away from the consensus as a people's army. It is
nearly certain that the excitement of those who led the decision and
implementation of this is directly tied to the big failure in
Lebanon...I still cannot understand how Israel gave up parts of its
land willingly and with abandon, and how the residents connected to
that land were turned into criminals, instead of raising their
dedication as a banner of preserving the Jewish identity of the state
of Israel.
Ilana Dayan, Journalist, Host of Popular 'Uvda' (Fact) Program on Channel 2: How come nobody is standing up and asking where this rain of Kassams is coming from? Why didn't we ask the deep questions? Why didn't we wonder whether this was the right way -- even for those of us who wanted to divide the land? Why did we only examine the Disengagement when 'orange' youth burned tires in the street? Why did [Sharon confidant and Disengagement architect] Dov Weisglas not tell us there would be a rain of Kassams on Sderot? Because this wasn't popular and because there was a strong prime minister [Ariel Sharon] with a firm hold on the central hubs of the media.
Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland, Chairman of the National Security Council and one of the Disengagement's chief architects: There was no forward contemplation. The Disengagement contributed nothing to a solution to the conflict...There was no discussion of its merits. When I was tasked with planning it, all that existed was the word 'Disengagement' used by Sharon at the Herzliya Conference...I was given four months to plan, but Dov Weisglas was already committing to the Americans and leaking details of the withdrawal plans to the press...The paradigm of two states for two nations is not implementable. Perhaps the whole world agrees to it, but on the ground, it simply cannot be done.
Avri Gilad, broadcaster and TV personality who supported
Disengagement: I supported the Disengagement. I was mistaken. The way
it was carried out was a crime.
From a practical perspective, pragmatic and seeing the situation for what it is -- the orange public was right...Large segments of the public supported the plan out of general ideological reasons.
Brig.-Gen. (Res.) Moshe Ya'alon, IDF Chief of Staff at the time
the government decided to carry out the Disengagement: "There is no
escaping the fact that the background leading to the decision was a
political crisis -- the decline in support for the prime minister, and
added to that was a personal crisis -- the investigations into
corruption...Examining the Disengagement in hindsight opposite
Israel's interests, it was the worst possible...Israel withdrew from
every millimeter, including evacuating settlements, received nothing
in return, and thus created a very problematic precedent."
Ron Ben Yishai, senior journalist for military affairs: The
fact that they mixed the IDF up with the Disengagement, that the army
was forced to do the job of the police, was a heavy blow to
motivation. Not to mention that the IDF didn't train for an entire
year, during which it dealt only with evacuations. We have to put the
IDF back in uniform.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a major backer of the Disengagement: The more we take the army out of the territories, the more terror nests develop.
Professor Aharon Tzachnover, 2004 Nobel Prize Laureate for Chemistry, vocal Disengagement advocate: I supported the idea of Disengagement last year, which seemed to me an act of unilateral volunteerism toward the Palestinians. I hoped our kindness would be returned, but I was mistaken. After our unilateral withdrawal we received only terrorism and more terrorism. The unilateral idea is bankrupt and along with it the party soap bubble of a party that was established on its basis.
Yoel Marcus, left-wing commentator for Haaretz and ardent
Disengagement supporter: To my great sorrow, it now seems that the
extremist and pessimistic settlers were those who were right. The
Palestinians do not wish to recognize Israel and have not accepted its
existence. And now, with the election of Hamas, they again are not
missing any opportunity to miss an opportunity...They turned the
communities of Gush Katif into launch sites against residents of the
Negev and particularly the town of Sderot. The warnings of Ariel
Sharon and Dan Halutz that 'If they will fire Kassams after Gaza is
evacuated, Israel's response will be harsh' has not really frightened
them.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the first to float Ariel Sharon's
Disengagement plan to the media: It must be said that that the
experience we had in Lebanon and Gaza are not encouraging. We
completely withdrew from Gaza, and every day they fire Kassam rockets
on Israelis.
Yaron London, Ynet commentator and host of Channel 10 London &
Kirshenbaum Show, supported Disengagement: Nothing was built on the
rubble except for terrorist training camps...The wall does not
guarantee quiet: Kassams fly over it and terrorists dig under it.
Meirav Michaeli, TV anchor and radio personality identified with
left-wing and feminist activism: The Disengagement left thousands of
families without a home, escalated the situation in Gaza and did not
advance the security situation at all.
Vice-Premier Shimon Peres, Oslo Accords architect and withdrawal
proponent: The Disengagement idea is over. There will not be a repeat
in Judea and Samaria of the Gaza withdrawal. There will not be a
massive evacuation of settlements...Public opinion is against the idea
of another unilateral Disengagement. Therefore, this won't occur, at
least in the next five year, or even the next decade.
Yehoshua Sobol, author and prominent left-wing spokesperson and
proponent of left-wing refusal to serve in the IDF: Nothing is being
built there [in Gaza] these days. Nothing -- nothing but destructive
activities. This assumption, that it is enough or us to leave
territory in order for the other side to stop its attacks has proven
false...I do not want to see a situation where we once again fold, in
Judea and Samaria, and the next day Kassam rockets begin to be fired
on Kfar Saba, Raanana and Herzliya.
Shabak (General Security Service) chief Yuval Diskin: The Disengagement was first and foremost a process of uprooting. There is in Israel a Laundromat of words. They call it an evacuation or all sorts of other things, but there was an uprooting here.
IDF Central Commander Maj.-Gen. Yair Naveh: I claimed from the beginning that there was not [a single] security consideration in the Disengagement. This was a purely political decision whose motivations will perhaps someday be investigated.
Yair Lapid, popular TV personality and commentator: The Disengagement was not carried out despite the settlers but because of them. It never had anything to do with the Palestinians, with demographics, with a peace agreement, with the IDF or with any of the other explanations given and reviewed over and over. The drive was one thing: to teach the settlers a lesson in modesty. The Disengagement is now examined with other tools -- political, strategic and demographic -- and it doesn't stand up to the test, especially while Kassams are falling on Sderot and Ashkelon.
We left Lebanon and the Hizbullah attack us from Lebanon. We left Gaza and the terror groups attack us from Gaza. The region that is most quiet right now is Judea and Samaria. Even the biggest leftists are faced with the creeping heretical though: perhaps it wasn't the occupation?
MK Amira Dotan (Kadima), head of the Knesset committee for Gush
Katif evacuees, supported the Disengagement: In hi-tech, when you do
something, you examine it fully before you say it is OK. Here, we did
something without examining what would happen afterward. There was no
working model created beforehand.
Absorption Minister Ze'ev Boim, who supported the Disengagement as
Deputy Defense Minister in the Sharon government and left the Likud to
join Kadima: From the beginning, the plan had some question marks
which, after the fact, became clear were serious defects in the plan.
We lost the Philadelphi Corridor [between Gaza and Egypt, though which
weapons and explosives are smuggled -- ed.]. It was a mistake to give
up control of Philadelphi.
Senior TV newsanchor Dan Margalit, a strong supporter of
Disengagement: Ehud Olmert has lost the mandate for a withdrawal from
Judea and Samaria that he received when elected on the platform of
such a withdrawal. When such a withdrawal is once again presented, I
will think again before choosing it at the ballot box.
Maj.-Gen. Gershon HaCohen, who commanded the Disengagement and
expressed his public agreement with it prior to implementation: What
happened last year was a crime, and I was part of this crime against
the Jewish nation. What is happening now -- the Second Lebanon War --
is the punishment for what happened last year.
Ezra HaLevi is a writer for Arutz Sheva (www.IsraelNationalNews.com). |
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A CLASSIC CASE OF 'BATTERED NATION SYNDROME'
Posted by Michael Freund, May 30, 2007. |
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Next week marks 40 years since Israel's miraculous victory in the 1967 Six Day War. Yet now, it seems, many Israelis are gripped by a failure to appreciate this astonishing triumph -- with some practically mourning the fact that we won the war rather than go down in defeat. As I suggest in the column below in the Jerusalem Post, this appears to be a case of "Battered Nation Syndrome" -- with the only possible cure that the Jewish state stop apologizing for its survival. |
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It was 40 years ago next week that tiny little Israel, facing destruction at the hands of its enemies, miraculously emerged triumphant from the 1967 Six Day War. Existential fear quickly dissolved into breathtaking joy as the Jewish state decisively vanquished its foes, reuniting Jerusalem and reclaiming large swathes of our ancient homeland. Our adversaries, who had gleefully pledged to feed us to the fish in the Mediterranean Sea, were forced to look on as their troops beat a hasty and humiliating retreat. The stunning victory of 1967 had all the markings of Divine intervention. It was a gift from Heaven to a besieged and beleaguered people. After nearly two millennia we were reunited at last with the cradle of Jewish civilization in Judea and Samaria, and with the heart of the nation, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. And yet, it seems, four decades later, many Israelis still just cannot forgive themselves for winning. In what has become an annual ritual, a variety of media pundits, left-wing activists and even some officials launch into mournful sessions of hand-wringing and breast-beating. They bemoan the outcome of the Six Day War, grumble about Israel's success in reclaiming Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and sound as if they would have preferred going down in defeat. Displaying an extraordinary lack of appreciation and an exceptional lack of historical perspective, these critics long to give up the hard-earned fruits of that war of self-defense, all in the vain hope of mollifying an incorrigible foe. HOW COULD so many forget so much in so short a time? Even now, as Palestinians fire rockets daily at southern Israel from the very same Gaza Strip that we handed over to them two years ago, the proponents of appeasement still refuse to acknowledge the error of their ways. It seems the only way to explain this phenomenon is to borrow a term from psychology: Certain parts of the Israeli public and its leadership are clearly suffering from what I refer to as "Battered Nation Syndrome." Like a victim of ongoing domestic abuse, the advocates of surrender to the Palestinians cannot muster the wherewithal to hit back at the abuser. All the hallmarks of the syndrome are there. Naturally, this distorted world-view results in an almost obsessive focus on Israel's perceived faults as lying at the root of the conflict with our neighbors. Consequently, the actions of the Palestinians are downplayed and minimized, excused and ignored, and Israel's policy-making process instead begins to resemble a good, ol'-fashioned. self-inflicted guilt trip. But it is time to break out of this collective funk and start viewing the world the way it really is. TO BEGIN with, Israel should stop apologizing for defeating the Arab states in 1967. Like any other nation, we have the right to defend ourselves, and we have the right not to be thrown in the sea. What many of the defeatists conveniently choose to ignore is what led up to the 1967 war: increased Palestinian terror, massive Arab military buildups, and public threats by Arab leaders to annihilate the Jewish state. They also forget that two years prior to 1967, back when Israel did not yet "occupy" the territories, prime minister Levi Eshkol put forward a proposal that could have resolved the Arab-Israeli conflict once and for all. Speaking to the Knesset on May 17, 1965, Eshkol suggested turning the 1949 armistice agreements into peace treaties, and offered to hold direct talks with the Arab states in order to do so. Pointing out that Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, combined, had 60 times the land area of the Jewish state, the premier noted that there was no logical reason for the Arabs to continue to pursue war. Instead, he offered a vision of peace that included open borders, bilateral trade, economic cooperation and freedom of access to the holy sites. All he asked in return, said Eshkol, was "full respect for the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of all the States in the region." But Israel's offer of peace was met two years later with a clear and unequivocal Arab response. Egypt and Syria mobilized their armies and their people, and vowed to destroy the Jewish state. Hence, Israel neither asked for war nor initiated it in 1967, so let's stop acting like we did. We do not owe the Arabs anything for defeating them, and we certainly do not need to give them any further territory from which to attack us. They tried to kill us. We won. Get over it. This appeared in the Jerusalem Post
Send comments and feedback to me at letters@jpost.com |
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TIME TO CHANGE COURSE
Posted by Ted Belman, May 30, 2007. |
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This was written by Moshe Yaalon, a former IDF chief of staff. It
appeared as an opinion piece in Ynet News
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It is not in vain that Michael Oren's book Six Days of War begins with Fatah's botched terror attack under the orders of Yasser Arafat on the night of December 31st, 1964. The attack aimed to strike at the national water carrier and to ignite the region. Its failure didn't prevent the rising Fatah leader from publishing an official victory statement that glorified the "Jihad duty" and to set January 1st 1965 as the date marking the organization's establishment. Indeed, the Six Day War changed the face of the Middle East. From a historic perspective it can be viewed as marking the beginning of the end of national-secular Arab ideology, which in turn encouraged the emergence of Islamic-Jihadist ideologies; it can also be viewed as marking the beginning of the end (temporarily?) of conventional wars between armies and the shifting of the threat on the State of Israel. However, I am of the opinion that more than anything the Six Day War influenced the way Israelis perceived themselves, it also impacted internal discourse pertaining to border conflicts and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the one hand, Israeli self assurance, which was naturally emboldened by the shining military victory, led to complacency until the outcome of the Yom Kippur War, while on the other hand it led to the willingness for territorial concessions aimed at achieving peace. The cornerstone of Israeli policy since the end of the war did not advocate annexation of territories nor a return to 1967 borders. This perception, along with failed political conduct to date, has ultimately led to significant erosion in the achievements of the Six Day War and has vastly detracted from the Israeli position, while also adversely affecting the Zionist narrative and its achievements. Israelis who sought to reach final-status agreement with the Palestinians through "land for peace" obscured the difference between resolving the conflict with Egypt via Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Those same elements went even further by obscuring the Palestinian demand for all of the Land of Israel rather then territories occupied in 1967 only, and ignored the persistent Palestinian refusal -- which has been in place since the birth of Zionism -- to partition the nation. These elements vastly contributed to the erosion of Israel's positions upon recognizing the Palestinian peoples' right for self determination without insisting on mutual Palestinian recognition for the Jewish people and an independent Jewish State. The self assurance that came in wake of the Six Day War created a sense of being "strong enough to take risks" -- which is reminiscent of the time of the Oslo Accords. This self confidence led to the loss of the attitude associated with a society facing constant struggle. Palestinian terror began before 1967 The sincere desire to achieve peace was interpreted as fatigue and led to public willingness to accept the "golden calves" presented as hope by politicians, spin doctors and the media, but which were quickly shattered. Those striving to return to 1967 borders, from within Israel and abroad, are taking advantage of the Six Day War triumph to argue that the problem lies in the "occupation" and that Israeli relinquishment of these territories will bring the longed-for peace. Yet the botched terror attack on December 31, 1964 reminds us that Palestinian terror began prior to the takeover of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Since then, additional proof accumulated over time attests to the Palestinian leadership's refusal to end the conflict based on such a solution. Moreover, recent statements by leaders of the Israeli Arab community expressed their refusal to recognize the State of Israel's right to exist as an independent Jewish State. Events of the past years, the Palestinian failure to adhere to agreements and obligations within the Oslo framework, the launching of a terror war in September 2000, and the situation in Gaza following disengagement -- could have served as opportunities to "reveal the true face" of the Palestinian leadership and its intentions to undermine the irrelevant concept of a "two state solution" within the ancient Land of Israel's western borders. Grounding the "two-state solution" discourse to a halt among the Israeli public and in the international arena is a prerequisite for encouraging a new direction of thought with regards to the conflict and possible ways of resolving it. The key to moving away from this concept is Israel's clear understanding of the problem, forging internal agreement around this understanding, and a willingness to struggle for it. The shining victory of the Six Day war has paradoxically turned into the starting point of the "retrenchment and withdrawal battle" over the Zionist narrative we are currently engaged in -- until we make an about face. Ted Belman is a Canadian and editor of the IsraPundit website |
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GANGING UP ON HEBRON JEWRY
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 30, 2007. |
| B'Tselem and the Association for Human Rights In Israel (ACRI) have accused the 500 Jews of Hebron and the Army of terrorizing the 115,000 Arabs of Hebron. The report claims that about half of the Arab houses and shops in the city center have closed, as a result, and thousands of Arabs have left the city. The report might have acknowledged that all of B'Tselem's researchers are Arabs and that both organizations receive extensive funding from foreign organizations that are anti-Zionist, uninformed, and unfair. A week earlier, an IDF official proved that ACRI had brought false data to the Knesset, and MKs rebuked ACRI and suggested its claims be greeted with skepticism. 'The report terms Hebron a 'Palestinian city.' The historical truth, however, is that Hebron is the world's oldest Jewish city, one of the four holy cities in Judaism, and the home of a Jewish community at all times until it was eradicated in the ghastly Arab massacre of 1929.' 'The restoration of Jewish life where it had been cut off by violent means is legal and historical justice. Objection to this kind of reclamation reflects a patently anti-Semitic approach.' Arafat obtained control over the rest of Hebron by signing an agreement recognizing the Jewish people's right to reside in the old Jewish Quarter. Contrary to international agreements, however, the report insists that the government expel the Jews. The report claims that, due to Jewish residency, the center of the city and marketplace is closed. The main Jewish neighborhood isn't in the center but in the ancient Jewish Quarter. It comprises houses that Jews owned in 1929. For some years, the confiscated Jewish property had been used as a marketplace. Now there is a notably modern marketplace in the true urban center of the city, elsewhere. Jews have the legal right to enter the P.A. part of the city, but the IDF won't let them, lest they be murdered by the nice Palestinian Arabs there. The Arabs keep Jews from visiting neighboring holy sites, also the Jews' right under the agreement. Arab and government violations of Jewish rights are not covered in the report. (I can't recall those organizations ever covering the extensive violations of Jewish rights, such as the official but secret government policy of legal harassment of Hebron Jewry. That policy makes a mockery of the report's claims that the government does not enforce the law against the 'settlers.') Yes, Arabs have more or less been kept from using the old marketplace commercially or residentially, but only because they used it to attack their neighbors. (Is that the 'side-by-side' living that Sec. Rice favors?) Thus Arabs are restricted from 3% of Hebron, and Jews are restricted from 97% of Hebron. The Supreme Court thought it unfair to restrict the Jews, who would be the victim of Arab attacks. Justice would be to restrict the population from which the predation emerges. When restrictions upon Arabs were eased, Arabs attacked and murdered Jews. The report emphasizes Arab hardships -- they may be searched or arrested. It ignores Jewish hardships -- they may be killed. Indeed, the Arabs have been firing at the Jews for years, particularly in the past year and-a-half. The report claims that Jews attack Arabs, but excluded from the report that Israel's Deputy Attorney-General wrote to them that Jewish attacks on Arabs have declined significantly. (The NY Times would love to report such attacks, if there were any. I haven't seen such reports in decades.) Another grievance reported is that Jews seize Arab property. To the contrary, Arabs have been living in houses seized from Jews. Jews have had to pay to get the property back! The self-proclaimed civil rights organizations ignore the Arab expropriation and call houses repurchased by the Jews, stolen. The P.A. has a program to ''strangle the Jewish community in Hebron' by forcing Palestinian families to move into the Israeli area... When homeowners are not interested in living in the area, the Palestinian Authority takes action to populate the properties with problematic tenants including low-life and criminal types and released terrorists' families. The new tenants receive benefits such as exemptions from taxes, rent, water, and electricity; sometimes they even receive a regular monthly allowance... The authors of the report concealed this fact from the public.' The report ignores P.A. violations of Arab rights when it compels Arab shopkeepers to operate in the unprofitable Jewish backwater of the city, on pain of losing their business franchise altogether (Arutz-7, 5/)14). Yes, thousands of Arabs have left the city. Tens of thousands have left Yesha. Wouldn't you, if you lived in the P.A. subject to chaos, unemployment, and gunmen? How unfair to blame such an exodus on the Jews! It reminds one of the charge that the Jewish resistance expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs, during the War for Independence. Thousands of the Arab higher class fled from terrorism and the expectation of war even before the Arab attempt at genocide began. That's the Arabs' fault. Since the Arabs attempted genocide, I think the Israelis would have been within their rights to have expelled the 140,000 who remained, and they were out of their minds not to have. In my article 14,994, I document the flight of thousands of Arabs from the P.A. to Jerusalem. Arab homosexuals also flee from the P.A., to Tel Aviv. The so-called Israeli human rights organizations are not interested in human rights, justice, or truth. They are extensions of Arab propaganda. 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 richardshulman5verizon.net |
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BRITAIN'S OBSESSIVE BOYCOTTERS
Posted by Gerald M. Steinberg, May 30, 2007. |
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This appeared today in the Jerusalem Post
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180450949000&pagename= JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull |
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While Israelis are targeted by rockets from Gaza and officials from the "elected Palestinian government" threaten attacks by female suicide bombers, calls for anti-Israeli boycotts based on human rights claims would appear to be both immoral and absurd. But the small group that controls Britain's trade unions has managed to combine both traits, and it is escalating its political warfare in parallel with Palestinian violence. A vote on yet another anti-Israel boycott proposal is scheduled to take place at the end of May, this time by the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU). This is the third such academic boycott campaign in Britain in two years, coming after a divestment debate within the Anglican Church, a "boycott Israel" movement led by British activists in the World Medical Association, and the adoption of a similar program by the National Union of Journalists. Beyond the obvious violations of the academic process inherent in a political boycott, this effort is part of a carefully prepared strategy aimed at isolating the Jewish state. The crucial difference, however, between the previous attempts and the current boycott battles, including the UCU effort, is the presence of a serious counterweight on the political battlefield to challenge the anti-Israel and often anti-Semitic slogans and myths. Sober and morally-minded British academics on the Left, led by a group known as Engage, as well as the "Fair Play Campaign Group," are particularly active. And under the IAB (International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom), many Israeli academics have also become active in countering the pervasive propaganda and misinformation.
FOR THE radicals, including obsessive ideologues affiliated with the Socialist Workers Party, history, facts and details are irrelevant. While always invoking "the occupation," the decades of Arab warfare, terrorism, incitement and rejectionism are erased from the record. This is not the result of ignorance but of willful conviction, and nothing will change their anti-Israel, anti-US and anti-democracy agendas. They will continue to use terms such as "apartheid" and "racist" to demonize Israel. As made clear in recent statements, it is Israel's existence that they reject, and not specific policies. However, the main purpose of the confrontations between boycott opponents and advocates is not to convince the fanatics, but to address the much larger group that knows very little about Israel and the conflict. After many years of avoidance, in the false hope that the absurdity of these boycotts against Israel would become obvious, there is now a coherent strategy that has a chance of success. Via vigorous debate, the goal is to encourage those who are not obsessed by Israel to break with the radicals. In trade union votes, these moderate voices will determine the outcome, and persuading many of the injustice inherent in the one-sided singling-out of Israel can defeat the boycott resolutions. This is a formidable task. The impact of the radical fringe has been greatly magnified by powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Britain that have also been campaigning for years. Well-financed pressure groups such as War on Want, Christian Aid, World Vision, Pax Christi, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch take the lead in singling out and systematically condemning Israel. They repeat the same invented histories, claiming that Israel was "founded in sin," and use invented evidence to condemn Israeli responses to terrorism and aggression. Many journalists who share these prejudices repeat the claims at face value. AS A result, those who know little about Israel or the Palestinians accept the agendas of the activists. Having heard so much about Israeli "disproportionate response" against attacks from Hizbullah and Hamas, and about the "apartheid wall" (as opposed to a security barrier that has prevented untold attacks by Palestinian suicide bombers), members of the union leadership who focus on other issues accept the attacks against Israel. There is evidence that some members of this group are beginning to question the obsessive anti-Israel propaganda. In 2005, after the leaders of the Association of University Teachers voted to endorse the boycott, members forced a second vote, which resulted in a reversal. They realized that a partisan boycott was unjust and antithetical to the principles of academic freedom. (A similar re-vote in the case of a second union -- NATFHE -- was avoided when this group dissolved in a merger with the AUT to become the UCU). In the Anglican Church, in which the politics resembles the trade union movement, a majority of the leaders overturned the attempt to become involved in a one-sided and counterproductive political attack. More recently, many members of the National Union of Journalists are demanding a revote after being embarrassed by the obvious pro-Palestinian bias formally adopted by their organization, which showed that British media coverage of the Middle East was systematically biased. These changes, while relatively small, demonstrate that attempts to demonize and boycott Israel are not inevitable, and that the inherently immoral and absurd nature of such campaigns can be exposed. Mr. Steinberg is the executive director of NGO Monitor and professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University. Contact him at steing@mail.biu.ac.il |
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KEY RETREAT PROMOTER YOEL MARCUS: OSLO DEAD, DISENGAGEMENT "SERIOUS MISTAKE"
Posted by Sergio Tessa (HaDaR), May 29, 2007. |
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The article below is entitled "Brains and Brawn." It was written by
Yoel Marcus, the HaAretz columnist and Oslo and deportation
MAIN INTELLECTUAL PUSHER. Sound like the one who throws a child from
the balcony and then says: "OOHPS!" The article was published today in
Ha'aretz Dr. Aaron Lerner -- IMRA: Yoel Marcus played an important role as key supporter and advocate of retreat from Gaza. He suggested on the pages of Haaretz that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would be able to avoid his legal problems if he launched a withdrawal initiative and, voila!, soon thereafter Marcus was Sharon's confidant, enjoying scoops about Sharon's decision to launch -- what a coincidence -- a retreat plan. Marcus transformed into Sharon's biggest fan and leading cheerleader for retreat. |
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1. No country in the world would sit around and watch one of its cities being bombarded for six years, powerless to bring the violence to an end. 2. With all due respect to the Palestinians, they must be complete idiots to be fighting one another. As Abba Eban famously put it, the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss every opportunity. 3. The dreams spun at Oslo have been shattered for good. All the stars of this show have died, become weaklings or disappeared from the stage. Challenged by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Fatah has lost the reins of government and the confidence of its people. The handshakes on the White House lawn and the Nobel Peace Prize have faded away like a dream. 4. Ariel Sharon's unilateral disengagement turned out to be a serious mistake. It gave terror a boost, allowed the Iranians to call the shots in Gaza instead of the Egyptians, fueled anarchy in the Palestinian street and pushed the chances for an agreement even further away. 5. At the same time, our settlers have become more radical. The next evacuation, if there ever is one, could end in bloodshed. Extremists on both sides are nourishing one another: The Jews have gone back to their dream of not giving up an inch, and the Palestinians have gone back to their dream of a greater Palestine. 6. After six years of Qassam rockets, Sderot has become an item on the international news. At first, these weapons were pooh-poohed as primitive metal pipes. They could not be aimed; they did not always explode; and they could not hit Sharon's ranch. From there, they moved up to primitive but lethal. Israeli defense officials were so dismissive of Qassams that they would not spend money on an interception system. They were right: We need to be getting ready for intercontinental missiles. 7. Very few people in this country of soaring stocks and high-rolling officials have ever stopped to consider what their homes might look like and how their kids might grow up if Qassams were landing in Ramat Aviv and Herzliya Pituah. 8. We cannot wipe out the Qassam launchers because they are much too primitive for a sophisticated army like ours. 9. The people launching the Qassams are not exactly quaking in their boots. They do not give a hoot when we say: "If we don't have quiet, you won't have quiet." What we need to get rid of over there is their motivation. 10. Every time we evacuate Sderot rather than Beit Hanun, we have lost the battle. 11. All this grumbling about bomb shelters is a bunch of hot air. First of all, shelters signify weakness. Second of all, this is like giving an aspirin to a cancer patient and resigning ourselves to the fact that Palestinian terror will be with us forever. Are we going to let a primitive hunk of pipe dictate how we live? Jacob Perry is right when he says that spending on shelters, in our case, is like throwing in the towel and giving up on the war on terror. 12. Major General Yisrael Tal is in favor of the "hate for hate" approach: Set up guns facing the "sources of rocket fire," and for every Qassam launched at us, we give back double and triple. Citizens might be killed? And Israeli citizens aren't? 13. An improvement on the Tal approach is the ultimatum: Every time a Qassam is fired, Israel will issue an immediate announcement that within three hours buildings x, y and z, on this or that street, will be blown up. This will give the tenants time to leave and no one will accuse us of killing women and children. 14. Moshe Ya'alon and a few other old-time generals think that we should carry out a Defensive Shield-type operation in Gaza -- just mop up and leave. On the other hand, we would have to be idiots to go into teeming Gaza when we pretty much know that they have stashes of long-range Katyusha rockets capable of reaching Kiryat Gat and Ashkelon and knocking out power in half the country. 15. So what are we going to do with Gaza? Occupy it? We have already done that. What have we achieved by that, apart from occupation? Haven't we learned that occupation is like riding on a tiger's back? All the fleas go along for the ride. There are no overnight solutions. What we need are leaders endowed with both brains and brawn -- courageous leaders prepared to talk to Syria, Saudi Arabia and all the Sunni Islamic countries in order to reach a comprehensive agreement. Only that will put an end to Hamas. 16. The time has come to stop going into a panic every time Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to destroy Israel. He is just a show-off with a very big mouth. The ayatollahs are the ones who say what's what and make the decisions in Iran. They will cut off his hands before he ever reaches the red button. Contact Sergio Tessa at HaDar-Israel@verizon.net |
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SITCOM POLITICIANS IN WARTIME
Posted by UCI, May 29, 2007. |
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Below is Caroline Glick's article in yesterday's Jerusalem Post. It is prefaced by a Dry Bones cartoon -- the cartoon was not part of the original article. |
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If life were a television show then the Labor Party primaries would be a Seinfeld episode. Like Seinfeld, yesterday's primaries for Labor's top-spot were about nothing but being on the air. The frontrunners, former prime minister and IDF chief of staff Ehud Barak, and former Navy commandant and Shin Bet chief MK Ami Ayalon, had no positions to speak of on the issues of the day. They had nothing to say about the Iranian nuclear program. They had nothing to say about Syria's daily threats of war. They had nothing to say about Gaza's post-withdrawal transformation into a mini-Taliban ruled Afghanistan replete with training bases for all the major global terror networks. Rather than relate to the threats that Israel faces, they showed Israel their faces. They preened before the Labor voters, regaling them with tales of their glory and wisdom. And then each assembled a star-studded array of retired generals and party intellectuals and reporters to tell us how wonderful each of them are and how shallow and corrupt all of the other candidates are. They attributed the stature of strategy to bromides about their commitment to peace, and then spoke about how and at what price they will remain in Ehud Olmert's government.
THEIR WILLINGNESS to remain in the Olmert government was key. Because that was what this primary was all about: acquiring and preserving power -- for the candidates, for the Labor party and for the Israeli Left as a whole. The underlying theme of the five-month long Labor primary was that power must be maintained at all costs. The party must remain in the government because more frightening than Iran or Syria or Hamas or Hizbullah is the specter of Knesset elections. Those elections, the candidates, their spinmeisters and media comrades all agree must be avoided because everyone knows what elections will bring. Allowing the nation to determine its government will bring Likud and Binyamin Netanyahu to power. Allowing the nation to choose it leaders means allowing the nation to reject them. The fact that today the sole idea around which the Labor party stands united is the need to prevent Likud and Netanyahu from gaining power makes it indistinguishable from the ruling Kadima candidates list. The lengths that Kadima is willing to go to remain in power were made clear in a little item in Haaretz last week.
THE NEWSPAPER'S political commentator Yossi Verter reported on a meeting that took place at the home of a rabbi in the south who has gained a following of politicians for his ability to predict the future. A cabinet minister from Kadima was present at the meeting where the rabbi predicted that a terrible war will break out within the next month to three months. The rabbi then consoled his guests by claiming that the war will save Olmert's government. As Verter put it, "The minister left the meeting feeling at once pessimistic and optimistic: Pessimistic because there will be war, optimistic because according to the rabbi, war means survival, that is, Olmert is sitting pretty." And unfortunately, on at least one count, the rabbi is certainly right. The probability of war in the near future is high. The fact that this is the case screams out from every quarter. Speaking Saturday in Isfahan, one of the Iranian cities made famous in recent years for its illicit nuclear facilities, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again threatened Israel with annihilation. "Sixty year of invasion and assassination is enough," he said. "If you do not cease invasion and massacre, soon the hand of power of the nations of the region will rub you criminals with earth." For his part, Syria's dictator Bashar Assad, who was just resoundingly reelected by a national referendum which pitted him against no one, is busily threatening Israel with war while using his al-Qaida surrogates in Fatah al Islam to overthrow the Lebanese government. As the Syrian dissident Reform Syria Party revealed this week, Fatah al Islam's commander is Shakir Absi, an until recently jailed Syrian Air Force officer. Syrian intelligence released Absi from prison and sent him to Lebanon to foment the overthrow of the Lebanese government. Then of course there are the Iranian and Syrian Palestinian proxies, Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad which are fighting a mini-war against Israel in the south. Speaking at the cabinet meeting on Sunday, Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin explained that the IDF operations in Gaza have in no way diminished the Palestinians' military capabilities. Hamas, Diskin said can turn its missiles and mortars on Ashkelon any time it wishes.
AND NOT only is the Olmert government failing to degrade the Palestinians' military capacity through limited air strikes, its feckless diplomacy has also failed to prevent Hamas's acquisition of international legitimacy. Britain, for instance has reacted to the abduction of BBC reporter Alan Johnston in Gaza by embracing Hamas. As British architects, physicians, vicars and professors line up to boycott Israel, the British glitterati and incoming prime minister Gordon Brown happily shared a stage with Hamas spokesman and terrorist Ghazi Hamad at a literary festival in Wales. Hamad wowed his audience by spreading lies about his non-existent efforts to free Johnston. The British embrace of jihadists is being matched by the collapse of the US policy on the war. Over the weekend The Boston Globe reported that the US closed down the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group, an interagency working group established last year to undermine the Syrian and Iranian regimes. The group was disbanded because the Bush administration has abandoned its policy of regime change in both countries. US Ambassador in Iraq Ryan Crocker's meeting yesterday with his Iranian counterpart in Baghdad is just the latest evidence of this US embrace of appeasement. Speaking of the significance of the American move, Iraqi parliamentarian Mithal al Alousi said that by opening direct contacts with the Iranians, the US "gives Iran guardianship over the Middle East." All of these developments bode ill for Israel. And there are voices in Israel who understand this and have clear visions for defending the country against the gathering storm. While Barak, Ayalon, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the other Labor candidates spent last weekend attacking one another while committing themselves to preventing general elections, and Olmert and his political advisors mouthed talking points about the need for "stability" which can only be achieved by preventing elections, other voices eked out a message of resolve and wisdom.
IN AN interview with the Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu cogently explained his strategy of using free markets to exert pressure on the Iranian regime that could lead to its overthrow. For the past six months, Netanyahu has been making frequent visits to the US to try to convince state and local governments to divest their public employee pension funds from companies that do business with Iran. Netanyahu explained that Americans across the political spectrum can agree to the principle that "a regime that promotes genocide cannot receive American taxpayers' savings . . . through European intermediaries." In Netanyahu's view, squeezing the companies that invest in Iran's oil industries will reduce the companies' stock prices and force them to end their cooperation with Iran. The foreign pullout will paralyze the Iranian economy and force Iranian economic elites to pressure the government to end its nuclear weapons program, or perhaps bring down the government. While it is far from clear that the divestment program, which was originally conceived by the Washington based Center for Security Policy, can in fact cause Iran to end its nuclear weapons program, it is absolutely clear that the initiative will make it more difficult for Iran to freely advance it. That is, even if it is only partially successful, the plan to end US investment in companies that enable the Iranian regime to function, will limit the regime's maneuver room. While Netanyahu was promoting a plan to build financial coalitions against Iran, former IDF Chief of General Staff, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Moshe Ya'alon took to the airwaves back home to point to the dangers of the Olmert government's refusal to take action against Gaza. "The problem in Gaza won't go away, and no one can solve it for us, not Egypt, or an international force," Ya'alon said in an interview with Channel 2. While the Olmert government dithers and allows Sderot to be abandoned by residents it refuses to defend, Ya'alon said, "We have to get to the terrorists, get to their workshops and hit their infrastructure. We did it in Defensive Shield and we had our reservations before launching that operation too. You have to be blind to think entering Gaza in unnecessary." What we see in Netanyahu and Ya'alon as well as in their colleagues is that Israel needn't be led by people who think that war is preferable to elections. We needn't be sitting by passively as US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice advances James Baker's policy of selling out Israel for a temporary lull in the carnage in Iraq that could allow the US to meekly retreat. We needn't be discussing surrender of territory to regimes that are actively preparing to attack us. We needn't be listening to men who think that leadership of a country at war is nothing but a popularity contest. Many commentators have for months ignored Labor's symbiotic relationship with Kadima and argued wrongly that the fate of the Olmert government would be decided in the Labor primaries. Given the fact that Labor and Kadima have identical interests, there was never any chance that Labor would bolt the government. If Israelis wish to be led by men intent on defending us in our hour of peril, we need to be pressuring Olmert's other coalition partners -- Shas and Yisrael Beitenu -- to abandon him. If we allow these empty-headed, self-obsessed incompetents in Kadima and Labor to remain in power unchallenged, we can trust not only the rabbi's prediction of war. We can also trust that that war will be led as incompetently as the last one.
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!"
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HERTZ: THIS LAND IS MY LAND
Posted by Boris Celser, May 29, 2007. |
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The only solution to Occupation is letting every one know that: Fifty-one member countries -- the entire League of Nations -- unanimously declared on July 24, 1922: "Great piece of scholarship. Could be truly described as 'The Mandate for Palestine Bible.'" -- David Singer, Australian lawyer and convenor of Jordan is Palestine International. "This document should be distributed to all media outlets and
parliamentarians. The facts as laid out here knock the ground clean
from under all deniers." -- Melanie Phillips, British journalist and
author. Best known for her controversial column about
political and social issues which currently appears in the Daily Mail. For more see:
Boris Celser lives in Canada. Contact him at celser@telusplanet.net
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A RARE TRIP THROUGH HIZBULLAH'S SECRET TUNNEL NETWORK
Posted by Avodah, May 29, 2007. |
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This article was written by Nicholas Blanford and was published May
11, 2007 in the Christian Science Monitor
(www.csmonitor.com/2007/0511/p01s02-wome.html). This article is archived at IMRA -- Independent Media Review and
Analysis |
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Monitor reporter Nicholas Blanford provides an exclusive view inside one of the militant Shiite group's wartime hideouts. RSHAF, Lebanon After scrabbling up a slope in this desolate valley amid Lebanon's craggy southern hills, I found it: an ominous pitch-black hole partially blocked by a layer of rock. It would be a tight squeeze to get in. And going farther was potentially risky. Our discovery was so rare and revealing that it could have been booby-trapped with explosives. I checked for tripwire, but didn't see any. "Found it. It's open. We can get in," I called to my two colleagues, laboring up the hill. We were about to enter the secret world of Hizbullah, the militant Shiite group that battled Israel from this perch, and dozens of other hidden positions, last summer. We weren't sure what we'd find below, but were certain it would tell us a great deal about the capabilities of the Lebanese guerrillas that fought from these steep limestone hills covered in a dense undergrowth of scrub oak and juniper bushes. Pausing to catch my breath, I shrugged off my backpack and reached inside for a head lamp. As we climbed in, air chilled by the deep subterranean passageways wafted out of the entrance, a refreshing contrast to the blazing heat of the valley. Bunker hunting I had been hunting for one of Hizbullah's bunkers since the end of the 34-day war. It had been a frustrating exercise, to be sure. The bunkers and rocket-firing positions had been constructed in great secrecy, the entrances cunningly camouflaged, in remote valleys along the Lebanon-Israeli border. In addition to possible booby traps, cluster bombs, and other unexploded ordnance litter many of Hizbullah's abandoned "security zones" in valleys and hilltops along the border. In March, I was fortunate enough to have received map coordinates from a source that led me to a bunker, which could be accessed by a 20-foot shaft. A second series of map coordinates, which I tapped into a global-positioning system (GPS) device, led us to this spot about two miles north of the Israeli border near Rshaf, earlier this week. As we followed the arrow on the GPS, we could hear the whine of an Israeli reconnaissance drone, invisible against the brilliant blue sky, as it slowly circled high above us. It was probably searching for signs of new Hizbullah activity. Going in Shining my head lamp into the entrance, I could see that the pile of boulders only ran for a few feet, after which the opening widened into a passageway. The walls and ceiling were reinforced with steel plates and girders painted black to prevent stray reflections from the sun giving away the concealed entrance. As I crawled in the tunnel, I watched carefully for scorpions and spiders. The passage ran horizontally for about 10 yards before doglegging to the right. It was little more than shoulder-width, and we had to stoop slightly to avoid hitting the ceiling with our heads. Once around the corner, the steel plates were painted white, this time to better reflect the electric lighting. Electric cables ran through white plastic tubes, fixed to the walls, leading to switches and glass-encased light sockets. A blue plastic hose running along the top of the wall carried the bunker's water supply. The first room we encountered was a small bathroom complete with an Arab-style latrine, a shower, a basin with taps, and a hot water boiler. There was even a drainage system constructed beneath the concrete floor. The air was blissfully cool after the sun-drenched heat of the valley. In two places along the main passage -- which must have been more than 60 yards long -- were vertical ventilation shafts covered by metal grills, ensuring a steady flow of fresh air. We were perhaps 100 to 150 feet underground at this point, deep enough to withstand almost anything in Israel's arsenal. I let my colleagues walk on and then switched off my head lamp. The sudden darkness and utter silence was unbearably oppressive. What must it have been like for the dozen or so fighters housed in this bunker, awaiting the advancing Israeli troops? There was a kitchen with storage shelves and an aluminum sink and taps. The white metal walls were mottled with brown rust. Every 10 yards or so along the passage was a heavy steel blast door that could be locked from the inside with a bolt. As far as I know, this is the largest and most elaborate bunker discovered so far. Just the effort that went into building it was extraordinary, and yet, it was constructed in complete secrecy. Most likely, no one outside Hizbullah knew it existed until two weeks ago, even with peacekeepers from the UN force known as UNIFIL (UN Interim Forces in Lebanon) patrolling the ground and Israeli aircraft watching from the skies above. Every piece of equipment, every steel plate, every girder, every door had to be carried by hand up the side of the valley and fitted into place inside the bunker. And there was no clue as to what happened to the hundreds of tons of quarried rock during the excavation work. Six years of building While it was widely suspected that Hizbullah had been building underground facilities in the six years prior to the war, it was only after the Aug. 14 cease-fire that their scale and sophistication was understood. Israel had seriously underestimated its foe and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other top officials are fighting for their political survival as a result. "It was a combination of a monumental intelligence failure -- the Israelis only found these bunkers by stepping on them -- and extremely professional and efficient work by Hizbullah," says Timur Goksel, a Beirut-based consultant on Mideast security issues and a former senior adviser to UNIFIL. Now, the bunkers are useless. Their locations having been compromised. Hizbullah has abandoned all the bunkers in the UNIFIL-patrolled zone along the border, redeploying to a newly constructed line of defense farther north. In this bunker, only a green sleeping mat and a simple metal bed frame remained. At the far end of the bunker, the narrow steel-lined passage broadened out into a rock cavern. In a niche to one side were four metal water tanks with the Arabic word for "sacrifice" painted across them. A twist of a tap at the bottom of one tank, and icy water gushed out. Several steep steps cut into the rock at the end of the cavern led to an access shaft about 15 feet high with a ladder soldered onto the lining of black metal plates. Climbing up led us back outside into a thicket of stubby oak trees about 40 yards from the entrance and farther up the hill. The Israeli drone still prowled overhead, its cameras perhaps hunting for the three mysterious people who had suddenly disappeared into thin air on the hill. Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com |
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LONDONISTAN CALLING
Posted by Christopher Hitchens, May 29, 2007. |
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for those who have not seen them yet, note the street signs in the Muslim demonstrations in London.
apparently the demonstrators are quite sure that they are going to win...and win big....otherwise they'd be worried that demanding genocide of all Danes for the 'crime' of insulting the Prophet (PBUH) might make some Brits and Danes angry. Sad commentary on London today, with photos of arcane but lethal street theatre from the 2006 cartoon intifada. The article below was written by Christopher Hitches and was published
in Vanity Fair
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They say that the past is another country, but let me tell you that it's much more unsettling to find that the present has become another country, too. In my lost youth I lived in Finsbury Park, a shabby area of North London, roughly between the old Arsenal football ground and the Seven Sisters Road. It was a working-class neighborhood, with a good number of Irish and Cypriot immigrants. Your food choices were the inevitable fish-and-chips, plus the curry joint, plus a strong pitch from the Greek and Turkish kebab sellers. There was never much "bother," as the British say, in Finsbury Park. Greeks and Turks might be fighting in Cyprus, but they never lifted a hand to one another in London. Many of the Irish had republican allegiances, but they didn't take that out on the local Protestants. And, even though both Cyprus and Ireland had all the grievances of partitioned former British colonies, it would have seemed inconceivable -- unimaginable -- that any of their sons would put a bomb on the bus their neighbors used. Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated along the main thoroughfare of Blackstock Road. This had had a good effect on the quality of the coffee and the spiciness of the grocery stores. But it felt odd, under the gray skies of London, to see women wearing the veil, and even swathed in the chador or the all-enveloping burka. Many of these Algerians, Bangladeshis, and others are also refugees from conflict in their own country. Indeed, they have often been the losers in battles against Middle Eastern and Asian regimes which they regard as insufficiently Islamic. Quite unlike the Irish and the Cypriots, they bring these far-off quarrels along with them. And they also bring a religion which is not ashamed to speak of conquest and violence. Until he was jailed last year on charges of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, a man known to the police of several countries as Abu Hamza al-Masri was the imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque. He was a conspicuous figure because, having lost the use of an eye and both hands in an exchange of views in Afghanistan, he sported an opaque eye plus a hook to theatrical effect. Not as nice as he looked, Abu Hamza was nonetheless unfailingly generous with his hospitality. Overnight guests at his mosque's sleeping quarters have included Richard Reid, the man in whose honor we now all have to take off our shoes at the airport, and Zacarias Moussaoui, the missing team member of September 11, 2001. Other visitors included Ahmed Ressam, arrested for trying to blow up LAX for the millennium, and Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian who planned to don an explosive vest and penetrate the American Embassy in Paris. On July 7, 2005 ("7/7," as the British call it), a clutch of bombs exploded in London's transport system. It emerged that one of the suicide murderers had been influenced by the preachings of Abu Hamza, as had two of those attempting to replicate the mission two weeks later. In fact, the British jihadist is becoming quite a feature on the international scene. In 1998, six British citizens of Pakistani and North African descent along with two other British residents were arrested by the government of Yemen and convicted of planning to kidnap a group of tourists and attack British targets in the port of Aden (scene of the near-sinking of the U.S.S. Cole two years later). One of the youths was the son of the tireless Abu Hamza, and another was his stepson. In December 2001, Richard Reid made his bid on the Paris-Miami flight. By then, two or three Britons had been killed in Afghanistan -- fighting on the side of the Taliban. The following year came the video butchering of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, whose abduction and murder were organized by another Briton -- a former student at the London School of Economics -- named Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. And the year after that, two British-passport holders, Asif Mohammed Hanif and Omar Khan Sharif, took part in a suicide attack on Mike's Place, a Tel Aviv bar. The British have always been proud of their tradition of hospitality and asylum, which has benefited Huguenots escaping persecution, European Jewry, and many political dissidents from Marx to Mazzini. But the appellation "Londonistan," which apparently originated with a sarcastic remark by a French intelligence officer, has come to describe a city which became home to people wanted for terrorist crimes as far afield as Cairo and Karachi. The capital of the United Kingdom is, in the words of Steven Simon, a former White House counterterrorism official, "the Star Wars bar scene," catering promiscuously to all manner of Islamist recruiters and fund-raisers for, and actual practitioners of, holy war. In the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings, which killed 52 civilians (including a young Afghan, Atique Sharifi, who had fled to London to escape the Taliban) and injured hundreds more, I found that American television interviewers were all asking me the same question: How can this be? Britain is the country of warm beer and cricket and rain-lashed seaside resorts, not a place of arms for exotic and morbid cults. British press coverage struck the same plaintive note. One of the murderers, Shehzad Tanweer, was a cricket enthusiast from Leeds, in Yorkshire, whose family ran a fish-and-chips shop. You can't get much more assimilated than that. Yet Britain's former head of domestic intelligence, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller (and you can't get much more British than that, either), said last year that there are more than "1,600 identified individuals" within the borders of the kingdom who are ready to follow Tanweer's example (including those in whose honor we now all have to part with our liquids and gels at the airport). And, according to Manningham-Buller, "over 100,000 of our citizens consider the July 2005 attacks in London justified." I told those who were interviewing me to go back and review the 1997 film of Hanif Kureishi's brilliant short story "My Son the Fanatic," and then to reread Monica Ali's 2003 novel, Brick Lane. The film is set in a dilapidated Yorkshire mill town very like the ones that spawned the 7/7 bombers, and the book is named for an area of East London that is now mainly Bengali and Muslim but has been home to successive waves of Huguenot and Jewish immigration. I remember leaving the cinema after seeing My Son the Fanatic, and feeling a heavy sense of depression, along with a strong premonition of trouble to come. In the figures of Parvez, the Pakistani cabdriver, and his morose son, Farid, Kureishi had captured the generational essence of the problem. In the 1960s, many Asians moved to Britain in quest of employment and education. They worked hard, were law-abiding, and spent much of their time combating prejudice. Their mosques were more like social centers. But their children, now grown, are frequently contemptuous of what they see as their parents' passivity. Often stirred by Internet accounts of jihadists in faraway countries like Chechnya or Kashmir, they perhaps also feel the urge to prove that they have not "sold out" by living in the comfortable, consumerist West. A recent poll by the Policy Exchange think tank captures the problem in one finding: 59 percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under British law rather than Shari'a; 28 percent would choose Shari'a. But among those 55 and older, only 17 percent prefer Shari'a, whereas in the 16-to-24 age group the figure rises to 37 percent. Almost exactly the same proportions apply when the question is whether or not a Muslim who converts to another faith should be put to death ... 'They remind me of the 60s revolutionaries in some ways," said Hanif Kureishi as we sat in one of London's finest Indian restaurants. "A lot of romantic talk, but a hard-core faction who will actually volunteer to go to training camps." Making a rather sharp distinction between the new young fundamentalists and the 1960s rebels, he added that he had never met a jihadist who wasn't militantly anti-Semitic. Monica Ali, whose lovely novel also emphasizes the generational divide and captures the Third World-type pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric, independently told me the same thing. She had seen British television cave in to extremists who did not want her book made into a film, and who threatened trouble if the cameras were brought to the East End, but this did not alarm her as much as "the way that hatred of the Jews has become absolutely standard, all across the community." It's interesting that it should be authors from Muslim backgrounds -- Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, the broadcaster and co-author of the Policy Exchange report Munira Mirza -- who are issuing the warnings. For the British mainstream, multiculturalism has been the official civic religion for so long that any criticism of any minority group has become the equivalent of profanity. And Islamic extremists have long understood that they need only suggest a racial bias -- or a hint of the newly invented and meaningless term "Islamophobia" -- in order to make the British cough and shuffle with embarrassment. Prince Charles himself, the heir to the throne and thus the heir to the headship of the Church of England, has announced his sympathy for Islam and his wish to be the head of all faiths and not just one. This may sound good, if absurd (a chinless prince who becomes head of a church because his mother dies?), but only if you forget that it was Prince Charles who encouraged the late King Fahd, of Saudi Arabia, to contribute more than a million pounds to build ... the Finsbury Park Mosque! If you want my opinion, our old district was a lot better off when the crowned heads of the world were busy neglecting it. Anyway, you can't be multicultural and preach murderous loathing of Jews, Britain's oldest and most successful (and most consistently anti-racist) minority. And you can't be multicultural and preach equally homicidal hatred of India, Britain's most important ally and friend after the United States. My colleague Henry Porter sat me down in his West London home and made me watch a documentary that he thought had received far too little attention when shown on Britain's Channel 4. It is entitled Undercover Mosque, and it shows film shot in quite mainstream Islamic centers in Birmingham and London (you can now find it easily on the Internet). And there it all is: foaming, bearded preachers calling for crucifixion of unbelievers, for homosexuals to be thrown off mountaintops, for disobedient and "deficient" women to be beaten into submission, and for Jewish and Indian property and life to be destroyed. "You have to bomb the Indian businesses, and as for the Jews, you kill them physically," as one sermonizer, calling himself Sheikh al-Faisal, so prettily puts it. This stuff is being inculcated in small children -- who are also informed that the age of consent should be nine years old, in honor of the prophet Muhammad's youngest spouse. Again, these were not tin-roof storefront mosques but well-appointed and well-attended places of worship, often the beneficiaries of Saudi Arabian largesse. It's not just the mosques, either. In West London there is a school named for Prince Charles's friend King Fahd, with 650 pupils, funded and run by the government of Saudi Arabia. According to Colin Cook, a British convert to Islam (initially inspired by the former crooner Cat Stevens) who taught there for 19 years, teaching materials said that Jews "engage in witchcraft and sorcery and obey Satan," and incited pupils to list the defects of worthless heresies such as Judaism and Christianity. What this shows is the utter futility of the soft-centered explanations of the 7/7 bombings and other outrages. It was argued for a while that the 7/7 perpetrators were victims of unemployment and poverty, until their remains were identified and it became clear that most of them came from educated and reasonably well-off backgrounds. The excuses then abruptly switched, and we were asked to believe that it was Tony Blair's policy in Iraq and Afghanistan that motivated the killers. Suppose the latter to be true. It would still be the case that they belong to a movement that hates Jews and Indians and all kuffar, or "unbelievers": a fanatical sect that believes itself entitled to use deadly violence at any time. The roots of violence, that is to say, are in the preaching of it, and the sanctification of it. If anything, Tony Blair is far too indulgent to this phenomenon. It is his policy of encouraging "faith schools" that has written sectarianism into the very fabric of British life. A non-Muslim child who lives in a Muslim-majority area may now find herself attending a school that requires headscarves. The idea of separate schools for separate faiths -- the idea that worked so beautifully in Northern Ireland -- has meant that children are encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to a distinct religious "community" rather than a nation. As Undercover Mosque also shows, Blair's government has appeased leading Muslim apologists by inviting them to join "commissions" to investigate the 7/7 attacks, and thus awarding them credibility well beyond their deserts. A preposterous and sinister individual named Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a man with a public record of support for Osama bin Laden, was made a convener of Blair's task force on extremism despite his stated belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are "Zionist controlled." It's impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated. Even at the time of the Satanic Verses affair, as long ago as 1989, Muslim demonstrations may have demanded Rushdie's death, but they did so, if you like, peacefully. And they confined their lurid rhetorical attacks to Muslims who had become apostate. But at least since the time of the Danish-cartoon furor, threats have been made against non-Muslims as well as ex-Muslims (see photograph), the killing of Shiite Muslim heretics has been applauded and justified, and the general resort to indiscriminate violence has been rationalized in the name of god. Traditional Islamic law says that Muslims who live in non-Muslim societies must obey the law of the majority. But this does not restrain those who now believe that they can proselytize Islam by force, and need not obey kuffar law in the meantime. I find myself haunted by a challenge that was offered on the BBC by a Muslim activist named Anjem Choudary: a man who has praised the 9/11 murders as "magnificent" and proclaimed that "Britain belongs to Allah." When asked if he might prefer to move to a country which practices Shari'a, he replied: "Who says you own Britain anyway?" A question that will have to be answered one way or another. 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 |
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EICHMANN'S PASSPORT WAS GIVEN TO HIM BY THE RED CROSS
Posted by Sergio Tessa (HaDaR), May 29, 2007. |
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This is a news item from
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The passport used by notorious Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to enter Argentina in 1950 has been found by accident in an archive in Buenos Aires. The passport, still in good condition, was issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. Eichmann was one of the main executors of Adolf Hitler's 'final solution', the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II. A judge, Maria Servini de Cubria, stumbled upon the document in court archives. The passport has been handed over to the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires, which confirmed the discovery. After Nazi Germany was defeated by the Allies, Eichmann fled to Argentina where he was tracked down and kidnapped by the Israeli secret service. He was sentenced to death in 1961 after a trial in Jerusalem and executed by hanging the following year. Eichmann recommended improvements to the gas ovens used for mass murder in concentration camps where six million Jews were killed during World War II. -- AFP Contact Sergio Tessa at HaDar-Israel@verizon.net |
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ROLE MODELS WANTED
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 29, 2007. |
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In Israel and America the need for role models at the highest levels of government are desperately needed. I think back to the time when President John F. Kennedy said: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." JFK was not a perfect man but the American nation took heart from his outstanding performance as a role model. Comparatively, I think of men like Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who said: "I'm tired of fighting; tired of being courageous; tired of winning, tired of defeating our enemies." That's a surprising comment since Olmert never served in combat. Whatever is the antithesis of a role model, people like Olmert, FM Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, Deputy PM Shimon Peres are perceived as spiritual loners? What young person going into Israel's Army would rush to model himself after the corrupt, crooked and cowardly leaders who seem to despise being Jewish and hold as worthless the Land G-d gave to the Jewish people? For a blink of time many considered Ariel Sharon, a valiant role model in courage when he creatively fought Israel's enemies. But, that was when he was a military man and focused his genius for combat against the enemy. Then he started to swim in the cesspool of Israeli politics as they have deteriorated in these later days, he turned his genius against his Jewish people. Arik was a fighting machine that didn't distinguish between the enemy and friends. So he became a role model for corruption like many preceding him and some of his contemporaries. Every nation needs her heroes to look up to and to emulate. The smaller the nation, the greater the need for role models of strong, ethical character. Regrettably, nations and their peoples think they are choosing the right people to lead them -- only to be fooled once they control the seat of power. The people suddenly discover that the pre-election speeches were malicious lies and the control of government rests in the hands of powerful forces who funded the new leader(s). The corrupt elite then run a "Shadow Government" through the leaders they bought and paid for. Ehud Olmert and his Kadima union of the most corrupt has led the nation into a swamp of risk. I wonder how many soldiers or school children would say: "I want to be like PM Olmert when I grow up."? Prime Minister Ariel Sharon picked Menachem Mazuz as his Attorney General. Why? Perhaps (or for sure) he knew the State was likely to catch him in one (or more) of his illegal deals and he needed someone he could twist to cover up for him. (1) Who is Mazuz? I don't know him personally (as I do several other Israelis mentioned here) -- but, several of his rulings have been very negative to the State and indicative of his true character. Just search Google at "Menachem Mazuz Attorney General rulings". The JNF (Jewish National Fund), a 100+ year old charity collected money from Jews all over the world to buy land in Eretz Yisrael for Jews. Menachem Mazuz ruled May 24th, that the JNF could not "discriminate" against Arabs in selling Jewish-bought land for them to build on. "Today JNF owns 13% of Israel's land, home to 70% of her population. Land owned by the fund is designated as public land and leased by the government to homeowners." JNF's Chairman Yehiel Leket said, "The state is obliged to treat all its citizens equally but, we are not the state." (2) & (3) Just a few of Mazuz's other rulings included: "Attorney General recommends that the barrier route be re-routed...because of the International Court of Justice (ICJ)'s non-binding ruling that parts of the barrier built on Palestinian land were illegal." (4) Mazuz is in favor of 'small', 'modest' Gay parade in Jerusalem as of May 11, 2006. (5) Attorney General's emphasis on the democratic character of the state as opposed to its Jewish character has opened the way for missionary groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses to operate in Israel, according to former justice minister Ya'akov Ne'eman. (6) Mazuz ordered eviction of families from Peace House in Hebron on Jewish owned land, even if the house were legally acquired for $700,000 -- because the settlers still required permission from the Israeli Civil Administration to inhabit it -- (or so said Amir Peretz now resigned as incompetent). The IDF assisted them to move in and the Defense Minister said he didn't give permission?! (7) Mazuz is merely another prototype of a party hack on call by those who hired him and kept him in office. But, that's all these low lifes want...to be kept in office, paid money, given perks, and to have friends at high levels to keep them out of jail. *** As for President George W. Bush, he started out on a high note as he told the American people he was going to fight world terror. But, over time in order to please the Saudis we find he is funding the Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah who are called "moderates" but who are also in reality Muslim Arab Palestinians terrorists. May 29th -- this just in: A 40% breakaway faction of Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah militant (read: terrorists) wing of Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigade has just announce that they are joining Hamas. No doubt, they will take with them the arms and ammunition given them by Olmert and Bush, including the CIA training in how to kill. We watch in shock as Bush, his family, the cohorts of his oil world manipulate oil and gas prices so the world's oil magnates can post sensationally high, usurious profits. Bush could have won the war in Iraq but, his judgement and that of his advisors was too simplistic. They never understand the Middle East and the Muslim Islamists whose goal was simply world domination for Islam, a Global Caliphate run by Muslims. Neither Bush nor the pro-Arab U.S. State Department took into account that every Arab Muslim State was run under a strong man dictatorship -- whatever it was called. They knew and understood the volatility of the people they ruled with an iron hand. Brutal suppression was the rule -- not the exception. But, Bush and his oil supporters did not comprehend any of this. . Neither Bush, nor his father Bush, James Baker, Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld would be a role model for young Americans. But, America is a Super Power that will survive almost any assault, whereas Israel is a very small nation in a sea of hostile Arab Muslims who may not allow her to survive (G-d forbid) especially given her weak defeatist government. No Role Models here. We hear stories of young Americans visiting Israel looking for ideological clarity and spiritual roots in a vibrant Judaism. What they find is many young Israelis asking them why they are volunteering, when they Israelis are looking for a way out? Once Israeli kids were anxious to join the elite Golani brigades to fight for their country. Now with accused and indicted criminals, self-serving leaders, leading the nation, there is a growing attitude of "What's the point?" Role models like Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, Ehud Barak, Arik Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni, 'et al', have demonstrated they have little or no use for being Jewish and that the Jewish Land is just a place they happen to live until they move out. Israel needs decent leaders, role models of courage and ethics. To accomplish this the entire elitist political establishment must be driven out of office along with every institution dedicated to bring the State to her knees. Here I include the current and past Prime Minister, the Cabinet, the Knesset, the Attorney General, the heads of the Court system, the politically-driven secret service, police, politically driven officers of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). I could also add the Hebrew media, which has demonstrated their dedication to goals of the Left who have long ago became political parties under the guise of reporting the news. All of the above are Israel's people current role models for defeat while teaching the public to have no honor for the Land or for Jewish national memory. When Olmert blabs, gushes and threatens the terrorists, all know he is what Americans call a flannel mouth. He orders restraint and then has the Israeli Air Force blow up vacant buildings. Not surprisingly, there are few reported casualties of terrorists -- given that they have gone underground or melded into the civilian population. Olmert and his gang of Kadima are only role models for cowardice, treachery, betrayal and avoidance of responsibility. Of course, they could be role models conveying a better lesson IF they were put in enclosed glass partitions before a Peoples' Court of Justice as was done with Saddam Hussein and his cohorts. That would be a powerful lesson to the Leftists, the selfish elitists who feed off of the nation like parasites and always the politically corrupt media. Indeed, negative role models forced to tell about their roles in subverting the Jewish nation can be significant lessons to the people. But, not to worry. Even as your read, know that the Labor Party Hacks are voting to divide up the people pie: that's YOU! You probably didn't know that you (the public) are merely a commodity to be bought, sold and divided up like a bunch of carrots. Labor is bringing back Ehud Barak as their newest old Role Model for you to follow -- head of the Labor Party to again become Prime Minister, they hope. He was the schlepper who offered Yassir Arafat most of Israel and also ran like a rat from Israel's security zone in South Lebanon in the middle of the night. But, that's not all, that will be offered. Shimon Peres is running for President of Israel. He should round out the re-runs of Party Hacks. ### 1. "Police rules out Sharon's bribery case complete before
election"
2. "In Watershed, Israel Deems Land-use Rules of Zionist Icon 'Discriminatory' " JNF Scored Over 'Jews-only' Sales" by Nathaniel Popper Forward.com Feb. 4, 2005 3. "Israel: Land bought for Jews must be shared with Arabs: Despite hundreds of million s of dollars specifically designated by non-profit group" by Aaron Klein WorldNetDaily.com May 24, 2007 4. "Israel court orders barrier reply"
5. "Mazuz's solution : 'Modest' Gay parade" by Efrat Weis
6. "A-G backs Jehovah's Witnesses' equal rights demand" Feb. 12, 2007
7. "Mazuz: Settlers have 30 days to challenge Hebron eviction order" by Mazal Mualem, Nadav Shargai & Amos Harel Ha'aretz April 12, 2007 Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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HAMAS-FATAH STILL FIGHTING; SAUDI KING APPROVES SAUDI
PLAN?; TEMPLE MT. QUESTION RESOLVED, CONFLICT DEEPENS
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 29, 2007. |
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HAMAS AND FATAH STILL FIGHTING
Despite a much-touted internal ceasefire, the Mecca Agreement, Hamas and Fatah men still are shooting at each other. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights wrings its hands over the shooting of civilian bystanders (IMRA, 5/13). Latest example is a child shot on 5/13. How does the world react to news of bystanders caught in the line of fire between clans and terrorists? The editorials are silent; diplomats are preoccupied; human rights organizations look away. When Israeli troops accidentally shoot an Arab bystander, the editors come to life, the diplomats warn Israel, and the human rights organizations denounce it. They don't honor human rights, they oppose Jewish rights. Muslims who can't keep peace agreements with each other cannot be relied upon to keep agreements with infidels. ISRAEL & THE U.S. BENCHMARKS FOR IT Israeli defense officials unofficially criticize the US benchmarks for Israel for greatly facilitating terrorism. The government has yet to demand that the benchmarks be changed and to what (IMRA, 5/13). Israel's government does not represent its people or doesn't know how to. IRAQ OIL & THE U.S. The government of Iraq's first contracts for oil (probably for development) went to non-American companies. The US is not, as accused, in Iraq to seize its oil (Victor Davis Hanson in Winston Mid East Analysis, 5/8). SAUDI KING MAY NOT APPROVE SAUDI PLAN The king's nephew, representing a different faction from the king, came up with the Saudi plan that Israel thinks it might adopt, if modified. Then the king degraded relations with the US and backed jihadists in Teheran and the P.A.. The Saudi King may not approve his nephew's plan (IMRA, 5/13). STRENGTHENING JERUSALEM Israel has devised several means of strengthening Jerusalem's function as the center of its government. It would move more government offices there, build a court complex, set up a school on Jerusalem affairs, and cancel an employers tax there (IMRA, 5/13). Meanwhile, the government wants to give away much of the city, including Judaism's holiest site, to the Arabs. TEMPLE MT. QUESTION RESOLVED, CONFLICT DEEPENS Different areas on the Temple Mount are of differing sanctity to the Jewish people, that built it. Centuries after the second Hebrew Temple was destroyed, Jews became unsure which areas were which. They felt it safer not to ascend the Mount at all, lest they violate its sanctity. Taking advantage of reticence by observant Jews, Muslims tighten their grip on the Mount, illegally expanding their buildings on it, illegally excavating below it, and illegally destroying ancient Jewish artifacts found in it. The Muslims were helped in this by a government and police hostile to Judaism and fearful of Muslim rioting if Jews were allowed up and to pray there. What kind of law and order in Israel is that! Christians also are not allowed to pray there. Although defeated in their war to exterminate the Jews, the Muslims were allowed by Israel to manage the Mount, and do so in their usual intolerant manner ' they don't recognize the sovereignty of the Jewish state. Tolerance could not be expected from a faith that teaches the duty to humble or extirpate other religions and which in recent decades emphasizes its belief that other faiths are evil. Now, Arutz-7 tells us, the religious Jews are coming to accept a scholar's designation of which areas are the holiest and which may be entered, with proper religious preparation. Forty rabbis ascended, under police protection, in a demonstration of this and in fulfillment of their faith (5/14). Isn't it shameful of Islam that Jews ascending and praying on their Temple Mount need police protection from Muslims? U.S. BOYCOTTING JERUSALEM INDEPENDENCE DAY This year, the US is joining the EU in boycotting Jerusalem Independence Day. They are deferring to the Muslim claim for Jerusalem, and ignoring a Congressional Mandate that the birth certificate of any US citizen born in Jerusalem state the country of birth as Israel and that the US move its Israel embassy to that city (Arutz-7, 5/14). But it is in Israel now, future negotiation results notwithstanding. Pres. Bush, thought pro-Israel lets the State Dept. run US foreign policy. ISRAEL TO ADOPT P.R. APPROACH TO GAZA ARMING The government finally decided to explain to the world that Iran is turning Gaza into a terrorist enclave and center, heavily armed for war (Arutz-7, 5/14). It is too late for public relations and almost too late for a military solution. The government cowardly hopes to substitute P.R. for armed force. 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 richardshulman5verizon.net |
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BINYAMIN ZE'EV KAHANE'S MURDERER CAUGHT
Posted by Avodah, May 28, 2007. |
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This was written by Hana Levi Julian and appeared in Arutz-Sheva
(www.IsraelNationalNews.com). |
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(IsraelNN.com) A long-sought Palestinian Authority terrorist was taken into custody by a Special Forces team late Monday afternoon in a joint operation between the IDF, Police Counter-terrorism Unit and General Security Services (Shin Bet). Khaled Shawish, a senior commander in the Al-Aksa Martyrs' Brigades terrorist organization, sponsored by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction, was cornered in his car by Israeli forces in Ramallah. The top terrorist has spent the past few years hiding out in Chairman Abbas' headquarters in the Muqata compound, where former PLO chairman Yasser Arafat lived out his last years trapped by the IDF. A gang of gunmen, including Shawish, was sheltered in Abbas' headquarters during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. Binyamin-Ze'ev Kahane, the son of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, and his wife Talia were shot to death and their five daughters seriously wounded in a December 2000 terror attack in which Shawish played a key role. The Fatah-linked murderer was responsible for the deaths of eighteen other people and the wounding of dozens in numerous attacks, including several in and around Jerusalem. Among the attacks orchestrated by Shawish were: - a 2002 suicide bombing on King George Street in Jerusalem IDF soldiers shot the senior commander but didn't manage to catch him in 2001; they did, however, disable him to the point that PA officials tried to convince Israel to allow him to go abroad for surgical treatment. He never went. Outspoken National Jewish Front leader Baruch Marzel, himself a close associate of the the terror victim Rabbi Binyamin Kahane, demanded that Shawish be turned over to supporters of Rabbi Meir and Binyamin Kahane. Marzel was quoted by the Kol Rinah news service as saying, "We can't rely on the justice system and [we] believe the murderer will be freed in a terrorist [exchange] deal. We'll know how to take care of him." Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com |
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OLMERT'S PLAN TO STEAL THE "WEST BANK" FROM ISRAEL
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 28, 2007. |
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After you read the following, you will only have touched on the betrayal and treason of individuals within the Israeli government. The forced evacuation of 10,000 men, women and children from 21 communities of Gush Katif from Gaza and 4 more communities from North Samaria was only one indicator of a perfidious plan to drive good Jews out of many areas where they pioneered. While the operational hand of this insidious plan are the politically compromised Police Force, the orders start at a higher level -- even beyond the corrupt government. Look for the hand of the Arabist U.S. State Department wired to the Saudis who mistakenly believe that driving the Jews from the Land will appease and pacify the Arab Islamic Terrorists. To believe that the Terror will cease when the Jews are gone and the Palestinian Muslim Arabs are given the Land is naive and wishful thinking. Meanwhile, Gaza -- as predicted -- is turning into a global terror operational fire base, indicative of what could happen to Judea and Samaria IF Olmert has his way. It no longer matters if the Police were ordered to attack Jews in the East Gush Etzion block south of Bethlehem because they are now like trained vicious attack dogs who cannot be de-programmed. Those who give the orders are so totally compromised, they can only be categorized as enemies of the Jewish people. Christians would say they are possessed and cannot be exorcized of their demons. Jews could say their souls were taken by a Dybbuk, deemed to be an evil spirit. Becoming a traitor or quisling can happen to ordinary men and women without the mystique of the devil's hand. The Plan, however, to drive the Jews from the Land is personally evil and driven by the same monsters who choose to aid Hitler's Genocide by not lifting a hand to stop it. I believe its planners, along with its enablers are a cursed lot and what they bring upon themselves and their nations is a choice they will regret. They are already experiencing the results of their planning as a "Judenrein" (Jew-free) Gaza turns into a small bit of Hell. Iraq has already become a graveyard for American young soldiers while the "Mujahadin" (Muslim warriors for "Jihad" Holy War) are reported to be spreading into Europe, America and other parts of the world. The Taliban in Afghanistan have re-energized all in sequence as the Jews are forced from a Land G-d gave them in perpetuity. It takes either a fool or a brave fool to spit in the Eye of G-d. This comes from Israeli & Global News and is entitled "Israeli Police Said To Ignore Arab Attacks In W. Bank". It was written by Elli Rodan of Hebron (www.Israeljustice.com). |
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On a recent Friday morning, about 15 Arabs from a village south of Bethlehem entered the tiny Jewish community of Sde Boaz, uprooted trees and destroyed equipment. When Jewish residents ran to the scene the Arabs began to fight them, swinging sticks and hoes. Several Jews were injured. Israeli police were called. They refused to arrest the Arabs. The reason: Israel's military determined that Sde Boaz was established on what authorities termed "disputed land." But Sde Boaz is not alone. Jewish residents and attorneys maintain that since the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank in 2005, authorities have prosecuted Jewish settlers in response to complaints by Palestinians. But Jewish complaints of Arab assaults, burglaries and vandalism have been ignored. "This has been a phenomenon for years," Naftali Wurtzburger, an attorney who has defended many Jews in these cases, said. "But in past few years it has worsened. I'm not sure where the initiative comes from [to prosecute the Jews] or whether it is an independent initiative of the police. But I suspect they have specific guidelines from the prosecutor's office." The police policy has not distinguished between unauthorized Jewish outposts and recognized Jewish communities. In early 2007, police refused to arrest or prosecute Arab suspects in a series of burglaries of the Jewish settlement of Bat Ayin in the Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem. In February, Bat Ayin resident Erez Levanon was assaulted and killed near Bat Ayin by who residents said were the people who had been burglarizing the community. This time, the police came out in force to surround mourners who came for the funeral and prevent them from retaliating. In many cases, police have warned Jews not to submit complaints against Arabs. Those who have were subjected to raids on their homes, summons and searches. "First of all, they arrest the Jews," Knesset member Arieh Eldad, a member of the State Audit Committee, said. "I don't think they have any written directives. But they receive oral instructions from the commanding officer." The 30 residents of Sde Boaz, established in 2002 as part of plans by the Gush Etzion Regional Council, regard the police and Arab attackers as working together. The Arabs, guided by Israeli Jews funded by the European Union, have repeatedly vandalized Sde Boaz and threatened violence. "It appears that in these cases Israeli authorities are collaborating with the same kind of group possessing the same kind of funding who are assaulting Israeli soldiers in Bilin [south of Ram'Allah]": Yitzhak Klein, director of the Jerusalem-based Israel Policy Center. In February, 30 Palestinians, accompanied by 10 foreigners and several Israelis, arrived at Sde Boaz and uprooted 1,500 saplings from the community's orchard. The unarmed Jewish residents tried to stop the intruders but did not assault them. Sde Boaz residents submitted a complaint to Hebron police against the Palestinians and foreigners from the International Solidarity Movement and the Israelis who belonged to the Israeli-based Taayush organization. Instead, police summoned all of the males of Sde Boaz and accused them of attacking the Arabs. The police also declared the orchards a "closed zone," thus banning the Jews from tending to their trees. Officers raided Sde Boaz homes without a warrant in what residents said was a search for gardening tools that could cut olive trees. "They [the police] just act like a group of criminals," H., a Sde Boaz resident under police investigation, said. "The police began to come around and investigate everyone in Sde Boaz they came into contact with. They opened criminal files and charged them with attacks [of Arabs]. They also conducted an illegal search in our home." On May 4, the Palestinians returned to vandalize at Sde Boaz. This time, residents were ready and called for reinforcements at the neighboring community of Neve Daniel. Fights erupted between the Arabs and Jews and the intruders fled. Again, Sde Boaz and Gush Etzion Council members who arrived at the scene demanded that police arrest the Arabs. Police, citing a dispute over the land, said three Arabs were detained and then released. "Three Palestinians were detained for uprooting saplings," West Bank police spokesman Moshe Pinchi told Israeljustice.com. "Criminal proceedings were not initiated against the three because the police had to wait for a decision from the Civil Administration as to rightful ownership of the land. I don't know how long this will take. Depending on the report, criminal files can be opened." Jewish residents believe that the police policy has been the result of government directives meant to undermine the settlement movement in the West Bank. Some of the residents said they were told by military officers that the Civil Administration was ordered to side with Arabs in all land disputes as part of a government policy to unilaterally withdraw from most of the West Bank. "The police act as if they are the police that serve the enemy," said Yoram Sheftel, a leading Israeli trial attorney who has defended Jewish settlers. Sheftel said the policy has also been reflected in cases where Jews were attacked by Arabs unrelated to land disputes. He cited the conviction of two army-appointed security officers of the Jewish community of Maaleh Rehavam, south of Bethlehem, summoned to respond to Bedouin infiltrators. The officers, Dan and Yitzhak Halamish, were sentenced to eight months in jail after being convicted of aggravated assault. "This case is a catastrophe," Sheftel said. "They [the Halamish brothers] were certainly in true danger." Yaakov Talia, a 49-year-old emigrant from South Africa, has been a farmer for the last 15 years in the south Hebron Hills. Talia has been repeatedly attacked by Palestinians and Israeli and foreign supporters and harassed by Hebron police. A leading Israeli agitator has been Ezra Nawi, a 55-year-old Israeli plumber who heads Taayush. Nawi has led Palestinians in attacking Talia and his family. On Sept. 15, 2006, Nawi led five Palestinians from the nearby village of Samoa to Talia's farm. The group threw stones and cursed the Jewish family and Nawi dropped his pants and exposed himself in front of Talia's wife. Talia photographed Nawi's act and submitted a complaint to Hebron police. Nawi, who maintains contact with police officials, was never prosecuted. Instead, on March 28, 2007, police closed the investigation for lack of evidence. At the same time, police have arrived at Talia's farm 3 times in as many months and charged him with attacking Arabs. Talia said a police investigator, Superintendent Avi Rotenberg told him not to carry his army-issued weapon on his farm because it provoked Arabs. "We have lodged numerous complaints with the Hebron police," Talia wrote in a complaint to the police. "These include incitement, provocations, obscenities, trespassing, illegal ploughing on the Sabbath without Civil Administration supervision, disturbing the public order and more. To date, nothing has been done, and every week, they incite the area and occupy staffs of police, army and civilians." Arab and Israeli agitators often spend Saturdays vandalizing Jewish settlements south of Hebron. In some cases, the Arabs vandalized or steal property and livestock from such fully-recognized communities as Maon, Beit Yatir and Susya. Police and army troops arrived but made no arrests. The Justice Ministry, which in 2005 issued guidelines against right-wing opponents of the government, denied directives for police to ignore Arab vandalism and other crime against Jews. The ministry did not relate to the police decisions to close the files of Jewish complaints against Arabs. "Decisions to serve an indictment or not in a criminal case are made, on the one hand, after the evidence is considered and on the other hand, after assessing the public interest in serving the indictment," Justice Ministry spokesperson Ganit Ben Moshe said. "All cases and their circumstances are examined thoroughly and professionally in this framework of judicial considerations. As to the question of how many defendants and their diversities according to ethnicity -- we don't have any data." The Judean and Samarian regional police command would not provide data for arrests that stemmed from Jewish complaints against Arabs. But police officials did provide details of their arrests of Jewish residents of the West Bank to the European Union-funded Yesh Din, which monitors Arab rights. "We have reciprocal relations with the police in the Shai [Judea and Samaria] region,'' Lior Yavne, Yesh Din research director told Israeljustice.com. "We also have professional working relations with them in the day-to-day affairs." In June 2006, Yesh Din, quoting police data, reported a steady increase in criminal charges against Jewish residents of the West Bank. The report said the increase was detected in 2005 as police rounded up Jewish protesters of the government's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank. From January to September 2005, the report said, more than 800 Jewish residents of the West Bank were arrested resulting in 150 indictments. The report quoted police commander Cmdr. Yisrael Yitzhak as saying that most of the Jews were detained amid the destruction of four communities in the northern West Bank in August 2005. The police said 43 Israelis were indicted on charges of assaulting Palestinians in 2005. The indictments stemmed from 299 Palestinian complaints against Israelis. "This means that 14.5 percent of the complainants were Palestinians," Pinchi, the West Bank police spokesman, said in a response to the Yesh Din report. "Eighteen out of the 43 indictments were for land disputes and this amounts to six percent of all the cases. In the first quarter of 2006, 250 criminal cases were opened against Jews in the West Bank, police said. In all, 151 indictments were filed, eight of them on charges of injuring Palestinians. "Fundamentally, the decision to tolerate and even collaborate with organizations that only mean ill to Israel is a policy decision made at the highest levels," Klein said. "The future of this policy depends on who in Jerusalem is making the decisions." Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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FROM ISRAEL: POLITICS
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 28, 2007. |
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May 28, 2007
As I send this out, there is not yet a clear winner in the Labor party primary. Barak and Ayalon are running so neck-in-neck that the exit poll of one TV channel declared one and winner and the poll of another TV channel declared another ahead. In due course we shall hear and the vast likelihood is that there will have to be a run-off after this in any event. ~~~~~~~~~~ It has been formally announced that Shimon Peres is running for the presidency; he is the only candidate from Kadima. Olmert has expressed strong support for him, but I figure if Shimon wins that's a good way for Olmert to get him out of his hair. Not every member of Kadima is supporting him; some have already declared support either for Reuven Rivlin (Likud) or Colette Avital (Labor). There is still time for others to join the campaign, but it's not clear that anyone will. Election is June 13. ~~~~~~~~~~ Eleven (count them: 11) Kassams landed in the western Negev today. One man was lightly wounded; two landed in a open wheat field causing a fire. Ironically, while Peretz was casting his vote in the Labor primary today in Sderot, where he lives, three rockets hit. Olmert is saying that we have to dig in for an extended operation -- that this won't be over soon. But, I'm sorry, that is simply not good enough. Defense officials insist that Hamas is hurting and that we will see results. When precisely that will be, they won't predict. All sorts of suggestions are being advanced -- from unofficial quarters -- on how to stop the barrage without actually doing a ground operation (the thought of which clearly makes Olmert nervous): Turn off their electricity; cut their water for three hours for each rocket; level any location from which rockets are launched, etc. Meanwhile, it has been announced that Sderot buildings that have been reinforced in the last two years are vulnerable to rockets, because the reinforcement was based on calculations for smaller rockets -- the power of them has since been roughly doubled. Still unclear is the gov't intention should Kassams stop: Do we let Hamas control our agenda, or do we keep going after Hamas in any event. ~~~~~~~~~~ Every death of an innocent from violence is a source of great sadness. But sometimes a particular death hits harder in the gut. So was it with Oshri Oz, who was buried today. Stories made the news about how his wife, six-months pregnant, was watching the news on television and saw pictures of a rocket landing near a car -- and recognized that it was his car, and collapsed. She collapsed again today at the funeral. Does the world know? Does the world care? ~~~~~~~~~~ The flip side of this pain, as always, is the enormous humanity of the people of Israel, who rally especially to help each other. In Sderot there is a Hesder yeshiva -- the hesder program combines religious study and army service. The students now have launched a yad-b'yad (hand in hand) campaign. They are going out in pairs to various neighborhoods of Sderot, lending help, offering words of encouragement. This is Israel at her finest. ~~~~~~~~~~ So is this: A Magen David ambulance today transferred an 8-day old Palestinian baby from Gaza to the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer; the child has a congenital heart defect and would not live long without surgery. "We transfer patients from the Gaza Strip under fire on a daily basis," said Moshe Vaknin, of MDA. "Last week, our medics continued to treat a patient while shells were fired at the terminal at Erez. During the Shavuot holiday we evacuated another baby in an incubator, endangering our staff." Dr. Dudu Mishali, head of the Department of Pediatric & Congenital Cardiothoracic Surgery at the hospital, said that on the average three Palestinian children arrive in his department every week. "We have daily communications by phone and fax with doctors in Gaza. There is no heart surgeon in the Strip, so they transfer all of these children, and there are many, to be operated on here." The PA pays half the costs, and the other half is paid for by donations raised by the hospital. ~~~~~~~~~~ Egypt is very worried about what's going on in Gaza because if the IDF goes in, there may be a flood of Palestinians trying to cross into Egypt. And so Egypt has called the major Palestinian factions to a meeting in Cairo, to discuss ways of bringing quiet to the region -- starting with quiet between the factions, which Egypt believes must come first. Yesterday I wrote that Fatah said that they wouldn't be meeting with Hamas at this meeting; but Hamas people have now changed their minds, and they will be participating. ~~~~~~~~~~ Rashid Abu Shabak, who was Fatah top security chief in Gaza, has resigned. The word is that he feels he did not get sufficient support from Abbas for his plans to impose law and order on Hamas. This is likely so, but the fact that six of his body guards were killed recently may also have had something to do with it. His resignation is being seen as a blow to Abbas and Fatah -- the "moderate" faction. But I never miss an opportunity to share information about these "moderates." Abu Shabak, who worked as a deputy to Muhammad Dahlan, was the one who personally supervised the preparation of the bomb when Dahlan gave the order for an attack on a school bus in 2000. ~~~~~~~~~~ Meanwhile, with the approval of the US, donor funds are flowing, via the PLO, to an account controlled by PA Finance Minister Salam Fayyad. The money is expected to be sufficient to pay the PA government workers half their salaries. However...15 anonymous gunmen have now abducted Hashim Abu Nada, the director general of the PA finance ministry. ~~~~~~~~~~ The IDF, working with the Shin Bet, has arrested Khaled Shawish, one of the top leaders of Al Aksa Brigades in Ramallah. Wanted by Israel since 2000, he is responsible for the deaths of several Israelis, including Rabbi Binyamin Kahane, son of Rabbi Meir Kahane, and his wife; he has sent out suicide bombers on several occasions. Shawish spent considerable time hiding in the Mukatah, headquarters of the PA president, which Arafat used to shield many wanted terrorists. Arlene Kushner is Senior Research Associate, Center for Near East Policy Research, Beit Agron International Press Center, Jerusalem, Israel. Contact her at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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PALESTINIAN PROMOTION OF CHILD MARTYRDOM
Posted by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, May 28, 2007. |
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Part 1- Hamas TV continues promotion of Shahada (martyrdom) for children
Hamas TV continues active promotion of Shahada (martyrdom) directed at children. The new video clip, broadcast Sunday, follows the growth of a young Palestinian boy from a child into a Hamas Shahid -- Martyr for Allah. The video shows the young child going to the mosque, praying and reading from the Quran, and then holding an automatic rifle together with the Quran as he envisions future participation in violent acts. View video on YouTube or on PMW website. [See part 2 below for an overview of the history of this phenomenon including links to numerous videos encouraging children to be Shahid -- Martyrs] The child then matures into a Hamas fighter, is shown participating in battle against Israel, and eventually dying as a Shahid as the choir sings, "The pure blood will produce honor and glory." This video directs Palestinian children to aspire to Shahada, reiterating a recurring music video theme of seven years that Shahada is expected of children. "Honor and glory" and "Shahada is sweet" are some of these messages specifically packaged for children on Hamas TV and Fatah controlled PA TV. PA schoolbooks likewise promote Shahada death among children. One example: "O heroes... Do not talk yourselves into flight. Your enemies seek life while you seek death. These drops of blood that gush from your bodies will be transformed tomorrow into blazing red meteors that will fall down upon the heads of your enemies." [Reading and Texts Part II, Grade 8 (2002), p. 16] The following is an excerpt from the new clip on Hamas TV: "We have come! View video on YouTube or on PMW website. Part 2: Overview of the history of promotion of children's Shahada (Martyrdom) Shahada for children is a recurring message on both Fatah-controlled PA TV and Hamas-controlled Al Aqsa TV. 1. Hamas TV has been broadcasting regularly from March to May 2007 a video dramatization of the four-year-old daughter of female suicide bomber Reem Riyashi singing to her dead mother and vowing to follow in her footsteps. The video clip ends as the little girl picks up explosives from her mother's drawer. View video on YouTube or on PMW website. 2. Another Hamas video encouraging the participation of children in terrorism focuses on Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas founder and religious leader killed by Israel. The video portrays young children as the continuation of Yassin's legacy. Children are shown in uniforms, holding rifles and participating in military training. The lyrics stress the children's connection to Yassin: "Even though they killed our [Ahmad] Yassin, the land will grow a thousand Ahmad." View video on YouTube or on PMW website. 3. In another video, which was broadcast on Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority TV hundreds of times from 2001 to 2004, a young boy leaves a farewell letter to his parents and goes off to seek Shahada, describing the death he aspires as "sweet." This PA clip is designed to offset a child's natural fear of death, by depicting Shahada as heroic and tranquil. View video on YouTube or on PMW website. 4. From 2000 to 2003, PA TV broadcast a music video depicting the delightful Shahid paradise of Muhammad Al-Dura, who died in crossfire. The child actor is shown flying a kite, frolicking on the beach and even at an amusement park. The clip opens with an invitation to other children from Al-Dura to aspire to Shahada: "I am waving to you not in parting, but to say 'follow me'." This video directing children to follow Al Dura to paradise as Martyrs was suddenly broadcast again in June, 2006, after Israeli troops had gathered at the border of the Gaza Strip, following the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. View video on YouTube or on PMW website. 5. The result of such virulent propaganda is apparent, when listening to the interview on PA TV with two 11-year-old Palestinian girls talking about Shahada and describing it as a primary ideal and personal goal. They explain that "all Palestinian children" view Shahada as more worthwhile than living because of its promised grand Afterlife. View video on
YouTube
or
on PMW website.
Itamar Marcus is director of PMW -- Palestinian Media Watch --
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GEORGE TENET'S SHAMEFUL LEGACY
Posted by Justice For Jonathan Pollard, May 28, 2007. |
| This was written by Avi Klar and it appeared May 16, 2007 in Hamodia. |
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There is an old story about the time a man asked his farmer neighbor whether he could borrow his donkey for a day. "I'm sorry, but my donkey is out on a long journey and won't be back for another three days," the neighbor replied. At that very moment, loud braying was heard from the barn located only a few feet from where they were standing. "Your donkey is right here!" the would-be borrower said. The neighbor was indignant. "Whom are you going to believe, your longtime neighbor or a dumb donkey?" George Tenet's recently published memoirs prove that while his abilities as CIA director are highly questionable, he is eminently qualified at the art of distorting and manipulating facts. He starts his book with a powerful anecdote that supposedly occurred early on the morning of September 12, 2001. Tenet claims he was walking beneath the awning that leads to the West Wing when he saw Richard Perle, described as one of the leaders of the neoconservative movement, exiting the building. Tenet writes, "Perle turned to me and said, ' Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.'" Great story. But it never happened. Perle revealed this week that he was in Europe on Sept. 12, 2001, unable to get a return flight to Washington, and that he "did not tell Tenet that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, not then, not ever." Tenet uses much of his book -- which runs more than five hundred pages -- to try to disassociate himself from the faulty intelligence that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He tries his hardest to put the blame on virtually everyone but himself, with one of his favorite targets being Vice President Cheney. In fact, he is clearly determined to dissociate himself from any possible failures, while making it clear to all that modesty is not among his attributes. After years of speculation, Tenet openly and defiantly acknowledges that he threatened Bill Clinton that he would resign if Clinton pardoned Pollard as part of the Wye River peace accord. He claims that if Pollard would have been pardoned he would have been "through as CIA director," for he would have "no moral capital left with my troops." Somehow the irony of his statement eludes him. While he felt that for the president to pardon Pollard was enough reason for him to resign, for the United States to go to war over non-existent weapons of mass destructions wasn't. No single event has so humiliated the United States' intelligence-gathering forces as the Iraqi WMD flap. While the CIA's abject failure -- on Tenet's watch -- to infiltrate Osama bin Ladin's inner circle prior to September 11 can possibly be defended, sending young men and women to war based on lies and misinformation is inexcusable and unforgivable. So is Tenet's conduct towards Pollard. In one way, however, it is perhaps not surprising; for, elsewhere in his book, Tenet declares that he couldn't help but like Yassir Arafat. What I did find surprising is Tenet's claim that then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich phoned Clinton to oppose Pollard's release. Tenet further says that it was Gingrich's call that "cemented the president's determination not to release Pollard." With Tenet's record of skewing the truth, this may in fact be another figment of his over-active imagination. However, the onus is now on Gingrich to deny this accusation. In recent days Gingrich has indicated a "great possibility" of running for president. He ought to be asked whether he made that call, and his answer should influence how much support he will get from our community. In any case, the donkey has brayed, and those who had any doubts about the character and legacy of Mr. Tenet now know that their suspicions were correct all along. See Also: * Tenet accused of lying in his memoirs: Aaron Klein -- Worldnetdaily.com Contact Justice for Jonathan Pollard at justice4jp@gmail.com |
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DEAR HAMAS
Posted by Uri Dromi, May 28, 2007. |
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An open letter to a Hamas supporter in Gaza: So, over the last 40 years Israelis have been told constantly by the world to pull out of Gaza and the West Bank. Two years ago we did evacuate Gaza, but what did we get in return? A barrage of deadly missiles on our south and a Palestinian government led by the Hamas people you had elected, people who openly advocate the destruction of Israel. Here is my prediction. You will most probably continue to launch those primitive Kassam missiles on our southern town of Sderot. You will surely get satisfaction from the sight of Sderot residents fleeing their shelled town. "After all," you will revel, "Israel, with all its aircraft and tanks, is not so mighty." Yet despite your efforts, many people will still remain in Sderot, and one of your Kassams might hit a kindergarten and -- God forbid -- might kill 10 children. What happens then? As a matter of fact, a Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, already addressed such a scenario. In a speech he gave in Israel a few years ago, he stunned his audience by suggesting a way to deal with Palestinian terrorism: If Palestinians intentionally attack Israeli civilians, he reasoned, then Israel, as an act of self-defense, should declare that the area from which the attack had been launched must be evacuated within a given time, after which it should be completely destroyed. At the time I thought that the distinguished professor had simply lost his mind and that it was easy for him to give us such advice from his safe haven in Harvard. However, every Kassam you or your friends launch on our poor city of Sderot causes me to think again about the professor's idea. Because, you know, democracies might look weak, with all their sensitivity to human rights, but when you push them with their backs against the wall, they will eventually take their gloves off. And you're bringing it on yourself, pal, because there is no situation on Earth where a sovereign state should sit by idly while its citizens are relentlessly and mercilessly terrorized. Do you insist on invoking upon yourself and your neighbors in Gaza the wrath of the Israel Defense Forces? I have a better idea. You stop launching those Kassams, and we stop eliminating your leaders by air-strikes. (Believe me, we can nail down each and every one of them, and we will, if you force us to do so.) We work out a grand plan tat will alleviate the situation in Gaza, and will pave the way for the big money waiting to be invested in infrastructure and services. You declare a hudna (truce, in Arabic), for, say, 20 years, by which you suspend your plan to destroy Israel. In 20 years you can build a state for your people, who long have deserved one, and believe me, if it works in Gaza, my fellow Israelis will be more than open to giving you most of the West Bank. Build schools, universities, hospitals, create jobs. You can do it with our cooperation -- a happy neighbor is a good neighbor -- or you can do it yourself. But instead of deceiving your children that Israel one day will just disappear, do something real for their future. And what happens after 20 years? Allah hu akbar, as we say in our region, God is Great. The ball is in your court, pal, and time is running out. Uri Dromi is the director of international outreach at the Israel Democracy Institute, Jerusalem. This article appeared May 25, 2007 in the Miami Herald
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YOUTUBE DELETES COPY OF HAMAS VIDEO
Posted by Avodah, May 28, 2007. |
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The Hamas supporter at YouTube who goes by the name "engahmed" has now gotten YouTube to delete the second copy of his evil child abuse video; isn't it nice that YouTube is protecting the jihadis' copyrights, while allowing them to post videos glorifying terrorism and murder? So here it is again, with a local copy this time, because Hamas should not be allowed to hide this stuff, with or without YouTube's complicity. Children in Gaza perform a monstrous "play," dressed as suicide bombers and terrorists, waving knives and guns, in front of a crowd of doting parents. UPDATE at 5/28/07 10:22:46 am: Here's the video in Quicktime format; I invite you to download it and spread it around as much as possible. Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com |
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THE REAL AGENDA OF PALESTINIAN SOLIDARITY GROUPS
Posted by Naomi Ragen, May 28, 2007. |
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Friends, Journalist Tom Gross in his recent mailing points out the following: "There are dozens of "Palestinian Solidarity Campaigns" in Britain. Yet with more than 150 Palestinians killed in "internal violence" in Gaza since the beginning of the year, and over 50 others killed in the past week alone in "clashes" at the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian Refugee camp in Lebanon, there has been complete silence from these pro-Palestinian groups. As the popular blog Harry's Place notes: * The International Solidarity Movement, * The Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, * The Scottish Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, * The Exeter Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, * The York Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, * The Brighton Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, * The Stop the War Coalition, * George Galloway's "Respect" political party, and many other pro-Palestinian groups "have nothing to say about these deaths at all." All these groups tirelessly protest Palestinian deaths (including those of terrorists) if Israel is to blame. One can only conclude that these so-called Palestinian Solidarity Campaigns are in fact merely groups that wish to single out Israel for attack. Given the fact that Israel's human rights record is far better than dozens of other states throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that anti-Semitism, rather than concern about Palestinian civilians, is a strong motivating factor for these groups." Naomi Ragen is an American-born novelist and journalist who lives in Jerusalem. She can be contacted at www.naomiragen.com, where you can subscribe to her newsletter. |
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STATECRAFT IN THE ABSENCE OF STATESMEN
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 28, 2007. |
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Olmert, go home!
There are rumors that the Jordanians are raising the possibility of forming a confederation with the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria. This plan is based on Jordan beginning to recognize that with Hamas in control of the Palestinian Authority, Israel has no Palestinian Arab partner to whom it could surrender Judea and Samaria. Therefore, Israel is incapable of adopting any so-called Arab "peace initiative" demanding that Israel withdraw its citizens and military forces to behind the 1949 armistice lines. Jordan is offering to fill the void by replacing the Palestinian Arabs. They say they want Israel to give Jordan Judea and Samaria as part of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation under Hashemite control and with this in mind the Jordanians are resuscitating the view that Jordan is Palestine. For this purpose King Abdullah is using Abed Salam Majali, the Jordanian former prime minister, as his envoy to try convincing Israelis to accept this newest idea. With the possibility that US forces will withdraw from Iraq without first stabilizing the country constitutes an existential threat to the Hashemites, who now understand that after defeating the Great Satan -- America -- Jordan will be next on Iranian-sponsored Syria insurgents' list. Analyzing Jordan's interests here is based on the fact that the Hashemite monarchy finds itself firmly lodged between the Iraqi rock and the Palestinian Arabs' hard place and with that the King is in danger of being overthrown. Since Hamas won the PA elections the jihadist group, and its sister organization the Muslim Brotherhood, are receiving increased popularity in Jordan, where more than 70% of the population are Palestinians. So what the Jordanians are offering to Israel is to take over Judea and Samaria as a bid to ride the Palestinian thus hoping to tame the beast before it devours Jordan. In the event America pulls out from Iraq, Israel, like Jordan, will be imperiled by a resurgent on the eastern front. In all likelihood, Israel, too, will pay a steep price if the jihadist forces on both sides of the Jordan River unite. Israel's national interests overlap those of Jordan. Though both countries will face dangers, it would be inexcusable for Israel to even consider transferring control over the Jordan Valley to the Jordanian military. Israeli withdrawal from its heartland in Judea and Samaria would undermine its ability to rally as a society against external enemies. In spite of the vast gap between what Jordan proposes and what Israel can accept, the fact remains that the two states shared interests are significant enough to form the basis for mutually beneficial discussions. There is a possibility Israel could offer Jordan functional sovereignty over the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and at the same time, Israel could assert its sovereignty over what the Oslo accords refer to as 'Area C' that includes all of the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, the hinterlands and the Jordan Valley. Asserting functional sovereignty by Jordan over the Palestinian Arabs in Judea and Samaria would include the return of their Jordanian citizenship, which, in 1988, the late King Hussein abrogated. Such functional Jordanian sovereignty would undermine the PA's political rationale and could act as a moderating force for Palestinian society as a whole -- both in Judea and Samaria, and in Jordan. Asserting functional sovereignty by Israeli over Area C would give Israel the ability to defend itself against a resurgent eastern front. More so, it would also be able to continue to protect the Hashemite kingdom from violent overthrow. Israel and Jordan's shared interests with the Jordanian talks' initiative can form the basis for discussions that could lead to the first ever agreement between Israel and its neighbors that could strengthen Israel and promote the chances of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinian Arabs, to the benefit of all. Olmert, though, expressed talks with the wrong party, Syria. By
opening talks with Syria Olmert is expressing his willingness to
further imperil the security of the country that will only radicalize
Damascus further. By this Olmert is demonstrating that he is lacking
responsibility and is incapable of advancing Israel's interests. His
willingness to engage in surrendering -- the Golan
Heights -- talks with Damascus shows that he doesn't even
understand what Israel's national interests are.
This article was written by Caroline Glick and it appeared May 25,
2007 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
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Over the past week, Ma'ariv has reported on two separate diplomatic initiatives that seem to be coming into line. First, there is the possibility that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will open negotiations with Syria on the surrender of the Golan Heights to Damascus. Second, the Jordanians are raising the possibility of forming a confederation with the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. Any analysis of the reasonableness of these initiatives must begin with two questions. First, do the relevant parties share enough common interests to enable them to reach an agreement that will be mutually beneficial? Second, do the sides have leaders who are competent to properly identify those interests and to work to advance them? According to Ma'ariv, "The prime minister has... become convinced that negotiations with Syria and a possible peace agreement will significantly alter the regional strategic situation and facilitate the isolation of Iran and a solution to the problem with Hizbullah. "This is especially the case," the newspaper reported, "against the backdrop of the collapse of Fatah and of [Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, aka] Abu Mazen, and the fact that there is no chance for a diplomatic initiative with the Palestinians in the near future." The report added that the IDF's General Staff believes that Israel can avert war with Syria by negotiating the surrender of the Golan Heights to Damascus. So Olmert sees three reasons to engage Damascus in negotiations about an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. He believes that doing so can prevent a war between the two countries. He believes that such negotiations will weaken Syria's protector, Iran. And he is interested in negotiations because he feels he needs to do something and he can't negotiate the surrender of Judea and Samaria with Hamas. Unfortunately, all of Olmert's rationales for opening negotiations with Syria are based on false assumptions. A review of the results of the US's current, much-less radical bid to appease Syria in Iraq demonstrates this clearly. The insurgency being waged against US-led coalition forces in Iraq today is directed by Syria and Iran. In an attempt to decrease the dimensions of the war, last month the Americans opened direct, high-level contacts with Damascus. First, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi paid a visit to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. Pelosi, who supports a US retreat from Iraq, praised the Baathist regime and so ended the isolation Damascus has been relegated to since it ordered the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. Although the Bush administration condemned Pelosi's visit, weeks later it followed her lead. At the beginning of the month, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a meeting with her Syrian counterpart, Walid Muallem, in Sharm e-Sheikh. The Americans hoped that direct contacts with Syria would moderate its behavior. Unfortunately, the opposite has occurred. Far from moderating Syria, US moves to mollify it have served to embolden Syria to advance its hostile policies. In the aftermath of Pelosi's visit, the regime cracked down on internal opposition, rounding up dissidents and sentencing them to prolonged prison terms. Rice's meeting with Muallem failed to put a damper on Syrian sponsorship of the insurgents. On Monday, a US official in Iraq said, "Our best estimate is that 85 to 90 percent of all the suicide bombers are foreign. Ninety percent plus come through Syria." Beyond Iraq and internal dissent in Syria, the legitimacy Washington has conferred on Damascus is emboldening the Syrians to destabilize Lebanon. The Fatah Islam Palestinian jihadist group that is now leading the hostilities in northern Lebanon is a creation of Syrian intelligence. Today the Syrians are keen to destabilize Lebanon in a bid to intimidate Lebanese lawmakers into rejecting the UN tribunal which is set to try Syrian officials for their role in Hariri's assassination. All of these Syrian actions point to the clear conclusion that the American appeasement efforts have backfired. Were Israel to similarly seek to appease Damascus, and to do so by far more radically offering to surrender the strategically vital Golan Heights to Syrian control, far from diminishing the prospects of war, Israel would likely exacerbate the likelihood of a Syrian or Syrian-sponsored strike against it. Similarly, it is doubtful that opening negotiations on an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights would weaken Syria's relations with Iran. Why would Syria consider distancing itself from Teheran when its close alliance with the ayatollahs is what is provoking the US and Israel to mollify it? So if offering to discuss an Israeli surrender of the Golan Heights will increase the probability of war and embolden the Syrians to intensify their alliance with Iran, the only remaining rationale for speaking to them is Olmert's desire to have some sort of diplomatic platform to stand on. Here the issue of a leader's competence to advance his nation's interests through diplomatic initiatives comes into play. By expressing a willingness to imperil the security of the country by opening talks with Syria that will only radicalize Damascus still further, Olmert is demonstrating that he is incapable of responsibly advancing Israel's interests. Indeed, his willingness to engage in surrender talks with Damascus shows that he doesn't even understand what Israel's national interests are. If Olmert wishes to prevent the coming war, he should be preparing for it. This he must do by highlighting Syria's radicalism and by neutralizing Syria's terror networks in Gaza, which would be used against Israel in any war scenario.
SO WHILE there is no possibility of launching a diplomatic effort with Syria or the Palestinians, what about the Jordanian initiative? According to the Ma'ariv report, the Jordanian plan is based on a recognition that with Hamas in control of the Palestinian Authority, Israel has no Palestinian partner to whom it could surrender Judea and Samaria. In light of this, Israel is incapable of adopting the so-called Arab peace initiative, which demands that Israel withdraw its citizens and military forces to behind the 1949 armistice lines. The Jordanians are offering to fill the void by replacing the Palestinians. Israel, they say, should give Jordan Judea and Samaria as part of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation under Hashemite control. In short, the Jordanians are resuscitating the view that Jordan is Palestine. King Abdullah is using former Jordanian prime minister Abed Salam Majali as his envoy to convince Israelis to accept this newest idea. An assessment of the opportunities and threats inherent in this offer must begin with an analysis of Jordan's interests. Bluntly stated, the Hashemite monarchy finds itself firmly lodged between the Iraqi rock and the Palestinian hard place and so is in danger of being overthrown. The possibility that US forces will withdraw from Iraq without first stabilizing the country constitutes an existential threat to the Hashemites, who understand that after defeating the Great Satan, Jordan will be the next target on the Syrian-and Iranian-sponsored insurgents' list. As to the Palestinians, since Hamas won the PA elections last year, the jihadist group, and its sister organization the Muslim Brotherhood, have seen a steep rise in their popularity in Jordan, where more than 70% of the population are Palestinians. The Jordanian offer to take over Judea and Samaria can therefore be seen as a bid to ride the Palestinian tiger in the hopes of taming the beast before it devours Jordan. In contrast to the situation with Syria, Israel's national interests overlap those of Jordan. Israel, too, will be imperiled by a resurgent eastern front in the event of an American pullout from Iraq. Israel, too, will pay a steep price if the jihadist forces on both sides of the Jordan River unite. Yet, given the dangers that both countries face, it would be inexcusable for Israel to even consider transferring control over the Jordan Valley to the Jordanian military. At the same time, the societal fragmentation that would ensue from an Israeli withdrawal from its heartland in Judea and Samaria would undermine Israel's ability to rally as a society against external enemies. While the gulf between what Jordan proposes and what Israel can accept is large, the fact remains that the states' shared interests are significant enough to form the basis for mutually beneficial discussions. As MK Benny Elon has been arguing for years, Israel could offer Jordan functional sovereignty over the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. At the same time, Israel could assert its sovereignty over what the Oslo accords refer to as Area C. Area C includes all of the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria, the hinterlands and the Jordan Valley. The assertion of functional sovereignty by Jordan over the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria would include the return of their Jordanian citizenship, which the late King Hussein abrogated in 1988. Such functional sovereignty would undermine the PA's political rationale and could act as a moderating force for Palestinian society as a whole -- both in Judea and Samaria, and in Jordan. The assertion of Israeli sovereignty over Area C would preserve Israel's ability to defend itself against a resurgent eastern front. It would also be able to continue to protect the Hashemite kingdom from violent overthrow. All in all, bearing in mind Israel's shared interests with Jordan, the Jordanian initiative can form the basis for discussions that could lead to the first agreement between Israel and its neighbors that could strengthen Israel and promote the chances of peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians, to the benefit of all.
BUT HERE we return to the question of leadership. Israel's ability to advance a confederative arrangement between the Palestinians and Jordan while ensuring Israel's continued control over Area C is wholly dependent on the skill of its leaders. Sadly, it is impossible to believe that Olmert, who is willing to endanger the country by engaging Syria, would be capable of conceptualizing, let alone managing, such delicate discussions. Indeed, in all likelihood, were Olmert to begin such discussions, he would do so while running roughshod over Israel's security. And by doing so, he would cancel the possibility of reaching a mutually beneficial arrangement for years to come. This, then, points to the greatest failure of the Olmert government. Not only is it incapable of recognizing dangers. It is also blind to opportunities. Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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FROM ISRAEL: BAD SCENE
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 28, 2007. |
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A critical continuation of my report on Lebanon, from a MEMRI special dispatch released yesterday: Al Hayat in London has just run an interview with Shihab Al-Qaddour, who is second in command of Fatah al-Islam. Al-Qaddour declared Al-Fatah ready to do battle with the Lebanese army and to sustain itself for two years. Explaining that his organization comprises Palestinian activists from various countries, with rich battle experience [e.g., in Iraq], he said: "The Fatah Al-Islam organization is Palestinian, and includes 600 to 700 activists in all the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, not only in the Nahr Al-Bared refuge camp. All the activists are on the highest battle alert.... "Fatah Al-Islam has bases and sleeper cells in all the Palestinian refugee camps in the various regions of Lebanon, and they...await only a sign from us." He said that he wasn't worried about Palestinian residents of the Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp rebelling against Fatah Al-Islam: "Many of the members of the Palestinian factions that oppose us politically deviated from their leaders' orders, stood with us, and identified with us when the camp was recently bombed." He denied that his organization is affiliated with Al-Qaida and said, "Our organization is an Islamic project aimed at liberating Palestine and Jerusalem." They did have connections with Hezbollah, he said, and bore no enmity to the Shiites in Lebanon. ~~~~~~~~~~ Meanwhile, whether Al-Qaida has official connections with Fatah Al-Islam or not, it is, according to YNet, showing support for the organization. An A-Qaida mouthpiece on the Internet has released a message: "Sons of Islam, o sons of the nation of Allah and Jihad, our brothers in the Nahr el-Bared camp in Lebanon are being subjected to the flagrant aggression of the army working for treason and apostasy, the Lebanese Army. "(This) is a war on Islam... It is a war planned to eliminate those who think about, and act to eliminate the State of the Children of Zion. Sons of the nation Muhammad, peace be upon him, help... your brothers in Islam. They are fighting for the sake of God... They wanted a confrontation with the Zionist aggressors, and it is the duty of every Muslim to help these boys, this is one of the most important duties today." ~~~~~~~~~~ Interesting... Fatah Al-Islam is claiming to want to liberate Palestine, but is doing battle against Muslims in Lebanon. The threat is that they can last for two years there and blow up Beirut. To what end? This is both evil and crazy at the same time. Is the world waking up? Both the US and Arab nations are providing military supplies to the Lebanese army. ~~~~~~~~~~ We are stepping up our strikes in Gaza. Yesterday the Israeli Air Force hit 11 Hamas sites, killing seven (terrorists) and wounding 30. But the Kassams keep coming. Today Oshri Oz was killed when a Kassam hit his car. He wasn't even from Sderot, but was there on business. He leaves a three-year old and a wife six months pregnant; she collapsed when receiving the news. Two other Kassams hit Sderot today, one other person was lightly injured and damage was done to a new community center. ~~~~~~~~~~ In a television interview yesterday, former chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. Moshe (Boogie) Ya'alon declared that we had no choice but to do an extensive military operation in Gaza. "It means we have to get to the infrastructure of terror, to the terrorists and camps, and strike there. One has to be blind not to see the absolute necessity in entering Gaza." Ya'alon also said he was opposed to evacuation of Sderot as this would be interpreted as a victory for terrorism. He called a "two-state solution" a misguided concept. Boogie's my kind of man. ~~~~~~~~~~~ The point about evacuation of Sderot being interpreted as a victory for terrorism should not be taken lightly. It is this that is most troublesome about the tent city erected by Gaydamak, where some 700 have gone, the vacations elsewhere provided by the gov't and Gaydamak, which some thousands have taken advantage of, and all the rest. Said Sderot's mayor Eli Moyal today, "if the government wants to strengthen the city, the way to do so is to fill it and not empty it....the fall of Sderot would be the fall of the entire Zionist enterprise." One-thousand residents have now returned from vacations and the government has promised to build 200 fortified rooms each month, until the entire population has protection. ~~~~~~~~~~ Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin says Hamas is preparing for a ground invasion by booby-trapping tunnels, putting snipers in place, and more. None of this is unexpected. He reports that Hamas is also shooting more from highly populated areas and less from orchards -- to provoke increased civilian casualties as we respond. In spite of this, we are keeping collateral damage low. Diskin further says that Hamas has the capacity to hit Ashkelon, but is refraining from doing so yet as this would further escalate matters. Meanwhile Public Security Minister Avi Dichter says the response to the Kassams is still not strong enough, and that Israel must create a more serious deterrent. ~~~~~~~~~~ Two Israeli security guards on patrol at the edge of Jerusalem were fired upon and wounded yesterday, one seriously. They returned fire and killed their assailants, who had Jerusalem IDs. Fatah's Al Aksa Brigades has claimed credit for the attack. ~~~~~~~~~~ Hamas has threatened that if we harm their senior leaders, Shalit will not be released. The response coming from an Israeli official was appropriate: "Israel will pursue the return of Gilad Shalit as if there are not rocket attacks, and pursue terrorists as if there was no Gild Shalit." We certainly cannot stop defending our nation because of such threats. ~~~~~~~~~~ Fatah and Hamas have been more or less honoring a truce between them for the last week. Tensions are still high however and Fatah officials, going to Cairo to discuss the situation with Egyptian authorities, said they would not be meeting with Hamas. Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. Dayton has provided testimony to the House Subcommittee on the Middle East regarding US assistance to strengthen Fatah. A most futile effort, as I have explained on previous occasions, because Fatah factions don't all want to take on Hamas -- insufficient weaponry and training is not the problem. According to a news report, when Congressman Mike Pence (R-Indiana) raised questions, the General assured him that "Nothing we do to strengthen the Palestinians' security capability will be targeted against Israel." What I would like to know -- since assistance provided to PA security forces in the past DID end up being used against Israel -- is how he can guarantee this now. Arlene Kushner is Senior Research Associate, Center for Near East Policy Research, Beit Agron International Press Center, Jerusalem, Israel. Contact her at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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POLLARD'S UNFORGIVABLE SIN
Posted by Ted Belman, May 28, 2007. |
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Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in a US federal penitentiary, committed an unforgivable sin. He unmasked US foreign policy. In a recent post on the American Ambassador to Israel saying that
the US was merciful in not executing Pollard there was a link to a
post by Robert Olive and a rebuttal (by Pollard attorneys, Lauer and
Semmelman) "Don't be fooled by Ron Olive"
"Mr. Pollard's unauthorized disclosures have threatened the US [sic] relations with numerous Middle East Arab allies, many of whom question the extent to which Mr. Pollard's disclosures of classified information have skewed the balance of power in the Middle East." This is unbelievable; yet, it is believable. In other words, the US didn't want anyone to know the true relationship between the US and its Arab allies. It suggests that the public face it puts on these relationships have nothing to do with reality. This is a matter of utmost importance to both the US and the Arabs. It also suggests that the US knew of Arab plans that were detrimental to Israel and the US was not willing to tell Israel about them. "Moreover, because Mr. Pollard provided the Israelis virtually any classified document requested by Mr. Pollard's co-conspirators, the US has been deprived of the quid pro quo routinely received during authorized and official intelligence exchanges with Israel, and Israel has received information classified at a level far in excess of that ever contemplated by the National Security Council. The obvious result of Mr. Pollard's largess is that US bargaining leverage with the Israeli government in any further intelligence exchanges has been undermined." The fact that the US, as a result of Pollard's actions, had fewer bargaining chips is of minor importance. Israel shares most of its intelligence without a specific quid pro quo. But this sentence supports the argument that the US has many secrets that it does not share with Israel. Why does the US keep Israel, ostensibly a friend and ally, in the dark? The US has no need for "bargaining leverage," but it does have a need to not share with Israel the many things it does which are not in Israel's favour. "In short, Mr. Pollard's activities have adversely affected US relations with both its Middle East Arab allies and the government of Israel." This sums it up. Pollard made Israel stronger because Israel had a clearer understanding of the true US-Arab relationship, and Arab intentions and plans. The way I see it, the magnitude of Pollard's sentence reflects the magnitude of the American secrets. One must conclude that the US was duplicitous. It worked to shrink Israel while posturing as its friend. So, in effect, Pollard was spying for an enemy, Israel, rather than for a friend. His life sentence proves it. I wonder if the US is being so hard-nosed about it in order to please the Saudis? See Also: The Victim Impact Statement: Why Pollard Got Life -- by David Zwiebel -- Middle East Quarterly
Don't be fooled by Ron Olive -- by Lauer and Semmelman -- Jerusalem Post
Ted Belman is an editor of the IsraPundit weblog. |
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TODAY'S QASSAM ATTACK VICTIM HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED AS OSHRI OZ, 35
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 27, 2007. |
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2:23PM: Today's Qassam attack victim has been identified as Oshri Oz, 35, from Hod Hasharon. The Jerusalem Post reports that Oz's wife found out about her husband's death on the Internet, where she saw the footage of the Kassam landing near his car.
More on Oshri Oz, the victim of Qassam fired into Sderot:
The man, 36-year-old Oshri Oz of Hod Hasharon, crashed into the wall with his car after it was hit. He managed to get out of the vehicle and take a number of steps before collapsing. He was evacuated to the Barzilay Medical Center in Ashkelon, where he died of his wounds. Oz was a computer technician who used to visit Sderot often as
part of his work. He was survived by his pregnant wife and a
2-year-old daughter.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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A TASTE FOR TERROR
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 27, 2007. |
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The Palestinian Arabs live in "refugee cams" that could be easily compared to Soweto Township (Soweto is an urban area in the Gauteng, in the outskirts of the City of Johannesburg, South Africa. The English syllabic abbreviation, short for South Western Townships, subsequently referred to by relocating residents and other South Africans as "So Where To". Soweto is the most populous black urban residential area in the country, with Census 2001 putting its population at 896 995) or perhaps they are some sort of ghettos. It is not at all acceptable nor is it justified that for 59 years the Palestinian Arabs have been recognized as refugees, a status that should have legally expired years ago. (A refugee is a person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country. The major exception are the 4.3 million Palestinian refugees under the authority of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinians Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), who are the only group to be granted refugee status to the descendants of refugees. The great majority have remained refugees for generations as they were not permitted to return to their homes or to settle in the Arab countries where they lived. Palestinian refugees from 1948 and their descendants do not come under the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Stats of Refugees, but under UNRWA, which created its own criteria for refugee classification. As such they are the only refugee population legally defined to include descendants of refugees, as well as others who might otherwise be considered internally displace persons.) Arab societies have a genius for self-destruction. The Arabs nations want the Palestinian Arabs to continue to suffer. They have about as much sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs living in refugee camps as all those "good" Germans had for the Jews whose real estate was suddenly available to them. The funding the Palestinian Arabs refugee camps, where poverty and destitute reigns and ignorance rules -- exactly the kind of situation in which Saudis, Syrians and Gulf Arabs like to keep Palestinian Arabs, the West, in particularly the United States, unjustly, but wickedly, have been promoting and prolonging their suffering. No one pays attention to the warning; everyone waits for something terrible to happen and then it is way too late. The radical Islam terror and its cancerous chaos in Gaza is endless. Now it has spread to Lebanon where the bodies pile up as the buildings burn. Where is next? This article was written by Ralph Peters and published in the New York Post, May 22, 2007. |
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Terror in Tripoli. Havoc in Gaza. Palestinians assassinating the innocent and blaming it on their own victimization. Sounds a lot like 1982? Yes, except that yesteryear's political hit-men are now fanatics. And the Palestinians have blown yet another chance -- to the relief of their fellow Arabs. No Arab potentate wants the Palestinians to build a successful, rule-of-law state that co-exists with Israel. Nor does a single Arab ruler likes democracy in Lebanon. The Lebanese army's siege of the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in Tripoli is an act of desperation. Forced to accept the autonomy of Palestinian bastions on Lebanese soil, a succession of Beirut governments has had to watch the growth of Islamist radicalism as rich Arab states played up the Palestinian cause -- and ignored their flesh-and-blood Palestinians. The camp under fire (by the way, the shelling isn't indiscriminate -- the Lebanese gunners just aren't very good shots) has 32,000 registered residents. The real number may be closer to 50,000, all crammed in a ghetto where poverty reigns and ignorance rules -- exactly the kind of situation in which Saudis, Syrians and Gulf Arabs like to keep Palestinians. The destitute camp -- really, an urban slum -- would seem to be a perfect recruiting ground for fanatics. Yet most of the local refugees, who have lived in Lebanon for a full generation, are siding with the Lebanese government. They don't like being shelled, but they want the terrorists gone. For their part, the terrorists hope the fighting will spread to other camps. And who are these terrorists whose actions brought the Lebanese army down on their heads? Fatah al-Islam is one of those countless splinter groups right out of Monty Python's "Life of Brian" -- except for its murderous bent. Aligned with al Qaeda and backed by Syria, its immediate mission is to make Lebanon ungovernable. So the bodies pile up as the buildings burn. Meanwhile, the Palestinian try at self-government in Gaza is an even greater shambles. When Israel withdrew its forces in 2005, Palestinian leaders had an unprecedented chance to prove that they could govern competently. With aid in the pipeline (from the West, of course) and goodwill abounding, they could have given the people they ruled a chance. Instead, they gave them anarchy, economic collapse, rampant criminality, a return to "honor killings" and a society broken by blood feuds and internecine hatred. Last week, the Gaza fighting spun out of control, and Fatah forces, whose leadership now quietly leans on Israel for support, proved tougher than the Hamas thugs expected. With newly trained security-forces in play, Fatah threatened to seize the local initiative. Hamas responded by launching waves of missiles against civilian targets in Israel. By week's end, the Hamas barbarism had become intolerable. Israel responded by killing dozens of Hamas terrorists. The result? A fragile truce to which Fatah had to agree in the name of Palestinian solidarity. But the Pal-on-Pal fighting will resume soon enough. After winning the last election, Hamas outed itself as a pure-terrorist organization obsessed with killing Israelis and grabbing power for itself -- not a party dedicated to improving the lives of the people. Average Palestinians would like to get on with the shabby lives left to them. And some are staging a quiet rebellion against Hamas: A significant number of the targets Israel struck over the past several days were identified via Palestinian tip-offs. Arab societies have a genius for self-destruction (look at Iraq), but President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party may prove readier to deal sensibly with Israel than any Palestinian faction in the past. Abbas recognizes that, today, the greatest danger comes from within, not from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. As for the mess in Lebanon, Syria's inability to refrain from deadly mischief is a blessing in at least one respect: It makes it harder for the advocates of phony Realpolitik (such as former Secretary of State Jim "Have you hugged your dictator today?" Baker) to push us back into yesteryear's cozy relationships with genocidal Arab despots. But who really are the victims here? Obviously, Israelis continue to suffer from Arab terror-as-self-actualization. But the global media hates Israel. So don't expect to hear much about the rockets raining on Sderot, beyond a perfunctory aside from a dismissive anchor-babe. Of course, the Lebanese have been the long-standing victims of meddling Arab powers and the refusal of larger and far richer Arab states to give Palestinians hope for better lives. If the Saudis love the Palestinians so much, why not build a model city in the Kingdom for the 400,000 or so stranded in Lebanon? (Actually, few Palestinians would choose to live in such an oppressive place.) The truth is that other Arabs want the Palestinians to continue to suffer. It's useful as an excuse for all their failings. They have about as much sympathy for the refugees as all those good Germans had for the Jews whose real estate was suddenly available. But the ultimate victims of this round of Palestinian violence are the Palestinians themselves. After passing up so many chances for peace and statehood, they can no longer be classed as victims of Zionism. Yet the Palestinians are victims -- of the other Arabs who exploit them and neglect them. And of the madmen spawned from their own kind. Forget the rage of the dispossessed and all that sanctimonious claptrap. For the Palestinians preying upon their brethren, terror's a business. And business is good. Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:http://ngthinker.typepad.com |
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THE BBC BLAMES ISRAEL FOR 'UNSTABLE BORDERS'
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 27, 2007. |
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This was written by James Lewis and it appeared in the American
Thinker
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/05/the_bbc_blames_israel_for_unst.html. James Lewis maintains a blog at http://www.dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/ |
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In a shameless effort to rewrite history: "The BBC News website is publishing a series of articles about the attempts to achieve peace in the Middle East and the main obstacles. Yesterday, Martin Asser looked at the question of Israel's borders and settlements." Surprise! It turns out that Israel is to blame for its "unstable borders." By Gum, it's just as if Israel wasn't attacked by invading Arab armies from its first day of life in 1948, and again in 1967 and 1974, when it pushed back the invaders to achieve some measure of border stability. Reading Martin Asser's wildly anti-Israel BBC "history" of the past sixty years, those events never happened. So Israel's defensive push-back is twisted into offensive imperialism, and the Beeb manages to "confuse the fire with the fire brigade," in the apt words of Winston Churchill. The BBC's dishonesty is beyond belief. But constant, relentless propaganda works. Most people can't resist the Big Lie when it is repeated over and over again. Naturally the Beeb's British and international audience hates Israel for making all the trouble in the world. Appeasers always look for scapegoats, and Israel is the natural choice. The BBC is run by the far Left in Britain, and once again, the extremes of fascism and the Left are allied, just as they were in the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1938. As the Beeb's favorite philosopher said, "history repeats, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." The BBC's malevolence has unintended consequences, however --- such as the radicalization of thousands of domestic terrorists in Britain's own alienated cities. The men who suicide-bombed the London Underground on "7/7" were radicalized by Islamist imams peddling Wahhabi world conquest. British police and intelligence agencies have warned that thousands of homegrown Islamist extremists may be ready to place more bombs. But the ideological ground was laid for them by ... the BBC, which continues to pump out industrial-strength hatred for America and Israel. The leftists who run BBC have naturally persuaded themselves that Islamist terrorism is not a real threat. Terrorism is all the fault of Bush and Blair. So today, an upside-down "history" of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is being peddled to push the incoming Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, into an anti-Israel stance. This is the message from the Labour Left, which controls the biggest tax-funded propaganda empire in the world --- more than six billion dollars per year. Yet Islamist terrorism is a very real threat in Londonistan and Britanostan. Islamists hate Britain and the West, as well as Israel, for being Christian, Jewish or atheist, for being pro-Gay and pro-women, for being richer and more productive than the Muslim world, and for a hundred other reasons. So the BBC itself is radicalizing Britain's Muslim population, even while seeming to displace all blame on Israel. While the aim is to discredit and ultimately destroy Israel, the Islamist backlash will inevitably harm the people of Britain, just as the Underground Bombing did. The Beeb ends up cutting its own throat. So the biter was bitten on 7/7, and has learned nothing in consequence. It may take more terror attacks to finally convince ordinary people that they have been systematically misled for decades. Unfortunately, Islamist terror bombs are far more likely to hurt innocent people than the sources of pernicious propaganda. George Orwell worked for the BBC, and satirized it in his dystopian novel 1984 as the "Ministry of Truth" --- which is of course the Ministry of Lies. The BBC continues to reveal a shameful black mark against a once-great country. Orwell lives. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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NEW NIGERIAN AND WEST AFRICA SCAM EXPLOITING ANTI SEMITISM
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 27, 2007. |
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This warning comes from Julie Saltoun, Regional Director, Anti-Defamation League Santa Barbara, CA 93101. Contact her at jsaltoun@adl.org or go to www.adl.org |
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There are not ENOUGH or HARDLY ANY Jews in Nigeria! Same applies to West Africa! A new email scam targeting the Jewish community is circulating on the Internet. The email message contains the subject heading: "There is a new anti-Semitism, please help the Jews," and uses the email address" helpthejews@gmail.com. The email claims to be from a Dr. Kane Andrew who is referred to as a "delegated representative of SAVE THE JEWS in Western African Region." The email claims that Jews are being killed and kidnapped in Nigeria, which is resulting in a "Holocaust caused by Antisemitism." This poorly written email is typical of what is known as the "Nigerian scams." These email scams can originate in different countries but they are collectively referred to as "Nigerian scams" because individuals in that country are rumored to have started the practice and are still a leading source of the scams. The emails can take various forms: some try to entice a person to get involved in a plan to help recoup a large sum of money and share in the proceeds; others try to get people to give money for disaster relief or some other cause. The ultimate goal is to bilk money from an unsuspecting victim. A copy of the "Help the Jews" email is below. It is unclear how widespread the email is at this point. From: SAVE THE JEWS [mailto: helpthejews@gmail.com] Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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EX-CHIEF OF STAFF YA'ALON: DISENGAGEMENT LED TO LEBANON AND GAZA WARS
Posted by Ezra HaLevi, May 26, 2007. |
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(IsraelNN.com) Former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon said Saturday that the Disengagement is what led to the Second Lebanon War and brought southern Israel under fire from Gaza. Ya'alon, who was replaced as Chief of Staff just before the 2005 Disengagement due to his semi-public disapproval of the plan, said on Channel 2's Meet the Press program that the only solution to Israel's current situation is a return of the IDF to Gaza. "The unilateral approach that drove the Disengagement Plan has failed and Israel must abandon it," he said. "The Disengagement is seen by the other side as Israel fleeing," Ya'alon said that no solution other than reversing the IDF's departure from Gaza is tenable. "The problems in Gaza won't go away," he said. "Nobody can solve it for us -- not Egypt and not an international force... You have to be blind to think entering Gaza in unnecessary. "In order to get the other side to recognize our right to exist as an independent Jewish State, we have to come off forceful...We have to strike the terrorists, hit their workshops and hit their infrastructure," Ya'alon continued. "We did it in [2002's] Operation Defensive Shield, although we had our reservations before launching that operation as well." Ya'alon qualified his statements, saying he was not talking about staying in Gaza or reestablishing the Jewish towns there destroyed during the Disengagement. "I'm not talking about going in and staying there. I'm talking about cleaning the place up," he said. "I'm not talking about ruling the city, but if we do not go in now, when they are firing at Sderot -- we will soon find ourselves with rockets in Ashdod." Ezra HaLevi writes for Arutz Sheva (www.IsraelNationalNews.com). |
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DRY BONES: POLLARD'S BIG MISTAKE
Posted by Justice For Jonathan Pollard (J4JP), May 26, 2007. |
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The essay was written by Yaacov Kirschen, the creator of the DRY BONES cartoons. |
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For years I've been at a loss to understand the irrational rage against Jonathan Pollard, but American Ambassador to Israel, Richard H. Jones, has just explained why Pollard has been subjected to such cruel and unusual punishment. "This is a very emotional issue in the United States," Jones said. "I know he was helping a friend but that's what makes it even more emotional for Americans, if a friend would cooperate in aiding and abetting someone who is committing treason against his own country." The ambassador is saying that the anger is at the "friend" who "aided and abetted" Pollard. The "friend" Jones refers to is either "the Jews" or the Jewish State. There's no need for Jones to apologize. We should be thankful to
the ambassador for having set the record straight at last. Jonathan
Pollard is not being punished. We are.
Contact Justice for Jonathan Pollard at justice4jp@gmail.com
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THE ROAD MAP OF THE HARLOT
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 26, 2007. |
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There are legends about her origins. Some say she is the very snake from the Garden of Eden itself. She reappears in different forms and under different names throughout human history. Many regard her as a she-demon from the netherworld. Everywhere, she has the same Modus Operandi: Come and show me your true vulnerability, she cried, and I promise we will live in peace forever, trust me. If you doubt my sincerity then YOU are the villain! But she is best known to us as Delilah, the harlot of Gaza. It was then that Samson went to her and lay with her. Reveal to me your true vulnerability, she insisted. I will not use it against you. Trust me. We will dwell together in peace. But he was shrewd. Piece of cake, he teased, all you have to do is bind me up with seven vines that were never dried. And no sooner did he offer her this goodwill gesture for peace than her Tanzim descended upon him and bound him with the very same vines. Death to the Occupier, she screamed. In fire and spirit we will redeem thee, oh Gaza. But he broke those bindings like thread and launched a reprisal raid for which the entire world condemned him as aggressor. You colonialist imperialist, she sneered. Make fun of my Peace of the Brave, will you? But Samson was under pressure from the entire world, including the White Pyramid, to smooth things over with the harlot. Reveal to me your true vulnerability, she insisted. So what if last time I used it to entrap you? This time I am sincere. Oh, alright, he agreed. Anything for some shut-eye. If you bind me with brand new ropes from Sears that have never been used before, I will be as weak as a newborn kitten. Rapid-eye-movement sleep had barely set in when the Tanzim leaped into the boudoir. Death to the Occupier, screamed the harlot, and her militia men attacked the sleeping paratrooper. But he arose and implemented a campaign of targeted assassinations against his tormentors. What, again you mock me? Where is your sense of trust?, sighed the harlot. And now the White Pyramid was getting impatient. It wanted the Philistines pacified so that it could pursue its campaign against the Chaldeans. I was just testing you, said Samson all goo-goo eyed. Now that I know you are my sincere sweet turtle dove, I will let you in on my true secret. Just weave seven locks of my hair into a Valentine's card, and I will be as Silly Putty in your hands. She did, but he just tore them off, got up and walked out. You cad, she wailed. You demon! The White Pyramid was really getting irritated now with the obstinacy of the guy and Belgium was going to try him for war crimes having to do with the foxes with burning tails ruining the fields of the Philistines. She is sincere this time, insisted the Secretary of State, you must put her good will to the test. That is true, insisted the Euro eunuchs. The Council of Kingdoms denounced the warrior as an aggressor. Professors from the tribe of Dan insisted that the Philistines were sincerely interested in making Peace Now. The Post-Zionist followers of Bilaam were calling for international sanctions against him. Human rights activists were demanding that he stop taunting the harlot. Oh alright, sighed the warrior in appeasement, if not in utter exhaustion. If you give me a Marine crew cut, then I will be as helpless as a chad gadya. But you gotta cross your heart and promise this time, and no more of your tricks! This time, you better be sincere. We know what followed. Samson eventually did get his revenge, but at the cost of his own Oslo-like self-destruction. But what ever became of the harlot of Gaza? The Bible is silent about that. Was she in that pagan temple brought down upon the heads of the savage in his feat of targeted assassination? Apparently not, or it would have been so noted. The she-demon wandered the world, showing up in unexpected places. She married King Ahab and sent out her shaheeds to murder the prophets of God. She tried to lure Odysseus to his destruction. She was almost captured in Salem, Massachusetts. She possessed the souls of the world leaders in the 1930s, as they submitted themselves to her charms. Show me your true vulnerability, she cooed. And after each round, her terror Tanzim stormed in and carried out atrocities, only to be followed by new flirtations and new peace programs based on the same old theme: Trust me, so what if I lied to you in the past, this time I am sincere. She went into hiding again until 1992. It was then that she crept out from her grotto beneath the fever swamp and once again painted her harlot face. Stepping upon the shore in her old Gaza stomping grounds, she sighed and taunted. Show me your true vulnerability, she said. Trust me, I only want to know out of curiosity. I would never use it against you. This is my sincere peace offer. And like Delilah of old, and like Delilah's love-struck gargantuan paramour, time after time she repeats the same strategy and he responds with the same tributes of puppy love. Her suitor never learns from her past behavior, never wises up, never tires of self-delusion. After each betrayal, she returns with the same siren call. Just expose your vulnerability to me. Just place your neck in this friendly noose. It is for peace, you see. So what if I lied to you every single time in the past. It was all because YOU did not truly trust me, she responds with melodramatically hurt feelings. You never went all the way, placing your very existence in my hands. And until you abandon your suspicions and obstinacy, until you show me your true love, by accepting my Road Map and placing your neck in my noose, we have nothing to talk about and the rockets will continue to fly. 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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il |
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A NEW CONTRACT
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 25, 2007. |
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This was written by Arieh Eldad. |
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"Your people is my people and your G-d is my G-d," said Ruth the Moabite to Naomi her mother-in-law, and she joined the Jewish people, and "Boaz redeemed her and she begat Obed and Obed begat Jesse and Jesse begat David." Thus ends the Megilla of Ruth which we read on the holiday of Shavuot. Did not the elders of Bethlehem, who sat at the city gate and ruled that Boaz was permitted -- even obligated -- to redeem and marry Ruth, remember what is written in Deuteronomy: "An Amonite and a Moabite shall not come unto the community of G-d, even unto the tenth generation shall they not come into the community of G-d, forever"? Did not Rabbi Berachiya and Rabbi Simon, who conclude the Midrash Rabba commentary on the Megilla of Ruth by stating that all the generations up until King David were merely a divine sifting and selection until G-d found David, remember that King David is the great-grandson of a Moabite? How would the history of Israel look if the elders of Bethlehem had been picky about the descent from Ruth? Even assuming that Ruth was converted according to halacha, we can only be thankful that a miracle occurred and there was no rabbinical court in that generation that abrogated her conversion, as recently happened with a rabbinical court in Ashdod, which abrogated the conversion of a woman that took place 15 years ago. The court retroactively abrogated her marriage after she admitted she had not been careful in observing the commandments and ruled that her children were not Jews, and this because the rabbi (Orthodox, not Reform) who converted her, Rabbi Chaim Druckman, is a "sinner" supposedly bringing pure gentiles into the nation of Israel. Another recent news item is that rabbinical courts are opposing those who wish to convert if their spouse (Jewish from birth) refuses to observe a religious lifestyle or is not willing to leave his place of work where immodestly dressed women also work. A week ago, the news also included a story about a major offensive by important rabbis against 30 Zionist rabbis who ascended the Temple Mount. And a torrent of curses descended upon those who -- with rabbinical support -- proposed legislation to formalize the character of the Sabbath in the State of Israel in the light of an accord written by Rabbi Jacob Meidan and Professor Ruth Gabison. The common denominator of these three phenomena -- the fight against conversion, against ascending Temple Mount, and against a Sabbath law -- as well as the refusal to address the needs of women whose husbands refuse to grant them divorce papers (a get), or permit enlistment in the Israeli army, is that they are attempts to be disconnected from history, to ignore the reality of our lives while burying one's head in holy ground. Hundreds of thousands of citizens who made aliya to Israel under the Law of Return cannot marry, hundreds of thousands of Arabs do as they wish on Temple Mount while only Jews are forbidden to ascend in order to avoid contaminating the holy mountain, millions of Israelis have turned the Sabbath into a day of shopping and work, thousands of women cannot marry because they are waiting for a get their husbands refuse to grant, tens of thousands of Haredi youth are not serving in the army and not doing any alternate national service because "their Torah is their livelihood," and super-models walk semi-naked in fashion shows after they win exemptions from military service claiming to be deeply religious. And the rabbinic establishment of Israel is convinced that they are thus saving the Eternal One of Israel. This week the Knesset marked Herzl Day. Herzl gave us political Zionism, but only a small portion of the nation accepted it. Most of Orthodox Judaism fervently fought Herzl. Detached from the history swirling around them, deaf to the hammering that was building the gas chambers, most of the rabbis in Europe preferred the ancient oath which came after the Bar Kochba rebellion "not to go up as a wall" to the oath of the Kabbalists Joseph Caro and Solomon Elkabatz to go up to Israel in order to redeem the Divine Presence and be redeemed. Thus the State of Israel was established mostly by secular Zionists who, even though they actualized with their bodies the Jewish souls beating within -- failed to bequeath this beating Jewish soul to their grandchildren. Trying to live outside of history in the last century brought about the destruction of millions in Europe. Trying to live outside of history today may bring about and maybe already has brought about the division of our people into two peoples, the ceding of the Temple Mount to the Arabs, the separation of religion from the state, and the abandonment of the Jewish character of the State of Israel. At the time of the first return to Zion from Babylonian Exile, the people were led by Ezra the Scribe and Nehemiah the statesman. After they built the walls of Jerusalem, they read the Torah to the whole people and renewed the covenant between Israel and its G-d. They wrote a new contract to be signed by all the leaders of the people. Today, too, the State of Israel is not enough, the Israel Defense Forces and military campaigns are not enough; we cannot hide behind ancient walls in a sort of Karaite-ism of the Oral Torah. We need a new contract. Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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A FRENCH REVOLUTION IS NEEDED IN ISRAEL
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 25, 2007. |
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As Joshua circled the ancient city of Jericho seven times, blowing the Shofar until the walls tumbled down, let the Israeli people similarly go up to Jerusalem and bring down Ehud Olmert and the currently useless Knesset. Let them also bring Shofrot and staffs to thump the ground until the buildings that house the political scoundrels shake with the righteous fury of the people. Today the weak, corrupt government that claims primacy over the people of Israel are putting on a false show of force, pretending that they are hitting a few of those infamous empty buildings at the orders of Olmert. Why does it seem that all the buildings they hit are invariably empty of Terrorists -- reminiscent of the Rabin and Peres days where they called ahead to warn the PLO terrorists to get out before the attacks?! It's all for show as the IDF fires at empty fields in anticipation, they say, that Kassam rocket launching teams may set up in that empty field. I do not necessarily wholly blame the military officers, given that they were selected for their PC (Political Correctness) in the anticipation of becoming a ranking politician after their military service. Most want to clear out Gaza and rectify the Sharon-Olmert decision to give up the Southern Front -- along with the Northern Front which Ehud Barak abandoned when he fled south Lebanon in the middle of the night in 2000. This isn't merely an incompetent, cowardly government but it is acting in a manner to invite attack by the Muslim Islamists. If ever that was sufficient reason to grab Olmert, Peretz, Peres and others of the Left and plant their behinds as hood ornaments on the fronts of tanks as they go into battle, it is now. Let the tanks sweep into Gaza, using the example of the bombing of Dresden, leaving nothing but ashes. Then let the good pioneering Jews of Gush Katif return and remake the paradise that was theirs. Let the nation rise up against these later-day Herods who was loyal to Rome as Olmert seems loyal to the interests of the Arabists in Washington. These corrupt and evil people have found a home and operating base in the heart of Israel. They deserve no pity, no mercy as they act as the enablers for Israel to be under assault by the insidious pagans who have dubbed themselves Muslim Arab Palestinians. As for America, the people of this great nation should not be named in the same breath as the Arabists in Washington who have supported Palestinian Terrorists for decades. But, those chickens have come to roost as everything the U.S. tries to do now to stem the tide of killer Islamists fails. It's only a matter of time before the Islamic friends of the Arabist State Department start their campaign of using dirty bombs against American cities. For years fellow traveling Arabist of the State Department and oil companies have been assisting Arab Muslim Terrorists, invariably calling such nations or terror organizations "moderates". How in Hell, and I do mean Hell, did the State Department qualify first Arafat and now Abbas as moderates to be paid, trained and armed? How did they manage to recruit Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin then Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz and Tzippi Livni as surrogates to weaken the Jewish State of Israel to Palestinian aggression? Was it merely the military grants or did they receive more personal gratuities? Did blackmail play a role, given that Israeli leaders were ripe for blackmail, for their thievery while in office, which is presently under serious investigation by a crooked police force and a political Attorney General Menachem Mazuz? If ever there was a time for a nation to revolt and drive the thieves out of government, that time is now. Let the people come in droves to Jerusalem with their Shofrot and staffs, making such a great noise that the hideouts of these perfidious gangs come tumbling down. Let the ground shake beneath their feet. Let the screams, this time, come from Olmert, the thugs in his Cabinet and the Knesset. The people have been screaming from a daily bombardment of Kassam Rockets from Gaza while Hezb'Allah has rearmed in South Lebanon with 20,000 Katyusha Missiles. Every time the Kassams land in Sderot, Ashkelon or those close-in kibbutzim, this ambulatory cancer named Olmert and his lackeys say: "We will know what to do if the missiles don't stop." What he means is that the Olmert gang, at the behest of the Bush Road Map Makers, will evacuate southern Israel as demanded by the Arabists in the Washington State Department. Treason is a hanging offense so let's get on with the trials while such action may yet do some good in defending the country. If the French people could rid themselves of the predator elite aristocracy, even the passive Jews could aspire to clean out their corrupt leadership if the Jewish nation is to survive. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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LITTLE MOUSE STEPS
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 25, 2007. |
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Israel has for decades crept in against attacking terrorists with little mouse steps called "restraint". Most of Israel's governments have meekly waited for an attack and then they respond with meaningless little mouse steps that do NOT crush their enemies decisively. Rather they encourage more terror by turning the meek cheek and teaching the Muslim Palestinians (both terrorists and the civilian population) that there is no price to pay for killing Jews. We must all recall the Rabin-Peres years where the little mouse steps against terror were air or artillery strikes against empty buildings -- usually with a prior warning call from Shimon Peres to the PLO to abandon the intended targeted then emptied buildings before the incoming IDF strike. It was a way to trick and pacify the angry Israeli people but, not crush the Palestinian Terrorists. It was a partnership made in Hell along with the pro-Arab U.S. State Department leading the orchestration. First the collusion was with Yassir Arafat; now it with Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) -- Arafat's 40 year companion and financier in terror. The U.S. and Israel also armed Fatah with weapons and ammunition and the CIA trained the Palestinian Authority's Police Force, many of whom were also terrorists -- especially during the various "intifadas". Each time the weak response generated a greater confidence among the terrorists leadership that they could successfully mount greater operations against Israeli citizens -- with impunity. They had not so secret partners at the highest levels of Israeli government and they thought they could count on that protection. It's happening again as Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert together planned and carried out a coup d'etat against the 10,000 Israeli people who made their homes in Gush Katif/Gaza. Sharon was advised time and again that a "judenrein" (Jew-free) Gaza would become an operational Global Terror Base for not only the Muslim Arab Palestinians but also dozens of other terror organizations such as Islam al Jihadi, Hamas, Fatah, Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades and, of course, Al Qaeda. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. Clearly, Olmert, among others, should be indicted, tried and jailed for treason, for crimes against the Jewish people. As for Sharon, he too should be tried, in modified absentia, given that he lies as a semi-rotting corpse kept alive by machines. The once unthinkable crimes of this once great hero continue to affect the lives of Israelis and he should be put on trial as a betrayer of his nation's trust. (Note! I say this as a once great admirer and friend of Ariel Sharon.) Whatever he once did for the nation as a charging General has long since been erased by choice. It is said that a man can achieve or lose Olam HaBa (the world to come) in a split second and Arik Sharon has clearly lost passage into Olam HaBa for all time. The horrible Leftists playing the role of subversive Fifth Columnists, having invariably restrained the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) from executing a crushing response to Terror have always wound up pleading with the Terrorists for forgiveness and to cease and desist their dastardly acts of Terror. Thus, we have Oslo, Barak's retreat for Lebanon's security buffer zone, and Gaza -- with more to come IF Olmert and the eminence gris, Shimon Peres, assist the terrorists by surrendering more Jewish Land, more weapons and more money to the P.A. Each time the expectations among the Arab Muslims grew exponentially, as they saw the pacifistic Israeli Left tremble, apologize for winning and demanding nothing from the vanquished. The Islamic creature fed on this weakness of the Jewish Left and grew to a point that it could well overwhelm Israel's defenses. If I were in charge, I would strip the so-called authorities of their powers, sentence them to something like 50 lashes and send them out into the wilderness to live out their days. These are the lepers of Jewish society and should be treated as dangerous untouchables. Islamists/Arabs/Muslims cannot be treated with kindness -- which they perceive as weakness, vulnerability and the invitation to attack -- again. Treat them as they treat each other -- with unyielding cruelty -- much the same as the Muslim Turks treated the Arab and Muslim population of the Turkish Ottoman Empire for 400 years. The Allies liberated the Ottoman Empire in WW1, creating a bunch of new free Muslim countries out of the former Ottoman Empire -- all of which became radicalized under new dictators. Treating the Muslims with respect and kindness only causes them to have contempt for the weak-kneed Leftist Jews. This leads to their accelerated hatred and visions of avidly contemplated Genocide as soon as they have the power to do so. Clearly, they have the same plans for American Arabists and the Europeans. Apologetic little mouse steps do not civilize Islamists but, rather only increase their vicious expectations of enslaving others. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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PALESTINIANS IN LEBANON
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 25, 2007. |
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I would like to look northward in this posting. Ultimately all of this affects Israel. ~~~~~~~~~~ In the last several days world attention has been drawn to the Nahr al Bared UNRWA refugee camp in northern Lebanon, where Lebanese Armed Forces have entered and are doing battle in order to drive out a militant Sunni group associated with al-Qaida, called Fatah al-Islam. The group, which has Syrian support, is led by a Palestinian, Shaker Abssi, and consists, according to reports, mostly of Palestinians, but includes others such as Syrians and Jordanians. The Lebanese army has encountered stiff resistance in the camp -- where they were fired upon by machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. That a militant group would headquarter in a Palestinian refugee camp, and that violence would ensue, should not come as a surprise. There are presently close to 400,000 Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon who are registered with UNRWA as refugees. Of these, some 225,000 live in the 12 official UNRWA refugee camps that currently exist in Lebanon -- all but one of these camps (the exception being one adjacent to Ba'albek) are situated near the Mediterranean coast. The remainder of the registered refugee population lives in close proximity to the camps. The situation of the Palestinian refugees inside of Lebanon is -- by any one of a number of measures -- worse than that of Palestinian Arab refugees living in other areas in which UNRWA functions: Jordan, Syria, Gaza, and Judea and Samaria. They endure greater poverty, a higher infant mortality rate, and poorer housing. Lebanon affords the Palestinians little in the way of social and civil rights and actually prevents them from working in dozens of professions. In a word, the Lebanese are hostile to the Palestinians and have no intention of making life easy for them or integrating them. There have been UNRWA refugees camps in Lebanon since 1950, and the Palestinians situated there were never welcomed or integrated. But current Lebanese hostility to the Palestinians was generated in good part by historical events of thirty years ago. When the PLO was thrown out of Jordan in 1970, Arafat moved his cadres to south Lebanon, and took over the refugee camps there, establishing a political, economic and military presence so considerable that it was referred to as a "state within a state." Ultimately the Lebanese paid an enormous price for this situation. The PLO financial empire, called SAMED, established farming and manufacturing industries and, utilizing cheap Palestinian refugee labor, became one of Lebanon's largest employers; they harvested poppies in the Bekaa Valley for an extensive drug trade, as well. The balance of Lebanon's fragile multi-factional society was upset in part by the presence of the Palestinians, who numbered some 300,000 by 1975 and had developed into a primary military force in Southern Lebanon. They established a law unto themselves that undermined Lebanese sovereignty, and they played a role in Lebanon's civil war. Perhaps bitterest of all to the Lebanese was the PLO use of Lebanese soil as the base for attacks into northern Israel. This provoked Israeli bombardment of Palestinian targets in south Lebanon, and then, in 1982, Israeli military movement into southern Lebanon to drive out the Palestinians. The PLO infrastructure was driven out and moved to Tunis. The Palestinian presence in the camps remained, however. To a considerable degree the residents of the camps continued to be a law unto themselves: By long standing agreement -- dating from the time of the PLO -- the Lebanese army has no authority to enter the camps, which are controlled by armed Palestinian militias. The entrance now of the Lebanese army into this camp marks a departure from what has been the norm. Lebanese from the area of Tripoli, near Nahr al Bared, cheered as the LAF entered. The Palestinian residents of the UNRWA refugee camps in Lebanon, as described above, are seen as a beleaguered population -- and there is clearly a way in which this is so. But they are also a radicalized population, often working against the best interests of a stable, independent Lebanon. In 2005, after the withdrawal from Lebanon of Syrian forces, both Syrian weapons and agents were moved into the Palestinian camps. Last summer, during the Lebanese War, the Palestinians in the UNRWA camps provided support for Hezbollah and a secure hiding place for some of its weaponry. At present close to one-half of the 30,000 residents of Nahr al Bared have fled, many to the UNRWA camp at Beddawi or to Tripoli. Meanwhile, Richard Cook, Director of UNRWA Affairs in Lebanon, is expressing outrage that a UNRWA relief convoy that entered the camp on Tuesday was fired upon. UNRWA officials now concede that they knew months ago about the presence of a heavily armed Fatah al-Islam group in the camp in Lebanon but were helpless to do anything about it. "Somebody hasn't been doing their job," said Commissioner-General Karen AbuZayd, referring to the Palestinian militias who patrol the camps. According to her the Palestinians refugees in the camp are unhappy about the presence of Fatah al-Islam. AbuZayd's statement opens the door to many questions: In early 1998, Kofi Annan, then secretary-general of the UN, stated in a report that, "Refugee camps and settlements must be kept free of any military presence or equipment, including arms and ammunition...the neutrality and humanitarian character of the camps and settlements must be scrupulously maintained." The Security Council, reflecting the spirit of Annan's words, subsequently adopted Resolution 1208, acknowledging that "the maintenance of the civilian and humanitarian character of refugee camps and settlements is an integral part of the national, regional and international response to refugee situations, and underlining "the unacceptability of using refugees and other persons in refugee camps and settlements to achieve military purposes." In light of this, how is it that armed Palestinian militias have been permitted to continue to control the UNRWA camps in Lebanon? Further how is it that UNRWA officials kept quiet for months when in possession of the knowledge that a heavily armed Fatah al-Islam group was in an UNRWA camp? The inability of UNRWA officials to "do anything" about the situation directly -- because UNRWA possess no armed forces -- does not absolve them of responsibility to call the situation to the attention of the Security Council or the international community more broadly. Lastly, AbuZayd's statement regarding the fact that the Palestinian militias in the camp "weren't doing their job" shines a spotlight on the very serious matter of possible complicity of Palestinians in the camps with the radical Islamic group. Arlene Kushner is Senior Research Associate, Center for Near East Policy Research, Beit Agron International Press Center, Jerusalem, Israel. Contact her at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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REMEMBERING A FRIEND -- TASHBIH SAYYED
Posted by Israel Christian Nexus, May 25, 2007. |
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Contact Evan Miller by email at icnexus.info@gmail.com The role of the Israel-Christian Nexus is to bring together (connect) Christians and Jews in support of Israel and of our shared Judeo-Christian heritage and values. |
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FATH AL-ISLAM MILITARY COMMANDER: WE ARE "READY TO BLOW UP EVERY PLACE IN LEBANON"
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 25, 2007. |
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Does anyone find it odd that Fath el-Islam (Palestinian terrorist group in Lebanon) can: kill civilians with impunity, Their's is a war of pure aggression....but no one utters a word of protest (except their victims). And, conversely, Israel's defensive retaliation in Lebanon brought calumny and criticism and great power intervention and UN intervention. This below comes from The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an independent, non-profit organization that translates and analyzes the media of the Middle East. This is a Special Dispatch -- Jihad and Terrorism Studies
Project/Lebanon, May 25, 2007, No. 1599.
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In an interview with the London daily Al-Hayat, the military commander of the Fath Al-Islam organization, Shihab Al-Qaddour, also known as Abu Hurieira, threatened that if attacks by the Lebanese military against his organization continued, 'all fronts will be opened' and that Fath Al-Islam would be 'ready to blow up every place in Lebanon.' He also noted that his organization's activists were prepared for a battle lasting two years or more. Al-Qaddour, 36, from the village of Mishmish in the sub-district of Akkar in northern Lebanon, is considered the No. 2 man in Fath Al-Islam, after the leader Shaker Al-'Absi. According to Al-Qaddour, who spent five and a half years in a Syrian prison, he has fought for 21 years in various areas, including Iraq. The following are excerpts from the interview: 'We Have Sleeper Cells On Alert In All Palestinian Refuge Camps' Endnotes: (1) In an Al-Jazeera TV interview on May 25, 2007, PLO spokesman As'ad Abd Al-Rahman defied reports that Fath Al-Islam is a Palestinian organization, asserting that there are no Palestinians nor are the casualties in the battles with the Lebanese Army Palestinian, and hinted that the organization is operated by the Syrian regime.
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 |
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STAR TREK, NOAH AND ISMAIL HANIYEH
Posted by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, May 25, 2007. |
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This was published today in Arutz Sheva
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The IDF has publicly informed all Hamas terrorists how to activate an anti-IDF force field that is more powerful even than the one around the starship Enterprise. That force field would inevitably fail in every other episode of the Star Trek television show, only to be repaired in the nick of time by Chief Engineer Scott. But the force field that the IDF spokesperson granted to the Hamastanian enemy is infinitely more reliable and effective. As reported by my colleagues at Israel National News.com: "Following a missile hit in the vicinity of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's home in the Shati neighborhood of Gaza City, an IDF spokeswoman said that 'Haniyeh's home definitely was not the target.'" "Definitely." That little word says so much. It says, "Oh no. We would never even think of harming Haniyeh or his lovely house! Oh, no, no, no. Don't be silly." So now, much like in the story of the Biblical Noah, any animal will know that he or she can find refuge in the "ark" of Haniyeh's home. They "cloak themselves"? Like the Romulans? I understand that Haniyeh's wife is to start renting beds on the second floor of her house to wanted terrorists seeking a rest from a hard day of shelling Sderot schools. Maybe it will become the new Arafat-style Mukata. Remember that? It was the "headquarters" where wanted PA terrorists hid out with their PLO Godfather, enjoying his beta-version anti-IDF force field. But if a Palestinian Authority terrorist is not fortunate enough to live near Ismail Haniyeh or the Mukata, he can always grab any child within reach and go on with his business appointments completely unmolested (which is generally less than can be said for the child). This method apparently works wonders for keeping those pesky IDF helicopter gunships away. As reported in the Jerusalem Post last year, the PA terrorists "'cloak' themselves in women and children and families. There can be a situation where for days we know a terrorist is in a certain place and we don't attack him... We feel that he's in a place that could be problematic. There are at least 10 operations we don't carry out for every one that we do," [Israeli Air Force Chief Eliezer Shkedy] said. They "cloak themselves"? Like the Romulans, also from Star Trek? The difference between Star Trek and life in the Middle East, of course, is that one is filled with bizarre creatures in outlandish costumes who are constantly threatening the future of the universe, and the other is a TV show. Nissan Ratzlav-Katz writes for Arutz-Sheva. |
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THE LABOR PARTY'S PRIMARIES AND DOCTOR STRANGEDOVE
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 25, 2007. |
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The Labor Party primaries are coming up. At the moment there are only three contenders left running to head what is Left of the once dominant party in what had been a One-Party Israeli State. The three who remain include Amir Peretz, whose chances of getting elected are about the same as those of Dennis Kucinich. After last summer's fiascos, the public understands that Peretz is incapable of properly managing a felafel stand or of tying his own shoes. The other two contenders are Ehud Barak, who was Prime Minister of Israel from 1999 to 2001, and Ami Ayalon. Ayalon is slightly ahead in the polls. Ayalon is basically a bald Yossi Beilin and his preferred policies and platform are simply Uri-Avnery-Lite. So from the point of view of Israel's survival, which of the three is the contender whose victory in the primaries would be the most beneficial? The answer is clearly Ehud Barak. Huh, you say! How can that be? After all, Ehud Barak personally dropped 4000 katyusha rockets on northern Israel this past summer! Well, if you are going to answer your own questions, you don't need me. Of course, Barak dropped 4000 rockets on northern Israel this past summer, some not very far from me. That is why it would be good if he were to win the Labor primaries! The public KNOWS that those missiles landed in northern Israel all because of Barak's cowardly unilateral capitulation to the Hizbollah in 2000. So with Barak as head of the rump Labor Party, any leader of the Likud or of a post-Olmert Kadima could easily defeat the Labor Party! Labor would pass into history as a curious anachronism, sort of like the Whig Party. In contrast, Ayalon would be the new boy on the block and that might
protect him from the public's contempt for the Labor Party. Of course,
Amir Peretz is hated even more so than Barak and is regarded as much
stupider than Barak. So his winning the primaries would also be good
for Israel, by producing the demolition of the Labor Party. But that
seems unlikely to happen.
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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.
Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
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SENSE OF UMMAH: THE TROUBLE WITH ISLAM
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 25, 2007. |
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This article was written by Tawfik Hamid and was published in the
Wall Street Journal as an Opinion piece. Dr. Hamid, a onetime
member of Jemaah Islamiya, an Islamist terrorist group, is a medical
doctor and Muslim reformer living in the West. It is archived at
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Not many years ago the brilliant Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, published a short history of the Islamic world's decline, entitled "What Went Wrong?" Astonishingly, there was, among many Western "progressives," a vocal dislike for the title. It is a false premise, these critics protested. They ignored Mr. Lewis's implicit statement that things have been, or could be, right. But indeed, there is much that is clearly wrong with the Islamic world. Women are stoned to death and undergo clitorectomies. Gays hang from the gallows under the approving eyes of the proponents of Shariah, the legal code of Islam. Sunni and Shia massacre each other daily in Iraq. Palestinian mothers teach 3-year-old boys and girls the ideal of martyrdom. One would expect the orthodox Islamic establishment to evade or dismiss these complaints, but less happily, the non-Muslim priests of enlightenment in the West have come, actively and passively, to the Islamists' defense. These "progressives" frequently cite the need to examine "root causes." In this they are correct: Terrorism is only the manifestation of a disease and not the disease itself. But the root-causes are quite different from what they think. As a former member of Jemaah Islamiya, a group led by al Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, I know firsthand that the inhumane teaching in Islamist ideology can transform a young, benevolent mind into that of a terrorist. Without confronting the ideological roots of radical Islam it will be impossible to combat it. While there are many ideological "rootlets" of Islamism, the main tap root has a name -- Salafism, or Salafi Islam, a violent, ultra-conservative version of the religion. It is vital to grasp that traditional and even mainstream Islamic teaching accepts and promotes violence. Shariah, for example, allows apostates to be killed, permits beating women to discipline them, seeks to subjugate non-Muslims to Islam as dhimmis and justifies declaring war to do so. It exhorts good Muslims to exterminate the Jews before the "end of days." The near deafening silence of the Muslim majority against these barbaric practices is evidence enough that there is something fundamentally wrong. The grave predicament we face in the Islamic world is the virtual lack of approved, theologically rigorous interpretations of Islam that clearly challenge the abusive aspects of Shariah. Unlike Salafism, more liberal branches of Islam, such as Sufism, typically do not provide the essential theological base to nullify the cruel proclamations of their Salafist counterparts. And so, for more than 20 years I have been developing and working to establish a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace. Yet it is ironic and discouraging that many non-Muslim, Western intellectuals -- who unceasingly claim to support human rights -- have become obstacles to reforming Islam. Political correctness among Westerners obstructs unambiguous criticism of Shariah's inhumanity. They find socioeconomic or political excuses for Islamist terrorism such as poverty, colonialism, discrimination or the existence of Israel. What incentive is there for Muslims to demand reform when Western "progressives" pave the way for Islamist barbarity? Indeed, if the problem is not one of religious beliefs, it leaves one to wonder why Christians who live among Muslims under identical circumstances refrain from contributing to wide-scale, systematic campaigns of terror. Politicians and scholars in the West have taken up the chant that Islamic extremism is caused by the Arab-Israeli conflict. This analysis cannot convince any rational person that the Islamist murder of over 150,000 innocent people in Algeria -- which happened in the last few decades -- or their slaying of hundreds of Buddhists in Thailand, or the brutal violence between Sunni and Shia in Iraq could have anything to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Western feminists duly fight in their home countries for equal pay and opportunity, but seemingly ignore, under a façade of cultural relativism, that large numbers of women in the Islamic world live under threat of beating, execution and genital mutilation, or cannot vote, drive cars and dress as they please. The tendency of many Westerners to restrict themselves to self-criticism further obstructs reformation in Islam. Americans demonstrate against the war in Iraq, yet decline to demonstrate against the terrorists who kidnap innocent people and behead them. Similarly, after the Madrid train bombings, millions of Spanish citizens demonstrated against their separatist organization, ETA. But once the demonstrators realized that Muslims were behind the terror attacks they suspended the demonstrations. This example sent a message to radical Islamists to continue their violent methods. Western appeasement of their Muslim communities has exacerbated the problem. During the four-month period after the publication of the Muhammad cartoons in a Danish magazine, there were comparatively few violent demonstrations by Muslims. Within a few days of the Danish magazine's formal apology, riots erupted throughout the world. The apology had been perceived by Islamists as weakness and concession. Worst of all, perhaps, is the anti-Americanism among many Westerners. It is a resentment so strong, so deep-seated, so rooted in personal identity, that it has led many, consciously or unconsciously, to morally support America's enemies. Progressives need to realize that radical Islam is based on an antiliberal system. They need to awaken to the inhumane policies and practices of Islamists around the world. They need to realize that Islamism spells the death of liberal values. And they must not take for granted the respect for human rights and dignity that we experience in America, and indeed, the West, today. Well-meaning interfaith dialogues with Muslims have largely been fruitless. Participants must demand -- but so far haven't -- that Muslim organizations and scholars specifically and unambiguously denounce violent Salafi components in their mosques and in the media. Muslims who do not vocally oppose brutal Shariah decrees should not be considered "moderates." All of this makes the efforts of Muslim reformers more difficult. When Westerners make politically-correct excuses for Islamism, it actually endangers the lives of reformers and in many cases has the effect of suppressing their voices. Tolerance does not mean toleration of atrocities under the umbrella of relativism. It is time for all of us in the free world to face the reality of Salafi Islam or the reality of radical Islam will continue to face us. [Editor's Note: Several readers made this point: "How can one have 'a theologically-rigorous Islam that teaches peace' when Islam holds the Koran to be the direct word of God, and the Koran commands Moslems to wage war on the entire rest of humanity for its forcible conversion? Islam, like Marxism and Nazism, is abhorrent in essence, not merely in some interpretation, and the only re-interpretation that will detoxify it, is one which pretends to be Moslem but isn't."] 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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il |
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ISLAMIC CIRCLE OF NORTH AMERICA (ICNA) FUNDS HAMAS THROUGH CUTOUT
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 25, 2007. |
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This was written by Joe Kaufman, of the Americans Against Hate
Organization. To learn more about JI's and ICNA's financing of Hamas,
read Kaufman's FrontPage Magazine piece, 'Helping Hand to
Hamas.' Joe Kaufman is available for interview; email him at
info@americansagainsthate.org. This press release is archived at |
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(Coral Springs, FL) Americans Against Hate (AAH), the terrorist watchdog group, is calling on the United States government to shut down the offices and freeze the assets of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) for its role in the financing of Hamas. As well, AAH is calling on the U.S. government to place the Muslim Brotherhood of Pakistan, Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), on the State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) for the same. In August of 2006, just nine short months ago, JI announced on its website that it had presented, via its charity Al-Khidmat Foundation (AKF), a check for $99 thousand (six million rupees) to the head of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal. Mashaal thanked JI and stated that Hamas would continue to wage Jihad (war) against Israel. ICNA was founded in 1971 as the American arm of JI. On AKF's website, ICNA is listed as the charity's two top donors, ICNA Relief USA and ICNA Relief Canada. Another of the listed donors is ICNA's charity, Helping Hand. AAH Chairman Joe Kaufman stated, "We have incontrovertible evidence that ICNA is part of JI and that JI is funding Hamas through a charity that ICNA is the top donor for. Given this proof, there is no reason whatsoever for the future existence of ICNA. In addition, given JI's financing of Hamas and given JI's communiqués with the leader of Hamas, there are clear grounds for the placement of JI on the State Department list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. We call on the United States government to take immediate action, with respect to both of these organizations." Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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WHAT THEY SHOW IN ENGLAND: PADDY ASHDOWN'S DEMOLITION OF ISRAEL
Posted by Aramy, May 25, 2007. |
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This was written by Carol Gould, who is a former ITV Drama Executive and author of 'Spitfire Girls,' about the British women pilots of WWII. She is now Editor of 'Current Viewpoint.com' This article is archived athttp://currentviewpoint.com/cgibin/news.cgi?id=11&command=shownews&newsid=935 |
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("Battle for the Holy Land: Jerusalem" -- Channel Four Television primetime Great Britain broadcast May 19 2007; Love thy Neighbour 21 May) Had I known nothing or even very little about Jewish, Zionist and Israeli history I would have come away from former MP Paddy Ashdown's two-hour documentary on British Channel Four's primetime Saturday 19 May slot thinking the Jews are just about the most disagreeable race on this planet. Were I an Arab or Muslim I would believe the Jews of the Holy City are the scum of the earth. The following Monday evening, Channel Four presented another film by Rod Liddle about those wicked, pesky Jews of the West Bank and Hebron. In his film Ashdown managed to label the Jewish authorities of Jerusalem 'racism masquerading as bureaucracy', 'discriminatory and inhumane' and 'waging a forty-year war over the Haram al Sharif.' In Liddle's film he did what every British journalist does: hang around waiting for settlers and soldiers to lose their cool as Palestinians are revealed to be hungry, penniless, stomped-on victims of 'apartheid.' Liddle also makes a factual error: he fails to mention the heroic victory by the Israeli army in Sinai, driving back the mighty Egyptian forces. He does not tell the audience that Menachem Begin -- whom every Briton loves to tell me was a lifelong terrorist -- handed the Sinai back to Anwar Sadat at Camp David. The peace-seeking Arabs thanked Israel for its generous gesture by assassinating Sadat. Liddle, Ashdown and Carter, who brokered the Sinai deal, never mention the fact that Sadat was murdered because the Muslim Brotherhood want all of Israel in Arab hands and the Jews driven into the sea or worse. Once again a British television programme has taken the complex and tragic story of Israel and turned it into a polemic about the endlessly victimised Palestinians and those brutal, hate-filled, despicable Jews. This is not just a British phenomenon. In the United States former President Jimmy Carter has been castigating Israel for everything under the sun. For those of us with family and friends -- Jewish and Christian -- in Israel, the picture painted by the Carters and Ashdowns of this world is virtually unrecognisable. Since 1948 the State of Israel has not known a day's peace due to the intransigence and violence of its hostile neighbours. This very weekend innocent Israelis are being bombarded with rockets and some are having to be evacuated from their towns and cities. The rockets come from Gaza, which 'brutal occupier' Israel left last year. It is common to have breakfast with an Israeli chum and be attending his or her funeral the same afternoon. It is possible to meet cheerful, optimistic Israeli women who have lost husbands, fathers, sons and brothers in perpetual wars but who still have hopes for peace with their Muslim neighbours. The image of violent and ruthless Jewish immigrants who want to kill and starve Palestinians is a calumny that is becoming a disturbingly frequent one. Israel is far from angelic but the distorted and deeply unjust image projected in the British media of this tiny but vibrant nation makes me sick to the core of my being. During the Second World War the Grand Mufti sided with Hitler and many Arabs sought to join the SS. When this fact was raised by Alan Dershowitz at SOAS (University of London) last year, the young Muslims sitting near me in the audience were genuinely stunned. Afterwards we stood outside, the young people smoked and reflected, and we agreed we had much to learn from each other and not from TV pundits, rabbis or Imams. It is this sort of fact-telling that is painfully absent from television programmes like Ashdown's. In the documentary he asserted that after 1967 and the rise of Zionism things went from bad to worse for the Arabs of Jerusalem. Mr Ashdown needs reminding that the birth of the Zionist movement took place in the 1890s after centuries of brutal and relentless European and British anti-Semitism, culminating in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus and the publication of 'J'Accuse' by Emile Zola. Why are these facts never offered in British programming or articles? The original Zionist movement was a noble enterprise led by Jewish Socialists hoping to establish co-operative farms alongside their Arab neighbours. Furthermore Jews have lived in the Holy Land for thousands of years and are not new, irritating arrivals, as is so widely promulgated by the mass media and the anti-Zionist New Left. Jews have lived in the Arab village of Piqu'in since the time of Jesus and only recently, when a female failed to have a child was the ancient local synagogue handed over to new caretakers. Why are broadcasters willing to provide young and impressionable audiences in an increasingly multicultural Britain with utter nonsense about the Jews, whom they portray as rapacious, avaricious invaders determined to make Arabia a giant Jewish Empire? All Paddy Ashdown need do is read 'Days of Our Years' by Pierre van Paassen and learn about the valiant efforts of the early European Jewish settlers to create peaceful and productive agricultural and scientific endeavours with local Arab Christians and Muslims. Frankly, I consider this kind of programming bordering on the criminal because the extreme bias against Israel and Jews could very easily incite young Muslims to attack Jewish targets after watching two hours of 'bad Jews, racist Jews, violent Jews' and their relentless campaign of pillage against helpless Palestinians. It needs to be mentioned here that I started life as a passionate advocate of Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) in the Rabin years but am not able to stomach the recent demonisation of the Jewish State, which remains a bastion of freedom and advancement in a woefully backward region. Ashdown did, to his credit, mention that in 1967, before the Six Day War, Israel faced annihilation. He did mention massacres of Jews, but his programme spent the rest of its duration finding every possible way to show how Arabs are victimised from all sides -- even by the tiny Greek Orthodox community! Another element that is never discussed in programmes like these is the absence of leadership in the Arab world. Where are their Mandelas, Kings, ben Gurions, Churchills, Roosevelts or Lincolns? Scenes of utter squalor and deprivation are shown, but where are the leaders and infrastructure in the Palestinian and Arab sectors? Billions in aid have poured in for decades; where has it all gone? It was explained in the programme that Palestinians' garbage is left uncollected for weeks at a time by the Jerusalem authorities, and that one man needs a permit to enter his house. Where is the leadership in their community to put this right? That Sheikh Maktoum of Dubai has today offered a staggering $10 billion to the region to put the Arab world in tandem with the West is an indication that oppression, poverty and primitive public services are not the fault of Israel but a grave problem in the wider Muslim world. The BBC reported in the story about Sheikh Makhtoum that more books are published in Turkey per annum than in the entire Arab world. When Jewish aid agencies have sent money to Israel over the decades it is put into remarkable enterprises like the Weizmann Institute, the Nervous Disease Centre in Herzliya, the multi-cultural Hebrew University and the Hadassah Hospital, where Arabs are treated as equals with anyone else; are Jews treated in Pakistani, Libyan or Saudi hospitals? ORT, the generous Jewish charity, helps all peoples across the globe, whatever their faith or colour. Why does Paddy Ashdown never examine this aspect of the progress of the two peoples? The constant complaining about the Arabs being second-class citizens in the Jewish State I answer thus: for twenty-eight years I lived in the UK as a non-EU citizen. I had no rights whatsoever although I paid tax, National Insurance, Council Tax and VAT. I could not vote in any election, belong to a political party or hold office. As a non-Anglican I could not hope to marry a Royal or any distantly-related gentry. It was an unwritten rule that I knew I could not aspire to certain clubs or sectors of society because of my background. Yes, it is different for Arabs in Israel because they were born there and they should have full citizenship rights, but we all have our crosses to bear. Their life in Israel is far better than that in corrupt Palestine. Again, if they have a valid grievance, where are their leaders? Conversely, nearly a million Jews were expelled from or fled hostile Arab countries in the past sixty years, and yet they are not asking for their homes back, or having Paddy Ashdown holding their hands and sobbing with them about their homes being taken, as he did with Arabs on this programme. Daniel Pearl went to Pakistan and promptly got beheaded for being a Jew. Ashdown seemed particularly incensed throughout the programme about the 'Jewish immigration' to the Jerusalem area and kept repeating phrases about 'more Jews' moving in. He referred to ' huge waves of Jewish immigration' in the time leading up to the 1948 War, but never once mentioned the genocide of the Nazi Holocaust and the remnant of European Jewry trickling into Palestine. He never told the story of British forces beating Jewish refugees as they tried to disembark. He never mentioned the quotas imposed. The 'huge waves' he describes ( estimated to be 850,000) included Jews from seven Muslim countries who fled persecution, not to mention the thousands who fled the West Bank and Gaza after the 1948 War. What is so infuriating about the iniquitous way the history of the Jewish State is depicted in every media form in the United Kingdom is the lack of context and the constant mantra of the millions of hostile Arabs being entirely innocent of any wrongdoing. I have always been of the contention that it would have been so nice if the Arabs had said 'Welcome, Jews -- come help us make a garden out of a wasteland.' That is exactly what the Jews did, and with no help -- only violence and fury -- from the surrounding Arab nations. Israel is a technological marvel and an oasis in the desert of staggering agricultural development, scientific advancement and cultural wealth. Take, for example, the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the Six Day War for her survival. A Syrian wasteland was turned into a world-class wine-producing region, with Israeli Yarden wines winning prizes at the Bordeaux Festival. There are more symphony orchestras in Israel -- the size of Wales -- than in the whole of Africa and the Arab world. Did Paddy Ashdown mention this? No. He even had the audacity to accuse the world-revered Israel Antiquities Authority of refusing to consult with the Arabs about works being conducted a good distance from the al Aqsa compound. Anyone who knows about Israel will be aware of the esteem with which the Israel Antiquities Authority is held worldwide and of the excellence of its work for sixty years. Watching a programme like this, one does wonder if some in the white Christian world, deep down inside, do not have a gene that just hates Jews and everything to which they aspire. Paddy Ashdown made a point that he abhors any thought of Israel's destruction but spent an entire programme cherry-picking situations that put Jewish nationhood in a bad light. He interviewed Geula Cohen and Effi Eitan, both of whom do not by the wildest stretches of anyone's imagination represent mainstream Israeli opinion. His cameras kept focussing on religious Jews in long coats and hats. When he interviewed David Rubinger and less militant Jews they had only dire visions of doom. He never interviewed cool secular Jewish kids in Jerusalem's cafes, theatre and concertgoers, students or musicians. Channel Four ought to be ashamed of having allowed the broadcast of a programme with such obvious bias and lack of research. One suspects even al-Jazeera would have presented a more balanced view of the Holy City! Now, here is a radical view: after having been intimidated and insulted to the core of my being last Monday by my fellow NUJ ( National Union of Journalists) members about the evils of Jews, Zionists, Americans and Israel, I suggest it is time for it is time for well-meaning liberal Guardianistas to get their obsessed minds off the wicked Hebrews and devote their energies to the crises in Sudan and Zimbabwe. Enough is enough of the demonising of the Jews, who have given the world more Nobel Prize winners, Broadway composers, playwrights and lyricists, symphony musicians, solo virtuosi and conductors than any other minority group in the history of mankind. And as it is a state with a conurbation of six million such brilliant, enterprising, enlightened, sober and hard-working Jews, the message to Channel Four, Jimmy Carter, Paddy Ashdown and those who choose to demonise its every action is: get a life, and whilst you are at it, hands off Israel. And may peace reign over all the peoples of the Holy City. Contact Aramy by email at aramy964gmail.com |
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NOTES ON THE URGENCY FOR RADICAL CHANGE in ISRAEL
Posted by Professor Eugene Narrett, May 25, 2007. |
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Early on Thursday May 24 a Kassam rocket landed on the access road to a gas station in Sderot. It missed a gasoline tanker truck that had just passed by about three seconds. See the one minute video at www.honestreporting.com This follows by a few days the murder of Shirel Freedman as she drove her car through the center of the small city. When residents who have been under attack for six months gathered to jeer and demand help from the drive through of Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni and her sidekick, EU diplomat Javier Solana, police beat and kicked the protesters. The expulsion government of Ehud Olmert and former State Labor boss (now posing as Defense Minister), Amir Peretz apparently believes that the citizens of Sderot require further pounding. Still, this government is not without its solutions to the problem. The Foreign Ministry, whose guiding hand continues to be Shimon Peres fronted by Livni has decided that "diplomacy, advocacy and public relations" will be used to awaken the conscience of Europe and its sense of fair play [sic]. This is how the expulsion-regime diffuses and smothers public demands for action while it proceeds with its plans to truncate Israel and encourage western-funded Arabs to grind into Jews the feeling that their lives are worth nothing. In other words, the holocaust continues with major assistance from Israeli enablers and puppets. This is something like the scandal Ben Hecht described in his book Perfidy (1960; 1977 re-printed Milah). While the Lebanese army uses artillery and tanks to pound away at "Islamists" and "terrorists" in a "Palestinian refugee camp" in Tripoli, the IDF finally responded to the months-long bombardment of Sderot and the western Negev by a few pinpoint strikes on terrorist leaders in the Gaza area. Papers from London and Paris to Australia blared the news that "Israel continues to pound Gaza" while the text mentions "several rocket attacks" without any details about the situation in Sderot. This is the conscience to which Labor-Kadima pretends to appeal; they run to the EU and Saxe-Coburg dynasty in Brussels (and London, look it up) for sympathy and "help." You can also read about this "running to Egypt" in Jeremiah or more horribly in Deuteronomy 28. A recent report from Aaron Klein on World Net Daily (www.wnd.com) details, with aerial photos from 1967 to the present how the Jewish bought and owned land purchased via the JNF for Jewish settlement has been transferred to the Israel Land Authority which has allowed massive and illegal Arab building on the areas, mostly in Jerusalem and around Bethlehem. The report exposes how the JNF has since about 1990 been dominated by rich leftish Jews from New Jersey that support the partition plans of Shimon Peres. The same FM Livni that did a drive by in Sderot and who boasted that she began demanding a ceasefire from day four of the summer 2006 conflict with Hezbollah (preemptive surrender) on May 23 begged the "international community to do something" about Iran and its growing nuclear capabilities. We have noted that Iran does not need to attach nuclear bombs to its rockets to decimate Israel. But the main point here is as above: instead of sovereign and vigorous preemptive self-defense (which is mandated by Torah and international law, for what the latter is worth) the FM bleats and whimpers to her Jew-hating pals in the world community to come and save Israel. As noted above, this is to diffuse, distract, confuse and disempower the Jews of Israel the better to turn it into a NATO and/or EU occupied "security zone" from which Judaism will be steadily laundered out. Add up these terrible events and one realizes that the time for Israel to regain the independence it just celebrated, to be sovereign and live is growing very short. The appointed time has come... Eugene Narrett's new book, WW III: the War on the Jews and the Rise of the World Security State 2007 www.lightcatcherbooks.com explains the geopolitics and cultural history of this nightmare and points toward the dawn. Visit his website at www.israelendtimes.com |
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THE WAR AGAINST ISRAEL
Posted by Avodah, May 25, 2007. |
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This was written by Melanie Phillips. It was published on her website
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People assume Israel itself was an artificial creation resulting from Holocaust guilt, when a load of European Jews were transplanted into a land owned for millennia by Palestinian Arabs. That itself is false. Israel was the nation state of the Jews centuries before the Arabs took it by force, and an unbroken Jewish presence remained in Jerusalem and other cities, some of which, indeed, had a Jewish majority. It is not surprising that people with perfectly decent instincts are enraged by the continued "occupation" of the West Bank. But they have been led to believe something that is not true. For a start, Israel's occupation of this territory is perfectly legal and legitimate as an act of self-defense, after a war of aggression against it in 1967. But at a deeper level still, the idea that Israel had no locus in this territory until 1967 is simply false. This West Bank land was never owned by the Palestinians. Following the war of extermination waged by the Arabs against the fledgling Israel at its creation in 1948, Judea and Samaria -- as they then were -- were illegally occupied by Jordan, and became "the West Bank" as a result. Furthermore, and even more significant, Judea and Samaria were part of Mandatory Palestine, within which Britain was enjoined to re-establish a Jewish national home. Hebron, for example, is one of the four most sacred Jewish cities. Jews lived there continuously for some 38 centuries -- Abraham settled there some 1800 years before Christ - until they were driven out by an Arab pogrom in 1929. To be told that Hebron is a place where Jews have no claim is therefore nauseating beyond belief. It is very important that people come to understand that Israel's core claim is one of justice, and the way this has been misrepresented is profoundly unjust. Indeed, it is monstrous. There are those who believe that the vilification of Israel is a prejudice which is not susceptible to reason. I beg to differ. Much of this madness is based on profound ignorance. Only when people are taught the truth will the big lie finally be nailed. (melaniephillips.com) Contact Avodah at avodah15aol.com |
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"AFFIRMATIVE ACTION" FOR THE ENEMY
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 25, 2007. |
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A NOVEL INSIGHT The State Dept. acts as if the primary interest of the Palestinian Arabs is in getting a state, which Israel may not allow while the PA. is devoted to terrorism. The State Dept. wants the P.A. to make a show of repressing terrorism, just a show of it, but considers Abbas' forces too weak to do even that. (Hence it sets benchmarks for Abbas' forces to make plans to repress terrorism, not to act.) What do those Arabs think? Polls show that their foremost concern is internal security. They want to stop being shoot, kidnapped, and robbed. Dr. Aaron Lerner draws a novel conclusion from the polls. Abbas has the major share of armed force in the P.A.. He would enjoy popular support if he deployed his forces to take the illicit guns off the streets and then out of the closet. He could restore order, if he wanted to (IMRA, 5/10). Apparently, he does not want to tangle with Hamas, because his primary interest is not statehood but jihad, which Hamas can help with (and not being assassinated). His other interest is graft. If he restored order, I think that then the primary popular interest there would be in conquering Israel. PM OLMERT OFFERS MORE "AFFIRMATIVE ACTION" Acknowledging unnamed discriminatory and bureaucratic hurdles for Israeli Arabs, PM Olmert offers more quotas in their behalf and a program for more integration of Arabs (IMRA, 5/10) but not citizenship duties equivalent to the Jews'. Integration with a religious community that attacks Jews, does not make sense. Neither does giving preference to the Arabs, who seek to take over the country. Meanwhile, the government, including the Supreme Court, discriminates against religious Jews and in favor of the Arabs. It condones wholesale theft and rioting by the Muslims and denial of equal rights to Jews on the Temple Mount. HIZBULLAH ALMOST READY FOR WAR Nasrallah boasted in Arabic of his war plan. It includes having his newly built shore batteries fire at the Israeli ships and his troops forcibly expelling the UNO peacekeepers. The IDF urges the government to release it to crush Hizbullah and Hamas before they can take to the attack. PM Olmert holds the Army back (IMRA, 5/8). There will be another Commission of Inquiry into the disastrous start Israel will have made. Perhaps some wag will publish it in advance, to shake the country out of its lethargy. And the UNO waits to be attacked? 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 richardshulman5verizon.net |
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A SHORT HISTORY OF THE PALESTINIAN REFUGEES
Posted by Avodah, May 25, 2007. |
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This was written by Marty Peretz, editor of The New Republic. |
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We've been reading for the last few days about the fury in what's really a poor Palestinian refugee neighborhood abutting Tripoli but what's been branded for decades and decades as a refugee camp. Nahr al Bared is its name. I do not know what the Arabic words mean. Still, the popular designation as a "refugee camp" brings a certain aura of victimhood and, more than that, an aura of innocence, to its inhabitants. In the fourth generation of their institutionalized helplessness, they do not --it is true--seem to have a future, and, multiplied many times over since 1948, they are never going to go "back" to Israel where, as Palestine, it was imagined that they had left fertile fields and orchards like in California and Florida. There were 100,000 of them, almost all from northern Galilee, in the contiguous natural terrain of Lebanon after the Arab war against the Partition Plan for Palestine which sanctioned the establishment of Israel. Now there are four times that many. Indeed, the very nomenclature of refugee is politically false. Yes, some of them were forced out of their towns and villages or left in the midst of heavy fighting now 60 years ago. They all expected, anticipating an Arab victory by the invading armies, to come back and some hoped to kill their Jewish neighbors on their return. Whatever! As it happens, they found themselves in the great and neighborly Arab homeland of what they called "the one Arab nation," not as tens of other millions cast far away into a hostile environment. A crossing of maybe 25 miles into an abutting province where people speak the same tongue, practice the same religion and purport to be of one ethnic seed is not truly an exile. Forgive me, I am not being harsh. Now, it is a fact that the Palestinians were not over time truly made welcome. This shows something of the sham of the one Arab nation. The sham of the fraternity of their Arab brothers. But the Palestinians--many thinking themselves South Syrians, others Jordanians, and still others in some way Egyptians--were not exactly thankful guests. In Iraq, they aligned themselves with the tyrant. In Jordan, they stirred up a revolution that brought "Black September" on their heads. In Kuwait, they cheered when Saddam invaded. In Lebanon or, to be more precise, in southern Lebanon they set up a brutal mini-state run by Yassir Arafat and his minions that over-lorded their hosts. The Saudis were canny: they did not allow them in in the first place. Sixty years on the international dole, with additional cash from the always so-loving Scandinavians, has actually castrated them. I use this masculine metaphor because it seems to illumine the contrast between the bravado of the Palestinians in Lebanon (but not just in Lebanon) and their powerlessness in any other way but to wreak havoc. This is not exactly power. So what is happening now in Nahr al Bared is actually no surprise to me. I'd first heard about this settlement of 40,000 Palestinians a quarter of a century ago. Of course, it was then more like 15,000. In recent years, friends who know about militant Islam, especially among the Palestinians, told me that jihad had taken root there, with all its fanaticism--Koran and guns--and its self-deception. Two weeks ago, I read a book by the French scholar Bernard Rougier. It is called Everyday Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam Among Palestinians in Lebanon. The study is really about Ain al-Helweh which I visited several times in 1982, yes, behind the skirts of the Israelis. But the camps of Tal al-Za'tar and Quarantine had in 1976 been razed by the Maronite forces associated with the Syrian army--but not before hundreds had been slaughtered. In 1982, the Phalange massacred more hundreds at Sabra and Shatilla, while the Israeli army looked away. Then, three years later, the Shi'a Amal bombarded the Beirut camps, maybe just for good measure. But Nahr al Bared figures in the narrative and the nutty logic of Salafism among the wretched Palestinians of Lebanon. Here's a message to many of my faithful readers who respond by foaming at the mouth: read something before you write. Your "talkbacks" might be a little less ugly and maybe even a bit more informed. Contact Avodah at avodah15@aol.com |
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PLEASE HELP JEFF SEATH
Posted by Andras Bereny, May 25, 2007. |
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This letter was written by Dina Moscowitz. |
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Jeff Seath (Hebrew name: Shmuel Zetham), a new immigrant from North Carolina, a Ger Tzedek age 40, has been sitting in jail almost a year (as of this writing, still without a sentence) for smuggling (since he didn't have the proper papers) a sophisticated rifle and ammunition in his lift which he intended to pass on to the IDF. He was arrested when he went to claim his lift in the Haifa port last June, and has been in jail ever since. He was recently found guilty of smuggling, but the judge also ruled that there is no proof that he is a "Jewish terrorist" who intended to kill Arabs with the rifle (as the prosecution tried to prove). He lost an appeal to be released on parole or house arrest, and the Supreme Court judge ruled that he is to be incarcerated until the end of proceedings against him. After being in telephone contact with him for the better part of the year, along with visiting him and organizing visits and fundraising for him, I am convinced of the truth of his intentions, notwithstanding his naiveté and lapse of good judgment. He was raised with guns in N. Carolina and they have become a natural part of his life. He honestly thought he was contributing to the country (in particular to the IDF) when he brought in the rifle. His own family, who lives in the hills of N. Carolina, is poor and cannot contribute to his legal expenses, which are considerable. His lawyer has demanded another (at least) 2000 shekels by June 1; despite numerous appeals, only NIS 3000 has been raised. The total cost of defense amounts to approx. $3-4,000. As you can see, we have a long way to go! I urge all generous souls out there, good Jews who are looking to do a mitzva to help out a young, sincere and idealistic man who only seeks to help out his country and his people: Please send desperately needed funds to the following defense fund: Mishalot Yisrael,
Please note (on the check or separately) that these funds are for Shmuel Zetham's/Jeffrey Seath's defense. In the merit of this tremendous mitzvah, may you and yours know only blessings from The One Above. Tizku l'mitzvot,
Contact Andras Bereny by email at bereny@tin.it |
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BRITISH ENERGY GROUP TO SELL PALESTINIAN GAS TO ISRAEL IN $4 BILLION DEAL
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 24, 2007. |
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This comes from the Media Line (TML), which describes itself as "an American non-profit news organization established to enhance and balance media coverage in the Middle East, promote independent reporting in the region, and break down barriers to understanding in the Arab and Israeli journalism communities." |
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The UK's BG Group is poised to close a deal in which it will sell $4
billion worth of natural gas discovered off the Gaza Strip coastline
to Israel. According to the Times, negotiators will meet next week to
work out terms of what is said to be a 15-year commitment. If the
deal goes through, Israel will meet 10 percent of its annual energy
needs, while the Palestinians will receive a commission estimated at
$1 billion. Media reports in Israel say the Foreign Ministry is
pressing for the deal to be concluded as soon as possible. The Gaza
Marine field was discovered by BG in 2000 and is said to be equal in
size to a 'large North Sea field.' Three weeks ago, the Israeli
cabinet approved a request by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to purchase
natural gas from the Palestinian Authority, reversing former prime
minister Ariel Sharon's declaration of six years ago that Israel
would 'never' buy fuel from the Palestinians.
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 |
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DESTRUCTION AND DECEIT IN NORTH LEBANON
Posted by Aramy, May 24, 2007. |
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This article was written by Michael Young,, opinion
editor of the Daily Star. It appeared in the Daily Star, Lebanon.
(www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=824). |
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There are few pleasures these days as Lebanon descends into the kind of violence that Syria seems to manufacture so effortlessly. However, one of them is discovering how easy it was for a gaggle of pro-Syrian Lebanese operators to manipulate investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, before he wrote a much-discussed article recently implying that the Lebanese government was financing Islamist groups, including Fatah al-Islam. In his article for The New Yorker, Hersh faithfully channeled what sources in Lebanon told him, lending legitimacy to statements he otherwise failed to prove. Most prominently, for being so specific, he wrote that "representatives of the Lebanese government" had supplied weapons and money to Fatah al-Islam. But Hersh's only evidence for this claim was a quote attributed to one Alistair Crooke, a former MI6 agent who is co-director of Conflicts Forum, an institution advocating dialogue with Islamist movements. Nor did Crooke have direct knowledge of what he was saying. In fact, he "was told" the weapons were offered to the group, "presumably to take on Hizbullah." The argument is now being picked up by media belonging to senior members of the Syrian regime to affirm that the Lebanese Army is fighting an Islamist group in the Nahr al-Bared camp that is effectively on the payroll of Saad Hariri. Lately, we've had more ricochets from that story. Writing in The Independent on May 22, journalist Robert Fisk, who we might forget lives in Beirut, picked up on Hersh, citing him uncritically to again make the case that Hariri was financing Islamists. So we have Fisk quoting Hersh quoting Crooke quoting someone nameless in a throwaway comment making a serious charge. Yet not one of these somnolent luminaries has bothered to actually verify if the story is true, even as everything about the fighting in Nahr al-Bared virtually confirms it is not true. The lie about the government financing of Fatah al-Islam has been given legitimacy thanks to a spectacular blunder by the Hariri camp, in particular Bahiyya al-Hariri. A few months ago she helped resolve a crisis that had resulted from the presence of Islamists located in the Taamir district of Sidon, abutting the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, by paying compensation money to Jund al-Sham militants so they would leave the area. From the narrow perspective of Sidon, which Bahiyya al-Hariri represents in Parliament, this made sense. Taamir was a running sore in relations between the state and inhabitants of the area on the one side and the Islamists and camp residents on the other. However, instead of disbanding, a number of the militants went to Nahr al-Bared, according to Palestinian sources. There, they joined Fatah al-Islam. Now the Hariris look like they financed Islamists, when they were really only doing what they usually do when facing a problem: trying to buy it away. The relationship between Fatah al-Islam and Syria is not absolutely clear. While the movement is undeniably doing Syria's bidding today and has received Syrian logistical assistance (after all, its militants who weren't inside Lebanon had to enter from somewhere), Fatah al-Islam may be operating in collaboration with, rather than as a direct extension of, Syria's security services. This gives Syria deniability. Shaker Absy, who is wanted by the Jordanian authorities for the killing of an American diplomat in Amman in 2003, fought in Iraq and was briefly arrested by the Syrians before being sent to Lebanon, according to two Palestinian officials. Fatah al-Islam's sources of funding are also difficult to establish. The group has been supplied with up-to-date weaponry and the means to distribute patronage. But it might be a mistake to assume the money is Syrian, even though Damascus can turn the tap to the group on and off. Between the fighting in the North and the bombings in Beirut, Syria is sending a very plain message, one that the foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, and the ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, brazenly echoed on Monday. It is that passage of the Hariri tribunal under Chapter VII of the UN Charter will mean a Lebanon in flames. The threat is clear, and the Verdun bombing on Monday evening seemed partly destined to send a message to the Russians, whose cultural center is located at the blast scene. Both Russia and China are the weak links in any Security Council vote on the tribunal. However, Syria wants more than merely to undermine the tribunal. It wants to have a decisive say in who becomes president of Lebanon at the end of summer. The bloodshed in the North as well as the bomb attacks have another destination: the United States, which has indicated that Syria would not be consulted on Emile Lahoud's replacement. The Assad regime never reconciled itself with its forced withdrawal from Lebanon, and is now actively seeking to reimpose its hegemony over its neighbor through a network of allies and agents. A return of tens of thousands of Syrian soldiers may not be achievable in the short term, particularly as the main barrier to such a return would, this time, be an outraged Sunni community. This could have severe implications for President Bashar Assad at home. However, the Syrians often operate according to an obsolete template -- that of Hafez al-Assad. While it may be easy for them to provoke conflict in Lebanon, as they did throughout the war years between 1975 and 1990, the Syrian leadership might not be able to resist the blowback this time around if new hostilities break out. Another Syrian objective, and this one will be far easier to achieve, is to increase Lebanese antipathy for the Hariri tribunal. It won't take many more bombs for people to begin wondering whether passage of the tribunal by the UN is worth Lebanon's destruction. Perhaps the tribunal is not worth it, but the question that both the international community and the Arab states must ask, and convincingly answer, is whether Syria will agree to surrender Lebanon if the tribunal's statutes are watered down. Up to now, Assad has shown no willingness to consider this quid pro quo. Those who insist that Syria must be "engaged" have thought very little about how to safeguard Lebanese sovereignty. Yet unless the Security Council, the Europeans, and the Arab states show that Syria will pay a heavy price for what it is doing in Lebanon, things will only get worse in the country. Every day, Assad feels more confident that he can prevail. And when prominent Western journalists so gullibly write what the Syrians want them to, there is no reason for him to feel any other way. Contact Aramy by email at aramy964@gmail.com |
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DENIAL IS NOT A STRATEGY
Posted by UCI, May 24, 2007. |
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The article was written by Caroline Glick and was
published in the Jerusalem Post May 21, 2007.
The cartoon was Dry Bones for May 20, 1997. It was not part of the Glick article. |
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The Olmert-Livni-Peretz government is incapable of learning. This is the only possible explanation for its handling of the Palestinian assault on southern Israel which has seen some 200 rockets and missiles fall on Sderot, southern Ashkelon and the surrounding areas in the past week alone. On Sunday, the security cabinet met and discussed options for contending with the situation. At the outset, it nixed launching a large-scale assault on Gaza in favor of continuing pinpoint air strikes against Hamas leaders. The security cabinet defined Hamas as Israel's enemy in the current campaign. The government discussed the option of transferring more arms and money to Fatah, which serves as a junior partner in the Hamas "unity" government. Such a move would simply follow the government's move last week to allow up to 500 Egyptian-trained Fatah fighters to enter the Gaza Strip. The security cabinet's discussion took for granted that it is not Israel's responsibility to secure Gaza's border with Egypt. As opponents of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza warned, that border has served as a terror thoroughfare since the IDF withdrew its forces from the area in September 2005. Through the border, Gaza has been inundated with advanced weaponry. Terrorists from abroad have entered Gaza at will. Terrorist from Gaza freely leave the area for terror training in Iran, Syria and Lebanon and then return. Rather than ordering the IDF to reassert control over the border, the security cabinet considered two other options. The Foreign Ministry recommends that an international force be deployed to the area, much like the UNIFIL forces in Lebanon. Defense officials think it would be better to have Egypt secure the border much as the Lebanese army now sits on Israel's northern border. Unfortunately, all of the security cabinet's strategic assumptions are either wholly or partially incorrect. As a result, the options it adopted or continues to consider will either have no strategic impact on Israel's security predicament vis-a-vis Gaza or will adversely affect Israel's national security. IN ITS definition of the parameters of its debate and policy options, the government displayed clearly that it has learned nothing from its defeat at the hands of Iran's proxy army in Lebanon -- Hizbullah -- in last summer's war. In the first instance, by limiting its definition of Israel's enemy in Gaza to Hamas, the government obfuscates the true strategic reality which confronts it. Hamas does not fight Israel alone. It fights in full partnership with the Fatah terror group. Indeed, Fatah has carried out more terrorist attacks against Israel over the past seven years of the Palestinian jihad than Hamas. Throughout the now 7-year-old war, Fatah and Hamas have willingly collaborated in terrorist attacks against Israelis. Fatah members, including thousands of gunmen of the official PA security forces, often also serve in Hamas. Weapons that Israel has transferred to Fatah through various PA security forces over the past 13 years have been used to murder Israelis by Fatah as well as Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists. And of course, Fatah now serves as Hamas's junior partner in the Palestinian "government." The Olmert-Livni-Peretz government does not merely refuse to acknowledge that Fatah is also Israel's enemy. It actively supports Fatah and upholds it as Israel's ally. In this it is repeating and indeed aggravating its strategically disastrous treatment of the Lebanese government last summer. IN THE immediate aftermath of Hizbullah's strike against the IDF position in northern Israel last July 12 which led to the abduction of reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and precipitated the war, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rightly stated that the Lebanese government is responsible for everything that occurs in Lebanon. Yet after receiving orders from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government did an about face and became a vocal supporter of the Lebanese government. Israel upheld Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora's government even though Hizbullah is a partner in his governing coalition and its representatives serve as ministers in his cabinet. Israel supported the Lebanese government even as Lebanese military forces actively collaborated with Hizbullah units by identifying Israeli targets for Hizbullah rocket and missile units, transferring intelligence about IDF troop movements to Hizbullah, and paying pensions to the families of Hizbullah fighters killed in the war. Israel supported the Lebanese government even as it acted as Hizbullah's agent in the cease-fire negotiations. During the cease-fire talks, Israel demanded that the Lebanese military be deployed to the border even though some 40 percent of its soldiers are Shi'ite and known for their sympathy and frequent collaboration with Hizbullah. Now deployed along the border, Lebanese forces have opened fire on IDF border patrols and have done nothing to prevent Hizbullah's rearming and reassertion of control over southern Lebanon. It is certainly true that to some degree the Lebanese government's support for Hizbullah is the consequence of its weakness. Were it strong enough, perhaps it would not be so tolerant of Iran's army in Lebanon. But be that as it may, Israel's strategic analysis should be informed not by what the Lebanese government might wish to do, but by what it actually does. IN STARK contrast to the Lebanese government, Fatah is far from an unwilling collaborator with Hamas. Like Hamas, Fatah leaders openly call for Israel's destruction. Fatah uses the same techniques as Hamas to indoctrinate Palestinian society to seek the genocide of the Jewish people. And yet, Israel's support for Fatah is far greater than its support for the Siniora government. Israeli officials travel the globe ratcheting up support for Fatah. The Olmert-Livni-Peretz government bases its national policies of land giveaways on Fatah's fictional moderation. The government raises money for Fatah more energetically than it raises money for the Israeli economy. And it allows the US and the Egyptians to arm and train Fatah terrorists. Equally alarming is the security cabinet's discussion of how to secure Gaza's border with Egypt. Rejecting offhand the notion that the IDF should secure the border, the government limited debate to finding someone else to secure southern Israel. For the past decade, the only policy that the Foreign Ministry has had for dealing with sub-national terror campaigns against Israel is for the IDF to perform a sound-and-light show for a few days that ends with the entry of the deus ex machina in the form of a foreign force which will save the day. In advancing this policy, the Foreign Ministry willfully ignores the fact that for the past 59 years, Israel has had only negative experience with foreign forces. These forces consistently serve as a buffer force behind which Israel's enemies arm, train and launch attacks against Israel. When Israel is forced to respond, it is roundly condemned for doing so by the same international forces behind which its enemies built their forces and launched their attacks. By recommending the deployment of international forces in Gaza, the Foreign Ministry demonstrates that it remains in denial of the plain fact that it was the government's willingness to listen to the Foreign Ministry's prescriptive advice to conduct limited, ineffective air assaults on Hizbullah and sue for a cease-fire with international forces in last summer's war which led to Israel's defeat. Then of course there is the issue of Egyptian forces. Here too, the comparison with Lebanon is instructive. For the past seven years, the Egyptians have been for the Palestinians what Syria is for Hizbullah. Namely, the Egyptians enable the Palestinians to conduct their war against Israel by arming them and providing them with international support. Just as the Syrians will not stop weapons shipments to Hizbullah, so Egypt will not stop shipments to Palestinian terror forces in Gaza. FINALLY OF course, there is the issue of the goal of the current campaign. As was the case last summer towards Hizbullah, today the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government has not set for itself the goal of defeating Hamas. Rather the goal of the current operations in Gaza is to send Hamas a message. Like last summer, today the government hopes that by killing a sufficient number of Hamas terrorists, it will induce the organization to stop attacking Israel. But of course, by limiting its goal in such a way, the message that Israel is sending is not that Hamas should stop attacking Israel. By refusing to fight to victory, Israel is telling Hamas that it cannot lose, which is to say, it can go on fighting forever. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the government's refusal to understand the lessons of the last war and to apply them in the current battle is that Israel has far more options for defeating its enemies in Gaza than it had in Lebanon. Gaza is a small territory and in contrast to Lebanon, Israel has the ability to take control of ingress and egress from the area. So too, Israel's intelligence capabilities are far greater in Gaza than in Lebanon. Then too, in Gaza, the enemy Israel confronts is not as well-armed or well-trained as Hizbullah. Aside from all that, Israel controls Gaza's economy. Israel sells Gaza its water and electricity. Were Israel to decide to stop selling water or electricity to Gaza, its enemies would be hard-pressed to function. All of these relative advantages that Israel can bring to bear in Gaza would enable Israel to cause long lasting damage to all of its enemies operating in the area while minimizing losses to its forces and civilians. But to take proper advantage of any of its strategic and operational assets, the government must first learn the proper lessons of the last war. Its refusal to do so bodes ill for the future.
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!"
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NICOLAS SARKOZY IS GOING TO PAY FRENCH IMMIGRANTS TO LEAVE FRANCE
Posted by Avodah, May 24, 2007. |
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This article is archived at
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,484716,00.html |
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New French President Nicolas Sarkozy made immigration a central issue of his campaign. Now, his new minister for immigration and national identity says its time to start paying immigrants to leave the country. France's new Immigration, Integration and National Identity Minister, Brice Hortefeux toured Charles de Gaulle airport on his first day on the job. He has said he intends to pay more immigrants to return home. France is home to over 5 million immigrants -- and the new conservative-led government doesn't plan on making things any more comfortable for them. While the new regime in Paris is determined to curb illegal immigration, it is also looking to encourage legal migrants to reconsider their decision to stay in France -- by paying them to go back home. ... Under the scheme, Paris will provide each family with a nest egg of €6,000 ($8,000) for when they go back to their country of origin. A similar scheme, which was introduced in 2005 and 2006, was taken up by around 3,000 families. Contact Avodah at avodah15@aol.com |
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ROCKETS DESTROY NEGEV KIBBUTZIM'S CROPS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 24, 2007. |
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This is archived at
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Southern kibbutzim lose dozens of acres of wheat in fires caused by Qassams; seek to expedite harvest in order to avoid further damage The recent Shavuot holiday will not be soon forgotten across kibbutzim in the western Negev, where dozens of acres of wheat went up in flames in the past week, just when it was time to begin the harvest. The Qassam rockets that have been raining on the area and setting the fields on fire caused substantial damage to the farmers, and the kibbutzim are now making efforts to salvage the remaining crops.
Kibbutz Nir Am has lost some 65 acres in the last week alone, and the local farmers are trying to reap what was left in the fields before the next Qassam lands. Kibbutz Be'eri has also lost about eight acres of wheat, and according to estimates, other kibbutzim and rural communities in the area have lost several dozen acres in the fires. Kibbutz Nir Am recently asked the government to help fund the leasing of combines from other communities, in order to expedite the harvest. According to Haim Yalin from Kibbutz Be'eri, the fires caused more than just financial damage. "It needs to be made clear that the profit on wheat is very small, and that we cultivate it mostly for Zionist purposes.
"We don't want to be dependent on import from other countries, and
therefore despite the hard work and the meager profit, we continue to
grow wheat here. This is the Zionist principle on which we were
raised, and we will continue doing so, as a message to our children
that life here goes on."
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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U.N. AGENCY KNEW OF ARMED FOREIGNERS IN LEBANON CAMP
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 24, 2007. |
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This was written by Betsy Pisik and published May 24, 2007 in The Washington Times. |
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A fighter from the Fatah Islam group shouts anti-Lebanese army slogans yesterday at the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared, in the north city of Tripoli, Lebanon. A fighter from the Fatah Islam group shouts anti-Lebanese army slogans yesterday at the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr el-Bared, in the north city of Tripoli, Lebanon. (AP) NEW YORK -- The U.N. agency that oversees the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon, the scene of three days of battles between Lebanese troops and Muslim militants, said yesterday it had been aware for months that heavily armed foreigners were moving into the Palestinian enclave but were helpless to stop them. The extremists of Fatah Islam, who local reports say hail from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bangladesh, apparently entered the camp, just north of Tripoli, several months ago. They are thought to have arrived in a group, not individually. Officials of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) could not say how a large band of foreigners carrying what has been described as mortars, rockets, explosive belts and other heavy weapons were able get past the Lebanese army soldiers stationed outside the camp. They also could not explain why militias of young Palestinian men who provide security and gather intelligence throughout Nahr el-Bared and other Palestinian areas allowed foreign fighters to settle there. "Somebody hasn't been doing their job," said Karen Koning AbuZayd, commissioner-general of UNRWA. "The problem with refugee camps in Lebanon is that they are self-policed. ... This group showed up a few months ago. As far as we know, it is mainly a foreign group. "The Palestinian refugees themselves have been very unhappy about it and have been trying to persuade them to leave," Mrs. AbuZayd told reporters. Yesterday, Lebanon's defense minister issued an ultimatum to Islamic militants barricaded in the camp to surrender or face a military onslaught. Also yesterday, refugees continued to leave Nahr el-Bared as a tense cease-fire held. Some piled onto the backs of pickup trucks or stuffed themselves into battered sedans. Many joined relatives in the nearby Badawi refugee camp, while others made their way to nearby Tripoli. UNRWA has 200 Palestinian employees inside the camp, mostly teachers, medical staff and aid workers who help distribute supplies. Mrs. AbuZayd said she was surprised that many of the camp's 30,000 inhabitants didn't leave before fighting erupted Sunday. On Tuesday, thousands of refugees took advantage of a pause in fighting to escape. "UNRWA couldn't do anything because the United Nations is not responsible for policing or administering the camps, only their own installations inside them," Mrs. AbuZayd said. Security inside Lebanon's 12 Palestinian refugee camps has always been a sensitive issue. Lebanese police and soldiers are not permitted to enter the camps but maintain a perimeter, as much to protect the Lebanese as to protect the Palestinians from outside threat. UNRWA says it does not administer the camps, nor does it maintain a roster of legal occupants. The U.N. agency is responsible only for registering refugees who want to use UNRWA facilities such as schools and clinics as well as assistance programs. About 400,000 Palestinians live in Lebanon, most of them in severely crowded camps with little fresh water, sanitation or jobs. They camps originally held those displaced by the 1948 creation of Israel, although the refugee numbers have multiplied in later generations. The chief U.N. coordinator for humanitarian affairs, John Holmes, yesterday condemned as "unacceptable and outrageous" a Tuesday mortar attack on a U.N. relief convoy that had just arrived inside the Nahr el-Bared camp. Baby formula, milk powder, bread and water supplies eventually were unloaded. "I simply don't know who is responsible for starting that exchange of fire," said Mr. Holmes, adding that the number of casualties in that and other attacks still cannot be gauged. He said the camp has been without running water or electricity since Sunday. UNRWA is working with other agencies and private humanitarian groups to obtain shelter and services to those who have left. UNRWA REALITY:
UNWRA accepted millions of dollars FROM TERROR GROUPS
Mortar Attacks on Israelis from UN Safe Haven
UNRWA Summer Killing School
SUPPLEMENTAL REPORT: A Rigorous Review of UNWRA Practices
Inside UNRWA: Special Investigative Report
Background to UNRWA Conference in Geneva
How Can the UN Address the Subject of Palestinian Refugees and Not
Allow Israel
Congressman Eric Cantor (R- Va).Analyzes UNRWA Palestinian Refugee
Camps by Gordon Robertson Archive:
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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PLEASE BOMBARD THE WHITE HOUSE WITH CALLS FOR CLEMENCY FOR JONATHAN POLLARD
Posted by Lee Caplan, May 24, 2007. |
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Please bombard the White House with calls (202-456-1414 and/or 202-456-1111) and with faxes and letters. Ask the President to free Jonathan Pollard and let the President know how angry you are at the comments made by Ambassador Jones! As Rabbi Lerner says below, "we cannot be silent. it is up to the jewish community to let the president know that this issue is important to us." Also, don't hesitate to let the Israeli government know that it is about time that it finally do the right thing with respect to Jonathan Pollard, and that is to sincerely ask President Bush to release him! Tizku lemitzvos. Rabbi Pesach Lerner can be contacted by email at plerner@YoungIsrael.org |
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i believe the case cannot be closed. the apology, as is, is still missing a correction of his comments. his facts were wrong, he needs to admit that. if similar comments were made against an arab moslem or others, not of the jewish religion, or perhaps not of the Caucasian race, such an apology would not be accepted and there could be rioting in the streets. we need to demand a full retraction, correction and perhaps an official inquiry into the sources of his information, from where his directive to respond with such lies originated from, etc. at the same time, it is incumbent on the israeli government to call in the ambassador and have him deliver a message to the white house, 22 years is enough. as james woolsey, former head of the cia, has been saying for months -- he knows the pollard file and still he says 22 years is enough. jonathan spied for an ally, a fellow democratic country and it is time, on humanitarian grounds, to let jonathan free and go to israel to live out his life. jonathan has been remorseful for his crime, is quite ill and 22 years is enough. we cannot be silent. it is up to the jewish community to let the
president know that this issue is important to us.
Contact Lee Caplan at leescaplan@yahoo.com |
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A REVIEW OF GRAINS OF SAND: THE FALL OF NEVE DEKALIM
Posted by Rosally Saltsman, May 24, 2007. |
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Grains Of Sand: The Fall Of Neve Dekalim
We are approaching the two-year anniversary of the tragedy of the Disengagement and the exile of the residents of Gush Katif from their beautiful communities. Gush Katif became a political movement and so we tended to forget that what we were dealing with were families, idealistic families who had settled the Gush and were now being uprooted along with the acacia trees. The battle was lost and has faded into the bittersweet and turbulent history of the fledgling Jewish State in its ancient land. Shifra Shomron has written a book, part personal diary, part historical third person narrative, about the transformation of Gush Katif from a Garden of Eden existence to a defensive outpost and finally to the site of the Jewish nation's newest exile. Peppered with appropriate Biblical quotes, it reminds us that being exiled from our land is not a new story. Shifra describes the last years in Gush Katif for the Yefet family, Yoram, Miri, Efrat and Yair and their dogs tending their garden, wandering on the sand dunes, a religious family who are a microcosm of the Gush and the archetypal wandering Jews. There is no one who could read this book and not be moved. It is an important book as a testimony to the short-lived life of the Settlers' dream and the not yet fulfilled vision of the final redemption. It is the chronicle of a teenage girl who had grown up in the idyllic world of the Gush who must leave it and her childhood behind both literally and figuratively. It is lyrically, poetically and innocently recounted. The Gush has returned to the dunes from which it sprang up but, as the parents of our heroine remind us, we will one day, God willing return to build upon the rubble of Neve Dekalim, the palm tree oasis which was one of the flourishing plantations of promised redemption. On this, the anniversary of the fall of Neve Dekalim, Katif, and the other communities that are no more, we must remember the many residents who have not yet managed to put down new roots, the yet unemployed, the youth still struggling with shattered dreams and disillusionment, the need to petition the Israeli Government for solutions and to remind them that the sacrifice of these people did not bring the hoped-for peace and the need for all of us to still pray for the final redemption. Shifra Shomron is now studying to be an English and Bible teacher at an accelerated college program in Israel. Her parents have still been unable to find work. The family lives in one of the Caravillas set up by the government before the expulsion. Shifra's website is: www.geocities.com/nevedekalim The book is available through Mazo Publishers, Amazon.com, select bookstores in Jerusalem and Barnes and Noble in the USA. Rosally Saltsman is a journalist and has written numerous magazine
articles. She is author of several books, including "Finding the Right
Words," "Parenting by the Book," and "A Portion of Kindness." You can
read excerpts from them on her website: |
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THE END NEARS FOR MILITANTS IN LEBANESE CAMP
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 24, 2007. |
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This was written by Ulrike Putz in Tripoli, Lebanon. |
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The Islamist militants from Fatah Islam have vowed to fight to the end. The Lebanese military has promised to annhiliate them. On day five of the crisis at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, the stand-off continues.
 "During the next 48 hours, we will eradicate them," says the elite Lebanese soldier, lying behind a freshly raised mound of red earth. "They," of course, are the militants of the radical Palestinian group Fatah Islam. And the effort to eradicate them has virtually destroyed the Palestinian refugee camp Nahr al-Bared where they are holed up. The ground is strewn with the empty casings of high-caliber bullets; the soot-blackened ruins of the camp north of the Lebanese seaport of Tripoli stand about 200 meters (650 feet) away. Fatah Islam snipers on the roofs take aim at the Lebanese rangers who have dug in east of the camp. "I hope they will attack us soon. Then we'll strike back and finish them off," says the officer, who wants only to be called Spiro. Spiro's merciless prediction is certainly not improbable. A
massacre seems inevitable on the fifth day of the stand-off between
fundamentalist Muslim militants and the Lebanese military. The
militia, which has entrenched itself in Nahr al-Bared, is surrounded
by a large contingent of soldiers -- including at least 700 elite
troops. Even as a cease-fire appears to be holding on Thursday, with
only sporadic gunfire, they are waiting for the decisive battle. It's
a battle the Fatah Islam militants cannot win and don't intend to
survive: Spokesmen for the group, which Western intelligence agencies
consider close to al-Qaida, have warned that it will fight to the end,
and take as many soldiers down with it as possible.
'Prepared to Commit Suicide'
The Lebanese side seems just as unwilling to back down. Lebanese
Prime Minister Fuad Saniora said in a television address on Thursday
that his military remains committed to eliminating Fatah Islam.
Calling the group a terrorist organization, he said it was "attempting
to ride on the suffering and the struggle of the Palestinian people."
He continued: "We will work to root out and strike at terrorism but we
will embrace and protect our brothers in the camps."
Just how many radicals are still alive and willing to fight is
unclear. A high-ranking officer said on Wednesday that more than 750
had barricaded themselves in the camp. The Fatah Islam militants are
just as well equipped and trained as the military, the officer says.
"But they are prepared to commit suicide, and that could be described
as their advantage."
The militia and the military have been engaged in heavy fighting
since Sunday, leaving about 70 militiamen and soldiers dead, according
to news agency reports. At least 20 civilians are also said to have
been killed during the skirmishes before a cease-fire negotiated on
Tuesday enabled many of the 31,000 inhabitants of the densely
populated Nahr al-Bared camp to flee.
The Lebanese government accuses the militia of having planned and
executed terrorist attacks, with the Nahr al-Bared camp serving as a
hideout and command center. About 400,000 Palestinian refugees, forced
by the wars in the Middle East to leave their homes, live in 12 camps
inside Lebanon -- camps to which the Lebanese police have no access
due to a 40-year-old agreement with the Palestinians.
'They Are Prepared to Commit Suicide'
The terrain on the edge of the camp where Spiro's soldiers have dug
in was still in the hands of the Fatah Islam militants on Tuesday. The
rangers moved in at dawn on Wednesday, flattening the reeds that grew
there and raising protective mounds of earth among the cypress trees.
Ranger Rommel can't say how many people he has killed in the past few
days. "It must have been a lot," says the 27-year-old, whose parents
named him after the German Field Marshal who commanded the Nazi
Afrikakorps. "At first it was a shock to be in a real battle after all
the training," Rommel says. Later, he adds, it was like being in a
movie. "A drunk state in which you don't care whether you're shooting
at children, the elderly or militants."
It looks like the movie will play again soon, he says: "We have
precise indications that our position will be a target for suicide
attacks." The information he has indicates that the attackers will be
old women.
It's the first time since the fighting started that Spiros's and
Rommel's units have had a chance to rest. The men smoke, eat fresh
plums and make bawdy jokes about each other's girlfriends. One soldier
hands out plastic bags with pita bread, tins of tuna and tomatoes.
Most answer questions in flawless English, having received, they say,
part of their training in the United States. Some of them are even
citizens of both the US and Lebanon.
The men have repeatedly raided the camp during the past 72 hours
and are markedly shaken by the house-to-house fighting they have
experienced. "These militants are not religious people; they're
sadists," says Husam, whose voice is hoarse from shouting over the
noise of battle. "They decapitated some of our people." He and his
fellow soldiers found Egyptian, Sudanese and Bangladeshi passports on
the bodies of dead Fatah Islam militants, he says. "Most of them are
not from here. They're fanatics from outside who have rallied here."
Nothing Good to Say about Fatah Islam
A few kilometers to the south, a caravan of refugees is leaving the
camp behind, moving slowly. Everyone's ID is checked to ensure no
militants escape by mingling with the refugees. From neighbors shot
while fetching bread to one farmer's economic ruin -- caused by a
grenade that killed eleven of his cows -- the refugees have gone
through days of horror. Now they are fleeing into a nearby Palestinian
camp, where an uncertain future awaits them. Even though it was the
Lebanese military that opened fire on the camp, nobody has anything
good to say about Fatah Islam.
Mahmud Darwish, an IT student who lives in the camp, also says that
the problems were started by foreigners who began moving into the camp
one or two years ago. The men, he says, married into Palestinian
families and spent lavishly to buy apartments in Nahr al-Bared. A
pharmacist reports that the fundamentalist Muslims disclosed their
identity increasingly openly in recent months. "They were impossible
to overlook, riding mopeds with their long beards and dressed in
ostentatiously chaste clothing," he says. As time went by, the
fundamentalists became increasingly self-confident. "When a man cursed
in their presence, they surrounded and scolded him," the pharmacist
says.
The Palestinians didn't just stand idly by as Fatah Islam moved in.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Nahr al-Bared tried
for months to isolate the fundamentalists. The current intervention by
the Lebanese army is -- over and above the suffering it has caused the
refugees inside the camp -- unwelcome by the Palestinian powers that
be.
After the cease-fire went into effect on Tuesday, the PLO announced
it wants to get rid of the radicals itself. The PLO's authority in the
camp would be substantially weakened were the Lebanese military to
find success where they have not. Most observers, though, have little
faith that the PLO would have much chance of victory.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese forces are considering storming the camp as
the Islamic militants have refused an ultimatum to surrender. Some
Islamists have allegedly tried to escape -- the Lebanese military
announced on Thursday that it had destroyed two small boats full of
militants trying to escape into the nearby Mediterranean Sea.
At the camp, the soldiers are busy preparing for more fighting.
Some, though, are also reflective after the four-day orgy of violence.
Spiro, standing next to the wreck of a vehicle that is missing all of
its windows, says: "People sought safety in this bus." Large puddles
of blood have dried on the pavement below. "They drove towards us.
They could have been militants," Spiro says.
His troops were the ones who opened fire on the bus -- before
retrieving three corpses and several injured from the wreck.
"Terrible, but that's just what war is like."
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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BOYCOTT BOOMERANG
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 24, 2007. |
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This comes from The Guardian.
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The Guardian reports that a Nobel laureate cancelled plans to visit a British university in part because of the National Union of Journalists' boycott of Israel. Professor Steven Weinberg was to give a talk on particle physics at the Imperial College this July: In the letter, the professor said his decision was triggered by an agreement by the National Union of Journalists at its national conference to boycott Israeli products. He wrote: "I know that some will say that these boycotts are directed only against Israel, rather than generally against Jews. "But given the history of the attacks on Israel and the oppressiveness and aggressiveness of other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, boycotting Israel indicated a moral blindness for which it is hard to find any explanation other than anti-semitism." Professor Weinberg, who currently teaches at the University of Texas, received the 1979 Nobel Prize for his research on electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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CANADA MUST NOT FUND PALESTINIAN TERROR THROUGH UNRWA
Posted by Canadian Coalition for Democracies, May 24, 2007. |
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Violence rages in Palestinian refugee camps: Canadian support for UNRWA must not be part of the problem Ottawa, Canada -- As the Lebanese government attempts to bring Palestinian terrorist and their foreign allies based in UN refugee camps under control, serious questions must be asked about the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) and its role in supporting and sustaining these armed gangs and their expensive infrastructures. For its part, the Canadian Government must investigate the way its own money and support for UNRWA have been misused to fuel extremism in the region. "Canada is one of the most active financial supporters of UNRWA. Since 2000, the Canadian International Development Agency has provided over $75 million to support the UN agency, ignoring serious concerns about terrorism and terrorist incitement in the camps, " said Naresh Raghubeer, Executive Director, Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD). "Now that Palestinian terrorists are again undermining Lebanon, as they have been doing with Israel, will Canada finally end its blind support for UNRWA?" UNRWA has 2,629 staff members in Lebanon who operate 12 refugee camps, including Nahr el-Bared where the current violence is taking place. Since the outbreak of fighting between the Lebanese army and Palestinian gangs on Sunday, over 79 have been killed, making it Lebanon's worst violence since the 1975-1990 civil war. "UNRWA's camps have been used for generations to indoctrinate hatred. UNRWA employs Palestinian terrorists from Fatah and Hamas, yet Canada, under both Liberal and now Conservative governments, has been silent," said Raghubeer. CCD calls on the Harper government to impose an immediate moratorium on funding to UNRWA until an independent, Canadian-led forensic audit is completed and controls are implemented to assure Canadian taxpayers that (1) armed gangs are no longer operating within the camps, (2) members of terrorist groups are not receiving Canadian aid or employment, and (3) incitement to violence and teaching of hatred have ended. "Prime Minister Harper has spoken both about the threat posed by terrorism and the need for accountability in spending taxpayers' money, and has pledged to make these principles part of his 2007 budget," said Raghubeer. "If the Prime Minister is serious, CIDA's unconditional funding of UNRWA would be an excellent place to act on these commitments." The Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD) is a non-partisan, multi-ethnic, multi-denominational organization of concerned Canadians dedicated to national security and the protection and promotion of democracy at home and abroad. Visit their website at their website: http://canadiancoalition.com For more information, please contact: Naresh Raghubeer Executive Director, Canadian Coalition for Democracies 416-452-6957, Mobile 613-216-2095, Ottawa Office. |
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STOP TERROR FINANCING AT THE SOURCE
Posted by Rachel Ehrenfeld, May 24, 2007. |
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This appeared yesterday on the Terror Finance Blog
http://www.terrorfinance.org/the_terror_finance_blog/, to which I am a contributor. |
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In retaliation to the intensifying Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza, the IDF conducted aerial attacks on businesses involved in transferring funds to terror organizations. According to the IDF's spokesperson, "The IDF carried out aerial attacks against money changers' offices and businesses in the Gaza Strip which have been transferring funds from Iran, Syria and Lebanon for the funding of the terrorist activities of Hamas and other organization." As effective as this bombing campaign my be, destroying the physical structures used for the transfers, may delay further transactions for a very short time, until new arrangements are made. As long as the sources of these funds, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and their likes, and their financial institutions and businesses are safe, the funds will continue to fuel Hamas and the many other Palestinian terror organizations. The same paymasters, who fund Palestinian terrorists to kill Israelis, are also funding the terrorists that kill American and coalition forces in Iraq. U.S.-led forces frequently discover caches of Iranian money and bomb-making equipment during raids on Shiite neighborhoods, especially in Sadr City that resembles Gaza. The U.S., like Israel, "accused Iran of providing weapons and training to Shiite militant groups in Iraq." Yet, the U.S. is persistent in its refrain of connecting the dots; the radical Muslims fighting the U.S. and Israel are the same. Moreover, the U.S. is reluctant -- in some instances -- to identify them -- Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, to name but a few. It clearly lacks the political will to act against them. And the closer we get to the Presidential election, the less likely it is that the situation will change. If anything, Israel would most likely be harshly criticized by the U.N. for trying desperately to stop the terrorist attacks on its citizens. Funds will continue to reach radical Muslim terrorist in the Palestinian Authority, Iraq and elsewhere as long as their paymasters remain free to fund them. Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the American Center for Democracy (www.acdemocracy.org); she writes on terrorism and corruption-related topics. She is author of "Funding Evil; How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It." |
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HAMAS IN ITS OWN WORDS: IDEOLOGY OF HATRED AND GENOCIDE
Posted by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, May 24, 2007. |
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The Hamas Ideology of Hatred and Genocide: Islamic supremacy over the world, destroying Israel and Jews, promoting terror and violence |
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Introduction In light of the escalating conflict between Hamas and Israel, it's important to review the Hamas ideology and understand how Hamas views the conflict. Hamas ideology, as expressed in the Hamas Charter, sees Hamas as part of the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood (Article 2) that seeks world Islamic domination. Israel is said to exist on territory that is Islamic Waqf (Article 11) and therefore Islam demands that Israel be destroyed. Accepting Israel's existence is a violation of Islamic law (Article 13). The Hamas charter presents the killing of Jews as God's will, and the inevitable extermination of Jews as coinciding with the "Hour of Resurrection" (Article 7). The charter expresses eagerness to participate in and promote this killing of Jews: "Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah's promise [killing Jews] whatever time it might take" (Article 7). Finally, violence and terror (called "resistance") are presented as legitimate tools. All of these principles continue to be stated regularly by Hamas leadership and in the official Hamas media throughout May 2007. Part 1: Islamic supremacy over the world Part 1: Islamic supremacy over the world Former Foreign Minister and Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Zahhar: "The prophetic foundation is the message of the prophet Muhammad, that Islam will enter every house and will spread over the entire world." [Al-Ayyam, March 25, 2007] Dr. Ahmad Bahar, Hamas (acting Speaker, Palestinian Legislative Council): "This is Islam, that was ahead of its time with regards to human rights in the treatment of prisoners, but our people was afflicted by the cancerous lump, that is the Jews, in the heart of the Arab nation. Make us victorious over the infidels. Allah, take hold of the Jews and their allies, Allah, take hold of the Americans and their allies Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don't leave even one." [PA TV, April 20, 2007] Deputy Director of Al-Aqsa [Hamas] TV, Hazem Al-Sha'arawi, discussing the children's program Tomorrow Pioneers: "Let's ask history: ...which time period was good to all communities? The Jews lived in the time of Islam [under Islamic rule] and were happy. The Christians lived in the time of Islam [under Islamic rule] and were happy. Look at the history, the prophet [Muhammad]... ordered the army: 'Do not kill a monk in his prayer room.' Even the Caliph Umar Bin Al-Khattab, [Islamic conqueror of Jerusalem in 638] when he came into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, he secured the churches and the prayer rooms. Therefore, when we talk about the mission of the restoration of Islam to its natural place [of world rule], we [are] calling for justice, and for goodness, and for world love... so that the Christians will live in peace, and that even the Jews will live in peace and security." [Al-Aqsa TV, May 13, 2007] Text from children's program on Hamas TV, Tomorrow Pioneers: Hazim (Adult): "Islam will spread to all parts of the earth from one end to the other and justice and good and kindness will spread. Did history witness a time period better than that when Islam ruled?... Every day do you remember Andalus (Spain)? This dear Andalus will return [to Islam] one day." [Al-Aqsa TV, May 11, 2007] Part 2: Destruction of Israel Dr. Khalil Al-Hayyah, member of the Hamas political leadership and the Palestinian Legislative Council: "The Hamas movement bases its strategy and its policy on that the option of resistance is the only option that can liberate Palestine from its [Mediterranean] sea to its [Jordan] river [ie destroy Israel]." [Al-Risalah, Hamas newspaper, April 19, 2007] Hamas spokesman, Dr. Ismail Radwan, confirmed ...that his movement will not recognize any existence of the Israeli enemy on an inch of Palestinian land and said, "We will liberate Palestine, all of Palestine...Palestine will not be liberated by negotiations, committees and decisions, it will only be liberated by the rifle and the "Al-Qassam" [rocket]. Therefore, prepare yourselves." [Al-Risalah, Hamas newspaper, April 9, 2007] Video of Ahmad Yassin, founder and former head of Hamas, about future destruction of Israel, broadcast regularly March -- May 2007: "Tel Aviv is gone. They are defeated, they have no words left. ... When this process will end, they will become a state with no ability, helpless. They established a state to protect the Jews from death and murder. If death and murder chase them in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Netanya and everywhere among them, then they will say: 'What am I doing here? I founded a state to protect me from death, and if death chases me, I want to flee and go back to Europe and America.'" [Al Aqsa TV, regularly, March- May 2007] Former Foreign Minister and Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Zahhar: "Our position is the liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine. This is the final and strategic solution for us. There is a Quranic message for us, that we will enter the Al-Aqsa mosque, and the entrance to the mosque means the entrance into all of Palestine. This is the message, no one can deny it. Anyone who denies it must check his faith and his Islam." [Al-Ayyam, March 25, 2007] Part 3: Demonization and extermination of Jews The Hamas spokesman, Dr. Ismail Radwan: "The Hour [Resurrection] will not take place until the Muslims fight the Jews and the Muslims kill them, and the rock and the tree will say: 'Oh, Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, kill him!'... We must remind our Arab and Muslim nation, its leaders and people, its scholars and students, remind them that Palestine and the Al-Aqsa mosque will not be liberated through summits nor by international resolutions, but it will be liberated through the rifle. It will not be liberated through negotiations, but through the rifle, since this occupation knows no language but the language of force... O Allah, strengthen Islam and Muslims, and bring victory to your Jihad-fighting worshipers, in Palestine and everywhere... Allah take the oppressor Jews and Americans and their supporters!" [PA TV, March 30, 2007] Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Bahar (acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council): "Oh warrior brothers, who stay put and withstand the [patience] test on the land of beloved Palestine. Do you know these Zionists, why they kill the children, the women and the men? This is the policy of the Zionist entity, this is a planned and organized policy. Their false Talmud, their false Torah, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, call for the murder of children, women and men, ..." [PA TV, August 4, 2006] Hamas Web site: video of Hamas suicide terrorist, February 2006-April 2007: "My message to the loathed Jews is that there is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood, and our children's thirst with your blood. We will not leave until you leave the Muslim countries." "In the name of Allah, we will destroy you, blow you up, take revenge against you, purify the land of you, pigs that have defiled our country... This operation is revenge against the sons of monkeys and pigs." [Hamas website, February 2006-April 2007] Part 4: Promoting terror, suicide terror, and violence Hamas TV dramatization of woman suicide terrorist Reem Riyashi's four-year-old daughter vowing to be a suicide terrorist like her mother -- March 21, 2007 and repeatedly through May 2007. [Background: Reem Riyashi killed four Israelis and wounded seven in 2004.] The following is the Hamas TV dramatization of the song in which Duha, Reem's daughter, sings to her mother: [Daughter sees mother preparing explosives sticks] Repeated calls for kidnapping Israeli soldiers "Fathi Hamad, Hamas member of Palestinian Legislative Council, demanded the kidnapping of more Israeli soldiers in order to force Israel to free the [Palestinian] prisoners... Hamad said this at a gathering of the "Wa'ed" organization for prisoners and released [prisoners] in Khan Yunis ... Hamad stressed it was the responsibility of the government, the Legislative Council, the [armed] factions and military arms to dedicate all the efforts at their disposal to free the prisoners. He argued that the kidnapping of the soldier Gilad Shalit hit Israel very hard." [Al Ayyam, March 10, 2007] Transcript of Hamas broadcast: Member of the Legislative Council Um-Nasser Farachat:"With no connection to my being a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and my involvement in the leadership, as a Palestinian citizen, by God, I don't believe in any solution other than one: kidnapping Zionist soldiers." Itamar Marcus is director of PMW -- Palestinian Media Watch --
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR NEW BOOK: THE LEGACY OF ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM
Posted by Bryna Berch, May 24, 2007. |
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RE: The Legacy Of Islamic Antisemitism
Steven T. Katz, Director, Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University, and author of Post-Holocaust Dialogues (1984), and The Holocaust in Historical Context (1994). Publication of the present anthology is a ground breaking event of major scholarly, cultural, and political significance. Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, author of Carnage and Culture (2001), and A War Like No Other (2005) Critics may be as surprised at Bostom's conclusions as they are unable to refute his carefully compiled corpus of evidence Martin Gilbert, official biographer of Winston Churchill, and author of Never Again: A History of the Holocaust, (2000), and The Jews of Arab Lands: Their History in Maps, (1976) Stimulating and informative: a fascinating and disturbing voyage of historical discovery...It is magnificent. Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture & Five-College 40th Anniversary Professor, Amherst College, author of The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories, and editor of The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature and The Scroll and the Cross: 1,000 Years of Jewish-Hispanic Literature. Eye-opening anthology should become an essential resource. Richard L Rubenstein, President Emeritus University of Bridgeport; Lawton Distinguished Professor of Religion Emeritus, Florida State University; Author, After Auschwitz, The Cunning of History, and Jihad and Genocide: The Nuclear Dimension (forthcoming). A priceless, indispensable, and authoritative resource which is being made available when it is most needed. Lee Harris is author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (2004), and The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Challenge to the West (2007) Bostom has rendered an invaluable service to those who are interested in understanding the historical realities of Islam Nonie Darwish, author of Now They Call Me Infidel Facing truths to end the denial Brigitte Gabriel, author of Because They Hate Most comprehensive analysis of the anti-Jewish hatred in Islam Martin Peretz, Editor-in-Chief, The New Republic Bostom sheds incandescent light on a subject that the easily-forgiving hearts would prefer to ignore Phyllis Chesler, Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies, and author of The New Antisemitism and The Death of Feminism No library, Department of Religious Studies, or Department of State should be without this definitive volume. Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler; editor of Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Antisemitism Exhaustively researched, powerfully argued study |
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MS. LIVNI THE DREAMER
Posted by Sorge L. Diaz, May 24, 2007. |
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It is truly disheartening to see the pursuit of the impossible elevated to the status of moral duty. I published this essay on May 9, 2007 on the Western Resistance website
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In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal
This is exactly wrong. Israel is in no position to choose between its Jewish and its democratic character. It cannot solve this dilemma through "a generous territorial compromise." Israel must, before engaging in daydreaming, win the fight for its very existence. But that is what is truly maddening about the political scene in Israel and elsewhere; only political fantasies are politically acceptable. Israel must save its democratic character at any price -- if that price is military and political security, well, though. Democracy is the new golden calf before which all of Israel must bow. Ms. Livni's plan, over which Mrs. Oz-Sulzberger fawns, is the pinnacle of political stupidity, one of the finest achievements of human self-delusion. She wants to trade land for peace, but pays no attention to whether the plan can succeed at all. To achieve peace, you must first check whether peace is possible. All "land-for-peace" deals are dangerous by their very nature. After they are consummated, there are no guarantees the party getting the land will honor its political commitments. Words are cheap, while land is expensive. The trustworthiness of your political opponent is crucial if peace -- or even "peace" -- is to be achieved. You don't give diamonds to a thief. And you don't give diamonds to Islam, period -- Islam commands Muslims to be political caravan robbers. Islam is not merely a religion, but a way of life and ideology of conquest. Trusting an Islamic country is pointless, since Islamic Law demands perpetual warfare against the unbeliever. This is no mere rhetoric; Islamic Law does not allow for perpetual peace treaties, only for truces up to a maximum of ten years. A good Muslim ruler, after the treaty has lapsed, must then renew Jihad warfare in order to "bring the gift of Islam" to the unbelievers. Notice it doesn't help to sign the treaty with a "bad" Muslim ruler: he might "get Allah" later and fulfill his religious duty, or he may be replaced by a different leader who takes the religion seriously and you'll have warfare in your hands anyway. Ironically, the only thing that can bring peace in the short term is the internal strength of the infidel -- Islamic Law does allow the renewal of truces when the infidel is militarily strong. Giving up land for a false peace, to the extent that it makes Israel weaker, not stronger, makes war more likely, not less. Ms. Livni, of course, wouldn't listen to any of this. She does not want to listen to reality at all. Listen to her on the nature of the "Arab-Israeli" conflict: "... [Ms. Livni] lashes out against what she calls "attempts to theologize the conflict. I cannot solve a religious strife," she says, "but I can solve a conflict between nations." This assumes, of course, that perceptions can always and everywhere trump reality. To be blunt, there is no need to "theologize" the conflict; the conflict is already as theological as it can be. Islamic Law demands that all of Israel be returned to the bosom of Islam, and there is nothing Ms. Livni can do about this theological reality. She does not want to deal with the political and practical consequences of accepting it. Her so-called moral vision is more important to her than the future of her people. So, I must ask our Israeli readers -- don't listen to this woman, don't listen to those who want "peace, peace!" when there is no peace to be had. Severe, grievous consequences usually follow the pursuit of the impossible. The future of your nation is at stake. Contact Sorge Diaz at sld1776@gmail.com |
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U.S. ARMY OVER-STRETCHED; WHO OPPRESSES WHOM?
Posted by Richard Shulman, May 24, 2007. |
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P.A. FORMING UNIFIED ARMY Abbas is uniting all the factions' militias and the official armed forces into a single army. Thus the faction that the US armed and the factions that Iran armed will have a common purpose (IMRA, 5/7). The US had proposed unification. Now it is coming about. Who supposes that its purpose is for Abbas to fight the others and protect the Israel he has spent his whole life trying to destroy for being infidel? Isn't it devilishly ironic how the US gets the Israelis to help arm some of the Arabs who are fighting them, and does so in the name of improving Israeli security! PM OLMERT'S PRAISE & THREAT He praised S. Arabia and other Arab states for willingness to make peace. He complained about continued attacks on Israel from Gaza, to which Israel barely responds. He said, 'Israel cannot show restraint forever.' Dr. Aaron Lerner remarked that PM Olmert thus has set a deadline for an end to Gaza attacks sometime between 'now and forever.' (IMRA, 5/7). S. Arabia is interested not in peace but in jihad. Hence its conditions for a treaty would make Israel easy to conquer. Some peace! Olmert doesn't understand that. Government officials there and in the US still haven't figured out what the Muslims want and that it behooves our officials to study enemy positions and ways of thinking. U.S. GROUND FORCES STRETCHED TOO FAR The US military has acknowledged that its ground forces are stretched too far. They all are either on active duty or about to deploy. There are few reserves capable of handling another front on the ground, though there are the forces to handle one from air and sea. Marine artillery units may not have had practice in artillery, having been sent, instead, to fight as infantry (IMRA, 5/7). This is the same way that Egypt and Iran, by prompting terrorist attacks on Israel, have gotten the IDF to curtail training for warfare against the massed armies that Egypt and Iran are capable of mounting. Is the US military lament fitting for a supposed super power? How is it that there still is no cry for more recruitment? Too pacifistic, here? Want too much butter and so we won't have the guns to defend our butter? The US waged WWII with a military force of ten million. What do we have now, 1.5 million? Okay, there are more civilian employees, but still! JACQUES CHIRAC'S STATEMENTS & ACTIONS: 1. Multi-party systems are a luxury for Ivory Coast' Africa is not ready for democracy; 2. (Repressive) Tunisia has an advanced human rights record, because the most important human rights are the rights to food, housing, education, and health; 3. Gave France's highest honor to Russia's President Putin, crushing freedom; 4. For his birthday party in Latvia, invited Putin, dis-invited Bush, snubbed the President of Latvia, and the embarrassed diplomats refused to go; 5. Called Saddam a personal friend; 6. The E. Europeans who support the US in the UNO should 'shut up;' 7. While negotiating with Iran to stop developing nuclear energy, said one or two bombs are not very dangerous. (No? And who says Iran would stop at two?); 8. Walked out when a French business executive addressed a European summit in English (Anne Applebaum, NY Sun, 5/7, Op.-Ed.). Which world leader is stupid, a liar, and can make his country a laughing stock? WHO OPPRESSES WHOM? Upon conquering Judea-Samaria in 1948, Jordan barred Jews from their holy sites (and destroyed the synagogues). Under Oslo, Israel let Arafat control much of Judea-Samaria, and he promised to let Jews access their holy sites. He broke that (and every other) promise. Terrorists again threaten Jews who visit Josephs' Tomb. An Islamist leader is arranging for Jerusalem's mosques to close on Fridays so Muslims attend the one on the Mount, until they sweep away the Jewish presence there (Arutz-7, 5/11). They sweep away Jewish artifacts in the Temple Mount, mostly destroyed Joseph's Tomb, and attack Rachel's Tomb. Nevertheless, for propaganda, the Muslims constantly complain that Israel damages the mosque on the Mount. World leaders do not denounce this libel, murderous, because it incites the easily aroused Muslims to violence. Neither the State Dept. nor the Pope, always asking Israel or 'both sides' for 'restraint,' call upon Muslims to stop potentially violent defamation. Where is the world leadership against jihad that declares such Muslims oppressive and without credibility? This oppression is not new but age-old and pronounced in the 1920s. 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@verizon.net |
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WHY ISLAMICS LOVE PERETZ
Posted by Paul Lademain, May 23, 2007. |
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What can be better than to have as one's enemy a clown
who says:
"DM" must stand for "Dumbest Moron". Sheesh! Somebody please clue this idiot to the fact that a sovereign nation, a real nation, is obliged to retaliate and defend its civilians the very instant they are attacked. Notice how easy it is to bully Jewish ponces like Peretz into doing nothing ... all it takes is patronizing praise for "Israel's restraint". O, such flattery makes Peretz glow. Then watch Peretz talk, talk, talk ...and then do nothing whilst the Islamics insult Israel by continuing to slaughter and bomb helpless Israeli women and children. Peretz should spin in hell. Get rid of these idiots! And arrest O-so-tired Olmert. Throw these bums into a dark hole where rots Arafat and toss Shimon Peres and Kofi Annan in after them. Contact Paul Lademain at lademain@verizon.net |
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CATCHING ON TO SHAVUOT
Posted by Judy Lash Balint, May 23, 2007. |
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It's 5:00 a.m on Shavuot morning and I'm having trouble finding an empty seat in any shul in Jerusalem's Old City. Every synagogue is already packed as I make the mistake of lingering a few minutes too long at the Kotel amongst the tens of thousands who have made their way there after a night of learning. After dropping in at three shuls, I finally find a spot on a bench under an outer archway of the women's section of the tiny synagogue inside the Old Yishuv Court Museum on Or Hahayim Street. After Hallel and the reading of the Ten Commandments, a swift Haftarah reading brings us to the Yizkor memorial prayer. Only three women are left inside as the young girls who filled the place and have not yet lost parents file out. It's about the same proportion down at the Kotel -- it seems that at least two thirds of the masses thronging the Kotel plaza are under 30. Coming barely a week after Jerusalem Day, when similar crowds filled the area to celebrate the reunification of the city, the Shavuot early morning spectacle is an affirmation of the strength of the connection of the people to its roots. In the cool air of the pre-dawn, it's as if the Old City is a giant magnet pulling the multitudes in from every direction. Flooding down Agron Street in front of the U.S Consulate building and its sleepy guards, the crowd gathers force and takes over the Mamilla area where freshly-planted olive trees soften the concrete steps of the Karta parking garage. The Tower of David and Jaffa Gate rise in front of us, outlined in the slightly garish bright blue lighting trim that was turned on last week for the 40th anniversary of the reunification. It's 4:45 a.m as we surge forward and down the steps of the David Street shuk only to encounter a human traffic jam as we make the turn onto the Street of the Chain and the approach to the Kotel. A few groups of Arabs heading to work are walking up in the opposite direction. No one bothers them as they make their way toward Jaffa Gate. There are only four entryways into the Kotel plaza, and they're all completely overwhelmed by the numbers of people pressing to get in. With a few friends, I veer off to the left to double around and join the crowd coming in from the direction of Damascus Gate, via the tunnel. We manage to squeeze our way into the back of the plaza and start to move toward the women's section, passing a group of nuns from Holland earnestly reading from their bibles by flashlight. There's barely room to move as more and more people surge in from each of the four entry points. The bright green lights adorning the two mosques behind the Temple Mount shine in the semi-darkness. As the sky begins to change color and turn slowly from dark grey to light blue, the garish lights vanish. Exactly at sunrise, chattering starlings swoop down, and the voices of the throng rise in prayer. On this holiday of Shavuot that commemorates the giving of the Torah, the symbolic wedding between God and the Jewish people, most of the women are wearing white and the centuries-old Kabbalistic custom of Tikkun Leil Shavuot, a night dedicated to Torah study is observed by hundreds of thousands of Israelis. On the eve of the holiday, commentators on Israel Radio remark on the phenomenon of secular Jews eager to take part in some kind of Torah learning on Shavuot. Shiri Lev-Ari writing in Haaretz observes: "The streets of Tel Aviv are full of life all night long, with wide-awake people circulating and exchanging tips that focus on the big question: Which lecture is worth going to now?" "People walk around with Bibles under their arms looking for interesting lectures, " says Iyun Academy Rabbi Roberto Arbiv. In Jerusalem, many places, like the Menachem Begin Heritage Center and Congregation Shira Hadasha are forced to turn people away for lack of space at their study sessions. On Palmach Street, the center of the English-speaking community in Jerusalem, the spacious open-plan apartment of Rabbi Ian and Rachel Pear of Shir Hadash is packed and abuzz with discussion at 1.a.m. Rav Ian has just delivered a stimulating hour-long session on Bikurim, the first in a series of lectures by different scholars that will go on until 4 a.m. In another example of the widening gap between Jewish observance in Israel and the Diaspora, a May 18 editorial in the American Jewish weekly newspaper, The Forward, notes, "...the proportion of Jews that turns out for the festival (Shavuot) will not be great...Shavuot simply hasn't caught on with recent generations of Jews." Judy Lash Balint is an award-winner investigative journalist and author of "Jerusalem Diaries: In Tense Times" (Gefen). Her latest is Jerusalem Diaries II: What's Really Happening in Israel (Xulon Press). |
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TEN WAYS ISRAEL IS TREATED DIFFERENTLY
Posted by Yuval Zaliouk, May 23, 2007. |
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This was written by David Harris and it was published in the
Jerusalem Post and is available on the Aish website:
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Here's my list. I invite readers to suggest other examples that particularly irk them. First, Israel is the only UN member state whose very right to exist is under constant challenge. Notwithstanding the fact that Israel was created with the imprimatur of the UN and has been a member of the world body since 1949, there is a relentless chorus of nations, institutions and individuals denying Israel's very political legitimacy. No one would dare question the right to exist of Libya, Saudi Arabia or Syria. Why is it open hunting season on Israel, as if we didn't know the answer? Second, Israel is the only UN member state that's been publicly targeted for annihilation by another UN member state. Think about it. The Iranian president calls for wiping Israel off the map. Is there any other country that faces such an open call for genocidal destruction? Third, Israel is the only nation whose capital city, Jerusalem, is not recognized by other nations. Imagine the absurdity of this. Foreign diplomats live in Tel Aviv while conducting virtually all their business in Jerusalem. Though no Western nation questions Israel's presence in the city's western half, where the prime minister's office, Knesset and Ministry of Foreign Affairs are located, there are no embassies there. In fact, look at listings of world cities, including places of birth in passports, and you'll often see something striking -- Paris, France; Tokyo, Japan; Pretoria, South Africa; Lima, Peru; and Jerusalem, sans country -- orphaned, if you will. Fourth, the UN has two agencies that deal with refugees. One, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), focuses on all the world's refugee populations, save one. The other, the United Nations Refugee and Works Administration (UNRWA), handles only the Palestinians. But the oddity goes further than two structures and two bureaucracies. They have two different mandates. UNHCR seeks to resettle refugees; UNRWA does not. When, in 1951, John Blanford, UNRWA's director, proposed resettling up to 250,000 refugees in Arab countries, those countries refused, leading to his resignation. The message got through. No UN official since has pushed for resettlement. Moreover, the UNRWA and UNHCR definitions of a refugee differ markedly. Whereas the UNHCR targets those who have fled their homelands, the UNRWA definition covers "the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948," without any generational limitations. Fifth, Israel is the only country that has won all its major wars for survival and self-defense, yet it's confronted by defeated adversaries who insist on dictating the terms of peace. In doing so, ironically, they've found support from many countries who, victorious in war, demanded -- and got -- border adjustments. Sixth, Israel is the only country that has been censured by name -- not once, but nine times -- since the new UN Human Rights Council was established in June 2006. Astonishingly, or maybe not, this UN body has failed to adopt a single resolution critical of any real human rights abuser. When finally discussing the Darfur situation, the Council shamefully balked at pointing a finger at Sudan. Seventh, Israel is the only country that, in violation of the spirit of the UN Charter, isn't a full member of one of the five regional blocs -- Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and West Europe and Others (WEOG) -- that determine eligibility for candidacy for key UN posts. While Israel achieved a breakthrough in 2000 and joined WEOG, its membership is limited to New York, not other UN centers, and is both conditional and temporary. Eighth, Israel is the only country that's the daily target of three UN bodies established solely to advance the Palestinian cause and to bash Israel -- the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People, and the Division for Palestinian Rights in the UN's Department of Political Affairs. Ninth, Israel is the only country that is the target of a boycott by the British-based National Union of Journalists. An earlier British boycott against Israeli academic institutions was voided on a technicality because the union that adopted the measure merged with another. There is now an incipient call by some in the British Medical Association to exclude its Israeli counterpart from the World Medical Association. And tenth, Israel is the only country where some associated with its majority population, i.e., Jews, openly call, for political or religious reasons, to dismantle the state. Is there a comparable situation to those religious voices of Neturei Karta, for example, who traveled to Teheran to join publicly with a leader seeking Israel's destruction, as well as those political extremists who seek to delegitimize the State of Israel and call for a "one-state" solution? Speaking of our own worst enemies... Tackling any one of these ten, much less all of them, is a daunting challenge, to state the painfully obvious. And, as I suggested, this list is far from complete. But it gives a sense of what's going on beyond the daily headlines. The old ad used to say that you don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's Jewish rye bread. Well, surely, you don't have to be an ardent pro-Israel activist to be troubled by the unjust treatment of Israel. All it takes is a capacity for outrage that things like this are going on before our very eyes. Yuval Zaliouk writes the Truth Provider columns. To subscribe, send an email to ynz@netvision.net.il |
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DOUBLE STANDARD WATCH: DAY OF CATASTROPHE?
Posted by Fred Reifenberg, May 23, 2007. |
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This report is by Alan Dershowitz, delivered at the Florida Society for Middle East Studies, Florida Atlantic U., Boca Raton, FL. |
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I just returned from a visit from several university campuses during which I spoke about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. On these and other campuses anti-Israel students commemorate the Palestinian Naqba. They call this the Day of Catastrophe on which the Palestinians were deprived of their homeland and were made refugees from their birthplace. They compare their catastrophe to the Holocaust. Perhaps out of deference to the suffering of the Palestinian people, pro-Israel students generally say nothing in response to these Naqba commemorations. The impression is thus created that everyone agrees that this was indeed a catastrophe inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians. The time has come to reply to this canard and to place it in its historical context. The Naqba was indeed a catastrophe, but it was a self-inflicted wound. The Palestinian Naqba was a direct result of the refusal of the Palestinian and Arab leadership to accept the two state solution offered by the United Nations in 1947-48. The UN divided what remained of Palestine, after Trans-Jordan was carved out of it, into two states of roughly equal size (the Israelis got slightly more actual land, but the Palestinians got considerably more arable land). Israel would control territories in which Jews were a majority, while the Palestinians would control territories in which Arabs were a majority. Israel accepted the partition and declared statehood. Palestinians rejected statehood and attacked Israel with the help of all the surrounding Arab countries. In the process of defending their new state, Israel lost 1% of its population (1 out of every 100 Israelis were killed). In the ensuing war -- a war declared to be genocidal by Israel's enemies - 700,000 Palestinians left their homes, some voluntarily, some at the urging of Palestinian leaders and some forced out by the Israeli military. None of these people would have had to leave Israel had the Palestinians and other Arabs been willing to accept the two-state solution. It was indeed a catastrophe for all sides, but the catastrophe was caused by the Palestinians and Arabs. In the aftermath of the war, Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip. There were no United Nations condemnations of these occupations though they were brutal and denied the Palestinians autonomy and sovereignty. Only when Israel occupied these lands, following a defensive war against Egypt and Jordan, did the occupation become a source of international concern. This is the reality. This is the historical truth. And the world should understand that this particular catastrophe, as distinguished from others like the Holocaust, could easily have been prevented had the Palestinians wanted their own state more than they wanted to see the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. The Germans don't celebrate the catastrophe resulting from their invasion of Poland. Japanese do not celebrate their catastrophe resulting from the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Why do Palestinians celebrate their catastrophe resulting from the Arab attack against Israel? See Fred Reifenberg's photo art on his website:
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EMERSON ON CNN HEADLINE NEWS DISCUSSING TIES BETWEEN AL QAEDA AND IRAN.
Posted by Rachel Neuwirth, May 23, 2007. |
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Steven A. Emerson is Executive Director The Investigative Project on Terrorism. Tel: 202-363-8602. email: transcripts@%ctnews.org This is a transcript of his remarks on the Glenn Beck show on CNN. |
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To watch the video, go here: http://www.investigativeproject.org/SAE-CNN-5-22-07.wmv" GLENN BECK: Let's turn to Al Qaeda here for a second. This is according to a British newspaper now, The Guardian, U.S. officials are now finally admitting that Iran has been secretly forging ties with Al Qaeda, elements in the Sunni-Arab militias in Iraq. Who would have seen this one coming? Well, "Real Story" is, if you're a regular viewer of this program, you saw this coming! Iran is at war with the U.S. They're only fighting it by proxy right now. They're sending weapons and Iranian-backed Al Qaeda operatives into Iraq to help the insurgents kill our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. This is all in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces. The sole intent is to get the United States Congress to vote for full military withdrawal from Iraq. Remember, this isn't what crazy Glenn is saying on his crazy show. This is what, according to The Guardian, a senior U.S. official is now finally confirming. Well, hallelujah. Now that somebody in Washington is telling us what many of us have believed for a long time, maybe we can take the steps to save ourselves and finally address the fact that Iran is the head of the snake and always has been.Iran and Al Qaeda want us out of Iraq so they can set up shop. They'll set up terrorist training camps, and they'll start popping up all across Iraq and the entire Middle East, just like Starbucks. And meanwhile, us here in the West, we're going to be in for a double shot of trouble. Osama bin Laden and Iran's ayatollah have both called the war in Iraq World War III, the battle for ancient Babylon.Check your Bible, gang. They are willing to kill for a worldwide Islamic state, a global, one-world government in their coveted Babylon, and that coveted Babylon is modern day Iraq. Steven Emerson, the executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, author of "Jihad Inc.," Steve, how frustrating is this to you that you see it -- you've seen this coming for years, and you keep saying it over and over and over and over again, and you keep being dismissed as a nut job? STEVEN EMERSON: Look, Glenn, I remember when I pointed out the relationship between Hezbollah and Al Qaeda and people said, "No, Al Qaeda is Sunni; Hezbollah is Shiite. They would never talk to each other." Well, they actually conducted an agreement for training and for explosives transfer. I remember when they said that Saddam Hussein, who's Sunni, would never conduct an arrangement with Al Qaeda because he was religious and Saddam Hussein was secular. Of course, they embraced each other. The fact is that these people are very pragmatic. They're pragmatic terrorists. They hate the United States. They'll do anything. Iran has been harboring top Al Qaeda leaders. They've been providing weapons to both Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq in order to kill Americans. And suddenly we have Democratic Party officials running to both Iraq and Syria, saying, "Let's negotiate." And I find that absolutely scandalous, because what are they going to negotiate about? And if they do negotiate, they're only going to be giving them paper words that they want to hear and then continue to go about blindly blowing up Americans. BECK: You know, it is amazing. It is absolutely amazing. These people are so bright; they're doing the opposite of what we're doing right now. We're feasting on each other. We're making enemies of each other while our enemy comes and gets us. Meanwhile, these guys, they're all going to kill each other eventually. I mean, Iran is going to kill the Sunnis or the Shias, and the Shias are going to kill the other ones. And Al Qaeda doesn't agree with Iran. It's all going to go into a bloody mess, but they're uniting to kill us first. EMERSON: Well, that's what usually happens, because, in their world, each one -- each existence contests the other's existence, and they have to kill each other in the end. And that's why ultimately we stand a chance. If they ever got together and really unified themselves, and didn't view each other's existence as a challenge to one another, then we wouldn't stand a chance. BECK: Give me the one thing that you just wish you could grab people by the collar and say, "Would you please wake up?" Give me the one fact that might wake up one person in this audience. EMERSON: Look, what I suggest to people is that our way of life is changing right now and that that was demonstrated by the reaction to the Danish cartoons, when not one American newspaper published the cartoons, with the exception of "The Philadelphia Inquirer." That was more important to me, just as important to me, just as significant as the 9/11 bombings, because that demonstrated the appeasement of the American newspaper, the American media, which was the fourth estate. That's the way we're changing our lives, due to the incredible demands made by Muslim radicals all over the world. That's a very serious, dangerous problem that we're not taking cognizance of. BECK: Steve, I only have time for a two-word answer on this: 25 percent of American Muslims under 30 now say, you know, it's OK to use suicide bombings. Scary or very scary? EMERSON: I would say that number is probably underestimated. I would say that this has been coming on for a long time, and it's definitely very worrisome. BECK: OK. Thanks, Steven. That's "The Real Story" tonight. The Investigative Project on Terrorism
Contact Rachel Neuwirth at rachterry@sbcglobal.net |
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LOSING BATTLE FOR SDEROT
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 23, 2007. |
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This was written by Hillel Halkin and was published in the New York Sun. |
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As if last summer's war in Lebanon were not bad enough, Israel now has the ignominy of Sderot: A reasonably prosperous city of some 20,000 inhabitants, an hour's drive from Tel Aviv, reduced to a state of shell-shocked panic by scattershot Kassam attacks from the Gaza Strip, its life paralyzed, and a large part of its population fled or wanting to flee, while the country's government and army seem powerless to do anything about it. And who is creating this pandemonium? Several hundred Palestinian irregulars, who may or may not be taking orders from a central command, firing homemade rockets from backyards and empty fields. For years now they have been shooting on and off at Sderot, sometimes more and sometimes less, with no effective way, it would seem, of stopping them. A few hundred men in backyards bringing a city of 20,000 to its knees. And what will happen when those same men, or others like them, slightly enlarge their rockets' range and regularly begin to hit Ashkelon, slightly further to the north, with 100,000 residents, or Ashdod, a bit further still, with 200,000 residents? One quails to mention Tel Aviv. From the Israeli point of view, this is no longer simply a failure in fighting terror. It is a disgrace and a terrible danger. Apart from the havoc wreaked to the lives of the inhabitants of Sderot itself, it is demoralizing to all Israelis and immensely encouraging to Israel's enemies... What is Israel to do? Of the solutions proposed so far, one is unlikely to work and one would be likely to work, but is at too great a cost. Although partially successful in the past, destroying rocket launchers and their operators from the air, or even killing the higher-ups in command of them by means of "targeted assassinations," will probably not be very effective this time. The anarchy in Palestinian society has reached the point that not even the heads of Hamas or Islamic jihad, were they to seek to stop the Kassam attacks because they feared for their own lives, would necessarily be able to do so. What probably would work would be an Israeli military re-occupation of Gaza. But the price Israel would pay for this in terms of military casualties would be high -- and once back in Gaza, how would it ever get out again? The last thing it needs is once again to have to police this tiny, overpopulated strip of human misery that is an ideal place for urban guerrilla warfare. Is there no other solution? Of course there is. It is the obvious one -- and the ugly one. And it may be the best one. Suppose Israel were to announce, clearly and unequivocally: "Starting exactly one week from today, any rocket attack from the Gaza Strip on any Israeli city, town, or village will be met with answering artillery fire aimed at Palestinian cities, towns, and villages in the Gaza Strip. This will of course cause civilian casualties far higher than those caused by Palestinian Kassams, since the weaponry at the Israel's disposal is far more accurate and destructive. These casualties will be innocent people, which is why we implore the world, the Arab states, and the Palestinian public to avoid them by putting every possible pressure on those who are firing rockets at Israel. Israel has no desire to see a single innocent Palestinian die -- but if it has to choose between innocent Palestinians and innocent Israelis, it will choose to protect its own citizens first." Brutal? Inhuman? Playing into the Palestinians' hands by turning Israel into a country of "eye for an eye" and "tooth for a tooth" morality? Doomed to failure in any case, since it would only lead to increasing spirals of violence? But it probably wouldn't. In fact, it might put an end to violence very quickly, once Palestinians in Gaza became as panicky as Israelis in Sderot and screamed at their leaders to put an end to it... Ultimately, deterrence only works when you are able and willing to harm your enemy more than he is willing to be harmed or able to harm you. This is not only true of backyard rockets from Gaza. It is also true of Syrian missiles tipped with chemical warheads or of a possible Iranian atomic bomb. As unpleasant as the thought may be, the only way to deter a Syrian or Iranian strike against Israeli civilian targets, with the huge numbers of deaths this would cause, is to make it clear to such countries that their own civilian targets would be hit in return, causing an even huger number of deaths. An Israel that is not prepared to be so "immoral" as to let the Palestinians of Gaza know that is a question not of an eye for an eye, but of ten or twenty or a hundred eyes for an eye, can certainly never deliver such a message to Iran or Syria. And that's the most worrisome part of what has been so far the losing battle for Sderot. Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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EGYPT: FATWA ALLOWS BREAST-FEEDING AMONG ADULTS
Posted by Bryna Berch, May 23, 2007. |
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This comes from the May 21, 2007 Jerusalem Post. It does give a whole new meaning to 'taking a break at the office and having a snack'. |
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Al-Azhar University, one of Sunni Islam's most prestigious institutions, ordered one of its clerics Monday to face a disciplinary panel after he issued a controversial decree allowing adults to breast-feed. Ezzat Attiya had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying adult men could breast-feed from female work colleagues as a way to avoid breaking Islamic rules that forbid men and women from being alone together. In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a degree of maternal relation, even if a woman nurses a child who is not biologically hers. It means the child could not marry the nursing woman's biological children. Attiya -- the head of Al-Azhar's Department of Hadith, or teachings of the Prophet Muhammad -- insisted the same would apply with adults. He argued that if a man nursed from a co-worker, it would establish a family bond between them and allow the two to work side-by-side without raising suspicion of an illicit sexual relation. |
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FATAH'S VERSION OF WIZO
Posted by Barry Shaw, May 23, 2007. |
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Take a look at the new Fatah version of WIZO... The latest hot fashion for Islamic women. Hey, it's just a
religion like any other.
This comes from yesterday's Little Green Footballs website
(http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=
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It's another death cult press conference, featuring the women's wing of the militant wing of the "moderate" Fatah party. Notice the camera in the lower right corner.
Female Palestinian militants from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, who
claim they are willing to be suicide bombers, hold weapons during a
news conference in Jebaliya, northern Gaza Strip, Monday, May 21,
2007. The women, who are part of the militant group with ties to the
Fatah Movement, vowed to 'be human bombs' in the way of the Israeli
army if it decides to invade Gaza. The arabic on headband reads 'Al
Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. ' (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)
Barry Shaw and his family made aliyah from Manchester, England, 25
years ago. He writes the "View from Here" columns from Israel. To sign
up to receive his emails, contact him at netre@matav.net.il
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SCRUTINIZE AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
Posted by Gerald Steinberg, May 23, 2007. |
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This appeared in the New York Sun and is archived at
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For many journalists, diplomats, and political activists, Amnesty International is considered to be a highly reliable and objective source of information and analysis on human rights around the world. But the halo that surrounds its reports and campaigns is beginning to fray, as the evidence of political bias and inaccuracy mounts. Recently, the Economist, published in Britain, noted that "an organisation which devotes more pages in its annual report to human-rights abuses in Britain and America than those in Belarus and Saudi Arabia cannot expect to escape doubters' scrutiny." Other critics, including law professor at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz, and the U.S.-based Capital Research Center, have been more pointed, providing evidence of Amnesty's systematic bias and reports based largely on claims by carefully selected "eyewitnesses" in Colombia, Gaza, and Lebanon. As Amnesty releases its annual report on human rights for 2006, amid highly choreographed public relations events, and repeating the familiar condemnations of Israel and America, NGO Monitor has also published a report on Amnesty's activities in the Middle East. The result is not a pretty picture for those clinging to the "halo effect." Using a detailed and sophisticated qualitative model for comparing relative resources devoted to the different countries, this report clearly shows that in 2006, Amnesty singled out Israel for condemnation of human rights to a far greater extent than Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and other chronic abusers of human rights. During the year, Amnesty issued 48 publications critical of Israel, compared to 35 for Iran, 2 for Saudi Arabia, and only 7 for Syria. Many of the attacks directed at Israel took place during the war with Hezbollah, but this terror group and state-within-a-state also got relatively little attention from Amnesty. Furthermore, as Amnesty has almost no professional researchers, many of the "factual" claims in these reports were provided by "eyewitnesses," whose political affiliations and credibility can be only guessed. And the language used in these reports also reflects an obsessive and unjustified singling out of Israel, with frequent use of terms such "disproportionate attacks," "war crimes," and "violations of international humanitarian law." And while Amnesty International was founded to fight for the freedom of political prisoners, the officials in charge of this organization failed to issue a single statement calling for the release of the Israeli soldiers that were kidnapped by Hezbollah and Hamas, and who have not been heard from since their illegal capture. These and many other details published in NGO Monitor's report on Amnesty provide further evidence that this powerful NGO has lost its way, and is no longer a "respectable" or credible human rights organization. These fundamental defects extend beyond the Middle East. Researchers from a Bogota-based conflict think tank, the University of London and the Conflict Analysis Resource Center, reached similar conclusions about reports on the conflict in Colombia. In their report, "The Work of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch: Evidence from Colombia," the authors state that both groups follow a "non-systematic approach that includes opaque sourcing and frequent changes in the objects they measure." In other words, these reports are biased and lack credibility. Moreover, they note the "failure to specify sources, unclear definitions, an erratic reporting template and a distorted portrayal of conflict dynamics" among the methodological problems with Amnesty International's publications, adding to evidence of "bias against the government relative to the guerrillas." These problems are compounded by the absence of transparency and any system of checks and balances among these powerful political actors. In contrast to the democratic governments that Amnesty officials frequently denounce and condemn, including Israel, NGOs are not subject to independent accountability. No one outside the inner circle knows how or why they choose their particular "targets," or how they assess the "evidence," or write their reports. And officials such as Amnesty's Irene Khan are often in power and in control of massive budgets for many years, without significant challenges or competition. Given this situation, the time is long past due for ending the "halo effect" that surrounds powerful groups such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. Their reports should not be given automatic credibility by journalists, diplomats, academics, and individuals genuinely committed to the universality of human rights principles. Rather than publicizing their reports and endorsing their campaigns, the publications of Amnesty and similar groups need to be subjected to the same type of independent questioning as is done for reports issued by governments and other political organizations. Mr. Steinberg is the executive director of NGO Monitor and professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University. Contact him at steing@mail.biu.ac.il |
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WESTERN HYPOCRISY RESONATES
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 23, 2007. |
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Western hypocrisy is now in full force in Lebanon, where the Lebanese army is taking action against Palestinians Arabs. It is clear that it is alright with the United States White House when the Lebanese Government shells a Palestinian Arab refugee camp, is an indiscriminate and disproportionate manner, with impunity! But when the Government of Israel authorizes pinpoint strikes against the Palestinian Arab on going intolerable provocations against its civilian population, the State Department immediately rises up to the occasion with its righteous indignation. Where is the UN Security Council resolution condemning the Saniora Government for its use of force? Where is the UN Human Rights Council, or Committee to shout to high heavens the way they do each time Israel is forced to simply defend herself? Why isn't Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice endlessly shuttling between the fighting parties in an effort to bring about peace or at least ceasefire? Where is the E.U? We all know that if it was about Israel and the Palestinian Arab their voice would have been heard loud and clear! Where is Russia? Where is Egypt? After all, don't they care about the well-being of the Palestinians Arabs? Where is UNRWA? Was UNRWA aware of the apparent Palestinian Arabs arms build-up in the camps in Lebanon? Isn't just what they were deployed to do there on Lebanon soil? Perhaps they were the enablers?! Many of us took the time to write and speak up. We warned in our speeches and writing that the withdrawal from the Gaza strip would lead to a Hamas/al-Qaeda controlled areas. (See second article below). And so, this is exactly what has happened. And although we wrote clear and truthful messages and even pointed direct fingers at the propaganda and the lies, Israel is roundly condemned for taking action when scores of rockets land in its cities and towns. The hypocrisy of the world is beyond comprehension. The hypocrisy of the United States is beyond comprehension and totally unacceptable. This article is called "Lebanese army shells refugee camp: Country
sees worst internal violence since end of 1975-90 civil war" and was
written by Bassem Mroue of The Associated Press. It was published in
the Baltimore Sun |
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TRIPOLI, Lebanon / Lebanese troops pounded a Palestinian refugee camp with artillery and tank fire for a second day today, raising huge columns of smoke as they battled a militant group suspected of ties to al-Qaida in the worst violence since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war. Nearly 50 combatants were killed in the first day of fighting Sunday, but it was not known how many civilians have been killed inside the Nahr el-Bared camp on the outskirts of the northern port city of Tripoli. Palestinian officials in the camp reported at least nine civilians were killed today, along with 40 wounded. The figures could not be confirmed because emergency workers or security officials have not been able to get in. The White House said it supports Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora's efforts to deal with fighting, and the State Department defended the Lebanese army, saying it was working in a "legitimate manner" against "provocations by violent extremists" operating in the camp. Black smoke filled the sky over Nahr el-Bared as fires raged for hours and heavy gunfire and explosions rang out constantly. Shells could be seen thudding into buildings in the seaside camp. Fighting paused briefly in the afternoon to allow the evacuation of 18 wounded civilians, according to Saleh Badran of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. But the fighting quickly resumed. Ambulances raced through the streets of nearby Tripoli, where many shops were closed and many residents stayed inside. "There are many wounded. We're under siege. There is a shortage of bread, medicine and electricity. There are children under the rubble," Sana Abu Faraj, a refugee, told Al-Jazeera television by cell phone from the camp. Late today, residents reported an explosion in a Muslim neighborhood of Beirut, the capital. The Future TV station said the blast occurred in the Verdun shopping area, while Hezbollah's Al-Manar television said it took place in a parking lot in the posh district. Television footage showed a burning car and at least one injured man. On Sunday night, a bomb near a mall in the Christian sector of the capital killed a woman and wounded 12 other people. Lebanon was already in the midst of its worst political crisis between the Western-backed government and Hezbollah-led opposition since the end of the civil war. The battle was an unprecedented showdown between the Lebanese army and militant groups that have arisen in Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps, which are home to tens of thousands of people living amid poverty and crime and which Lebanese troops are not allowed to enter. The troops were fighting a group called Fatah Islam, whose leader has said he is inspired by al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and was training militants for attacks in other countries. Lebanese officials have also accused Syria of using Fatah Islam to stir up trouble in Lebanon, a charge Damascus has denied. Lebanese officials said one of the men killed Sunday was a suspect in a failed German train bombing -- another indication the camp had become a refuge for Fatah Islam militants planning attacks outside of Lebanon. In the past, others affiliated with the group in the camp have said they were aiming to send trained fighters into Iraq and the group's leader has been linked to al-Qaida in Iraq. Hundreds of Lebanese troops, backed by tanks and armored carriers, surrounded the refugee camp today. M-48 battle tanks unleashed their cannon fire on the camp, home to 30,000 Palestinian refugees. The militants fired mortars toward the troops at daybreak. An army officer at the front line said troops directed concentrated fire at buildings known to house militants. He said troops also had orders to strike hard at any target that returned fire. "Everything we know that they were present in has been targeted," he told the Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media. A spokesman for Fatah Islam, Abu Salim, warned that if the army bombardment did not stop, the militants would step up attacks by rockets and artillery "and would take the battle outside Tripoli." He did not elaborate. "It is a life-or-death battle. Their aim is to wipe out Fatah Islam. We will respond and we know how to respond," he told the AP. Earlier in the day, another refugee camp, Ein el-Hilweh in southern Lebanon, was tense after Lebanese troops surrounded it and armed militants went on alert. At least 27 soldiers and 20 militants were killed Sunday, Lebanese security officials said. But they did not know how many civilians had been killed in the camp because it is off-limits to their authority. Lebanon says it has no authority to enter the camps under understandings with the Palestinians that give the PLO the authority in the camps. But Lebanon also is believed to be leery of entering for fear that any such actions would cause widespread unrest, be very costly and could spark pan-Arab sympathy for the Palestinian refugees that would trigger a backlash against the country. The clashes were triggered Sunday when police raided suspected Fatah Islam hideouts in several buildings in Tripoli, searching for men wanted in a recent bank robbery. A gunbattle erupted at one of the buildings between the group's fighters, and troops were called in to help the police. Militants then burst out of the nearby refugee camp, seizing Lebanese army positions, capturing two armored vehicles and ambushing troops. Lebanese troops later laid siege to the camp, where Fatah Islam militants were believed to be hiding. Fatah Islam is led by a Palestinian named Shaker al-Absi, who is wanted in three countries. He is believed to have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. He told The New York Times in March that he was trying to spread al-Qaida's ideology and was training fighters inside the camp for attacks on other countries. He would not specify which countries but expressed anger toward the United States. And he was sentenced to death earlier in absentia along with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq killed last summer by U.S. forces in Iraq, for the 2002 assassination of an American diplomat in Jordan. In a news conference in March, al-Absi denied he was sending fighters to Iraq. "Fighting in our homeland (Palestine) is more important," he said then. "We have no connection with any regime or organization on this earth. Our connection is with 'There is no God but God' (the slogan of Islam). We have come to raise it over the skies of Jerusalem." Al-Absi had been in custody in Syria until last fall but was released and set up his group in the camp, where he apparently found recruits, Lebanese officials said. Lebanon's national police commander, Maj. Gen. Ashraf Rifi, said Damascus was using Fatah Islam as a covert way to wreak havoc in the country. He denied Fatah Islam's al-Qaida links, saying it was a Syrian-bred group. "Perhaps there are some deluded people among them but they are not al-Qaida. This is imitation al-Qaida, a 'Made in Syria' one," he told the AP. Lebanese security officials said Fatah Islam has up to 100 members who come from Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia and Syria, as well as local sympathizers who belong to the conservative Salafi branch of Islam. The Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. TV station reported the dead militants included men from Bangladesh, Yemen and other Arab countries. Some wore explosive belts, security officials said. Officials identified the suspect in the failed German train bombing as Saddam El-Hajdib, the fourth-highest ranking official in the Fatah Islam group, an official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. El-Hajdib had been on trial in absentia in Lebanon in the failed German plot. It was unclear whether Lebanese authorities had known the whereabouts of El-Hajdib or al-Absi before the gunbattle first broke Sunday out in Tripoli. White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said the Bush administration is concerned about the fighting. "We believe the parties should take a step back from violence," he said. The State Department gave its support to the Lebanese army's battle with Fatah Islam. "This is a group that has been involved in violence to achieve whatever their stated objective may be," spokesman Sean McCormack said. McCormack declined to discuss whether the group may be tied to al-Qaida or other groups outside Lebanon. Asked about a possible Syrian link, McCormack said, "At this point I wouldn't draw that connection." In Monday's fighting, a driver for the AP, working with journalists at the scene, was injured when he was hit in the thigh by a bullet or shrapnel. He was being treated at a hospital and was expected to recover. Ahmed Methqal, a Muslim cleric in the camp, told Al-Jazeera that five civilians had been killed. "You can say there is a massacre going on in the camp of children and women who have nothing to do with Fatah Islam," he said. "They are targeting buildings, with people in them." Lebanon has struggled to defeat armed groups that control pockets of the country -- especially inside the 12 Palestinian refugee camps housing 350,000 people. Some camps have become havens for Islamic militants accused of carrying out attacks in the country and of sending recruits to fight U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq. Palestinian officials from the moderate Fatah faction in the West Bank sought to distance themselves from Fatah Islam and urged Palestinian refugees in the camp to isolate the militant group. Khaled Mashaal, exiled political leader of the Palestinian militant group Hamas, asked Saniora to take "necessary procedures" to ensure refugees in the camp are not harmed. Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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THE SAUDI LOBBY
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 22, 2007. |
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Foreign governments and corporations pay for lobbyists to expedite their demands upon the US. Some of their interests clash with America's. Congress found out that Saudi officials gave some financial and other backing to the 9/11 terrorists (largely from S. Arabia). The President had that part of the Congressional documentation blacked out. The White House and the FBI blocked an investigation of Saudi participation in the terrorist plot. Government censorship was not to protect US security but that of alleged 'allies.' The state-sponsored terrorist network largely still exists in the US. Sen. Graham remarked that the President acts as if more loyal to S. Arabia than to the US. 'In covering up Saudi Arabia's direct role in supporting Al Qaeda, the 9/11 Commission goes even a few steps further than the Congress and the Executive Branch. The report claims 'there is no convincing evidence that any government financially supported al-Qaeda before 9/11.' Their report ignores all the information provided by government officials to Congress, as well as volumes of published reports and investigations by other nations, regarding Muslim and Arab regimes that have supported al Qaeda. It completely disregards the terrorist lists of the Treasury and State Departments, which have catalogued the Saudi government's decades of support for Bin Laden and al-Qaeda.' S. Arabia supported Pakistan's development of nuclear weaponry and gave Saddam $5 billion to develop it in Iraq. S. Arabia sought Chinese nuclear weapons. It already has long-range missiles. Usually, the US frowns on such activities. S. Arabia, however, buys tens of billions of dollars of US weapons annually. The sellers lobby to keep the facts about Saudi terrorist involvement classified. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying and tens of millions of dollars on campaign donations. Among their lobbyists or influence peddlers are Bush Sr. and James Baker. Yet Baker was invited officially to come up with alternative policies on Iraq! Some coddled countries trade in narcotics and the nuclear black market. Turkey does, and one of its lobbyists is Brent Scowcroft (who presents policy proposals as objective). Pakistan also is a military customer of the US. It would have been barred from such purchases, if its work on nuclear weaponry had been made public. The US official who figured out 20 years ago that Pakistan had an a-bomb was fired and silenced. Pakistan went on to proliferate its knowledge, sharing it with N. Korea and Iran, among other threats to the US. Thus the US military-industrial complex jeopardizes American national security (Miriam Gardner of American Yated Neeman, 1/4/07). RED CROSS SAYS ISRAEL DISREGARDS HUMANITARIAN LAW The Red Cross accuses Israel of violating the law of occupation, in linking annexed territory surrounding Jerusalem to Jerusalem. Israel denies occupying areas it legally annexed, offering Israeli citizenship to the residents (Steven Erlanger, NY Times, 5/15, A8). There was no country there to occupy, so Israel's acquisition in self-defense of unallocated land of the Mandate for a Jewish national home hardly is occupation. 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@verizon.net |
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HAMAS SAYS JEWS MUST RUN ...
Posted by Paul Lademain, May 22, 2007. |
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Where did the Islamics get this idea, that Jews "run". Well, we can tell you that Israel's leadership, besotted with their 1967 victory against the Islamics, foolishly reasoned, like self-righteous and patronizing "Lady Bountifuls," that being "generous" to the Islamics would purchase the Muslim world's love and respect. These old Jews were fatally wrong. Instead of purchasing "love and respect" from those who will always despise Jews for being Jews, these old Jews bought themselves and their hapless nation a whole load of disrespect and ridicule. And that was because the leadership of Israel, proclaiming themselves Jews, then picked up their skirts and ran. Jews run ... Or so these old Jews thereby gave the Islamics every reason to believe. The Old Jews found an excuse to run from the Sinai: they bowed and scraped and tugged on their forelocks and returned valuable land seized from their vicious enemies ... in exchange for empty kisses blown into their ears. And then these Old Jews began to quarrel amongst themselves as if they were Shiite and Sunni. The Old Jews, egged on by the glib Polish fantasist, Peres, ran from Lebanon, like rats deserting a sinking ship -- thereby earning the disrespect of the Christians and the ridicule of the Islamics. And the free but silent world. And then the Old Jews found the most stupifyingly dumb excuse to flee from Gaza. And that was when the entire world began to believe that one need only threaten any Jew and he will cringe and cower and weep, and blabber, and pontificate ... and in the end, after huffing-and-puffing ... pick up his skirts, pack his bags, and run. And then came the worse Jew of all: the Oinking Olmert. He Is So Tire ... so very tired. So tired of fighting and winning. So tied and soiled, he is eager to roll over and surrender the shirts from the backs of Israeli civilians so that he might save his own. (Sure ... Olmert thought people would assume he was cleverly using the stylish lies of the Islamic enemy against the enemy, but the Islamics didn't see it that way. The Islamics, like the Brits who support them, took Olmert's foolish words at face value.) Now the Islamics think all Jews are like Olmert: Weepy, tired, used-up, and ready to flee -- the way Jews have historically fled their homes in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Poland, Germany, etc. Olmert and his shabby predecessors convinced the Islamics that Islamics and their oil-soiled friends can threaten the Jews, murder them with impunity, and then the Jews will prattled about what they "may do" while they turn and run from their homeland into a watery grave. It is now clear that the Patriots of and for Israel must rise up and use all their might to totally destroy not only the enemy without but also the defeated, miserly, self-aggrandizing, pompous and blindly greedy enemy within. Viva Israel from the NON-evangelical Christians for Zion. We say: Restore JEWISH Palestine from the ocean to the sea the way the world originally intended it to be. Contact Paul Lademain at lademain@verizon.net |
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SYRIA'S USE OF VIOLENCE AS A TOOL FOR POLITICAL GAIN
Posted by Barry Rubin, May 22, 2007. |
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In the Middle East, violence is not the result of poor communication but a tool for political gain. Nothing proves that point better than Syria's successful use of violence and terrorism to promote its interests. No amount of dialogue is going to change that reality. Now Syria is using a Palestinian front group to start a war inside Lebanon, just as it employed another Lebanese client organization, Hizballah, to battle Israel last year. The Syrian government's message is simple: Lebanon will know no peace until it again becomes our satellite. In two years, 15 major terrorist attacks targeted Lebanon's independent-minded leaders. Most notorious was the assassination of popular former prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005, which also killed 22 bystanders. In response, the UN set up an international investigation whose interim reports pointed the finger at Syria and even, in unpublished drafts, at Bashar's closest relatives for the killing. Last week, the United States, Britain, and France introduced a resolution in the UN to set up a tribunal to try the murderers. Since the tribunal is in cooperation with Lebanon, Syria must ensure that country's parliament vetoes the plan. Suddenly, bombs start exploding in Beirut and a Syrian-backed Islamist group stages an uprising against the government. People get the hint. Cross Syria and you get hurt. To hold the tribunal given events in Lebanon, says South African diplomat Dumisani Kumalo, "We would need to have our heads examined. We were for going very slow to start with. Now we are even slower." What is less understood is how the regime's radical strategy is used at home and why this makes it impossible to gain anything from engaging with Syria. Like other Middle Eastern dictatorships, Syria's rulers face a paradox. How to stay in power after failing so completely? The economy is a mess, there is little freedom, and the regime is dominated by a small Alawite minority which is both non-Muslim and historically secular. Since taking power in 2000 on his father's death, Bashar has met this challenge. He sends terrorists against Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, and even the U.S. military but nobody retaliates in kind against him. At home, the regime sounds increasingly Islamist; abroad it is the biggest sponsor of radical Islamist groups in the region. As a result of their interests and as a matter of survival, Syria's rulers need anti-Americanism and the Arab-Israeli conflict to mobilize support and distract from their failings. For example, when Syrians demanded reforms after Bashar took power, then Vice-President Abd Halim Khaddam told a meeting that nothing could change as long as Israel controlled the Golan Heights. But actually getting back this land would be disastrous for the regime since making peace with Israel would dissolve that excuse but also because it would open massive demands by its own citizens for democracy, prosperity, and reform. Bashar has even declared a new doctrine he calls "Resistance" which combines Arab nationalism and Islamism. The West's goal, he claims, is to enslave the Arabs. The mistake made by other Arabs was to abandon war. "The world will not be concerned with us and our interests, feelings, and rights unless we are powerful" and victory requires "adventure and recklessness." Any who disagree are mere "political mercenaries" and "parasites." This mandatory radicalism ensures that Syria interprets Western concessions and confidence-building measures as acts of surrender, proving its strategy is working. Years of dialogue and numerous visits by secretaries of state could not even get Syria to close the terrorist offices in Damascus, much less make any policy changes. Anwar al-Bunni, a democratic dissident, explained in 2003 that the only thing that held back the regime was fear of America. Only due to "the fright it gave our rulers, that we reformers stand a chance here." But once U.S. members of Congress flocked to Damascus, offering words of praise and advocating détente, Bunni was proven right. He was sentenced on trumped-up charges to five years' imprisonment. Being nice to Syria will lead nowhere because the regime thrives on conflict and its demands -- including a recolonized Lebanon -- are too much against Western interests to meet. U.S. policy should treat Syria's regime as a determined adversary whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of America, no matter who sits in the White House. Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and co-author of "Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography" and "Hating America: A History" (Oxford University Press, August 2007). His latest book is The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). Prof. Rubin's columns can now be read online at http://gloria.idc.ac.il/columns/column.html. Contact him at profbarryrubin@yahoo.com |
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ISRAEL IS AT WAR WITH HAMAS!
Posted by Lawrence Uniglicht, May 22, 2007. |
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Israel is at war with Hamas! Nizar Riyah, a spokesman for the missile launching terrorist organization asserts, "Hamas is determined to wipe Israel off the map and replace it with the state of Palestine", emphatically reiterating anti-Semite Iranian madman Mahmoud AhMADinejad's perilous pronouncement, kindred spirits in their ultimate quest to Islamisize the planet. Riyah continues his war declaration, promising Hamas will fight "...until the last Jew is expelled." His jihad, for now against Israel, is supported by some 150 deadly missiles propelled into Israel, murdering, wounding, and spreading fear throughout a besieged citizenry. Enough! If the 'up till now' pusillanimous Prime Minister Olmert, allowing his state to absorb indignities no sovereign nation should bear with but a few retaliatory measures, will not immediately command his troops, backed by air support, to enter in force the hell-hole of a stupidly abandoned Gaza, indeed Sharon's folly, and pummel Hamas psychopathic savages into submission, he must resign his stewardship, allowing an intrepid Israeli leader, perhaps Bibi Netanyahu, to take over. Period! You must not pull your punches in a war initiated by your enemy, especially one that yearns to obliterate you. Furthermore, there are no political solutions when you deal with obsessed criminals with little regard for human life. Indeed, Hamas strategists shroud not only vulnerable adults but even Arab children with explosives, converting human beings, many of which have not yet experienced life, into weapons of mass destruction. Can any rational person deal with such an immoral cadre of fiends? Hamas Jihadists justify their depraved behavior by reciting malevolently interpreted Koranic verse. Such interpretations reflect an atavistic anti-secular faith based violent culture, today characterized by an unwillingness to compromise one core belief that the perceived' infidel' nation 'Jewish' Israel must be annihilated, as its very existence taints holy Muslim ground. In effect, per that mindset, Jews have evicted Palestinians from their rightful territory hence must be eliminated from it. If indeed that was attainable, Western Europe could be the next quest for Hamas and kindred spirit jihad junkies, but such an ambitious agenda must be accomplished one step at a time. A prescient Europe logically should align in common cause with Israel, but that would require an abandonment of its own pro-Palestinian anti-Israel agenda. An astute Israeli leader would fervently begin educating European movers and shakers of such a likely scenario, alert Washington's somnambulistic leaders with a two by four steel wake up call, while preparing for all out war. The United Nations buffer along Israel's Lebanese border will need to be bolstered, perhaps by NATO troops, in order to prevent Hizbullah from entering the fray. U.S battleships in range of Iran will need to be on heightened alert while the White House reads AhMADinejad and his crew of contemptuous mullahs the riot act, dissuading them from getting involved while Israel destroys Hamas. Innocent Arabs will need to seek refuge perhaps in arm-twisted King Abdullah's Jordan, their true homeland. Forestalling a forceful response to Hamas' declaration of war will exacerbate Israel's future security as her mortal enemy gains strength. A smoldering brushfire must be extinguished before morphing to an inferno, perhaps of the Dr. Strangelove variety. What in fact will prevent Hamas, with delusions of invincibility, from someday launching a nuke made in Iran toward Tel Aviv, or attaching a WMD to one of its lunatic martyrs, perhaps able to penetrate a check point; one never knows! Any response by Israel at that point would be too late. If Prime Minister Olmert will not rise to the occasion, someone else must. To reitterate an ever appropriate phrase, this is no time to go wobbly Ehud! Lawrence Uniglicht is a career civil servant, working for the Social Security Administration. He advocates for the State of Israel with an American perspective. He writes, "Advocating for the disrespected underdog has been my passion, no doubt Israel falls into that category." Contact him by email at larose@snip.net |
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CONDI'S DANGEROUS FANTASY
Posted by Daily Alert, May 22, 2007. |
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This editorial was published yesterday in the New York Daily News and
is archived
www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2007/05/21/2007-05-21_condis_dangerous_fantasy.html |
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What, after all, is the point of being a terrorist if you can't wreak terror? And so the soldiers of Hamas, who transparently never had the slightest intention of making a go of their end of that fledgling Palestinian power-sharing government, are once more having themselves a fine old time blowing up everything in sight. Armed militiamen of the rival Fatah faction. Innocent civilians. And, of course, any southern Israeli town within rocket range. And thus, of course, Israel is launching air strikes into Gaza, by way of defending itself against the rocket attacks. And thus, of course, such self-defense measures immediately make Israel the bad guy here, and thus, of course, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas telephones Washington and pleads with Secretary of State Rice to make Israel stop its "military escalation." If that's what Condi does, then once again she will have made a bad choice in what is now a long string of bad choices. Her peacemaking initiatives have once too many times now bordered on the absurdly naive, premised as they are on the supposition that Hamas might at some point decide to conduct itself in reasonably civilized fashion. This is a dreadful joke. Hamas will decide no such thing. Hamas will bomb and shoot and kidnap and slaughter. That is what Hamas does. It must be obvious by now, musn't it? Fundamentally, the secretary is pressing for a peace agreement when no one on the Palestinian side has both the interest and the capability of entering one. Gaza is on the verge of civil war. Abbas is at sea. And the Arab world is worse than useless. Rice should give it up. 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 |
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ALLAH'S VULGAR LANGUAGE IN THE QURAN
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 22, 2007. |
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This article is by Mimin Salih and it was published yesterday on the Islam
Watch website. It is archived at
http://islam-watch.org/MuminSalih/Allah-Vulgar-Language-in-Quran.htm |
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We should never underestimate the power of religious beliefs in obtunding senses of its followers. A person's mind becomes moulded to fit only with his/her set of religious beliefs. Under the effect of such 'opium', the person becomes disillusioned and disorientated to the perception of what is morally right or wrong. I wonder how, as a Muslim, could I easily gulp such Islamic insanities for so many years. Now that I am free from Islam, I really find no reason for my acceptance of much of the Quranic nonsense as moral or logical, having read the Quran for many years. It is evident from the Quran that, just like an angry rude Arab, Allah often loses His temper and uses obscene and vulgar words against His creations! Allah sides with Mohamed against his adversaries and treats them as His personal opponents. He swears at them with offensive remarks and threatens them with severe torture and promises that He and His prophet will prevail. To prove this misdemeanour of Allah, I am going to discuss the cases of only two Arabs who, through their rejection to Mohamed's claims, caused Allah to lose His temper and refer to them by using some strong language in the Quran: Abul Uzza Ibn Abdulmuttalib Abul Uzza Ibn Abdul Muttalib was Mohamed's uncle. He was wealthy and influential, but did not believe his nephew's claims of being a prophet. However, that did not stop him from providing some protection to his nephew purely based on tribal kinship. Once he was told that Mohamed claimed that the late Abdul Muttalib, who was Abul Uzza's father, would be burnt in hellfire because he died as a non-Muslim (although there was no Islam at the time of Abdul Muttalib who had died when Mohamed was still a child). This is laughable; nevertheless, that is the logic of Mohamed. Hearing that, Abul Uzza was disgusted at Mohamed's utter lack of respect for his own grandfather, who had looked after Mohamed when he was a child. Abul Uzza then became openly hostile to Mohamed and denied him any protection or financial support. Sura Al Masad is a short chapter that is solely dedicated to swear at Abdul Uzza, later known as Abu Lahab, and his wife. Let us read this sura, Q.111 In an average street in an average Arab town, it is usual to hear few people shouting and swearing at one another using words like yukassir ideek. This is generally considered to be rude and is only used by bad-mannered people in times of anger. Yet it is exactly the modern equivalent of 'perish the hands of ...' used in the Quran fourteen hundreds years ago. What is more disturbing is that, every one of the above verses is actually a swearing verse! The above sura is one of the most commonly recited suras in the Quran, Nearly all Muslims know this sura by heart, even though it serves no religious function whatsoever. One would wonder why Allah, with all his greatness, could be so angry with one man and dedicate an entire chapter of his only book to swear at him and at his wife. Why Allah did not try to punish them during their lives? There is no evidence from Islamic history that Abu Lahab or his wife had ever suffered of any harm when they lived in Mecca. Sura Almasad is another proof that the Quran is a reflection of a sick man's thoughts. This sura should alarm the reader to the falsity of this book. But do Muslims see it that way? Not at all! Muslims can only see miracles in the Quran, and this sura is no exception. Muslim scholars strategy is always to go on the offensive by converting the Quranic errors into miracles! In this case they say that Abu Lahab died as a non-believer and he could have converted to Islam just to prove that the verse is not accurate. But he did not. By making such a claim, Muslim scholars deliberately ignore the principle of abrogation in the Quran in which newer Quranic verses cancel the older verses. If desired, Mohamed could have easily 'revealed' other verses in praise of his uncle, or even could have asserted that Allah had ordered him to remove the sura completely. Al waleed Ibn Almugheera, the son of a bitch! Alwaleed Ibn Almugheera was one of the chiefs of Quraysh. It is claimed that he was one of the most eloquent Arabs. Muslims frequently quote him that once he had praised the Quran. It is the remarks allegedly made by this man that are frequently quoted as evidence of what Muslims claim to be a language miracle of the Quran. The reality however, is that there is no valid historical evidence that Alwaleed had ever praised the Quran. In reality, the contrary is true, because Alwaleed never believed in Mohamed or accepted the Quran. Mohamed must have harboured a deep hatred for Alwaleed. The obscene verses in sura Alqalam (also known as sura Nun) reveals Mohamed's intense disdain for AlWaleed's rejection of the Quran. Let us read the following verses from sura Alqalm, Q. 68; Verses 10-13: But yield not to the man of oaths, a despicable person,
All the verses quoted above are severely offending. As an example, let us focus on verse 13 where the Arabic word zaneem has been politely translated to 'impure by birth'. The exact meaning is the son of the woman who commits zina (unlawful sex). To those who know Arabic it means the 'son of Manyuka', which is the most vulgar and most offending words that can be said in the Arabic language. The nearest English translation is 'son of a bitch!' The Quran, especially the Meccan verses, like those quoted above, uses an old language. The style and many of its words are now obsolete. This lack of clarity provides a protective shell to a book, which is otherwise no more than a collection of ancient myths. The Quran becomes even more sanitized when translated in to English because of the PC and apologist approach adopted by the translators. These translators soften the harshness of the Qurnic obscenity by unabashedly adding decency to the vulgar words. Let us assume that Alwaleed's mother had indeed committed zina and that alwaleed was the product of that zina. Is that the fault of Alwaleed? Why should Allah blame Alwaleed who even did not exist during the act? After all it was Allah's wish that Alwaleed should be born in this manner. How do Muslims defend such a vulgar language? Again, Muslims can only see a miracle! Muslims claim that Alwaleed questioned his mother and she admitted he was indeed the product of zina, so it must be a miracle! Otherwise how did the Quran know? This is typical Islamic nonsense, because there is no way to believe that an Arab woman will admit to her son that she committed adultery. This is simply unbelievable. Besides, Alwaleed did not change his treatment to his mother or convert to Islam, but continued to reject and expose Mohammed's claims. Mohamed's Allah had to interfere again to reassure his beloved prophet that He will torture Alwaleed. Allah asks the readers of the Quran to just leave Him alone with Alwaleed and watch what happens! This is how Allah describes his plans in dealing with Alwaleed: Q.74 Every time I read the above verses, it conjures my mind the image of a common scenario when two bad-mannered Arabs engage in a street quarrel but held back from each other by the crowd, and each party shouts 'leave me alone with him' The Quran consistently uses offending remarks whenever it mentions non-Muslims. It describes non-Muslims as animals (Q.7: 179, Q.25: 44, Q.47: 12). Then it describes the Jews as donkeys Q. 62:5 then as apes and pigs (Q.2: 65, Q. 5:60, Q. 7:166). To be described as an animal is a bad insult in Arabic culture, but pigs, apes and donkeys are particularly bad. The extensive uses of swearing language in the Quran have escaped criticism for many years, although the use of similar language by other books or articles would make them un-publishable. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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JEWISH ANTISEMITES & ISRAELI HOLOCAUST DENIERS; HOW PEACE TALKS CAN HURT
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 22, 2007. |
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JEWISH ANTISEMITES & ISRAELI HOLOCAUST DENIERS Prof. Steven Plaut lectured to high school students about Jews who are antisemitic, hate Israel, and deny the Holocaust. The students hardly could believe that some Jews are antisemites. After Prof. Plaut cited enough examples and recited enough of their statements, the students accepted it but numbly. Those antisemites don't admit to hating Israel; they pretend to want justice for the (unjust) Arabs. This 'antisemitism denial' is the equivalent of Holocaust denial. They are avidly quoted by antisemites of the Left, Right, and Islam. The quoters contend that surely Israel is evil, because even (a few neurotic) Jews find it such. This makes powerful propaganda. Some of the worst offenders are university professors such as Noam Chomsky. They favor terrorism and want Israel destroyed. Their polemics are just defamatory. The Jewish people have been naïve about this. Their enlightenment may come from Jewish Divide over Israel by Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor, Transaction Books, 2006. The book explains ethnic self-hatred as a uniquely Jewish phenomenon, spreading but still infecting only a small percentage. Prof. Plaut thinks Israeli Jews have different motives for it from non-Israeli Jews. Some non-Israeli Jews, indifferent to their heritage (or not wanting to be identified with it), seek to please gentiles who like to hear their posturing against Israel or want them to prove their non-identification with fellow Jews. The Israeli anti-Zionists really hate their people and want to see the Jewish state destroyed. They are like the American Far Left in its anti-Americanism, except that the US Far Left is more harmless, whereas the Israeli Far Left collaborates in many matters with the country's enemies and in time of war. There seems to be a psychological aberration behind the Far Left (Plaut, 5/7). Plaut thus provides a rationale for Barry Chamish to find that leftist generals sabotaged the first Lebanon war and Peres sabotaged the home front, though Peres then did it to deny a military victory to the Likud Party, then in power. I think the US Far Left is dangerous, too. It spreads defeatism in the world war. BILL CLINTON'S OBSERVATION 'If a nuclear bomb ever exploded in the Middle East, even if it wiped out Israel, the main victims eventually would be all the Muslims around it who would be killed in the nuclear fallout,' said the former President (Seth Gitell, NY Sun, 5/7, p.5). That is in addition to the million Muslims within Israel, he didn't mention. What was his point? It should have been that the President of Iran doesn't care about Muslim fatalities, so long as infidels are eradicated. Why didn't he make it? He still fails to understand the world war he led us into facing backward. PM OLMERT REJECTS IDF PLAN FOR GAZA The IDF proposed measures to stop terrorism from Gaza, short of major invasion and searching for arms (that Sharon once did successfully): 1. Make a buffer zone in the Arab side of the separation fence, to keep terrorists at a distance and from which to move against the enemy as needed; All PM Olmert would approve is a slightly wider area within Gaza that the IDF may operate in. He will be briefed, again, on IDF plans to counter terrorism (plans that he rejected?). Dr. Aaron Lerner wonders if this delay is a ruse to stay in power longer while the public thinks he is working out a way to win this war (IMRA, 5/8). How could he object to aerial assassination, destroying more arms tunnels, and improving intelligence? It does seem as if he doesn't care what happens to his country, only to himself, that he is afraid to fight when the US doesn't want him to, and that he doesn't know how to tell the US to stop undermining Israel. HOW CAN PEACE TALKS HURT? Syria is arming for war and calling for peace negotiations. How can talks hurt? 'Well, considering that many think Israel should withdraw to the Kinneret in return for a piece of paper and a house-of-cards-based security arrangement that relies on a combination of foreign observers, gizmos and the bizarre faith that Syria's military capabilities are permanently frozen in time there may very well be a lot to lose.' 'Today a Syrian attack is a brazen act of aggression. But what if Syria attacks after talks fail, to the frustration of Dennis Ross and others who are insulted that Israel was not willing to stake its future on empty assurances?' (IMRA, 5/8). Talks with the PLO led to disastrous Olso. At talks, the US presses Israel to make damaging concessions to the Arabs. Israeli leaders don't know how to negotiate and have unwarranted faith in Arab goodwill. Talks are dangerous. 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@verizon.net |
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LEBANESE GOVERNMENT TO ARMY: FINISH OFF MILITANTS IN CAMP
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 22, 2007. |
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A Lebanese youth is seen behind shattered glass of his car Monday night at the site where a bomb exploded just near the Russian cultural centre in an upmarket district of Beirut.
TRIPOLI, Lebanon -- Artillery and machine gun fire echoed around a crowded Palestinian refugee camp Tuesday as the Lebanese government ordered the army to finish off the Fatah Islam militants holed up inside the refugee camp in the country's north. Artillery and machine gun fire echoed around a crowded Palestinian refugee camp Tuesday as the Lebanese government ordered the army to finish off the Fatah Islam militants holed up inside the refugee camp in the country's north. The fighting -- which resumed for a third straight day after a brief nighttime lull -- reflected the government's determination to pursue the Islamic militants who staged attacks on Lebanese troops on Sunday and Monday, killing 29 soldiers. Some 20 militants have also been killed, as well as an undetermined number of civilians. The Cabinet late Monday authorized the army to step up its campaign and "end the terrorist phenomenon that is alien to the values and nature of the Palestinian people," Information Minister Ghazi Aridi said. Hours after the decision, fighting flared up again Tuesday morning around the Nahr el-Bared camp, with black smoke billowing from the area after artillery and machine gun exchanges. A spokesman for Fatah Islam, Abu Salim Taha, said fighters of the group repulsed several attempts by Lebanese troops to advance on their positions inside the camp. "The shelling is heavy, not only on our positions, but also on children and women. Destruction is all over," he said Tuesday. Lebanese artillery has pounded the suspected positions of the Fatah Islam militants, seeking to destroy the group with al-Qaeda ties or force them out of the camp on the outskirts of this northern port, Lebanon's second-largest city. The fighting has also raised fears that Lebanon's worst internal violence since the 1975-1990 civil war could spread in a country with an uneasy balancing act among various sects and factions. Fighting paused briefly Monday afternoon to allow the evacuation of 18 wounded civilians, according to Saleh Badran, an official with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. Palestinian refugees have been hiding in their homes inside the camp and Palestinian officials there said nine civilians were killed Monday. Reports from the camp of food and medical supplies running out could not be confirmed because officials and reporters could not enter. The camp is home to more than 31,000 people living in two- or three-story white buildings on densely packed narrow streets. It is one of more than 12 impoverished camps housing more than 215,000 refugees, out of a total of 400,000 Palestinians here. Lebanese authorities do not enter the camps, according to a nearly 40-year-old agreement with the Palestinians. Major Palestinian factions have distanced themselves from Fatah Islam, which arose here last year and touts itself as a Palestinian liberation movement. But many view it as a nascent branch of al-Qaeda-style terrorism with ambitions of carrying out attacks around the region. The military assault adds yet another layer of instability to Lebanon's potentially explosive politics. Prime Minister Fuad Saniora's government already faces a domestic political crisis, with the opposition led by Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah demanding its removal. Raising fears of spreading violence, an explosion went off in a shopping area in a Sunni Muslim sector of Beirut late Monday, wrecking parked cars and injuring seven people -- a day after a bomb blast in a Christian part of the capital killed a woman. Although there were no claims of responsibility, the confluence of two bombings in as many days while the fighting was going on in Tripoli was highly unusual. Saniora now risks sparking a backlash among Palestinians in Lebanon's other refugee camps, where armed groups and Islamic extremists have been growing in influence -- and, in at least one case, have been sending recruits to fight U.S. troops in Iraq. The White House said it supports Saniora's efforts to deal with the fighting, and the State Department defended the Lebanese army, saying it was working in a "legitimate manner" against "provocations by violent extremists" operating in the camp. The leader of Fatah Islam, Palestinian Shaker al-Absi, has been linked to the former head of al-Qaeda in Iraq and is accused in the 2002 assassination of a U.S. diplomat in Jordan. He moved into Nahr el-Bared last fall after being expelled from Syria, where he was in custody. Since then, he is believed to have recruited about 100 fighters, including militants from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and other Arab countries, and he has said he follows the ideology of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Among the militants killed in the fighting Sunday was a man suspected in a plot to bomb trains in Germany last year, according to Lebanese security officials. Lebanese security officials accuse Syria of backing Fatah Islam as a tool to disrupt the country, charges that are denied by Damascus, which controlled Lebanon until 2005 when its troops were forced to withdraw from the country following the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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ARM THE GOOD GUYS
Posted by Professor Ernest Narrett, May 22, 2007. |
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[Contrast the] world's and US's response to the Lebanese army's shelling of the Nahr al-Bedar "refugee camp" and the striking difference of this response to the Christian revenge at Sabra and Shatila in 1982: [blame the Jews]... An editorial in the Jerusalem Post May 21 soberly notes the obvious point (a nationally circulated Israeli paper accessible to the anglophone world published it, at least) that it is insane and/or treacherous for Israel to arm Fatah so that this gang of 'moderate' holocaust-deniers and Jew-killers can defeat Hamas. The editorial noted briefly that any arms or funds sent to Fatah (and America's government, funded by the poor American people -- field beasts of their tax-masters) filter through to Hamas. One may peruse the archives of memri.org or imra.org.il among others for analyses detailing the interconnectedness of all the jihadist groups within and around Israel. The leader of Fatah, Mr. Abu Mazen-Abbas is a holocaust denier and planner of murders of Jewish civilians. He and his subordinates often have stated that any arms they receive will "be raised against the occupation," that is, against Jews in Israel. See the archives of Aaron Klein on wnd.com or type in Fatah to the search engine on israelnationalnews.com for many examples. Remember that Fatah ("Conquest") is the parent organization of the PLO and an outgrowth of the Arab High Command formed during WW II to facilitate extermination of Jews. For these cadres and their millions of middle-eastern supporters it's not about Judea and Samaria... it's about destroying Jewish sovereignty, murdering Jews and erasing most traces of Jewish history from the Promised Land. Like Hamas, Fatah is committed to the destruction of Israel in its entirety, in phases. Only the rhetoric and middlement for distributing western (and Israeli) weapons, cash and other perks distinguishes the two interlocked groups of neo-Nazis. Both are fans of and networked with today's brown shirts, Hizballah. The policy of the NSC's client regime (Kadima-Labor) and their affiliated media and judicial supremacists is that the Jewish areas west of the Jordan "must never become a Jewish state." Since it did, despite all Anglo-American, German, Islamic, Bundist efforts to prevent it now it must be destroyed, slowly and tastefully, by negotiations (mostly) the way Chamberlain wanted Hitler to take Poland. If only the Arabs would behave! But they never will... read the Scriptures. These writings also mention the surging staff coming through the land because of the covenant of death and pact of lies (Isaiah 28). It long has been urged that Israel open the Aswan damn to create a modern correlative of this scourging flood. This would sweep away the lies of the "peace" with Egypt so beloved by proponents of the New Middle East (the Arab Federation, aka, MEFTA) and uncover Elephantine isle for more historic excavations... Anyone who is serious about fighting and winning the war on terror and terror-states will ARM the GOOD GUYS: the Jews of Israel and will support and encourage them to win a decisive victory. Peace comes only via Victory which is the true integrity and wholeness, shlaimut. From shaleim comes shalom as readers of Hebrew now. Arm the good guys: arm the Jews. Restore the word, the desire and the means for total victory. Then there will be genuine peace. Shalom and chag sameach Shavuot....... Professor Eugene Narrett is the author of hundreds of articles, columns and reviews on politics, American culture and the arts. He writes often on subjects relating to Israel and Judaism. His new book is WW III: the War on the Jews and the Rise of the World Security State, (www.lightcatcherbooks.com 2007). Contact him by email at culturtalk@aol.com and visit his website at www.israelendtimes.com |
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ASSOCIATED PRESS CENSORSHIP
Posted by Paul Lademain, May 21, 2007. |
May 20, 2007 A/P reports: "Palestinian refugee groups in Lebanon have called on an Islamist splinter group to stop its battle with the Lebanese Army." Which Palestinians? The Jewish Palestininans? Or the Muslim Palestinians? Or the Islamic Palestinians? Bigger question: Where are the hundreds of thousands Jewish citizens who were driven by the Arabs from Old Palestine and Syria and Iraq and Iran and Egypt and Medina (Saudi Arabia) etc. etc?? Why has the Associated Press deceived the entire world by pretending these refugees don't exist? And while we are at it ... explain why the Associated Press censors and hides the reports of Islamic butchery and murder in Darfur and the Sudan? Decent People want to know why the Associated Press serves the Saudi colonialists? Contact Paul Lademain at lademain@verizon.net |
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THE KASSAMS OF HAMAS
Posted by Barry Shaw, May 21, 2007. |
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The Western news media would have you believe that the Israeli air strikes in Gaza are simply a recent tit-for tat exchange due to recent rockets fired into Israel. Here are two facts that they are keeping from you.
Tonight, the European Foreign Minister, Javier Solano, escorted by Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, had their convoy stopped at the entrance of Sderot as a fatal Kassam slammed into a car, killing a 40 year old woman and injuring others. A total of fourteen rockets fell on this town today. With the increasing damage, both physical and psychological, to the citizens of Sderot they are justifiably angry at the inactivity and inability of the Israeli political and military leadership to stop the attacks. It is apparent that the inactivity of the Israeli Government over the last year to take measures to stop the rocket attacks of the last year has caused Israel to lose the deterrent factor, and to embolden Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists in increase their missile launchings in proportion to the massive amounts of explosives and weaponry that have been smuggled into the Gaza Strip from Egypt. The stockpile of arms that have been tunneled into Gaza, under the eyes of the Egyptians patrolling the Philadephi border, have fallen mainly in the hands of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. About a thousand Palestinian fighters have used these tunnels to make their way to Iran to be trained by the Republican Guard. Many have now returned to recruit and train others in a future war against Israel. That future is not far off. The Palestinians may cry poverty, but the death industry of missile production and arms training are keeping many Palestinians gainfully employed. What are, if any, the solutions for Israel? For every decision there is a price. Here are a series of options.
Barry Shaw and his family made aliyah from Manchester, England, 25 years ago. He writes the "View from Here" columns from Israel. To sign up to receive his emails, contact him at netre@matav.net.il |
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WHEN YOUR DOCTOR IS A MUSLIM PRACTICING IN THE USA
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 21, 2007. | |
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Can We Afford To Have Doctors In America Whose Allegiance To Their Patients Is Far Less Than Their Allegiance To An Extreme Observance Of A Religion Of Hate? This is a letter written by Gail Tenzer to David Horowitz
(DHorowitz@earthlink.net) It was printed May 17, 2007 in Front Page
Magazine:
The article below is called "When Your Doctor is a Muslim: Medical
Terrorism Comes to America." It was written by Debbie Schlussel and it
appeared on her website
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Sometimes -- so many times -- diversity is not what it's cracked up to be. Just ask Joseph Applebaum. Well, you could ask him. But you won't get an answer. He's dead. And he's dead because he was a Jew, and his doctor is a Muslim and grad of "Ayman Al-Zawahiri" Medical School. But Applebaum wasn't denied treatment for being a Jew in Egypt. Or elsewhere in the Muslim world. It happened right here on U.S soil; In Chicago. As Muslim doctors continue to flood into the country under lax immigration laws, hospitals around the country have acquired their fair share of them. Many hospitals in the Detroit area are now dominated by Muslim doctors and have been for some time. But even in hospitals where they do not predominate, Muslim doctors are starting to demonstrate behavior toward non-Muslim patients that is beyond alarming. On December 1, 2003, Joe Applebaum was admitted to Rush North Shore Medical Center, a major hospital in Chicago. He was stricken with an acute (or distended) abdomen -- a swelling of the stomach that is easily diagnosed and treated. But it was never treated by anyone at the hospital. For 12 hours, Joe Applebaum was left alone -- left to die, which he did the next day. A Jewish man, he was identified as a Jew on the front page of his medical chart. The chief resident doctor assigned to treat Mr. Applebaum, Osama Ahmed Ibrahim, MD, sure noticed the religious notation on Applebaum's chart. And it appears that this is why he never once checked or examined this emergency patient, Mr. Applebaum, and left him to die. When another doctor at the hospital finally examined Mr. Applebaum -- not his assigned doctor, Dr. Ibrahim, he told Applebaum's son, Michael, to say good-bye to his father because he was about to die. Dr. Ibrahim, is a Muslim from Birmingham, England -- a hotbed of Islamic radicalism and terror planning. It is breeding ground for anti-Semitic hate. He is a graduate of Ain Shams University Medical School in Egypt. This extremist school is also the alma mater of Al-Qaeda mastermind and number two, Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Zawahiri's father -- a Muslim Brotherhood enthusiast -- also taught at the University. Other Ain Shams grads and faculty members include: * Late HAMAS leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin; Why did Dr. Ibrahim neglect a patient who came in with an easily treatable condition and leave him to die, 12 hours later? It appears it can only be because he did not want to treat a Jewish patient and let him live. There can be no other reason. Mr. Applebaum's son, Michael, is a medical doctor and an attorney. While he was waiting for Dr. Ibrahim to see his father, he called Dr. Ibrahim and alerted him to the growingly severe condition his father was in and that his father was suffering from an acute abdomen. Dr. Ibrahim claimed he examined Mr. Applebaum. But that was a lie. He'd never seen him. And he essentially murdered him by denying treatment. It's a case of extreme negligence and medical malpractice for the apparent purpose of anti-Semitic murder. Joseph Applebaum's son Michael is now suing Dr. Ibrahim, the hospital -- Rush North Shore Medical Center, and others involved in his father's murder. The case is filed in Illinois, and he is looking for a good attorney to pursue the case he has filed. If you are interested or can help, please contact him at the website he set up to document this ongoing tragedy. This isn't the only case where a Muslim doctor deliberately let his Jewish patient die; it is just the first that we know of. And it likely won't be the last. Muslim doctors -- especially those from foreign medical schools deep in the world of anti-Semitic, anti-American hate; but many from here, too -- have backgrounds that are incompatible with the basic level of care that is required and expected in America. Sadly, no-one is vetting them out of our healthcare system. And no-one will. But we know that there are many doctors who've been at the forefront of taking lives -- not saving them -- in the name of the "Religion of Peace": * Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri--Al-Qaeda mastermind and number two man, reportedly a surgeon and/or psychiatrist; And there are other issues, such as infectious disease. We are no seeing cases in Britain in which some Muslim doctors refuse to wash their hands with alcohol-based disinfectant, per the Muslim prohibition on alcohol consumption. In New Jersey, Dr. Ahmed Rashed, a Muslim Arab resident, severed and stole the hand of a cadaver as a gift for a stripper. Such little respect for life from a religion now very much participating in a profession that takes an oath to do no harm and to preserve patient's lives. Not only did he get a slap on the hand -- no jail time and, likely, no criminal record -- but he currently has a job practicing medicine at Maimonides Medical Center in New York. The real Maimonides -- a legendary, brilliant Jewish doctor, rabbi, and religious scholar -- is turning over in his grave. Perhaps, Dr. Applebaum's suit against Rush North Shore Medical Center will make hospitals think twice before they hire Muslim doctors inclined to practice Medical terrorism against their patients. Today, the victim is a Jew, solely because he is Jewish. But tomorrow, it will be a Christian, solely because he/she is a Christian. Or some other non-Muslim victim, solely because he/she is a non-Muslim victim. Can we afford to have doctors in America whose allegiance to their patients is far less than their allegiance to an extreme observance of a religion of hate? If they cannot and will not tender care, they should not be licensed to practice medicine in the United States. Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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MEDIA BACK AMNESTY BILL
Posted by Family Security Matters (FSM), May 21, 2007. |
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As Rep. Edward Royce says, "Perhaps the most staggering issue is the cost. Amnesty will cost the American taxpayer two-and-a-half trillion dollars." Not only that, it contains provisions that will create a North American Union of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Not only did the politicians sell us out, so did the media. This article is archived at
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In order to counteract Big Media support for the amnesty-for-illegals bill, Congress needs to hear from the American people. The Washington Post, in an editorial, calls the Bush-Kennedy bill a "breakthrough." Yet, by the admission of the White House, it commits the U.S. to finishing only 370 miles of the border fence. Rep. Duncan Hunter declared, "The Senate's decision to blatantly ignore the Secure Fence Act signed into law last year and only require construction of 370 miles of fence, as opposed to the 854 miles mandated by the law, is a dramatic failure of this legislation. The San Diego border fence has proven that fencing works. The time has come to quickly implement the Secure Fence Act, not retreat from its mandates." In the Republican debate, Hunter revealed, "I called up the other day, and they've done two miles of border fence." Roy Beck, President of Numbers USA, warns, "Many Senators are telling staffers and other Senators that they are inclined to vote for the giant Kennedy/Bush amnesty bill (S. 1348)...because they say they have been surprised at how few phone calls of protest they've gotten during the last two months of highly-publicized negotiations to create the amnesty." Beck continues that senators "are concluding that the citizens of their states just aren't all that worked up about granting an amnesty. And they're interpreting that as a green light to give corporations the huge new supplies of legal foreign labor they desire." Beck believes that senators are counting the number of phone calls they receive to decide if they will approve the amnesty bill. The phone number for the Capitol Hill Operator is 202-224-3121. You can ask to be connected to your senators or congressman. Beck says the bill includes:
Although the majority of Republican senators last year voted against the amnesty bill that passed, at the moment, according to Beck, the only Republican senators who can be counted on to oppose the new amnesty bill are DeMint (SC), Enzi (WY), Crapo (ID), Vitter (LA), Allard (CO), Sessions (AL), Chambliss (GA), and Grassley (IA). It will take 41 senators to block a vote on the bill. Right now there are only eight. On the House side, there is more reason for hope. Rep. Edward Royce, who has drawn attention to provisions in a House version of the bill that creates a North American Union of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, has denounced it as amnesty. Royce declared, "The Senate bill will provide amnesty to those here illegally, no matter how the senators 'spin' the issue. Amnesty failed in 1986, as it prompted a massive increase in illegal immigration with the anticipation of future clemency. Amnesty says that individuals need not respect our laws, it awards people who break the law and flout our sovereignty." In terms of the financial costs, Royce says, "Perhaps the most staggering issue is the cost. Amnesty will cost the American taxpayer two-and-a-half trillion dollars. The true costs of this amnesty will slam taxpayers and endanger this country's economy at a time when social security will face insolvency. When all the senators who played politics and passed this bill are gone, our Social Security system will be bankrupt. The Heritage Foundation recently released a report that analyzes what low-skilled households cost the U.S. taxpayer. For every dollar they pay in taxes they get three dollars in benefits. The drain on the U.S. economy will be unsustainable." Rep. Hunter adds, "Amnesty is not the answer. Border enforcement must be first and it must be comprehensive. To do otherwise is to repeat the mistakes of the past. This Senate bill is bad for Americans, bad for our workers, bad for law enforcement and, most importantly, bad for national security. I will fight it." We know which side the media are on. What will the American people have to say about this? The Family Security Matters (FSM) website provides essays on matters of concern to our homeland security. Contact them at www.FamilySecurityMatters.org |
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US AMBASSADOR'S BRAZEN LIES ABOUT JONATHAN POLLARD
Posted by Justice For Jonathan Pollard (J4JP), May 21, 2007. | ||
Refuting US Ambassador's Brazen Lies About Jonathan Pollard -- by J4JP What is behind the gross slander of an Israeli agent by the US Ambassador? Why is a foreign diplomat violating all norms of international diplomacy by slandering Jonathan Pollard? Is this smear "new" US policy towards Israel, or towards the American Jews? Or is this an attempt to inflate Jonathan Pollard's value as a bargaining chip against Israel? What is really going on here? According to Ha'aretz, AP and other media sources, Richard Jones, the US Ambassador to Israel, speaking at a conference on US - Israel relations at Bar Ilan University this morning responded to a question about Jonathan Pollard with malicious slander and lies. Jones declared that Pollard got off easy because he deserved to be executed. He falsely accused Jonathan of being a mercenary and of selling out the US. Jones claimed that the fact that he spied for an ally made Pollard's crime even more egregious. He stated that the US is dealing with Pollard according to international norms. He accused Jonathan of treason, and claimed that all the facts allegedly came out at Jonathan's 'trial". All of these blatant lies are easily refuted: THERE IS NO DEATH PENALTY FOR THE CRIME JONATHAN COMMITTED. Jones declaration that Pollard got off easy because he deserved to be executed is wantonly malicious, especially since he know that Jonathan DID NOT commit treason which is the only crime which carries a death penalty. In point of fact, Jonathan was charged with the least serious of the espionage statues: one count of passing classified information to an ally. The median sentence for this offense is 2 to 4 years. Jones' claim that Jonathan took money and sold out his country is also baseless. Jonathan's indictment specifies that he was not charged with harming the United States, and his sentencing transcript clearly shows that the court recognized this fact. Consequently the court did not impose a monetary fine as it would have if he he had spied for money. Most important of all, Israel formally admitted in 1998 that Jonathan Pollard was a bona fide Israeli agent.The formal recognition of Jonathan as an Israeli agent puts the lie to any claims that Jonathan spied out of mercenary motives. REPEATING THE FALSE CHARGE OF TREASON. When Jonathan was originally sentenced, then-Secretary of Defense expressed a false charge of treason against Jonathan in a last-minute memorandum to the sentencing judge. This was the cue to the judge to ignore the plea agreement and sentence Pollard to the maximum sentence of life, as if he had committed the far more serious crime of treason. It should be noted that contrary to Jones' claims, Jonathan never had a trial. He gave up his right to a trial in a plea agreement with the US, which Jonathan honored and the US violated on all counts. Jones' claims against Pollard repeat Weinberger's false charge of treason by giving the impression that Jonathan was charged with treason. Treason, unlike espionage, does carry a death sentence, and does entail selling out one's country to the enemy. The US constitution defines Treason as aiding and abetting an enemy in time of war. Jones knows that Jonathan was never accused, indicted or or convicted of treason! FLYING IN THE FACE OF THE FACTS Jones' vicious comments fly in the face of the facts and contradict statements made recently by other US officials who are far more knowledgeable about the case, such as James Woolsey, Caspar Weinberger, and Dennis Ross, who all say that Pollard has more than served his time. Indeed, Caspar Weinberger, in a 2002 interview before he died, clearly stated that the case against Jonathan Pollard was in fact "a minor matter" and that it had been blown up out of all proportion to serve another agenda. In his book, "The Missing Peace", Dennis Ross is on record that Pollard deserved to be free long ago, but that he continues to be held by the US as a bargaining chip against Israel. Ross has repeated his call for Jonathan's release in public forums and in the media a number of times in recent days. The same is true of former CIA head, James Woolsey, who has repeatedly declared that it is time to let Pollard go. It is a well-known fact that when you blacken an agent, you blacken his cause. Jonathan Pollard is an Israeli agent, who served the security of the State of Israel, and who has served 22 years in prison on behalf of the State. By slandering Jonathan with malicious lies, Jones is slandering his principals, the State of Israel. If Jonathan's actions as an agent of Israel are so heinous and can never be forgiven, what does that say about the true state of relations between Israel and the US? Jones' claim that the US is acting within standard international norms with regard to the Pollard case is laughable. NO ONE in the history of the United States has every gotten a life sentence for spying for an ally. The median sentence is two to four years. Those who have committed far more serious crimes than Jonathan by spying for enemies of the US have for the most part received lighter sentences than Pollard. A recent example is the case of Ronald Montaperto, a Pentagon analyst who spied for the Chinese for at least 10 years. Montaperto was sentenced to 3 months in prison! INFLATING POLLARD'S VALUE AS A BARGAINING CHIP? Even more compelling, no other spy has been held by the United States under such harsh conditions, serving a grossly disproportionate sentence for more than 2 decades, with the open admission by top officials such as Dennis Ross, that his continued incarceration is intended to inflate his value as a bargaining chip. Has it now become US policy to inflate Jonathan's value even more, by having the US Ambassador falsely accuse Jonathan of heinous crimes which he did not commit? It is up to the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Israel to respond to Ambassador Richard Jones. It is their duty to call him to account for his lies and slander against Israel's agent, and as a consequence against the State. It is incumbent upon the Government of Israel to set the record straight and then to send Richard Jones home. Now! J4JP Post Script: Dr. Aaron Lerner of IMRA News Agency offers the following comment as background: "It should be noted that Ambassador Jones made his remarks during the Q&A segment of his presentation in reply to a written question. It was the last question he answered in the session. Ambassador Jones had literally a pile of questions to choose from to answer (most were of course not answered). In the case of another question (relating to AIPAC) he simply read it and explained that it was not his place to comment. People present observed that he seemed to switch from a diplomatic demeanor to a very emotional one when he answered the written question relating to Pollard." For an excellent summary of the facts in the Jonathan Pollard case, click here. To call the White House: 1 202 456 1414.
Contact Justice for Jonathan Pollard at justice4jp@gmail.com |
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WAS CHURCHILL A FRIEND OF THE JEWS AND ZIONISM?
Posted by Daniel Mandel, May 21, 2007. |
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When I recently published a piece* debunking the recent crop of revisionism (including his attitude to Jews) surrounding Winston Churchill in the American Spectator, a number of familiar and important questions came in from readers expressing doubt as to Churchill's partiality for Zionism and Jews. Their objections can be split into three: 1. Since Churchill in 1922 excised Transjordan from Palestine, thus denying to Zionism more than half of the territory earmarked for the Jewish National Home, is Churchill perhaps not overrated as a friend of the Jews? 3. If Churchill was such a good friend to the Jews, why did the restrictive provisions of the 1939 White Paper, which limited Jewish immigration into Palestine to 15,000 annually for the period 1939-1944 after which any further immigration would be dependent on Arab approval, remain in force under his leadership? 3. Since the failure of the RAF to bomb Auschwitz and of the British Army to stop the farhud (pogrom) against the Jews in Baghdad in 1941 have been attributed respectively to the RAF and the British Foreign Office, are we to surmise that Churchill lacked control of his own government and armed forces? These are my answers: 1. The excision of Transjordan in 1922 from the territory in which the development of the Jewish National Home was to proceed was one of a number of decisions that was made during Churchill's visit to the region as Colonial Secretary, which included the creation of Iraq. Transjordan was then, as now, a largely arid tract of territory with no Jewish settlements. As such it was established as emirate for Abdullah, son of Sherif Hussein of Mecca and a British ally, by way of payment for services rendered during the First World War. It was said by his deeply pro-Zionist political adviser, Richard Meinertzhagen, that Churchill saw the force of his argument that this decision deprived Zionism of room for development, but by then the decision had been made and could not be undone. Undoubtedly to Zionism's loss, the decision was not aimed at harming the movement, support for which was in fact reaffirmed as being unchangeable British policy in the 1922 White Paper. Nonetheless, it is a justified point that Churchill's decision caused a major part of Palestine to be lost to Zionism. 2. It is perfectly true that upon becoming Prime Minister in May 1940, Churchill did not overturn the 1939 White Paper, whose terms he had so eloquently denounced at the time in the Commons. The White Paper was retained because such was then the weakness of the British position that disowning it at that point was thought likely to precipitate a calamitous Arab revolt. This was probably a mistaken calculation, but in the circumstances of May 1940, it prevailed. However, the question remains as to why Churchill did not discard it later and it was one I put to the Churchill biographer, Martin Gilbert, when I interviewed him in 1987. He responded that, from the outset, Churchill fought a Cabinet almost uniformly hostile to permitting Jewish refugees into Palestine. When Churchill was effectively overruled on this point by the Cabinet in March 1942, he and his Colonial Secretary, Lord Cranborne, bypassed its decision by devising a new policy that, contrary to the White Paper, permitted all Jews who might arrive in Palestine to stay there. The arrival of so few Jews and the failure to fill even the existing 15,000 annual quota was attributed by Gilbert to the virtual impossibility that by then existed for Jews to escape from Europe, which, he noted, the Mufti of Jerusalem, a Nazi collaborator, worked hard to achieve. When the White Paper's absolute ban on Jewish immigration was due to come into effect in May 1944, Churchill refused to sign it into law. Gilbert's 1993 address, "Churchill and the Holocaust: The Possible and the Impossible," concisely elaborates this and other matters which, viewed in combination, provides a different picture to that of unfulfilled friendship and sympathy. To name some further significant facts: as First Lord of the Admiralty (1939-40) Churchill ended the practice of Royal Navy vessels intercepting refugee ships bound for Palestine when he discovered the Foreign Office and Colonial Office had initiated this policy without his knowledge. When the British Commander in the Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, sought to have deported from Palestine a group of Jewish refugees who had entered the country aboard the Patria, Churchill intervened to prevent it. He also pressured a BBC that was then reluctant to report on the Nazi targeting of Jews for murder, to do so. In January 1944, Churchill's Cabinet approved in principle a new partition plan for Palestine, which was due for adoption in the very week in November 1944 that the British Minister of State in the Middle East and Churchill's friend, Lord Moyne, was assassinated by Lehi (Stern Gang) members. Churchill's support of Zionism thereafter became subdued but endured and he withstood demands at home for a military crackdown on the Jewish community in Palestine. The Cabinet however shelved partition. The same year, in the face of persistent opposition from the British military establishment, Churchill pushed through the creation of a Jewish military force. Indeed, such was the perception of his concern for Jewish causes that, on two occasions, callous members of his own inner staff withheld from him Jewish requests out of fear that he would respond positively to them. In short, Churchill, virtually singled-handedly, fought an indifferent and hostile bureaucracy to help the Jews and Zionism. 3. Gilbert has explained in Auschwitz and the Allies that the failure of the RAF to bomb Auschwitz et al. was the result of its commanders overriding Churchill's directives on sometimes spurious logistical grounds. The farhud in Baghdad was permitted to occur due largely to the defective judgement of the British ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis and Wavell, not Churchill, who at one stage even had to prod the latter to use the forces at his disposal to establish British authority in Iraq. Elie Kedourie has a typically authoritative account of these matters in the last two chapters of his Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies. Therefore, we are not to conclude that Churchill was a poor friend of the Jews or that he had lost control of his own government. Rather, even the most formidable of democratic war leaders have to contend with contrarily-minded bureaucracies and must perforce delegate important decisions to diplomats and commanders in the field. So much of the tragedy (and glory) of history is the role played by individuals in the situations they find themselves. * Read it below by clicking here. Daniel Mandel is a Fellow in History at Melbourne University and author of H. V. Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist(Routledge, London, 2004). His blog can be found on the History News Network. This article was published today on the History News Network website (HNN) and is archived at http://hnn.us/articles/39017.html |
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AL-QAIDA RECRUITING BLACK BOMBERS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 21, 2007. |
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This comes from World Net Daily and is archived at
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pitch to African-Americans invokes 'martyr' Malcolm X Al-Qaida is aggressively recruiting black Americans for suicide operations against the homeland, say FBI analysts who have reviewed recent videotaped messages from the terror group's leaders. A speech released May 5 by Osama bin Laden's deputy confirms earlier fears that African-Americans are the No. 1 recruiting target for the next generation of attacks. Al-Qaida has been trying to lower its Arab profile to reduce the odds that its terror cells will be subjected to security scrutiny. "Federal and local law enforcement authorities should be aware that al-Qaida terrorists may not appear Arab," warns a recent Homeland Security intelligence report obtained by WND. "Non-Arab al-Qaida operatives could find it easier to avoid unwanted scrutiny since they may not fit typical profiles." In the latest message, al-Qaida No. 2 Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri clearly seeks to sow political and racial discontent among African-Americans. He makes frequent references to what he calls the "martyr" Malcolm X, and says "I want blacks in America to know that we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all mankind." Zawahiri encourages African-Americans to follow the example of Malcolm X, a.k.a. al-Hajj Malik al-Shabaaz, who he says was not afraid to sacrifice his life to fight American "oppression." According to a transcript of the hour-long screed, Zawahiri said this is "the culture which the struggler and martyr Malcom X (may Allah have mercy upon him) fought against when he told his repressed black brothers in America, 'If you're not ready to die for it, take the word "freedom" out of your vocabulary.'" "Freedom is something that you have to do for yourself," he quotes Malcolm X as as saying. "The price of freedom is death." Zawahiri, again citing the teachings of Malcolm X, suggests that black Muslims who do not rise up against America are no better than "house slaves." It's the first time al-Qaida has identified Malcolm X as a fellow Islamic "struggler and martyr," analysts say. "Zawahiri's focus on race relations may be benefiting from the input of a U.S. citizen named Adam Yahiye Gadahn -- a.k.a Azaam al-Amriki -- who is a senior member of al-Qaida's media committee," said former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, now an analyst for the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank specializing in national security. "Indeed," he added, "the deftness and political timeliness of Zawahiri's statements suggest that al-Qaida may have more than a single American advising it." Last year, in another nearly hour-long videotaped speech, al-Qaida propaganda chief Gadahn invited blacks to convert to Islam and take revenge against a nation that enslaved their ancestors. Gadahn, a white convert from California thought to be operating out of al-Qaida's new base in Pakistan, slammed his native America, which he said "shamelessly brought us lynch laws, Jim Crow, and a death row where only convicts of certain races are sent." In courting African-Americans, he also encouraged them to forsake Christianity, which he claims whites have used as an excuse to abuse blacks. "Islam rejects the Judeo-Christian doctrines concerning Eve and Ham, which the West has used to justify all manner of abuse and ill treatment of women and blacks," Gadahn said. "Islam is for everyone." Gadahn, who is wanted by the FBI for treason, also claims that America "enslaved Africa." Islamic terrorism analysts point out that al-Qaida's racial history lessons conveniently leave out the fact that Arab Muslim slave traders sold Africans into bondage. "The Arab is the true master of the African," said Bill Warner, director of the Center for Study of Political Islam. "Blacks like to imagine Islam is their counterweight to white power, not that Islam has ruled them for 1,400 years." Blacks account for the largest share of Muslims in America. A great many of them are converts to Islam. And remarkably, the religion is flourishing among African-Americans since 9/11. Analysts fear the trend plays right into bin Laden's hands. Black converts say Islam has more in common with their African heritage than Christianity. In fact, black Muslim leaders often refer to such conversions as "reversions," claiming black "reverts" are merely returning to the Islamic faith prominent among their African forebears who were forced into slavery. "You have African-American men seeking liberation," explained black Muslim leader Eric Erfan Vickers, "and many see Christianity as a white man's religion that continues to oppress." Vickers, a convert to Islam, does not consider al-Qaida a terrorism group. "They are involved in a resistance movement," he contended. Prisons have already proven to be a fertile recruiting ground for al-Qaida, spawning the likes of shoebomber Richard Reid and alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla. Christian prison chaplains say Islam is so popular with inmates they are having a hard time competing with Muslim chaplains for their souls. Blacks are being converted by the cell block. The FBI worries blacks could be the next face of terror in America. Since 9/11, the agency has already disrupted several homegrown terror plots involving black Muslim converts, including: # A group of black Muslim converts in Miami who allegedly conspired to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago (some had rap sheets). # A Chicago black Muslim, Derrick Shareef, who allegedly plotted to blow up a local shopping mall. # A black U.S. soldier, Hassan Abujihaad, who allegedly fed terrorists classified information about U.S. battleship movements in the Strait of Hormuz. # Black ex-con Muslims in Torrance, Calif., who allegedly planned to attack military recruiting stations and synagogues in the state. The plot was initially hatched in prison. Still, some analysts doubt al-Qaida's pitch will resonate in today's black community beyond a handful of malcontents. They point out that African-Americans are no longer held back by institutional racism, and are growing wealthier as evidenced by the expanding black middle class. Indeed, Zawahiri does not paint a very enticing picture in describing the sacrifices required along the path of jihad, especially for those used to the material comforts of America. "If we continue to aspire to nothing more than diplomas, positions, salaries, pensions and the raising of our children, there will be nothing but humiliation in store for us, our children and our grandchildren," he argued. "If, on the other hand, we are happy with killing, captivity, emigration, losing one's spouse, orphanage, and losing one's wealth, homeland and beloved in the path of Allah, then with Allah's help, no power on the face of the earth can defeat us." Zawahiri in his latest speech also made fresh threats about coming attacks on America. He warns that a new "squadron of martyrdom-seekers" is lined up behind "hundreds" of new leaders who are following in the footsteps of captured 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. "They shall achieve more than he achieved," Zawahiri vowed. "The Americans shall pay dearly." He says American voters had a chance to fire Bush in the last presidential election for invading Iraq, but they chose instead to reelect him. He suggests they forfeited their chance for protection from terrorism, and deserve punishment. "The Americans deserve what they're getting," he said. "They chose this liar two times, so let them pay the price for their choice." Gadahn has said "the streets of America shall run red with blood," later singling out Los Angeles as a target of attack. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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BEYOND HITLER'S GRASP -- BULGARIAN JEWS
Posted by Milton Fried, May 21, 2007. |
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It is nice to read about Bulgaria's humnitarisnism iduring WWII. The French Vichy government did all it could do to see that as many Jews as possible would be killed. So did the British government during WWII. The latter sentence will probably sound wild or absurd to most people. Sadly, it is true. Elements of the Mussolini Fascist government tried to save Jews. The Italians allowed a Jewish Underground organization to use Naval facilities in Italy to help Jews run the British blockade which was intercepting any ships heading to British occupied Palestine during WWII. The British government informed Hiltler that the Italians were helping Jews to escape in the hope that Hitler would put a stop to it. The British opposed bombing the rail lines leading to Nazi death camps which were, at the time, exterminating over 12,000 Jews a day. Roosevelt did not override British objections to impeding the death camp's operations. Roosevelt agreed with the British.The USA Air Force was not allowed to bomb the rails to the death camps because Roosevelt acceded to the British. Roosevelt was part of those who looked the other way during WWII genocide. Roosevelt deserves condemnation, Instead, he is viewed as a friend by most Jews. Francisco Franco ordered his generals to save any Jew who claimed descent from Spanish Jews. Bulgaria's and Denmark's humanitarian actions towards Jews in WWII were all the more remarkable, because their actions were so out of line with the rest of the European's actions. We should remember that the Finns,while fighting on the side of Germany during WWII, would not allow the Germans to as much as touch a Finnish Jew. Marshal Mannheim, the Finnish commander, successfully opposed the German's plan to massacre the Jews of Finland.. Compare Mannheim's actions with those of Pope Pius the XIIth. I think it was the XIIth, who was Hitler's pope. During most of WWII, the Nazi's were allowing any Jew to leave Nazi controlled territories, even to leave concentration Camps, if they had a visa to go anywhere, Sadly, there were very few visas for Jews, for whom a visa meant life. The visas were not even given for Jewish children in the camps. The world's governments all knew what was happening in the camps. There were two large world conference's about the problem. One in Evian, and one in Bermuda. The world chose to allow the eradication of theJews. That is an unpleasant fact. Today, the world is ganging up on the children of the survivors of Hiltler's death camp. Anti Israelism is the current main manifestation of Jew hating. This comes from Bob Windhotz who can be reached at rswindholz@lawyerserve.com |
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A great many Jews know the story of how the Danes rescued 8,000 Jews from the Nazi's by smuggling them to Sweden in fishing boats. Very few Jews, know the story of how all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved. Not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported to the death camps, due to the heroism of many Bulgarians of every walk of life, up to and including the King and the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. In 1999, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti Defamation League flew with a delegation to Sophia to meet the Bulgarian Prime Minister. He gave the Prime Minister the first Bulgarian language copy of a remarkable book, Beyond Hitler's Grasp, written in 1998, by Michael Bar Oar, a professor at Emory University. (A Bulgarian Jew who had migrated to Israel and then to the USA). This book documents the rescue effort in detail. The ADL paid for and shipped 30,000 copies to Bulgaria, so that the population could partake in the joy of learning about this heroic facet of their history. This story is clearly the last great secret of the Holocaust era. The story was buried by the Bulgarian Communists, until their downfall in 1991. All records were sealed, since they didn't wish to glorify the King, or the Church, or the non Communist parliamentarians, who at great personal risk, stood up to the Germans. And the Bulgarian Jewish Community, 45,000 of whom went to Israel after the War, were busy building new lives, and somehow the story remained untold. Bulgaria is a small country and at the outset of the War they had 8 million people. They aligned themselves with the Nazi's in hopes of recapturing Macedonia from Yugoslavia and Thrace from Greece. Both provinces were stripped from them, after W.W.I. In late 1942 the Jews of Selonica were shipped north through Bulgaria, on the way to the death camps, in sealed box cars. The news of this inhumanity was a hot topic of conversation. Then, at the beginning of 1943, the pro Nazi Bulgarian government was informed that all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews would be deported in March. The Jews had been made to wear yellow stars and were highly visible. As the date for the deportation got closer, the agitation got greater. Forty-three ruling party members of Parliament walked out in protest. Newspapers denounced what was about to happen. In addition, the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Archbishop Krill, threatened to lie down on the railroad tracks. Finally, King Boris III forbid the deportation. Since Bulgaria was an ally of Germany, and the Germans were stretched militarily, they had to wrestle with the problem of how much pressure they could afford to apply. They decided to pass. Several points are noteworthy. The Bulgarian Jews were relatively unreligious and did not stand apart from the local populace by virtue of garb, or rites. They were relatively poor by comparison to Jews in other countries, and they lived in integrated neighborhoods. Additionally, the Bulgarians had many minorities, Armenians, Turks, Greeks, and Gypsies, in addition to Jews. There was no concept of racism in that culture. The bottom line here is that Bulgarians saw Bulgarian-Jews as Bulgarians, and not as Jews. And, being a small country, like Denmark, where there was a closeness of community, that is often missing in larger countries. So, here was a bright spot that we can point to as example of what should have been. The most famous of those saved was a young graduate of the Bulgarian Military Academy. When he arrived in Israel, he changed his name to Moshe Dayan..... What a great story to pass on to your e-mail list.... Contact Milton Fried by email at docmiltfried@mindspring.com |
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SHAVOU'OT -- PENTECOST 2007
Posted by Yoram Ettinger, May 21, 2007. |
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1. Shavou'ot 2007 is celebrated upon the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, the Heart of the Jewish Nation and the Jewish State. Shavou'ot-Jerusalem-Torah represents the Cradle of Jewish History, the core of historical-religious-political-spiritual-physical Jewish existence. The root of Jerusalem is Shalem (Salem), wholesomeness, never to be repartitioned. 2. SHAVOU'OT is celebrated on the 6th day of the Jewish month of Sivan, 50 days following Passover. It commemorates a critical event, which has shaped the nature of the world in general and Western democracies in particular: the receipt of the Torah 26 generations since Adam (Adam-Noah-Abraham-Amram, Moses' father). The Hebrew words for Jehovah equal 26 in numerology, as is the number of Hebrew letters of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs: Abraham, Yitzhak, Yaakov, Sarah, Rivka, Rachel and Leah. 3. SEVEN. The word SHAVOU'OT is derived from the Hebrew word SHVOUA' (vow), referring to the exchange of vows between G-D and the Jewish People. The root of Shvoua' -- and Shavou'ot -- is the Hebrew word Seven-SHEVA. Shavou'ot is celebrated 7 weeks following Passover, reflecting the qualities of 7 key Jewish leaders: Abaraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aharon, Joseph and David. Number 7 represents wholesomeness in Judaism -- 7 days of Creation. The Sabbath is the 7th day, there are 7 directions (No., So., West, East, Up, Down, one's own position), Moses' birth/death was on the 7th day of Adar, Jethro had 7 names and 7 daughters, Passover and Sukkot last for 7 days each, the first Hebrew verse in Genesis consists of 7 words, The Menorah has 7 branches, Jubilee follows seven 7-year cycles, each Plague lasted for 7 days, 7 Continents, 7 notes in a musical scale, 7 days of mourning, 7 Jewish Prophetesses, etc. Pentecost is celebrated -- by Christians -- on the 7th Sunday after Easter. 4. SHARED ISRAEL-US (JUDEO-CHRISTIAN) VALUES. The Holiday of Shavou' ot sheds light on the foundation of the special relations between the Jewish State and the USA -- the high regard for the Torah. The Five Books of Moses have shaped the morality of Western Democracies, and have impacted the US Constitution, Separation of Powers, Checks and Balances and Bill of Rights. John Locke aspired for the "613 Laws of Moses" to become the legal foundation of the new society established in America. 5. HOLIDAY OF UNITY -- KING DAVID. Shavou'ot is the day of birth/death of KING DAVID (as well as the day that Moses was saved by Pharaoh's daughter), who united the Jewish People, elevating them to a most powerful position. David -- along with Moses and Abraham -- was a role model of humility, hence the Hebrew acronym for ADAM (human-being in Hebrew): Abraham, David and Moses. 150 candles are lit at King David's tomb on Mt. Zion in Jerusalem, consistent with the 150 chapters of Psalms mostly attributed to David. 150 is the numerical value of NEST (KEN in Hebrew), the warm environment of the Torah. David's personal history (from shepherd to king) provides a lesson for individuals and nations: There's an opportunity for everyone, the road to success is paved with difficulties and ups & downs, human beings are fallible but they must repent for their errors. 6. SCROLL OF RUTH -- KING DAVID -- HONOR THY MOTHER IN-LAW. Shavou'ot is highlighted by the studying of the Scroll of RUTH, the FIRST of Old Testament's five scrolls: Ruth (read on Shavou'ot), Song of Songs (Passover), Ecclesiastes (Sukkot), Book of Lamentations (Ninth of Av), Esther (Purim). Ruth was the great grandmother of King David. She stuck by her mother-in-law, NAOMI, for more than 10 years during Naomi's most difficult times, financially and socially. Ruth, the daughter of Eglon and the granddaughter of Balak, kings of the Moabites, had the option to be reunited with her own People, and be assured of affluence. RUTH chose PRINCIPLES (LOYALTY, CONCERN, MODESTY and LOVE) OVER CONVENIENCE. Boaz -- the chief of the Sanhedrin (Jewish Legislature) -- attributes his initial affection for Ruth, whom he married, to "I am informed of your support of your Mother-In-Law." The total sum of the Hebrew letters of Ruth - in Numerology -- produce the number of laws granted at Mt. Sinai (606), in addition to the 7 laws of Noah. 7. HOLIDAY OF MODESTY AND HUMILITY. The Torah was granted on a small mountain -- to a small People -- in the desert. The Torah was delivered by Moses, "the humblest of all human beings" ("Ha'Anav Ba'Adam"). The content of the Torah doesn't require an impressive stage. Humility -- a prerequisite for absorbing the lessons of the Torah -- is essential for learning and for constructive relationships and leadership. 8. HOLIDAY OF LIBERTY/HARVEST/OPTIMISM. The Torah was granted in the desert, a platform of Liberty, away from physical and spiritual constraints. Celebrated fifty day following the Exodus (physical deliverance) from Egypt, Shavou'ot signifies spiritual liberation. Shavou'ot celebrates the culmination of the agricultural, physical and spiritual HARVEST season of optimism, which starts on the second day of Passover. 9. THE SECOND OF THREE PILGRIMAGES. Shavou'ot is one of the THREE Jewish Pilgrimages (Sukkot-Tabernacles, Passover and Shavou'ot), celebrated in the THIRD Jewish month, Sivan. It highlights Jewish Unity, compared (by King Solomon) to a TRIANGULAR cord, which cannot be broken. The Torah -- the first of the THREE books of the Old Testament -- was granted to the Jewish People (which consists of THREE components: Priests, Levites and Israel), by Moses (who was a THIRD son, brother of Aharon and Miriam), a successor to the THREE Patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob). Shavou'ot highlights Ruth, who lived THREE generations before King David, son of Jesse, grandson of Ovad, the son of Ruth. The Torah was forged in THREE WAYS: Fire (commitment to principles), Water (lucidity and purity) and Desert (humility and principle-driven tenacity). 10. DAIRY DISHES REINFORCE HUMILITY. Dairy dishes are consumed during Shavou'ot, commemorating the most common food -- of shepherds like King David -- during the 40 years in the desert. Unlike wine, milk is poured into simple glasses. The total sum of MILK (Chalav in Hebrew) is 40 in Jewish numerology, which is equal to the number of days and nights spent by Moses on Mt. Sinai and the number of years spent by the Jewish People in the Desert. 40 is also the value of the first Hebrew letters of Moses, Miriam, Manna, Egypt, Desert, Menorah, Tabernacle, Mitzvah (commandment), etc. 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 |
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U.S. OFFERS PALESTINIANS MORE WEAPONS
Posted by UCI, May 21, 2007. |
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This was written by Aaron Klein and it appeared today in World Net Daily. |
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JERUSALEM -- The United States last week sent diplomatic messages to the Palestinians that if aid were requested, America would bolster Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Fatah organization in clashes against Hamas, including providing Fatah with U.S. weapons, according to senior Israeli and Palestinian diplomatic sources. The sources said Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, the U.S. security coordinator for the Gaza Strip and West Bank, passed messages to Abbas that America would aid Fatah with assault rifles and ammunition if the assistance is needed. The sources also said Dayton urged Israel to provide assistance to bolster Abbas' security forces in Gaza, particularly Force 17, Abbas' security detail which also serve as de facto police officers. Many members of Force 17 are openly members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, Fatah's declared "military wing" which took responsibility for every suicide bombing in Israel the past two years. The Jewish state regularly arrests Force 17 members accused of carrying out shooting attacks against Israelis. After forging a unity government in February that ended several rounds of deadly factional Palestinian infighting, Fatah and Hamas last week engaged in heated gun battles killing 53 Palestinians in some of the deadliest internal clashes in Gaza in months. Abbas' decision to station thousands of loyalist security forces on the streets of Gaza without consulting Hamas touched off the violence. Yesterday, Fatah and Hamas attempted a fifth cease-fire in seven days, but the truce got off to a shaky start after a gun battle erupted outside the home of a senior Fatah official and both Hamas and Fatah abducted rival members. U.S. policy largely considers Fatah "moderate," while the State Department labels Hamas a terror group. The reported U.S. willingness to send weapons to Fatah comes after WND reported Hamas last week obtained a shipment of American rifles sent in recent months. Last Sunday, after a Fatah gunman shot a Hamas member, a Fatah convoy of three trucks was stopped by Hamas at a makeshift checkpoint at Dabit Circle, a northern Gaza town, according to Hamas sources. Hamas abducted 18 Fatah gunmen and seized stockpiles of American weapons that were in the vans, the sources said. According to Israeli and Palestinian security officials and Hamas sources, Hamas militias in recent months have taken almost complete control of the northern Gaza Strip, including areas from which rockets are launched regularly into nearby Jewish communities. The officials said Fatah, which is backed by the U.S., is restricted to acting within a half-mile radius of a major Fatah military compound. Hamas has set up roadblocks and checkpoints throughout northern Gaza to ensure Fatah militias remain near their compound. The U.S. in recent months reportedly transferred large quantities of weapons to Fatah, purportedly to back Abbas' military organizations against Hamas. The last confirmed U.S. weapons transfer to the Palestinians took place last May and consisted of 3,000 assault rifles, but WND reported multiple other transfers later were delivered to Fatah, including a cache of 7,000 rifles last January and about 8,000 assault rifles in February. While the weapons were meant to bolster Fatah in Gaza, Hamas has reportedly won most battles against the U.S.-backed militias. WND reported last month a Fatah militia in Beit Lehiya, a major city in the northern Gaza Strip, surrendered to Hamas forces after reaching an agreement in which the Fatah militants stated they will evacuate the city and depart the Gaza Strip. The Fatah force in Beit Lehiya consisted of about 40 senior officers from Force 17, the Palestinian Preventative Security Services and the General Security Services. The leader of the Force was Samih El- Madhun, who is also openly a senior leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group. Last weekend, according to Palestinian security sources, Baha Abu Jarad, a Fatah strongman in Gaza, surrendered a large swath of territory to Hamas, nearly completing Hamas' grasp on the northern Gaza Strip. In February, after a shipment of U.S. weapons reached Fatah, Hamas spokesman Abu Oubaida told WND his terror group would obtain any American weapons transferred to Fatah militias or purchased by Fatah using U.S. aid. Congress last month approved $59 million in aid to Fatah's militias after an earlier Bush administration pledge of $86.4 million was blocked for fear the money might reach terrorists. The aid package contains a new qualification stipulating the money must not be used to purchase weapons. The vast majority of the U.S. aid is slated to bolster Abbas' Force 17 security forces. Israel has raided Force 17 compounds on multiple occasions and arrested wanted terrorists from the units. WND reported Israel earlier this month arrested 18 Fatah fighters in the West Bank wanted for shootings against Israeli civilians. Seventeen of those arrested also were members of the Brigades, Israeli and Palestinian security officials said. Israel this weekend conducted a raid of a Fatah complex in Ramallah and arrested a Force 17 fighter wanted for anti-Israeli shootings. Abbas last June appointed senior Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader Mahmoud Damra as commander of Force 17. Damra, who was arrested by Israel in November, was on the Jewish state's most-wanted list of terrorists. WND last month quoted Israeli and Palestinian security officials stating intelligence and security organizations associated with Fatah, including Force 17, are infiltrated by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations. A top Palestinian intelligence official admitted to WND: "We are leading a large number of investigations and some of the results prove that such an infiltration by Hamas (of Fatah's security and intelligence forces) exists." The official oversees intelligence for Fatah's police forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "I can say that in some cases we diagnosed a deep infiltration to high posts in some Fatah security services," the high-ranking Palestinian intelligence officer told WND. "In some cases we believe there are officers that are exposed to very sensitive information." He said since the U.S. announced it is providing Abbas' forces with additional funds, Fatah intelligence officials at the direction of American security coordinators here have been attempting to expel Hamas infiltrators. He said in the past month "dozens" of members of Hamas, the Popular Resistance Committees and Islamic Jihad were found operating in the Fatah forces. The U.S. has been attempting to isolate Hamas, which it labels a terrorist group. The Popular Resistance Committees regularly carries out rocket and shooting attacks and took credit for a 2003 bombing in Gaza that killed three American contractors. Terrorists: We infiltrated U.S.-funded militias Terror leaders and spokesmen for terror groups told WND their militants are "well-placed" within Fatah's militias. Muhammad Abdel El, spokesman for the Committees, told WND last week Fatah's attempts to discover militants from his group "have not even scratched the surface of our infiltration." "We are very well-placed within Fatah's units and their little investigations made no difference," he said. Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip, told WND, "It doesn't seem Fatah's campaign to oust Hamas from inside their organizations has made a difference for us as far as our penetration of Fatah." Fatah attempts to expel Hamas members from its midst might be in vain since the two factions last month agreed to forge their militias together and incorporate Hamas militias and terror cells into a unified security force under the authority Abbas. The PA cabinet yesterday approved a comprehensive security plan that incorporates Fatah and Hamas militias into one central organization. According to the plan, Hamas' so-called military wing, responsible for scores of anti-Israel terror attacks, will be allowed to continue operating under the aegis of the PA's Interior Ministry. The plan calls for all armed organizations, including the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, to maintain a single operations center under the authority of Abbas. 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!" |
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GETTING HOTTER
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 20, 2007. |
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The Security Cabinet today approved attacks against Islamic Jihad and Hamas commanders responsible for the current Kassam escalation. There will be both air and ground operations, with attacks on arms supplies as well. And, indeed, that is what we're seeing: stepped up attacks. Among other actions today, a cell was hit in Gaza City, and at least six members of Hamas were killed. (Along with this, we can see the inevitably stepped up PR effort by Hamas, letting the world know that we are merciless in attacking civilians.) In a statement made after the meeting, Olmert said that if the present level of attacks does not bring quiet (it won't), the activity will be escalated further. There are, however, no plans to halt smuggling at the Philadelphi Corridor. Instead this will be approached via diplomatic efforts. Please keep in mind how successful the diplomatic effort -- known as Security Council Resolution 1701 -- has been in stopping the smuggling of arms across the border from Syria to Hezbollah. ~~~~~~~~~~ The Cabinet will be considering a request from the US that we permit either Jordan or Egypt to transfer weapons, ammunition and other military supplies to forces loyal to Abbas. This is something of a joke already, except that it's a lethal. joke. The notion that the situation can be fixed by an infusion of additional weapons in an area already awash in weapons is close to ridiculous. But even more ridiculous is the hope, sustained in the face of the evidence to the contrary, that Fatah is going to take on Hamas sufficiently to defeat them. ~~~~~~~~~~ Eleven more Kassams were launched at the western Negev today; since the barrage of rockets began last Tuesday, a total of 132 rockets have been launched. Sderot, of course, continues to bear the brunt of this, and while precise numbers are not available, reportedly some 4,000 - 8,000 Sderot residents have fled the city already. The entire issue of the government's failure to protect the homefront in Sderot is getting hotter along with the broader situation. Considerable debate has ensued as to who is responsible for shelters, and the government has tried its utmost to cover itself and rationalize its failings. The issue is not money, but rather stagnation and politicking. Today Defense Minister Peretz declared the area to be in a state of emergency, which means schools can be closed and other actions deemed appropriate can be taken. "Too little, too late," say the residents. On Friday, Russian billionaire Arkady Gaydamak visited Sderot and volunteered to reinforce homes of residents at his own expense. To a person, government officials expressed outrage, declaring that this is not within his jurisdiction, but the government's. As commentator Nahum Barnea put it, "Gaydamak is the cruel mirror through which the terrible weakness of the government is reflected." It has happened repeatedly now that the government responds in the face of Gaydamak's offers. ~~~~~~~~~~ The Central Committee of Labor was supposed to have made a decision on Friday with regard to remaining in the government. Chair Amir Peretz, however, requested that because of the current situation the decision be postponed. The issue will be raised again after the Labor primary on May 28, or the subsequent run-off on June 11. ~~~~~~~~~~ Head of Yisrael Beitenu, Avigdor Lieberman, who serves as strategic affairs minister, today made a no-nonsense statement: "It's time for tough action. I am not talking about a small operation, but a very specific one that will destroy Hamas completely and absolutely. One that will create a new situation on the ground. This is not an ultimatum, in that I am not demanding a certain time-frame -- but the choice is clear, either Hamas is dismantled or this government will be dismantled." Does this mean he will leave the government if action isn't taken on Hamas? Sounds like it, but my inside information is that it does not. Mr. Lieberman, once again, is mostly hot air. More's the pity, because he might have the ability to take down the government. ~~~~~~~~~~ Good old Shimon Peres. In Jordan today for a meeting of the World Economic Forum, he said that Israel was drafting an alternative to the proposed Arab League peace plan. Representatives of Olmert's office are denying that a counterproposal is being drawn up. Head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, said that a counteroffer would be considered if it were "reasonable." You can guess what that means. Palestinian Saeb Erekat didn't even go that far. "Mr. Peres," he said, "our negotiations (what negotiations?) have finished... Today, it's time for decisions. Stop the bombardment of Gaza immediately and restart the truce between us immediately. We are willing to engage now in sustaining the cease-fire." What does one respond to such nonsense? Arlene Kushner is Senior Research Associate, Center for Near East Policy Research, Beit Agron International Press Center, Jerusalem, Israel. Contact her at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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AM I GONNA CATCH IT FOR THIS ONE!
Posted by Gerald A. Honigman, May 20, 2007. |
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What the hell. Here goes anyway... A friend sent me an article the other day from the May 18th Jewish Daily Forward, "Foxman, Wiesel Upbraid Israel For Pace of Peace Effort." Elie Wiesel co-hosted the third annual Petra Conference ("for improving the world") of Nobel Laureates and others in Jordan. Abraham Foxman participated in a panel discussion at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Both men are Holocaust survivors and have made a lucrative career out of Jewish victimization. Indeed, besides Moses in the bulrushes and Jesus on the cross, Wiesel has become the Gentile's favorite Jewish victim. Wiesel's writings have no doubt served an important purpose...and perhaps, in the Eternal Plan, he was spared for this. Both he and Foxman have sired much good in a post-Auschwitz world. But human both are... Now please bear with me for a moment. Oprah Winfrey has been listed as one of Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People in the World." On both her April 25, 2005 widely-viewed television show and in her almost three million readers a month June 2005 edition of O Magazine, she showcased alleged Arab victimization at the hands of Israelis. Both were blatantly one-sided depictions of reality. In case you haven't heard yet from the Arabs and their assorted derriere kissers, the Jews have become the new Nazis. A favorite theme...victims now victimizers. That someone as influential as Oprah lends support to this nauseating lie is tragic. But it gets worse... To shut the Jews up afterwards, she soon dragged out guess who? The world's third most famous Jew victim! On her May 24th and 25th 2006 shows, she strolled arm-in-arm with Wiesel to Auschwitz. So, the Jews were victimized too. Oprah says so...How 'bout that! But Wiesel's return to Auschwitz did nothing to counter Oprah's anti-Israel endeavors. Some things need to be spelled out very clearly. The differences between what happened to stateless Jews for millennia and what is happening to Arabs in their attempt to create their 22nd state on the ashes of -- not along side -- the Jews' sole, resurrected nation were definitely not. As both Foxman and Wiesel know, time after time Arabs have shown that they seek to replace the Jew of the Nations with a purely Arab one. So-called Arab moderates themselves have repeatedly stated that their "moderation" was/is simply a Trojan Horse. Arafat called it "the Peace of the Quraysh," the pagan tribe Muhammad temporarily made a hudna with until he felt strong enough to deal the final blow. The State Department and the West's darling, Mahmoud Abbas, is Arafat in a suit. He ran on a platform for Israel's destruction...but by more acceptable means. As I like to point out, blown buses bring bad press. He still holds to this...no matter what Foggy Bottom says. The latter needs an Arab good cop to present along side the Hamas bad cop to shove virtual suicide and/or total dependence upon others' support down the Jews' collective throat. Despite the periodic infighting, the difference between Fatah and Hamas, when it comes to a Jewish Israel, is tactical, not strategic. Any real Arab moderates on this issue go the way of Isam Sartawi...they're dispatched from this world. Others, like Wiesel's conference colleague, Yasser Abed Rabbo -- whether serious or (probably) not -- are temporarily tolerated for the assorted mileage they achieve in Western eyes. For such sweet talk, the Jews are expected to bare the necks of their kids and give away the store. Withdraw, Jew, from (disputed) territories and the conflict will end. Agree to return to your pre-'67 nine-mile wide armistice line (not border) existence as a rump state and the Arabs will grant you peace (of the grave). Like in Gaza... And I'm Santa Claus. Keep in mind that Wiesel knowingly played right into all of this. At the conference, he even made Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert (arguably the Arabs' best buddy), the brunt of mockery and laughter. The latter deserves this...but not for the reasons Wiesel & Co. charge. Think about it... While placing blame for the lack of real progress towards peace on the Jews themselves for not caving in to all that Arabs demand, elsewhere both he and Oprah speak of Darfur and the Sudan and never mention the word Arab. I guess the Martians are responsible... Again, some things need to be spelled out very clearly. Had those "oppressive Jews" used Arab techniques against black Africans in the Sudan, against Kurds in Iraq and Syria, and so forth, their Arab headache could have largely been resolved long ago. Millions of black Africans have been killed, maimed, raped, enslaved, murdered, and so forth on behalf of purely Arab patrimony. Decades ago, President Nimeiry's stated during the earlier Arab slaughter of blacks in the Sudan in the 1960s and 1970s (and now several times more ever since) that... "...the Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into...black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission " (Arabism and Pan-Arabism in Sudanese Politics, Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 11, #2, 1973, pp. 177-78). Why is it that, for Oprah and far too many others, the Arab Man's Burden is acceptable, but the White Man's Burden isn't? Back to Wiesel's virtual anti-Israel pandering and, to a lesser extent, Foxman's more vague statements about Israel's "seriousness." While there's always room for improvement, and mistakes are surely made by both sides in any conflict, surely both men -- one of whom I know personally, worked with for years, and so forth -- understand the real facts of life here. Given real and even not-so-real peace partners, Israel has repeatedly bent over backwards, forwards, and sideways to reach honorable compromise and accommodation...certainly far more than Arabs have ever done with their own ethno-nationalist competitors. So, indulging in such things as pointing the finger at Israel during a conference like that in Petra (very likely filled with Israel bashers) is nothing short of self-serving and cowardly. Both Foxman and Wiesel know that the root cause of this conflict has always been an Arab refusal to accept that anyone but themselves be granted political rights in "their" region. Again, scores of millions of Kurds, Copts, Assyrians, black Africans, Berbers, Semitic but non-Arab Lebanese, native and whom the Arabs call kilab yahud -- Jew dogs -- have been murdered, gassed, subjugated, enslaved, turned into refugees, and so forth for daring to disagree. The conflict Israel was criticized for at Petra could have been solved long ago had Arabs been willing to grant Jews a mere microscopic slice of the very rights they demand for themselves. And, again, both men know this very well. So, given such an enemy, it is hard to conceive of what they were thinking when they willingly participated in shifting the spotlight onto Israel. Will either take up permanent residence in Israel's Sderot, blasted daily by Arab rockets and adjacent to Arab-controlled and now Judenrein Gaza, or in Israel's narrow waist (where most of its population and industry are located) after it's forced to return to its 1949 Auschwitz, er armistice, lines and next agrees to accept millions of allegedly "returning" jihadist Arab refugees? Sure... But if the answer to my question just happens -- by some small chance -- to be in the negative, then perhaps its time to put the period of perpetual Jewish victimization behind us...despite what these two famous Holocaust survivors now assert. Their approach will, no doubt, only perpetuate this further. Maybe afterwards Wiesel can then get the world to weep for yet millions of more dead Jews. Maybe... But while this may be good for the Jewish victimization business, it's not good for Jews. I'll demand empathy over sympathy any time... And Israel better do likewise. 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 |
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LET THEM UNITE
Posted by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, May 20, 2007. |
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This article was written by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz. It was published in
Arutz-Sheva
(www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Blog.aspx/1#2143). |
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According to our own Gil Ronen
I have four brief comments on this latest insane statement by our venerated and mustachioed leader:
I'd also like to point out what Peretz did not say in response to the suggestion that cutting off the Palestinian Authority's fuel and electricity would end the Kassam rocket barrages. He never argued that it wouldn't work. |
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WHAT WINOGRAD MISSED
Posted by Yehuda Poch, May 20, 2007. |
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A very disturbing interview was aired on Israel Radio this morning with former IDF Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin Shahak. Shahak succeeded Ehud Barak as Chief of Staff in 1995, after serving as Barak's Deputy Chief of Staff. Following his retirement from the army, he served one term in the Knesset, and served as Minister of Tourism and of Transportation in Barak's government. Shahak's interview came against a background of several recent events. At the end of last week, he came out in support of Barak in the upcoming Labor party leadership primary, with the belief that Barak was best suited to assume the role of Defense Minister, and later of Prime Minister. More seriously, though, the Palestinians in the Gaza strip last week resumed firing Kassam missiles at the Israeli city of Sderot and surrounding towns and villages. An average of 25-30 rockets are being fired every day at these communities. An estimated 6000 Sderot residents have left the city -- out of a total population of only about 27,000. Through luck and miracle alone, no one has yet been killed in the latest wave of missile attacks, but several dozen have been injured, some quite seriously. In this morning's interview, Shahak opined that right now the situation is not serious enough to justify occupying Gaza but that if rocket attacks extend to include Ashkelon then there might be no choice but to occupy Gaza. In that one statement, Shahak exposed what is so terribly wrong with the mindset currently gripping Israel's military and political decision-makers. The idea that some of Israel's population -- those in larger cities or with more money -- are more important to Israel's security doctrine than others, is an idea that has been eating away at Israel's moral imperative for decades. It is one that cuts across security, economic and educational realms, and across political lines of all colors. And it is a rot that threatens to physically destroy the entire country, causing our entire reason for being here to erode, and arguably preventing Jews from other countries from considering the idea of moving to Israel. And in all the hype generated by the Winograd Commission's interim findings, it is the one principal cause of last summer's war that went almost completely unnoticed. Winograd correctly slammed the Prime Minister, Defense Minister and then-Chief of Staff for their conceptual and tactical failures that led to the war and its unsuccessful conclusion. They called into question the decision-making abilities of the three principal leaders as well as the information with which each was provided or not provided. Winograd stopped short of making recommendations as to the futures of these three men, preferring to let the people of Israel make that determination. But without a fundamental change in the ideas and opinions that motivate our nation's leaders, without leaders who are prepared to deal with a situation from a position of strength and awareness of our own purpose here, all is lost. In the final analysis, the failures of the Second Lebanon War and the Kassam barrages that have been plaguing Sderot for the past five years can both be traced to the same major problem. It is a problem when Israeli leaders can say with a straight face that attacks on certain populations don't warrant a response. Whether it is Kassams in Sderot, Katyushas in Acco, terrorist shootings in Gush Katif or Judea and Samaria, or bombs in the markets and busses of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, those populations have all been told in recent years that they don't matter to Israeli decision-makers. But if they ever come to the 'next' community, the terrorists better watch out. Soon after the interview with Amnon Lipkin Shahak, the radio broadcast a report that Hamas had issued a warning that they were preparing to launch missiles at Ashkelon as well, and that they would cause a situation in which Ashkelon residents would also be forced to flee. So it seems that Hamas is perfectly willing to put Shahak's words to the test. The failures examined by the Winograd Commission, and those continuing to take place regarding the Gaza Strip, did not begin in 2000. They did not begin when the rockets started raining down on Israeli homes and schools. These failures were sown years earlier by political and military leaders -- people like Shahak and Barak -- who think that we owe the Palestinians anything and that we should be negotiating with the very same people who are currently blowing up our kindergartens. It is the careless, cowardly attitudes of a succession of Israeli leaders that have allowed our enemies to rain these missiles down on our heads safe in the knowledge that if we do respond, it will be only half-heartedly and not in a way that is likely to cause them much damage. Amnon Lipkin Shahak and Ehud Barak, as well as Sharon, Olmert, Peretz and Halutz, have worked tirelessly to turn Israel's military, political and technological might into the laughingstock of the middle east, and have turned our tiny country into a vast training ground for the next generation of terrorists and their newest weapons. The time has come for Israel's voters to get rid of all putative 'leaders' like Shahak who have instilled in our national consciousness the idea that military or terrorist attacks on some people are acceptable. The blood that has flowed in Israeli streets for the past seven years -- or hundred and seven -- continues to cry out for real Jewish justice and not the ignorant cowardice of our leaders. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel.
His article appeared on his website:
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THE BAD AROLSEN HOLOCAUST ARCHIVES IS NOW FULLY OPEN
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 20, 2007. |
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For sixty years the Bad Arolsen's Shoah bottomless well of 16
miles (25 kilometers) of information filling was off limit to the
Holocaust victims' families. Except for identification purposes,
millions, yes, millions of documents were concealed for what seemed
infinite. As of this writing this information is being released. The
documents are being finally released so we can further learn "what
happened." We now know that the suffering did not end with the war
ending; death and suffering went for so much longer. More importantly
we must try keeping the memory alive and HOPEFULLY learn some more
from the awful mistakes of decades ago so we can ensure that nothing
like the Shoah, ever, yes, ever happens again. Wake Up America blogger
wrote: The Holocaust was not about one sick man, Hitler...it was his
dream, yes, but it took a large group of sick, sadistic people...
Unfortunately, it also took an apathetic, to what was going on, world to enable Hitler to execute his dream. Hitler wrote a book explaining what he was going to do and no one took him seriously. No one actually waned to believe that a human being could ever be so heinous and act on his heinous dream. So the world went on about life like nothing is happening; the world sat back and watched Hitler execute his Final Solution -- Judenreit or "Jew free" world. Because of their apathy and passivity, those who were complacent are just as guilty as those who executed Hitler's plan.
In today's world we are regrettably living the past. The world of today is just as apathetic as the 1920s and 1930s. We read way too many commentaries and we hear the same imams and clerics' speeches over and over again. They all preach death, destruction and the apocalypse. We expect Islamic "religious" leaders to teach their flock about peace, love and harmony, but they do not. Instead they are teaching the masses about the command of God to join martyrdom so they can meet 72 virgins waiting them in heaven. Really, go argue with God' s command! But none of the evidence that a disaster is at our door step is being taken seriously enough. Once again the world's nations remain skeptical to the signs these despots give us and that they actually mean what they say. Undoubtedly they will perpetuate their terrorizing -- holy war -- jihad. Just like Hitler did then, these Islamo-fascists monsters are telling us exactly what they want to do to us. If we don't wake up to take them seriously and soon, the millions of pages of testimonies from the Shoah-Holocaust and its aftermath, as told in the report below, will be our future not only our past. Like defenseless cattle on the way to the slaughter house, the Nazis and their cronies packed in windowless train cars innocent people who happed to be Jews, and took them away form their families, homes, livelihood, and all they were familiar with. They then locked them in death and labor camps and tested them endlessly how to maintain sanity in the most cruel and insane conditions ever known to the mankind! As if for 40 or 50 years no one wanted to remember or face reality so no one opened any of Bad Arolsen's history files. Now that the information is finally distributed to Yad Va'shem in Jerusalem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, it will refresh our mind to what happened. Don't let history repeat itself! This comes from May 18, 2007 CNN and is entitled "German archive
reveals a panorama of misery"
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BAD AROLSEN, Germany (AP)--Looking back at the first weeks after World War II, a French lieutenant named Henri Francois-Poncet despaired at ever fulfilling his mission to establish the fate of French inmates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. For the living skeletons who survived the Nazi terror, the Displaced Persons camp set up two miles (three kilometers) away offered little relief from misery. People still died at the rate of 1,000 to 1,500 a day. Corpses were stacked in front of barracks, to be carted away by captured SS guards. "Bodies frequently remained for several days in the huts, the other inmates being too weak to carry them out," Francois-Poncet wrote in a report for the Allied Military Government.
"As most of the survivors could not even give their own names, it was useless trying to obtain information as to the identity of the dead," he wrote. He reported a meager 25 percent success rate. When the Third Reich surrendered in May 1945, 8 million people were left uprooted around Europe. Millions drifted through the 2,500 hastily arranged DP camps before they were repatriated. A bleak picture springs with stark immediacy from typewritten reports by the Allied officers, found in the massive archive of the International Tracing Service in the central German town of Bad Arolsen. The Associated Press has been given extensive access to the archive on condition that identities of victims and refugees are protected. Far from scenes of joyful liberation that should have greeted the end of Nazi oppression, the files reveal desperation, loss and confusion, and overwhelmed and often insensitive military authorities. Many had nowhere to go, their families among the 6 million Jews consumed in the Holocaust, their homes destroyed or handed out to new occupants. Those who wanted to get to Palestine were shut out by a British ban on Jewish immigration to the Israeli state-in-waiting. "Owing to ill treatment by the Germans, most DPs have a distrust and fear of the Allied authorities," said a September 1945 report signed by British Lt. Col. C.C. Allan. "Many DPs have sunk into complete apathy regarding their future." Liberated concentration camps were transformed into DP camps. Food was still scarce -- often just coffee and wet black bread -- and medical care was insufficient, said a report written for President Harry Truman. Inmates were kept under armed guard to maintain order. They still wore their old striped, pajama-like concentration-camp-issue uniforms and slept in the same drafty barracks through a bitter winter. Compounding their misery, they could watch through barbed wire fences and see German villagers living normal lives. In some places, those villagers were forced to tour the camps and help with the burials or at least face up to what their Fuehrer had wrought. But it was scant comfort to the victims. "As things stand now, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them," wrote presidential envoy Earl G. Harrison in his famously quoted report to Truman after visiting that summer. Known for its unparalleled collection of original concentration camp papers, the ITS, a branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, also safeguards the world's largest documentation on postwar DP camps. It has nearly 3.4 million names on its card index of those who sought designation as refugees eligible for aid. Until now, the documents have been used only to trace missing people and verify restitution claims. But now the full breadth of the archive, filling 16 miles (25 kilometers) of shelf space, is to be opened to historians for the first time. At a meeting last week in Amsterdam, Netherlands, the archive's 11-nation supervisory commission agreed to begin transferring electronic copies this autumn to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Within weeks after the war, U.N. agencies and volunteer charities took over the DP camps, processing applications for relief and emigration. By 1947, a quarter million Jews -- a piteous remnant of European Jewry -- shared space with displaced Eastern Europeans fearful of return to what was now the Soviet bloc. Also among the DPs were ex-Nazis. Adam Friedrich's 1949 application to the International Refugee Organization to join relatives in St. Louis, acknowledges that for three years he belonged to the Waffen SS, the combat arm of Hitler's dreaded paramilitary organization. He also noted he had been imprisoned for 20 months after the war. An IRO official scribbled on his form, "The applicant was forced to report to the SS in Jan. '42. Served in the infantry and took part in fighting." Friedrich was rejected. But U.S. authorities did not have that information four years later when he applied again through the U.S. Refugee Relief Act. Then, Friedrich reported he had been in the German army but said nothing about his SS service. Decades after he obtained citizenship, the U.S. Justice Department uncovered Friedrich's past. He was stripped of his citizenship in 2004, lost a Supreme Court appeal, and was due to be deported when he died last July. At Bad Arolsen, questionnaires and affidavits are stuffed into 400,000 envelopes which, including families, refer to 850,000 displaced people, and fill binders spreading over several rooms of floor-to-ceiling shelves. The last DP camps were closed in 1953, so "When you feel the paper tug as you try to pull it out, that means no one has opened it for 40 or 50 years," said Rudolf Michalke, head of the archive's postwar section. Accounts of camp survivors and their tormentors
Some files contain detailed histories of survivors and the tortures they endured. Refugees relate their futile struggle to resettle after the war, and their hopes of rebuilding their lives far from Europe. An Austrian pastry chef recounts the hostility he found when he returned to Vienna. "Given the large and increasingly negative climate against Jews, I have not been able to get a job and am forced to emigrate," he testified, seeking passage to Australia. Others describe their tormentors, hoping they will be prosecuted. A Polish Jew writes about "Workmaster Batenszlajer," one of about a dozen guards he named as particularly cruel. "He made selections. Those who lost their strength because they were exhausted and looked bad were picked out and shot down," he wrote. Batenszlajer would pick four girls at a time and hold them for several days. "He raped them and afterward he took them into a wood and shot them down." In a world where racism was rampant, finding a new home was not easy, as one Yugoslav-born man with Asian features learned. "Being a Kalmyk of Mongolian race, [he] is ineligible for most Anglo-Saxon countries," authorities scrawled on his form. "The doors are closed to unmarried mothers," said a note from strongly Catholic Ireland. Lining up employment in a new country was critical for obtaining a visa. Yugoslav-born Nikolai Davidovic, a mathematics professor who spoke seven languages and authored two textbooks, left for America in 1950 with his wife Larissa -- but only after she had been promised a job as a maid. Friedrich was not the only war criminal to slip through the screening process. Dieter Pohl, of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, estimates that up to 250,000 Germans and Austrians had participated in the Holocaust, but only 5 to 10 percent were ever punished -- most of them in the Soviet zone. Altogether, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million people committed crimes against humanity, he said. But no one knew who the perpetrators were. "More than 90 percent of files on Nazi war crimes were destroyed," Pohl said in a telephone interview. The U.S. zeal in pursuing former Nazis came late. In the war's aftermath, the Americans were more concerned about the looming threat from Stalin's Soviet Union. In 1979, the Justice Department created the Office of Special Investigations to pursue ex-Nazis who committed visa fraud by lying about their past. Since then, it has won 104 prosecutions and denied entry at the U.S. border to 175 people from its watch list of 70,000 suspected persecutors. "We are still very busy with World War II cases," said OSI director Eli Rosenbaum. "We have always routinely checked Arolsen's DP holdings when we've been investigating someone," he told the AP. But the ITS files are far from complete, and unlike Friedrich, most former SS members concealed their crimes with lies or half-truths. John Demjanjuk, a Ukranian-born camp guard who became an auto worker in Cleveland, reported in his refugee papers, seen in Bad Arolsen, that he had been a "worker" in Sobibor. Although Sobibor later became infamous as a death camp in occupied Poland, few people had heard of it after the war because it had been dismantled in 1943. Demjanjuk was awarded DP status. In 1977, the U.S. government moved to revoke his citizenship, misidentifying him as "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious guard at Treblinka extermination camp. He was extradited to Israel, tried and sentenced to death in 1988. The sentence was overturned on appeal and Demjanjuk returned to the U.S., where his citizenship was restored -- only to be taken from him again for concealing his work for the Nazis. He is now fighting deportation. The file on Valerian Trifa, who became the U.S. archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox church and who once gave the opening prayer for the U.S. Senate, sheds light on the deceptions he deployed to win a ticket to the U.S. Trifa, a leader of Romania's fascist Iron Guard, told refugee officials he had been interned in Dachau and Buchenwald, but he said nothing about the privileges or protection he received from the Germans, according to Paul Shapiro, who investigated the Trifa case in the late 1970s for the Justice Department. Shapiro is now director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Shapiro saw Trifa's file at ITS for the first time when he visited Bad Arolsen last year with an AP reporter. "I knew the facts that are in here, except for the manner in which he was treated in terms of his Displaced Persons status," he said, flipping through aging pages in the manila folder. "It's quite shocking when you actually see it." Trifa relinquished his citizenship in 1980 after it was discovered he gave a speech in 1941 in Bucharest that unleashed a pogrom in which more than 150 Romanian Jews were killed. He left the United States in 1984 for Portugal, where he died three years later. "To see someone receiving citizenship based on lies is not a great
thing," Shapiro said. "If this stuff had been available then [in the
1970s], his case would have been resolved earlier. He would have lived
fewer years in the United States."
Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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AUNT ROSA COMES HOME
Posted by David Wilder, May 20, 2007. |
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Last week was Hebron Liberation Day, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the return to the City of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs during the 1967 Six-day War. This is always a momentous event, and this year even more so, considering all that's been happening in Israel over the past months and years. When the Israel Defense Forces entered Hebron in June of 1967 they found white sheets hanging from the rooftops and windows. In actuality, the city was captured by one man, Rabbi General Shlomo Goren, then Chief Rabbi of the IDF, who liberated the city single-handedly. He was one of the first Jews to gain access to the second holiest site to the Jewish people in the all the world, Ma'arat HaMachpela -- the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, in 700 hundred years. In 1267, following the capture of Hebron by the Mameluks, who expelled the occupied Crusaders, that holy site was declared a Mosque, off-limits to anyone not of the Islamic faith. And so it remained until the first week of June, 1967. However, Rabbi Goren was in for a surprise. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan ordered that the Israeli flag, hanging on the side of the Ma'ara's outside wall, be removed and that all visitors entering the building remove their shoes 'because it's a mosque.' Those orders were later rescinded, but the policy was set and, in many respects, hasn't changed to this very day. Despite the odds, Hebron remained in Jewish hands, and slowly developed. But when the Hebron accords were signed and implemented ten years ago, it seemed that the survival of Hebron's Jewish community was in jeopardy. With the advent of the Oslo War, otherwise known and the second intifada, and the daily shooting attacks from the surrounding hills into the Jewish neighborhoods, it looked like the blackest predictions might materialize. But they didn't. Hebron's Jewish community continues to thrive and prosper in spite of the problems. Our purchase and entrance into Beit HaShalom -- the peace house, between Hebron and Kiryat Arba, proves the point. How does one celebrate such a momentous occasion? Hebron Day itself, was Thursday, and I was privileged to spend most of the day with an old friend and partner to 'the cause,' Nachum Segal, host of the popular morning radio show in the New York metropolitan area, JM in the AM. On Thursday Nachum broadcast live from Hebron his entire show, which was a lot of fun. Using a make-shift studio in the Gutnick Center, just outside Ma'arat HaMachpela, Nachum, together with Hebron Fund director Yossi Baumol, interviewed numerous Hebron residents and personalities, giving listeners a real feel for the joy of the day. In addition the show was broadcast live on internet (audio and video). (Pictures and the sound track can be heard via the Hebron web site.) This wasn't the first time Nachum broadcast live from Hebron. Over eleven years ago he broadcast via a cell phone and toured the city with Noam Arnon and myself. That too was a show I'll never forget. Nachum Segal is a true friend and associate in everything we do here, bringing Hebron to tens of thousands of people. However, in reality, I didn't really feel Hebron Day until Friday afternoon, in a very round-about, yet somewhat direct fashion. One of my friends called earlier in the week and asked if a Shabbat guest could sleep at our apartment on Friday night and I agreed. Friday afternoon a pleasant-looking middle-aged gentleman, dressed in a suit and tie and speaking with an accent appeared at our door. He introduced himself as Mordechai and came in. After a cup of tea and some introductory small talk, he asked if he could use my computer to check some email. Sitting him down next to the computer, I continued about my business, preparing for Shabbat. A little while later I came back into the living room and found him staring, somewhat blurry-eyed, at a picture on the screen. The photograph, obviously taken decades ago, was of an attractive young woman, with a fur-collared coat and a white blouse. Her eyes stared at me as if she was standing in front of me, at that very moment. Mordechai turned and looked at me and said, 'this is a picture of my aunt. It is the first time in my life that I've ever seen her." And he turned back to screen to continue gazing at her. A little later he told us the story. 'Rosa was born and lived somewhere in Czechoslovakia. In the 1930s she managed to flee and immigrated to Belgium. In the late 1930s she married a widower and gave birth to three childen, living in Antwerp. She and her husband tried to obtain documents allowing them to escape Belgium also, but failed. During the last days of August, 1942, Rosa and her three young children were arrested by Nazis and transported to Auschwitz, where they arrived on September 3, after a three day train journey. Of the 555 women on the transport, only 88 were left alive for slave labor in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The other 469 were killed immediately. Being that my Aunt Rosa, my father's sister, was with three young children, she must have been gassed that same day. This is the first time I've ever seen her picture.' 'The Belgians saves all the immigration records and transport documents from that era, but they were classified as secret, and no one was allowed access to them. A few years ago, the documents were made public and over a period of time, computerized. I made contact with various officials who assisted me to locate my aunt, and a few days ago received an email containing documentary information and a picture. I was on my way to the airport and for some reason wasn't able to open the attached picture. But here, sitting at your computer, here she is, my Aunt Rosa.' 'My father was the only one of his family who survived the holocaust. We knew that he had a wife and children, all of whom were lost, together with his parents and brothers and sisters. But he never spoke to us about them. We found, written in his books, lists of names and their relationship to him. But he never talked about them. He died 27 years ago. But now, as least, I can see one of his sisters, my Aunt Rosa, who was killed with her three children, in 1942. She was 30 years old.' Rosa, hy"d ended her life in the gas and flames of Auschwitz. But I have her picture here, next to me, and in a little while I'm going to take it over to Ma'arat HaMachpela. Maybe Rosa never made it to Hebron in body, but she sure did in spirit. We are here to keep that spirit and the spirits of millions and million of others, from the past, and in the future, alive. Hebron, the roots of our existence, continues to provide nourishment to our people. We are here to keep those roots from being destroyed. That's our privilege and our responsibility. This is why I can celebrate Hebron Liberation Day. If we are here, one way or another, all Am Yisrael is here. Aunt Rosa, welcome home. David Wilder is spokesman of The Jewish Community of Hebron. You can contribute directly to The Jewish Community of Hebron, POB10, Kiryat Arba-Hebron 90100, hebron@hebron.org.il, 972-2-9965333 or write to The Hebron Fund, 1760 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11230, hebronfund@aol.com |
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HOW AMERICANS' ACTIONS HAVE BROUGHT REPRESSION IN SYRIA
Posted by Barry Rubin, May 20, 2007. |
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Last month, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress visited Damascus, flattered their hosts, and called for talks with the Syrian dictatorship. Last week Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice broke the previous boycott by meeting her Syrian counterpart. What has happened since then shows this approach to be totally wrong. As demonstrated in the state-controlled Syrian media, the regime took all the calls in America for U.S. concessions as a victory proving that it could continue its policies. There is nothing subtle about it. Mamoun Homsi is a courageous pro-democracy activist who had been one of the few independent members of Syria's puppet parliament. In March 2002 he was thrown out of the legislature and sentences to five years in prison. As he was dragged off to jail, Homsi shouted, "This is a badge of honor to me and others like me. Long live the people!" Released after four years in 2006, Homsi immediately left the country, saying there was no possibility of changing the regime by reform and that any criticism would bring more imprisonment. He wrote Pelosi a letter urging her not to visit Syria as such a step would only strengthen the regime. Last week, the government seized all of his assets in the country, leaving his family destitute. Kamal Labwani, head of the Liberal Democratic Gathering, visited the United States in 2005, including meetings with human rights' groups and a trip to the White House. He told the Americans he saw that he would be arrested once he got back home. Sure enough, the Syrian police grabbed him at Damascus airport in November 2005. But he was not tried. After all, the regime reasoned, perhaps the United States might get even tougher with Syria if they repressed a man who had just been a White House guest. Last week, confident that the current administration and its presumed Democratic successors were caving in, the government sentenced Labwani to life imprisonment, "kindly" commuted to 12 years with hard labor. The charge? "Inciting a foreign state to attack Syria." That's not all. Anwar al-Bunni, a lawyer and another brave dissident, knew what held back Syria from crushing any dissent. Back in 2003 he explained, "The government's fear that it will be next on America's `regime change' list may make it wary of committing gross violations of human rights....Some of us say that it is only because of what America did in Iraq, the fright it gave our rulers, that we reformers stand a chance here." Bunni was proven right. Once Syria no longer had any fear, the regime sentenced him to five years' imprisonment. Two more democratic activists, one of them Michel Kilo, an articulate journalist who most clearly expressed the hope of peaceful change in Syria, will be sentenced soon. The White House condemned the sentencing of Labwani and Bunni, including credible information that they were tortured in prison, in an eight-line-long press release. No doubt, Syria is not intimidated. Damascus knows that it can continue helping insurgents next door kill Americans and murder Iraqis. The regime understands it can continue to sponsor terrorism against Israel and Lebanon. It has a good hope of escaping indictment in the international investigation of Syrian involvement in the murder of popular former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri in February 2005. Those who call for engaging Syria and giving it concessions are contributing, however unintentionally, to helping the worst dictatorship in the Arab world and the leading Arab sponsor of terrorism in a post-September 11 world. And by the way, Syria is the main partner of radical Islamist Iran. Least publicized of all is the apparent holding of former FBI agent Robert Levinson as a hostage in Iran, where he was visiting in March. Last week, Iran also arrested on trumped-up spying charged Haleh Esfandiari, director of Middle East programs for the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington DC and an American citizen. Her boss is former Congressman Lee Hamilton, co-sponsor of the Iraq Study Group report calling for engagement with Syria and Iran. The lessons about these regimes' extremist behavior should be clear by now. When someone extends its hand in offered friendship, they interpret this as hands raised in surrender. Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and co-author of "Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography" and "Hating America: A History" (Oxford University Press, August 2007). His latest book is The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). Prof. Rubin's columns can now be read online at http://gloria.idc.ac.il/columns/column.html. Contact him at profbarryrubin@yahoo.com |
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UNORTHODOX TACTICS NEEDED TO ROUT GAZA-BASED PALESTINIAN TERROR
Posted by Avodah, May 20, 2007. |
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DEBKAfile's military experts: Unorthodox tactics needed to rout Gaza-based Palestinian terror and halt Qassam offensive against Israel. Conventional warfare will no longer serve As the Palestinian missile offensive enters its second week, military experts recommend dosing Hamas and its allies with their own medicine: harassment behind the lines by small undercover Israeli units on hit-and-run missions to blow up Palestinian infrastructure, weapons workshops and commands centers and around-the clock ambushes of their fighters and chiefs. Palestinian operatives must be kept on the run in fear of their lives. They say the moment has passed for a conventional invasion, such as the 2002 Defense Wall operation that cleansed the West Bank of its effective suicide cell structures, such as some opposition leaders and ministers propose. It would have been logical after Israel's 2005 evacuation of the Gaza Strip. But today, Gaza is swarming with a hodgepodge of Hamas, Jihad Islami, Fatah-al Aqsa Brigades, Popular Resistance Committees and al Qaeda terrorists and militias. According to DEBKAfile's intelligence sources, Iranian and Hizballah advisers are telling them how to combat a substantial Israeli ground-tank incursion. They must go underground and wage a guerrilla-terrorist war equivalent to the Iraqi insurgent campaign against US troops. Israel is strongly advised to avoid that trap. Unorthodox strategic and tactical thinking is needed, say the experts, not an effort to fight the Lebanon War anew in Gaza. The clock cannot be turned back to the days before 2005, when former PM Ariel Sharon supported by Olmert pulled Israel out of the Gaza Strip and the strategic Philadelphi border route -- or when Olmert after becoming prime minister let Hamas win the Palestinian general election in 2006 with FM Tzipi Livni's support. Israelis have defeated Arab terror before. In the 1930s, The English military genius Orde Wingate taught Jewish paramilitary defenders his Special Night Squads tactics for turning Arab guerrilla methods against them. Nothing much has changed in 71 years, except for the fact that today, Israel has a strong army of its own, and does not need British or other international force to defend its sovereign territory. All that is needed is a government with resolve that lets the military do its job. Contact Avodah at avodah15@aol.com |
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SAMSON BLINDED: A MACHIAVELLIAN PERSPECTIVE ON THE MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT
Posted by Avodah, May 20, 2007. |
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This below is an excerpt from Obadiah Shoher's book Samson
Blinded: a Machiavellian Perspective Much of the book is devoted
to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The index to the book can be found at
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Judaism is a practical religion for individual people. It has no requirements or conditions that make normal life impossible or cannot be fulfilled in reality. Minute regulation developed only in Levitical and especially in late rabbinic interpretation; the law of the Torah is not oppressive. Judaism is not a religion in traditional sense. Jews need not believe in supernatural events like eternal nirvana or someone's resurrection. Even ostensible miracles in Judaic epos may be explained according to the laws of nature. Judaism is a system of ethics which can be understood, evaluated, and consciously accepted. Atheists are uncomfortable with the Creation' strikingly similar to the Big Bang -- but the issue is practically unimportant. Some critical people doubt that God dictated Moses the commandments, but what changes if Moses already knew the laws and wrote them down for the judges to apply, as Jethro told him? In the end, Judaism is the law; all events in Tanakh only demonstrate validity of the law. Any other view makes Judaism a pagan religion whose tribal deity favors one ethnic group above others. Jews are chosen to observe the law, and remain chosen insofar as they are expected to observe it. Unlike sectarian radicalism, Judaism is not maximalist. The world is not divided between good and evil. According to Talmudic tradition, it is enough for men to be one-thousandth good and enter the heavenly realm. The commandments do not require absolute obedience in the sense that transgression does not preclude righteousness. The more a man keeps, the better, the easier is the Way. Transgression is cause for repentance, aimed at not repeating the mistake. There is no anger. God is as indifferent to people's behavior as he is immutable. Commandments are instructions for living in this world. One can disregard them and constantly stumble upon obstacles. Those are not God's anger, not blows of fate, but simply laws of nature which we do not yet understand. The commandments tell us how to live comfortably in the field of those laws; obeying them keeps the Way free of hindrance. No one complains of the warning on an electrical appliance. That caution is a consequence of the law of nature, not an arbitrary rule. One may ignore it and touch the wire. Shock is not a result of rage, but the effect of natural phenomena. Commandments are the same kind of advice. People are free to observe the commandments or refuse Judaism. People endowed with free will need not follow arbitrary, incomprehensible laws, if choice exists (it does not exist for the law of gravitation). But the commandments are not arbitrary. The Ten Commandments establish just and efficient society; other rules more or less plausibly interpret the Ten. A person who encounters interpretation he disagree with is entitled to reject it, though not without large benefit of doubt: if many other rules are correct, perhaps the one in question is only misunderstood. The original Judaism did not even threaten afterlife punishment: souls of good and evil alike abode in the eternal sleep, returning to the primordial unity where no such distinctions exist. Judaism was conceived as a religion of free will without the coercion of afterlife threat or subornation of earthly privilege. Not incidentally, Hebrews were promised neither dominance, nor riches, but the priesthood of serving God. The values of freedom and individualism, features of the modern political landscape since the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, were declared three thousand years ago from Sinai. The social dimensions of the Ten Commandments characterize any free society. Jewish theology stipulates free will and responsibility as the bases of human actions. Do not put the Lord your God to the test implies that people should rely on their actions, not prayer or rituals. Judaism, unlike other religions, is orthopraxy, a way of deeds. A Christian can cross himself before or after a murder; his only maxim, "you should love your neighbor" is sufficiently flexible -- perhaps he even murdered a Jew out of love to Christ. Jews have clear commandments, and minimally religious Jew cannot murder. In family life, good deeds are more important than cheerful repetition of "I love you"; similarly in religion. Observing the Judaic ethics is the all-important end; the path matters, not goals like salvation or nirvana. Jews are taught to enjoy the process of life, made comfortable by their ethics, not strive for otherworldly aims. Judaism is based on two principles: love to God and not harming others. The Ten Commandments develop these principles into actionable rules. The Ten Commandments include four minimal, commonsense religious rules, but theories, including political theories, are also based on axioms. The axioms undergirding democracy, egalitarianism and state authority, called self-evident, are more ambiguous than the commandments. Other commandments are deduced from the Ten, and rabbis later deduced more rules from the commandments. Thus, kashrut interprets You shall not murder, and the rules against homosexuality elaborate You shall not commit adultery. This is a classic three-tier legislation: constitution, laws, and government decrees. The last are open to doubt, correction, and modernization. The second might be reinterpreted or sometimes changed, though the burden of proof that changes are necessary lies on the challengers. The first tier is immutable, and forms the cultural basis of the nation. Likewise, the Ten Commandments are divine, but derivative commandments could be questioned and rabbinical law modernized. The first two commandments, to love God and to eschew idolatry, are the axioms that assure acceptance of the Torah's social system. Socialists require us to love egalitarianism and to eschew self-interest. Philosophical schools refer usually to an authoritative founder or rationalize their features. Jewish laws rest on divine authority. Contact Avodah at Avodah15@aol.com |
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YOU CAN'T NEGOTIATE A TRUCE WITH AN ENEMY COMMITTED TO THE DESTRUCTION OF OUR CIVILIZATION.
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 19, 2007. |
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An open letter to President Bush Dear Mr. President, Please connect the dots. Per article #1 [1], we learn from none other than the FBI that el-Qaeda is likely to have nuclear weapons soon, and has no compunctions about using them against us. Per article #2 [2], there can be no compromise, no negotiated truce, with an enemy whose commitment is the destruction of our civilization. There can be only complete victory for our side and unconditional surrender for theirs. Just as Eisenhower and Roosevelt were clear that Germany needed to agree to unconditional surrender, and they were clear that the war needed to procede to that end even though Germany was willing to discuss a negotiated truce a year before the war's end; so too you, today, must have the perspicacity to see that a negotiated truce with Iran and/or el-Qaeda will merely pave the way for more war and more destruction later. By crushing Nazism completely, and by replacing it with a post-war German government that outlawed Nazism, arrested Nazi leaders, disarmed Nazi supporters, dispersed Nazi activists, jailed Nazi sympathizers, and supported actively the Neuremberg trials in which Nazi criminals were tried and executed, the victors of world war 2 were able to create a new world order in Europe -- a world order that brought us peace and cooperation for the past 60 years. It is not likely that such an outcome would have been the case had the Nazi German government been allowed a respite, to regroup, re-arm, re-deploy, regain its support within the German populace, and re-establish Nazism as a legitimate national ideology. Per article #3 [3], Australia shows us one important aspect of this war which we can employ to our benefit, to our victory....starve them of their money. Terrorism is expensive. It is time to start dealing with Saudi Arabia as an enemy in this war; because they use their galactic oil wealth to finance the terrorists who want to destroy us. Stop the sham. Stop the charade. Start strangling terrorists by cutting off their funding. If Australia can do it, we can do it. Per article #4 [4], you can be reminded that the Islamofascist terrorist forces that we face in this world war 4 are alive and well and active in our own country, with dozens of attacks, most of which, happily, were intercepted by our law enforcement or Homeland Security forces before they could be successfully carried out. And per article #5 [5], we learn that some of the Muslim organiziations operating in the USA are clearly in cahoots with the terrorists, and are quite willing to lie for them, to whitewash or legitimize their operations, and to try to lull you and our government and our media and our intellectual leaders in to the mistaken belief that we have nothing to fear from the purveyors of islamofascist extremism. When I connect these dots, it seems to me that we have only four options in this war, Mr. President.
The stakes are high, Mr. President: ... A world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms ... or a world dominated by a radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihad, under the Mullahs and the Sharia (Islamic law). We live in a society that took almost 4,000 years to create (from the time of Abraham). Our society supports democracy, human rights, civil rights, liberty, freedom, multi-culturalism, diversity, freedom of information, freedom of assembly, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and equality before the law without regard to race or religion or gender or national origin or sexual preference. And that was a long time in the making. But if the terrorists win ... it will be, overnight, the end of our civil rights, human rights, democracy, and all the freedoms that we cherish.....except for the males among us who choose to become Muslim. Just look at what life is like under Wahhabi rule in Arabia, or how it was in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Any option other than '1.' means support for the ultimate victory of the Islamofascist Jihadist Terrorist Tyrannical Totalitarian Theocratic Triumphalist Supremacist Imperialist leaders of the Muslim world today. I vote for '1'.
End Notes [1.] "FBI's Mueller: Bin Laden Wants to Strike U.S. Cities With Nuclear Weapons"
Osama bin Laden and his terrorist group desperately want to obtain nuclear devices and explode them in American cities, especially New York and Washington, D.C., FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III tells NewsMax. [2.] "Can There Be Peace Without Victory?"
[...] [3.] Cameron Stewart,
[4.] "A trail of plots since 9/11"
Here are some of the plots or alleged plots cited by U.S. authorities in recent years:
To which list may be added (just off the top of my head)
So...the USA is the target of attempted terror attacks, on-going, inside the USA; and USA civil-rights laws and charity regulations are exploited by these local or even home-grown Islamofascist terrorists for assistance to international terrorist enemies. (as of 5.11.07) [5.] Patrick Poole
In December 2005, the Dallas Morning News published an exchange between counterterrorism researcher Daveed Gartenstein-Ross ("Extremists among Us?") and Mahdi Bray ("We're proud of our Muslim 'face'"), head of the Muslim American Society's (MAS) Freedom Foundation. At issue was an announcement by MAS, subsequent to the 7/7 terrorist attack in London, that the group would be launching a campaign to combat terrorism. 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 |
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'THE INSURGENT ADVANTAGE'
Posted by Lawrence Uniglicht, May 19, 2007. |
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David Brooks Op Ed piece in the 05/18/2007 edition of the New York Times, 'The Insurgent Advantage', is a must read for those who wish to acquaint themselves with an uncomfortable realization. He discusses, 'Brave New War', a book by John Robb, a graduate of Yale University and the Air Force Academy, an insightful recently released work drawing little fanfare, whose premise should smash any caring individual upside his sheltered head with the clout of a steel two by four. The essence of Robb's contention is insurgents exist in many loosely connected cadres, maintain a feudal mentality, yet are quite adaptable, technologically advanced, and wish to weaken but not destroy states. Clearly, they cannot be defeated as long as civil nations maintain centralized bureaucratic military mindsets unwilling to recognize the crux of their dilemma. Indeed, 'nation-states are inefficient learning organizations, at least compared to their feudal and postnational foes.' In effect, a comparatively lumbering tortoise, even one with ample resources, patriotic fervor, and a shock and awe strategy cannot defeat a swifter hare, with access to sufficient resources, learned in manipulating vulnerable minds, and obsessed with jihadist aspirations. Logic dictates the most efficient perhaps only way to deal with such an insidious organism, extremely agile, ever metastasizing through the bowels of civilized and not so civilized nations spreading terror, is to starve the malignancy; cut off its funding. The direct source of such funding is rogue oil-rich Islamic regimes, most notably Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan. Although these loosely linked cadres may espouse different brands of hate-filled Koranic gospel, they are kindred spirit jihad junkies. Bizarrely, the indirect financers of these jihadists are industrial oil-dependent nations, the very targets of their murderous activity. Indeed, petrodollars flow from non-Muslim industrial nations to oil-rich Islamic regimes that finance insurgents who terrorize non-Muslim industrial nations that provide petro-dollars to oil-rich Islamic regimes that finance insurgents and on and on; a never ending surreal circle born of stupidity and greed. Military incursions, deploying ground forces into neighborhoods infested with insurgent/terrorist cells, attempting to root out that enemy, no doubt would result in heavy casualties to those invading forces as well as civilians, acting willingly or unwillingly as human shields for the terror mongers, ever willing to sacrifice even their own brethren in the name of their perverted god. Furthermore, the home field advantage is enormous, making it virtually impossible to ultimately vanquish resident malignant well-armed continually funded jihadist slime oozing into each and every nook and cranny of inhabited tenements strewn about the malevolent landscape. Moral imperatives prevent civil warriors from leveling such neighborhoods with missiles, launched from air, land, or sea. Surely, those who value human life are at a distinct disadvantage over those who do not. As a result of such military failure, insurgents could leave their hideouts and penetrate into civil states, easily wrecking havoc by planting bombs or blowing themselves up, murdering and disabling proximate victims. No doubt, insurgents/terrorists pose enormous threats to civil nations, eluding the broadest of military campaigns, thus potentially able to slither into targeted nations and inflict carnage. John Robb, per David Brooks critique, suggests 'democratic nations need to build their own decentralized counterinsurgency networks....imagining local squads of grass-roots terror fighters.' Indeed, imagine a world where nimble squads of well-trained good guys go after ever adapting groups of bad guys. What civilian would feel safe in such a scenario, trying to make it through a day without becoming a victim of some jihadist massacre? What mother would let her child go to school? What economy, heretofore mostly immune to the ravages perpetrated by violent Islam, would survive in the wake of abandoned shopping malls, stadiums, office buildings, factories, and any other venues where ordinary citizens normally gather, now unwilling to risk an explosive laden martyr that might go undetected despite a superior police force, if say even a few homicide/suicide bombers successfully detonated? Is there but one such relatively inexperienced democratic nation, not so hardened like an experienced Israel that could withstand the impact of terrorism unleashed within their local communities? There is only one sensible way to attempt to preemptively prevent such a potentially worldwide catastrophe. Cut off the funding cycle now and hope it is not too late! Lawrence Uniglicht is a career civil servant, working for the Social Security Administration. He advocates for the State of Israel with an American perspective. He writes, "Advocating for the disrespected underdog has been my passion, no doubt Israel falls into that category." Contact him by email at larose@snip.net |
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UNDERSTANDING THE WORTH OF OUR NATION
Posted by Michael Travis, May 19, 2007. |
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This essay was written by Frank Salvato, Managing Editor of The
New Media Journal U.S. and it was published yesterday at
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It is difficult to value something when its worth is unknown. The adage of one child being given a toy only to leave it out in the rain to rust, never understanding the toys worth, while another child made to earn the same toy is found to take care of it, valuing its worth, is a fitting analogy. This basic truth applies to our American heritage and the continued welfare of our nation.
Most of us have never had to take up arms to protect our freedoms, our liberties, our rights as guaranteed under The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and The Bill of Rights, our Charters of Freedom. In most cases these gifts have been bequeathed to us from those of generations past who did have to serve, to protect and defend our nation and by those who valiantly volunteer to serve today. What is asked of us in return for this legacy of freedom is loyalty to the covenant between citizen and government, loyalty to our nation.
Today, our country faces both a threat from abroad and a threat, in the form of ideological conflict, from within. Some among us choose to accentuate the imperfections of our nation. Some condemn our culture. And still others literally champion our nation's defeat and demise. Those who choose to diminish the significance of the United States' contributions to the world, do so in ignorance of the intent of the documents that charted the course for this great nation and the ideologies and principles that provided the foundation for the creation of our governmental covenant.
September 11, 2001 signaled to the world that radical Islamofascists
were serious in their declaration of war against the United States and
her Western allies. As we move further away from Osama bin Laden's
1996 fatwa -- his declaration of war --
and as we progress in our examination of the inner-workings of this
macabre ideology, it becomes increasingly evident that this conflict
is a generational conflict and a confrontation as we have never
experienced before.
Those who criticize the use of the term Global War on Terror have a point but their point is a matter of semantics and all who argue this point are not genuine in their dissent. Many of those who argue this point do so from an ideological standpoint, using the linguistic argument to divert from the intended meaning of the phrase.
The fact of the matter is that fundamentalist Islamofascism is being fought in countries around the world. From Iraq and Afghanistan to Somalia and Sudan, Indonesia and India to Paraguay, China, Russia, the UK, France and the United States, radical Islamists are training, planning and engaging in activities meant to cause harm to the west in general and particularly the United States and those who stand in her defense.
In the United States al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood -- to name but a few terrorist organizations -- have set up regional headquarters in Boston, Chicago, New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Tampa, Washington DC and over 38 other cities around the country. They are not only raising, laundering and funneling money back to the Middle East to support their terrorist organizations, they are setting up jihadi training camps right here in the United States.
Dr. Paul Williams' recent exposé on the Islamist jihadi training compound at Islamberg, New York [Editor's Note: see this below. and the followup.] stands as a clarion call to the American people -- and the US Government -- to awaken from their politically correct stupor to the reality that radical Islamist jihadis are here, now, and training among us for future attacks on our nation. Compounds (or hamaats) identical to the one found by Dr. Williams in Islamberg can be found in Hyattsville, Maryland; Red House and Falls Church, Virginia; Macon, Georgia; York, South Carolina; Dover, Tennessee; Buena Vista, Colorado; Talihina, Oklahoma; Tulare County and Commerce, California; and Onalaska, Washington. Dr. Williams points out that others are being built, including an expansive facility in Sherman, Pennsylvania. At the same time, here in the United States we are engaged in what some experts are calling a culture war. Some would go as far as to call it a second Civil War for the fact that several elected officials, along with myriad activists, have acted to the detriment of our military and the well-being of our nation, cavorting with world leaders who actively call for our country's ruin. This "second Civil War" is being fought on the ideological and political battlegrounds. The catalysts for this conflict are drastically opposing ideologies, very different visions for the future of our country and an ever-widening disparity between those who value our country and the principles on which it was founded and those who are unable to value them because they do not understand their worth. One faction is invested in the ideology of one-world globalism, an ideology that draws heavily from the Socialist/Communist dogma in that they are inclined to embrace the idea of the global village or the "its takes a village" philosophy of governmental authority. They champion government as a vehicle for change over the idea that rights exist independently from government. This ideology rebukes much of the libertarian and classically liberal philosophies of those who influenced our Framers and Founders to create the great American experiment. Another faction entrenches itself so thoroughly in the Laissez Faire segment of classical liberalism that they refuse to acknowledge there are many times when government involvement in societal affairs is beneficial, not only to the masses but also to the individual. And the largest group among the United States' citizenry has been swayed over the past several decades, through the promotion of multiculturalism and political correctness, to identify more with their genealogical "roots" and with the suggestion that they are more members of an overriding global community than members of a cohesive American culture, thus facilitating the Balkanization of American society. This, in part, results in a great number of Americans being not only less concerned with the preservation of our American heritage, but thoroughly apathetic toward the American governmental process. These three major groups identified, we are faced with the stark reality that 55.3% of our population is engaging in the governmental process, this percentage comprised almost evenly of those identifying with the active but opposing ideologies now battling this uniquely American culture war, while an alarming and potentially potent number ignore their civic responsibility of constitutional stewardship by being apathetic to the process altogether. In essence, all it takes to win a national election is to garner the support of a little over twenty-eight percent of those eligible to vote, as the majority of Americans stand hypnotized by a limited societal vision cultivated by the malady of civic apathy prevalent throughout the "Me Generation." It is a difficult thing for any nation to endure deep rooted and defined ideological divisions. Add to that the external threat of an aggressive and militant ideology in the form of radical Islamofascism and what presents is a "perfect storm" for an effective deterioration and/or cessation of our unique society, our American heritage and our constitutional form of government. What is desperately needed for our country to survive this unprecedented challenge, this "perfect storm," is an adequate understanding of the principles, ideologies and history that moved the Framers and our Founding Fathers to risk freedom, liberty, property and ultimately life, so that their dream of the great American experiment could come to fruition. We, the American people one and all, need to understand why they found so much worth in our nation's creation and why they valued this endeavor enough to risk dying for it. The only way to achieve this much needed infusion of ideological enlightenment is for each American to invest some time in the accurate, first-source, fact-based examination of not only the Charters of Freedom, but the principles and ideologies embraced by our Framers and Founders in the creation of these remarkable documents along with the history that brought them to their fates. We must acquaint ourselves, even if briefly, with the works that moved them to action, the philosophies of Locke, Hobbes, Burke and even Cicero and Aristotle. To exercise this very basic loyalty to our country is to move toward understanding the meaning behind the words of our Founding Documents. To understand the meaning behind the documents is to understand the worth of our nation. And understanding the worth of our nation allows us to value it, to want to defend it; it allows us to be uniquely American and proud to be so. In an era when so few can be so devastating to this country, the greatest hope for freedom and liberty in the world, it can be considered our duty to embrace this civic responsibility. Out of respect for all those who braved the creation of our nation and to honor all those who fought and died fighting for our continued freedoms we need to satisfy this very basic civic responsibility. There are no excuses for not doing so, regardless of your ideological bent, especially when our very survival is at stake. To refuse to do so can only be seen as stand against the principles on which country was founded. To refuse to do so is being unpatriotic and un-American. Contact Michael Travis at michaelmgr@gmail.com |
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HAS ANY POPULATION EVER BEEN LESS SUITED FOR STATEHOOD THAN THE PALESTINIANS?
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 19, 2007. |
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This was written by Jeff Jacoby and it appeared in the Jewish World Review
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The war between Fatah and Hamas was raging a few months ago when Palestinian authority leader Mahmoud Abbas addressed a Fatah rally in Ramallah. "The priority for me is preserving national unity and preventing internal fighting," he told the crowd on Jan. 11. "Shooting at your brother is forbidden." But Abbas made clear it was only intra-Palestinian bloodshed he opposed. Attacking Jews was still OK..... "We should put our internal fighting aside and raise our rifles only against the Israeli occupation," he said, according to a World Net Daily report. In a nod to his Arab rivals, he praised arch-terrorist Ahmed Yassin, the co-founder of Hamas who was killed by Israel in 2004. For good measure, he threw in some anti-Semitic boilerplate: "The sons of Israel are mentioned as those who are corrupting humanity on earth." Most media accounts of the Fatah rally mentioned only Abbas's "unity" remarks, leaving out the gamier stuff about raising rifles against the humanity-corrupters (AP headline: "Abbas calls for respect at Fatah rally"). In similar fashion, news reports have rarely pointed out that in the Gaza Strip, where the Fatah-Hamas street battles have taken place, the "occupation" ended in August 2005, when Israel razed 21 Jewish settlements and expelled every Jew from the territory. For all intents and purposes, there has been a sovereign Palestinian state in Gaza for the past 18 months. The anarchy and violence, the kidnappings, the myriad of armed gangs -- that is the authentic face of Palestinian statehood. Take a good look. "In the State of Palestine," writes columnist Caroline Glick in the Jan. 30 JWR, "two-year-olds are killed and no one cares. Children are woken up in the middle of the night and murdered in front of their parents. Worshipers in mosques are gunned down by terrorists who attend competing mosques. ... In the State of Palestine, women are stripped naked and forced to march in the streets to humiliate their husbands. Ambulances are stopped on the way to hospitals and the wounded are shot in cold blood." The wonder is not that the Palestinian Authority seethes with violence and instability; there are other places too where bloodshed is the daily fare. The wonder is not that the Palestinians, who receive copious amounts of international aid -- more than $1.2 billion last year from Western governments alone -- channel so much of their resources and energy into weapons and warfare. The wonder is that so many voices still push for a Palestinian state. But has any population ever been less suited for statehood than the Palestinians? From the terrorists they choose as leaders to the jihad promoted in their schools, their culture is drenched in violence and hatred. Each time the world has offered them sovereignty -- an offer that the Kurds or the Chechens or the Tibetans would leap at -- the Palestinians have opted instead for bloodshed and rejectionism. "What do you want more," a frustrated Shimon Peres once asked Yasser Arafat, "a Palestinian state or a Palestinian struggle?" Over and over, Palestinians have chosen the "struggle." The very essence of Palestinian national identity is a hunger for Israel's destruction. Both the Fatah and Hamas charters call for the obliteration of the Jewish state through bloodshed. A two-state solution -- Israel and Palestine living peacefully side-by-side -- is emphatically not what the Palestinians seek. No amount of Israeli concessions or American wheedling or Quartet cajoling is likely to change that. So why does the Bush administration continue to pretend otherwise? "There is simply no reason to avoid the subject of how we get to a Palestinian state," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice blithely asserted Feb. 2, even as the best reason to do so -- the Palestinians' unfitness for self-government -- was on display in Gaza's streets. Last week Abbas agreed to form a "unity" government with Hamas, making any prospect of peace with Israel more remote. Yet next week Rice will host a summit meeting with Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and there will be a fresh flood of empty words about peace and statehood. James Woolsey, who served as director of central intelligence under President Clinton, said recently that it would take "many decades" before Palestinian society is civilized enough for statehood. Even some Palestinians might agree. "Everyone here is disgusted by what's happening in the Gaza Strip," Shireen Atiyeh, 30, a Palestinian Authority government worker, told the Jerusalem Post. "We are telling the world that we don't deserve a state... Today I'm ashamed to say that I'm a Palestinian." When will it be time to consider statehood for Palestine? When it is led by people like her. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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RABBI MELAMED DENOUNCES ISRAEL'S ACADEMIC FIFTH COLUMN
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 19, 2007. |
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An interesting New Ally against the Academic Fifth Column in Israel One segment of the Israeli population is generally unaware of the mischief and dangers related to Israel's academic fifth column. namely, the Orthodox. By and large these folks do not take advanced university degrees, and when they do it is usually at Bar Ilan University, which is a relatively minor arena of Post-Zionist agitation. Over the weekend a major article was published that may signal a change in this. "Besheva" is a free weekly distributed mainly through synagogues over Shabbat in Israel, dealing partly with religious issues and partly with politics, in Hebrew only. It is nominally connected with the Israel National News (Arutz 7) web site but seems to be produced independently. This past weekend, May 17, it carried a full page article by Rabbi
Eliezer Melamed about Israeli universities. Rabbi Melamed is one of
the best known and most respected Rabbis among the Orthodox religious
Zionist movement. He is a respected "posek" or issuer of Rabbinic
rulings regarding religious questions (see
In the weekend column, part of his article was devoted to questions regarding college tuition and the ongoing current student strike in Israel, which has lasted now for about 2 months. Melamed denounced the strike and the strike leaders, and declared it unjust and immoral. But then he went on to write a broadside attack on the leftwing "Post-Zionist" faculty members at Israeli universities, who devote their energies to demonizing Israel and denouncing Israel's legitimacy. He notes that these are a particularly common plague in the Schools of Social Sciences and the Humanities. He writes (page 40): "We cannot support Israeli academia without reservation. Too many things going on there are not in accordance with our values. From the schools of social sciences and the humanities there are emerging numerous voices that abhor Jewish tradition and values and are the worst anti-Zionists, people who denounce Israel for almost every conceivable and imaginary evil. From out of Jerusalem shall Torah Go Forth, but from out of Israel Academia Monitor (www.israel-academia-monitor.com) is going the news about the mischief of Israel's academic fifth column, and it is reaching important new audiences! 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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il |
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STATE DEPT. GOAL; BILL CLINTON'S UNOBSERVANT OBSERVATION
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 19, 2007. |
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WHEN THE DICTATORSHIP CRACKS DOWN ON DISSIDENTS Headline: 'Syrian Arrests Signal Narrowing Freedoms.' Syria has done it again. After allowing critics of the regime latitude to agitate and organize, the government arrested a leading critic, and sentenced him to five years in prison. The crime was defaming the country. (Defamation of Syria, that's a good one!) Why the expensive (and harsh) means of signaling? Why not call in the leading critic and tell him he must stop, now, or else the regime will make an example of him? Perhaps such agitators don't get the message unless it is cruel. STATE DEPT. GOAL At a press briefing, the State Dept. representative said the US goal is to get Israel to see that it has a neighbor devoted to fighting terrorism, so that Israel would permit it sovereignty. The representative did not explain, and the State Dept. and President has not explained why a neighbor devoted for decades to terrorism deserves any consideration and at the expense of its victims. It never discussed the consequences of sovereignty if those Arabs retain terrorism ' sovereignty means independence to promote terrorism. It never explained how a culture dedicated exclusively to predation can be expected to reverse itself just as jihad is moving into high gear and high expectations. Why doesn't the State Dept. discuss those problems? I think that it is because to raise them is to show that its avowed goal has no merit nor sense. Its real goal probably is not to make peace or help the Arabs but stifle the Jews. Unfortunately for America, the State Dept. needs Israel's help in combating jihad, but instead helps the jihadists combat Israel. Few Americans realize how anti-American the State Dept. biases work out to be. When will an Israeli Prime Minister explain to Congress and on US television that the Arab-Israel conflict is jihad same as against the US, and that the State Dept. makes matters worse for both countries. Instead they come with undeserved praise and perpetuate the myth of US friendship for Israel. SAUDI TOURIST PLANS S. Arabia receives many pilgrims but few tourists. A tourism program might feature: (1) Madrassas, where hatred is engendered; (2) Wife-beatings, as an example for men; (3) Proper apparel for proper women; (4) Amputation as punishment; and (5) Arab hospitality to persuade Westerners how nice they are. ON SYMPATHY FOR MUSLIMS Muslims have taken refuge in the West. Most Muslim mosques, schools, and rallies, however, emphasize hatred of the West and sympathy for jihadist attacks on it. The West is reluctant to respond by warfare to a movement that is subversive internally and belligerent externally. Whatever mere police action the West takes in self-defense, Muslim representatives depict as Islamophobic. They exploit Western tolerance and fear of offending the proponents of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism can work only with mature and tolerant cultures. Islam has not evolved beyond its primitive origins of intolerance, violence, repression of speech and of women, and deceit about it and in its tactics. P.A. Muslim society probably is devoted more to jihad than any other Muslim society. The whole people give priority to jihad over normal governance. The whole culture is devoted to indoctrination in it. All that the people resent about it is the resulting random violence by unrestrained thugs. They want their dictators to make the streets safe. Preoccupation with jihad has impoverished the people but not altered their priority. Many would like to move to some more prosperous country, but unfortunately they would bring in their destructive values. If the West continues offering 'humanitarian' aid to the P.A., then the Muslims there can continue to war on innocent people and eat their pita, too. The western Palestinian Arabs are aggressors driven by bigotry and lacking scruples or mercy. In all the world, they deserve the least sympathy. Unfortunately, many well-meaning Westerners, who don't know Islamic history or Muslim values pity 'the poor Palestinians' and would support their victory. Destroy Israel, and those Westerners are next. It is a sad reflection upon Western education that sympathizers with the Palestinian Arabs can't differentiate between violators and victims. Many Western Christians fail to realize that those Arabs and Muslims generally persecute Christians. MUSING ON THE STATE OF W. EUROPEAN CHRISTIANITY On my way to visit the Cloisters in Manhattan, I briefly heard rap music. It exhorted to narcotics and sex. At the museum, I was impressed by Christianity's lengthy tenure and the evolution of its rules and outlook. Europeans are abandoning that religion in favor of a degrading hedonism, and are letting themselves slide under the feet of the Muslim religion that emphasizes the very elements that the Europeans abhor and surpass. 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@verizon.net |
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ISRAEL AND ITS MEMBERSHIP IN THE OECD
Posted by Kaustav Chakrabarti, May 19, 2007. |
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Israel's membership in the OECD comes as a welcome step in the organization's recognition of the Jewish state's economic viability. The recognition, in fact, had been long overdue. To most of the international community, and to the economic pundits of our times, Israel has been a subsidized state, depending for the most part, on American aid. There was no such thing as an independent Israeli economy in their mental horizons. This has been a biased notion owing to several interplaying factors, namely: anti-Semitism, leftism, Arab propaganda and so on and so forth. Israel has long been touted as a propped up state by Western powers, militarily and economically. Israel has been derisively described as the "fifty first state" of the US. But if we take a hard look, we shall find that all such comments are guided by prejudice rather than by facts. The following statistical data would suffice to put Israel on the world economic map: IMF projects a 4.8% GDP growth for 2007, one of the highest in the industrialized world, trailing Hong Kong and Singapore at 5.5% and Ireland's 5%, ahead of So. Korea's 4.4%, UK's 2.3%, Japan's 2.3%, US' 2.2% and Germany's 1.8%. Inflation is projected to be at 0.1% deflation (!), while the average industrialized countries' average is 1.8%. Unemployment is projected to decrease to 7.5% from 9% in 2005 and 8.4% in 2006, still one of the highest among industrialized countries, trailing Germany, France, Belgium, Spain and Greece (Globes, April 11). Way back in 1995, the IMF had taken Israel off the list of developing countries. BANK OF ISRAEL ON 2006 INDICATORS: GDP growth -- 5.1%, compared with 3.1% in the EEC and 3.3% in the US. GDP per capita rose by 3.3%, compared with 2.3% in the US and EEC. GDP per capita -- $19,900 ($18,700 in 2005, $18,000 in 2004, $17,200 in 2003, $16,600 in 2002 and $19,200 in 2000 before the burst of "The NASDAQ Bubble"), compared with $34,000 in the EEC and $43,000 in the US. Inflation -- minus 0.1%, compared with 2.1% in the US and 2.3% in the EEC. Unemployment -- 7.7% (trending downward), compared with 7.4% and 4.6% in the EEC and the US. Public Debt -- trending downward to 88% of GDP, compared with 73% and 61% in the EEC and the US. $4.4BN all-time record sales by ISRAEL's DEFENSE INDUSTRIES, 75% to foreign markets. Previous record was achieved in 2002 -- $4BN (Jerusalem Post, Jan. 2, 2007). Israel happens to be the fourth largest arms manufacturer in the world. (Courtesy: Sanda Abramovici Lam) If the above-mentioned data are any indicator, then Israel could be said to have out-performed the world's leading economies. This has actually happened in spite of all adversities that the Jewish State has had to face in the last 60 years of its existence. Moreover, Israel is the only country in the Middle East with minimal or no oil reserves. So unlike the oil-based economies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran or Oman with their huge petro-dollar reserves, Israel had to depend mostly on its ingenious and enterprising population for maintaining a sustainable economic growth. In this respect brainpower has definitely stolen a match over oil power. Another interesting thing about the Israeli economy is that it
produces not only for feeding and sustaining its population, but also
gives substantial aid to developing countries in Asia, Africa and
Latin America in terms of financial aid and technical assistance. With
this end in view was born the MASHAV, which provides vocational skills
to people from developing countries. In terms of providing
humanitarian assistance, Israel has done a great job. From soil
cultivation programs in Kenya to computer education in Ethiopia, from
medical programs in Jordan to seminars on cattle husbandry in India,
Israel has helped alleviate hunger, disease and poverty in many
developing countries More than 140 countries have benefited from Israel's international humanitarian aid. Thus it is evident that Israel's economic performance has not only enabled its citizens to lead a happy and prosperous existence, but has also provided healing touch to most of the world. This has happened despite the world taking an opposite, even hostile stand, on issues related to Israel. This deep humanitarian commitment surely credits Israel to have a place in world organizations, including the prestigious OECD. Contact Kaustav Chakrabarti at kaustav12000@yahoo.co.in |
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THE MASTER POLITICIAN AND US
Posted by Paul Lademain, May 18, 2007. |
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This article was written by Caroline Glick and was published yesterday
in the Jerusalem Post
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Monday, The New York Times reported that in just a few weeks, Iran will be capable of building nuclear bombs. The Times report, which was largely substantiated by the Chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency Muhammad el-Baradei, means that in just a matter of months, Israel is liable to find itself in danger of being wiped off the map. This grave development was barely noted by the Israeli media. They were busy with other matters. There was the State Cup soccer championship this week. And that sudden rainstorm in Jerusalem that forced the government to cancel the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the capital's liberation was a very big deal. Then, of course there is the Palestinian onslaught against southern Israel which has turned Sderot into a ghost town. But the primary reason that the Israeli media are ignoring the rapidly gathering mushroom cloud is because Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is a master politician. Two weeks after the Winograd Committee's interim report found Olmert responsible for Israel's defeat at the hands of Iran's army in Lebanon last summer, almost no one seems to remember there was a report. Olmert has removed his incompetence from the pubic agenda. With no support from any quarter of the country, Olmert clings to power through his successful use of the political art of distraction. His response to the public outcry that the Winograd Committee's report unleashed was to change the subject. Rather than contend with the calls for his resignation, Olmert turned his guns on his deputy, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. After he successfully outmaneuvered his not terribly bright and politically unsavvy colleague, the media completely forgot about the issue of his incompetence to lead and placed their spotlights on Livni's pathetic political implosion. Last week, Olmert used the Supreme Court-ordered publication of his testimony before the Winograd Committee as an opportunity to attack the panel that he himself appointed. And again, rather than report on the dangers besetting Israel as a result of Olmert's incompetence, the media gave extensive coverage to Olmert's request to reappear before the committee. In his most recent gambit, this week Olmert turned his guns on State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss. As UN nuclear inspectors discovered Sunday that Iran is currently operating 1,300 centrifuges at its nuclear facility at Natanz, Olmert -- the seasoned attorney - had his personal attorneys send a 58-page letter to Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz requesting that he open a criminal probe against Lindenstrauss. From the outset, Olmert and his lawyers knew that Mazuz would reject their request to investigate the comptroller for his investigation of Olmert's below market price purchase of his luxury home in Jerusalem. But that was beside the point. As far as they were concerned, the maneuver was an out and out success. The prime minister of Israel achieved his goal: for two days, his fight with Lindenstrauss and not his unfitness to lead the country was the story of the day. There is little correlation between Olmert's failure as a national leader and his success as a party politician. Two weeks after 150,000 people crowded into Rabin Square in Tel Aviv demanding his resignation for his failed leadership during last summer's war, the protest is all but forgotten and Olmert is sitting pretty. His governing coalition, and particularly his partnership with Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu, is rock solid. The consequences of the disparity between his professional and political capabilities couldn't be worse for the country. Olmert, the major league politician, sits securely on his perch while Olmert, the little league leader, is plunging us into a new war, which like the last one, he is incapable of winning. The decision to deploy a few tanks in northern Gaza on Thursday, like the decision to send a few planes to bomb a few targets over Gaza, is not part of an overall strategy aimed at defending southern Israel from rocket and mortar fire. Olmert, like his friend former prime minister Ehud Barak at the start of the Palestinian terror war seven years ago, is cynically exploiting the IDF. Rather than give the military an order to defeat our enemies, Olmert, like Barak before him, has ordered the IDF to perform a sound and light show for the public which demands that the government defend it. Olmert's refusal to order a serious strike in Gaza has brought about the effective abrogation of Israeli sovereignty over Sderot and the Western Negev. It is impossible to speak of Israel as a properly functioning, sovereign state when its citizens are forced to flee their homes because their government refuses to protect their lives and property. And Sderot is not alone. Just as the opponents of the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza warned, Israel's absence from the area enabled Gaza's transformation into a new nexus of global jihad. As a result of the incompetence and paralysis of the government in contending with this foreseen development, the fate of Sderot will soon become the fate of Ashkelon and Kiryat Gat. Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah, al-Qaida, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the Popular Resistance Committees and their friends are not all sitting in Gaza, armed to the teeth with anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and tons of explosives just to kill one another. For nearly two years, the open border between Gaza and Egypt has enabled terrorists and their weaponry to flood Gaza. The increased capacity has placed an additional 200,000 Israeli citizens within range of their rockets and missiles. The horrific images of the mothers and fathers of Sderot hiding beneath their cars with their children during rocket barrages, and jumping through the windows of buses bound for the relative safety of Beersheba -- as if missing the bus would mean certain death -- and then the eerie silence as a town is Israel is abandoned are impossible to abide. So too, the foreseeable prospect that these images will soon plague Ashkelon and Kiryat Gat bespeak an unbearable future. But these are small potatoes when compared to the danger of national annihilation approaching us from Iran's nuclear installations. While Olmert hunkers down in his office and alternatively wrecks our relations with the US; dispenses empty promises to secure the South and rebuild the North; blames everyone and anyone for his personal failures; and speaks of "the peace process" as Palestinian society self-destructs, Iran is sprinting to the doorway of the Nuclear Club. And with the government of Israel in the hands of knaves, no one is placing obstacles in Iran's path as it acquires the means to annihilate the Jewish state. As the Times reported, when UN nuclear inspectors visited the Natanz nuclear facility on Sunday, they saw 1,300 centrifuges buzzing along, producing nuclear fuel. Another 300 are poised to begin operating next week and another 300 centrifuges are now under construction. The diplomatic source who spoke to the Times said that if it maintains its current pace, Iran will be operating 3,000 centrifuges by next month and 8,000 by the end of the year. With just 3,000 centrifuges in operation, Iran will be capable of enriching sufficient bomb-grade uranium to produce one atomic bomb per year. Daily, the Iranians and their Hizbullah and Palestinian proxies threaten that if Iran's nuclear installations are attacked, they will retaliate by attacking Israel with tens of thousands of rockets and missiles. There is no doubt that this threat should be taken seriously. But what will become of Israel if we do not attack Iran's nuclear installations? Can anyone believe that the same Olmert who was incapable of defending northern Israel from Hizbullah last summer, and who today is incapable of defending southern Israel from the Palestinians, will be able to defend central Israel from a nuclear-armed Iran? Olmert tells us that we have nothing to worry about because the Americans will deal with the Iranians for us. But the US's actual policies towards the ayatollahs tell a different tale. This week, the Americans reacted with indifference to Iran's swift nuclear progress. R. Nicholas Burns, the Undersecretary of State for Policy who directs US policy towards Iran, told the Times that the newest revelations from Natanz will not affect American policy. "We're proceeding under the assumption that there is still time for diplomacy to work," Burns said, adding that if the Iranians maintain their refusal to suspend their uranium enrichment activities, "We will move ahead toward a third set of sanctions." And while Burns declared the US's resolve to impose a third set of sanctions on Iran after the first two failed completely to affect Iran's behavior, on Wednesday, the State Department announced that it would begin direct negotiations with the Iranians on May 28. The only voices in Washington these days calling for military action against Iran's nuclear facilities belong to people, like former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, who were forced from their positions after the Democratic victory in last November's Congressional elections. And this brings us back to Israel -- and to the prime minister who is unfit for his position but uses his stunning political acumen to cling to office. Two weeks after the Winograd Committee's report, and 10 months after the last war, it is clear that Olmert will take neither his own incompetence nor the public's rejection of his leadership into consideration. He will not resign from his position even if 300,000 people demonstrate in Kikar Rabin. He will not resign from office even if Ashkelon's 90,000 residents are forced to flee just as Sderot's 20,000 residents are fleeing today. He will not quit even if Iran conducts a nuclear test. Rather than go home, he will pick a fight with Livni over how best to divide Jerusalem or surrender Hebron, or with Mazuz over his right to give millions of shekels of government subsidies to industrialists who are represented by his former law partner. Given this most disturbing reality, one must conclude that public and political pressure for Olmert to resign is futile. He doesn't care. Rather than direct our attention at Olmert, Israelis must turn our attention to his enablers. Yisrael Beiteinu head and Minister of Non-Existent Strategy Avigdor Lieberman and his buddy, Shas leader and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Something or Other Eli Yishai, as well as Shas's religious leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef should become the objects of public pressure. They must be made to understand that if they desire a political future of any kind, they must abandon Olmert and allow the nation to elect a new government. The enormous gap between the threats that Israel faces and the agenda of the Israeli government has become a threat to our national security. The only way to turn the tide is to hold new elections. Contact Paul Lademain at lademain@verizon.net |
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WORLD BANK REPORT ON PALESTINIANS BASED ON FALSE NGO REPORTS AND ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS
Posted by NGO Monitor, May 18, 2007. |
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This report was published May 16, 2007 on the NGO Monitor website
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Summary: On May 9, 2007, the World Bank published a report entitled "Movement and Access Restrictions in the West Bank: Uncertainty and Inefficiency in the Palestinian Economy." As the following analysis demonstrates, the claims made by the so-called "technical team" of the World Bank's report lack credibility, and are based entirely on the publications of a variety of highly politicized groups and NGOs, including B'Tselem, Peace Now, HaMoked, Bimkom, Amnesty International, and UN OCHA. Furthermore, this report only focuses on one dimension of the complex issues that are involved. The authors briefly note that "Israel had legitimate reasons to take steps to protect its citizens from violence", but then dismiss the implications of this central point. As a result, the allegations and analysis contained in this report cannot reliably be used by policy makers attempting to deal with the challenges posed by the combination of ongoing Palestinian violence and economic crisis. In addition, this report is inconsistent with the World Bank's apolitical humanitarian mission, and reflects negatively on this institution. This report purporting to examine economic conditions of Palestinian in the West Bank is composed entirely of claims and allegations from various other sources, primarily politicized NGOs and OCHA (the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), with the addition of some newspaper reports and partial quotes from Israeli government documents. This report contains no original research by the World Bank. Of the 71 footnotes, 22 cite B'tselem claims; 6 are based on Peace Now's political publications; with many others based on Hamoked, OCHA, Yesh Din, Bimkom, and Amnesty International. In addition, the journalistic publications cited in this report are themselves based on the allegations made by these NGOs and by OCHA. These organizations all have a long history of one-sided and inaccurate reporting, reflecting political and ideological bias. B'Tselem and Hamoked, which are repeatedly cited in the World Bank publication, have issued a number of reports with allegations that were shown to be invalid. For example, the jointly published report of May 6, 2007, entitled "Utterly forbidden: The Torture and Ill-Treatment of Palestinian Detainees" used misleading methodology and had no verifiable sources. As shown in a detailed rebuttal published by the Israeli Ministry of Justice, the B'Tselem/HaMoked report is "fraught with mistakes, groundless claims, and inaccuracies." The MOJ notes that the report refers to a group which is named in the report as 'ordinary' detainees, concerning interogatees which were arrested between 13-17 of July 2005 when on the day of July 12, 2005, there was a terrorist attack in the city of Netanya, that caused the death of five people and the injury of many others ... as a result of the interrogations, the perpetrators of the attack ... were exposed. In addition, more terrorist units were exposed and weapons that were to be put to use in future terrorist attacks were handed over. Thus, in basing its reports entirely on the claims of these NGOs, the World Bank has also produced a report that lacks credibility. One of many examples of the faulty methodology and lack of credibility in this World Bank report can be seen in Section 27 (pp.9-10) which asserts claims: "These findings are reinforced by another recent study funded by the New Israel Fund and the British Embassy in Tel Aviv and conducted by the Israeli organization, Bimkom... " However, the World Bank's "technical team" did not directly cite and may not have read this report. Instead, the quote is taken from a newspaper article (The Independent -UK) which reflected a politically biased presentation. The Bimkom report makes the ideological allegation that the separation barrier is "focused almost exclusively on the desire to maintain the fabric of life of Israeli settlers," which is not a fact and source based analysis. In addition to such politicized NGOs, the World Bank publication also relies heavily on OCHA (the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) for many of its allegations. However, an examination of OCHA staff and reports suggest that this organization is also highly politicized and its reports lack credibility. For example, the World Bank report repeats OCHA's claim that there are 546 "non-fixed Israeli barriers in the West Bank." In contrast, according to Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh, the actual number is far less. "The World Bank report uses data of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA], which is inclined to count every opening in the separation fence, checkpoints on the Green Line, and every two rocks on the road as roadblocks in the West Bank." (Avi Issacharoff "Sneh: World Bank report slamming Israel is one-sided", Haaretz, 13 May 2007.) OCHA's biases and inherent lack of credibility reflect those of its employees, including Allegra Pacheco, who heads the Information and Advocacy unit at the UNOCHA in Jerusalem. Before taking this position, Ms. Pacheco was deeply involved in radical anti-Israel campaigning, and this ideology and core bias is reflected in OCHA's publications, including ReliefWeb, which helps give additional publicity to claims by politicized NGOs, (as documented by NGO Monitor). Many of Pacheco's speeches and writings including oped articles use the rhetoric of demonization to refer to Israel, such as "apartheid", "collective punishment", etc., while blatantly erasing the context of Palestinian terror. In September 2000, Pacheco addressed a pro-Palestinian political rally in Washington DC, whose official slogan was "No Return = No Peace" and urged the dismantling of the Jewish state. Pacheco called for the abolition of Israel, declaring "The solution is Awda, complete and unrestricted return to Palestine, all of it from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. [1] The Israeli political organization known as "Peace Now" (and funded by various European governments and other donors) is another source used by the World Bank. In October 2006, this NGO published "Breaking the Law -- One Violation Leads to Another," falsely asserting that "a large proportion of the settlements built on the West Bank are built on privately owned Palestinian land." As initially pointed out by media accountability organization CAMERA, this report is based not on research regarding land ownership, but relies only on Palestinian claims to such rights. Many of the claims, such as those made by the Jahalin Bedouin on Ma'ale Adumim, were examined and rejected by Israeli courts long ago. As a result, Peace Now's allegation that Ma'ale Adumim sits on 86.4% Palestine land stands in stark contrast to the revised information indicating that only 0.54% of the land is Palestinian. Peace Now admitted these core errors, but also claimed credit for the resulting "media whirlwind". Similarly, in repeating such false reports, officials at the World Bank are also primarily seeking to create publicity, at the expense of credibility. In summary, this report published by the World Bank is a political document which is based entirely on claims and allegations published by NGOs and other groups that lack credibility. The allegations and analysis provided by the World Bank cannot reliably be used by policy makers attempting to deal with the challenges posed by the combination of ongoing Palestinian violence and economic crisis. In addition, this report is inconsistent with the World Bank's apolitical humanitarian mission, and reflects negatively on this institution. End Note: The authors of this report are identified only in terms of a "World Bank Technical Team", the content is highly political, reflecting references to events, negotiations and agreements going back to 1949. Much of this content is incomplete and/or misleading, reflecting the absence of detailed knowledge or deliberate bias on the part of the members of this "technical team". For example, this report cites various agreements out of context, and many of the details are inaccurate. The so-called "Oslo Accords" are in fact a series of agreements beginning with the 1993 Declaration of Principles and followed by a series of interim documents which were predicated on negotiations towards a permanent status agreement and a cessation of violence and incitement by the Palestinians, none of which were implemented. Similarly, the terms of the November 2005 "Agreement on Movement and Access" were violated within a few days of the signing ceremony. The references to the 2003 "Mitchell report" ("Report of the Sharm el-Sheikh Fact Finding Committee") and the "Road Map" proposals remove both the context of the ongoing mass terror attacks and the failure of the Palestinian side to implement any of its security obligations. Footnotes: 1. From al-Majdal, (quarterly magazine of the BADIL Resource
Center), September 2000, and cited in
The NGO Monitor organization (www.ngo-monitor.org) promotes
critical debate and accountability of human rights NGOs in the Arab
Israeli Conflict. Contact the NGO Monitor by email at
mail@ngo.monitor.org. Their website address is |
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HAMAS INCREASING TERROR CAPABILITIES; AL QAEDA JOINING FRAY
Posted by UCI, May 18, 2007. |
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This was written by Hana Levi Julian and it appeared Arutz Sheva (www.IsraelNationalNews.com). |
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(IsraelNN.com) The Hamas terror organization has been increasing the number and efficiency of attacks on Israel, while engaged in its militia war with rival PA terror faction Fatah. New reports suggest that Hamas' capabilities are improving, particularly with the influence and assistance of Al Qaeda. IDF Maj.-Gen. Giora Eiland said in an interview with Israel Radio on Friday that the Gaza terrorist group's military capability and the range of its rockets are improving. He also expressed doubt that Fatah could prevail in the militia war against Hamas for control of the government. "Gaza is a clear and hostile Hamas state in every sense of the term," Eiland said. "The Palestinian Authority and [PA Chairman Mahmoud] Abbas are pathetic and irrelevant," he added. Al Qaeda's Fingerprints Increasing in Gaza A new report indicates that Al Qaeda has begun active efforts to strengthen the Hamas terror organization in the battle for control of the Palestinian Authority. As the Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to weaken, the Al Qaeda terrorist network has strengthened ties with Hamas, according to a report written by Army reserve Lt. Col. Jonathan HaLevi for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Following the expulsion of Jewish residents from the Gaza area and the destruction of their communities, Al Qaeda already had begun to fill the vacuum in security, HaLevi wrote. Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas last year said, "We have signs of the presence of Al Qaeda in Gaza and the West Bank." Further evidence of the al Qaeda presence was produced earlier this month when the terrorist group Army of Islam, identified with Al Qaeda, took responsibility for the March kidnapping of British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) reporter Alan Johnston, whose whereabouts and condition are unknown. The same group teamed up with two Hamas-sponsored terror groups to carry out last year's abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in a cross-border attack which killed two other soldiers and wounded a third. "Even external appearances show Al Qaeda's growing influence as members of its affiliate movements in the Gaza Strip will often wear the same black head covering that was a trademark of the late Al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi," noted HaLevi. "All the evidence indicates that rather than challenge Al Qaeda's bid to expand its presence in the Gaza Strip, Hamas prefers to collaborate with these new militant groups," he added. Fatah May Pay the Price for Al Qaeda Presence The Fatah faction led by the PA chairman has been warring with Hamas for control of the government for more than a year. Despite numerous efforts by local and international leaders to end the internecine clashes between the two factions, the fight has continued. Fresh shootouts and kidnappings resumed in Gaza a week ago; two broken ceasefires attempts, 44 dead civilians and terrorists and more than a hundred other wounded have not yet stemmed the flow of blood in the streets. For its part, Fatah has spent the past year cultivating cozy relations with Jordan and the United States, which pledged millions of dollars and munitions to help shore up the PA Chairman's personal security force. Fatah, which is seen by most western nations as a moderate force in the terrorist-led PA government, was promised -- and received -- thousands of weapons from Jordan in a deal approved by the Olmert government. Hamas has similarly boosted its weapons cache, by smuggling through elaborate tunnels across the Egyptian border. At the moment, Fatah and Hamas guns are being aimed at each other. But longer-range weapons have been reserved for use against Israel. Hamas Receiving Upgraded Weapons and Training Hamas has worked hard with other groups to develop and refine the Kassam rockets they use in their attacks on the western Negev, focusing especially on improving their aiming capability and range. The short-range Kassam rockets can be pointed in a general direction, but are incapable of pinpoint targeting. Improvements in the past year have created what is considered by weapons experts to have been the final product in the Kassam line, a rocket which they say cannot be refined further. Intelligence reports indicate that Hamas terrorists this year acquired Russian-made 22 kilometer-range Grad missiles, more versatile and lethal than the primitive, short-range Kassams. In addition, Hamas operatives have been bolstered by advance terror training programs, financial support and gifts of Katyusha rockets from the Iranian-backed Hizbullah terrorists in Lebanon. Hizbullah used several different Iranian and Syrian-made missiles against Israel in last summer's Second Lebanon War; most were short and medium-range Katyushas. According to one military source that requested anonymity, PA terrorists used Katyushas in three attacks within the past year, reaching the outskirts of Ashkelon each time. A number of strategic installations exist in the Mediterranean coastal city, making it an inviting target. Police said Friday they are preparing for the possibility that long-range rockets may be fired at Ashkelon. Regardless of who received guns and from where, at the end, a Hamas official commented to a World Net Daily reporter, the weapons will eventually all be distributed among the other terrorist groups anyway, and all will ultimately be pointed at Israel. Al Qaeda Urged Hamas to Escalate Against Israel While the two factions continue their renewed militia war, the Hamas organization simultaneously launched an intensive attack against the Jewish State on Tuesday, aiming at communities in the western Negev. Sderot, closest to the border, has taken the brunt of the rocket fire, although other communities have been attacked, including the large coastal city of Ashkelon. The attacks have come less than a month after a senior member of Al Qaeda called on Hamas to show a little more energy in its war against Israel. In a video that appeared on Al Qaeda's website, Abu Yaha al Libi asked Hamas, "Where is the revenge? Where are the bombs? Where is the fire?" The senior Al Qaeda terrorist urged Hamas to step up its attacks. "Your loyalty will be measured only through your commitment to the path of Jihad," chided al Libi. 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!" |
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POLL OF ISRAELI JEWS FROM MARCH 2007: 58% OPPOSE "LAND FOR PEACE"
Posted by Barbara Sommer, May 18, 2007. |
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This comes from Dr. Aaron Lerner of IMRA and was reported in Yediot Ahronot 18 May 2007. Contact Dr. Lerner by email at imra@netvision.net.il or go to his website: http://www.imra.org.il |
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The Results This was a telephone poll of a representative sample of 709 adult Israeli Jews carried out by INSS (previously the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies) in the month of March, 2007. Statistical error +/- 3.7 percentage points. Is it possible to reach peace with the Palestinians?
Do you support the :land for peace" formula?
Do you support the evacuation of settlements within the framework of a
unilateral withdrawal?
Who won the Second Lebanon War?
Do you expect another war in the next three years?
What are the real goals of the Palestinians?
Do you count on the IDF?
Is the Government capable to make the right decisions on security matters?
Contact Barbara Sommer at sommer_1_98@yahoo.com |
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RICE AND ISRAEL PURSUING SURRENDER; JIHADIST PRETENSE OF PEACEMAKING
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 182007. |
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Sec. Rice bars US commanders in Iraq from mentioning that Iran and Syria help the war against the US, because she is seeking to surrender Iraq to Iran and Syria. She opposes helping dissidents overthrow the Iranian regime or bombing its nuclear factories. Her only policy is diplomacy. She offers money to N. Korea but lets it keep nuclear arms. The US continues to arm P.A. terrorists and lower Israel's defenses. Rice supports a Somalia coalition that includes a party backed by al-Qaeda. Representing the appeasement-minded Establishment, Rice won control of foreign policy over Pres. Bush, who represents the tough neo-conservatives. She gained ground when Israel, which could have showed its value as an ally of the US, by defeating Hizbullah, didn't try to. (N. Korea proliferates nuclear arms development. It must be taken down, if possible. Diplomacy without military backup is useless against evil regimes. Why didn't Pres. Bush replace Rice? She courts disaster.) The appointment of a commission to investigate Israel's wartime performance suspended protests needed to force the incompetent regime to resign. The commission didn't tell the public anything new. It blames an ideology of complacency, but failed to blame the cause of complacency, the leftist ideology of appeasement that denies Israel has enemies. Thus the Chief of Staff proposed not victory but fending off Hizbullah until international forces would separate them; Foreign Min. Livni set that policy into motion. It legitimized Hizbullah and protected its rearmament from IDF interference (and makes likely another war). The report falsely credits that policy with improving Israel's position. If Israel improved its position, then the war and its strategy were not mismanaged, contrary to the report's other findings. The report placed the blame on three officials, and not on the Establishment they represented and that endorsed them. That leaves the Establishment free to replace those officials with others of the same mentality. Shimon Peres is seeking to become the country's leader in appeasement, again. (So is Min. Livni.) The Winograd Report ignored the 'fact that the Second Lebanon War was a war of ideas no less than a war on the battlefield. Last summer Israel had the opportunity to expose the truth about the nature of the war being fought against it. It had the opportunity to assert itself as a vital ally of the US. It had the chance to defeat the leftist narrative of peace which claims that there is no difference between the IDF and the terror forces attacking Israeli society and so there is no reason to seek to defeat them; and which claims that the war against Israel is not connected to the global jihad (Caroline Glick, IMRA, 5/5). HIGHER EDUCATION DIFFICULTIES IN GAZA A journal of higher education lamented the woes of college students in Gaza. They can't easily study in Judea-Samaria. Either courses are not available in Gaza or they take them by TV hookup to Judea-Samaria. They couldn't get to colleges in Israel, either, until the Supreme Court overruled the government. Some students don't even attend college, because they are afraid that they will be stopped at a checkpoint and arrested. Oh the 'poor Palestinians!' And it's all Israel's fault, the tone implies, because Israel has restrictions. IMRA notes that the Gaza Arabs should direct their frustrations at their own government, whose terrorism requires those restrictions (5/7). In other words, the article is a false sob story, propaganda against Israel. The restrictions are due to terrorism that the P.A. foments especially among youths. Don't pity lesser access to colleges ' P.A. colleges are used to recruit terrorists. But there is more. The article failed to note that it was the former Israeli administration of the Territories that built the colleges ' Jordanian, Egyptian, British, and Turkish rulers didn't. Then the Arabs received autonomy and increased their population, without building more colleges. Instead, they discouraged business growth, embezzled from their budget, and diverted more than half of it to jihad. And then they want the country against which they are making jihad to provide college opportunities for youth that make war on it? Israel's Supreme Court apparently thinks that is a fine idea. That Court overturns many security measures, as it helps in the effort to turn Israel from being a Jewish state protecting its people into a state for its Arabs to despoil the Jews. When will the Jews clean out that Court, curb its power, and help turn Israel into a real democracy instead of a make-believe one? JIHADIST PRETENSE OF PEACEMAKING Abbas' forces sealed up an arms smuggling tunnel, amid US applause. The US touted that action as evidence that the P.A. will meet the benchmarks set by the US to lead to final status negotiations. Dr. Aaron Lerner calls this a photo-opportunity instead of 'destroying '¦training camps, specifically identified fortifications, etc.. Require also closing down the rocket factories, and confiscation of rockets, weapons, explosives, etc. and transfer of the contraband over for removal/destruction.' The huge quantities of munitions invite numerical goals (5/7). Instead, the US brings arms in! That tunnel could be unsealed. Abbas' TV promote suicide bombing. The US always treats P.A. fakery as positive. 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@verizon.net |
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CONSTANT TERROR IN SDEROT
Posted by Michael Travis, May 17, 2007. |
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This essay was written by Masha Rifkin and it appeared today in the Jerusalem Post. Cornell University junior Masha Rifkin of Newton, Massachusetts, is a volunteer at the Mishol social work office in Sderot. |
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The first Tzeva Adom (Color Red) Kassam rocket warning siren went off while I was across the street from my office, using a friend's computer on the fourth floor. As usual, we stepped into the corridor -- the safest place in the apartment building -- and waited. I counted: 15, 14, 13... I had gotten to 12 when I heard the screams. It was a type of scream I couldn't recognize, half laughter, half terror, complete madness: 11, 10... it hit. A block away at most. Everyone else raced outside; it wasn't until 30 seconds later -- when I woke from my daze -- that I realized the screaming hadn't stopped. I was about to join everyone outside when, once more, Tzeva Adom: 15, 14... I had barely reached 13 when it crashed, shaking my entire body -- half a block away. My phone rang: It was my boss, Natasha, telling me to immediately come back to the office, as the fourth floor of any building was not safe. My roommate in Tel Aviv, Jackie, was with me for the day, curious about my work in Sderot, and we ran back across the street to my office, as quickly as we could. Natasha looked us over, then asked if we had heard the scream. She said a young mother was pushing her child in a stroller when the first siren went off. She should have had enough time to pick up her son and rush into a nearby basement. Instead, she knocked the stroller over, child inside, and fell to the ground -- screaming. She didn't stop until Natasha and others carried her and her child to a neighbor's apartment. What do you picture when you read about Sderot's "anxiety victims?" It's this woman, convulsing, flailing. It's her inability to think rationally -- to protect her child. She was only able to collapse, beating the ground. Natasha, Jackie and I sat in the social work office, trying to work. That's what you do in Sderot. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. We didn't get much done as every few minutes we received phone calls from hysterical parents. It was 7 p.m., parents were still at work and their children alone at home. All I could hear was Natasha screaming on the phone: "Calm down... calm down. listen to me, breathe! I won't talk to you until you breathe. Listen, your children are fine. No, I don't know why they're not picking up the phone. They probably ran downstairs. I said calm down." Then Purim Yaakobov walked in; I will be taking her son to a summer camp in the States in June, and we had set this meeting last week. She had walked amid the Kassams to keep the meeting. Yaakobov was still dressed in black, mourning her husband, who was killed by a Kassam six months ago. She lowered herself slowly onto a chair, her face absolutely white. She was reliving her husband's death. She took my hands and, tears rolling down her cheeks, pleaded, "Please, I have nothing. I have no one. My sons are everything. Promise me he will be happy. I need to hear it from you, please, they are all I have." Jackie -- experiencing her first Kassams -- threw her arms around her. Yaakobov left the office, and then... Tzeva Adom. We ran into the corridor; there were many of us now, as the student volunteers were holding a meeting. I tried to count down from 15 again, but was interrupted by a student. She was laughing: "Hamas and Fatah finally made up, and in celebration, they're firing a nice salute to us!" she said. We all burst out into fits of painful laughter... Boom. The laughter stopped, and someone said what was on all of our minds: "That one was really close." Again I heard screaming; I looked around and realized that Natasha was no longer there. Suddenly I heard her voice, "Masha, water! Hurry!" I ran outside and found a circle of women, Natasha at the center, trying to comfort a young girl. Hyperventilating, choking on her tears, yelling for her mother, over and over again. Another "anxiety victim." Natasha quickly poured cold water on the girls face, and embraced her. The girl clawed Natasha's back and shoulders, leaving deep scratches. Eventually her breathing returned to normal, when it came again: Tzeva adom, tzeva adom. The girl fell to the ground screaming, "No, no, no, no, no!" As I write this, Kassams are hitting Sderot. Children are screaming, mothers are collapsing in despair, and doctors are pulling shrapnel out of the bodies of Jews.
Contact Michael Travis at michaelmgr@gmail.com
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ISRAEL COMMISSION WAS RIGHT: OLMERT BOTCHED It
Posted by Rabbi Aryeh Spero, May 17, 2007. |
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A recently released study by an Israeli Commission finds, among other things, that Ehud Olmert acted indecisively during the recent war in Lebanon. Olmert, Israel's weak-minded and liberal Prime Minister, stood in the way of his army winning a decisive victory over the Hezbollah terrorist group. Let this be a lesson for us here in America. Instead of perceiving this as a major turning point Battle in the war against Islamic terrorism, timid Olmert treated this as a skirmish. Sure, he talked big, but we now see that he did so hoping his rhetoric would unnerve the Hezbollah enemy. From the get-go, he never inhered the resolve to do what had to be done. Hezbollah was not frightened of his words and did not blink. Olmert blinked. Olmert still does not see Islamic terrorism as part of a greater Jihad to conquer the West. He thinks this whole scenario is just about Moslem desires for just a little bit more land. As he said and continues to say: "I was elected to orchestrate the process of giving up the West Bank (Judea and Samaria ) ' for peace' ". Yes, no one is more blind than he who refuses to see what he doesn't want to see if it is contrary to his foolish hopes. For liberals like Olmert, peace comes not through strength but compromise and concession. "Victory" has been replaced by "peace-process". Western liberal leaders crave negotiated settlements for to them it means that the enemy now accepts us. They crave their enemies' approval. But why should someone crave the approval of those who represent a barbaric and devilish system? That, my friends, is the disease of moral relativism, which afflicts the liberal West. Olmert had an opportunity to protect his country and be part of saving the world from a strain of Nazism infecting much of Islam and endangering our world. He could have been a Churchill, instead he remains an Olmert. Olmert is the affirmation of the truth of " The Peter Principle". Many men are equipped to go only so far as leaders. When they venture beyond their abilities and are elevated to positons requiring greatness, they fail and are a disaster for those relying on their leadership. Olmert is a pol. Someone good for the horse-trading that constitutes local governance. He should have remained a mayor or an unimportant member of Knesset (parliament). He is not Prime Minister material -- especially in a jihadist era that requires great leaders. Like many kings in the First and Second Commonwealth of ancient Israel, Olmert has chosen the acceptance of foreign leaders over what is necessary to ensure victory for his own people. How seductive it must be to feel that one can become a card-carrying member of the international fraternity of leaders. The European Union, the U.N, the left wing NGOs, the "beautiful people" in the halls of power and celebrity. Olmert could not abide their continued condemnation, their displeasure. Olmert is Israel's Jacque Chirac. Some say that Israel needed just ten more days -- 30 days was not enough, Israel needed 40. In otherwords, the ceasefire was 10 days too soon. Not so. Had Israel wanted, it could have destroyed Hezbollah during the first ten days. The Israeli people were willing, more united about this issue than any other in the last 33 years. It was Olmert and his socialist Defense Minister Peretz -- only recently a radical leftist labor Union leader -- who didn't want it. It was obvious from the very beginning. We waited, the world waited -- but the resolve never came. The politicians overruled the army -- and the people. What blocked Israel from achieving its military goal is the new "higher morality" the Israelis have placed upon their soldiers: spare "the innocents" even if it means getting yourself killed to save them. Many Israeli soldiers were killed that did not have to be. Instead of bombing terrorist houses from above, soldiers went house-to-house -- and were ambushed. At least a couple of dozen died to spare the "innocents" who, if given the chance, would slit their throat in a heartbeat. The unnecessary deaths of these soldiers was demoralizing and further weakened the tepid resolve of the Israeli Prime Minister. Some servicemen were reluctant to bomb specific strategic targets out of fear of court-martial if their pinpoint shooting ended up killing "the innocents". So some targets remained untouched. Olmert was afraid to unleash a comprehensive ground war for, in his mind, the deaths of "innocents" constituted a greater failure than allowing Hezbollah to remain intact. One gets the sense that the Israelis wage these wars not to win but to show how moral they are in war. But there is no one to blame for this conclusion than the silly and insecure Israeli political establishment that instituted these rules of war conduct to begin with. They boast how "proud" they are of their "higher morality in war". Well, I'm not! To save one's countrymen, a soldier must risk his life. He should not be forced to die to save the enemy. Would you want your son to die for such a "cause"? Why do the Israelis feel that their soldiers are somehow guilty, expendable, in relation to the enemy's "innocents"? Why do they continue to feel a need to prove how moral they are? We in America should take heed. Liberals are not to be relied on for our national defense. They have too many hang-ups. They lack a moral clarity and the guts necessary to defeat the enemy. They don't belive in victory. It goes against their grain, their belief system. They believe in "peace processes", i.e., appeasement, torturous, bit-by-bit concessions: attrition. They crave international approval more than that of their countrymen. They'll never deliver the necessary military knock-out-punch. But most dangerously, they have fashioned a set of war rules that makes it impossible to defeat the enemy. Worse, our enemy knows it and exploits it. And we seem unable to stomach nor to stand up to the enemy's well rehearsed, professional whining. They will terrorize us, blow us up and defeat us with their most effective weapon yet: the propaganda of guilt and tears.
Rabbi Aryeh Spero is a columnist for Human Events, writing about both
Israeli/Middle East and American issues. In addition his articles have
appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, National
Review, New York Sun, Newsmax, Front Page Magazine, N.Y. Daily News,
Policy Review, American Conservative Union, Atlanta Journal and
Constitution, Judaism, Tradition, Midstream, Free Congress Foundation,
Response, Jewish Spectator, Post and Opinion, Sh'ma, Free Republic,
Viewpoint, Jewish Press, and many other publications. |
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POLL SHOWS THAT ISRAEL IS A STAUNCH AMERICAN ALLY
Posted by Eytan Gilboa, May 17, 2007. |
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Israelis Overwhelmingly Appreciate US Support for Israel and Believe that Mutual Strategic Interests are a Key Factor in the Special Relationship The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies ("The BESA Center") and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today released results of a comprehensive poll which surveyed Israeli opinion on a range of issues relating to US-Israel and Israel-Diaspora relations. The poll is the first comprehensive survey on these issues in more than 30 years, and was carried-out as part of a broad-ranging BESA-ADL international conference on "US-Israel Relations in a New Era," to take place Sunday-Monday, May 20-21, 2007 at the BESA Center. Conducted by the Ma'gar Mochot polling agency for the BESA Center/ADL, between May 1-4, 2007. 505 adult Israelis were surveyed. Margin of error: 4.7% On US-Israel Relations
On American Jewry
How Israelis View America Poll respondents were asked for their views on the strength, reliability and character of the US-Israel relationship. Two-thirds of Israelis have a positive perception of the US (64%), versus only eight percent (8%) with a negative view of the US. Most Israelis view the US as a loyal ally of Israel (65%). The vast majority of those surveyed (91%), believe that close relations between the US and Israel are vital for the security of Israel. Eighty percent (80%) believe that the US will come to Israel's assistance should Israel's existence be threatened. Seventy-three percent (73%) consider President George W. Bush as friendly to Israel. A majority of Israelis (59%) believe that in retrospect the US was correct in going to war in Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, in contrast to the majority of Americans (including American Jews). Thirty-six percent (36%) disagree. Seventy-one percent (71%) of Israelis surveyed believe that if the international diplomatic effort and economic sanctions fail to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the US "should use force" to destroy the Iranian nuclear facilities. "This poll clearly demonstrates the strength of the special relationship that binds Israel and America together," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "Israelis view the US as their closest and most important ally. Similarly, US public support for Israel is based on the perception of Israel as a strategic and value-based ally. The two countries share a truly remarkable, unique alliance." Poll director Prof. Eytan Gilboa of the BESA Center, an expert on American-Israeli relations, added that "Israelis overwhelmingly appreciate US support for Israel and believe that mutual strategic interests are a key factor in the special relationship." BESA Center Director Prof. Efraim Inbar said that "Israelis have a strategic prism on regional affairs. They supported the deposing of Saddam Hussein and clearly expect the US to deal with the much greater threat posed by Iran." Prof. Gilboa noted that this survey of Israeli opinion on US-Israel relations is the first comprehensive survey of its kind since 1983; and that the BESA Center and the ADL jointly intend to conduct follow-up polling on a regular basis. How Israelis View American Jews The poll also surveyed Israeli opinion of American Jews and their connection to Israel. Fifty-two percent (52%) of Israelis believe that the level of American Jewish support for Israel is sufficient, but one-third believes the opposite. Forty-nine percent (49%) believe that US Jews are assimilating rapidly and they fear that American Judaism eventually will disappear. A majority (57%) think that American Jews might vote for a presidential or congressional candidate who is anti-Israel, while 38 percent (38%) reject this possibility. "These results suggest that Israelis are concerned about American Jewish support for Israel over the long term," said Prof. Gilboa of the BESA Center. "They fear that US Jewry does not place Israel high-up enough on its scale of priorities." 505 adult Israelis were surveyed between May 1-4, 2007 by the "Ma'gar Mochot" polling agency. The survey has a margin of error of 4.7 percent. The Conference "US-Israel Relations in a New Era," a two-day international conference will take place Sunday-Monday, May 20-21, 2007 at the BESA Center. Among the conference foci: domestic influences on U.S. Mideast policy (including the Walt/Mearsheimer accusation that the pro-Israel lobby holds undue influence), American policy dilemmas regarding Iran and Iraq, the new Congress and Israel, American Christian support for Israel, U.S.-Israel defense and security cooperation, changing American Jewish demography and its impact on Israel-Diaspora relations, and more. U.S. Ambassador Richard Jones will deliver a central address on U.S.-Israel security cooperation (Monday, May 21 at 9:00 am). Among the major figures arriving from abroad for the conference are Prof. Steven David of Johns Hopkins U, Prof. Dov Waxman of CUNY, Ken Jacobson, deputy national director of the ADL, Prof. Ira Sheskin of U of Miami, Prof. Chaim Waxman of Rutgers U, Prof. Jonathan Stevenson of the U.S. Naval War College, Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi of the Transatlantic Institute in Brussels, and Steven Simon of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations. The full conference program is at
Eytan Gilboa, Ph.D. is a professor in the
Political Studies Department and Senior Research Associate, BESA
Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He is
also Visiting Professor of Public Diplomacy, Annenberg School for
Communication, University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Contact him at egilboa@mail.biu.ac.il
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AD NETZAH -- TO ETERNITY, MY JERUSALEM
Posted by Rachel Kapen, May 17, 2007. |
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One of my most treasured childhood memories was my first journey to Jerusalem which took place in the summer 1945. My parents Sarah and Yosef Garber Z"L were staunch supporters of Hebrew University since its inception in 1925 and charters members of Friends of Hebrew University and to show its appreciation, they were invited, with a group of other supporters from the Tel Aviv vicinity, to an organized tour of the university. And being that the now so prevalent institution of baby-sitting wasn't then even in its infancy and there was no extended family of aunts and uncles -- both my parents made aliyah in the early 1920's leaving their families behind -- my older sister Shula and I accompanied our parents anywhere and this included -- thank G-d, also that Jerusalem journey, and a journey actually it was. The road to Jerusalem was more than twice longer then and quite narrow and of the worst quality, nothing like the modern highway of today, and as fir the old Egged buses of yesteryear, they were much smaller, their seats often worn out and they bore no resemblance to the comfortable, air-conditioned buses of today, and thus our bus made its uphill and circuitous way leading to Jerusalem. The journey didn'[t last more than two hours at the most yet to me it seemed like an eternity. Yet we finally arrived at Har HaTzOfim -- Mount Scopus and as our parents joined the other members of the group in touring the whitewashed building of Hebrew University, my sister Shula and myself were left to spend the time in a small pine grove situated across the road from the university. There we collected armsful of pine cones which covered the ground in order to take them home with us. We really didn't know what we going to do with them but toys were then few and those seemed like a good thing fir our rich and creative imagination. After a short picnic with our parents following the university tour we boarded the bus to go back to Tel Aviv but the clean mountain wind, as clear a water as Naomi Shemer so beautiful described it in Yerushalayim shel Zahav and the pine aroma which was simply intoxication remained etched in my memory for years to come, until my return to that grove of my childhood. The year was 1968, a year following the miraculous vistory of the Six Day War and the reunification of Yerusalayim. During the period stretching between the the War of Liberation in 1948 till the vistory of 1967 the road leading to Mount Scopus was in enemy hands and thus not accessible only a once a month convoy brought necessary supplies and reinforcement to the people who stayed put there so as not to abandon the now desolate Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital. Finally, it became necessary to replace the Hadassah Hospital with another abode and it acquired old buildings on Haneviim Street in downtown Jerusalem and it was there there I gave birth in 1961 to my son Alon. When I saw again this grove of my childhood as was as if nothing had changed in these much eventful years, the same clean, invigorating mountain air, the same simply intoxicating pine aroma. Except, there building everywhere, Mount Scopus and Hadassa returning to life. Some years back when celebrating the 3,000 Birthday of our capital, I asked myself what kind of wish is appropriate when the usual ad 120 -- to 120 -- won't quite do? Of course Ad Netzah -- To Eternity popped right into my mind. So now, as we celebrate 40 years to the reunification of Jerusalem, this will be my heartfelt wish to her, to my Jerusalem. Contact Rachel Kapen by email at skapen285466MI@comcast.net |
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AT THE KOTEL, JERUSALEM DAY 2007
Posted by Judy Lash Balint, May 17, 2007. |
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Visit http://flickr.com/photos/jerusalemdiaries/ for more photos of Yom Yerushalayim 2007. |
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After a day of rain, thunder and lightening that was more reminiscent of mid-winter than mid-May, the skies clear and tens of thousands of people flock to the Kotel in the late afternoon of Jerusalem Day. All roads in and around the Old City are closed as buses from every part of the country disgorge Israelis of all ages dressed in blue and white. Many who march in the Flag Parade are soaked to the skin by the time they arrive at Jaffa Gate. Walking down the wet, slippery stones of the Old City shuk where almost all the Arab-owned shops are shuttered tight, many youth groups sing at the top of their lungs. One favorite that resounds off the ancient stone alleyways is: "Heshiveynu Hashem aylecha, venashuva, Chadeysh Yameynu Kekedem" -- Turn us to you, Hashem, and we'll return: Renew our days as of old.
Soldiers and border police are stationed every few feet along the way down to the Kotel plaza. Two soldiers are standing in ankle-deep water on a balcony overlooking the northern side of the plaza where I plant myself every year to get the best view of the crowd. Despite the weather, the plaza is completely full by the time dusk begins to fall. Whirling circles of dancers jubilantly waving flags jostle for space on the men's side, while throngs of teenage girls kick up a storm a few yards away. Jerusalem songs blast out over the sound system as more and more people pour into the plaza from every direction. I'm standing just above the tunnel into the Moslem quarter, which is spotlighted, so I have a great view of the crowds arriving from the direction of Damascus Gate. Everyone is trying to tell their friends where they are, so the cellphone networks go down periodically. As well-known singer Chaim Dovid starts to play, the dancing circles intensify and the feeling in the air of gratitude and jubilation that we are here to witness the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem is palpable, Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar steps up to speak and start the evening prayers with a request that everyone join together to recite the Shema and the traditional prayer for God's help -- Ana Hashem Hoshiana. With Jews under Kassam attack just an hour and a half away in
Sderot, we need all the help we can get. Looking at the mostly young
crowd of Israelis celebrating at the Kotel who are so deeply committed
to their country at least gives a glimmer of optimism that we'll soon
be able to overcome our inept leadership and embark on the right path.
Judy Lash Balint is an award-winner investigative journalist and
author of "Jerusalem Diaries: In Tense Times" (Gefen). It is available
for purchase from www.israelbooks.com
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WHIPPED FOR TWO BEERS -- AH YES, THE RELIGION OF "PEACE"
Posted by Michael Travis, May 17, 2007. |
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This news item is from Norway's Aftenposten |
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Norwegian-Iranian Mamand Mamandy had a brutal meeting with police after drinking two beers while on holiday in Iran. "It's getting better now, but I am still in great pain," Mamandy, 35, told Aftenposten.no. "My brother is a doctor, and treated me after the whipping. I was in great pain and could not sleep." Mamandy, a Kurd, explained that he was visiting his mother in Baneh, Iran in April when he was arrested by police. "We were on an outing with family and friends, six or seven in the evening, and were having a barbecue and enjoying ourselves. Altogether I drank two beers. The police happened to drive by," Mamandy said. He said that he was immediately arrested and taken to the police station where he was sentenced to 130 lashes. This sentence, for beer drinking, was carried out publicly according to news agency Iran Focus. "I received 130 lashes on the back of my body. Police whipped me," Mamandy said. He came to Norway as an asylum seeker in 1999. He lives in Drammen with his wife and they are awaiting Norwegian citizenship. Mamandy traveled home to Norway shortly after his punishment and has been since treated by his family doctor here. Aftenposten.no has been in contact with the Foreign
Ministry, who said that they had not been contacted by Mamandy or his
family in connection with the matter.
Contact Michael Travis at michaelmgr@gmail.com
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U.N.: BAN VOWS TO BOOST COOPERATION WITH ISLAMIC CONFERENCE
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 17, 2007. |
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Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon vows to be an even better lapdog. The OIC is already the single largest voting bloc at the UN. It's hard to imagine how the UN could become more compliant to its wishes than it is now. This below is from www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/016461.php |
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From AKI: New York, 16 May (AKI) -- Praising the cooperative relationship between the United Nations and the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has anticipated strengthening these ties in the years ahead. In a message to the OIC Ministerial Conference meeting in Islamabad, Ban said Tuesday the gathering comes at a crucial juncture. "Instability in Islamic States -- from Afghanistan and Iraq to Sudan and Somalia -- carries profound implications for international peace and security,"he said. "The OIC, as a leading multilateral institution, is well placed to play a leading role in addressing all these challenges," said Ban. "I would especially like to commend the excellent cooperation between the Untied Nations and the OIC." Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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HORRIFYING: VIDEO ON SAUDI WAHHABI INFLUENCE IN LONDON'S MOSQUES
Posted by Fishbein Associates, May 17, 2007. |
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Is this America's future.....? Chilling undercover investigation into the influence of Saudi Arabian religious extremism throughout the UK. Despite being considered ... Britain's principal ally in the Middle East, this disturbing report reveals Saudi Arabian Islam -- Wahabism -- is spreading a message of bigotry and hatred to a section of Muslims and predicting an imminent jihad. An undercover reporter joins Islamic worshippers..." CLICK HERE or Paste into URL tool bar Contact Fishbein Associates by email at fishnet@pipeline.com |
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MUBARAK EXPRESSES CONCERN OVER GROWING STRENGTH OF HAMAS. CROCODILE TEARS?
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 17, 2007. |
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It must be noted that Egypt played a central role in preserving and maintaining Hamas and other radical forces. Every step of the way Cairo pressed for a series of arrangements and agreements under which they were able to retain their illegal armed forces in the field. Add to that what at best has been a gross blind eye (excepting periodic photo ops) towards massive smuggling from Egypt to Gaza of weapons, ammunition, explosives, etc. At the end of the day, Egypt has consistently followed a policy of giving preference to the development and encouragement of forces in the Gaza Strip who could hurt Israel over its concern over the impact such forces could have over the stability of the neighborhood This news item is called "Mubarak expresses concern over growing
strength of Hamas," and was written by Barak Ravid, Haaretz
Correspondent. It is from today's Haaretz |
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Haaretz has learned that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak expressed great concern over the increasing strength of Hamas in talks with senior diplomatic officials on Wednesday. He said that the Egyptian government is at a loss regarding the future of the Gaza Strip. However, he also proclaimed that Egypt is making great efforts to end the Hamas government and support Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. "With Hamas no way," he reportedly said. Mubarak painted a dark picture of the situation with Hamas and said there was no chance for peace with the organization. "Hamas will never sign a peace agreement with Israel if it stays in power," the Egyptian president said. Mubarak also said that Egypt did not accept Hamas in power, especially in light of its growing ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, which leads the opposition in Egypt. Mubarak sees the Brotherhood, which gained considerable power in Egypt's last parliamentary elections, as a threat to secular power. Egypt has begun barring senior Hamas leaders from entering Egypt due to concerns over their contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood. Since Hamas rose to power and in view of the continuing strife between Hamas and Fatah, Egypt has been working through its security delegation in Gaza to reach a cease-fire among the factions. At the same time, Egypt has continuously held talks with Hamas, the Popular Resistance Committees and the Islamic Army over the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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CULTURE OF VIOLENCE
Posted by Lawrence Uniglicht, May 17, 2007. |
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Islamic Fatah and Hamas murder each other in Gaza, Islamic Sunnis and Shiites murder each other in Iraq, one weapon of choice being homicide/suicide bombers, as well as a more than occasional beheading or ten to up the terror quotient. Indeed, homicide/suicide bombing is now all the rage in war torn Taliban infested Islamic Afghanistan. The genocide in Darfur, a western region of oil rich Sudan, continues unabated, perpetrated by janjaweed Arab murders, at the behest of bejeweled Islamic tyrants squatting in Khartoum. Islamic jihadist murderers are responsible for the dominant share of worldwide violence, beginning even before the catastrophic events of 9/11 in America, including the more recent bombings in London, Madrid, Indonesia, Israel, Egypt, as well as homicide in the Netherlands, to name but a few of the more noteworthy catastrophic incidences. Yet, Israel is accused by an ex-U.S. President of committing apartheid in the so-called West Bank, and the International Red Cross leaks a document suggesting Israel is being inhumane to Arabs residing in the eastern sector of Jerusalem. These accusations are not only bogus, considering Israel must defend its citizens thus inconvenience Arabs, some of whom wander about wrapped in explosives, but in the grand scheme of things, receive far more attention than they deserve, when juxtaposed to all the Muslim violence raging throughout the Middle East. We are all products of our cultures, thus when cultural infrastructures devolve, become more isolated from surrounding influences i.e. more incestuous, the mindsets of respective adherents devolve as well. Indeed, Koranic interpretations skewed towards hatred of outsiders, crafted by narrowly focused individuals, is culturally symptomatic rather than a cause of devolved fundamentalist Islam. Tolerant Judeo-Christian culture, for one, has not so devolved, thus peaceful resolutions of disputes, peaceful interpretations of gospel, are more the norm, with but a few exceptions such as until now a seemingly never ending dispute in Northern Ireland. Somehow, Muslim culture, spread throughout the Middle East and East, has become less worldly, more introverted, less tolerant, more violent, except for several small Gulf States and perhaps Turkey. (Lebanon, once secular, now writhes in chaos influenced by outside fundamentalist forces.) This consequence could be in part indicative of having lost an Islamic Ottoman empire in the early twentieth century to culturally different non-Muslim nations, shrouding the losers under a cloud of humiliation, causing them to devolve into a defensive war-like state of existence, blaming the collective infidel for all misery, especially the Jewish infidel. None of this would matter to calculating non-Muslim industrial nations, indeed, Israel would not be in many mindsets a virtual pariah state, if particular dysfunctional Middle East Muslim regimes were not both blessed and cursed by fossil fuel wealth, the energy addictive substance truly out of place in time yet ever necessary to fuel the sophisticated technologically advanced engines of sophisticated culturally diverse century twenty-one tribes, led by Armani clad tribal chiefs, throughout this globally warming planet. Furthermore, such Islamic oil producers are perilously enabled, thus advance their weapons technology, because the despised 'infidel' feeds their coffers with petrodollars in exchange for the Arabic and Farsi tea beneath their scorpion infested desert. If industrial movers and shakers worldwide would stop buying Middle East oil, perhaps such oil producing regimes would be forced to morph their raw material dependent economies into economies able to compete in a secular global economy, funneling erstwhile accumulated oil profits into educational institutions worthy of century twenty-one, training future generations in math, science, economics, real history, cultural diversity, and other subjects far removed from hate filled misogynist Koranic verse. The best way to remove a cloud of humiliation is to turn out productive citizens. Cultural traits are not etched in stone. Lawrence Uniglicht is a career civil servant, working for the Social Security Administration. He advocates for the State of Israel with an American perspective. He writes, "Advocating for the disrespected underdog has been my passion, no doubt Israel falls into that category." Contact him by email at larose@snip.net |
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WAS OSAMA RIGHT?
Posted by Louis Gordon, May 17, 2007. |
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This article was written by Bernard Lewis and it appeared yesterday
in Opinion Journal |
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Islamists always believed the U.S. was weak. Recent political trends won't change their view. During the Cold War, two things came to be known and generally recognized in the Middle East concerning the two rival superpowers. If you did anything to annoy the Russians, punishment would be swift and dire. If you said or did anything against the Americans, not only would there be no punishment; there might even be some possibility of reward, as the usual anxious procession of diplomats and politicians, journalists and scholars and miscellaneous others came with their usual pleading inquiries: "What have we done to offend you? What can we do to put it right?" A few examples may suffice. During the troubles in Lebanon in the 1970s and '80s, there were many attacks on American installations and individuals -- notably the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, followed by a prompt withdrawal, and a whole series of kidnappings of Americans, both official and private, as well as of Europeans. There was only one attack on Soviet citizens, when one diplomat was killed and several others kidnapped. The Soviet response through their local agents was swift, and directed against the family of the leader of the kidnappers. The kidnapped Russians were promptly released, and after that there were no attacks on Soviet citizens or installations throughout the period of the Lebanese troubles. These different responses evoked different treatment. While American policies, institutions and individuals were subject to unremitting criticism and sometimes deadly attack, the Soviets were immune. Their retention of the vast, largely Muslim colonial empire accumulated by the czars in Asia passed unnoticed, as did their propaganda and sometimes action against Muslim beliefs and institutions. Most remarkable of all was the response of the Arab and other Muslim countries to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Washington's handling of the Tehran hostage crisis assured the Soviets that they had nothing to fear from the U.S. They already knew that they need not worry about the Arab and other Muslim governments. The Soviets already ruled -- or misruled -- half a dozen Muslim countries in Asia, without arousing any opposition or criticism. Initially, their decision and action to invade and conquer Afghanistan and install a puppet regime in Kabul went almost unresisted. After weeks of debate, the U.N. General Assembly finally was persuaded to pass a resolution "strongly deploring the recent armed intervention in Afghanistan." The words "condemn" and "aggression" were not used, and the source of the "intervention" was not named. Even this anodyne resolution was too much for some of the Arab states. South Yemen voted no; Algeria and Syria abstained; Libya was absent; the nonvoting PLO observer to the Assembly even made a speech defending the Soviets. One might have expected that the recently established Organization of the Islamic Conference would take a tougher line. It did not. After a month of negotiation and manipulation, the organization finally held a meeting in Pakistan to discuss the Afghan question. Two of the Arab states, South Yemen and Syria, boycotted the meeting. The representative of the PLO, a full member of this organization, was present, but abstained from voting on a resolution critical of the Soviet action; the Libyan delegate went further, and used this occasion to denounce the U.S. The Muslim willingness to submit to Soviet authority, though widespread, was not unanimous. The Afghan people, who had successfully defied the British Empire in its prime, found a way to resist the Soviet invaders. An organization known as the Taliban (literally, "the students") began to organize resistance and even guerilla warfare against the Soviet occupiers and their puppets. For this, they were able to attract some support from the Muslim world -- some grants of money, and growing numbers of volunteers to fight in the Holy War against the infidel conqueror. Notable among these was a group led by a Saudi of Yemeni origin called Osama bin Laden. To accomplish their purpose, they did not disdain to turn to the U.S. for help, which they got. In the Muslim perception there has been, since the time of the Prophet, an ongoing struggle between the two world religions, Christendom and Islam, for the privilege and opportunity to bring salvation to the rest of humankind, removing whatever obstacles there might be in their path. For a long time, the main enemy was seen, with some plausibility, as being the West, and some Muslims were, naturally enough, willing to accept what help they could get against that enemy. This explains the widespread support in the Arab countries and in some other places first for the Third Reich and, after its collapse, for the Soviet Union. These were the main enemies of the West, and therefore natural allies. Now the situation had changed. The more immediate, more dangerous enemy was the Soviet Union, already ruling a number of Muslim countries, and daily increasing its influence and presence in others. It was therefore natural to seek and accept American help. As Osama bin Laden explained, in this final phase of the millennial struggle, the world of the unbelievers was divided between two superpowers. The first task was to deal with the more deadly and more dangerous of the two, the Soviet Union. After that, dealing with the pampered and degenerate Americans would be easy. We in the Western world see the defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union as a Western, more specifically an American, victory in the Cold War. For Osama bin Laden and his followers, it was a Muslim victory in a jihad, and, given the circumstances, this perception does not lack plausibility. From the writings and the speeches of Osama bin Laden and his colleagues, it is clear that they expected this second task, dealing with America, would be comparatively simple and easy. This perception was certainly encouraged and so it seemed, confirmed by the American response to a whole series of attacks -- on the World Trade Center in New York and on U.S. troops in Mogadishu in 1993, on the U.S. military office in Riyadh in 1995, on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 -- all of which evoked only angry words, sometimes accompanied by the dispatch of expensive missiles to remote and uninhabited places. Stage One of the jihad was to drive the infidels from the lands of Islam; Stage Two -- to bring the war into the enemy camp, and the attacks of 9/11 were clearly intended to be the opening salvo of this stage. The response to 9/11, so completely out of accord with previous American practice, came as a shock, and it is noteworthy that there has been no successful attack on American soil since then. The U.S. actions in Afghanistan and in Iraq indicated that there had been a major change in the U.S., and that some revision of their assessment, and of the policies based on that assessment, was necessary. More recent developments, and notably the public discourse inside the U.S., are persuading increasing numbers of Islamist radicals that their first assessment was correct after all, and that they need only to press a little harder to achieve final victory. It is not yet clear whether they are right or wrong in this view. If they are right, the consequences -- both for Islam and for America -- will be deep, wide and lasting. Contact Louis Gordon at louis3105@gmail.com |
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DOCTERS WITHOUT BORDERS DON'T GET A CLEAN BILL OF HEALTH
Posted by David Frankfurter, May 17, 2007. |
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Dear Friends,
It is rare that one of the so-called "human rights" NGOs that support Palestinian terror are openly exposed. Watchdog NGO Monitor has reported the tendency of Medicines sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) "members [to] exploit this NGO for political goals including unsupported attacks on Israel in contradiction to the pledge to maintain independence from political powers." Of particular concern to NGO Monitor is the specialist's diagnosis: Israeli actions degrade Palestinian healthcare. Of course, Palestinian violence and terror that make the protective actions necessary do not form part of the medical record. It seems that the mental and physical health of Israeli civilians does not even get an appointment. Today, Albawaba Middle East news service reports: Medicines sans Frontieres has been infected by the terror virus. "Palestinian charged with plan to kill Olmert" Instead of their ongoing negative prognosis, Medicines sans Frontiers would be better giving a second opinion on the free medical treatment Israeli hospitals and doctors so frequently provide our Palestinian Arab neighbours. 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/ |
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TOO MANY ILLEGAL ALIENS
Posted by Family Security Matters FSN), May 17, 2007. |
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This article was written by Alan Caruba and published on FSM's
website. It is archived at
How many millions of illegals streaming into the United States would constitute a foreign invasion? FSM Contributing Editor Alan Caruba's latest commentary paints one of the most grimly realistic pictures you will ever see on the subject of when enough should be enough! |
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Here's one of those statistics that sums up everything you need to know about America's immigration crisis. The May 14 edition of US News & World Report had a small item noting that, "Mexico has lost more people to migration to the United States than to death since 2000." "An average of 577,000 people moved to the United States annually during the 2000-2005 period, while 495,000 people died in Mexico." The U.S. agency providing this data estimates that about 11 million Mexicans are living, legally or not, in the United States. This is not about disliking Mexicans. Many have come here legally, become citizens, and have risen in our society to contribute in business, academics, and government. This is about saving America from a wholesale and entirely illegal invasion, and its consequences. Mexico has an entirely different view of people who would move there. The Center for Security Policy points out that Mexico prohibits foreigners from owning land within 100 kilometers of the Mexico border and within 50 kilometers of the Mexican coastland, prime real estate. Mexican law permits the government to revoke the naturalized citizenship of anyone who chooses to live in his country of origin more than five years. Foreigners are admitted only after proving they have "the necessary funds for their sustenance" and they can be fined or jailed if they show false papers. Any Mexican who helps an illegal alien is breaking the law there. On the average, annually Mexico grants citizenship to just 3,000 people, compared to the U.S. rate of almost 500,000. Compare this with the insidious and stupid immigration law, S. 1348, that Majority Leader, Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and other members of the U.S. Senate are trying to fast-track to passage with the support of President Bush. Co-sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Ken Salazar (D-CO), this bill would provide amnesty to those who are here illegally and invite a whole new rush to the border by more Mexicans and others. By way of illustrating why the virtually uncontrolled flow of Mexican and other aliens represents a problem that cannot and must not be ignored, let me share some facts about its impact on just one State, New Jersey, where I live. In a recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform on the "Cost of Illegal Immigration to New Jerseyites", the executive summary notes that, "The illegal alien population residing in New Jersey is costing the state's taxpayers nearly $2.1 billion per year for education, medical care, and incarceration." Bear in mind that New Jersey is essentially broke thanks to the huge debt it has been incurred under several governors. When you add in the costs of an estimated 372,000 illegal aliens, you just exacerbate a bad situation. In sum, the "annual tax burden amounts to about $800 per New Jersey household headed by a native-born resident." Even if you subtract the sales, income, and property taxes that might be collected from illegal aliens, you still have net costs of $1.6 billion per year. New Jersey is small, but when one extrapolates such costs to a State like California, you begin to see why illegal aliens pose an enormous cost to educational, medical, and other institutions and agencies trying to cope with people who have absolutely no right to be here. It is estimated that 40% of all workers in Los Angeles County are working for cash and not paying taxes. In Los Angeles, 95% of warrants for murder are for illegal aliens and more than two-thirds of all births in LA County are illegal aliens. And that's just for one county. Then there's the issue of national security. In November, a report from the inspector general's office of the Department of Homeland Security revealed that half of the 91,516 illegal aliens from terror-sponsoring countries and those of 'special interest' apprehended at the border between 2001 and 2005 were released into the U.S. population. I grant you that Mexico is not a sponsor of terror, but it provides an avenue for access to America from nations where the drug industry rivals all others. In addition to the high-risk aliens who were released, the report notes that authorities also released 27,947 known criminals over a period of five years between 2001 and 2004. When you consider that only one in four aliens attempting to enter the U.S. during this period were caught, the actual numbers of those who were not are some 350,000 from high-risk nations and an estimated 400,000 criminal aliens. A 2006 study by Edwin S. Rubenstein, a former contributing editor for Forbes, commissioned by the National Policy Institute last year stated that, "Illegal aliens cost the American taxpayer $25 billion more than they pay in taxes." Titled "The Economics of Immigration Enforcement", the study concluded that they cost U.S. citizens an estimated $81 billion per year. "Amnesty would make things worse," stated the study, "by adding another $44 billion to government spending for services." Something is very wrong when, given just these few facts, there are members in Congress seriously considering the granting of amnesty -- no matter how they mask the true intent of the legislation -- and that the President of the United States is one of its leading advocates. The tyranny of numbers is that they cannot be ignored. The U.S. faces a new torrent of illegal aliens; seeking to absorb them despite ample evidence we are endangering and burdening current native-born and naturalized citizens. The proposed legislation is a demographic time bomb. The Family Security Matters (FSM) website provides essays on matters of concern to our homeland security. Contact them at www.FamilySecurityMatters.org |
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ISRAEL'S ONLY WAY OUT: FOLLOW KAHANE!
Posted by David Ben Ariel, May 17, 2007. |
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Israel must make concessions, Israel must do this, Israel must do that, while the Arabs continue to get away with mass murder and terrorism (while promising peace and feigning ignorance), aided and abetted by the international community. The Atlantic Times repeats the list of delusional demands upon the Jewish homeland in "The Only Way Out: A Stringent Policy of Peace" that completely ignores history and the facts on the ground: Israel has no peace partners; Israel has no peace but only an ongoing war of attrition; the entire lying "peace process" is all part of the phased destruction of Israel that the Israelis have insanely enabled to continue. This harsh reality will soon blow up in the faces of those who have chosen to remain in a state of denial, repeating the big lie of Palestine as the proffered solution. "Israel must reach an understanding with Syria," drones the asinine article written by a German Jew in a self-imposed exile from the Promised Land of Israel (contrary to Judaism), and then exposes such an "understanding" amounts to total Israeli surrender of the biblical territories of the Golan Heights (inheritance of Manasseh, son of Joseph) for more worthless promises and toilet paper agreements. "The Jewish state must completely pull out of the occupied territories, abandon the settlements there and recognize East Jerusalem as the future Palestinian capital." If Rafael Seligmann, the suicidal author, wants to slit his own throat or offer his head to the Nazi-Muslims, so be it. However, such murderous slander against biblical Judea and Samaria (occupied by covetous Arabs), such hateful incitement against Jewish pioneering communities (let RS take an armed stroll through the destroyed Jewish towns near Gaza, victims of Judenrein policies), and such treacherous talk against Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel, must not be tolerated! A self-respecting Jewish country would rebuke such nonsense (whether its from writers or world leaders) and unequivocally reject such an invitation for disaster. Shame on Seligmann for his defeatist bile that spewed, "Now that the military option has been exhausted, Israel must safeguard its future through a brave policy of peace." What a schizophrenic statement! Israel has never truly utilized their military option but have always been restrained by world opinion and lucrative bribes. If the Israelis won't properly defend themselves, they can never enjoy peace but will suffer open season against Israeli men, women, children and babies in strollers with further calls for appeasement and surrender. The German-Jesuit EU knows this full well, and wait in the wings to occupy Jerusalem as "peacekeepers." However, the EU is not a savior but a destroyer. The Vatican purposely exploits the Arab-Jewish conflict to breach Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and will soon influence agents to invoke the accursed UN Resolution 181. The aforementioned "Seligmann Column" of Jewish self-loathing, deliberate deceit and shameful collaboration with hostile elements, crumbles when examined in the brilliant light of history and the Bible: The Israelis were offered the only way out when Meir Kahane, rabbi and former Knesset Member, reminded them of the Law of Moses that teaches peace through strength, treating sworn enemies like sworn enemies and restoring the Temple Mount (Judaism's holiest site) as the Temple Mount without apology or hesitation (Malachi 4:4). It's past time the Israelis come to their senses and acknowledge Kahane was right and succeed, following the direction of the Torah, or the Jews will continue to suffer escalating consequences for disobedience and Jerusalem will suffer defeat (Daniel 9:11). David Ben Ariel is a Christian-Zionist writer and author of
Beyond Babylon: Europe's Rise and Fall. With a focus on the
Middle East and Jerusalem, his analytical articles help others improve
their understanding of that troubled region. Check out his Beyond
Babylon blog: |
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MAN BITES DOG AND HAARETZ DISCOVERS "TERRORISM"
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 16, 2007. |
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It is said that dogs biting men are not news but when a man bites a dog, THAT makes the headlines! Newspapers love reversal of roles and stereotypes. When Arabs murder Jews simply because they are Jews, it is hardly news. THAT happens all the time. Boring! Haaretz, Israel's leftwing Post-Zionist daily, sometimes called the Palestinian newspaper printed in Hebrew, has never been very interested in Arabs murdering Jews because they are Jews. Following the lead of the overseas Bash-Israel media, Haaretz always refers to such perps as "activists" and "militants". The "T" word (terrorism) is never used to refer to Arab murders of Jews in stories at Haaretz. But let a Jew go and murder an Arab, and Haaretz runs banner headlines about "Jewish terrorism". In 2005 when Eden Natan-Zada, a mentally ill 19-year-old AWOL Israeli soldier, killed four Arabs on a bus in Shfaram (and was then himself murdered by the mob there), Haaretz headlines screamed about the Jewish "terrorist who murdered Arabs because they are Arabs." This week Julian Soufir, a French Jew living in Israel, murdered an Arab, claiming he did so because he just wanted to kill an Arab. He was arrested and is pleading not guilty by reasons or mental illness, and he may well be mentally ill. He has been under psychiatric care since some domestic violence incidents. Justice Muki Landman wrote in his judgment that the investigation material indicated that the suspect suffered from a mental illness. "Under these circumstances, and due to the fact that in the best interest of the investigation and reaching the truth it is imperative that his mental condition be evaluated." But Haaretz has yet another example of the worldwide scourge of "Jewish terrorism." Pluralism at Haaretz resembles that in Pravda back in the days of Brezhnev. There is only one correct opinion, that of the ultra-Left, and it is repeated ad nauseum by almost all writers in the paper. Today Haaretz runs an Op-Ed by one of its countless leftists, Goel Pinto, demanding that Jews collectively apologize to Arabs for "Jewish terrorism". We can't seem to recall many cases when Arabs apologized for mass murders of Jews because they are Jews. Pinto in Haaretz blasts Jews, especially French Jews, for being "racist". His evidence? Many of them voted for Sarkozy! Of course most French citizens voted for Sarkozy. Pinto adds: 'The Jewish murderer Soufir immigrated to Israel before he murdered an Arab -- and not because of any shortage of Muslims in France. Rather, it was because in France many Jews prefer to wrap themselves in the tallit of victimhood -- and the anti-Jewish incidents there give them sufficient ammunition to do so....Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Acting President Dalia Itzik should pay a visit to the family of the murder victim and ask for forgiveness in the name of the state and the Jewish people....This is also the appropriate time for the heads of France's Jewish community, led by Chief Rabbi Yosef Sitruk, to visit the Great Mosque of Paris and to ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness for the murder, but also for the anti-Muslim racism that is rooted in their community, which is one of the main causes for the deterioration in relations between Jews and Muslims in France.' Now here is a thought. Since reversal of stereotype is so newsworthy, maybe Haaretz should try an experiment in it and reverse its own role playing and stereotype. All it need do to create the biggest Man Bites Dog story in decades is come out clearly in favor of Israel's right to defend itself against Arab terrorism and Islamofascist aggression, including by means of assassinating terrorists, and also come out clearly in opposition to Palestinian demands, including the "right of return." 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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il |
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RABBI MOURNS DEATH OF GREAT CHRISTIAN LEADER; HAMAS HITS ISRAELI SCHOOL
Posted by Simon McIlwaine, May 16, 2007. |
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"We mourn death of great Christian leader and friend of Israel -- Reverend
Jerry Falwell"
It is with great sorrow that I come to you to tell you of the death of a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people -- and a man that I was honored to call a personal friend as well. The Rev. Jerry Falwell passed away today suddenly at the age of 73. When I started The Fellowship 25 years ago, he was among the first Christians to step forward and express interest in being involved in our bridge-building work. And, over the years, he proved his solidarity repeatedly. His involvement helped break down the barriers of mistrust that characterized the relationship between Jews and evangelical Christians at the time. There were those who remained skeptical of Rev. Falwell's support. I recall on one occasion nearly 30 years ago, I invited him to speak at my synagogue and was criticized by many in the Jewish community who questioned his motives. But this did not deter him one bit in his unfailing support for Israel and the Jewish people. Very directly, but always graciously and lovingly -- I never saw him behave otherwise towards people -- he would remind those who questioned him that, as a Christian, his support of Israel was based on eternal biblical truths and, because of that, it would not falter. I am happy to say that he managed to win over many of his skeptics through the consistency and obviously genuine quality of his love for Israel and the Jewish people. The Rev. Falwell once said that "the Bible Belt is Israel's safety belt." Over the years, he helped me realize the truth of that saying. Wherever there are faithful, Bible-believing Christians, I can be assured of finding true friends and supporters of Israel. And the Rev. Falwell himself did much to ensure that "safety belt" remained strong as ever. Please take a moment today to join with me and Fellowship staff to pray for the many friends and family of Rev. Falwell, and all the staff and students at his school, Liberty University, who mourn the loss of their leader and are now left to carry on his great legacy. He will be sorely missed. I also invite you to share your thoughts and memories of Reverend Falwell with us. With prayers for shalom, peace,
"Hamas Hits Israeli School"
Hamas, the elected governing party of the Palestinian Authority, is claiming credit for hitting an Israeli school with Qassam rockets. In twenty-four hours, thirty rockets have been fired at civilian targets in Sderot. Numerous children have been injured in these attacks. These children were not injured because they happened to be close to a military target at the time of an attack. These children (along with other civilians) were the target of Hamas' Qassams. As the following account makes clear: Hamas is a terrorist organization whose aim is to kill and injure inncocent people. From Ynet News: One of the victims of yesterday's rocket attacks on Sderot was a woman who celebrated her daughter's birthday in her garden. "When the Red Alert siren was sounded she rushed the kids home but she realized that one was missing. She went out and found the kid lying on the ground terrified. Then the boom was heard. She brought the child in and she also suffered from shock," said Dr Rosa Schneider, a trauma specialist at the Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon. "We had 14 victims who suffered from shock and I heard hair-raising stories," she said. "I can't remember an event with so many victims....It is a feeling of hopelessness. You do nothing bad and suddenly your life is destroyed," Schneider said. Another victim was a pregnant woman who fell as she ran to seek shelter and injured her stomach. We have previously written that Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, has visited the region and been very vocal in her criticism of Israeli security policies. We ask all TeachKidsPeace subscribers to contact her and demand that she release a statement unequivocally condemning this attack on innocent children. Demand that Israeli children be protected equally. In the midst of the battles taking place between Hamas and Fatah terrorists, over 30 Qassam missiles have been fired with intent at the residents of Sderot in a 24 hour period and continue to fall even as we write. This, despite Israel's 2006 withdrawal from Gaza and Palestinian claims to be adhering to a "ceasefire". If anyone still doubts the dangers and lethal potential of Qassam
missiles, we invite you to view this short video of a missile strike
in Sderot that knocked the videographer to the ground as a Qassam hit
a neighbor's house, injuring a member of the family.
Contact Simon McIlwaine at Simon.McIlwaine@ormerods.co.uk or visit the website at: www.anglicansforisrael.com |
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COUNTERING ANTI-ISRAEL POSTER CAMPAIGN IN WASHINGTON DC
Posted by Stand With Us, May 16, 2007. |
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This is an article written by Yaakov Lappin that was published
yesterday in Ynet News
(http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3400283,00.html). |
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The subway system in America's capital city is set to be the scene of a poster campaign war between a pro-Palestinian organization seeking to harm Israel's image and a pro-Israel group which has decided to fight back. Last month, the 'US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation' (ETO) placed 20 poster ads showing "an imposing tank pointing its main firing turret at a child with a schoolbag walking along a dirt road," the Canadian Jewish News (CJN) reported. "'Imagine if this were your child's path to school. Palestinians don't have to imagine,' the poster states, before continuing to call for an end to US aid for 'Israel's brutal military occupation, paid for by US taxpayers like you,'" the report added. But a response to the anti-Israel campaign was not long in coming, after the Los Angeles-based StandWithUs (SWU) decided to launch its own pro-Israel poster ads. Describing the ETO posters as "deceptive and emotionally manipulative," SWU's International Director, Roz Rothstein, said: "Israel is not fighting children. It is defending itself against extremists like Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad whose charters call for Israel's obliteration and whose terrorist attacks target civilians, including school children and toddlers." A press release sent by SWU said the group "will launch a month-long ad campaign in mid-May through June 11, urging Palestinians to teach their children peace instead of hate, and urging Palestinian extremists to reform."
"SWU's ads will appear in 20 downtown Washington DC metro stations to counter the misinformation in an anti-Israel ad campaign scheduled to run in the stations concurrently," SWU added. "The anti-Israel ads misinform the public about occupation, funding, and responsibility for violence," the statement said, adding: "Israel withdrew completely from Gaza in 2005 and from over 40% of the West Bank almost nine years ago. The land was turned over to the Palestinian Authority and 98% of Palestinians are self-governing under its rule. Unfortunately, the 2005 withdrawal did not promote peace. Instead, rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel rose four-fold." "America has also given billions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians either directly or through the United Nations over the years," SWU said. Speaking to Ynetnews, Rothstein said SWU may expand its poster campaigns to other cities, and possibly to other countries too. "Other communities have expressed interest in our metro ad campaign. With their support, we could expand it as part of our ongoing effort to raise public awareness about the obstacles to peace. We are already preparing an online campaign to amplify this critical message," he said. Rothstein added that Israel's supporters in US and Europe should take an assertive stance in the information battle. "Have confidence in the justness of your position and remember that you are fighting not just for Israel and Jews, but for all people who believe in fairness and human rights. Build coalitions for strength and mutual support, and to brainstorm about the most creative and effective ways to combat anti-Israel propaganda," Rothstein said. "We know Europeans face an especially difficult challenge. We are opening a StandWithUs branch in Europe to partner with local activist organizations. We are looking forward to developing responses that will resonate with European audiences," he added.
Contact Stand With Us by email at activistnews@standwithus.com
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HIZBULLAH TV CREWS FILMED IN ISRAEL DURING WAR
Posted by Gil Ronen, May 16, 2007. |
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A reporter for Al Manar TV operated freely in Israel during the Second Lebanon War despite the fact that the station is a propaganda and intelligence gathering arm of Hizbullah -- Israel's enemy in the war. Additional TV stations from enemy countries had reporters in Israel during the war: Iranian TV, Saudi Arabian TV, and the Al Jazeera news channel. Omedia reports that Al Manar is not a media network in the regular sense of the word. In the USA it is considered a terror organization and its operation within the USA has been banned by presidential decree since the 9/11 terror attacks. When reporters for a station like Al Manar transmit information about the locations hit by missiles in real time, they are for all intents and purposes enemy spies. Al Manar's television broadcasts -- including those aimed at children -- encourage suicide terror attacks and call for the conquest of the world by Islam and jihad. The network also transmits anti-Semitic messages, which have caused European countries, including France, to ban its broadcasts. The matter was investigated by the committee of inquiry, headed by retired judge Dalia Dorner, that was established to review journalistic coverage during the war. The protocols of the committee's work include an exchange between Haaretz's veteran military affairs analyst, Ze'ev Schiff, who was a member of the committee, and IDF Spokesman Miri Regev, in which Regev confirms that "Al Manar broadcast from the ground all of the time." A senior official in the Government Press Bureau said that freelance Arab reporters from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Dubai and other countries operated in Israel during the war and reported for Al Jazeera, NBC Dubai and Al Manar. During the war itself they were allowed to report from Haifa, even though they did not have government press cards. The reporter for Al Manar, said the Press Bureau official, is an Israeli Arab. And Israeli citizens are allowed to report for news organizations that operate from enemy states. When asked whether reporters for Al Manar and Iranian TV submitted their reports to the censor before transmitting them, the IDF Spokesman replied laconically: "the foreign TV stations operating in the territory of Israel are required to submit reports to the censor before broadcasting, and this was true in the Second Lebanon War as well." Gl Ronen writes for Arutz Sheva (www.IsraelNationalNews.com). This article appeared today. |
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EVANGELICALS BLAST JERUSALEM DAY BOYCOTT
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 16, 2007. |
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This article was written by
Etgar Lefkovits and it is archived at
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A prominent Jerusalem-based evangelical organization slammed on Tuesday the decision of much of the international community to boycott celebrations marking the 40th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, calling the move a "perverse and immoral act." "The Jewish restoration to Jerusalem in modern times is one of the clearest cases of historic justice ever, whereby a people longing to return to a land and a holy city from which they were violently uprooted millennia ago finally realized that sustaining dream. Yet due to Arab pressures and threats, the Jewish return to Jerusalem has been perversely turned into an immoral act," Rev. Malcolm Hedding, Executive Director of the International Christian Embassy, wrote to Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski. The unabashedly pro-Israel Jerusalem-based evangelical ICE was established in the city in 1980 at a time when foreign embassies were leaving the city to relocate in Tel Aviv. There are currently no foreign embassies in Jerusalem due to the city's disputed status. The letter came just one day after US Ambassador to Israel Richard Jones, as well as EU representatives, boycotted the official Knesset ceremony marking Jerusalem Day. "Jerusalem remains a 'burdensome stone' among the nations, as borne out by the decision of much of the international community to boycott this year's Jerusalem Day observances," Hedding wrote in his letter. Earlier this week, Lupolianski blasted foreign government for planning to boycott this week's events. "Whoever does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel does not recognize the state of Israel," Lupolianski said. (End) Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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THE "HUSTLE" ON ISRAEL IS RAMPING UPWARD
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 16, 2007. |
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When the flagship journals start to fill their pages with "friendly" recommendations of how to appease the Arab Muslims then the "Hustle" is on -- again! I will start with the OpEd purportedly written by Fuad Siniora, Prime Minister of Lebanon but strangely, it has the fingerprints of State Department propagandists doing their job.(1) Siniora tells us that military action does not give the people of Israel security. This from Siniora who neglected to put Lebanese troops in the South where he promised to keep Hezb'Allah terrorists away from Israel. Instead, he also allowed Hezb'Allah to establish a six square block compound in the middle of Beirut. Siniora advises Israel that the only way to achieve a comprehensive peace settlement is to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Reams have already been written by objective Middle East experts to the effect that, while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is said to be the reason for Arab uprisings all over the world, there is no truth for this claim. I wonder if Siniora is prepared to defend his disinformation when Islamists are blowing up the world in places where there are no connections to Israel. There are over 70 Terrorist organizations operating in Iraq, supported, supplied and funded by Iran, Syria, Russia, China and North Korea as weapons' suppliers. Siniora tells us that the 22 members of the Arab League will recognize Israel if she withdraws to the 1949 Armistice cease-fire lines. (Those lines were the vulnerable positions that invited the Arab Muslim aggression leading to the 1967 Six Days War -- that Abba Eban called "Auschwitz borders"). Siniora agrees that giving Israel recognition and a promised peace is (get this) a "high price" the Arabs are willing to pay. But, Israel must give up 22% of her very tiny territory. Israel is now only some 22% of the land that was set aside to become a Jewish State when the map of the Middle East was redrawn after World War 1. Siniora wants the "Palestinians to establish a viable independent state in Yesha (Gaza, Samaria and Judea), which is roughly 22% of Israel" and .22X.22 (=5%) of Mandated Palestine. What Siniora leaves out is that Jordan is already 78% of historic Palestine. Do the math! Jordan is 78% of historic Palestine. Now add 5% of historic Palestine for another state in Palestine. That adds up to 83% of historic Palestine which was reserved by the League of Nations, "to establish a Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine. Article 4" "... shall facilitate Jewish immigration...while assuring the close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes. Article 6." (2) In the parlance of Middle East code-words, that statement tells all that Israel will get the equivalent of a Mohammed-type "Hudna" (Arabic for temporary cease-fire) which is a false, short-term agreement to be abrogated when the Islamists are strong enough to mount a full offensive.** This was the trick, the Hudabaiya Treaty, mentioned by Yassir Arafat when speaking in Arabic to explain any short-term cease fire he negotiated with the Israelis would be abrogated -- like the first Oslo Accords. But, Siniora, who himself is a Muslim, knows the history of Mohammed who was a clever arch-killer who taught that any trick may be used against the infidel (non-Muslim) in a Jihad (holy war for Islam). Siniora blathers on the talk of "Peace and Security" which obscures his position supporting the Saudi Plan to flood Israel with three to five million (3,000,000-5,000,000) descendants of the original 480,000 fellaheen Arab Muslims who were urged to leave by the incoming six Arab armies. The Arab leaders said: "Clear the roads so we can eliminate the Zionist Jews and then you can come back to claim your homes and those of the Jews." Siniora complains of the damage done to Lebanon as a result of the 2006 Lebanon war July 12 to August 14, 2006. Of course, he neglects to mention that Hezb'Allah killed 8 Israeli soldiers and kidnapped 2 whom they still hold. (Plus the soldier that Hamas kidnapped) Siniora also neglects to mention that Hezb'Allah started firing long range Katyusha missiles into Israel without provocation and he made no effort to send in Lebanese troops to stop the missile launchings. (3) Siniora uses the buzz words of disinformation such as "injustice, oppression, illegal occupation of Arab lands". He speaks of extremism (meaning terror) as a reluctant response to Israel, ignoring of over 50 years of uninterrupted aggression through war and terror -- all with the intent of eliminating Israel and her people. He forgot the illegal occupation and illegal building by Arabs on Jewish-owned land and Arab Muslim desecration of Jewish holy places whenever the Muslims were in control. When Arabs under Islam cannot achieve in the short term the utter conquest of their intended victim, they fall back on screeching for fairness, understanding and a cessation of their victims' efforts to defend themselves. They generally seek allies among intended future victims. In this case, it would be America, Europe and Russia to whom the Islamists appeal for support, planning that one day soon, through infiltration, nuclear threats or simply outbreeding their adversaries, they will dominate the world by Islam with a Global Muslim Caliphate. They don't hide their goals; they proclaim them loudly and often. Why don't we listen? They say what they mean and they mean what they say! Siniora also tells us that the Arabs like the Israelis have security concerns. What he fails to mention that well-documented history plainly states that it's those "peaceful" Arabs who plan, arm and restart the conflicts. When Israel responds in self-defense, the Muslim Arabs put their propaganda machine in high gear, bleating about how unfair it is for Israel to respond. For example, Israel gave up Gush Katif in Gaza and now receives daily launchings of Kassam Rockets. Israel under Ehud Barak foolishly left the security buffer zone in Lebanon and Hezb'Allah moved in and established firing bases with the benign neglect of Siniora and the Lebanese Army. After the War, Hezb'Allah was re-stocked by Iran through Syria and now has 20,000 Missiles ready to assault Israel -- again. Why does "Never Again" never mean "Never Again"? Babbling about a "Just and Lasting Peace" is merely the cover Arabs need to seduce the world at large or Israeli Leftists who live in an illusory world where words are treated like things. Things being solid irrefutable reality where, in fact, words are merely transitory sounds which fade in moments. Only the intentions can be considered viable and those are tested each day for accuracy. Siniora bleats about International Law as if any Arab/Muslim/Islamic nation considered International Law binding on Muslims. In brief, Siniora is a typical Muslim liar who conjures up words. In his enthusiasm to hoodwink his audience, he actually believes his own voice -- for the moment. ### 1. "Give the Arab Peace Initiative a Chance" by Fuad Siniora New York Times, May 11, 2007 2. "Palestine Mandate of the League of Nations: 1922"
3. "2006 Lebanon War" Wikipedia
** This is the true meaning of what Yassir Arafat told his people in Arabic when he signed the Oslo Accords September 13, 1993. He called it a Hudaybiya treaty. This is how Mohammed treated the 10 year treaty he signed with the Jews of the Quarish tribe, which he broke in 2 years when he was militarily stronger. Then he came back, massacred the men, sold the women and children into slavery. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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A BATTLEGROUND IN GAZA
Posted by Daily Alert, May 16, 2007. |
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This was the May 14, 2007 editorial in the Washington Times
(http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20070513-100738-1015r.htm). |
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Don't be surprised if you wake up one morning and learn that the Gaza Strip has become a lot like Lebanon was last summer. Gaza looms as a major battleground in the larger global struggle with jihadism, with the Israeli military squaring off against terrorist proxies of Iran and Syria in addition to al Qaeda factions burrowing into the region. Hamas has built in essence a 12,000-man militia -- two to three times the size of the Hezbollah force in last summer's Lebanon war. Gaza is crawling with hundreds of terrorists affiliated with the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, part of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah organization; Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and the Popular Resistance Committees, an amalgamation of terror groups in Gaza. The buildup of Gaza's jihadist network has proven to be a largely cost-free exercise for Tehran and Damascus, which provide funding and weaponry but remain largely immune from substantial Israeli military retaliation. Many of the terrorists in Gaza have trained with Hezbollah, Iran's proxy, and much of their funding and weaponry is smuggled from Egypt into Gaza through tunnels under civilian homes. Israeli intelligence agents estimate that more than 50 tons of TNT have been smuggled into Gaza during the past year or two -- enough to build and produce tens of thousands of rockets in the small arms shops in Gaza. Palestinian and Israeli security officials said last week that there are 15 active tunnels in the Rafah area of Gaza being used to move arms, drugs and agents between Gaza and Egypt. The tunnels are controlled by powerful family clans who operate independently of the PA. Almost every day there are rocket firings into Israel, and/or gun battles involving the clans, terrorist factions and Palestinian security services. Over the past few months Islamists, some apparently affiliated with al Qaeda, have attacked video stores, Internet cafes and an elementary school in Gaza to protest "un-Islamic" behavior. As Gaza descends into chaos reminiscent of Afghanistan under the Taliban, Israel, which withdrew all of its soldiers and civilians from there two years ago in the hope that the Palestinians would respond by building a viable independent state), has difficult decisions ahead. The government must decide whether to conduct major military operations against Gaza-based terrorists who are expanding their capability to attack neighboring Israeli towns. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's center-left government wants desperately to avoid a large anti-terror ground operation that could include reoccupying parts of Gaza, but the Israel Defense Force chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, says bluntly that the only solution to the continuing problem of Palestinian rocket fire into Israel is an army ground operation. In November, Israel agreed to a "cease-fire" in which it would refrain from any large-scale campaign against Gaza-based terrorists, while the Hamas-dominated PA government would halt the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel. But since November more than 250 Qassam rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza -- some by Hamas, with others by various Palestinian factions, all with the tacit approval of Hamas. While Mr. Olmert and the country's civilian leadership hope to avoid a ground operation, officials say privately that their hand will likely be forced on the issue -- particularly if the terrorists firing from Gaza hit a school or a day-care center. That almost happened a week ago in Sderot, an Israeli town of 20,000 less than a mile from Gaza, which has been the target of hundreds of rockets from Gaza during the past two years. In Sderot, nine- and ten-year-old children in day-care centers routinely practice what to do in the event of rocket strikes, and a week ago a rocket fired from Gaza struck a Sderot house close to a kindergarten. The PIJ -- which is based in Damascus and gets most of its funding from Iran -- claimed "credit" for it. But miracles are scarce, and the first school or day-care center that takes a hit will provoke an irresistible demand for military retaliation. When the Jewish state withdrew from Gaza almost two years ago, tens of thousands of Israeli civilians were within range of Palestinian rockets in Gaza; today, that figure is 200,000 and growing. The situation is likely to become more dire. The rockets smuggled into Gaza, like those produced inside Gaza, are of much higher quality than the rockets of a year ago, enabling terrorists to create a stockpile. This poses a dilemma for Israeli officials who understand that delay creates ever more peril on their southern border. 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 |
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POLITICIANS' HUBRIS; NEW MEANS OF POLITICAL PERSECUTION
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 16, 2007. |
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WHAT IS RICE UP TO? Sec. Rice does not rule out working with Iran to stabilize Iraq. Surely she knows that everything Iran does about Iraq is to destabilize and dominate it. Then she must be preparing to pretend Iran will help, in return for an excuse to withdraw US troops (Eli Lake, NY Sun, 5/1, Op.-Ed.). Iran would take over. What then? Iran does shift its arrangements, but regardless of arrangements, it remains our unscrupulous enemy. We need to change its regime. Any deal she is thinking of would be a sell out. Unfortunately, the US sells out some allies. POLITICIANS' HUBRIS More than egotism drives politicians. They refuse to pay the price for failure. They insist on staying in office to correct the mistakes they already made. They won't admit that their being in office is the chief mistake. Olmert and coterie would continue to blunder (IMRA, 5/3 from Yossi Beilin & Effie Eitam in Maariv). Olmert cannot correct his own incompetence. He is likely to be incompetent in making corrections. He may not even want to follow through on corrections, if his priority is stealing and surrendering. He has other disastrous policies in the making. Nor is he in control of himself, being subject to indictment. The focus on Olmert should not let escape scrutiny of those who supported him. This would include the opportunists who were in his coalition and their Cabinet Members who voted for his policies. Organs of the media that supported his mistakes should be shamed. If the Army were run down because of economies instituted by MK Netanyahu, Netanyahu would deserve a share of the blame for the wartime inadequacies, not the mantle of premiership. HOW DOES ISRAEL PREPARE? Israel's Foreign Min. Livni is 'preparing' for a trip to Cairo. Dr. Aaron Lerner asks what she means by 'preparing.' Is she preparing photo-ops? Is she preparing the usual compliments Egypt doesn't deserve, in return for the usual Egyptian criticism Israel doesn't warrant? Is she preparing suggestions for exactly what Egypt should and could (but won't) do to end the arms smuggling into Gaza? Is she preparing suggestions that could be agreed to at the meeting so something would be accomplished by it? (IMRA, 5/4.) These meetings serve no useful purpose, humiliate Israel, and dig Egypt deeper into its position of dominance. If Israel only had a pro-Israel foreign policy to begin with, there would be some point in preparing for it. HOW GOVERNMENT MISUSES STATISTICS These statistics are not about jihad, but they show a way by which government misleads people, which it might do about jihad. In New York State, 67% of New York City high school students graduate with Regents diplomas, but elsewhere 87% of the students do. In past years, the rate of City students was half the current rate. The Chancellor is pleased with the improvement and its catching up to the rest of the State. What the Chancellor neglected to say was that the City's improvement came after the tests for that diploma were eased! (Sarah Garland, NY Sun, 5/4, p.1.) 'Regents exam' sounded ominous to my Freshman classmates in Brooklyn. My father reassured me by telling me that the exam's purpose was to help the farm boys upstate pass. The City schools did much better than they. Now people should ask how come the City lost its lead in the first place? CRITERIA FOR CHARGE OF ESPIONAGE The crime is purveying classified information. An accused spy for China 'saw nothing wrong with sending the papers to China, because they had been presented at public conference attended by foreigners.' (Josh Gerstein, NY Sun, 5/4, p.6.) What about classified documents whose data is public knowledge? I think the criteria are not realistic. They do not address traditional espionage methods that China carries further. Traditionally, espionage agencies cull through civilian, non-classified sources for useful intelligence. China gets many people to contribute small pieces of the puzzle. That way, few people do enough to fall under suspicion. If they didn't put in that effort, aided by overseas Chinese, China would not get enough data from filching secrets, alone. What did the accused think he was doing? I see something wrong, if not yet illegal, with helping foreign countries gain a military or industrial advantage over us. A new definition should embody this concept, with suitable qualification. NEW MEANS OF POLITICAL PERSECUTION Apparently like Mr. Libby, Karl Rove is not suspected of any crime, but he is being investigated and asked to testify in the hope that some question will trick him into what can be called perjury. Then he can be prosecuted (Emmet Tyrrell Jr., NY Sun, 5/4, Op.-Ed.) This assault on civil liberties is by anti-Bush people. Are they the same ones who accuse Bush of attacking civil liberties? Will haters of Bush because his war efforts impinge on civil liberties object in these cases? 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@verizon.net |
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A FAUSTIAN BARGAIN FOR ISRAEL
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 16, 2007. |
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We are grateful to DEBKAfile, that excellent news organization, for several alerts regarding Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert traveling to Arab countries, while he prepares to abandon more of Israel to accommodate the Saudi evacuation Plan. In addition, what is the role of Jordan's King Abdullah II in the following scheme? (1) Now it is up to us to connect the traveling dots and see where this Faustian Bargain between the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Hamas, Fatah, Egypt and Jordan is going. Many such meetings are scheduled as the scoundrels get together to see how much Land and how many concessions they can wring out of Olmert aimed at Israel's demise. Earlier I wrote that Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's meeting with President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak -- followed by a planned meeting with the King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, portends a double-cross (which should be prosecuted as treason for Olmert and Livni). The Machiavellian arranger of this meeting can be laid at the doorsteps of the Bush Administration, with the strings being pulled by the Arabist State Department and James Baker directing the players. It is imperative to all of the above schemers that Olmert and the Kadima Party stay in office long enough to commit Israel formally to the evacuation of Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights, Jordan Valley, and all of Jerusalem occupied and desecrated by Jordan for 19 years from 1948 to 1967 (that is, all the especially holy Jewish sites and the new Jewish neighborhoods encompassing Jerusalem and protecting her from attack). Concurrent to that, DEBKAfile kindly informs us that King Abdullah II of Jordan may fly to Ram'Allah to visit with Fatah's leader (and its military wing the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigade) Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen). However, before Abdullah meets with Abbas, as I write this May 15th Olmert is meeting with King Abdullah in Petra, Jordan where Abdullah is to commit to Jordan's participation in Israel's abandonment of her precious Lands. King Abdullah of Jordan will thereby give "cover" to Hamas. The purposes of the meeting is to offer Jordanian Linkage to Fatah and Hamas so Olmert can finesse the surrender of Judea and Samaria to Fatah and Hamas under the cover of the Jordanian Linkage. (These secret negotiations -- without approval from the Knesset or a referendum of the people are a re-run of the failed Oslo Syndrome -- also planned in secret by Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin and signed by then PM Yitzhak Rabin, hosted by President Bill Clinton on the White House lawn September 13, 1993.) According to U.S. State Department planning, this would create the false image of a legitimate Palestinian Unity Government, enabling the U.S. and Europeans to release donor monies currently withheld because Hamas is still rightly considered a Terror Organization to whom it is illegal to give American and European tax-payers' money. Of the Billions of dollars awaiting transfer, Abdullah II of Jordan could expect his "cut" for participation in this scheme. Abdullah has a certain personal interest in offering cover to Hamas, namely to defend against his own probable assassination as Hamas grows more dominant. Abdullah is most likely expecting to receive a greater allocation of the fresh water resources flowing from the Golan Heights and mountains of Samaria than Jordan now receives from Israel as part of the Jordan-Israel Peace Agreement. Naturally Olmert, Livni, Peres and Kadima are in on the same scam of transferring the Lands to Fatah/Hamas with Jordan's likely control over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. As you might expect from the usual faulty planning of a virtual Leftist Government, all others will gain while Israel and her people will lose. In brief, this will be like the brutal "ethnic cleansing" of the 10,000 Jewish men, women and children from the 21 communities in Gush Katif/Gaza and the 4 strategic communities in Northern Samaria which overlooked and protected the towns and cities of the coastal plain below. The Gush Katif Committee reports that 97% of the 1,667 uprooted families still live in temporary housing, mostly in the Israeli Negev desert in small, government-built prefabricated "trailer villas" (euphemistically called "cara-villas" in Hebrew). They have yet to receive full compensation promised by the Israeli government. In a normal country, Olmert, Livni, Peres and Peretz would already be indicted for treason and awaiting sentencing for betraying the Jewish nation and her people to foreign Islamic nations who have declared often that they intend to take over ALL of Israel and make ALL of Jerusalem their capital. Those nations and their leaders are Israel's self-declared most vicious enemies. Why do the E.U., U.N., Russia and the U.S. State Department support them? Anti-Semitism mixed with oil is a powerful narcotic. As for Olmert and the Winograd "ploy", keep in mind that the investigating committee dragged its feet in issuing its first report which only covered the events leading up to the 2006 War in Lebanon and the first 5 days of its debacle. The full report will only be issued sometime in mid or late summer despite the fact that the investigation is complete now and should be ready for publication almost a year after this War. This manipulation of information is already obvious to all (or most). Delay of publication and the Winograd Commission's conclusions that Olmert and his cohorts should be retired, has allowed Olmert and his corrupt government to stay in power long enough for Olmert to conclude his Faustian Bargain with the Devil. Olmert plans to abandon all the Jewish Land in Judea, Samaria, the Jordan Valley, the Golan Heights and those parts of Jerusalem which Jordan occupied for 19 years. That 22% of Israel, west of the Jordan river now houses close to a million good Jews, guards the rest of Israel from attack by her avaricious and spitefully hostile neighbors, mentioned earlier and protects 60-65% of Israel's fresh water sources. During this "grace" period, Olmert, at the behest of the U.S. State Department, is negotiating with Bashar Assad to re-take the Golan Heights. Recall that the Golan is a key defensive position on Israel's North-Eastern borders. And remember that at least 30% of Israel's fresh water comes from these Heights which Syria tried to dam up earlier in the 20th century. As long as Israel is stationed there on the high ground, she can observe any military actions starting up in Syria and prepare to defend her citizens. Without that defensive territory, the ability and need to mobilize Israel's mostly civilian army increases to days instead of hours. The U.N., however, is pushing to take Sheba Farms and Mt. Dov, both key military observation posts on the Heights. They want to put a U.N. Peacekeeping Force there, effectively blinding Israel to Syrian maneuvers and preventing the IDF from moving in self-defense and/or preemptively. Note that if Israel surrenders either the Golan Heights and/or Judea and Samaria, the Muslim Arabs will be in control of 65% of Israel's fresh water resources (30% from the Golan and 35% from the Samarian mountains). If the Golan and Samaria is under Muslim/Arab control, they will be able to pollute those waters with sewage, contaminated industrial waste and other poisons. Under Israeli control, these waters are kept clean and rationed by Israeli technology today so the water can serve both the Jews and the Arabs who live in Israel and Jordan. While Syria held the Golan Heights (part of the original territory of the ancient Jewish people), Syria continually shot down on the farmers in the valley. Remember that there are some 20,000 good Jewish men, women and children living peaceably in their homes on the Heights, gainfully employed in some outstanding industries, including a magnificent winery. Where would Olmert put those Jews if he expropriates their lands and evicts them? How would he pay for their re-settlement? He still has not re-settled the Jews from Gush Katif and Samaria -- nor have the majority of them yet found gainful employment. Prior to the August 2005 evacuation, unemployment in Gush Katif was less than one percent. Now some 37% of the evacuees are unemployed. 400 adults aged 50 and over have lost the opportunity for gainful employment. (2) Underlying all of the aforementioned is the so-called Saudi Initiative of February 2002 (most likely written by ghost writers in the U.S. State Department and hand delivered by Thomas Friedman to the Saudis). This PR ploy by then Crown Prince, now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was needed to restore Saudi-U.S. relations after 9/11/01 when 15 of the 19 hijacker/bombers were Saudis (4 were Egyptian). During the months that followed that act of war, the media exposed Saudi Arabia's massive role in financing Global Jihad through direct aid to terror organizations, the establishment of jihadist mosques and schools from Pakistan to Peoria to Paris. (3) The Saudi Plan for Israel's Destruction was only that the Arab League would consider normalizing relations with Israel (NOT recognizing Israel's right to exist) IF Israel retreated to her indefensible 1949-1967 Armistice Lines. These cease fire lines were so vulnerable they caused the 1967 Six Days War, in which Israel's IDF liberated Judea, Samaria, the Jordan Valley, Golan Heights and those parts of Jerusalem (north, east and south) Jordan had occupied from 1948 to 1967. This vulnerability to attack is why Abba Eban called them the "Auschwitz Borders". Even the most radical Jewish Leftists must be suspicious of an offer which the Islamic Wahabbi religion cannot allow. What is allowed, according to the present interpretation of Koranic Law is that Muslims may sign any agreement with an infidel (non-Muslim believer), but is ordered to break that agreement as soon as he is militarily strong enough to defeat that peace partner. This is in line with the Muslim Haditha (Oral Law), as practiced by Mohammed in the 7th Century, particularly using the custom he originated in the Hudabaiya Treaty which Mohammed signed for 10 years of peace with the Jewish Quarish tribes. Instead of keeping the peace treaty, Mohammed returned in 2 years when he was militarily stronger, slaughtered the Quarish men, selling the women and children into slavery. Back to King Abdullah Hussein of Jordan: Clearly, it is just a matter of short time before the dominant numbers of Palestinian Arab Muslims in Jordan (now approximately 80%) will stage a coup d'etat and Jordan will revert to being wholly Palestinian Arab Muslim, controlled by radical Terrorist organizations. Then Israel and America will have another dedicated enemy endangering their lives and even dominating the Saudi oil fields -- unless Iran gets there first. You might argue that Iran has plenty of its own oil but, to put a choke hold on the Free West, they would be happy to deny the West access to oil -- especially America who they call the "Great Satan". The Saudis and Egyptians would assist Iran in attacking the U.S. Double crossing Israel may seem to buy only a bit of time but, the schemers plan that in the end Jordan will become wholly radical Palestinian Muslim, controlling Judea, Samaria, Gaza, the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley and most of Jerusalem. After the death of Hosni Mubarak (by natural means or assassination by the Muslim Brotherhood), Egypt will probably be taken over by its insidious Muslim Brotherhood. Recall that the U.S. State Department planned and has armed Egypt to occupy the Saudi oilfields to bolster America's interests. But the Muslim Brotherhood will become heir to the American arms, paid for with some $60 Billion in American taxpayers' money, then move on to the Saudi oilfields and their enormous weapons' depots. If Olmert succeeds in completing his duplicitous marching orders as issued by the Bush Administration and the U.S. State Department, Israel will be hard pressed to defend herself. Given that everyone but the Israeli people will receive their cut and benefit from this nefarious scheme, I wonder what Olmert and his cohorts expect as their benefits for betraying their nation and their own people? Perhaps he merely gets to keep such illegal profits already made but now under investigation by the Police and Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz. This is my conclusion as I see Olmert wandering the Arab Muslim capitals of the world (or, at least those who would allow a "fallen" Jew to set foot in their countries). Otherwise, while he is en route to complete his betrayal, he would be allowed into only some neutral, out-of-the-way places like Petra, Sharm el Sheik, etc. The concept of selling one's soul to the Devil for riches and success in this world has become well known as a "Faustian Bargain. Clearly, many (not all) of Israel's erstwhile leaders have chosen to sell their souls, as Faust did, for the short-term benefits they may have received on earth. Many are already paying their just retribution for betraying their nation and her people. They have lost their elected or appointed offices and whatever was left of their contaminated soul. The Devil always collects his due. I must point out the fiction of Vice President Dick Cheney's visit to Saudi Arabia wherein he claims he wants America to double the Saudi Air Force to contend with Iran's Air Force -- possibly loaded with missiles carrying WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) whose warheads may contain NBC (Nuclear, Biological and/or Chemical) poisons. First, the Saudis already have the largest and best equipped Air Force. But, they have lousy combat pilots and poor maintenance. Secondly, Iran has no Air Force to speak of and they are limping along with old F14 Tomcats for which they are constantly scrounging for parts. However, for huge profits, the U.S. aircraft manufacturers wish to sell more aircraft to the Saudis who are flush with American oil dollars. The simple fact is that America would have to go in and fight to keep access to the Saudi oil fields for the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Besides, once Iran is nuclear-capable, all the nations in the Middle East region will have to accept Iran's dominance, knowing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is crazy enough to use his new nukes on any nation that refuses his Islamic leadership. Regrettably, we already see President George W. Bush in a mode of caving in, with his legacy being the virtual godfather of a nuclear radically Islamist state of Iran. Bush could have taken Iran's nuclear capability out with all the sea and air power now gathered off the Iranian coast. Instead, it seems he has caved in. It is tragic to see the world's greatest hope for peace and security for all on earth to allow the world's greatest Islamic Terrorist nations to grow and eventually threaten the whole world in order to dominate the world with a Global Caliphate gained by "Jihadi" Terrorism. ### 1. DEBKAfile reports: "Israeli PM OLmert and FM Livni bound for Arab capitals to seek modifications of the Saudi Peace Plan." DEBKAfile May 9, 2007 2. "Quick Takes: News from Israel You May Have Missed" by Aaron Klein Jewish Press Mar. 30, 2007 3. "The Saudi Plan for Israel's Destruction" by Caroline B. Glick Jewish Press March 30, 2007 Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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HOW TO HANDLE HAMAS THREATS
Posted by Talya Lapidott, May 15, 2007. |
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The State of Israel-The Government of Jerusalem: Jerusalem -- A daily average of 20 Kasam rockets fall on The State of Israel from the town of Gaza, who harbor Arab murderers. Hamas, the so called murderers -- worshipers of Sadam Hussein -- made threats and declared: If Israel will come and destroy the Kasam rockets in Gaza they will kill the Israeli soldier Shalit. We asked Jacob Gurewich,* the author of The Enemy Within and Fear Factors, a former Yeshiva scholar and a commander in the Irgun, to comment on Hamas threats. Here is what he said: "Where there is no vision, the people perish! To stop the rain of terror and murder upon the land of Israel, knowing clearly the whereabouts the murderers hide, Israel should urge the Gaza civilian-collaborators to evacuate Gaza within 7 days, and enable them to seek refuge in Israel -- providing shelter, food and medical aid, and unequivocally declare: *Aftermath: the 1973 Yom Kippur Shoah, and the Oslo fiasco 20 years later, which our own enemy within our nation inflicted on the Israel, Gurewich clearly envisioned the present dire Israel's state of affairs, as he scrupulously detailed in his books: The Enemy Within and Fear Factors, in his essays, letters, and speeches. Talya Lapidott is Professor Emeritus, Charlottesville VA. |
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FORGIVENESS, A NECESSARY INGREDIENT...BUT...
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 15, 2007. |
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To the Editor, Patricia Boyle's letter in today's Palo Alto Daily News (5/15/07) is deeply touching and poignantly insightful. Indeed, as she says, 'Forgiveness is the only place where peace can flourish.' What she may not know, however, is that in the Israel-Arab conflict Israel has offered forgiveness and peace, resolution and reconciliation, reparation and negotiation, cooperation and co-existence, many times over. Fifteen times since 1937, Israel or the UN or the UK or the USA, or some combination of these, have offered Palestinian leadership their state, de facto and de iure, alongside of Israel. Israel has accepted all 15 offers, recognizing the right of the Palestinian people to political self-determination and national self-fulfillment. The Palestinan and other Arab states' leadership have rejected all fifteen, with violence, murder, terrorism, war....and the endlessly and vociferously and shamelessly repeated commitment to the destruction of Israel and genocide of its Jews. The past and current cadre of Arab leaders do not want a Palestinian state, nor have they ever wanted this state, alongside of Israel. They want this state instead of Israel, and on the corpses of Israel's 6,000,000 Jews. Their leaders promote this goal endlessly...and their deeds match their words. They do not recognize Israel's right to political self-determination. They do not even recognize Israel's right to exist. Forgiveness is indeed a necessary ingredient for peace....but it is not, by itself, an adequate ingredient. As former Hezbollah leader Abbas Massawi told the world almost 15 years ago, 'we are not fighting you (Israel), because we want something from you. We are fighting you because we want to destroy you.' Palestinian leaders have echoed his words many times over since then. When the Arab terrorists put down their weapons, there will be no
more violence. Below is Patricia Boyle's letter. |
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Dear Editor: One group blows up a bus that kills 20 shoppers at the market plus the 30 bus riders and maims 60 more. The next day, another group sends a suicide bomber to the mosque and kills 35 souls at prayer and maims another 30 as revenge. All this tragedy is based on revenge. There is no understanding of forgiveness, which is heartbreaking. Forgiveness is the only place where peace can flourish. Forgiveness allows the wronged to begin healing while revenge keeps wounds as open, gaping holes, infected by hate. To forgive those who commit the most evil of crimes, is the most difficult of all kindnesses. But, the forgiver eliminates hate from his soul, leaving room for love to develop and close the wound. It doesn't eliminate the sorrow connected to the loss, but it does make living life without the loved one possible. The one with revenge in his soul has no chance of happiness. He will live and die with hate in his heart. As a woman who lived through some of the worst years of 'the troubles' as they are known in Ireland, I have a slight bit of hope that peace can be found in the Middle East. Sectarian violence has devastated my little corner of the world. But, with agreements made just this past March, there is now light at the end of the tunnel. I pray the same for the Middle East. Patricia Boyle, Foster City 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 |
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TOLERATING HYPOCRISY IN JERUSALEM
Posted by Barbara Sommer, May 15, 2007. |
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This was written by Caroline Glick and it was published on the Jerusalem
Post
(www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1178708600 683&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull). |
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Last week the EU-financed Peace Now organization held an "Alternative Jerusalem Day" ceremony in which it called for Israel to renounce its sovereignty over half of the city in the interests of peace. Why anyone would believe that an Israeli surrender of the eternal capital of the Jewish people to Hamas will lead to peace is anyone's guess. It seems particularly fatuous in light of the blatantly unpeaceful results of Israel's 2005 Peace Now-supported surrender of Gaza to Hamas, its 2000 Peace Now-supported surrender of south Lebanon to Hizbullah, and the Peace Now-supported Barak government's offer to surrender the Temple Mount and other parts of Jerusalem to Yasser Arafat in 2000. Also last week, the EU-financed Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies published a survey claiming that if current trends continue, the prevailing two-thirds Jewish majority in Israel's capital city will be reduced to a 60-percent majority by 2020. Why there is any reason to believe the doom and gloom numbers is also anyone's guess. It seems a particularly hard sell given that the Jewish and Arab fertility rates in the city (3.8 and 4.1 respectively) are nearly identical, and economic trends that now stifle Jewish population growth are reversible. This week, the EU supplemented its NGOs' work to divide the capital by announcing its boycott of Wednesday's Knesset ceremony celebrating Jerusalem's liberation. The US also loudly absented itself from the ceremony. For its part, the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government could not hide its befuddlement. After Jerusalem mayor Uri Lupolianski attacked the US and EU boycott, arguing, "Whoever does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel also does not recognize the State of Israel," the government stammered out a couple of bromides. With her characteristic weakness, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni
stuttered
that Israel's connection to Jerusalem is "indivisible." Prime Minister
Ehud
Olmert said nothing.
IN THEIR attack against Israeli sovereignty over the eternal capital of the Jewish people in the name of peace, the Left, the EU and the Americans were nothing if not consistent. So too was the government consistent in its stuttered response to the onslaught against Jerusalem. Over the past 14 years the policies of Israel's governments, the Israeli Left, the EU and the US have consistently been predicated on hypocrisy. The Left claims to be working for the civil rights of Arabs, whom it claims are being discriminated against by Israel and the Jerusalem municipality. The EU claims to seek a repartition of the city along the 1949 armistice lines to advance the cause of peace. The US claims to oppose any action that would prejudice the outcome of final status negotiations toward peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel's governments claim that they are committed to Israeli sovereignty throughout the city and to the upholding of the rule of law. The fact that all of these purported objectives are false was copiously documented in a report published last year by the Office for Public Inquiries for East Jerusalem. The organization, headed by Arieh King, is funded by private Jewish donors. Entitled "Illegal building in East Jerusalem as a strategic tool of the Palestinian Authority in its struggle for the future of Jerusalem," the 61-page report and its several hundred pages of attached documents provide a neighborhood-by-neighborhood survey of illegal Arab building in the city. Contrary to the Left's repeated contention that Jerusalem's Arabs are forced to build illegally because the municipality refuses to grant them construction permits, the city approved a planning scheme that provides for the construction of 32,500 new housing units in Arab neighborhoods. This is on top of 24,000 units already in various stages of the licensing process, and another 20,000 illegal structures built by Jerusalem Arabs in the past 20 years. The political aim of the illegal construction is made clear by its
financing
sources. Since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994,
the
PA, Saudi Arabia and the EU have spent millions of dollars in financing
illegal construction in Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, often on state
and
privately owned lands.
IN AN EFFORT to degrade the Jewish character of the city, for instance, Arabs have built homes on state-owned lands adjacent to the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives that are earmarked for future cemetery expansion. The strategic aim of the building is apparent from its location. Much of the building has been carried out meters from strategic traffic arteries including Highways 60, 1, 4 and 443. Additionally, illegal construction has rendered the Atarot airport insecure. Israel has done next to nothing to destroy the illegal structures constructed adjacent to the only airport east of Ben-Gurion International Airport. The illegal Arab construction, which has placed most neighborhoods in Jerusalem and the highway approaches to the city within rifle range of hostile gunmen, has been met with indifference by the Israeli governing bureaucracy. Successive governments have hypocritically announced their commitment to Jerusalem. But the King report shows that government decisions passed in 1998, 2002 and 2003 ordering government agencies to stem illegal Arab construction were never effectively implemented. King sent his report to dozens of government offices and Knesset
committees.
Aside from a meeting with one official from the Justice Ministry, no
one
responded to his work.
AS KING'S report notes, the Left plays a key role in enabling illegal Arab building in Jerusalem employing organizations like Peace Now, Bimkom and the International Coalition against House Demolitions. The leftists claim that they are committed to civil rights and peace, yet their work undermines the civil rights of Israeli landowners and undermines peace by empowering a regime that is openly opposed to all the ideals they claim to stand for. The PA insists that its land be empty of Jews. So too, the first law it promulgated made it a capital offense for Arabs to sell land to Jews. Dozens of Arab Jerusalemites have been murdered by the PA since 1994 for their "crime" of selling their land to Jews. For its part, Israel keeps the city open to all faiths and facilitates
Arab
building.
THE EU claims that its support for the repartition of the city stems from its commitment to a peace where Israel will have secure and recognized borders. Yet, in funding pressure organizations and illegal construction, not only does the EU undermine Israel's control of its capital city, it undermines Israel's security by enabling construction along strategic traffic arteries and in sniper range of neighborhoods within the 1949 armistice lines like Sanhedria, Romema and Har Nof. For its part, the US claims to object to any move by either Israel or the Palestinians that would prejudice the deliberations toward a final peace settlement. Yet by refusing to recognize Israel's right to its capital city, in breach of US law which does so, the Bush Administration, like its predecessors is prejudicing the outcome of those future deliberations against Israel. The US loudly demands that legal Jewish communities in Judea and
Samaria,
like Migron, be destroyed, and objects to legal Israeli building in
Ma'aleh
Adumim. All the while, it actively supports illegal Palestinian
building in
Jerusalem by opposing any Israeli assertion of sovereignty through the
unprejudiced enforcement of its laws.
THE HYPOCRISY of all these parties is of course dwarfed by the hypocrisy of successive Israeli governments. With the exception of the Netanyahu government, every Israeli government since 1993 has enabled the Arabs to undermine the state's control of Jerusalem. While paying lip service to the city's unity, by errors of commission and omission, Israel's governments have failed to defend the property rights of public and private land owners in Jerusalem. They have allowed the PA, enemy states like Saudi Arabia and the EU to openly abet illegal building projects in the city. Moreover, while they have used the letter of the law to justify expelling Jews from their communities in Judea and Samaria, successive governments have ignored both the letter and the spirit of the law in refusing to take concerted action to enforce the laws of the state by blocking illegal building in the capital. So this week, as the government conducts its hollow celebrations of the reunification of eternal capital of the Jewish people which it does so little to defend, and the Left, the EU and the US emptily speak of their "peace policies," the Jewish people must stop tolerating this dirty game. When Barak offered Arafat the Temple Mount at Camp David in 2000, Ariel
Sharon reacted by stating that Jerusalem is an eternal trust given to
the
Jewish people and no one has the right to breach that trust.
FORTY YEARS after the city's reunification, it is the responsibility of Jews in Israel and throughout the world to stand up for Jerusalem. We must work to expose that in its support for the city's division, the Left seeks to empower a racist regime that embodies everything the Left claims to oppose, against Israel, which embodies the very rule of law and civil rights the Left purports to care about. Similarly, Jews must call our so-called friends in Washington and Brussels to task for their malevolent, discriminatory support for the human-rights-abusing, racial supremacists in the PA over the human-rights-respecting Jews who keep Jerusalem open to all faiths and all peoples. Finally, we must demand that the leaders of the State of Israel fulfill their duty to posterity by upholding and strengthening Zion. If they are unwilling to do so, the Jewish people as a whole must stand up and demand they resign to make room for a government that will defend our eternal capital. Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@yahoo.com |
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GOV'T DECIDES ON PR AS ANTI-TERRORIST WEAPON
Posted by Avodah, May 15, 2007. |
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This was written by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu and appeared in Arutz-Sheva. |
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(IsraelNN.com) The government, faced with a continued escalation of Kassam rocket fire on Sderot and the western Negev, decided Sunday to concentrate on a public relations campaign to explain the problem of arms smuggling to the international community. Although intelligence officials have stated over the past year that Gaza terrorists already have a huge stockpile of advanced weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles, the Cabinet deferred taking direct military action except for its approval of pinpoint targeting of terrorist cells. Ministers said the government wants to explain to the world how the unchecked smuggling has turned Gaza into a budding Lebanon. The Cabinet decided not to take a stand on whether to okay or nix a ground offensive against counter-terrorists. "Iran is building a 'Hamastan' in Gaza... Iran is involved in supporting both the Islamic factions and Fatah... Today, at least 40 percent of Fatah's different fighting groups are also paid by Hizbullah and Iran," Shalom Harari, of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, recently noted. At least 40 percent of Fatah's different fighting groups are also paid by Hizbullah and Iran. "If Israel again attacks deep into Gaza, Hamas hopes to confront it with something like what was seen in southern Lebanon -- reserves of Hizbullah dug in deep under the earth. They have air conditioning experts for the underground tunnels they are constructing.... They have experts for every field connected to the development of weapons and rockets," added Brig.-Gen. Harari. "In Gaza there are between 80,000 and 100,000 automatic rifles and machine guns. This is the most [heavily] armed people in the Middle East except for Somalia. In 2006, thirty tons of TNT were brought into Gaza," Harari said. "The IDF will have to enter Gaza in a very wide-scale operation in the next year, if not in the next six months. ... The big question is whether to do it now or wait, like Israel did in Lebanon -- and look at the results." Arab terrorists fired three more Kassam rockets on the western Negev Sunday, one of them causing a brush fire but no injuries. More than 250 rockets have been fired on Israel since the so-called Gaza truce announced in late November by Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. As the attacks continued, the Cabinet discussed the problem for four hours. Former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said he opposes a ground action, reasoning that "at this moment a large-scale operation in the Gaza Strip won't bring solutions." The only major change the Cabinet approved, except for the public relations campaign, is to allow the military to hit known terrorists, rather than restrict its targets to rocket-firing cells "caught in the act." Notable exceptions to opposing a ground action were Public Security Minister Avi Dichter (Kadima) and Strategic Threats Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Israel Our Home -- Yisrael Beiteinu). Contact Avodah at avodah15@aol.com |
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ON ZIONIST YOUTH MOVEMENTS
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 15, 2007. |
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The following appeared in Midstream in the late 1980s. It was never converted to electronic form, until now. I just stumbled acrosss someone who put it on line at
This examines what the role of Zionist youth movements should be in encouraging aliyah. Since I have never posted it, here tis: |
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I grew up in a Zionist youth movement. Like most of the members of all Zionist youth organizations, the movement itself played a central role in my childhood and teen-age years, and perhaps even today exercises a certain amount of influence upon me. For many years the movement was the center of gravity in social matters. I have many fond memories of those years; some of my closest friends today are old movement comrades. The movements, of course, strive to be much more than social organizations. Each group has a specific agenda, with immigration to Israel playing a particularly important role. Each has a political self-definition and identity. Few other organizations could generate in teen-agers and college students the same feelings of importance, righteousness, and of serving the grand cause. Today I am advancing reluctantly toward middle age. I am also an Israeli. I intend here to put aside nostalgia in order to engage in a critical analysis of Zionist youth movements from an adult perspective. I am sure many will not agree with it; perhaps it may serve as a catalyst for dialogue. Zionist youth organizations are worth discussing for the simple reason that they are the future of and in many ways the most important bodies within organized Zionism in the Diaspora. To some extent they produce future Israelis, although this is not their sole function. At minimum they are extremely influential over their own membership. The weaknesses of the Zionist youth movements are so obvious when viewed in retrospect through adult eyes that it seems hard to explain why they have been and remain so difficult to identify for those participating directly in those movements. I will discuss several of these shortcomings that are in my opinion the most harmful and disturbing. I find the most problematic aspect of the Zionist movement in general and of the Zionist youth movements in particular to be their divisions and allegiances along the internal party lines of Israel. Each organization seems to see itself as the overseas appendage of a specific Israeli party, following that party's lead and line. Each organization believes its raison d'etre is to act as a Diaspora base, supplying personnel and political support for its Israeli counterpart. This partisan politicization of the Zionist movement is in fact only a natural extension to the Diaspora of the extensive over-politicization of all aspects of life in Israel, upon which I have commented elsewhere. Indeed it extends beyond the Zionist movement proper and into the general Jewish (and occasionally non-Jewish) communities in the form of partisan support for Israeli political organizations, e.g. Peace Now, Gush Emunim, and so on. Of all the problems that could and should be addressed by organized Zionism in the Diaspora, or as I prefer to think of it -the Zionist 'opposition" within Diaspora Jewry, can think of none that would be less relevant and less beneficial than the question of the "proper stance" vis-a-vis Israeli elections. After all, what importance or relation do these elections have to the issues facing Diapora Jewry, to the questions of individual and communal Jewish identity, Jewish education, assimilation, Anti-Semitism, or even aliyah? The partisan mobilization consigns the Zionist movement to marginality because it focuses energy and attention on elections whose outcomes do not directly affect Diaspora Jews. The latter are by and large ignorant of what those elections are all about and the issues at play. In any case, election issues like monetary policy and urban planning are not exactly the stuff from which dramatic Zionist rallying cries are made. Several Zionist youth organizations are associated with specific kibbutz associations in Israel. I can re"' call impassioned debates among American movement colleagues, sometimes running into the wee hours, over the advantages and disadvantages of these kibbutz associations. I would wager that not one Israeli kibbutz member in five can clearly explain or cares the least about the differences among these associations. (Perhaps the picture was different 30 years ago.) Among non-kibbutz Israelis virtually no one knows or cares. Yet in the United States the Zionist youth movements splintered and passionately "battled" one another over such irrelevant lines of distinction. It is ironic to note that the Israeli parties themselves receive very little benefit from this Diaspora politicization. For example, the flow of American immigrants to kibbutzim is minuscule; many who join are not movement graduates, and some are not Jewish. Of movement graduates who join kibbutzim, many subsequently leave, and many also leave Israel. The net increment (inflow minus outflow) from all overseas youth movements to all kibbutzim together is at most a few score per year, and probably at times is negative. Financial support from the Diaspora organizations to their Israeli counterparts is also small, and in some cases it too is probably negative on net. Even the political support for specific Israeli parties generated in the Diaspora by Zionist and non-Zionist organizations is not of great value, given the natural (and usually justified) inclination of Israelis to dismiss as meddling attempts from abroad, including those from Zionist Jews, to preach to them about their political alternatives. These anachronistic partisan loyalties condemn much of the Zionist youth movement to impotence and render it unable to exploit the scale economies and momentum that would accompany organizational amalgamation. Even religious distinctions would not stand in the way of amalgamation as party loyalties do. American Jews are generally much more tolerant of one another's religious (or non-religious) inclinations than are Israelis; the religious heterogeneity of most Diaspora Zionist organizations is a testament to the feasibility of amalgamation. Another major problem of the Zionist movements is the role assigned to aliyah and the way in which the "aliyah issue" is represented. I say this not because I think aliyah is unimportant (I think it is important) nor because I think American Jews should not make aliyah (I think they should). The problem is that aliyah is a major life decision, something on the same order of magnitude as marriage or parenthood. In the youth movements, however, it has been reduced to a slogan. People do not make life decisions -at least not successful ones- on the basis of slogans. Aliyah must stem from a careful examination of one's goals, ideology, religious outlook, world-view, etc. It is really not a one-shot "decision," but rather an ongoing chain of decisions that continues long after physical relocation to Israel. Even serious and well-considered aliyah decisions often end in reverse migration within a few years. Frivolous aliyah decisions seldom succeed. Part of the problem is that the Zionist youth movements, while excessively aliyah-centered, are insufficiently Jewish- and educationally-centered. Herzl once said that in order to get the Jews out of Egypt Moses first had to get Egypt out of the Jews. The Zionist organizations cannot hope to create an aliyah stream unless they first succeed in a campaign of serious Jewish education. Aliyah is a byproduct of deep J ewish commitment and consciousness. Because there is little Jewish consciousness, and weak Jewish identity, there is little aliyah. Interestingly, this is very poorly understood in Israel. Israel continues to pour significant amounts of money into the network of shlichim, whose function is supposed to be the encouragement of aliyah. A cabinet minister for absorption is also supposed to be working at encouraging aliyah. Perhaps it is time to re-examine the effectiveness of the shaliach idea. In most cases, the shaliach supplies some technical information or expedites some bureaucratic chore involved in aliyah -but it is rare that he or she inspires the decision to make aliyah itself. To increase aliyah, fundamental Jewish identity issues must be addressed. The "sloganization" of aliyah in the youth movements has a number of negative repercussions. When aliyah is the central focus of youthful enthusiasm, many forget to ask the obvious next question, "After aliyah, what?" There are many movement graduates who optimistically made the immigration decision completely unprepared for life and career thereafter. Zionist youth organizations are in many cases indifferent toward career preparation and in some cases downright hostile toward it. In the kibbutz-oriented movements career goals are often considered ideologically impure, or are at least relegated to secondary importance, since the future oleh is to dwell in an agricultural communal proletariat. Many seem to have been convinced that in kibbutz life skills, training, and education are expendable. Of course they are not. And in Israeli life outside the kibbutz confines, these things are certainly no less vital than they would be in America. When aliyah is seen as the grand solution, other life problems may remain unaddressed. It is a truism among veteran olim that every single problem someone has before aliyah will remain with him after aliyah, with some new ones to boot. Life in Israel can be extremely rewarding, but no one claims that it is easy. It is probably impossible to really prepare someone for many of the tribulations of absorption. But to tackle absorption without some direction in terms of one's professional goals means that additional life crises and problems must be tackled at the same time. There are countless stories about movement graduates who have immigrated to Israel, joined kibbutzim, and then -ten years down the line -leave the kibbutz only to find themselves unskilled, under-qualified, bereft of savings, and with a family to support. Under these circumstances it is not surprising that many leave Israel altogether. Given a choice between a fresh start in America vs. blue-collar or low-rung clerical work and salary in Israel, few breadwinners over 30 will choose the latter. In some of the youth movements the urgency with which aliyah is stressed means in effect that immigration takes place by age 20 or so, or else it is "too late." This reminds me of how single women past a certain early age are relegated to spinsterhood in some societies. To arrive in Israel armed with professional skills, or at least with a clear decision about career direction, is to win half the battle. It also makes aliyah a more rewarding experience. The youth movements do not seem to have digested the fact that Israel's swamps have been drained and its roads have been built. The pioneering challenges of today have changed. Israel of the 1980s is an advanced modern society full of problems. The modern pioneer, the immigrant who wishes to devote himself to attempts at resolving those problems, needs more than the fervor of his Zionist commitment. He needs skills, degrees, training and of course infinite patience and energy, to succeed. Ninety-seven percent of Israelis have voted with their feet against kibbutz life. Kibbutzim are increasingly marginal to Israeli society in all senses. Small-town agricultural communal life is in many ways the most unnatural and the most difficult to adapt to for those raised in urban, individualist, Western society. The centrality of the kibbutz for so much of organized Zionism often backfires in that it steers many away from urban and suburban life-styles available in Israel, the ones chosen by the vast majority of the Israelis, the ones most amenable for a Western Jew. I am behind those who choose to live on kibbutzim. I am also behind those who choose to live in urban or suburban Israel. There is nothing morally superior about the former. The aliyah issue is actually only one side of a more general problem, namely the role of "youth" and of the youth movement. This is particularly manifested in the attitudes of youth organizations and their members toward the relative importance of education vs. activism. The movements revel in the idea that education, or at least Zionist education, can and should be completed by the late teens, if not sooner. Thereafter the movement member becomes an educator and activist. The result is a population of teen-agers and those in their early twenties convinced that they already know all there is to know (at least all that is important to know) about Israel, Zionism, Judaism, politics, sociology, etc. Such an attitude is of course a sure path to intellectual shallowness and closed-mindedness, and perhaps even anti-intellectualism. Somehow the idea gets conveyed in the youth movements that solutions and answers are possible without serious, long years of deep and difficult analysis and experience. For college-age movement members, Zionist activities often consist of campus activism and agitprop, but not serious education and learning. Many of them move to Israel thinking they have the answers to Israel's problems in their suitcase. The feeling that answers are already known to movement seniors is reflected in other ways. Among the Zionist movements, several define themselves as Socialist, and at least one as Marxist. Members and individuals in other organizations also sometimes follow Leftish fads. Zionist youth movement graduates have always been active on the far Left of the political spectrum, both within Israel and on American campuses. For some, the transition from the Zionist Left to just plain campus Leftism (and anti-Zionism) comes easily -another symptom of the shallowness of movement education. Marxism, of course, has taken on more of the trappings of a cult than of a serious social science and "Socialism" is no more than the slogan of the economically illiterate. The continuing romance with Socialist rhetoric of so much of the Zionist movement damages that movement in many ways. Though this is not the place to go into details, I believe the main source of Israel's economic difficulties is the continuing attempt by its political elite to run the economy along Socialist lines. The last thing Israel can use is more "Socialism," that is, more bureaucracy, regulation, government control of the economy, and taxation. Immigrants who come to Israel with Socialist banners become part of the economic problem, not the solution. Ironically, "Socialism" as a slogan and ideal is dead in Israel for virtually all those outside of the kibbutz, and perhaps even for many inside. Socialist preaching is a sure method for being dismissed as irrelevant or just ignored. Within the Diaspora it also hinders the positive role the Zionist organizations can play. The bulk of the non-Orthodox community has replaced Jewish self-interest and survival with the American liberal agenda as their political identity, indeed as their religion. The role of Zionism should be to confront American Jewish assimilationism and present an alternative based on Jewish interests. By singing Socialist tunes the Zionist movement ends up playing the role of Left-wing opposition within the Jewish community, rather than Zionist opposition. "Zionists" are then no more than Jewish liberals in a hurry. In some extreme cases, movement graduates migrate into the Leftist anti-Zionist opposition groups within the Jewish community. I have been speaking very critically, perhaps severely, of organized Zionist youth movements. I hope my intentions are not misconstrued. I think that in small doses the movements do some positive things, and there is potential for doing much better. The way for organized Zionism to expand its role and its contribution is to amalgamate its various youth organizations into a very small number of broad and non-political organizations (preferably just one). Organized Zionism should divorce itself from Israeli electoral politics and from kibbutz associations. Its political stance, to the extent that it should have any, should be supporting the broad Israeli electorate on those matters for which consensus exists. Its role within the Diaspora should be first and foremost educational. Its activism within the Jewish community should be over issues of Jewish self-interest and not the American electoral questions of Right and Left. Israel should playa central role. Aliyah should be discussed, even encouraged, but its complexities and difficulties, too, should be addressed. The idea of spending at least part of one's life in Israel should be promoted, but not as a slogan, Education should be a serious, professional, continuing process. Finally, causes of the Left liberal political agenda mayor may not be justified on their own grounds. Regardless, they are not the causes of Jewish self-interest, the Zionist agenda. This should be made crystal clear to all by those in the Zionist movement; first and foremost, they must learn it themselves. 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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il |
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1967 SIX DAY WAR -- 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF JEWISH REBIRTH
Posted by Daryl Temkin, May 15, 2007. |
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In Israel, events are marked by their Hebrew calendar date, and this year, the anniversary of the Six Day War comes out on May 15th, one day following the historic May 14th, 1948 date of Israel's creation. This is significant only because in the Arab world and for Arab student organizations on university campuses across America, May 14th is commemorated as the "Catastrophe Day". At many universities, there will be a week-long series of fiery anti-Israel speeches along with heated anti-Israel marches and vulgarity screaming anti-Israel demonstrations. In contrast, in Jerusalem, the celebration for the "The Day of Jerusalem" marking the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 -- Six Day War and the reunification of Jerusalem is commemorated by one of the most beautiful and moving ceremonies one can imagine. The main streets of Jerusalem's center city are closed to traffic. Tens of thousands of young and old fill the streets briskly waving hundreds of full size Israeli flags, and musicians are posed every few blocks with loud speakers filling the air with their songs. As the musicians play popular Jewish melodies, the streets become a dance stage for well choreographed circle dances and line dances -- each song with its own special dance steps. The joyous group singing on the street and the intense community dancing is a unique sight. Following the hours of this street event a community singing march to Jerusalem's Old City begins. The march proceeds through the Old City's ancient gates and cobblestone streets leading to the Western Wall -- Kotel Plaza. It is estimated that several thousands of people file through the Old City's picturesque and narrow passageways to join in the hours of singing, dancing, and speeches commemorating the Jewish return to a united Jerusalem. In Jewish tradition, the number 40 has its own significance. It often refers to a stage of maturation and accomplishment. The biblical Flood rains stopped after 40 days, Moses was 40 when he confronted the Egyptian taskmaster, Moses was 80 when he confronted Pharaoh. The Jews were in the desert for 40 years prior to entering the Land of Israel, Rabbi Akiba was 40 when he began his study of Torah, and 40 is the number of weeks leading to human birth. And now, this forty years of Jerusalem's unification is a monumental and historic moment marking the miraculous victorious Six Day War. 1967 was quite a different time. Israel had yet to reach its 20th anniversary. It had already experienced two wars. One, upon its creation, by neighbors who demanded that the nascent state be destroyed immediately and the second war, eight years later, when its neighbors decided to cut off and strangulate Israel's supply lines. Prior to 1967, relatively few American Jews even expressed an interest to visit Israel. Israel's first decades watched an immigrant absorbing country developed at a slow and struggling pace. With minimal resources, Israel invested in military protection knowing that its Arab neighbors were preparing for another attempt to destroy it. During the 1960's, international support for Israel was tenuous at best. Israel's neighbors were actively buying the most sophisticated weapons available. The world knew this but continued to make it difficult for Israel to compete. Prior to 1967, the volume of belligerence and anti-Israel hate speech from the Arab world was becoming more and more deafening. Egypt's President Nassar made his intent clear to the world -- that Israel's days were numbered. The theme of pushing the Jews into the sea became a steady crescendo on the Arab street. Time, Newsweek, and other publications reported military statistics comparing Israel's military strength to that of her threatening Arab neighbors. Israel was heavily outnumbered and out-armed in every military category. The military comparison charts appeared as if an ant was being compared to an elephant. The American Jewish community, as well as much of the world, was bracing for the annihilation of the Jewish state. There was no imaginable way for Israel to survive the sheer numbers and mighty force of the expected Arab attack without the military support of the United Kingdom or America. But that super power support was not to be found. Once again, the Arabs cut off the supply lines to Israel, a clear act of war, and without hesitation, the leadership of Israel commanded the Israeli Defense Forces to launch their attack. Within hours, the entire Egyptian air force and all Egyptian air fields were disabled. In days of fighting, the vast number of Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian tanks became useless heaps of scrap metal. And then the Israeli forces entered the Old City of Jerusalem. After very costly and deadly hand to hand combat battles against the Jordanian Old City soldiers, in shock and awe, the Israeli paratroopers found themselves standing victorious in front of the ancient Western Wall of the Temple Mount. The famous and emotional phrase spoken into the Israeli army radio transmitter was the announcement, "Jerusalem is in our hands." The world had gone to bed envisioning that by the next morning Israel would have been wiped off the face of the map. The resulting news was quite different. In six days, the Sinai Desert, the Gaza Strip, the Jordan West Bank, the Golan Heights, Jerusalem's Old City, and its surrounding areas were fully under Israeli control. All of the menacing Arab armies had been destroyed or forced to retreat. West Point military analysts speak of the Six Day War as an inexplicable military victory. "Miraculous" was the West Point officer's explanation for the Israeli Defense Force's victory over what was believed to be impossible odds. In 1967, it was still okay for an army to achieve an absolute victory. Subsequent to that date, Israel has not been allowed to defeat its enemy. In future wars and conflicts Israel would unbelievably be pressured by world powers not to accomplish a full military victory, to neglect enemy aggressions, and to even provide the enemy with guns and ammunition. 1967 was a time that Israelis were not told that they are "tired of fighting and tired of winning battles". Jews at that time understood that when their enemy says that they are going to kill them, the enemy means what it says and Israel does not wait to be attacked. During that time, no one believed that the enemy could be appeased or that, if victorious, the enemy would responsibly stop fighting at the original 1947 UN lines. It was understood throughout Israel that there was only one thing that the Arabs had hoped to achieve, and now after 40 years, that goal of the destruction of Israel has not been relinquished. Following 1967, respect for Israel and the Jews soared throughout the world. Slumbering and even non-identifying Jews began to proudly identify with the Jewish people and the Jewish State. Israel had accomplished a victory of good over evil, and few in the world had any doubt about it. Forty years is a time of great significance. It is a time of reflection and rebirth -- 1967 marked the rebirth of the Jewish people, their values, their mission, and their right to exist and to contribute to this world. World politics has tried to reframe this Jewish Israeli victory into a defeat, and it is up to us to prevent history from being erased, eroded, or confused. The 1967 victory was a victory for humankind. The lessons of that era have not changed and therefore must not be forgotten.
Daryl Temkin, Ph.D. is the founder and director of the Israel
Institute which is devoted to teaching the historic and spiritual
importance of Israel as well as presenting discussions concerning
contemporary issues confronting the Jewish State and the Middle East.
Contact him by email at DT@Israel-Institute.com
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RELIGIOUS PROFILING IN EUROPE
Posted by Gary Bauer, May 15, 2007. |
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Yesterday, the Washington Times reported that security officials throughout Europe have endorsed a plan to "profile mosques on the Continent and identify radical Islamic clerics who raise the threat of homegrown terrorism." One of the key issues security officials will be investigating is sources of funding. For years, I have been critical of the role Saudi money is playing in the spread of Wahabbism, an extremely virulent form of radical Islam that breeds jihadist sentiment. In my report last Wednesday about the Muslim radicals arrested for plotting a massacre of U.S. troops at Fort Dix, I suggested that the mosque they attended should be investigated and more ought to be done to keep Saudi-funded extremism out of our country. Let the ACLU howl about "religious freedom." Nothing in the First Amendment requires this country to allow a foreign entity to build and control mosques in the United States and to "preach" the destruction of the United States and Israel. But that is exactly what is going on in many mosques around the world. On January 19th, I wrote about a chilling report by journalists in Great Britain who had gone undercover into mosques in Britain and Australia. What they found was nothing short of sedition -- praise for Osama bin Laden, calls to turn children into homicide bombers, hatred of Jews, Christians, and Western Civilization. Now, European law enforcement officials are taking steps to stop it. One Muslim imam has been jailed in Great Britain for inciting his followers to "kill the infidels" and another is facing deportation orders for links to terrorism and for posing a threat to national security. If European "progressives" can take such steps to identify the enemy and protect their citizens, surely we ought to be doing more here to determine the extent of the danger we face. This comes from Gary Bauer of the American Values organization. Contact them by phone at 703-671-9700 or by fax at 703-671-1680. |
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"JERUSALEM"
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 15, 2007. |
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Tonight begins Yom Yerushalayim -- Jerusalem Day -- which marks the reunification of Jerusalem. This year is special because we are celebrating 40 years. There will be concerts and parades, fireworks and ceremonies. Parts of the city are lit with special decorative lights. This is OUR celebration, and ours alone. I devote my message exclusively to Jerusalem. ~~~~~~~~~~ HISTORY Three thousand years we go back with regard to Jerusalem. That's when King David conquered the ancient city and made it his capital for a united Judean/Israelite kingdom. David's son, Solomon, built the First Temple on an elevated place above the city called Mount Moriah (which has considerable sanctity in Jewish tradition for other reasons). The Babylonians destroyed the Temple in 586 BCE, and the Jews were exiled to Babylon. They returned in 548 BCE and constructed the Second Temple on the same site: it was ultimately enlarged and expanded, most notably during Herod's time just at the beginning of the Common Era. Jerusalem fell in 70 CE; the Romans sacked the Temple. Thus began two millennia of Jewish disaspora. But there was always a Jewish presence in Jerusalem. Never, with all of the many occupations that transpired over 1900 years, did any other people ever make Jerusalem their capital. While the Temple was destroyed, the Mount it had stood on and sections of its supporting wall to the west and south remained. In the late 7th Century, during the Umayyad (an early Muslim) caliphate, the Dome of the Rock was constructed on the Mount, with the Al-Aksa Mosque following in the beginning of the 8th Century. These edifices, too, were rebuilt over time. In the early 16th Century, the Turkish Ottomans gained control of Jerusalem, and Suleiman the Magnificent constructed the walls that surround what is today called "The Old City" -- which encompasses the Temple Mount, and the Kotel or Western Wall (a section of its retaining wall). By the mid 1800s, Jews had again become the majority of Jerusalem. At first they lived within the walls of the Old City. In 1861, they established the first neighborhood outside of the walls: Mishkenot Sha'ananim. Other neighborhoods followed. Following WWI, the British controlled Jerusalem. When they received the Mandate for Palestine in 1922, Jerusalem was included. In 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution recommending that Palestine be divided between the Jews and the Arabs, with Jerusalem to be internationalized as a "corpus seperatum" -- a separate entity. It must be emphasized that this was only a recommendation, because General Assembly resolutions have no legal status in international law. In any event, the Arabs rejected this recommendation. When Israel declared independence in 1948, the Arab League promptly attacked. By the time the war ended in 1949, and armistice lines were established, Israel controlled western Jerusalem (the newer part of the city) and Jordan controlled eastern Jerusalem (the Old City and other neighborhoods), which was rendered totally Judenrein. According to the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Jordan, Jews were supposed to be allowed access to their holy sites in eastern Jerusalem. Jordan reneged completely; Jews could not even reach the Kotel. The Jordanians ransacked 57 synagogues, destroying 12 completely and turning others to various uses including as stables for animals. They also ransacked the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives, using tombstones to build latrines. It is this time period that turned eastern Jerusalem -- the very heart of Jewish heritage -- into a seemingly "Arab" area. On January 23, 1950, Israel resolved that Jerusalem was the Capital. In the course of the Six Day War of 1967, a defensive war, Israel took eastern Jerusalem from Jordan. Jerusalem was reunited after 19 years -- the only time in its entire 3,000 year history that it had been divided. Almost immediately, the Islamic Wakf (trust) was given day-to-day religious control of the Temple Mount. (At that point the Wakf was Jordanian controlled; during the Oslo years it came under Palestinian control; now the Jordanians are seeking to control it again.) Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem were offered citizenship, but most declined. They do have residency cards which provide them with Israeli perks such as health care, and franchisement within the city. In July 1980, under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the Knesset passed Basic Law: Jerusalem -- Capital of Israel: "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel." Israel has taken enormous pains to safeguard within Jerusalem the holy sites of all religions. Over the years a number of new neighborhoods have been established -- French Hill, Gilo, Pisgat Ze'ev, etc. The Jewish Quarter of the Old City has been rebuilt -- with a plaza in front of the Kotel; and in recent years old Jewish neighborhoods of eastern Jerusalem are again being acquired by Jews. ~~~~~~~~~~ RIGHTS Almost universally, the world has refused to recognize our annexation of eastern Jerusalem. To whom then would it belong? In terms of international law -- never mind ancient heritage -- our case is exceedingly strong. The Jordanians, who acquired the area in a war of aggression, have no claim. The Palestinian Arabs never had it. (It should be noted, they live in large numbers in the city, where the Jerusalem residency cards are highly coveted, and they do a considerable amount of illegal building to gain a further foothold.) The issue of it being an international city is entirely moot -- though people continue to drag up this option. (It was Ben Gurion who pointed out that when Jerusalem was under siege, the international community paid no notice, leaving it to Jews to attend to the matter.) The simple, unpalatable truth, is that Jewish rights are diminished by the international community and we are treated differently from the way the world treats other nations. Only in the case of Israel is a nation's right to select her own capital denied. Embassies are in Tel Aviv. The US Consulate in Jerusalem issues US documents such as passports for US citizens resident here that say, "Issued in Jerusalem." Period. Not "Jerusalem, Israel." Yet another simple truth -- largely unacknowledged -- is that the world benefits by Israeli control of Jerusalem, because it is only under our control that holy sites of all religions will be protected. Not only has Jordan a record of total disregard of Jewish religious rights. The Palestinians have demonstrated a similar disregard. Outside Shechem they failed to protect Joseph's Tomb, as they were committed to do under Oslo, so that it was desecrated. In Bethlehem, Palestinians desecrated the Church of the Nativity. From a purely religious perspective, Palestinian Arab control of eastern Jerusalem would be a disaster. ~~~~~~~~~~ JEWISH ATTACHMENT TO JERUSALEM Jerusalem is absolutely central to Judaism. "If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning..." Yom Kippur and the Pesach seder both end with "Next Year in Jerusalem." A Jewish man, when marrying, crushes a glass under his foot to commemorate the destruction of the Temples. All over the world, Jews face Jerusalem when praying. In Jerusalem, Jews face the Temple Mount. In the Tanakh, Jerusalem is mentioned hundreds of times. (e.g., "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.") MUSLIM ATTACHMENT TO JERUSALEM Muslim attachment to Jerusalem is a dubious, sometimes affair, and often suggests the need for dominance over another group rather than intrinsic devotion. There is nothing in the historical record to suggest that Mohammad ever set foot in the city, although Islamic legend has it that his night flight to heaven originated there. Nor is Jerusalem mentioned in the Koran even once. Over a period of time, there were Muslim rulers who had control of the area that included Jerusalem who never, ever set foot in Jerusalem. In fact, there was such neglect of Jerusalem after the Umayyad dynasty ended that the Dome of the Rock collapsed. According to Eli Hertz, in Myths and Facts, the Umayyads constructed the edifices on the Temple Mount because of a power struggle within Islam. They were afraid that their rivals would block their entry into Mecca and so established an alternative holy site. Jerusalem is referred to as the third holiest site in Islam. Muslims pray with their backs to Jerusalem, facing Mecca. In Jerusalem they pray with their backs to the Temple Mount. ~~~~~~~~~~ THE TEMPLE MOUNT (Hebrew: Har Habayit) In point of fact this is Judaism's holiest site. Not only was it the location of the Temples, the Rock that the current Muslim Dome of the Rock covers is believed to be the Foundation Stone that sat inside the Holy of Holies in the Temple. The Mount and surrounding area is awash in a wealth of archeological evidence of the ancient Jewish presence. (If you've never been here, come and see for yourself: It's astounding.) But the Jewish importance of the Mount is obscured today. In a enormously ill-conceived gesture of good will, Moshe Dayan turned day-to-day control of the Mount over to the Muslim Wakf right after Israel gained control of the area. What has happened in recent years is that the Muslims conduct themselves as if this site is totally theirs. From a Jewish religious perspective there are restrictions on going on to the Mount, because care must be taken not to step where the Holy of Holies was. But Jews do go up on the Mount, do want to go up. Yet Muslim regulations constrain them. We need Muslim permission to get to our own holiest site. What is more -- incredibly -- Jews are not permitted to pray on the Mount. Jewish visitors are watched, and escorted off if their mouths are seen to move silently. Can this be? It is. What is more, the Muslims have taken liberties with the Mount, and did massive excavations at an area called Solomon's Stables, in order to construct a new, huge underground mosque. In the process, they destroyed buried archeological ruins and artifacts, dumping them in a garbage heap. They were rescued by an archeologist with private funding. But the antiquities department of Israel was all too silent while this was going on -- even though rules forbid the sort of digging that was being done. As if the antiquities department too thinks the area has been relinquished to the Muslims. Can this be? It is. Shame. In recent years we are seeing what Dore Gold refers to as "Temple Denial." It started with Arafat, who told an astonished Clinton that here had never been Temples on the Mount. The whole thing, you see, was strictly Muslim. This theme has been picked up by many others, including PA President Mahmoud Abbas. And, lastly, we are seeing a deliberate attempt to politicize the Mount, as radical Muslims use it as a way to inflame the people -- telling them that we are deliberately about to destroy Al Aksa and that riots are necessary to protest. We saw something of this when Sharon went up on the Mount in 2000 and this was used as a pretext to start the Second Intifada. And we saw it again recently when Israeli construction outside the Mount to replace a bridge to the Mount led to cries that we were going to cause the whole thing to collapse. ~~~~~~~~~~ PALESTINIAN CLAIMS/JEWISH RIGHTS It is repeated over and over: A Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital. A mantra. A demand. What they ostensibly claim is that they want eastern Jerusalem -- that Jerusalem can be the capital of two states at the same time. This would happen if we (G-d forbid) returned to the '40 armistice lines as demanded. But this is patently ridiculous for a host of reasons, not least of which that Jerusalem must not be divided again, ever. However, when you examine their demands more closely -- including the fact that they say JERUSALEM as the capital of a Palestinian state -- it becomes quite clear that they intend to take the whole city. It is not theirs, IT IS OURS. We must believe in our right to Jerusalem, and treasure her, and stand up to the world in all forums and defend that right forcefully. ~~~~~~~~~~ I write this from Jerusalem, the most beautiful of cities. I am blessed. I live here. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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"PROGRESSIVES" WORK WITH TERRORISTS; CHRISTIANITY & ISLAM
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 15, 2007. |
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ISLAMIST DOG-IN-THE-MANGER ATTITUDE Someone shot holes in water tanks that an international charity was distributing to people in Gaza. The union of private P.A. institutions decried this lawlessness that damages the work of international health organizations (IMRA, 1/19). Is it just lawlessness? I think it is total war by Islamists for control there. When both sides damage property, whom are the people supposed to surrender to? And if much is destroyed, how much relief will the people get from peace? The Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan attack international aid workers. They would rather that their people suffer than that their non-Islamist government help their people. Their people should learn to put down the Islamists. BEDOUIN RUSTLERS -- more 'The Israeli government is hesitant to take on Bedouin crime families, which possess political influence, connections in the IDF, and constitute what is openly referred to as a mafia in Be'er Sheva and other southern locales.' (Arutz-7, 1/19.) The late Rabbi Meir Kahane warned about the Druse, at a time when they as well as many Bedouin served in the IDF with distinction and no divided loyalties. The Druse had a conflict with some Muslims. They attacked the Muslims with arms taken from the IDF. Other Israelis were unconcerned, but Meir Kahane wrote that Israel should not let such a group act as an independent armed force. He warned that they cannot be trusted. Since Israel was not clearing up the Arab-Israel conflict by a forceful Jewish solution, he foresaw trouble from the Druse. The Bedouin have resumed their age-old smuggling and raiding. Many steal land and stone Jewish travelers. Not all do, not yet. The more they see Israel afraid to stop their rustling, the more contempt they develop for Israel. The Druse usually join the winning side. They may decide that the Muslims will win. INTOLERANCE For the second time in three months, Arabs seriously vandalized a new synagogue in the Benjamin region of Judea-Samaria (Arutz-7, 1/19). 'PROGRESSIVE' ZIONISTS WORK WITH TERRORISTS 'Breaking the Silence' are 'progressive' Israeli soldiers who claim they want to help burnish Israel's reputation by getting other soldiers not to commit wanton violence against P.A. Arabs. But they have been working with Arab terrorist propagandists, who strive to burn Israel's reputation (IMRA, 1/19 from ZOA). ON SYMPATHY FOR MUSLIMS Muslims have taken refuge in the West. Most Muslim mosques, schools, and rallies, however, emphasize hatred of the West and sympathy for jihadist attacks on it. The West is reluctant to respond by warfare to a movement that is subversive internally and belligerent externally. Whatever mere police action the West takes in self-defense, Muslim representatives depict as Islamophobic. They exploit Western tolerance and fear of offending the proponents of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism can work only with mature and tolerant cultures. Islam has not evolved beyond its primitive origins of intolerance, violence, repression of speech and of women, and deceit about it and in its tactics. P.A. Muslim society probably is devoted more to jihad than any other Muslim society. The whole people give priority to jihad over normal governance. The whole culture is devoted to indoctrination in it. All that the people resent about it is the resulting random violence by unrestrained thugs. They want their dictators to make the streets safe. Preoccupation with jihad has impoverished the people but not altered their priority. Many would like to move to some more prosperous country, but unfortunately they would bring in their destructive values. If the West continues offering 'humanitarian' aid to the P.A., then the Muslims there can continue to war on innocent people and eat their pita, too. The western Palestinian Arabs are aggressors driven by bigotry and lacking scruples or mercy. In all the world, they deserve the least sympathy. Unfortunately, many well-meaning Westerners, who don't know Islamic history or Muslim values pity 'the poor Palestinians' and would support their victory. Destroy Israel, and those Westerners are next. It is a sad reflection upon Western education that sympathizers with the Palestinian Arabs can't differentiate between violators and victims. Many Western Christians fail to realize that those Arabs and Muslims generally persecute Christians. MUSING ON THE STATE OF W. EUROPEAN CHRISTIANITY On my way to visit the Cloisters in Manhattan, I briefly heard rap music. It exhorted to narcotics and sex. At the museum, I was impressed by Christianity's lengthy tenure and the evolution of its rules and outlook. Europeans are abandoning that religion in favor of a degrading hedonism, and are letting themselves slide under the feet of the Muslim religion that emphasizes the very elements that the Europeans abhor and surpass. 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@verizon.net |
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GAZA ON THE VERGE OF CIVIL WAR
Posted by Daily Alert, May 15, 2007. |
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This was written by Andrew Lee Butters and it on Time. |
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Imposing order on the rival gunmen of Hamas and Fatah would have been a tall order for a leader far stronger than Palestinian Interior Minister Hani Kawasmeh. Kawasmeh, a career civil servant rather than a tough-guy commander of either of the two main Palestinian factions, was appointed to the position as a compromise candidate after Hamas and Fatah brokered their unity government in Mecca earlier this year. And it came as no surprise when he announced his resignation on Monday, amid a fierce resurgence of fighting between the two camps that has claimed at least eight lives since Sunday. Absent a power base of his own, Kawasmeh's prospects for integrating the fighting forces of the rival factions into the Palestinian Authority's security forces were always slim. But his resignation may nonetheless portend the collapse of the unity government, and the onset of a full-blown Palestinian civil war. Kawasmeh's failure results in part from the refusal of Fatah hardliners to cede power within the Palestinian Authority to Hamas, despite the fact that the latter won last year's Palestinian parliamentary elections. Even after their leaders agreed to a power sharing arrangement in Mecca last fall, many Fatah officials have done their best to make it fail -- perhaps encouraged by the U.S., which has refused to have any relations with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, and has made isolating the Islamist ruling party a focus of its Middle East policy. But Hamas has its own hard-liners, who have plenty to gain from the collapse of the unity government. One of the main reasons for sharing power with Fatah -- to circumvent the U.S.-led financial siege of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority -- has turned out to be moot. The U.S. and the EU continue to refuse to give direct aid to any Palestinian government with Hamas in it, despite the unity government. A narrower Hamas government would also be in a better position to prevent the already fragile Arab League initiative offering Israel a comprehensive peace agreement in exchange for a returns to 1967 borders. Despite frantic efforts by the leaders of both parties to restore calm, fighting raged on the streets of Gaza on Monday. Masked gunmen have reportedly taken up positions at major buildings and intersections all over Gaza city, and Fatah officials predict the collapse of the government in a matter of days. The chaos in Gaza is a disaster for a Palestinian population suffering the stress of more than a year of sanctions, but it also bodes badly for Israel. Qassam rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel have become an almost daily routine since March, when Hamas ended its unilateral cease-fire. If the Palestinian government collapses, Israel may soon resume strikes against militant leaders and rocket cells, which in turn will likely escalate the attacks. Israeli security officials have admitted there is no military solution to the rockets, but they may be drawn further into the conflict if Gaza militants begin using longer range Katyusha rockets, of the kind used by Hizballah from Lebanon last summer, and which Israel fears may have been smuggled into Gaza. The area evacuated by Israel in 2005 is well on its way to becoming
a kind of seaside Falluja, a safe haven and training ground for
extremists of all kinds. Aid workers recently returned from Gaza
describe a city breaking down into tribal and gang formations, much
like Iraq. The fact that these groups can act with impunity is clear
in the ongoing captivity of BBC journalist Alan Johnston, who was
kidnapped in March, and has been held despite the fact that his
release has been demanded by the top leadership of both Fatah and
Hamas. Last week, Palestinian President Mahmhoud Abbas said that his
security forces are aware of Johnston's location and the identity of
his kidnappers, but have been unable to act on that information,
ostensibly out of concern for Johnston's safety. Without a government
in Gaza, near term prospects for Johnston's return will look even
worse.
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
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BIKE HELMETS FOR ISRAEL
Posted by Rubenu Organization, May 15, 2007. |
[Editor's Note: Rubenu requests that you please send this on to your friends and family.] |
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AFTER 40 YEARS, U.S. AVOIDS JERUSALEM REUNIFICATION DAY
Posted by UCI, May 15, 2007. |
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The United States will avoid Jerusalem Reunification Day festivities this week despite a 12-year-old Congressional bill calling for the American embassy to be located in the capital. Since then, every President has exercised a waiver in the bill allowing the move to be deferred for a renewable period of six months. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni insisted that the "connection between Israel and Jerusalem is inseparable" despite the boycott by the U.S. and most of the international community. Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski went further and declared, "Anyone who doesn't recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel does not recognize the State of Israel." American officials, including former Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, have stated that moving the embassy is not likely to happen until there is a final peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority (PA). The U.S. did not issue an official statement explaining why the current Ambassador, Richard Jones will not be attending the ceremonies, but Ambassador Dr. Harald Kindermann from Germany, which heads the European Union (EU) this year, specifically said EU countries will not participate because of Arab claims of sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem, which includes the Old City. The Foreign Ministry said Sunday it is "unhappy and disappointed" that most delegations announced they were not coming to the festivities but added that officials from several embassies will attend. Two American lawmakers have launched an effort to put a stop to the continuing deferral of the Congressional bill to move the embassy from Tel Aviv. Republican House of Representatives members Joe Wilson and Mike Pence recently introduced a resolution stating that Jerusalem "must remain an undivided city in which the rights of every ethnic and religious group are protected as they have been by Israel during the past 40 years." The new resolution "strongly urges" American President George W. Bush to stop exercising the waiver to delay the move of the embassy. It also calls on him and American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to "repeatedly affirm publicly, as a matter of United States policy, that Jerusalem must remain the undivided capital of the State of Israel." The congressmen also noted that the 2003 Foreign Relations Authorization Act directs that the birth of any U.S. citizen born in Jerusalem should be recorded as "Jerusalem, Israel" upon the request of the citizen or his or her guardian. That requirement has never been implemented, and the city is listed without its being designated that it is in Israel. Israel officially incorporated all of Jerusalem into the municipality in 1980, a move that caused virtually all of the embassies that had been located in Jerusalem to move away. The last holdouts were El Salvador and Costa Rica, which pulled out several months ago. 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!" |
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SAUDI EXPERT ON FAMILY AFFAIRS EXPLAINS WIFE BEATING IN ISLAM
Posted by Avodah, May 14, 2007. |
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Clip # 1447 -- Saudi Expert on Family Affairs Dr. Ghazi Al-Shimari Explains Wife Beating in Islam and States: If a Wife Licks Pus and Blood Coming Out of Her Husband's Nose -- She Still Would Not Have Observed All His Rights The following are excerpts from an interview with Dr. Ghazi Al-Shimari, a Saudi expert on family affairs, which aired on Iqra TV on May 9, 2007. Ghazi Al-Shimari: Yes. According to a hadith, Umm Zar' said to 'Aisha: "My husband is the epitome of stupidity and impotence. He is afflicted with every possible defect. Either he wounds me, or breaks my bones, or both." This poor woman said that her husband was a stupid idiot, and that on top of that, he didn't even know how to have sex. But "when he talks to me, he wounds me, breaks my [bones], or both." Interviewer: Someone like that reads the verse as "bite them," instead of "admonish them." Ghazi Al-Shimari: Nice. So when some people understood the beatings this way, the women of the Quraysh tribe went to the Prophet to complain. They said: "Oh, Prophet of Allah, the men have begun beating us." So the Prophet decided: "Don't beat the women who serve Allah." Then Omar came and said: "Oh Prophet of Allah, the women have become insolent. We cannot take it anymore. You said not to beat women who serve Allah, so what should we do with them?" So the Prophet approved [beatings], but said that those who beat "are not the best among you." [...] The Prophet said: "If I were to order anybody to bow before anyone, I would order the wife to bow before her husband." The husband's rights are very great. Therefore, according to a reliable Hadith, a woman said: "Oh Prophet of Allah, I will not marry before you tell me what my husband's rights from me are." The Prophet said: "Do you really want to know?" She said: "Yes." He said: "If pus or blood comes out of your husband's nose and you lick is up, you still will not have observed all his rights." The rights of the husband are great, and you must observe them. TO VIEW THIS CLIP: Click here. For assistance, please contact MEMRI TV Project at memritv@memri.org or go to the website: www.memritv.org. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is an independent, non-profit organization that translates and analyzes the media of the Middle East. Copies of articles and documents cited, as well as background information, are available on request. Contact Avodah at avodah15@aol.com |
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ARE WE CRAZY FOR VISITING ISRAEL?
Posted by Ari Abramowitz and Jeremy Gimpel, May 14, 2007. |
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Unfortunately, your situation is more the rule than the exception. Based on sensationalized media coverage, many perceive Israel as a perpetual war zone in which chances are better than not that a katyusha rocket will join you for breakfast any given morning. Now that American Fox News has made its way to Israeli cable TV, a colleague of ours mentioned that he was nervous about his upcoming trip to the US. He told us that the terror alert level has just gone from "elevated"(yellow) to "high" (orange). When investigating the governments recommended activities to properly respond to this heightened alert level, he came across the list of elements to be included in the emergency preparedness kit. Due to his lack of hand-crank radios or dust masks, he explained, he was considering canceling his trip and staying home in the relative safety of Israel. In reality, visiting Israel is statistically safer than staying in the US. Based on a study by The University of Maryland comparing homicide rates in 33 different countries between 1955 and 1996, Israel's average rate was 1.26 compared to 7.88 in the US. When taking the last intifadas into account, Israel's rate rose to 4.80 which is still significantly lower than that of America. This fear of visiting Israel is no less rational than the trepidation so many share of flying considering the fact that the chances of dying in a car accident, according to the US Department of Transportation, is 1 in 7700 while the likelihood of a airline accident is less than 1 in two million! So much for rational phobias. As a matter of fact, Ari Abramowitz was stabbed in the back in Manhattan after serving on active duty in Lebanon, Hebron, and Gaza! Statistics are irrelevant. G-d created the universe and controls every event from the global to the minute. David did not consider probabilities when confronting Goliath with a pocket full of river rocks and Gideon did not consult a military statistician before widdling his army down to a mere 300 to slay the Midianite force of 135,000. We are to put our fates in G-d's hands by determining our actions based on their merits and not the probability of our self preservation. Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzato, one of the most revered Jewish mystics, explains that while every country in the world is appointed an intermediary angel to oversee its affairs, G-d's level of interaction in The Land of Israel is of the most direct and intimate nature. David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel explained that in Israel "in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles." The State of Israel is the culmination of scores of prophecies in the bible and G-d warns that those who seek her harm will surely meet their demise and are harming "the apple of his eye" (Zechariah 2:8). Despite the plethora of European countries meeting with Hamas and supporting the Hezbollah, when seen through the eyes of the prophets, there is nowhere safer than The Land of Israel. Ezekiel clearly proclaims "When I gather in the House of Israel from the peoples among whom they were scattered, then I will be sanctified through them in the eyes of the nations, and they will dwell on their land that I gave to my servant, to Jacob. They will dwell upon it in security and build houses and plant vineyards and dwell in security when I execute judgments upon all those who despoil them from their surroundings and they will know that I am Hashem, their G-d." The nations to which many flee for safety will not always be safe, the countries of material affluence and spiritual bankruptcy will not always provide refuge. When Abraham and his cousin Lot separated, Lot chose the greenest and richest pastures of Sodom. Before long, the city was destroyed. He and his daughters were the sole survivors. Despite our greatest efforts at keeping the wool over our eyes, we are facing a world war that may very well dwarf the past two. Governments are preparing for nuclear fall-out and no one is sure where it will strike first. In Kings II, Chapter 19, Isaiah the prophet warns that "from Jerusalem shall emerge a remnant, and survivors from Mount Zion." Jeremiah explains that "Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will dwell in security" (33:16) while Obadiah reassures "On Mount Zion there will be refuge..."(1:17). If you count the prophets as geopolitical experts, and according to their track record you should, Jerusalem is the safest city in the world today! In this life you have to put your faith in something. While many of
the cynics who laugh at you for coming to the Holy Land may place
their faith in money and politicians, simply explain that your faith
is in the G-d of Israel and his prophets, and that your destination is
the Holy Land because only in G-d's hands is there true safety.
Contact Ari at Ari_Jeremy@thelandofisrael.com and Jeremy at
speaking@theleadofisrael.com |
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PEOPLES UNDER THREAT
Posted by Israel Zwick, May 14, 2007. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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See if you can find where the Palestininas are listed in the ranks of threatened minorities. This article was written by Mark Lattimer | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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It is something of a paradox that, in the period from the aftermath of the Cold War to the early years of the 'war on terror', the world became, by most objective criteria, much safer. Certainly, the number of conflicts fought around the world has steadily fallen and, the great Congolese war apart, the total number of people who have died in them has decreased too. Each research institute compiles its figures somewhat differently, but most conflict experts recorded 20 or fewer major armed conflicts in 2006, compared to a high of over 30 in 1991. Of course, whether a community feels safe is as much a judgement about the future as an evaluation of the present. The recent use in Western states of emergency powers and other mechanisms curtailing civil liberties is a response to armed attacks in the USA, Spain and the UK which are in many respects unprecedented, although very rare. But the great toll of death from political violence continues in the countries of the South, in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and today's wars have this in common with the ethno-nationalist conflicts that succeeded the fall of the Soviet Union: the violence is overwhelmingly targeted by ethnicity or religion. Wars as a whole may be less common, but in three-quarters of the major armed conflicts around the world in 2006, particular ethnic or religious groups were the principal target. In 2007, minorities have more cause than most to feel unsafe. New threats in 2007 Minority Rights Group International (MRG) has used recent advances in political science to identify which of the world's peoples are currently under most threat. As explained in the last edition of State of the World's Minorities, academic researchers have identified the main antecedents to episodes of genocide or mass political killing over the last half century (see State of the World's Minorities 2006). Approximating those main antecedents by using current data from authoritative sources, including the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and leading conflict prevention institutes, enables the construction of the Peoples Under Threat 2007 table (see p.11 for short version and Table 1, pp.118-22 in the Reference section for the full version). The indicators used comprise measures of prevailing armed conflict; a country's prior experience of genocide or mass killing; indicators of group division; democracy and good governance indicators; and a measure of country credit risk as a proxy for openness to international trade. The position of Somalia at the top of the table for 2006 attests to a highly dangerous combination of factors. In June 2006 the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), an Islamic coalition seeking to restore law and order to Somalia, took over Mogadishu and subsequently much of the country, curbing the power of Somalia's warlords. However, in December, Ethiopian armed forces acting in support of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), and supported by the USA, overthrew the UIC, which had received support from Eritrea and a number of Middle Eastern states. The TFG is unlikely to be able to retain control of the country without outside support. While one side has portrayed itself as fighting terrorists linked to al-Qaeda, and the other claims it is fighting Christian invaders, the most immediate fear is now a renewal of atrocities against civilians in the context of Darood-Hawiye inter-clan rivalry and a threat to minorities both in Somalia and in neighbouring Ethiopia. Although the UIC emphasized the importance of moving away from clan politics and had achieved some success in overcoming 'clanism', it was nonetheless particularly associated with the Hawiye clan. It also provided overt support for Oromo and Ogaden self-determination movements in Ethiopia. There is now a grave threat of violent repression against these populations, as well as other groups in Somalia in the context of a power vacuum and/or continued intervention by neighbouring states. The situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate. Figures released by the United Nations (UN) based on body counts in Iraq's hospitals and morgues showed over 3,000 violent civilian deaths a month for most of the latter half of 2006. These were mainly comprised of killings by death squads, often linked to the Iraqi government itself; attacks by Sunni insurgent groups; and deaths in the context of military operations conducted by the Multinational Force in Iraq. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that between 40,000 and 50,000 Iraqis flee their homes every month. What is less well publicized is the particular plight of Iraq's smaller communities, the 10 per cent of the population who are not Shia Arab, Sunni Arab or Sunni Kurd. These minorities, which include Turkomans, Chaldo-Assyrians, Armenians, Mandean-Sabeans, Faili Kurds, Shabaks, Yezidis and Baha'is, as well as a significant community of Palestinians, made up a large proportion of the refugees fleeing to neighbouring Jordan and Syria in 2006. In addition to the generalized insecurity they face, common to all people in Iraq, minorities suffer from specific attacks and threats due to their ethnic or religious status, and cannot benefit from the community-based protection often available to the larger groups. With Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan taking three out of the top four places in the table, and Pakistan rising eight places to be ranked eighth, the correlation between peoples under threat and the front lines in the US-led 'war on terror' is even starker than it was in 2005-6. The debate about whether US foreign policy on terrorism is making Americans safer or not continues to rage in the US, but it is now surely beyond doubt that it has made life a lot less safe for peoples in the countries where the 'war on terror' is principally being fought. The most significant risers in the table in addition to Pakistan are listed below. Perhaps the most startling case is that of Sri Lanka, where peace talks failed and the conflict between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam re-erupted, causing over a thousand civilian deaths and the displacement of hundreds of thousands in 2006 (see the report by Farah Mihlar). Civilians in Tamil areas are at particular risk, as is the country's Muslim population, which is caught between the two sides but was excluded from the peace negotiations. Another long-running self-determination conflict that experienced a resurgence in 2006 was in Turkey, where a Kurdish splinter group carried out bomb attacks in major cities. It remains to be seen whether the ongoing negotiations over Turkey's accession to the European Union will temper the ambitions of some parts of the Turkish government and military to increase repression of the Kurds. In fact, Kurds throughout the region face heightened threats in 2007, with both Turkey and Iran massing troops on their respective borders with Iraq, claiming that Iraqi Kurdistan is being used as a base by armed Kurdish groups from which to launch attacks on their territory. Iran's position in the top 20 does not relate solely to the threat against Iranian Kurds but also to the country's other minorities (including Ahwazi Arabs, Baluchis and Azeris), who in total constitute nearly 40 per cent of the population. Successive Iranian governments have been hostile to demands for greater cultural freedom for ethnic minority communities, and the US-led intervention in Iraq and the international stand-off over Iran's nuclear programme have left the government deeply wary of any perceived foreign involvement with minority groups. President Ahmadinejad has blamed British forces for being involved in 'terrorist' activities in Khuzistan, a mainly Arab province bordering southern Iraq. The military coup in Thailand in September 2006 was effected without significant bloodshed, although Thailand's status as a popular Western tourist destination ensured it received widespread media coverage. Less well known is the fact that the coup followed an escalation in the conflict in the south of the country between the government and separatist groups, placing the mainly Muslim population in the southern border provinces at increased risk. That both Lebanon and Israel and the Occupied Territories/Palestinian Authority have risen in this year's table comes as no surprise following the war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006 and an escalation of Israeli military operations in the Occupied Territories. (Israel did not appear in last year's table due to the absence of data on some of the indicators.) Israel's bombardment of Lebanon fell particularly heavily on the Shi'a population, but the war has destabilized the country as a whole, placing all communities at the greatest risk since the early 1990s of a return to civil war. In Gaza, an Israeli offensive followed the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier in June, with a total of over 600 Palestinians killed in 2006 as a whole. Throughout the Occupied Territories/Palestinian Authority, the population faces an increased threat, not just from Israeli military operations but also from civil conflict between rival Palestinian factions. Three states have fallen out of the top 20 in 2006: Indonesia, where a peace agreement signed in 2005 in Aceh has so far held, and Liberia and Algeria, both of which continue to recover following the civil wars that tore those countries apart in the 1990s. Finally, it should be noted that although the number of African states in the top 20 has fallen slightly since 2005-6, Africa continues to account for half of the countries at the top of the table, making it still the world's most dangerous region for minorities. Participation as prevention The identification of communities at grave risk around the world prompts the immediate question: what can be done to improve their situation? International action is considered later in this chapter; here, we concentrate on one factor at the national level which, perhaps more than any other, has the potential to address minority grievances and to prevent the development of violent conflict. The public participation of minorities, their active engagement in the political and social life of a state, underpins all other efforts to protect the rights of minorities and acts as a safety valve when major sites of disagreement between communities threaten to turn violent. Within the state, public participation can take many forms, including, most importantly, representation in parliament (this is considered in more detail in Andrew Reynolds' chapter below) and in the executive branch of government, and participation in the judiciary, civil service, armed forces and police. More generally, it extends to taking part in the economic and social life of a state, such that minorities feel they have a real stake in the society in which they live, that it is their society as much as that of anyone else. In areas where minority communities are geographically concentrated, it may also include a measure of autonomy or self-government. In an important speech he made on a visit to Indonesia, the former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan also made this point when he was commenting on the extreme case of separatism. 'Minorities have to be convinced that the state really belongs to them, as well as to the majority, and that both will be the losers if it breaks up. Conflict is almost certain to result if the state's response to separatism causes widespread suffering in the region or among the ethnic group concerned. The effect then is to make more people feel that the state is not their state, and so provide separatism with new recruits.' Even within one state, very different responses to claims for regional autonomy can develop. In India, for example, the positive approach shown to managing decentralized governance in Tamil Nadu can be contrasted with the state's hostility towards autonomy claims in Punjab, Kashmir and Nagaland. In the Russian Federation, the accommodation of autonomy in a region such as Tatarstan can similarly be contrasted with the gross human rights violations that continue to be committed in Chechnya in the name of combating separatism. Each situation is of course different, but it is notable that, in the case of Indonesia itself, perhaps the most significant faller in this year's Peoples under Threat table, the national parliament in July 2006 adopted a framework for autonomy that will enable the first direct local elections to be held in the region of Aceh, the scene of nearly three decades of separatist conflict. Since a pact was signed in August 2005, the Free Aceh Movement has reportedly dissolved its armed wing and the Indonesian government has withdrawn troops from Aceh. But, in many states, it is public participation at the national level that constitutes the key issue for minority protection and conflict prevention. Here it is worth making a distinction between the formal mechanisms of participation, such as elections, and having a genuine say in how a country is run (the former being a necessary but not sufficient condition for the latter). That Iraq has been pushed from the top of the list in this year's table is due to a slightly less negative showing under the cited World Bank governance indicators, particularly for 'Voice and Accountability', a measure of the extent to which citizens of a country are able to participate in the selection of governments, including an assessment of the political process and human rights (note that the indicators were published in September with a nine-month lag). Yet the fact that Iraqi citizens were able to participate in elections and that the main communities are all represented in government has not prevented the polity from being fatally fractured. The same could be said of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which remains stubbornly alongside Serbia in the upper part of the table, despite over a decade having passed since the power-sharing deal established under the Dayton Peace Agreement. It is clear that the international community still has a lot to learn about the application of public participation in practice. For public participation to help reduce the threat of violent conflict it needs to be more than simply an entry ticket to a shouting match. It needs to constitute participation in governance, and that in turn depends on a basic level of governmental effectiveness and rule of law. However, in both Iraq and Bosnia the mechanisms for community representation introduced under international control have themselves exacerbated or entrenched the division of the state on ethnic or sectarian lines, and induced a level of state failure. Following the occupation of Iraq in 2003, the coalition authorities established an Iraqi Governing Council in which membership was strictly apportioned along ethnic and sectarian lines. Political patronage ensured that whole ministries became dominated by officials from the minister's own sect or group, and sectarian politics quickly became the defining feature of the new Iraqi state. This mistake was compounded at the first Iraqi elections in January 2005, when the electoral system based on a national list combined with a boycott in Sunni Arab governorates effectively ensured that Sunni Arabs were largely excluded from political representation during a key year in the country's attempted transition to democracy. In other states with a long history of ethnic conflict, such as South Africa or Nigeria, constitutional and electoral mechanisms have been established which aim to promote inclusive political systems, with representation across ethnic or religious communities. The subject of political participation and community representation in very divided societies merits further study, given its fundamental importance to peace-building and stability, and the focus on participation in this edition of the State of the World's Minorities is intended as a contribution. But just a brief review of country situations illustrates the obvious danger of constitutional or electoral systems which make ethnicity or religion a principal mobilizing factor in politics, leading to the creation of a majority or dominant group which is defined by ethnicity or sect. This should be contrasted with the growing range of examples, some quoted above, of where effective participation of minorities has helped to resolve or prevent conflict, through the promotion of more inclusive political systems, whether at national or regional level. In addition to power-sharing agreements, a wide range of mechanisms are available to promote such participation appropriate to the given situation, including rules or incentives for political parties to appeal across communities, the adoption of electoral systems that favour rather than marginalize minorities, systems of reserved seats, special representation, formal consultative bodies, formal or informal quotas in public administration, and positive action programmes, as well as arrangements for greater self-government in regions where minorities are geographically concentrated. Given the very high correlation around the world between minority status and poverty, it should also become a priority for international development agencies to promote the participation of minorities in their programmes, particularly at national and local level. It is now widely accepted that anti-poverty initiatives are unlikely to achieve long-term success unless the poor are closely consulted and involved in their formulation and delivery, yet minorities are typically excluded from the planning of development programmes, often through the same societal discrimination that is the root cause of their impoverishment in the first place. This is one reason why development programmes, while often bringing important benefits to a society, rarely succeed in targeting effectively the poorest communities. The international response After the hopes raised by the UN World Summit in September 2005, the international response in 2006 to the situation of peoples under threat can only be described as disappointing. The headline case during 2006 continued to be the mass, ongoing crimes under international law committed against the population of the Darfur region of Sudan, which the Sudanese government is manifestly failing to protect. The World Summit resolved that, in such cases, the UN Security Council should be 'prepared to take collective action' in a manner that is 'timely and decisive' In the event, the reaction of the Security Council was seen to be belated and divided. The strategy of the Sudanese government has been to emphasize its cooperation with the existing African Union (AU) mission in Darfur -- while on the ground effectively controlling the AU forces' access to much of the region -- and to oppose the deployment of any stronger UN force, relying on divisions in the Security Council and in particular the support of China, a major trading partner and heavy investor in the Sudanese oil industry. In August 2006, the Security Council did finally approve a 20,000-strong UN force, but Sudan continues to withhold consent for its deployment. Meanwhile, the situation in Darfur has deteriorated and continuing attacks by Sudanese armed forces and Janjaweed militia on civilian targets threaten to push the death toll far beyond the 200,000 that have already perished. A measure of what international peacekeeping forces can achieve was demonstrated during 2006 in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, where the UN's largest peacekeeping force oversaw the successful conclusion of the country's first free elections for 45 years, a major milestone on the road to peace. However, despite a new readiness on the part of the UN peacekeepers to react robustly to threats from militia groups, armed conflict continued in the east in both Ituri and Kivu (leaving the position of the Congo unchanged, near the top of the Peoples under Threat table). In the programme of UN reform initiated at the World Summit in 2005, the most important development for human rights was the replacement of the discredited Commission on Human Rights with a new Human Rights Council. The vision was for a smaller body that would meet more often, combining improved expertise and objectivity with greater clout within the UN system. By the end of 2006, however, uncertainty still prevailed over the modus operandi of the Council's two main tools: the new system of Universal Periodic Review, by which states' human rights records would be assessed by their peers, and the Council's special rapporteurs and working groups, with the future of the country rapporteurs called into question. More worryingly still, the Council quickly attracted accusations of political bias, and even criticism from the UN Secretary-General, after it held two special sessions devoted to the situation in Gaza and one to the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, but failed to look critically at other major cases of human rights violations around the world. It finally held a special session on Darfur in December, but passed a weak resolution, authorizing a high-level mission to assess the human rights situation but failing to recognize the culpability of the Sudanese government for the abuses committed in Darfur. This was despite the fact that indisputable links between the government and the militias responsible for much of the killing had been reported almost two years earlier by the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur established by the UN Security Council. Two recently established UN mechanisms have, however, played an important role in protecting minorities. The Independent Expert on Minority Issues has consistently highlighted minority protection issues worldwide, including issuing communications on the situation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic and on minority women in Burma (Myanmar). The Special Adviser to the UN Secretary-General on the Prevention of Genocide has undertaken two missions to Darfur, one to Côte d'Ivoire and one to the Thai-Burmese border to investigate events in Burma's Karen state following an intensification of Burmese military operations from November 2005 onwards. The Special Adviser makes recommendations concerning civilian protection, establishing accountability for violations, the provision of humanitarian relief and steps to settle the underlying causes of conflict. The outgoing Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, established in May an Advisory Committee on the Prevention of Genocide to provide guidance to the Special Adviser and to contribute to the UN's broader efforts to prevent genocide. The committee's report, which has not been published, is believed to recommend strengthening the role of the Special Adviser by ensuring he report directly to the Secretary-General, improve his access to the Security Council and increase resources to the office, as well as calling for improved cooperation within and outside the UN system to obtain information specifically focused on early warning of genocide and other crimes against humanity. The recommendations have been sent to the incoming Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, and his response will be an early test of the new Secretary-General's commitment to improving civilian protection from mass atrocities. The principal normative development during 2006 was the finalization of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which had occupied the UN Commission on Human Rights for over a decade. At its first meeting in June, the Human Rights Council approved a text of the Declaration that recognized indigenous peoples' rights to live in freedom, peace and security; not to be subjected to forced assimilation, destruction of their culture or forced population transfer; and recognized their rights to self-determination and self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, and to practise their languages and cultural traditions. However, in November the third committee of the UN General Assembly passed a procedural motion blocking approval of the Declaration, at least until later in 2007. The motion was put forward by Namibia on behalf of the African group on the committee and promoted by states including Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, which had claimed during the debate that the Declaration may negatively affect the interests of other sectors of society. Although the Declaration's force would essentially have been hortatory and not legally binding, the motion was interpreted as an attempt to weaken the document or to ditch it altogether. The failure to approve the Declaration is illustrative of a widespread refusal by states to recognize the special, and often very dangerous, position in which indigenous peoples and minorities more generally find themselves, and their urgent need for better international protection. Even affluent states that are free of internal armed conflict and whose territorial integrity remains unchallenged -- whatever other security threats they face -- frequently ignore the extent of discrimination faced by minorities and often indulge in a tendency to blame any community dispute or integration problem on the minority community itself. As the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide wrote in the State of the World's Minorities 2006, 'Governments in both the South and the North persist in labelling some people a threat simply because they are members of a minority.' Yet any assessment of prevailing conflicts and human rights violations around the world indicates that it is minorities themselves who are at greatest risk, usually at the hands of their own governments. Without the political courage to admit that reality, and to respond appropriately, the world is unlikely to become a safer place for minorities any time soon.
Contact Israel Zwick at israel.zwick@earthlink.net and visit his
website:
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HAMAS SEIZES U.S. WEAPONS
Posted by Barbara Sommer, May 14, 2007. |
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This article was written by Aaron Klein and it appeared today on Ynet News
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Gaza sources say Hamas ambushed US convoy, seized
stockpile of weapons aimed for Fatah militias
Hamas ambushed a convoy in the Gaza Strip on Sunday and seized a stockpile of US weapons transferred in recent months to militias associated with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party, according to Hamas and Fatah sources.
"We obtained the US weapons and will keep hijacking any assistance the Americans provide to Fatah. Our fighters are aware of the American and Israeli conspiracies to topple our government. We're trained and well prepared to defeat the American-backed (Palestinian) agents," said a top member of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip.
According to Israeli and Palestinian security officials and Hamas sources, Hamas militias have taken almost complete control of the northern Gaza Strip in recent months, including areas from which rockets are regularly launched from the territory into nearby Jewish communities.
The officials said Fatah is restricted to acting in a half-mile radius in the vicinity of a major Fatah military compound. Hamas has set up roadblocks and checkpoints throughout northern Gaza to ensure Fatah militias remain near their compound.
After a Fatah gunman shot a Hamas member on Sunday, a Fatah convoy of three trucks was stopped by Hamas at a makeshift checkpoint at Dabit Circle, a northern Gaza town, according to Hamas sources. Hamas abducted 18 Fatah gunmen and seized stockpiles of American weapons that were in the vans, the sources said.
Hamas won most battles
The US has transferred large quantities of weapons to Fatah in recent months to back Abbas' military organizations against Hamas. Fatah and Hamas engaged in months of factional clashes until the two forged a unity government in February. But renewed fighting in Gaza in recent days has threatened to torpedo the unity deal.
The last confirmed US weapons transfer to the Palestinians took place last May and consisted of 3,000 assault rifles, but WND reported multiple others transfers were since delivered to Fatah, including a cache of 7,000 rifles last January and about 8,000 assault rifles in February.
While the weapons were meant to bolster Fatah in Gaza, Hamas has reportedly won most battles against the US-backed militias. WND reported last month that a Fatah militia in Beit Lehiya, a major city in the northern Gaza Strip, surrendered to Hamas forces after reaching an agreement in which the Fatah militants stated they will evacuate the city and altogether depart the Gaza Strip.
This weekend, according to Palestinian security sources, Baha Abu Jarad, a Fatah strongman in Gaza, surrendered a large swath of territory to Hamas, nearly completing Hamas' grasp on the northern Gaza Strip.
US sends aid to Fatah
The US Congress last month approved $59 million in aid to Fatah's militias after an earlier Bush administration pledge of $86.4 million was blocked for fear the money might reach terrorist groups. The aid package contains a new qualification stipulating the money must not be used to purchase weapons.
The vast majority of the US aid is slated to bolster Abbas' Force 17 security forces, which serve as de facto police units in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. But many members of Force 17 are openly members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror organization and Israel has arrested wanted terrorists from these units.
WND last month quoted Israeli and Palestinian security officials stating intelligence and security organizations associated with Fatah, including Force 17, are infiltrated by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist organizations.
Fatah infiltrated by Hamas
A top Palestinian intelligence official told WND: "We are leading a large number of investigations and some of the results prove that such an infiltration by Hamas (of Fatah's security and intelligence forces) exists.
"I can say that in some cases we diagnosed a deep infiltration to high posts in some Fatah security services," the high-ranking Palestinian intelligence officer told WND. "In some cases we believe there are officers that are exposed to very sensitive information."
He said that since the US announced it is providing Abbas' forces with additional funds, Fatah intelligence officials at the direction of American security coordinators here have been attempting to expel Hamas infiltrators. He said the past month "dozens" of members of Hamas, the Popular Resistance Committees and Islamic Jihad were found operating in the Fatah forces.
Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@yahoo.com
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NETWORK NIXES BOMBSHELL 'ISLAM' FLICK
Posted by Daily Alert, May 14, 2007. |
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This was written by Roger L. Simon and it was published yesterday in
the New York Post
(http://www.nypost.com/seven/05132007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/ too_fine_for_pbs_opedcolumnists_roger_l__simon.htm). Roger L. Simon, the CEO of PajamasMedia, received an Academy Award nomination for his screenplay of "Enemies, A Love Story." |
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I call on my fellow Motion Picture Academy members, whatever their politics, to protest this cowardly and un-American act of censorship. I HAVE to admit the first thing that attracted me to Martyn Burke's "Islam vs. Islamists" was that PBS had suppressed it. As is now well known, the network rejected Burke's documentary -- produced with Frank Gaffney and Alex Alexiev for the network's "American Crossroads" series -- on the film's completion. PBS's initial explanation was that the film was not good enough, aesthetically. Well, yes, I thought, that could be. Most things aren't. As a filmmaker, I know that well. Only one of the films I have written -- "Enemies, A Love Story" -- can I even watch today. Most PBS documentaries I find so stultifying I'd rather read the phone book. So I assumed the criticism of Burke's film was valid. Still, I was curious. I had not been entirely satisfied with previous documentaries I had seen on related subjects -- "Islam: What the West Needs To Know" and "Obsession" -- because, like Al Gore's global-warming film, they were made in the old-fashioned, didactic style of the conventional documentary that always teeters on the edge of propaganda or special pleading. I assumed "Islam vs. Islamists" would be like that. Boy, was I wrong. Burke's doc is a riveting and creatively made film about the most important subject of our time: What to do about radical Islam? It confronts this dilemma in a sly, novelistic manner, inter-weaving the stories of good, moderate Muslims with the imams and supposedly "true Muslims" who, not surprisingly, accuse the moderate Muslims of not being Muslims at all. Soon enough we learn these imams are apologists for terrorism and for the worst kind of medieval religious sadism. (One of them enthusiastically endorses the stoning to death of adulterers by holding up a Koran. "I didn't make this up," he says proudly. "It is written here.") The mostly mild-mannered moderate Muslims are shown to be at risk for their lives, some of them accompanied everywhere by bodyguards. All this is done with the people talking about themselves and revealing themselves (including the imam responsible for the bloody Danish Cartoons riots). There are no so-called "terrorism experts" or other talking heads interpreting reality for us. In other words, this is a film, not another one of those didactic docs referred to above. But it does have a strong point of view -- and therein lies the rub. PBS, clearly, doesn't like what this movie says. And I suspect it likes it less because the film is well made (the reverse of what the network originally claimed). PBS's views seem particularly troglodytic today in light of recent events at Fort Dix. But that is the least of it. What is far more important to our country is that our Public Broadcasting Service, an organization supported by taxpayer money, is practicing the most obvious censorship. PBS is operating here in the manner of similar institutions in the former Soviet Union and in modern Iran -- financing artists and then withholding distribution of their work when it is not deemed ideologically "correct." It's a form of thought-control, and it's unconscionable. I hereby call on my fellow Motion Picture Academy members, whatever their political leanings, to protest this cowardly and un-American act of censorship. As artists, we should be appalled by such blatant disregard of our First Amendment rights. Public funding of PBS should be reconsidered if such reactionary behavior continues. 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 |
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JERUSALEM DAY -- May 16, 2007 (5767)
Posted by Eli E. Hertz, May 14, 2007. |
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Only twice in Jerusalem's history has the city served as a national capital. The first time was as the capital of the two Jewish Commonwealths during the First and Second Temple periods, as described in the Bible, reinforced by archaeological evidence and numerous ancient documents. The second time is in modern times as the capital of the State of Israel. It has never served as an Arab capital for the simple reason that there has never been a Palestinian Arab state. No matter where Jews lived throughout the world for those two millennia, their thoughts and prayers were directed toward Jerusalem. Even today, whether in Israel, the United States or anywhere else, Jewish ritual practice, holiday celebration, and lifecycle events include recognition of Jerusalem as a core element of the Jewish experience. Consider that:
Even body language, often said to tell volumes about a person, reflects the importance of Jerusalem to Jews as a people and, arguably, the lower priority the city holds for Muslims:
Contact Eli E. Hertz by email at eli@mythsandfacts.org |
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BUT FOR THE GRACE OF G-D
Posted by Yehuda Poch, May 13, 2007. |
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This week, Israel celebrates the 40th anniversary of what many people at the time called an open miracle. Israel's defeat of 6 enemy armed forces in 6 days has continued to astound military theoreticians from around the world. More importantly, however, that victory served to unify the historic homeland of the Jewish people. It brought the cradle of Jewish civilization -- Jerusalem, Hevron, Shchem and Shilo -- under Jewish control for the first time since the State of Israel was re-established. And it had the potential to correct an arbitrary flaw of the historical flow in the Land of Israel. Immediately upon Israel's astounding victory, the State of Israel's leaders began making mistake after mistake with the miraculous gift they had been handed. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan famously handed the keys of the Temple Mount to the Muslim Waqf, allowing them to maintain freedom of worship on the Mount. This developed into a situation where today, 40 years later, the Waqf believes it is the sovereign power over the Temple Mount. Its teams work tirelessly to destroy and remove any remaining vestige of the once-proud Jewish history attached to the place. And Jewish people are allowed onto the Mount only in small groups at a time -- if at all. The cities of Hevron and Shchem have been all but totally given over to Arab residency, even as they contain the second holiest site to Jews, and even as they contain the other two places in Israel for which a record exists of Jewish purchase (the third being the Temple Mount itself). Jewish communities have blossomed in Judea and Samaria during the past 40 years. But they have done so in a piecemeal fashion, usually despite the best efforts of consecutive governments to block their construction or halt their development. These communities, for the most part, remain small rural outposts, exposed to terrorist attack. They are portrayed far and wide as a security burden, placing IDF forces in danger's way for the sake of a few dozen "settlers" here or there. The Six Day War was undoubtedly a turning point in Jewish history. It marked the point where the Jews finally were able to shake off the constant threat of our enemies and show the world our true modern strength. But the one thing no Jewish leader then or since has been able to transform into conventional wisdom is that this victory, this turning point, was a G-d given gift. The Six Day War could have heralded the completion of the Jewish ingathering in the Land of Israel. If Israel's leaders had shown the same courage, the same vision, and the same unyielding determination to take Israel's destiny in its own hands, we could have been celebrating this week with a completely Jewish state from the Jordan to the Sea. We could have been celebrating a hard-won peace without the threats that terrorism poses not only to Israel, but to the entire world. We could have once and for all vanquished our enemies. If Israel's leaders of the day had taken the courageous steps of building and developing in Judea and Samaria just as they did in the Galilee, and the rest of the country in the previous 80 years, the entire region today would have been a verdant paradise of Jewish communities, industrial growth, educational and business opportunities, and economic power -- just as the pre-67 areas of Israel are. But the Six Day War, for all of its miracles, for all the heady aura of invincibility and victory that it brought with it, was the turning point that ushered in an era of failed vision, failed leadership, failed military adventures and a sense of defeatism among Israel's population. Two weeks ago, the Winograd Commission issued an interim report on last Summer's Lebanon War. The report was devoted to exposing the failures of Israel's political and military establishment in planning, execution, decision-making, supply, tactics, and all other aspects of leading a nation in wartime. It exposed the folly of Israeli military withdrawal in the face of terrorism -- from Lebanon and by extension from Gaza, Judea and Samaria. For those willing to see it, the report exposed a system of faulty leadership, faulty decision-making, and faulty vision, among the Israeli political and military leadership in general -- a kind of false conception shared by every branch of the Israeli leadership for decades -- which enabled the kind of failures we saw last Summer. This conception is the child of the serious errors in judgment made by the Israeli leadership in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War. Israel's failure to accept the gift it was given and to use that gift to its fullest potential created the situation in which we find ourselves today. A week ago, former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon described the futility that currently characterizes much of Israel's internal debate. "We argue over what the solution is, but we still haven't agreed on what the problem is." Ya'alon is right. But even Ya'alon doesn't know what the real problem is. The real problem is the idea that Israel must concede something in order to emerge with a better situation. This idea has taken such a stranglehold on Israeli thinking that most Israeli leaders are prepared to outline -- even before being elected -- what they will be willing to offer in negotiations. 84% of Israel's population does not believe there is a chance to reach peace with the Palestinians according to a recent poll. Yet 57% of them support negotiations with the Palestinians. The need to make concessions is so deep-seated it has become an end unto itself. If only we make one more try, perhaps we can solve the problem. But the problem is not terrorism. The problem is not an intractable foe rubbing its hands with glee at the next possible concession. The problem is not poverty or international acceptance. The problem is the Israeli conception that we must be the ones to make concessions. The problem is the Jewish guilt we collectively feel at actually having won a war for our survival 40 years ago. The problem is that we have not yet learned to accept the gift and use it to our fullest benefit. The problem is that 40 years ago, we took an open miracle and refused to believe in its source or in its purpose. This week, when I celebrate the unification of Jerusalem and the return of Hevron, Shchem and Shilo, I will be celebrating the miracles G-d bestows upon us. I will recite the prayer of Hallel with a tremendous appreciation for all that G-d does for us in this Land. And I will thank G-d for the Grace He has shown us in allowing us to live in this Land, in this city and in this time. For only through such realization and appreciation of all that we have been given will we stand any chance of knowing how to hold on to it. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. |
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UNFAIR COUNTER-ATTACK
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 13, 2007. |
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UNFAIR COUNTER-ATTACK In his editorial, 'An Unfair Attack,' David Gergen, Editor-at-Large of U.S. News & World Report, rebutted the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis that American Jews form the core of a lobby for Israel that twists US foreign policy to serve Israel at the expense of US security. Hence terrorism increases. This lobbying largely worked: to the disadvantage of the Palestinian Arabs; to invade Iraq; and to be against Iran whose nuclear weaponry would not endanger the US, they claim. The rebuttal ignores the thesis resemblance to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, offering little evidence and being non-scholarly. The rebuttal did not take up the falsity of the charges about the Palestinian Arabs, Iraq, and Iran. I would chide the theorists for working against the interests of US national security -- Iran threatens to use its new weapons against the US even as it puts its existing weapons in the hands of men who use them against US forces. Other reviewers have taken up those charges. Instead, the rebuttal restricts itself to upholding the patriotism of US Jewry and the independence of US Presidents who often have 'correctly' opposed Israel in behalf of American interests. Mr. Gergen asserts that: (1) All US Presidents since Truman have befriended Israel; (2) Reagan, 'a great friend of Israel,' had Israel call off its assault on Beirut, after he saw pictures of Lebanese victims; (3) Eisenhower had the Israel's, British, and French withdraw from the Suez Canal; (4) Kissinger, Carter, and Clinton pressed for peace. He undermines this defense by conceding that the US 'sometimes tilted too much toward Israel.' (4/3, p.68.) I think JFK was in office too briefly for us to discern his policy. Although a President occasionally asserts himself, US foreign policy primarily is devised by the State Dept., which is anti-Zionist. The State Dept. does not act in the interest of the US, when it undermines our faithful Israeli ally in favor of perfidious enemies. It undermines Israel in several ways, mainly by barring it from following through with every victory against Arab aggression and by campaigning for Israel to give up strategic borders, the core of its homeland, and most of its water supply. 'That is not tilting too much toward Israel.' Barring and undoing Israeli victories is not 'correctly' in the US interest, but have helped make stronger the Muslims, who now are taking us on. I think it behooves a President to learn about the issues and study the culture of our enemies, so he can understand what they really want and what would work with them. Then he should clean out and reform the State Dept. Beware the Arab lobby! I believe that no President befriended Israel and none have worked for peace. When they say 'peace,' they mean getting Israel to make fatal concessions to the Muslims, who do not intend peace. The photograph shown Reagan was a hoax. Eisenhower later regretted his mistake on Suez, which boosted Nasser's anti-Western and anti-Israel pan-Arabism and led to terrorism and war. The Arabs made fools of Kissinger, Carter, and Clinton, and where are we now? 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@verizon.net |
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SPRINGTIME IN ISLAMBERG BACKGROUNDER
Posted by Michael Travis, May 13, 2007. |
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This article provides some background for the article on Islamberg in New York State below. It is called "Sheikh Gilani's American Disciples," and was written by Mira L. Boland. It appeared in the Weekly Standard, 03/18/2002, Volume 007, Issue 26. It asks what are we to make of the Islamic compounds across America affiliated with the Pakistani radical group Jamaat al-Fuqra? Mira L. Boland's articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times. |
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Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped when he went looking for the leader of a group called Jamaat al-Fuqra in the terrorist bazaar of Pakistan. At the time he disappeared, Pearl was tracking reports that Fuqra had hosted would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid at its walled compound in Lahore. In the end, it was agents of another group that spirited Pearl off to his death, but Fuqra remains a subject of interest, and not only because of its activities in Pakistan. For Fuqra has had a disturbing U.S. presence for more than 20 years. Today, half a dozen Fuqra residential compounds in rural hamlets across the country shelter hundreds of members, some of whom, according to intelligence sources, have been trained in the use of weapons and explosives in Pakistan. Fuqra's founder and chief, the man Pearl sought to interview, is a rotund Kashmiri of Sufi background with long-standing ties to Pakistan's Interservice Intelligence Agency (ISI), Sheikh Mubarik Ali Hasmi Shah Gilani. At least until President Musharraf's decision last fall to support the American war on terrorism, the ISI sponsored terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Sheikh Gilani has rubbed shoulders at international terrorist confabs with gunslingers from Hamas and Hezbollah, their mullah backers, and Osama bin Laden. And he has trained fighters for the battlefields of Kashmir, Chechnya, and Bosnia. Gilani launched his U.S. operations in 1980. Within ten years, Fuqra's communes were billing themselves as havens where Muslim converts -- many of them inner-city blacks, sometimes recruited in prison -- could build new lives. At least seven such communities are active today, in Hancock, N.Y.; Red House, Va.; Tulare County, Calif.; Commerce, Ga.; York, S.C.; Dover, Tenn.; and Combermere, Canada. While some of these enclaves contain only rudimentary buildings and trailers, the California compound has 300 residents on a 440-acre spread, according to a recent report by a local ABC station. Residents deny any involvement with terror, but Fuqra has a history of getting into trouble with the law. Over the years, at least a dozen Fuqra members have been convicted of crimes including conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers' compensation fraud in the United States or Canada. And Fuqra members are suspects in at least 10 unsolved assassinations and 17 firebombings between 1979 and 1990. Nor is Fuqra's criminal activity all in the past. In the last year alone, a resident of the California compound was charged with first degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff's deputy; another was charged with gun smuggling; the state of California launched an investigation into the fate of more than a million dollars in public funds given to a charter school run by Fuqra leaders; and two residents of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations, while a third awaits trial. Harder to document publicly but affirmed by several investigators and intelligence sources are the group's continuing links with guerrilla training in Pakistan. But then elusiveness is the order of the day for an organization whose members are well versed in the use of aliases; whose structure, shrouded behind front groups, is a network of safe houses and cells; and whose founder and members consistently maintain that it doesn't exist.
SHEIKH GILANI found his first American recruits by raiding the ranks of an existing American Muslim organization, the Dar ul Islam. At a Brooklyn mosque, Gilani, sporting ammunition belts, preached Islam as the path to a better life and called for fighters to join the holy war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Under the guise of studying Islam, some of his followers were initiated into the international Islamist movement. Their campaign of crime on U.S. soil began almost at once. As befits Gilani's close ties to Kashmir and the ISI, Fuqra's early targets in North America were ethnic Indians and sites linked to Indian sects. Thus, in July 1983, Stephen Paul Paster, a ranking member of Fuqra and one of its few whites, blew off most of one hand while planting a pipe bomb at a Portland, Ore., hotel owned by followers of the late guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At the time Fuqra's principal bombmaker, Paster escaped from a hospital and remained on the lam for two years. After police caught up with him at a Fuqra house in Colorado, Paster served 4 years of a 20-year prison sentence for the bombing. He was suspected but not charged in two other bombings in Seattle in 1984 while he was a fugitive, the bombings of the Vedanta Society temple and the Integral Yoga Society building. Paster now lives in Lahore, where U.S. intelligence sources say he provides explosives training to visiting Fuqra members. Shortly after the hotel bombing in Portland, two Fuqra members allegedly murdered Dr. Mozaffar Ahmad, a leader of the minority Ahmadiyyah Islamic sect in Canton, Mich. Both suspects died in a fire they had set at the Ahmadiyyah mosque in nearby Detroit, but the weapon used to murder Ahmad was found with their bodies. No one was ever charged in a triple slaying on August 1, 1984, but police suspect Fuqra. The victims were Lela Nevaskar, an Indian national who was in the United States as part of a government-sponsored health project, and her sister and brother-in-law. The three were murdered in a suburb of Tacoma, Wash., during a spate of firebombings of Hindu and Hare Krishna temples in Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia, and Kansas City, Mo. Police found news reports of the Tacoma murders from Seattle papers among Fuqra files seized in a later case.
FUQRA'S violence gained wider public notice in 1989, when police, seeking evidence in a series of thefts, searched a storage locker in Colorado Springs. They found a remarkable trove of armaments and documents, with multiple links to Fuqra. Among the handguns, semi-automatic firearms, more than 30 pounds of explosives, pipe bombs, and bomb components were several bombs of an unusual design identical to that of a device recovered from the firebombed Hare Krishna temple in Denver. There was a large photo of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric who would be convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and target silhouettes labeled FBI Anti-Terrorist Team, Zionist Pig, Delta Team, and SAS (British Special Air Service), on which were found the fingerprints of James Donald Williams, Fuqra chief for Colorado, and the handwriting of Vincente Rafael Pierre (of whom more later). There were blank birth certificates, Social Security cards, and several sets of Colorado driver's licenses bearing identical photos but various names. Among the documents were agreements signed by Fuqra members. They promised to tithe to the organization and to further contribute to the purchase of weapons and land. Those receiving welfare "pledged" to contribute either 75 percent or 100 percent of their welfare checks and food stamps. And they stated, "I, too, am willing to be used as a channel through which kuffar [infidel] monies are contributed toward the building of an Islamic town and other allied cities and/or programmes outside the continental United States, as well." Individuals selected to live on compounds agreed to "abide by the law and discipline of Jamaatul Fuqra." Several documents described the activities and code of the "Muhammad Commandos of Sector 5," who apparently met for training in weapons, hand-to-hand combat, intelligence gathering, explosives, incendiaries, and booby traps, according to Susan M. Fenger, then chief criminal investigator of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, who handled the case. And a document headed "Incogs" instructed commandos on ways of blending in with infidels while on an operation. Finally, the locker yielded what Fenger termed "targeting packets" on potential targets and victims in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Colorado. These included maps of oil and gas fields and electrical facilities, notes on cell phone sites and repeaters, references to the U.S. Air Force Academy and other military locations, and lists of people in 12 states and Canada with Jewish or Hindu-sounding names. A trove of targeting packets tied followers of Gilani to the firebombings of the Hare Krishna temples in Denver and Philadelphia. One of the packets outlined a murder plot that hadn't yet unfolded -- but soon did. The target was a rival imam in Tucson, Rashad Khalifa. Alarmed by interior and exterior surveillance photographs of the cleric's mosque and a four-page handwritten murder plan, Colorado Springs police notified authorities in Tucson, who warned Khalifa he was a marked man. A week later, on January 31, 1990, assailants stabbed Khalifa 19 times. The murder was "a carbon copy of the handwritten plan," said Colorado assistant attorney general Doug Wamsley. The scheme called for attacking Khalifa in the mosque's kitchen at night, proceeding by "the quietest method feasible: knife, garrot [sic]," and eliminating any witnesses. Khalifa apparently had angered Fuqra when he preached that the Quran was written by man, not God. No one was charged with murder in Khalifa's death, but eventually two Fuqra members, James Donald Williams and Nicolas Edward Laurent Flinton, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder. A Colorado jury convicted Williams in October 1993, but he jumped bail just before sentencing and remained free until he was arrested in Lynchburg, Va., in 2000; at the time Williams was living at the Fuqra compound in Red House. Flinton also fled; arrested in 1996 at a Fuqra community in South Carolina, he pleaded guilty and is currently in prison appealing his 22-year sentence.
FUQRA terrorism in North America appears to have peaked in the early 1990s. In 1991, luck derailed Fuqra plans to bomb an Indian movie theater and a Hindu temple near Toronto. Five men were arrested at the Niagara Falls border crossing after U.S. Customs agents searched their cars and found photographs, floor plans, and videotapes of the interiors of the targets, details of "recon team," "guard team," and "hit team" roles, and a description of how "time delay" bombs could be placed below the cinema floor. A second document stated that targeting a Hindu temple would "allow for total focus on the Hindus without any other party being involved in the fallout." A Canadian jury convicted three American Fuqra members of "conspiracy to commit mischief endangering life." A fourth suspect, Max Lon Fongenie, who had come to Canada from Pakistan shortly before the plot was set in motion, fled back to Pakistan after his co-conspirators' arrest, according to evidence presented at the trial. By this time, Fuqra was often operating under the cover of two front groups, "Muslims of the Americas" and Sheikh Gilani's "Quranic Open University." On its incorporation papers, the open university portrayed itself as a religious, charitable, and educational institution dedicated to home study and public awareness of the Quran. But Gilani's own writings and statements exposed the militant mission behind this fa ade. Thus, works by the sheikh published by the Quranic Open University and seized in a 1991 investigation instructed his followers that their "foremost duty" was "to wage Jihad" against the oppressors of Muslims. One of Gilani's poems is entitled "We dhikr [pray] to the beat of a submachine gun." Another exhorts, "Come join my troops and army / Says our Sheikh Gilani / Prepare to sacrifice your head / A true believer is never dead / Say 'Victory is in the air' / The kafir's [infidel's] blood will not be spared." Gilani's appearance in a recruitment video from this period (seized in 1992 and used in the Canadian trial) is in the same vein. The video shows mujahedeen types being trained in the use of firearms and explosives. Gilani, wearing a camouflage jacket over traditional Pakistani dress, declares: "We give [recruits] highly specialized training in guerrilla warfare. ... We are at present establishing training camps. ... You can easily reach us at Quranic Open University offices in upstate New York or in Canada or in Michigan or in South Carolina or in Pakistan. Wherever we are you can reach us." Even more damning is footage filmed in December 1993 by the Canadian Broadcasting Company when it covered a major jihadist conclave in Khartoum. The meeting was sponsored by then-Sudanese strongman and terror impresario Hassan Abdullah al-Turabi. An urbane, Sorbonne-educated Islamic scholar, Turabi had engineered a strategic alliance among Sunni-dominated Sudan, Shiite Iran, and Pakistan. With funding and expertise from Iran, Turabi made his country the launching pad for the first attack on the World Trade Center. Turabi also created the Popular Arab Islamic Conference (PAIC) as a vehicle for bringing together Sunni, Shiite, and secular, heretofore Marxist, terrorist groups. The 1993 PAIC conference in Khartoum was a who's who of Islamist terror. Mullahs from Iran and Afghanistan were there, along with delegates from Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Two generals, one of them a former chief of the ISI, and an adviser to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto led the Pakistani delegation. Osama bin Laden, not yet a kingpin but living in Sudan while developing the organization and funding for his nascent network, was there. So was Sheikh Gilani: Foreign journalists placed him in the company of an unnamed Pakistani general and another man they took to be an "ex"-Pakistani intelligence official. In the evening, large crowds regaled the assembled jihadists with chants of "Down, down USA! Down, down CIA!," and (in Arabic) "Death to the Jews!" In an interview taped by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Gilani acknowledged that one or two of the men charged in the Toronto bombing conspiracy had studied with him in Lahore. Nevertheless, he insisted that Fuqra does not exist and that he does not advocate violence. "Once [people] join our [Quranic Open] university," he said, "they become real good citizens. They stop smoking, they stop stealing, they stop living on welfare. That is what I teach them."
THAT BENIGN face is the one Gilani's current American followers seek to present to the world. Several Fuqra compounds boast signs at their gates for the Quranic Open University or Muslims of the Americas. Residents have told reporters they came seeking refuge from the mean streets. Law enforcement and intelligence sources, however, suggest the drop-off in Fuqra violence in recent years may be due to its sponsors' "tightening the leash" after the earlier attacks drew police scrutiny without advancing Islamist objectives. Fuqra's core of trained operatives in the United States, according to this view, have been directed to lie dormant until needed to support a "cost effective" strike. Be that as it may, there are plenty of continuing grounds for concern. One is new evidence of misuse of public funds. The California Justice Department is investigating the finances of GateWay Academy Public Charter School. The academy's CEO and superintendent, Khadijah Ghafur, is also secretary of Muslims of the Americas and a member of the board of directors of the Quranic Open University. One of GateWay's 11 campuses is located at Baladullah, Fuqra's compound in Tulare County, in the foothills of the Sierras. GateWay cannot account for $1.3 million in state money, according to Jill Marmolejo, spokesman for the Fresno Unified School District, and is in default on another $1.8 million in loans. The school seemed poised to obtain greater public largesse -- it submitted a $5.9 million budget to the board of education for fiscal 2002, apparently based on a wildly inflated student count (charter schools in California receive $4,600 per pupil) -- but the district revoked its charter on January16. This is reminiscent of an earlier Fuqra scam, the bilking of the Colorado workers' compensation fund in the early 1990s, for which several Fuqra members were jailed. Prosecutors showed that some $350,000 had been laundered through Professional Security International, a Fuqra security firm, and Muslims of the Americas. Investigator Susan Fenger says she tracked a portion of the funds through PSI to Fuqra couriers who traveled to Pakistan. That security firm also served the purpose of enabling Fuqra members to obtain federal licenses to buy automatic weapons, according to Fenger. And it obtained bid packages from the Defense Department, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services. It is hardly reassuring, then, that Fuqra currently maintains two security firms, Dagger Investigating Services and 786 Security Company, Inc., in Brooklyn, N.Y. Law enforcement sources suspect the group is continuing to launder funds through the firms for transfer to Gilani. Then there are the recent weapons violations and other crimes. Ramadan Abdullah, charged in the shooting last August of a Fresno County deputy sheriff in the course of a burglary, had come to Baladullah from Hancock. James Hobson, another Baladullah resident, was arrested earlier last year by U.S. marshals and charged with smuggling guns between South Carolina and New York. Hobson, also known as Umar Abdussalam, is the son-in-law of Musa Abdussalam, an elder at Baladullah. And at the Red House commune -- whose origins go back to 1993, after Fuqra abandoned its Buena Vista, Co., location in the wake of conspiracy convictions -- agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms made three arrests last fall. They charged Vincente Rafael Pierre and his wife Traci Elaine Upshur after she made "straw purchases" of .45 caliber handguns that her husband had selected. As a felon (he pleaded guilty in the workers' compensation scam), Pierre is not allowed to own firearms. A jury convicted both. A third Red House resident, Abdullah Ben Benu, is scheduled for trial in April for illegally transporting ammunition for AK-47 automatic rifles. Here, again, a trail leads back to Pakistan: The woman who raised Ben Benu is living in Lahore, according to law enforcement sources, with bombmaker Stephen Paul Paster. The ATF had the Red House colony under surveillance for a couple of years before making last fall's arrests. After September 11, authorities decided to move without further delay. At a bond hearing for Vincente Pierre on September 28, 2001, ATF Special Agent Thomas P. Gallagher told the court: "Individuals from the organization are trained in Hancock, N.Y., and if they pass the training in Hancock, N.Y., are then sent to Pakistan for training in paramilitary and survivalist training by Mr. Gilani... We have information from an informant that one individual [from Red House] did further his training by going to Afghanistan." And apparently the travel isn't all one way. At the same hearing, Pierre testified that Red House has hosted "many Muslims ... from Pakistan, Arabic." Pakistan, of course, isn't an Arab country, but plenty of Arabs have gone there to learn to use a gun. There is no ironclad evidence that Fuqra's American members today are part of the international conspiracy that threatens us. Rather, the ties are circumstantial and suggestive. What should be made, for example, of the fact that several weekend residents of Fuqra's headquarters compound at Hancock work during the week as toll collectors at New York City bridges and tunnels -- considering that the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had plans to blow up the George Washington Bridge and Hudson River tunnels? We also know that in the early 1990s Gilani's U.S. recruits signed an oath saying, "I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah's sake." At the least, it is clear that Daniel Pearl was digging into a very interesting story. Contact Michael Travis at michaelmgr@gmail.com |
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GAZA INDECISION
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 13, 2007. |
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The Kassams keep coming -- last Friday one landed near a "strategic facility" in Ashkelon -- and the IDF Southern Command keeps pushing for a major ground operation into Gaza. Yet still there is no government approval of such an action, and, in fact, the Cabinet is split on the issue, with some pushing for attacks from the air. Following the condemnations in the Winograd Report regarding decisions taking in the Lebanon war this past summer, there is more fear than ever about taking that critical step -- fear of not being ready, fear of judging badly. But it may well be that -- as Maj. Gen. (res.) Amidror has warned -- the decision-makers are applying the wrong lesson. For the build-up of armaments continues and the training continues, while the issues are debated. Galant has indicated that the massive and well-trained Hamas army must be weakened immediately or it will become as strong as Hezbollah. Unfortunately, painfully, I continue to have the sense that what the political echelon is waiting for is an incident with Israeli deaths, that will presumably justify a ground incursion in the eyes of the international community. For still I read comments about the benefit in terms of international approval we have secured via our "restraint." This is sad indeed. The Security Cabinet met later today without resolving this issue and will resume discussion soon. ~~~~~~~~~~ King Abdullah of Jordan was due to meet with Abbas in Ramallah today -- the first time he would have entered Judea and Samaria since early 2000 -- to promote the Arab League "peace initiative." The trip, however, was postponed, ostensibly because bad weather made it impossible for his helicopter to fly. Not unsurprisingly, other versions of the reason for the cancellation are also floating about -- including that Abdullah has not secured sufficient concessions from Israel to make this trip productive. What I find more interesting than the fact of this postponement (or cancellation, as the case may be) are comments released beforehand: Both PA and Jordanian officials denied that there would be discussion of a Palestinian-Jordanian federation. For their part, the Palestinians declared that what they are seeking is simply an independent Palestinian state. But Marouf Bakit, Jordanian prime minister, said, "It's premature to talk about a confederation or federation with the Palestinians, because this might harm the interests of both countries." He suggested that ultimately a confederation might be possible. Now, I believe talk of this is premature, in the sense that the parties are not ready to deal with it. But I am alert for, and pleased to see, allusions to this possibility. For those of us who see the notion of a Palestinian state as absolutely not viable, some confederation of Palestinian autonomous enclaves with Jordan is one possibility that is being considered. Jordan is, after all, not only 70% Palestinian demographically, geographically it was carved from the original Mandate for Palestine, promised to the Jews as a homeland. That is, it IS the Palestinian state and may yet some day come to fill that roll properly. ~~~~~~~~~~ This week we here in Israel celebrate the 40th anniversary of a reunited Jerusalem. Later this week I will have a great deal more to say about this. Now, however, I will simply report that the EU president has informed our Foreign Ministry that ambassadors of European countries will not be attending ceremonies commemorating the event (although YNet says some European countries will ignore the EU ban and attend anyway). And apparently US Ambassador Richard Jones won't be attending either (Americans, take note). Our response here? Fury, almost universally. Every other nation in the world is permitted to choose its own capital. Only Israel is denied this right. Heaven forbid that Arab sensibilities should be offended. Jerusalem mayor, Uri Lupolianski, in a strongly worded statement that expresses the sentiments of many, said, "Anyone who doesn't recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel does not recognize the state of Israel." At a program last week, I heard this story, which fairly sums up our response now: At the first Camp David, attended by US President Carter, Israeli PM Menachem Begin (whose memory is for a blessing), and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Carter told Begin, "We don't recognize your right to all of Jerusalem." To which Begin replied, "We do not recognize your non-recognition." Amen and amen! ~~~~~~~~~~ I was very gratified to see that on the matter of our rights in Jerusalem, the Israeli populace is near unanimous. In a poll done by the Tazpit Research Institute, at the request of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 96% of Israeli Jews are against relinquishing the Kotel, the Western Wall, even in exchange for peace. And 89% are unwilling to give up the Temple Mount for peace. This means that even a good percentage of Israeli Jews who are not themselves religious would not relinquish these holy sites -- as is being demanded of us by such "plans" as the one advanced by the Arab League, which requires our return to pre-'67 lines. The Temple Mount, first, and then the standing section of the supporting wall of the Mount -- the Kotel -- are Judaism's most sacred places. They are our eternal heritage. To surrender them would be to surrender the very essence of our reason for being tied to this land. It would be a step towards surrendering who we are. Additionally, according to the poll, 91.5 % said they believe it is imperative to maintain a large Jewish majority in Jerusalem, while 81.3 % said they believe that a mostly-Jewish Jerusalem strengthens Israel's moral; 62.4 % said they believe Jewish settlement in Ma'aleh Adumim and Gush Etzion serve to strengthen Jerusalem, and 61.3 % think it important to "prioritize" Jerusalem so as to strengthen its status and standing. All right!! ~~~~~~~~~~ Speaking of strengthening Jerusalem, at the Cabinet meeting today, Olmert announced that 5.75 billion NIS would be spent on strengthening Jerusalem over the next five years. ~~~~~~~~~~ Hamas and Fatah are at it again. Baha Abu Jarad, a leader of Fatah's Al Aksa Brigades has been assassinated, along with his body guard/companion, and Fatah is blaming this on a Hamas ambush. A Fatah spokesman called this "a serious violation of the Mecca agreement," while Hamas, naturally, is claiming innocence and condemned the "hasty judgment of Fatah." At his funeral this morning, 3,000 Fatah supporters called for revenge and began shooting in the air. At the home of a Hamas supporter, a gunfight broke out and three people were wounded. In subsequent action this afternoon, Fatah gunmen opened fire outside of a Mosque in Gaza City, killing two members of Hamas and wounding 11 others. Then early this evening, masked gunmen abducted a well-known Hamas religious scholar, Ali Sharif, from this home; Hamas is hold Abbas responsible for his safety. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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THE FRENCH PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS OF MAY 2007: IMPLICATIONS FOR FRENCH-ISRAELI RELATIONS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 13, 2007. |
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This article was written by
Tsilla Hershco and was published as a
BESA Perspectives Paper No. 29, May 13, 2007
Dr. Tsilla Hershco, a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, specializes in Franco-Israeli relations. |
Executive Summary: The election this week of Nicolas Sarkozy as President of France is unlikely to lead to a substantial shift in French policy towards Israel, although the tone of French-Israeli relations can be expected to improve. Even the most favorable French administration will continue to take into account France's traditional ties with the Arab world, France's significant Muslim population, and public opinion in France -- which is not at all favorable to Israel. Sarkozy's promise to affect a transatlantic rapprochement does not necessarily mean a positive shift in French policy towards Israel. It is equally possible that tightened French-US (or EU-US) coordination regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (combined with a possible change in the American administration, if that occurs), may lead to enhanced diplomatic pressure on Israel. However, in spite of political disagreements, the existing dialogue as well as the gradual process of improving bilateral relations will most likely prevail. The presidential elections in France, and especially the run-off elections on 6 May 2007, attracted world wide attention. On one side of the political duel competed the attractive, determined Segolene Royal, the left-leaning candidate of the Socialist Party (PS). Royal is the first woman in France to come this far in an election. On the other side of the arena raced her opponent, Nicolas Sarkozy, of the right-oriented Union for a Popular Movement (UMP). The charismatic, goal-driven, experienced and well-informed Sarkozy, who won the election with 53 percent of the vote, provokes mixed reactions because of his clear cut opinions, his past harsh expressions regarding the November 2005 riots and his Jewish roots (his grandfather was an immigrant of a Jewish family). The two talented and ambitious candidates, who represent a new generation of leaders in France, contributed to the media's intensive focus on the campaign. The weighty issues on the French public agenda might equally explain the passionate interest of the media in the elections and their results. At the heart of the public debate during the 2007 presidential campaign, there were crucial domestic social and economic issues, including; the public budget deficit, unemployment, scarcity of low priced lodging, low pensions, decreasing purchasing power of French salaried employees, uncontrolled immigration policy and deteriorating systems of education and health. Above all, there was the looming apprehension of the loss of national identity. The predominance of these issues was evident during the two and half hours of televised confrontation between the two finalists on 2 May 2007. During the debate, the candidates spoke mostly on domestic issues, referring only briefly to major foreign policy themes such as the European constitution, the adhesion of Turkey to the EU, the Iranian nuclear ambitions, the human rights abuses in China and the genocide in Darfur. Unexpectedly, the Middle East was not even mentioned. In fact, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the crisis in Lebanon, issues which normally stimulate obsessive interest in France, were almost totally absent from the public debate during the presidential elections. Middle East Policy Expectations Eventually, the Israeli public and the media tend to regard the French presidential campaign through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the crisis in Lebanon. They often express their expectations for a change in French Middle Eastern policy which would hopefully lead to a more balanced French attitude towards Israel. Consequently, Sarkozy's victory was followed by positive reactions by Israeli media and public opinion. The expectations for a change probably stem from the assumption that the end of Chirac's presidency will tremendously affect French policy in the Middle East. In this context, during Chirac's 12-year rule (1995-2007), he manifested an intensive personal implication in the formulation of French Middle Eastern policy. This implication was often marked by an anti-Israeli and pro-Arab attitude. The Israeli public remembers well Chirac's hostile attitude towards Israel as well as his massive one-sided support for Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, especially during the first stages of the second Intifada. Israeli expectations for a change in French attitude are equally based on the friendly declarations of the newly elected Sarkozy regarding Israel as well as on his firm struggle against anti-Semitic aggressions in France. Additionally, Israelis often express their hope that Sarkozy's warm attitude towards the United States might serve Israel's interests as well. Yet, the repercussions of these elections on French policy towards Israel should not be overestimated. Unless an extreme crisis occurs -- which is not to be easily overruled in this turbulent region -- no significant changes should be expected. The election results will probably lead to a more pleasant style and tone, as well as to a more balanced French attitude regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nonetheless, the main features of French current policy towards Israel will probably continue under the new French president. Features of French Attitudes Towards Israel French policy towards Israel is characterized by two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, there is a gradual process of improving bilateral relations. On the other hand, there are deep political divergences of opinion between the two countries. The improvement in bilateral relations was initiated at the end of 2002, as an intentional process based on French-Israeli common objectives. The amelioration of the French-Israeli bilateral relations became a formal policy in September 2003, with the signing of a detailed plan elaborated by a special high level French-Israeli committee. According to the agreement, mutual common projects in fields such as culture, economy, commerce and science were planned and executed. In addition, the agreement included the promotion of bilateral strategic cooperation. Previously, the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000 caused a severe deterioration in Franco-Israeli relations, essentially due to French pro-Palestinian attitude. The French formal initiative to improve relations reflected their comprehension that their partial attitude towards Israel constituted a detriment to their aspirations to play an influential role in the mediation of the conflict. The French realized that in order to overcome Israeli's resentment to their diplomatic implication in the mediation, they had to demonstrate a more balanced attitude. Additionally, the improvement of bilateral relations was based on common perceptions and objectives such as the fight against international Islamist terrorist movements and Iranian nuclear ambitions. The July 2006 war in Lebanon constituted a major test for the improvement of French-Israeli relations. At the same time, it accentuated other points of common concern: the stabilization of the democratic regime of Fouad Siniora, the prevention of the rearming of Hizballah and the limitation of Syrian and Iranian involvement in Lebanese affairs. The process of improving bilateral relations did not erase the political disagreements characterizing French-Israeli relations, especially since the second Intifada. The divergences are essentially connected with basic perceptions: France still believes that the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the creation of a viable Palestinian state on the territories conquered by Israel in 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital. France claims that this solution is still relevant and feasible in spite of the increasing terror and chaos in the Palestinian Authority. On the contrary, Israel insists that as long as terrorism persists, a peaceful and long-standing solution is impossible. Additionally, conspicuous Franco-Israeli disagreements have emerged in the context of the Lebanese crisis. Thus, French refusal to add Hizballah to the list of terrorist organizations provokes harsh Israeli criticism. Another bone of contention between the two countries stems from the flight of Israeli air force planes over Lebanese airspace. France claims the flights constitute a violation of UN Resolution 1701, while Israel maintains that the operations inspect and prevent arms smuggling through the Syrian border. Conclusion: Will French Policy Towards Israel Change After the Election? The results of the May 2007 presidential elections in France will not substantially change the essence of French attitudes towards Israel. Thus, the process of intensive bilateral relations and cooperation, initiated in 2002, will not be interrupted since they are based on French-Israeli common interests, concerns and perceptions. Accordingly, it is reasonable to assume that France and Israel will strengthen their strategic cooperation as result of mounting terrorist threats against the two countries. Similarly, the results of the elections are probably not going to drastically change French perceptions of its Middle East policy. Indeed, even the most favorable French administration will continue to take into account the weighty considerations such as French traditional ties with the Arab world, the significant French Muslim population and French anti-Israeli public opinion. Moreover, the French most likely will not modify their traditional perception regarding the creation of a peaceful Palestinian state as the only solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This perception will continue to constitute a source of political discord between France and Israel as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues and as long as Palestinian terror and chaos prevail. Even Sarkozy's friendly assurances towards the US and the potential transatlantic "rapprochement" do not necessarily signify a positive shift in French policy towards Israel. On the contrary, tightened US-French (or EU-US) cooperation regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, combined with a potential change in the American administration, might produce joint pressures on Israel for painful and even dangerous concessions and compromises. In addition, the precarious and explosive situation in Lebanon, the French traditional attachment to this country and their concern for the security of their 1,600 UNIFIL soldiers, who risk being targeted by Hizballah, might serve as further potential disagreements between France and Israel. The unstable and perilous situation in Lebanon produces a great amount of uncertainty as to various aspects of French policy regarding the Lebanese crisis. In the forthcoming period there will probably be a profound reassessment of French attitude regarding its future participation in UNIFIL (the present mandate expires in August 2007), as well as closer potential dialogue with the Syrians and the Iranians in the context of the Lebanese crisis. It seems, however, that a potential dialogue with Iran and Syria over the Lebanese crisis is not is going to compromise the firm French attitude in the Iranian nuclear issue. Lastly, the results of the forthcoming legislative elections to the French National Assembly in June 2007 might be crucial as to the capacity of the newly-elected president to carry out the main lines of his politics. They will probably have their impact on the composition of the next French government and hence on the French interior and foreign policy, including its attitude towards Israel. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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ATTENTION AP AND ALL YOU MAINSTREAM MEDIA FOLKS...
Posted by Gerald A. Honigman, May 13, 2007. |
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I have a favor to ask. In articles published starting during the week of May 7th, reports dealing with the possible finding of King Herod's tomb have become news. The articles speak of the Judean Desert, Judea, the Jews' revolt for freedom, and so forth. But, don't you know that these are all merely Zionist concoctions? Indeed, you showed that you are aware of this since you identified Herodium, at the beginning of these articles, as being on the West Bank (as you did likewise for Hebron)...not Judea. You certainly know how to put those Jews in their place! Michael Moore and Jimmy Carter must be proud... But, to avoid confusion and misleading your readers, please be more consistent in your opposition to those fabricating Jews. The other correct designations you should have used therefore would be the West Bank (not Judean) Hills, the West Bank (not Judean) Desert, and so forth... Don't dare Judaize those places...that's just what those conniving Zionists want! And, in the future, please refrain from reporting about the Jewish Temple and Temple Mount in Jerusalem as well. You made this mistake in your recent articles. As the Arabs will tell you, the Jews never had a Temple there. Mere pipedreams... Abbas and his latter day Arafatians as well as Islamic Jihad and the Hamasniks will be glad to supply you with its real name, Buraq's Mount. It was named for Muhammad's winged horse, which took him there from the Arabian Peninsula to ascend to Heaven after he learned of the Temple (of Solomon) Mount itself from the Jews, founders of the date palm oasis at Medina. The Jews, many of whom fled to Arabia after the Roman wars, gave Muhammad refuge in Medina during his Hijira (flight) from Mecca in the 7th century C.E. He would later repay them with slaughter, rape, and enslavement for not accepting his religio-political leadership. The Prophet says he spoke to the Angel Gabriel to learn of the Temple and other such things. Nice, but he also spent a long time in Medina with Jewish teachers (and met Christians elsewhere whose religion was an offshoot of that of the Jews) who introduced him to G_d, Abraham, ethical monotheism, etc. in the first place (he even had his followers turn towards Jerusalem for a while to win the Jews' support), and it is primarily the Book of the Jews which mentions Gabriel and so forth. Certainly nothing of such matters was to be found in sources of Muhammad's earlier fellow pagan Arabs themselves. Gabriel's chat with Muhammad...the latter's Jewish tutors... What a coincidence! Moving on... Don't dare listen to those who will next tell you that the land was known as Judea -- land of the Judaeans (Jews) -- and Samaria for almost 3,000 years until British imperialism divided the land in the early 20th century after defeating the Turks in World War I (who ruled it for over 4 centuries) into a west bank and an east bank (of the Jordan River). The Brits' Mandate of Palestine was granted to them on 4/20/1920 and covered both banks. Those same Hebrew story tellers will next claim that in 1922 British imperialism then rewarded its Hashemite Arab allies from Arabia with the entire east bank -- so, right from the getgo, Arab nationalism was granted almost 80% of "Palestine." The Brits' East Bank rep back then, Sir Alec Kirkbride, wrote all about this in his book A Crackle Of Thorns. Later, when Transjordan attacked a nascent Israel in 1948 and seized land on the other (west) side of the Jordan River, the West Bank designation took further hold. So, on behalf of Roman, British, and Arab imperialism and expansionism, you media folks are obviously correct to agree on renaming Israel, Judea, and Samaria from their prior 3,000 year old designations to the newer ones. Despite what the Christian Gospel of Matthew says (2:1), Jesus was born in Bethlehem of the West Bank...not Judea. But, again, watch out for those extremist Jews and others who will disagree. They'll also tell you that after the Jews fought for their freedom against their Roman oppressors and Herod -- whom your own reports and articles state was seen by most Jews as a Roman stooge -- no other people ever had an independent nation there as it was simply conquered by one imperial power after another -- including the Arab Caliphates which ruled it for several centuries from either Damascus or Baghdad. Those Jews will tell you that the vast majority of Arabs arrived in the wake of these 7th century Arab imperial conquests when they burst out of the Arabian Peninsula and spread in all directions, conquering millions of native non-Arab peoples and forcibly Arabizing their lands. And they'll say that most Arabs didn't settle themselves in "Palestine" until after the late 19th century. Furthermore, they'll cite the Records Of The Permanent Mandates Commission of the League Of Nations and numerous other sources to make their point. Everyone knows how deceitful those Jews can be... Remember...this is all Zionist propaganda...as is the Jews' claim that the Emperor Hadrian, after they dared to revolt a second major time against Roman rule in 132-135 C.E., decided to end their hopes once and for all by renaming the land itself after their historic enemies, the Philistines -- a non-Semitic sea people from the Aegean or eastern Mediterranean region. Judaea -- as Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Flavius Josephus, and other major contemporary Roman and Roman-sponsored historians wrote extensively about -- was thus renamed Syria Paleastina. So Zionists hold that the very name "Palestine" itself represents the imperial conquest of the Jews and the tragic consequences which followed. If all the above is not enough, there's something else which adds even more to my confusion... Most of you mainstream media folks supposedly don't like nasty imperialism and the fruits of it. I don't either. So, I can't understand how you insist on using new names, like the "West Bank," born of imperial conquest and massacres of Jews in their quest for freedom in their own land, in your reporting instead of using the names by which those places were known as for thousands of years before. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, none of the above are really just figments of the Zionist imagination or Zionist propaganda. My real confusion, thus, is why the the Associated Press, the BBC, and most of the rest of the allegedly "liberal" mainstream media treat such things as if they were. 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 |
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DON'T COUNT ON SAUDI PLAN
Posted by Barbara Sommer, May 13, 2007. |
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This article was written by Dr Dore Gold, who heads the Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs (JCPA). It was published May 13, 2007 in
Ynet News |
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As it turns out, Saudi king apparently doesn't back peace initiative It may well be assumed that the Olmert government, which is currently under great pressure at home, will seek a way to revive the diplomatic process so as, among other reasons, to also create a political agenda. It will seek a legitimate political initiative as long as it is premised on accurately reading regional reality. Prior to the publication of the Winograd Report, senior Israeli officials praised the Saudi initiative despite reservations regarding its content. The Saudi initiative was backed by the Bush Administration, a fact which influenced Israeli considerations. Yet something strange happened during the last visit to the Middle East by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: When Rice praised the Saudi initiative, which calls for full Israeli withdrawal in exchange for "normalization" of ties between Israel and the Arab world, the Saudi king cancelled his participation at a festive dinner with President Bush at the White House and condemned the American invasion of Iraq, calling it an "illegal foreign occupation." Recently Abdullah also refused to meet with Iraqi Prime minister Nuri al-Maliki and thus struck the Bush administration another blow, as al-Maliki is thought to be a pro-American leader. In face of the series of mishaps in the relations between the US and Saudi Arabia, Martin Indyk recently wrote an article in the Washington Post where he argued that the honeymoon between the Saudis and Bush was over. False hope The obvious question being asked is how can the US lead a diplomatic maneuver between Israel and Saudi Arabia when relations between Riyadh and Washington are so fragile? Moreover, it's surprising that Rice presented a Saudi stance that is open to negotiations with Israel while the Saudi king is making harsh anti-Western statements. Apparently, the person who promoted the Saudi initiative to the American administration was Prince Bandar bin Sultan, currently the national security advisor and previously the former Saudi ambassador to Washington for 22 years. It was clear to anyone monitoring developments in Saudi Arabia that Bandar had problematic relations with King Abdullah. Firstly, Bandar is the son of Crown Prince Sultan, who comes from a different faction of the Saudi royal family -- former King Fahd's Sudeiri faction. Secondly, Bandar failed in recent years in leading Saudi PR in Washington: Therefore, in wake of the events of 9/11 Abdullah dispatched his then-political advisor Adel Jubair to appear on American TV. A report in the New York Times on April 29th revealed that Bandar did not present Saudi positions that reflect his uncle King Abdullah's views, but rather, his own personal views. According to reports in the Israeli media it was Bandar who had met with Olmert in Jordan several months ago. Indeed, similar to Israel, Saudi Arabia would also like to curb Iranian influence in the region, yet it is not prepared to strengthen moderate Palestinian elements on Hamas' back or to enter open dialogue with Israel. Thus, the hope that lies in the adoption of the Saudi initiative may prove to be false. Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@yahoo.com |
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POLL: 96% OF ISRAELI JEWS WON'T GIVE UP WESTERN WALL FOR PEACE
Posted by Sergio Tessa (HaDaR), May 13, 2007. |
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96% would not give away the Kotel, but how many care about the FACT that Har HaByith, THE REAL THING, is in Arab hands and how many wouldn't care if that situation continues under whatever flag? It seems that most don't want to give-up their Knorr beef-cubes and meat-soup powder, but don't care if someone else takes their meat! I WANT MY STEAKS AND MY ROAST-BEEF! |
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On 13 May 2007, at 07:53, imra@netvision.net.il wrote: "Poll: 96% of Israeli Jews won't give up Western Wall for peace" Contact Sergio Tessa at HaDar-Israel@verizon.net |
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ISRAEL MUST MONITOR A CHANGING U.S. POLITICAL SCENE
Posted by Lawrence Uniglicht, May 12, 2007. |
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It is ever essential that Israeli tacticians closely monitor the ebbs and flows of United States politicos, attempting to discern who will eventually reflect will of the American people in the 2008 presidential election. Furthermore, such tacticians must attempt to discern which party will be in charge. Israel's close affiliation with the Bush Administration, infatuated by an Israel unfriendly Road Map mandate and Holocaust trivializer Mahmoud 'the smoothie' Abbas, must be distanced. Bush's popularity is lower than the New Orleans delta. More importantly, he has recently disrespected Israel by asserting she was strategically defeated by Hizbullah. Et Tu Bush! Is that consistent with reality? A 10,000 member U.N. force now buffers Israel from the terror organization. Furthermore, much of Hizbullah's weaponry, provided by Iran and Syria, was destroyed by Israeli artillery. Israel is more not less secure that before. Can we say the same for Lebanon, more in the clutches of Hizbullah and Syria than before the war? The United States, a nation in political flux, has always been an essential and most formidable ally of Israel. Yet, the American personality is intensely polarized, and as the pendulum swings, so will its behavior, and perhaps subtle relationships with Israel. America will always be Israel's friend (let us pray), yet friends do not always craft policies in the best interests of other friends. Uncle Sam's superpower status cannot be ignored, thus his preferences greatly influence tiny Israel, a nation surrounded by hostile Arab and Persian neighbors. Of course, Israel must be its own state, not a protectorate, but it certainly helps having friends in high places. Convince the anticipated new transatlantic politicos on the block Israel must retain every inch of land, without a doubt, justifiably secured in 1967 as a consequence of vanquishing hostile Arabs yearning to annihilate the Jewish State. All nations, including the United States, adhering to a policy of 'manifest destiny' when it in effect took its Southwest from Mexico, keep territory claimed (or implicitly claimed) during wartime. Why should Israel be held to a different standard; especially when Judea, Samaria, the eastern sector of Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights (as well as Gaza) were acquired during a war fought for the Jewish State's very survival? World class investor Warren Buffet, investing billions in Iscar, a tool manufacturing firm located within the boundaries of acquired land, the Galilee sector of the Golan Heights, implicitly agrees with the past practice of rightful acquisition. If any naïve soul might believe Buffet would even consider investing his Berkshire Hathaway money in a business, potentially destined to be located on land governed by Syria, than that soul might also believe the moon is made of green cheese and pigs will one day sprout wings and fly. Convince those same politicos that Israelis do not occupy so-called Palestinians, truly morphed Jordanians. Israeli defense forces must deploy in Judea and Samaria, must set up check points, must in effect inconvenience Arabs, since the 'unified' Fatah Hamas terror organization refuses to protect Jewish Israeli citizens, choosing to reside in those regions, from violent jihad junkies and other Islamic criminals. Furthermore, since Israel abandoned Gaza, Arabs have morphed that strip of land into a festering quagmire of discontent, laced with scum of the Earth murderers, financed by Iranian Jew haters, lobbing lethal qassam missiles into Israel's backyard on a daily basis. Why encourage Israel to create a similar hell-hole by likewise abandoning any parts of Judea, Samaria, Israel's capital Jerusalem, or the Golan Heights? Only members of civil mankind infected with a death wish would adhere to that mindset. Israel's technology driven economy remains vibrant, yet its formidable ally's economy could be in serious trouble down the road. Expensive military commitments could soon plague the U.S. Treasury, the greenback continues to lose value especially to the euro jeopardizing the ever necessary preeminence of the U.S. petrodollar, enormous quantities of U.S. debt notes are held especially by calculating Chinese and Japanese bankers who could dump them in a New York minute if U.S. consumers become expendable, and a soaring stock market caused in part by corporations buying back their own stock for the sake of high positioned officers bloated with stock options, in lieu of investment, could wreck havoc from Wall Street to Main Street when the sell orders ultimately spill over the levees, all suggesting Uncle Sam's newly elected stewards could truly have a mess on their hands. Might Israel now offer to relinquish acceptance of truly unnecessary i.e. all foreign aid, indeed a psychologically infuriating transaction that could very well result in anti-Semitic responses from embattled Americans, especially if the flood waters manifest? None of this is to suggest Israel disrespect the Bush Administration, despite the fact its assertion Israel suffered a 'strategic defeat' to Hizbullah, a misperception believed by many, is a true kick in the teeth to an ally and friend. Nevertheless, prescient Israeli movers and shakers must look ahead, sizing up who they will likely have to deal with in the near future. It pays to begin nurturing those expectant relationships now. Lawrence Uniglicht is a career civil servant, working for the Social Security Administration. He advocates for the State of Israel with an American perspective. He writes, "Advocating for the disrespected underdog has been my passion, no doubt Israel falls into that category." Contact him by email at larose@snip.net |
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WHY ARE WE IGNORING REALITY?
Posted by Yuval Zaliouk, May 12, 2007. |
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"As long as we continue to base our national debates and policies on enemy propaganda, it should surprise no one that Israel finds itself in its current dire predicament. If we are serious about solving our problems, we must liberate ourselves from hostile forces that distort our national conversation with the help of their Israeli media buddies." Dear friends, Are almost 50% of Israelis really blind to the dire realities forced upon us by our murderous enemies without and within? The tragic answer is, unfortunately, yes! and with the help of the leftist Israeli media. Figure this: There is no printed or on the air national media
outlet in Israel. Nothing similar to, for instance, FOX Network. The
only national media Israelis can access is on the Internet:
Here is another brilliant article on the subject published in the
Jerusalem Post
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In an interview last Friday with Ma'ariv, former IDF chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya'alon expressed his view that the ongoing debate in Israel regarding the solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is an exercise in futility. As he put it, "We argue over what the solution is, but we still haven't agreed on what the problem is." On the face of it, Ya'alon's statement beggars belief. It doesn't take a genius to understand what Israel's problem is. All a person has to do is take a look at Palestinian "educational" television, where Mickey Mouse exhorts kindergarteners to become mass murderers, destroy Israel, and bring about Islamic world domination, to know that Palestinian society seeks Israel's destruction and Islamic global supremacy. And the Palestinians are not alone. The Arab and Muslim world supports their goals. The Syrian government threatens war with Israel everyday. Hizbullah and Iran issue daily calls for Israel's annihilation. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the central clearinghouses for genocidal anti-Semitism, replete with Holocaust denial and Nazi-propaganda characterizing Jews as subhuman filth who the Muslim world must unite to snuff out. Opposing all this is the State of Israel and its citizens. Since we are not interested in being annihilated and don't like it when people insult us, it should be fairly clear that Israel must be strong in order to defend itself and to prevent our enemies from acquiring the ability to carry out their evil designs. But as Ya'alon points out, for the past 15 years, this obvious predicament has rarely been mentioned. It certainly has not informed the policies of Israel's governments. So it would seem that if we wish to solve our problems, the first question that must be addressed is, why are we ignoring reality? Over the past week, three events exposed the causes of this national flight of fancy. First, last week, B'Tselem and Hamoked published a joint report entitled, "Utterly Forbidden: The Torture And Ill-Treatment Of Palestinian Detainees." The report purports to detail 73 testimonies of Palestinian prisoners claiming to have been tortured by IDF soldiers and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) agents. The report was extensively and dispassionately covered by the Israeli media. The fact of its publication was the first item on Israel Radio's hourly news updates for several hours running. The impression given by the coverage was that there was no reason to doubt the veracity of the report's findings. The press reports made no mention of the fact that B'Tselem and Hamoked are radical leftist organizations with documented histories of falsifying and distorting data. No mention was made of the funding these groups receive from European countries. Representatives of B'Tselem and Hamoked were not asked why their report does not identify any of the alleged victims and so makes it impossible for the Justice Ministry to investigate any of their claims. Moreover, the media made light of the fact that the alleged victims are terrorists who were arrested and interrogated for their role in planning and carrying out terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens. This Wednesday, another report received similar sympathetic coverage. The World Bank published a report claiming that Palestinian poverty in Judea and Samaria is the direct result of IDF checkpoints and roadblocks. Rather than substantively examine the allegations, in repeated broadcasts, Israel Radio gave the impression that the World Bank's allegations were credible. The fact of the matter is that the World Bank's findings, as well as its methodology and sources, are grossly prejudicial to Israel. The World Bank based its claims on reports by the Israeli radical leftist organizations B'Tselem, Hamoked, Peace Now, Yesh Din and Bimkom; the blatantly anti-Israel UN Organization for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs; and Amnesty International. While placing the full measure of blame for Palestinian economic failure on the IDF, the World Bank report completely ignores the fact that the Palestinians are waging a terror war against Israeli society and that the IDF has a responsibility to defend the state and its citizens from murder. An indication of the report's extreme prejudice is found in the fact that the word "terror" is never mentioned. The fact of the matter is that roadblocks are a vital component of the IDF's success in preventing terror attacks from being carried out in Judea and Samaria. In 2006 alone, security forces arrested 45 suicide bombers in Judea and Samaria en route to their murderous missions. Many of them were intercepted at roadblocks. Others were captured because the presence of roadblocks forced them to travel in a manner that facilitated their capture. In placing the blame on Israel for the Palestinians' economic failure, the World Bank also ignored the fact that the Palestinian Authority is a kleptocracy. But this is not surprising. Since the PA was established in 1994, the World Bank has played a central role in ignoring and so enabling Palestinian leaders to abscond with hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid money. Far from fulfilling their duty to oversee the use of development funds, World Bank officials have turned a blind eye to their diversion to private accounts controlled by Yassir Arafat and his deputies, who used the pilfered funds to enrich themselves and to raise terror militias. To date, the Israeli media has not asked World Bank officials to explain why the august lending institution is operating as an anti-Israel pressure group and propaganda organ. The professional malpractice of the Israeli media came through a second time on Wednesday when all three television stations opened their evening broadcasts with a radical leftist propaganda film. The film portrayed a violent altercation at a roadblock near Otniel between IDF reservists and radical leftists and Palestinians who outnumbered the troops by a ratio of 20 to one. The leftists and the Palestinians were forcibly confronted by the reservists as they illegally dismantled an IDF roadblock. It is hard to shake the impression that it was no coincidence that the group chose to assault a far-flung, lightly manned IDF roadblock on the same day that the World Bank published its report condemning the very existence of IDF roadblocks. Whatever the case, the media glossed over the fact that group was not merely demonstrating. By dismantling the roadblock, they were actively sabotaging Israel's national security and the security of its citizens that the roadblock was erected to protect. Treating the propaganda film as fact, the media gave the impression that the aggressors at the scene were the soldiers, not the saboteurs. In recent years, the once ad-hoc collaboration between leftist anti-Israel and anti-American organizations and jihadist terror organizations has become premeditated. In one striking example in late March, 20 Canadian "anti-war" activists participated in a conference in Cairo along with senior members of several terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Hizbullah. The expressed goal of the Cairo Conference was to forge an alliance against "imperialism and Zionism." According to a report in The Ottowa Citizen, at a post-conference briefing in Toronto on April 27, the Canadians who participated in the conference encouraged their colleagues on the Left to cooperate with terrorist organizations. As one speaker put it, "We have to forge a more solid and more united anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist movement here to be able to have something to show our brothers and sisters [in the terrorist organizations] when we get back [to the next conference]." These organizations and their fellow travelers in the UN and the World Bank have had an immense impact on Israeli and US policy-makers. Their disinformation campaigns have engendered the current situation where the US and Israeli governments base their policies on lies while stubbornly ignoring the reality of terror and the global jihad. Case in point is the US State Department's recently released paper calling for Israel to dismantle roadblocks and checkpoints in Judea and Samaria and to enable free travel between Gaza and Judea and Samaria. The report was greeted with shock by the IDF and the Shin Bet, which quickly understood that implementing it would be tantamount to signing the death warrants of countless Israelis. Not only would bombers be allowed to move at will, by enabling free travel between Gaza and Judea and Samaria, Israel would all but guarantee that the rockets now terrorizing residents of the western Negev would also threaten residents of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Despite the security services' logical opposition, the Foreign Ministry has given the US document passing marks. On Wednesday, The Jerusalem Post reported on one official who claimed that Israel should accept the US demand to dismantle roadblocks. As he put it, "The Western world, with the exception of the US, sees the roadblocks and checkpoints as a main problem here. It is considered collective punishment that bothers everyone, but only weeds out a few terrorists." So rather than attacking those who would deny Israel its inherent right to safeguard its territory and the lives of its citizens, the Foreign Ministry, which is responsible for arguing Israel's case to the world, thinks we would be better off just letting terrorists run free and so endangering the lives of Israeli citizens. That is, the Foreign Ministry has swallowed whole our enemies' propaganda and is basing its positions on their false narratives of Israeli aggression and brutality. Similarly, Wednesday night, rather than defend the reservists for their actions in defending the roadblock from attack, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and Military Advocate General Brig.-Gen. Avichai Mandelblit hung them out to dry. Peretz called the soldiers' behavior "egregious and deviant." IDF officials referred to the footage as "embarrassing." Mandelblit ordered an investigation of the soldiers for their actions in defending their position. In abandoning the reservists, the three sent a clear message that they care more about being embraced by the media than about defending the honor of their soldiers and the reputation of the country. All of this returns us to Ya'alon's observation that before we try to find solutions to our problems, we first must understand what they are. As long as we continue to base our national debates and policies on enemy propaganda, it should surprise no one that Israel finds itself in its current dire predicament. If we are serious about solving our problems, we must liberate ourselves from hostile forces that distort our national conversation with the help of their Israeli media buddies. Yuval Zaliouk writes the Truth Provider columns. To subscribe, send an email to ynz@netvision.net.il |
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TENET: ROSS RESPONSIBLE FOR POLLARD'S CONTINUED IMPRISONMENT
Posted by Justice For Jonathan Pollard, May 12, 2007. |
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This was written by Dr. Judith Apter Klinghoffer, who is an affiliate professor at Haifa University, Member of the International Advisory Board for Academic Freedom of Bar-Ilan University and was the 1996 Fulbright professor at Aarhus, Denmark. This article can be read online at politicalmavens.com/index.php/2007/05/05/tenet-ross |
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If Tenet is telling the truth in "At the Center of the Storm" Jonathan Pollard is not sitting in jail because the American intelligence community believes that he still poses a danger to American interests but because Dennis Ross wanted to keep him as a trump card to be used during the final Israeli Palestinian negotiations and George Tenet worried that his underlings would be unhappy with him. Pollard's life sentence was the most severe prison term ever given for spying for an ally. Moreover, as Alan Dershowitz repeatedly pointed out, Pollard's sentence was far greater than the average term imposed for spying for the Soviet Union and other enemies of the United States. Some justify the discrepancy by claiming that Pollard also spied for others and that his information he provided Israel reached America's enemies causing the country major harm. Former CIA director, James Woolsey, said it was not true that the information given to Pollard was leaked to other countries and Tenet does not make either claim. He only writes: Many people in the intelligence community believed that Pollard hadn't been motivated by love of Israel alone. There are indications that he offered to spy for other countries. I suspect that the reason Pollard was not released was also because Democratic Clinton, Albright and Ross were determined not to give Likud (read "Republican") and Bibi a political victory. After all, James Carville, Clinton's campaign manager, was the man who helped Labor (read "Democratic") candidate Ehud Barak defeat Bibi in the following elections. Israelis understood as much at the time, but so no reason not to please, their friend, Clinton. Retelling the incident at this point may also serve to undermine Bibi yet again. See, it says, his critics were right. Bibi was a lousy Poker player. Had he stuck to his guns, Pollard would have been released. But wouldn't Tenet have resigned? Not by the hair of your chinny chin chin. Yes, he told Clinton he would because that was what Albright hinted she wanted him to do. Clinton needed a valid excuse to break his promise to Bibi and his CIA director's threat to resign (with the implication that freeing Pollard would damage US national security) was an excellent one. How do we know Tenet was wavering? Well, he reports that everybody was strengthening his hand. First he told Stan Moskowitz, one of Albright's men and when did nothing to stop him, he told his wife. She, too, failed him. Instead of trying to talk him out of it, she said, "Stick to your guns." Probably informed by Moskowitz and disappointed by Tenet's failure to follow through with Clinton, Madeleine Albright ambushed him. Tenet writes: About midnight that Thursday, Madaleine came up to me and said: "If you're going to say anything to the president about Pollard, now is the time to say it.""Why?" I asked, but she just repeated herself. "If you've got something to say, say it now." Madeleine was absolutely critical here: ..." Critical, indeed, without her encouragement, he probably would not have gone even as far as make the threat. She forced his hand and he saw Clinton. He did and afterwards, "fair" Dennis had to calm Tenet's nerves: "Don't worry," Dennis had to tell him, "In the end we will get the deal." Meaning, I believe, that the President will not blame him for scuttling the deal and nor will he have to resign. And just to set the record straight. Bibi did not lose the Poker game to Tenet. He lost it to Dennis Ross. For Clinton did not back down because of Tenet. He knew him too well. When Bibi insisted, Clinton was still inclined to fulfill his promise. Only Ross stopped him: Tenet writes: According to Dennis, he asked the president if he had promised Pollard to the Israelis. Clinton said no, but reading between the lines, Dennis believes that the president had all but walked up to that point. Ross apparently knew just how truthful Clinton is. (No, I did not make a promise to that man!) Not that it stopped him from telling Clinton to ignore his commitment to Bibi. Making use of his best bureaucratic language he told Clinton to ignore his promise: "You don't have a choice. ... If you promised Bibi you would release Pollard, then you have to release him. But this agreement is too good for Bibi to give up. Hang tough and we will get a deal." Yes, you could count on Bibi to put the good of his country ahead of domestic politics. So, Ross won his bet and, I am sure accolades from his bosses while Pollard is still languishing in prison 11 years hence. I cannot but wonder does being responsible for keeping a hostage this long keeps Ross (and Albright for that matter) up nights? For his soul's sake, I hope it does. See Also: The Wye Double-Cross Page http://www.jonathanpollard.org/wye.htm Tenet accused of lying in his memoirs -- by Aaron
Klein -- Worldnetdaily.com
Excerpts from "The Missing Peace" by Dennis Ross
Contact Justice for Jonathan Pollard at justice4jp@gmail.com |
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NOW MUSLIMS GET THEIR OWN LAWS IN BRITAIN
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 11, 2007. |
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This was written by Paul Jeeves and it appeared in Sunday Express UK
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MUSLIM radicals have established their own draconian court systems in Britain. Controversial Sharia courts have been set up in major towns and cities to impose Islamic law and enable Muslims to shun the legitimate British legal system. Last night religious leaders and politicians expressed outrage that Sharia law is gaining an increasing foothold in our society. Critics insisted that the GovernÂment is allowing a two-tier legal system to flourish in the name of political correctness and that the authority of UK justice is being undermined. The Daily Express can reveal that one of the controversial courts has been set up in the home town of the 7/7 London bombings ringleader. Mohammed Siddique Khan was responsible for the Edgware Road Circle Line explosion which killed six people and injured 120. Our investigation has found that the Sharia court system has been set up in the heart of Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, and that it is a model for others across the country which are operating outside the British legal process. The Dewsbury court is called the Sharee Council -- another term for Sharia -- and operates as a Muslim judiciary making decisions by which attendees must abide. In many countries, hard-line interpretations of the Islamic law allow people to be stoned to death, beheaded or have their limbs amputated. Non-Muslims are excluded from the secretive court which is registered as a charity to receive British tax benefits. Although the court has no official legal standing, scales of justice adorn a sign outside a former pub building which has been converted by the Islamic Institute of Great Britain. Last night the Sharia courts were blasted by both Christian and Muslim groups for their non-democratic attempts to establish their legal system. Mark Wallace, campaign manÂager of the Freedom AssoÂciation said: "British society must be one of free speech, free personal choice, democratic freedom and fairness. "If individual Muslims wish to inform their decisions by the teachings of Sharia, that is fine, but they must do it within the structures of British law and they must understand that sharia will never be acceptable as the legal system of the UK." His views were echoed by the Muslim Council of Britain, whose spokesman Inayat Bunglawala said: "We believe one legal code should apply for all citizens of the UK. There is no place for multiple legal systems for people of different religious or ethnic backgrounds." Dewsbury councillor Imtiaz Ameen, a Muslim, said: "Some people advocate total Sharia law but you cannot have it being the case in any country that there is one law for one and one law for another." Critics say the Government has not done enough to stop radical Muslim groups establishing their brand of law. Liberal thinkers in the GovÂernment claim that the law enables full-face veil-wearing Muslim women who are afraid of British courts to gain justice the "traditional way". But one insider told the Daily Express that the Sharia court, which is run from the backroom of a Madrasa -- an Islamic education centre -- in Dewsbury is just one of "dozens" operating in Asian communities. And a leading Muslim commentator claimed similar courts exist in every major city across Britain. The Madrasa -- which is a former pub situated less than a mile from the one-time home of London bombing mastermind Khan -- sits as a court every other weekend and hears up to 10 cases a day. Four Muslim scholars, who have spent their life studying and preaching the Koran, sit in judgment on an array of cases alongside a Muslim solicitor whose role is to advise on the implications of their rulings in British law. The operation is headed by prominent scholar Sheikh Yaqub Munshi. Accounts for the Dewsbury court's parent company the Islamic Research Institute of Great Britain, show that it was registered in Dewsbury as a charity in 1996 with the ethos of promoting the advancement of Islamic religion and education in the United Kingdom. Charitable status allows the organisation to claim tax relief and apply for government grants and trustee funding. Between April 1999 and April 2004 its gross annual turnover rocketed from £2,500 to above £177,000. At the end of the last financial year it recorded total funds of £255,000 but it is not known if or how it charges for use of the service. At the moment, the leaders insist they only deal with civil matters such as Muslim divorces, wedding dowries and asset sharing. But the secretive Muslim-only nature of the dealings will provoke fears that radical Sharia law could be allowed to spread across the Muslim population. The source said: "These courts take the law into their own hands and dish out punishment for bad behaviour. "I have not heard of physical punishments being used but those in the wrong are often ordered to pay compensation. Many who have no respect for British law are the most stringent observers of Sharia law." Sheikh Yaqub admitted that inÂtroducing Sharia law into the UK has been his goal since moving to Britain from PakiÂstan in the 1960s. But he insisted its main aim is to help repressed women who are trapped in bad or violent marriages and who dare not use British law. He said: "Ever since I arrived here in the 1960s there has been a case of women being forced to get married, others forced to get married, but unhappy afterwards. Until now there was no organisation which could Islamically solve their problems." Sharia is derived from the Arabic translation Sariah and outlines Islamic law according to the Koran. The term means "way" or "path" and gives the Islamic framework within which people must regulate their lives according to the Muslim faith. After the Sharia court has ruled in judgment, solicitors process matters officially through UK courts on their clients' behalf. Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, said: "Sharia courts now operate in most larger cities, with different sectarian and ethnic groups operating their own courts that cater to their specific needs according to their tradition." Philip Davies, the Tory MP for Shipley, said: "I am abÂsolutely appalled and find the prospect of such courts totally terrifying. Places like this should be closed down or else everybody will want to establish their own courts. "How many more places like this are there in the UK? Who knows where it could all end? It simply cannot be tolerated."
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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ALEX GROBMAN'S NATIONS UNITED
Posted by New Leaf Press, May 11, 2007. |
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"Nations United: How the United Nations Undermines Israel and the West (Hardcover)"
Editorial Review Grobman's work is both invaluable and definitive. His excellent research, clear writing style, and use of photos make the work easy to follow. His argument is balanced and therefore forceful. The United Nations is the largest Naked Emperor of our time. It is a union of dictatorships against democracies, an institution in which mediocrity and bureaucracy triumph over genius and creativity, and where issues are not diplomatically resolved but rather fomented and allowed to fester. I recognize Grobman's United Nations because once I worked there. Human rights violations of every kind are allowed to flourish under its aegis, both at Turtle Bay and in the world at large. The UN has proved ineffective in every single area including that of genocide and preventable disease save one. Its single (diabolical) accomplishment has been in legalizing and internationalizing Jew hatred. Grobman makes this very clear. This work is an essential weapon in the cultural war against propaganda and Big Lies that currently dominate university life in the West. Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D. Author, The New Anti-Semitism and The Death of Feminism -- Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D. Review "This is the most comprehensive and informative assessment of Zionism=Racism I have seen. May it enlighten a naive and insufficiently Jewishly educated student constituency." Shoshana Cardin, Former President Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Former President of JTA and Former Vice Chairman of United Jewish Communities and United Jewish Appeal. "Dr. Alex Grobman's book, Nations United, presents historical and intellectual analyses of a pivotal moment in Jewish, Israeli, and world history as impacted by the United Nations. We learn why the ideals of Zionism are now interpreted as racism throughout much of the world. Jews and Christians, students and scholars, thinking people of all ethnic groups, religions and moral perspectives will now understand how pure ideals can be made derogatory. This is a book that you will want to read!" Marlene Post, President, Hadassah International; Chair, birthright Israel North America; Past National President, Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America -- Marlene Post, President, Hadassah International |
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APPEAL FROM AN ISRAELI EMERGENCY RESPONSE TEAM
Posted by Voice of Judea, May 11, 2007. |
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Hi my name is Shaul Levine, I have been a member of the Kfar Tapuach Rescue Team for about three years now.The rescue team have been called out countless times in the past from every thing from car accidents and road-side ambushes to Terrorist attacks. A couple of months ago we were called out to a car accident near Tzomet Eli (Eli junction} when we arrived we discovered that there were two cars involved a mini van and a small red compact. Most of the people in the mini van escaped without injury, on the other hand, the two in the red compact were seriously injured. The rescue truck from the neighboring city of Ariel took 45
minutes to arrive because it was involved in another accident rescue
on the other side of the Shomron {Samaria}.In the end, because it took
more the 55 minutes to extricate them, the two victims died of there
wounds. I can't begin to tell you how the others and I on the rescue
team felt knowing that if we just had the necessary tool we may have
been able to save them. Since then we have with G"D's help obtained
some lite rescue tools like the 18v cordless dewalt sawzall, But it's
still not enough. We must be prepared with heavier tools Like the BCT
3120 SCRT Combination Tool which is a battery operated "Jaws of Life",
and sold by Dival safety Equiptment in New York their contact details
are located at this link
Thanking you from all of us on The Kfar Tapuach Team. Anyone interested in purchasing the said tool can email back to mishallyisrael@yahoo.com (mailto:mishallyisrael@yahoo.com) and i will instruct you where to send the tool to. Contact Voice of Judea by email at mishal@mishal.org |
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PLEASE READ AND DISTRIBUTE FAR AND WIDE! MITZVA -- IRAN HOLOCAUST CONTEST!
Posted by Boris Celser, May 11, 2007. |
This email was sent by Dave Alpern who wrote:
"We simply MUST wake up to the reality of the radical Islamic threat to the Judeo-Christian West and its way of life. Please forward this e-mail to everyone who cares. Thanks!" The message below was written by Joel Leyden. Contact him at israelprpros@yahoo.com |
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Just hours after Iran announced that they were going to mock the Holocaust by creating an international Holocaust Cartoon Contest, the Israel News Agency went to work to bury their results on the Net. Within days, anyone searching for the Iran Holocaust Contest found an Israeli site coming up # 1, not an Iranian! We took their cartoons and inserted the facts of the Holocaust inside them. Since then, the Iranians have learned something about Internet marketing -- SEO -- search engine optimization. Today they are now #1 when searching for their barbaric and cruel cartoons. The INA is again responding. We are again optimizing our Israeli page to outshine the one coming from Iran. But we need your help! Please click on this page: Forward this page to every Israeli, every Jew, every Christian person and organization you can think of. If you do this -- then Israel, not Iran will place the Holocaust in its proper and factual prospective. In the memory of the 6 million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust, Joel Leyden
Boris Celser lives in Canada. Contact him at celser@telusplanet.net |
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RADICAL MUSLIM PARAMILITARY COMPOUND FLOURISHES IN UPPER NEW YORK STATE
Posted by Michael Travis, May 11, 2007. |
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This was written by Paul. L. Williams, Ph.D., with the able assistance of Douglas Hagmann, Bill Krayer and Michael Travis. Dr. Dr. Williams is the author of The Al Qaeda Connection and forthcoming The Day Of Islam. Lee Boyland is the author of The Rings Of Allah. |
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Situated within a dense forest at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains on the outskirts of Hancock, New York, Islamberg is not an ideal place for a summer vacation unless, of course, you are an exponent of the Jihad or a fan of Osama bin Laden. The 70 acre complex is surrounded with "No trespassing" signs; the rocky terrain is infested with rattlesnakes; and the woods are home to black bears, coyotes, wolves, and a few bobcats. Muslim Lane Muslim Lane The entrance to the community is at the bottom of a very steep hill that is difficult to navigate even on a bright sunny day in May. The road, dubbed Muslim Lane, is unpaved and marred by deep crevices that have been created by torrential downpours. On a wintry day, few, save those with all terrain vehicles, could venture forth from the remote encampment. A sentry post has been established at the base of the hill. The sentry, at the time of this visit, is an African American dressed in Islamic garb -- a skull cap, a prayer shawl, and a loose fitting shalwat kameez. He instructs us to turn around and leave. "Our community is not open to visitors," he says. Behind the sentry and across a small stream stand dozens of inhabitants of the compound -- the men wearing skull caps and loose fitting tunics, the women in full burqa. They appear ready to deal with any unauthorized intruders. The hillside is blighted by rusty trailers that appear to be without power or running water and a number of outhouses. The scent of raw sewage is in the air. The place is even off limits to the local undertaker who says that he has delivered bodies to the complex but has never been granted entrance. "They come and take the bodies from my hearse. They won't allow me to get past the sentry post. They say that they want to prepare the bodies for burial. But I never get the bodies back. I don't know what's going on there but I don't think it's legal." On the other side of the hill where few dare to go is a tiny village replete with a make-shift learning center (dubbed the "International Quranic Open University"); a trailer converted into a Laundromat; a small, green community center; a small and rather squalid grocery store; a newly constructed majid; over forty clapboard homes; and scores of additional trailers. It is home to hundreds -- all in Islamic attire, and all African-Americans. Most drive late model SUVs with license plates from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The locals say that some work as tollbooth operators for the New York State Thruway, while others are employed at a credit card processing center that maintains confidential financial records. While buzzing with activity during the week, the place becomes a virtual hive on weekends. The guest includes arrivals from the inner cities of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and, occasionally, white-robed dignitaries in Ray-Bans from the Middle East. Venturing into the complex last summer, Douglas Hagmann, an intrepid investigator and director of the Northeast Intelligence Service, came upon a military training area at the eastern perimeter of the property. The area was equipped with ropes hanging from tall trees, wooden fences for scaling, a make-shift obstacle course, and a firing range. Hagmann said that the range appeared to have been in regular use. Islamberg is not as benign as a Buddhist monastery or a Carmelite convent. Nearly every weekend, neighbors hear sounds of gunfire. Some, including a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, have heard the bang of small explosives. None of the neighbors wished to be identified for fear of "retaliation." "We don't even dare to slow down when we drive by," one resident said. "They own the mountain and they know it and there is nothing we can do about it but move, and we can't even do that. Who wants to buy a property near that?" Islamberg's Grocery Store The complex serves to scare the bejeesus out of the local residents. "If you go there, you better wear body armor," a customer at the Circle E Diner in Hancock said. "They have armed guards and if they shoot you, nobody will find your body." At Cousins, a watering hole in nearby Deposit, a barfly, who didn't wish to be identified, said: "The place is dangerous. You can hear gunfire up there. I can't understand why the FBI won't shut it down." Islamberg is a branch of Muslims of the Americas Inc., a tax-exempt organization formed in 1980 by Pakistani cleric Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani, who refers to himself as "the sixth Sultan Ul Faqr," Gilani, has been directly linked by court documents to Jamaat ul-Fuqra or "community of the impoverished," an organization that seeks to "purify" Islam through violence. Though primarily based in Lahore, Pakistan, Jamaat ul-Fuqra has operational headquarters in New York and openly recruits through various social service organizations in the U.S., including the prison system. Members live in hamaats or compounds, such as Islamberg, where they agree to abide by the laws of Jamaat ul-Fuqra, which are considered to be above local, state and federal authority. Additional hamaats have been established in Hyattsville, Maryland; Red House, Virginia; Falls Church, Virginia; Macon, Georgia; York, South Carolina; Dover, Tennessee; Buena Vista, Colorado; Talihina, Oklahoma; Tulane Country, California; Commerce, California; and Onalaska, Washington. Others are being built, including an expansive facility in Sherman, Pennsylvania. Before becoming a citizen of Islamberg or any of the other Fuqra compounds, the recruits -- primarily inner city black men who became converts in prison -- are compelled to sign an oath that reads: "I shall always hear and obey, and whenever given the command, I shall readily fight for Allah's sake." In the past, thousands of members of the U.S. branches of Jamaat ul-Fuqra traveled to Pakistan for paramilitary training, but encampments, such as Islamberg, are now capable of providing book-camp training so raw recruits are no longer required to travel abroad amidst the increased scrutiny of post 9/11. Over the years, numerous members of Jamaat ul-Fuqra have been convicted in US courts of such crimes as conspiracy to commit murder, firebombing, gun smuggling, and workers' compensation fraud. Others remain leading suspects in criminal cases throughout the country, including ten unsolved assassinations and seventeen fire-bombings between 1979 and 1990. The criminal charges against the group and the criminal convictions are not things of the past. In 2001, a resident of a California compound was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting of a sheriff's deputy; another was charged with gun-smuggling' and twenty-four members of the Red House community were convicted of firearms violations. By 2004 federal investigators uncovered evidence that linked both the DC "sniper killer" John Allen Muhammed and "Shoe Bomber" Richard Reid to the group and reports surfaced that Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded in the process of attempting to obtain an interview with Sheikh Gilani in Pakistan. Even though Jamaat ul-Fuqra has been involved in terror attacks and
sundry criminal activities, recruited thousands of members from
federal and state penal systems, and appears to be operating
paramilitary facilities for militant Muslims, it remains to be placed
on the official US Terror Watch List. On the contrary, it continues to
operate, flourish, and expand as a legitimate nonprofit,
tax-deductible charity.
Contact Michael Travis at michaelmgr@gmail.com
Dr. Williams charged that the nuclear facilities at McMaster U.
weren't safe. Moreover, the University was using public funds to
provide cover for Al Qaeda operatives. Public hearings are soon to be conducted.
Support Paul Williams in his battle against terror and injustice
......you may be next!
http://www.paulwilliamsdefensefund.com
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POLICE RENEW FOCUS ON MUSLIM CABBIES
Posted by Michael Travis, May 11, 2007. |
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This was a news item in today's World Net Daily
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Authorities worry about 'taxi jihadists' in cities With the arrest of a Philadelphia taxi cab driver in the Fort Dix terror plot, authorities are paying closer attention to Muslim cabbies, many of whom are militant believers, WND has learned. Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, a U.S. citizen born in Jordan, was charged earlier this week with conspiring to kill at least 100 soldiers on U.S. soil. The FBI says the 22-year-old drove a cab in Philadelphia. "My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of soldiers," said Shnewer, the alleged mastermind of the terror plot. Muslims account for the majority of cab drivers in many major U.S. cities -- including the nation's capital. And a number of them have ties to terrorism, federal and local authorities say. After 9/11, the U.S. Park Police, which enforces laws on federal roads leading into such places as CIA headquarters, ran a search of Islamic terror suspects against a database of traffic stops in the Washington, D.C., area going back decades. "It came back with a nearly 25 percent hit rate," a U.S. Park Police official said. "Many of them were cab drivers." The official, a veteran police detective who wished to go unidentified, says roughly 80 percent of cab drivers in the Washington area practice the Islamic faith. Their numbers concern police, who believe they make up part of the terror support network in America. "If they're not suspects themselves, they pick up suspects at airports and take them to safehouses here," he told WND. "It's a jihadi network." The federal Park Police work with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies assigned to the National Counter Terrorism Center, or NCTC, headquartered in McLean, Va., a Washington suburb. The FBI is now closely monitoring the activities of taxi drivers in the area, bureau sources confirm. A great many of them worship at the large Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., another D.C. suburb. On Fridays, FBI case agents say they typically observe 50 or more cabs and limos parked among other cars in the parking lots used by the radical mosque, which has included several Hamas and al-Qaida terrorists among its members. Some of the 9/11 hijackers also attended services at Dar al-Hijrah, while receiving assistance obtaining housing and IDs from mosque members and officials, some of whom are admitted members of the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood. In between fares, many taxi drivers congregate at the Starbucks located down the road in a shopping center in Baileys Crossroads, which has the highest concentration of Muslims of any area outside Dearborn, Mich. The shopping center is within a few miles of the Pentagon, and right across the street from two luxury apartment high-rises that erupted into cheers when the World Trade Center fell on 9/11. Law enforcement has dubbed the Skyline Towers the "Taliban Towers" after conducting several counterterrorism investigations involving tenants. Washington is not alone. Other major cities are dealing with radical Muslim taxi drivers. 9/11 'Party Platters' Miami-Dade County Police Department officials tell WND that after 9/11 a group of Muslim cab drivers at Miami International Airport held a celebration on a carpeted area of the concourse reserved for Islamic prayer. Some were overheard allegedly saying, "Finally, the Great Satan got what it deserved." "They brought out party platters," a Miami-Dade police detective said. "We tried to ID the taxi drivers who celebrated and give their names to the FBI." New York also has had its share of "taxi jihadists," as law enforcement calls them. Take Mahmud "The Red" Abouhalima, a former Manhattan cabbie. He helped plant the explosives-packed van that the terrorists used to try to blow up the World Trade Center in the first attack on the towers in 1993. Those who knew him say he transformed his cab into a mobile Islamic institute, filled with copies of the Quran, jihadi books and tapes of sermons recorded in Arabic. Like the Jersey jihadists accused of targeting Fort Dix, Abouhalima lived in New Jersey, which has a large Muslim population. Police believe he also was the intended getaway cab driver in the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane. More recently, in Nashville, a Muslim cab driver for United Cab this year was charged with assault and attempted homicide. Ibrahim Ahmed allegedly tried to run down two Vanderbilt University students. One was seriously injured. Surprisingly, the 9/11 attacks emboldened many Islamic taxi drivers. In Minneapolis, for instance, they've asserted the tenets of their faith, refusing airport passengers carrying duty-free wine and even blind riders accompanied by seeing-eye dogs. Alcohol is forbidden in Islam, and dogs are considered unclean. About three of every four cabbies at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport practice Islam. Even after authorities last month agreed to slap fines on them for refusing "infidel" fares, some refuse to bend. "I am Muslim. I'm not going to carry alcohol," insisted Abdi Mohamed, a driver for Bloomington Cab. Islamic Foot-Baths Muslim taxi drivers also have demanded special accommodations at airports. In Kansas City, for one, airport authorities recently built several foot-baths in a restroom for Muslim drivers after they requested them to help them prepare for Islamic prayer, as WND first reported. Kansas City International Airport police say about 70 percent of the taxi drivers there are Muslim. A great many taxi drivers are immigrants from the Mideast or Pakistan. Last November, Homeland Security agents rounded up dozens of Pakistani immigrants across the East Coast working illegally as cabbies. Pakistan is an al-Qaida hotbed. Before last year's congressional election, a U.S. lawmaker was widely criticized for suggesting Muslim cabbies were a terrorist threat. Republican Sen. Conrad Burns said the U.S. is up against a faceless enemy of terrorists who "drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night." The longtime senator lost his seat to Democrat Jon Tester. Contact Michael Travis at michaelmgr@gmail.com |
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HOPE FOR A MUSLIM DEMOCRACY
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 11, 2007. |
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COUNTER-TERRORISM SUCCEEDING IN S.E. ASIA Five years ago, the governments of Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand would not admit being the object of jihad, despite the increasing number and boldness of terrorist attacks. That changed with new elected leadership. The first three countries have destroyed most of the jihadist leadership and have the followers on the run. The terrorists went too far. They made whole countries feel brutally and wantonly attacked, and spoiled their tourist industries. This gave Indonesia the opportunity to show how bad terrorism is. It shows videos of suicide bombings and enrolls moderate clerics and former terrorists to denounce terrorism as non-Islamic. Avoiding inflammatory rhetoric, the US stays in the background. The fighting largely is a local effort. Hence the natives have no foreign intrusion to resent. The US provides special equipment and advice and immediately trained special forces to stand on their own, rather than relying upon regular military forces that the terrorists bribe. These special forces investigate rather than torture, to gain information. The public is with them. The governments tightened controls against money laundering. They have learned to share intelligence. Some of them also have instituted democratic reforms. The US has invested in local infrastructure and economic development, to good effect. The US helps settle local conflicts that otherwise might fuel Islamism. The tsunami flushed out an Indonesian terrorist organization, which then made peace with the government. The US swiftly provided disaster assistance, which impressed Indonesians, now coming to favor the US. The US may be able to apply these means elsewhere (Joshua Kurlantzick, Commentary, 5/2007, p.35). This gives hope for democracy in a country of Muslims, as hope is waning in Turkey ABBAS FORCES FAIL TO GUARD SINAI BORDER Freshly armed and trained by the US, Abbas' police at the border look the other way, rather than arrest Fatah men there (IMRA, 4/30). That US policy failed. SYRIA'S PREPARATION Syria has built 30 underground silos so it can fire hundreds of more accurate, more powerful, and more elusive missiles at Israel before the Israeli air force could destroy them, as it might with mobile launchers (IMRA, 4/30). 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@verizon.net |
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TWO MOTHERS, ONE BATTLE
Posted by Daily Alert, May 11, 2007. |
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This was written by Diana Bletter, who is a writer based in Israel.
It appeared in the International Herald Tribune
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SHAVEI ZION, Israel: The other day, two mothers who had never met before stood on the Israeli side of the border that separates Israel from Lebanon. Harriet and I were looking at a Lebanese village where our two sons fought during last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah. My son, Shlomie, and Harriet's son, Michael, were in the same paratrooper unit of the Israeli Army. During combat, Michael was hit by sniper fire. Shlomie, a medic, also received shrapnel wounds. He did everything he could to save Michael -- but Harriet's son died in my son's arms. I had never met Harriet until that day. After the war ended on August 14, I wrote a letter of condolence to her in Pennsylvania from my village in Israel's Western Galilee. We began to correspond with each other and then, during a recent trip to Israel, she came to meet me. We knew it was important for us to drive to the northern border, about a half-hour from my house. There we would be as close as we could get to the village where our sons -- American-born Jews who had enlisted in the Israeli Army -- had fought their fateful battle. It was a bright, clear day. Except for an occasional house with shattered windows, you could not tell that a war had taken place just months before. Thousands of Hezbollah-fired Katyusha rockets had fallen around the region, yet everything was tranquil now. The sun was shining; birds sang and the air was filled with the aroma of blossoming orange trees. Along the border, the road dipped through the green hills. We turned around a sharp bend and there, in the distance, was Aita al-Shaab, the Lebanese village where the battle had taken place. It sat on a hilltop, beyond a rolling valley. It looked so beautiful and so, well, peaceful. Harriet got out of the car and took some photographs. Then she began to cry. I thought of the night that my son had called to say he was about to leave for the war. After he said goodbye, I fell down on my knees by his bed and prayed. At the very same time, Harriet must have also been praying for her son. When two mothers pray for their soldier sons during a war, does one mother's prayer cancel out the other's? And why does one son return and one son never comes back? An Israeli Army jeep approached and a soldier told us we had to move on. He explained that if we stopped for too long, we could be targets for Hezbollah soldiers who might have returned to their positions just beyond the border. I said we needed a few more moments and we'd be on our way. I then remembered Shlomie recounting that right before going into battle, he asked to borrow Michael's knitted green kipah, his skullcap, to say the holiest Jewish prayer, "Shma Israel." When Shlomie finished, Michael asked, "Are you ready now?" "Yeah," he said. "I'm ready." I looked at Harriet standing next to me. I wanted to ask, "Are you ready now?" but I knew that she would never be ready. No mother can ready herself for the loss of her child. We gazed at the village one last time and then turned to the car. As we continued along the road, I wondered how many mothers on how many roads around the world have to take a journey like ours. 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 |
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SHIMON PERES'S STATEMENT
Posted by Zeev Shemer, May 11, 2007. |
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(Reuters) Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres said on Friday, that Israel is prepared to enter "serious talks" with a group of Arab League states over their land-for-peace deal. I guess we should continue implementing land-for-peace deals. Since Israel gave up Jericho and Gaza it has been dandy!!! Our only hope is that since Peres is 83, the powers below will recall his evil spirit back to turn off any possible sparks of common sense and light, that not-so-evil souls have somehow accidentally created. Or it could be, that Sadam, Titus and Adolf are waiting for their poker partner. Either way, since we cannot count on the Israeli public to put a stop to these anti-Zionist leftist morrons, nature might throw us a rope. Don't count on HaShem... We need to do our bit if we expect the Creator to give us a hand, and looking out my Naharia window, I can tell you that Israelis have long given up on the government and on themselves. Shabat Shalom
Contact Zeev Shemer at zeev.shemer@yahoo.com |
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NEXT STOP: TEHERAN
Posted by Fern Sidman, May 11, 2007. |
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In a radical departure from US foreign policy, it has been reported
that US Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice held high-level meetings
with Syrian Foreign Minister, Walid Muallem during a regional
conference in Sharm e-Sheikh. According to a report in The Jerusalem
Post, (05/03/07) these talks marked the first time in years that the
US conducted any direct negotiations with Syria.
The report stated, "The Bush administration has shunned Syria, accusing it of fueling tensions in Iraq and Lebanon. It sharply criticized a visit to Damascus last month by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But the White House has been under pressure to open dialogue with Syria and Iran." A chief demand of the US is that Syria takes action to stem the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, which has been exacerbating the tensions and factional fighting there. An unnamed Israeli official admitted, "that the meeting did represent a change in US policy, which for the last few years had been to isolate Damascus. The official said Israel was "not taken by surprise" by the meeting. "They tried to ostracize Damascus, and that didn't work," the official said. The report also stated that, "the Iraqi government is pressing for Rice and Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to hold talks during the gathering, saying Washington's conflict with Teheran is only fueling the instability in Iraq. Both the US and Iran had also spoken favorably of a possible meeting, but the chances for that remained unclear, and neither side had commented publicly on any immediate arrangements." It is clear that the Bush administration is being pushed against the wall. So much for the bombastic rhetoric that once characterized President Bush's stance on terrorism. So much for the promise to isolate those who harbor and feed terrorists and aid and abet them in any fashion. With President Bush's popularity at an all time low and criticism steadily mounting on his handling of the war in Iraq, the administration in Washington is now chartering a course of inclusion of states that sponsor terror against both the United States and Israel. The movement in the United States calling for President Bush's impeachment is growing by leaps and bounds. The failure of the Bush administration to create a plan of departure for US troops in Iraq is serving as fodder to the bevy of Democratic candidates in this high-pressure election year. President Bush is under pressure by his own party to ensure victory in Iraq, thereby giving a Republican candidate a possible chance of being elected. If negotiations with Syria, a chief sponsor of Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists can be a viable US foreign policy option, it is clear that direct talks with Iran are sure to follow. Despite US condemnations of Iran's uranium enrichment program and Iran's reluctance to cease the expansion of it's nuclear arsenal, the United States is now sending signals in Teheran's directions that negotiations can become a reality. Let us not forget the vow of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to wipe Israel off the map and his bellicose rhetoric towards the US. Let's not forget that Iran is the breeding ground for terrorists of all stripes and is the hotbed of Islamic extremism. The Jewish people and the nation of Israel stand alone. Now that the US is shifting positions on the war on terror, we can no longer hold on to the illusion that the US will stand in solidarity with Israel in the next war against Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. We can no longer delude ourselves in believing that the US will aggressively confront Iranian nuclear threats against Israel. Hatred of Jews and Israel is escalating dramatically and the world remains silent. Liberal and leftist Jews rail against the Christian Zionist movement in the United States and accuse them of a nefarious agenda, while these organizations have displayed unanimous support for Israel and for Torah institutions. There's nothing like alienating allies at a juncture in history when authentic allies are truly scarce. It is time to dispense with the belief that we can "raise our eyes unto Washington and from Congress shall come forth our salvation". Rather, it is time to hearken to the voice of the G-d of Israel, to return to His ways and walk in His commandments. We must recognize the "wake up calls" that we see and hear everyday. In these days before the holiday of Shavuos, we must storm the gates of Heaven with our heartfelt prayers and we must reconcile to cleave to our Holy Torah, to listen to its prophecies and to embrace its timeless teachings. We must remember that we are never alone. Hashem will be with us, if we only allow Him in our hearts and souls. Contact Fern Sidman at AriellaH@aol.com |
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ISRAEL MUST SHAKE ITS DELUSION OF PEACE
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 10, 2007. |
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First Reality Check: The Arabs and Muslims will never stop wishing for the death of Israel. Nor will they ever stop conspiring to kill Israel or ever stop doing what they can to hurt Israel at home and abroad. Most of the world -- civilized or not -- would like to see Israel dead. So for Israelis to think otherwise is delusional If Israelis are not prepared to live their entire existence -- forever -- prepared for war, and be willing to fight whenever and wherever the need arises, they might as well start packing-up and begin looking for a new place to call home. Because that's the way it is. Second Reality Check: Since Israelis elected a leader who isn't prepared to fight to the death for Israel's right to survive in safety from the outside world...since Israelis elected a leader who wants peace at any cost...since Israelis elected a leader who lets politics govern Israel's need for security...in a true democracy the fault always belongs with the people, therefore, in the final analysis and what the Winograd will not report, the real guilty party to this mess are the millions of Israelis who elected these incompetents to protect Israel. Therefore, the big question that really needs to be answered is: What will the Israeli people do about all of this? This was written by Howard Galganov, who manages the Promar Media
Group, an advertising agency that specializes in the hospitality
industry. He was the host of a popular Montreal radio talk show and a
cofounder of the Quebec Political Action Committee (QPAC) that
promoted equal citizenship for Quebec's minorities.
It appeared in Muslim World Today
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After reading the preliminary Winograd report on Israel's failed war with Lebanon (Hezbollah), I've come to the conclusion that the report wasn't worth all that much. There are very few Israelis who need to read Winograd to know that Israel lost big against what could best be described as a well organized (and limited in scope) terrorist army. In essence, because of Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and the incompetents he surrounded himself with (and still does), Israel lost on the battlefield, in the public relations war, in terms of global respect, and most important of all: its self-confidence. They saw it as Israelis by the tens of thousands cowered in basement bomb shelters, or ran from their homes to get away from an Arab army of thugs. Ehud Olmert along with his Cabinet shamed Israel and Jews all over the world. But it didn't start with him or them. It started with Clinton, Rabin, Peres and Barak. Rabin and Peres opened the door to Arafat at the insistence of Bill Clinton. And when Barak became Prime Minister, he ordered Israel's troops out of Southern Lebanon in a manner that gave the "legitimate" impression that the retreating Israelis were a defeated army. And from the moment Clinton, Rabin and Peres resurrected Arafat, successive Israeli governments looked for diplomatic solutions with the Arabs, where there were none. Even Israel's so-called "peace-partners" Jordan and Egypt have no love for Israel, and would celebrate by dancing in the streets if Israel disappeared. Do Israelis or any thinking Jews and well informed friends of Jews really need Winograd to tell them this? Where Israel really screwed-up in their war against Lebanon, is when Israel didn't fight to win; and that they didn't include Syria in the fight. Olmert is famous for saying that Israelis are tired of war. Are Israelis also tired of living? If Israelis are not prepared to live their entire existence (forever) prepared for war, and be willing to fight whenever and wherever the need arises, they might as well start packing-up and begin looking for a new place to call home. Because that's the way it is. The Arabs and Muslims will never stop wishing for the death of Israel. Nor will they ever stop conspiring to kill Israel. Nor will they ever stop doing what they can to hurt Israel at home and abroad. And they're not alone. Most of the world-civilized or not-would like to see Israel dead. And for Israelis to think otherwise is delusional. There is no question in my mind that Olmert and much of the people who surround him must go, and will go much sooner rather than later. And for Israel's sake, they would do well to have a general election with which to completely clear the air. But I doubt that will happen anytime soon. As for the phony peace talks with the Palestinians: bring them to an end immediately. Israel has far more important issues to deal with than screwing around with Palestinian garbage negotiations. As for Hamas attacks on Israel proper, Israel must stop playing games and kick the holy crap out of Hamas. As for Hezbollah, Israel would do very well to do the same with them. Israeli troops must cross into Lebanon in force and beat Hezbollah into a different time zone. And if Syria becomes involved, even in a small way; Israel must take the fight to Syria-all the way to Damascus. The Arab world must understand that Israel is not their punching bag; that there are severe consequences to be paid for harming Israel. And that Israel will no longer fight for its very survival with one hand tied behind its back, as it has being doing since the horrific Oslo Accord. Israel's best and only road to real security, is a policy of zero tolerance to attacks on its territory and people, backed up by a fearsome military no one wants to take on under any circumstances. And to the Israelis for what it's worth:
In a true democracy, fault always belongs with the people. Therefore, the big question that really needs to be answered is: What will the Israeli people do about all of this? Their answer, and only their answer, will decide the future of Israel. Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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DECADE OF FAILURE
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 10, 2007. |
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For years I have been reading U.S. Defense News which covers the military of most of the world's nations. The author of the following analysis, Barbara Opall-Rome, who reports about Israel's military, has been one of the most penetrating and articulate journalists of Defense News. The following is a piece that should be re-published in the Hebrew Press, IF they have the nerve to tell the truth. The people of Israel have the right to drive these selfish, corrupt, so-called leaders out of their offices of power and out of the country for what they have done. Barbara Opall-Rome is senior correspondent in Israel for Defense News. |
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May 9, 2007 -- ANGRY and embittered by their government's botched military confrontation with Hezbollah, Israelis are focused on settling accounts with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his hapless defense minister, Amir Peretz. Great -- but civic rage also should target the deep-rooted flaws that compel commissions of inquiry every time Israel goes to war. There is no excuse for the blunders of Olmert and his team, laid bare by retired Supreme Court Justice Eliyahu Winograd and others in their interim report on the latest Lebanon War. They use variations on the word "failure" 167 times to characterize the 33-day war with Hezbollah. Olmert & Co. started off with all the advantages of moral high ground, military superiority and an intimate knowledge of the Lebanese theater. But they rushed into war with a half-baked military plan and strategic goals that the report calls "overly ambitious and not feasible." Olmert and Peretz bought the assurances of Chief of Staff Dan Halutz that airpower would deliver the goods. But Lt. Gen. Halutz's prescribed "two- to three-day" retaliatory operation ultimately evolved into the longest and most indecisive war in Israel's history. By day six of the war, it was clear (according to many who later testified before the Winograd Commision) that the Air Force had run out of meaningful targets. But Olmert and Peretz either didn't know this or chose to ignore the growing clamor within the Cabinet and the general staff for a call-up of the reserves. By the time these strategic neophytes got around to approving a widescale ground war, it was too late. They barely squeezed in two days of real, maneuvering warfare before they were forced to swallow a United Nations cease-fire that didn't even come close to meeting initial aims. According to latest Intel estimates, Hezbollah is rearming to its prewar levels, courtesy of Iran and Syria, with better, even more lethal weaponry. There's still no word on the two kidnapped soldiers, whose safe return was the pretext for embarking on the war in the first place. Last summer's misadventure seriously damaged a keystone of Israeli national-security strategy, deterrence: The Israel Defense Forces no longer seem unbeatable, especially to terrorist groups and so-called rogue states that have copied each page of the Hezbollah playbook. The first installment of Winograd's probe only covers the first six days of the war -- enough to damn Halutz (who eventually did the right thing and resigned), Peretz and Olmert. A second round of reckoning comes later this summer, when Winograd's full post-war probe is published. But Israel's problems won't be fixed simply by putting in new faces. The true fathers of the Lebanon fiasco include every leader of the past generation. Ironically, two of Israel's most respected warriors, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, are most to blame for creating the conditions that culminated in last summer's war. It's not for nothing that the Winograd panel began its probe from May 2000, with then-Prime Minister Barak's unilateral, overnight withdrawal from Lebanon and Hezbollah's provocative repositioning along Israel's northern border. Yes, Barak vowed to respond immediately and with force to all attempts to compromise Israeli sovereignty beyond that border. But when Hezbollah crossed that line to kidnap/murder three soldiers in October 2000, he fired off a few tank rounds and put up some choppers. As the Winograd report notes, Hezbollah grew stronger under Barak's policy of restraint and even more so under Prime Minister Sharon. After a March 2002 attack that killed six Israelis, Sharon gave strict orders not to respond in ways that could escalate into combat. Ditto for at least two other kidnapping attempts and dozens of cross-border shelling events under his watch. Sharon was too busy combating Palestinian terror to deal with another front in the north. Sharon confidants later said he couldn't stomach the thought of becoming re-embroiled in Lebanon, Israel's version of Vietnam. (As the defense minister in 1982, of course, he had initiated what would become Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon and the subsequent rise of Hezbollah.) And Sharon went on to preside over Israel's summer 2005 unilateral retreat from the Gaza Strip. Now it's only a short matter of time, says lawmaker Aryeh Eldad, one of Israel's more cerebral hard-liners, before the Israeli military is forced back into Gaza to quell the same threats that forced Israel back into Lebanon. "And when we go back in," he warns, "our soldiers will face a much more organized and better-equipped enemy. Iran and Syria exploited the vacuum we left by arming Hezbollah to the teeth, and the same is happening in Gaza right under our noses." Fortunately, the Winograd report offers some recipes for reforming the improvisational, expedient and often arbitrary manner in which strategic decisions are made and managed. For starters, Israel needs an empowered National Security Council to offset the government's undue reliance on the IDF. The Foreign Ministry must be more involved in assessing strategic scenarios. And clearly defined procedures must be in place for evaluating, determining and updating critical security issues. Incredibly, the Winograd Commission could not determine -- despite reams of documents and testimony from 74 key witnesses -- when the decision to go to war this summer was taken. Giora Eiland, who headed Israel's National Security Council under Sharon, sums up the true problem: "The process is unbelievably broken; if I wasn't a direct participant and witness to the way our nation's strategic destiny is determined, I wouldn't believe it myself." If the anger of the Israeli public turns onto the larger policy and procedural reasons for the Lebanon debacle, the grassroots groundswell could lead to meaningful change. But if the rage vents only on those sitting in the hot seat in the last war, it could easily usher in even worse alternatives. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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"IT'S BETTER TO BE HEROD'S PIG THAN HIS SON"
Posted by Rachel Kapen, May 10, 2007. |
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The discovery of Judean king Herod's tomb after decades of searching is no doubt a great discovery. For despite his known brutality, he murdered members of the Hasmonean family whom he perceived to be potential threat to his rule including his wife Mariamne as well as her two sons Alexander and Aristobulus and even his own flesh and blood, his son and potential heirAntipater. It is told that Augustus Caesar commented that it is better to be Herod's pig than his son alluding to the fact that Herod refrained from eating pig. King Herod died 5 days after his son's execution occurring in the year 4 b.c.e. Yet, in spite of all the cruelty associated with him this wasn't his entire legacy to the Jewish People. Because of his rebuilding of the Beit Hamikdash, the Temple, we now have the Kotel -- the most revered Western Wall, which is the Jewish People's most hallowed symbol. It is said of Herod's rebuilt temple that it was so beautiful that "He who has not seen the temple does not know what beauty is." Aside from the rebuilding the Beit Hamikdash and bequeathing Israel and the entirety of the Jewish people their most revered symbol nationally and religiously speaking, he should also be credited with the mount and fortress of Massada which he also built, no doubt fir his own self gratification, which became an icon of Jewish bravery. Also, the beautiful city of Caesaria is Herod's legacy, one of present day Israel's most important tourist attraction. It was reported that King Herod (Hordos in Hebrew) was so hated by the Judeans that the Judean community rejoiced in the day of his death. Now, 2,000 years hence, the discovery of his tomb is also a cause for celebration and not merely for its archeological and historical significance but also because it is a reminder, if one should be necessary, that there was an independent Judean or Jewish country in Palestine, the only independent entity in the area. Contact Rachel Kapen by email at skapen285466MI@comcast.net |
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BENCHMARKS
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 10, 2007. |
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May 9, 2007
I would like to focus today on a Jerusalem Post column by Evelyn Gordon, entitled, "Benchmarks for a bloodbath," because I consider it so important. Gordon says: "US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is not purposely trying to destroy all of Israel's hard-won security gains of the last five years. But if she were, she could hardly have improved on her new benchmark proposal. The proposal comprises two parallel sets of "benchmarks": steps (mainly Israeli) to increase Palestinian freedom of movement, and steps (mainly Palestinian) to combat Palestinian terror. However, it does not make either track conditional on the other. Thus should Israel accept the proposal, it would be pledging to fulfill its own side of the bargain regardless of whether the Palestinians honored theirs. And since increased freedom of movement for Palestinians includes increased freedom of movement for terrorists, that essentially means an Israeli pledge to facilitate terrorist operations even if the Palestinian Authority makes no compensatory effort to thwart such operations. The stuff of nightmares, from our "friends." Gordon suggests that Rice is willing to sacrifice Israeli lives to give the impression to "moderate" Arabs and Europeans -- whose support is being sought re: Iraq -- that progress is being made on this front. ~~~~~~~~~~ US Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams concurs with Gordon. At a closed door meeting with Jewish Republicans he confided that the Bush administration was active now in the Middle East, in order to pursue "process for the sake of process" and that this was being done to "assuage the Arabs and the Europeans, who haven't been happy with the United States [and are] happy to see that there's at least an attempt or energy being put into the peace process." Abrams pledged to guard against the State Department taking over American Middle East policy, and I'd love to know how he intends to do this. (The unspoken implication is that White House and State Department policy are not the same. This is hardly new.) When meeting participants expressed concern about Europe and the Arabs squeezing Israel into a corner, they were offered assurances about the US putting the brakes on. And after how much damage has already been done?. ~~~~~~~~~~ Oh joy. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is doing her diplomatic thing. She was in Cairo today, meeting with President Mubarak about the Arab League "peace initiative." They agreed that an Arab League delegation -- including the Jordanian and Egyptian foreign ministers -- would come to Israel within weeks to discuss this. Remember that the Arab League proposal, which insists upon return of "refugees" and our pullback to pre-'67 lines, was offered to us "take it or leave it." Jordan and Egypt, the only Arab states with full diplomatic ties, were assigned the task of convincing us. ~~~~~~~~~~ Syrian President Assad who alternately is said to be on the verge of war or on the verge of peace negotiations, made a statement to a newly formed Syrian parliament: "The Golan Heights region is not open to negotiation... "We are working toward a just and comprehensive peace, but Israel is incapable of conducting comprehensive and just negotiations because its government is too weak to take the necessary steps...Syria has not presented any preconditions for the peace process, but we do have demands. The land is a basic principle for us, and we will never relinquish it." Got all that? ~~~~~~~~~~ Security sources say that 15 tunnels between Gaza and Egypt in the Rafah area are currently active -- being used for smuggling of weapons, persons and drugs. Another 10 tunnels in the area are at the moment inactive. ~~~~~~~~~~ Three Kassams landed in Sderot today. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il
and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
"Benchmarks" was published in the Jerusalem Post
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CUTTING DOWN CHURCHILL TO SIZE
Posted by Daniel Mandel, May 10, 2007. |
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There have been recent efforts by pundits, foreign affairs analysts and historians to cut to consign to disrepute the ideas Winston Churchill personified or to cast him as an exponent of their opposite. Why these exertions? Let's examine what these revisionists say. Writing in the British Spectator in 2004, Michael Lind, an escapee from conservatism to the New America Foundation, used selective quotation and the ambiguity of terminology ("poison gas") from a 1919 Churchill document to paint him as an advocate of using weapons of mass destruction against "uncivilized tribes." The purpose of Lind's exercise was to prove that Churchill was an imperialist WMD-wielding warmonger and thus scarcely a rightful model and inspiration to devotees of destroying WMDs and constructing democracies. But this was nonsense. Consulting the full passage in that document shows the very opposite: Churchill explicitly supported the ban on such weapons while approving the use of lesser ones like tear gas. More recently, in September 2006, Graham Allison and Dimitri Simes, writing in the National Interest, urged greater indulgence of Russia's Vladimir Putin on the basis that Churchill would have had enough sense to form a strategic alliance with Russia in a time of major crisis like our own. In which way is America to do that? Conceding Putin's maleficent role in world affairs, Allison and Simes are "not suggesting that Russia be permitted to use force against its neighbors with impunity or try to recreate the Soviet Union." But they are suggesting that America was wrong for siding "with Russia's new neighbors in almost every single dispute they had with Moscow, treating Russian influence in the post-Soviet space as unacceptable neo-imperialism." Unfortunately, it is Russia that is intimidating its neighbors, not the reverse. As such, there is little scope to "side" with Russia without thereby permitting it to act with "impunity" against its neighbors. Allison and Simes are therefore saying that allowing Putin to have his way should not be our policy -- merely our practice, and that Churchill would have recommended as much. Churchill might have handled matters differently with Russia today. We cannot tell. But it is reasonably certain that he would need something pretty large -- a massive unstinting Russian commitment to the war on Islamism which Allison and Simes themselves note is not likely to be forthcoming -- before making a dirty agreement with them like the one that, in return for fighting Nazism to the death, conceded to Stalin much of Eastern Europe. The latest piece of Churchill revisionism concerns his reputed philo-Semitism and its author seems to have genuinely believed that he had grounds for it. Richard Toye, author of a new Churchill biography, last March told of having exhumed an unpublished 1937 article among Churchill 's papers that had "apparently lain unnoticed in the Churchill archives at Cambridge since the early months of the Second World War." The article in question contended that the Jews are partly responsible for the persecution they suffer. Says Toye, "I nearly fell off my chair when I found the article. It appears to have been overlooked. I think a lot of people thought that the file it was in only contained copies of articles that had already been published. It was certainly quite a shock to read some of these things and it is obviously at odds with the traditional idea we have of Churchill." With reason -- Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert was quick to disclose that the article was not penned by Churchill, but by one of his part-time ghost-writers, Adam Marshall Diston, who was a supporter of British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley (though himself a British Labour Party parliamentary candidate at the time). Churchill disagreed with its contents and vetoed its publication, leading Gilbert to conclude that "Someone else's opinions, in an unpublished article, which never appeared in print under Churchill's name, cannot be laid at Churchill's door." Just so. Churchill's opinions of Jews and the extent of his support, at different times, for Zionism have been questioned before (for example, in Michael J. Cohen's Churchill and the Jews), but Gilbert's forthcoming Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship should, ideally, put outstanding issues into perspective. In any event, Toye's rediscovery of the unpublished article is a broken reed for his revisionist thesis. The periodic reinvention of Churchill -- Atlanticist, democrat, totalitarian foe, philo-Semite -- into a WMD-enthusiast, democracy sacrificer, realpolitiker, anti-Semitic dabbler -- is sometimes remarkable for its boldness, whether based on a flight of documentary fancy, manipulation or reinterpretation. The temptation to undermine (if necessary, invert) the claims on our attention that is owed to Churchillean ideas is not hard to understand. Chronic Iraq problems have given strength to opponents of muscular anti-Islamism and democracy-promotion. A disapproving focus on their Churchillean antecedents can assist an effort to discredit them. But the evidence shows that those wishing to do so had better look elsewhere for inspiration. Daniel Mandel is a Fellow in History at Melbourne University and author of H. V. Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist(Routledge, London, 2004). His blog can be found on the History News Network. This article was published today in the Spectator
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THE DAYS OF JERUSALEM AND HEBRON
Posted by Yossi Baumol, May 10, 2007. |
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"When G-d restored the return to Zion, we thought we were dreaming." (Tehillim 126). It seems like a dream today, but people tend to forget the unbelievable power of the events of 40 years ago. First of all, came the prophecies. On Israel Independence Day, 1967, weeks before the war broke out, two things happened which in retrospect were accepted by the people as prophecies of the great impending victory. In the Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook gave his historic speech: "Where is our Hebron, where is our Shchem? That night, at the Israeli Song Festival, an unknown singer named Shuli Natan got up and sang for the first time what would later become Israel's all time favorite song -- Naomi Shemer's "Jerusalem of Gold -- Yerushalayim Shel Zahav" which stirred the hearts of an entire country with longings to return to Jerusalem's Old City and the Temple Mount. Just three weeks later, Hebron, the Old City and the heartland of biblical Eretz Yisrael were suddenly and miraculously restored to an incredulous Jewish People. The miracles didn't stop there. In the years that followed, the aftershocks of the war shook the very foundations of the Jewish people throughout the world, bringing about a phenomenal rebirth of Jewish pride, faith and confidence. Economically speaking, Israel went from being a poor, third-world backwater country in constant recession, to today's economic powerhouse. (President Bush recently asked PM Olmert for advice on how to cut the national deficit!) In Devarim 30, the prophecies of our return to the land and our return to our faith are intermingled, literally sentence by sentence. After the Six Day War, these twin prophecies began to be fulfilled in tandem. The mass Aliyah movements -- in the US, but even more so, in the Soviet Union -- were born as a result of the Six Day War. The Teshuva movement, basically non-existent in Israel and in the Diaspora until then, flowered and grew at the same time. Suddenly, Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, where exhibiting unbelievable pride and self-sacrifice for the land and for the Torah. Orthodox Jewry in Israel, which until that time was divided between the faithful Ultra-Orthodox who shunned public involvement and the National-Religious camp which served as the non-committed "caboose" of the Zionist Labor movement, underwent a deep and crucial transformation. G-d's promise to Rachel Imenu: "And the sons shall return to their borders" came true along that very same road connecting Jerusalem and Hebron. Kfar Etzion and Hebron spearheaded the settlement movement. The initial Jewish settlement of Hebron at the Park Hotel, became the settlement movement's "Mayflower". Anyone who wanted to be counted as a settlement leader claimed to have spent that first Pessach in Hebron with Rabbi Levinger. Why did the return to Jerusalem and Hebron have such a profound effect on the Jewish people? More than anyone else, Rabbi A. Y. Kook sought to teach us the religious significance of the land. His most basic teachings relates to the "mission statement" for all Jews, handed down to Avraham at the beginning of Lecha Lecha. He explained that this mission has two basic stages: 1) Become a great nation. Jerusalem represents stage two -- when all nations will unite in praise of Hashem. Hebron represents stage one -- the stage of nation building! This is where our founding fathers and mothers made their homes and chose to be buried.
From the days of Avraham's first calling, described in Parshat Lech Lecha, down until the recent purchase of "Beit HaShalom", featured on the front page of the Sunday NY Times -- Hebron is where we must go to build our nation. This is why the return of what some people consider "merely real estate" has had such a far ranging effect on our nation. Not only does the place have a special significance -- the time does as well. It is no accident that these landmark events of nation-building -- in 1948 and again in 1967 took place in the month of Iyar. Rabbi Chaim Falagi, a great 19 century Kabbalist wrote in his commentary on "Ethics of Our Fathers": "It is suitable that we read "Pirkei Avot" during Iyar, because the letters of Iyar stand for our Avot -- Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov and Rachel...we should make every effort to give Tzedaka during the month of Iyar to the "Kupah" of Hebron and Rachel's Tomb." Every Friday night, in Lechu N'rannena we quote G-d who says: "For 40 years will I struggle with that generation and I will say, they are a nation of confused hearts and knew not my ways". Although this passage in Tehillim 95 seems to refer to the Jews who left Egypt, it is interesting to note that it is written in future tense. Maybe this is somehow connected to the opinion brought in the Gemara -- "the times of Mashiach are 40 years". For 40 years, Hashem has been showering us with blessings -- the burgeoning Israeli economy, the growth of Torah, the Aliyah movements, the Teshuva movements -- all these blessings stem from the land and from its restoration to us 40 years ago. For 40 years, a "nation of confused hearts" refuses to see this and tries to give away the source of all our blessings. Let us hope and pray that this stage will soon be over, that the lessons of Hebron will be learned, that we will succeed in building our nation as it should be, so that we can move on to the next stage, showering bounty and blessings on all the nation of the world -- from Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yossi Baumol is Executive Director of the Hebron Fund. You can contribute directly to The Jewish Community of Hebron, POB10, Kiryat Arba-Hebron 90100, hebron@hebron.org.il, 972-2-9965333 or write to The Hebron Fund, 1760 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11230, hebronfund@aol.com |
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AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PARENTS OF RACHEL CORRIE; LATEST FROM THE LAND OF OZ
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 10, 2007. |
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1. "An Open Letter To The Parents Of Rachel Corrie"
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Corrie, You are continuing with your campaign of demonization and delegitimization against Israel, a campaign that now manifests itself in a shallow anti-Israel propaganda play being staged in Seattle. All this, of course, came after your earlier open letter to the world, "A Call to Action; Rachel's Words Live," which was reprinted in many different media outfits, including the viciously anti-Semitic Counterpunch magazine, and the Guardian of the UK. In that letter, you begin by recalling that your daughter was "killed by an Israeli bulldozer," but you neglect to mention the circumstances under which she was so killed (and the fact that she died from her injuries while under Palestinian medical care). You then add, "She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent resistance organization, the International Solidarity Movement, trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes and wells." No, she was not. She was trying to prevent the demolition of tunnels used to smuggle weapons for Palestinian terrorists seeking to murder Jewish civilians. The International Solidarity Movement, or ISM, to which she belonged openly endorses Palestinian "armed struggle" against Jewish children and civilians and openly collaborates with terrorists. It has hidden wanted terrorists and their weapons in its offices. It is an accomplice in murder. Two Arabs who entered Israel under ISM auspices blew up a Tel Aviv pub and murdered Jews. Lying is not the best way to drum up sympathy for your dead daughter. Your daughter was in Rafiah in the Gaza Strip to serve as a human shield to defend and promote Palestinian terrorism. When you yourselves were nearly kidnapped in Gaza last year, you were there for the same reason. You pretend that your daughter died trying to protect an "innocent house." You are lying again. That "innocent house" she was protecting was camouflage for a not-so-innocent terrorist smuggling tunnel, and the residents of that "innocent house" knew all about the tunnel. Explosives and arms were being smuggled by terrorists through that tunnel to commit mass murder. Your daughter was in a war zone as a belligerent, as one who had -- perhaps wittingly and perhaps not -- recruited herself on behalf of a genocidal movement of Arab fascists seeking to destroy Israel and murder as many Jews as possible. Your daughter died while interfering with an anti-terror operation carried out by an army in a land in which she had no business being at all. You demand that we in Israel feel your pain at the loss of your daughter, yet your daughter conscripted herself as an aid for those seeking to murder my children. The raison d'etre of the ISM is to assist Palestinian terrorists murder Jewish children, and to prevent all Israeli efforts to fight that campaign of murder. Your daughter foolishly put herself in harm's way by challenging a large bulldozer and placing herself in a position where the operator could not see her. You know quite well that the bulldozer operator was not seeking to harm your daughter. And you know very well that no harm would have fallen her had she not decided to "play chicken" with the machine -- about as responsible a form of behavior as running across unlit segments of LA freeways at midnight. In that earlier open letter of yours you write, "We had not understood the devastating nature of the Palestinians' situation." Of course, you have never expressed any interest in the devastating nature of the Jews' situation. The Jews have been battling Arab fascism and terrorism for a hundred years, before, during, and after the Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews. Your daughter was allied with those seeking to continue the perpetration of Nazi-like atrocities against randomly selected Jews. You smugly praise the propaganda play about your daughter in London, which ignored all the other Rachels, the Jewish women victims of terror in Israel, who were murdered by the genocidal terrorists with whom your daughter's ISM friends collaborate. Your daughter, and apparently you as well, never had any understanding of the Middle East conflict. The Middle East conflict is not about the right of self-determination of Palestinian Arabs, but rather, it is about the right to self-determination of Israeli Jews. For a century, the Arabs have attempted to block any expression of Jewish self-determination, using violence, armed aggression and terrorism. The Arabs today control 22 countries and territory nearly twice the size of the United States. They refuse to share even a fraction of one percent of the Middle East with Jews, even in a territory smaller than New Jersey. The Arab countries invented the imaginary Palestinian "people" and their imaginary "plight" after 1967 as a propaganda ploy, in imitation of the German campaign on behalf of Sudeten self-determination in the 1930s. Just as the struggle for "Sudeten liberation" was nothing more than a fig leaf for the German aggression aimed at annihilating Czechoslovakia, so the struggle for "Palestinian liberation" is nothing more than a jihad to destroy Israel and its population. And it is in support of that goal that the ISM operates, even taking its operational orders from terror leaders. You write, "Clearly, our daughter has become a positive symbol for people." I am afraid you are mistaken. Your daughter has become a symbol for dangerous foolhardiness. She committed suicide as an empty gesture meant to assist murderers and terrorists. You want the world to mourn for your daughter, who died as part of
her efforts to assist those trying to murder my children. You demand,
on the pages of anti-Semitic propaganda web magazines, that the world
mourn your daughter, but you do not have a single word of sympathy for
the families of the thousands of innocent victims of the terrorists
with whom your daughter chose to ally herself.
2. "Latest From The Land Of Oz"
Amos Oz never tires of finding ways to blame Israel for the absence of Arab-Israeli peace, no matter how clearly the voices on the other side, in Palestinian and broader Arab media, mosques, and schools, declare that their idea of peace is the annihilation of Israel and the destruction of its people. Nor does the celebrated Israeli novelist tire of grossly rewriting history to serve his blame-Israel narrative. His latest article in this vein appeared on the Yediot Aharonot website on April 29 under the title "Israel Partly at Fault." Among the unconscionable falsehoods Oz tosses out in the piece is the statement that "On the Israeli side there is a fixed tendency to increasingly reject the 'core issues' of the conflict: Refugees. Jerusalem. Borders. Settlements. This rejection was perhaps what led to the failure of the Oslo Accords." Was Oz away, visiting some other planet, during, for example, the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000, when Israel offered to uproot the great majority of settlements, return virtually to the pre-1967 armistice lines, divide Jerusalem, and give pre-1967 Israeli territory to the Palestinians to compensate for the five percent or so of the West Bank that it would retain? Was he still off somewhere, beyond the reach of the media, when Israel sweetened the deal even further a few months later at the Taba talks? Has no one told him either of the Israeli proposals or of the Palestinians' rejections? Or perhaps he knew at one time but has since forgotten that the Palestinians responded to Israel's offers by launching a terror war. Even on the refugee issue, Israel apparently made some concessions during the talks in 2000, offering to take in tens of thousands of 1948 refugees and their descendants. But Oz is so desperate to blame Israel, to define some step that Israel only need take to resolve the conflict, that he ignores all this. His focus in this latest piece is the refugee issue, and he agrees that there can be no "right of return," that Palestinian demands for such a "right" are a formula for transforming Israel into another Arab state. But, he argues, Israel has been too averse to discussing the problem, and if it would only bring itself to acknowledge some fault for the plight of the refugees ... some partial responsibility ... and preparedness to help resolve the problem in ways short of "return," then its doing so, Oz avers, "is likely to send an emotional shockwave through the Palestinian side. It will serve as an emotional breakthrough of sorts that will significantly facilitate the continuation of talks." What talks? And to what end? His argument is at once absurd and dishonest. It is absurd, of course, because the Palestinians do not want resolution of the issue in any manner other than "return" and have made that clear in innumerable ways, including in the incessant message proffered by all their instruments of indoctrination. It is dishonest in that Israel has on numerous occasions expressed the very preparedness to help that Oz is urging. In addition, while Oz suggests Israel has always refused to acknowledge any expulsion of Palestinians during the 1947-48 war, mainstream Israeli historians have written at least since the late 1950's about instances of expulsion -- most notably from Arab towns and villages that were part of the Arab blockade of Jerusalem -- which in their totality perhaps accounted for ten to fifteen percent of the refugees. (What is rarely written of in glosses on the war and the expulsion of civilians is the fact that, of Jews living in areas that came under Arab control, 100% were killed or expelled and none remained at the fighting's end. In contrast, within Israeli territory, there remained at war's end an Arab community of more than 120,000, constituting about 16% of Israel's total population. That community has since grown to number over a million.) Oz could send copies of those acknowledgments to every Palestinian household, and could no doubt even arrange to read the relevant passages aloud on Israel state television and have their contents endorsed by leading Israeli officials. But his doing so would not, unfortunately, serve as any "breakthrough." Indeed, no step by Israel, short of national suicide, can provide a "breakthrough" that would open the way to ending the conflict. But Amos Oz refuses to acknowledge that essential truth, and prefers instead to conjure up fantastical indictments of Israel and delusional assertions that, but for this or that Israeli fault, all would be well. It is a monomania, an idee fixe, that for Oz appears beyond cure. Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian. He is the author of .The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege. (Smith and Kraus Global), now available in paperback. 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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il |
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CHRISTIAN MISSIONARIES TARGETED IN GAZA; HIRSI ALI'S CHALLENGE TO HUMANITY
Posted by Simon McIlwaine, May 10, 2007. |
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The first story is from Israel Today |
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A Palestinian Islamic group confirmed on Tuesday that its "armed wing" is targeting what it called "Christian missionary activity" in the Gaza Strip. In a statement faxed to WorldNetDaily, the Islamic outreach Jihadia Salafiya admitted that gunmen affiliated with the group had carried out a deadly attack on a UN-run school in Gaza on Monday. One person was killed and six others were wounded when the attackers hurled grenades at the school, after declaring over loudspeakers that the institution was "corrupting Islam" by allowing boys and girls to participate together in sporting activities. In its official statement, Jihadia Salafiya accused the UN of "spreading Christian missionary activity" and "trying to convert our Muslims under the cover of an international organization." The group said it "will keep hitting them and trying to kill them." Last month, the head of Jihadia Salafiya, Abu Saqer, praised other Muslim elements for bombing a Christian bookstore in Gaza. The Bible Society bookstore, which was funded by American Protestants, was severely damaged in the blast. Research over the past decade has shown a systematic campaign of persecution against Palestinian Christians by the Muslim majority. However, most Christians in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip are too afraid to speak out themselves, and have instead opted to leave the region.
To understand why this 37-year-old woman is extraordinary, she must be assessed in the context of the forces pitted against her in her twin struggles to force the Western world to take note of Islam's divinely ordained enslavement of women, and to force the Islamic world to account for it. A series of incidents this week placed the forces she battles in stark relief. Sunday Muslims shot up the Omariyah elementary school in Gaza. One man was killed and six were wounded in the onslaught. The murderers attacked because the UN-run school in Rafah had organized a sports day for the children, in which little boys would be playing with little girls. The idea that that boys and girls might play sports together was too much for the righteous believers. It was an insult to Islam, they said. And so they decided to kill the little boys and girls. On May 3, in Gujrat, Pakistan, Muslims detonated a bomb at the gate of a girls' school. Their righteous wrath was raised by the notion that girls would learn to read and write. That too, they felt, is an insult to Islam. On April 28, US soldiers in Iraq discovered detonation wires across the street from the newly built Huda Girls' school in Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. They followed the wire to its source and discovered the school had been built as a deathtrap. The pious Muslims who constructed the school had filled propane tanks with explosives and buried them beneath the floor. They built artillery shells into the ceiling and the floor. To save the world for Allah, they decided to butcher little girls. And the brutality is not limited to the Middle East. Last month in
Oslo, Norway, Norwegian-Somali women's rights activist Kadra was
brutally beaten by a crowd of men piously calling out 'Allah Akhbar.'
She was attacked for exposing the fact that inside their mosques in
Norway, Norwegian imams praise female genital mutilation in the name of
Allah.
LATE LAST year Hirsi Ali published her memoir, Infidel. In describing her own life, what she actually explains are the two competing human impulses -- conformity and individualism. In her own life, the clash of the two has been played out on the stage of Islamic ascendance and Western cultural collapse. Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia to a politically active father who sought to free his country from Said Barre's Marxist dictatorship. Forced to flee the country with her family, Hirsi Ali's childhood in Arabia and Africa revolved along the axis of Islamic ascendance at the hand of the Saudi-financed Muslim Brotherhood and Khomeini's Iran. Hirsi Ali's rebellion against Islam was personal, not political. As a young girl and later as a young woman, she found herself abused and stifled by the dictates of Islam just as her youthful spirit wished most to take flight. As a five-year-old in Somalia, she screamed in pain and shock when her grandmother tied her down and had a man with a knife mutilate her genitals. Living in Saudi Arabia she was struck by the oppressiveness of the 'true Islam.' Why, she wondered were she and her mother and sister prohibited from leaving their apartment without a male relative escorting them? As an adolescent in Nairobi she wondered why the enjoyment she felt in the company of boys was sinful. Why did her mother need to suffer the humiliation of polygamy? Why
could she not choose her own husband? Why was she told by one and all
that her normal human impulses to seek love, respect and compassion and
think for herself were sinful and evil?
AS SHE puts it, 'I could never comprehend the downright unfairness of the rules, especially for women. How could a just God -- a God so just that almost every page of the Koran praises his fairness -- desire that women be treated so unfairly? When the [Islamic teachers] told us that a woman's testimony is worth half of a man's, I would think, Why? If God is merciful, why did He demand that His creatures be hanged in public? If He was compassionate, then why did unbelievers have to go to Hell?' In her words, 'The spark of will inside me grew even as I studied and practiced to submit.' Ali credits Harlequin romance novels for her initial mental deliverance from submission. These books, with their passionate loves and steamy sex scenes were her first glimpse at the possibility of freedom. The novels showed her that the emotions and desires she was told to repress were natural and could even be beautiful and right. Her impulse to rebel was matched by her impulse to conform. As a teenager, Hirsi Ali tried to be a faithful Muslim and even joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Embracing the notion of submission she began wearing a full-body burka. But try as she might, she could not accept that her own will had no inherent value. She blamed the preachers for the terror she saw as a Muslim girl, believing they must be distorting the Koran. 'Surely,' she writes, 'Allah could not have said that men should beat their wives when they were disobedient? Surely a woman's statement in court should be worth the same as a man's?' Yet, when she sat down and read the Koran on her own, she found that
everything the preachers had said was written in the book.
AT 21, HIRSI Ali emancipated herself. Fleeing from an arranged marriage
to a Somali immigrant in Canada, she sought and received asylum in
Holland. There, she embraced Dutch society and freedoms and quickly
flourished in a true rag-to-riches immigrant tale. She learned Dutch
fluently and began supporting herself as a translator. In just four
years she had bridged the cultural divide between Africa and Europe and
began studying political science with the creme de la creme of Dutch
society at the University of Leiden.
A mere decade after her arrival, as a naturalized Dutch citizen, she
was a pubic figure, an outspoken social critic of Islam in Europe. In
January 2003, she was elected to Parliament as a member of the
conservative Liberal Party.
IN HOLLAND, Hirsi Ali found herself confronted by a kinder, gentler type of cultural tyranny -- the moral relativism of political correctness and multiculturalism dictated by the Left. Just as she rejected Islamic oppression in Africa, so in Holland she refused to submit to the will of the majority not to notice, judge or take action against the misogynist tyranny and anti-Western culture of the Muslim minority. Hirsi Ali's labors brought her to Theo Van Gogh. In 2004 the two produced the film Submission, Part One. The short film shows a young Muslim woman wearing a see-through burka. Passages of the Koran permitting the abuse of women are written on her body. The woman prays in submission to Allah all the while noting her abject suffering in his name. At the end of the movie, the woman raises her head to Allah and calls into question the reasonableness of her submission. The film's provocative message placed both Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh's lives in imminent danger. And on November 21, 2004 Van Gogh was butchered by a Dutch Muslim on the streets of Amsterdam. The murderer stabbed a letter into Van Gogh's chest in which he threatened to murder Hirsi Ali 'in the name of Allah Most Gracious and Most Merciful.' While Hirsi Ali was forced to flee her home and live under armed guard
in army installations, her message proved too much of a challenge for
the Dutch establishment which vomited her out last year. Her own party
found a formality on which to revoke her citizenship and throw her out
of the country and the parliament. Although the public outcry that
ensued forced the government to restore her citizenship, the message was
clear.
HIRSI ALI moved to Washington, DC. As a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute she continues to warn the West of the dangers of Islam and of Western cultural disintegration under the tyranny of multiculturalism. Just last month, her work brought an imam from Pittsburgh to call for her murder for the crime of apostasy. In her life and work, Hirsi Ali personifies the central challenges of our times. She holds a mirror up to the Islamic world and demands that it contend with the evil it propagates in the name of divinity. She holds a mirror up to the Free World and demands that we defend our freedom against the onslaught of moral relativism and cultural decline. So too, she demands our compassion for the women of Islam. She says we must see the suffering beneath the veil and work to alleviate it. Whether it means that we must mass produce and distribute Arabic and Urdu copies of Harlequin romance novels throughout the Islamic world; challenge veiled women to explain why they ascribe to a faith that gives men the divine right to beat and rape women; or simply hold Muslim communities in the West to the standards of freedom on which our civilization is based, the West must help these women free themselves from oppression. Finally, in our own societies we must protect and uphold voices like Hirsi Ali's. For the past five years, Hirsi Ali has lived under threat of death for her views. We must understand that only when she, and people like her can walk on
the streets unafraid will we have properly defended our freedom
Contact Simon McIlwaine at Simon.McIlwaine@ormerods.co.uk
or visit the website at: www.anglicansforisrael.com
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PLANT A TREE BEFORE SHEMITAH
Posted by Manhigut Yehudit, May 10, 2007. |
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Less than 90 days left to plant trees in Israel for an ENTIRE YEAR!!! Starting this Rosh Ha'Shanah the Shemitah(Sabbatical) year begins when planting in Israel is strictly forbidden by Torah law. As a matter of fact, all vineyards must be planted NO LATER than the 15th of Av, which corresponds to July 30th. After that date, no more grapes can be planted for more than a year! This SERIOUSLY impacts the many settlements that count on these plantings for growth and prosperity. Manhigut Yehudit and Zo Artzeinu have decided to spearhead a project that will bring THOUSANDS of new plantings into Yesha in these crucial days before Shemitah... and YOU can take part in this amazing Mitzvah, which takes place just ONCE IN SEVEN YEARS!!! Click here to plant a fruit tree in Yesha before Shemitah. Your tree will be planted, cared for and brought to life by 100% Jewish labor. These young men and women are pioneers in the land and follow all Halachot (Jewish Law) carefully. Your tree brings them life, growth and parnossa (financial income). A beautiful personalized -- full color -- certificate will be mailed to you. Trees can be planted in memory of departed ones, in honor of family or friends or for any reason at all. Your certificate will contain the text you want and is suitable for framing. Click here to plant your fruit tree NOW before the Shemitah year begins. HURRY!!! 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) |
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DEMOGRAPHIC TREND IN ISRAEL; LEBANON WAR PREPARATION
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 10, 2007. |
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SINISTER ROLE OF SECURITY FENCE Israel claims to be erecting the fence in Judea-Samaria for national security. Local Arabs often complain that the fence impedes their eventual statehood there. The fence is their pretext for attacking Israelis. Min. Livni told a UNO representative that the fence actually promotes the Arab goal (Arutz-7, 4/27), which means national insecurity. The news brief did not state her explanation how it does so. Jews who oppose the fence route as creating insecurity do explain. It separates the Territories from Israel along a route similar to what the Arabs are demanding, so it becomes a de facto border, and it cuts off or otherwise leaves exposed many Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria, so they couldn't survive terrorism. NEW DEMOGRAPHIC TREND IN ISRAEL Demographers usually over-estimated the birth rate of Arabs in and near Israel. No longer. A new study finds the birth rate of religious Jews in Israel high, higher than the Arabs'. If the trend continues, Jews will become a larger majority of the country, again in two decades. The birth rate of Bedouin fell when subsidies were reduced, but remains very high (Arutz-7, 4/27). Birth rate projections are risky. To counter-balance their growth, ultra-Orthodox say, the ruling class brought in hundreds of thousands of gentile Russians posing as Jews, in order. The government has let Arabs sneak in or immigrate, though there is some tightening of the rules about that. In the US, Jewish birth and intermarriage rates are such that secular Jewry is shrinking and Orthodox Jewry is expanding. The future of Jewry is, as its distant past, Orthodox (and Ultra-Orthodox). The handwriting is on the wall. Arutz-7 sounds pleased with the projection for Israel. So am I. Whether my fellow American Jews, largely secular, will approve the trend in either place, is questionable. They see their way of life disappearing. WHY DO THEY OBJECT TO CARTER'S BOOK? Jimmy Carter's defenders claim that people object to his book because it criticizes Israeli policy. His detractors, however, point out specific lies about the conflict. Carter ignores their exposé, and his book engages in "petty accusations and character assignation" (Joshua Muravchik, Commentary 5/2007, p.6). Anti-Zionists try to head off criticism by claiming merely to be criticizing Israeli policy. Actually, they denounce its existence. They are devious. LEBANON WAR PREPARATION Prof. Yehezkal Dror had suggested that the government should have asked these questions, before authorizing the recent Lebanon war: - What are the principle alternatives that the IDF can carry out within set periods of time -- week, two weeks, month, more? 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@verizon.net |
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IT'S OK TO KILL KIDS IN BATTLE: SHEIK SULEIMAN SAYS
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 9, 2007. |
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The good sheikh gets it right....but I doubt that he considered beforehand the full implications of any application of his words to real-life situations. This is from today's The Australian: and was written by Richard Kerbaj. See my interlinear notes IN CAPS. |
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THE deputy spiritual leader of Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali has told his students that it is 'obligatory' for all Muslims to engage in jihad if an Islamic country is under attack, even if it means killing the enemy's children. Sheik Shady Suleiman, a youth leader at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney's southeast, told his students in a one-hour Arabic and English lecture that it would be 'self defence' to kill children who were attacking them in battle. SO LET'S APPLY SHEIKH SULEIMAN'S RULING TO THE ISRAEL-ARAB CONFLICT. HE HAS JUST SAID THAT IT IS OK FOR ISRAELI SOLDIERS TO KILL PALESTINIAN CHILDREN IF THE CHILDREN ARE ATTACKING THE SOLDIERS. SO, APPLYING THE GOOD SHEIKH'S LECTURE TO THE REAL LIFE WORLD OF ISRAEL TODAY, WHEN A 13-YEAR-OLD PALESTINIAN BOY, FRESH OUT OF SUMMER CAMP WHERE HAMAS INSTRUCTORS HAVE TRAINED HIM IN THE USE OF THE M-16, OPENS FIRE ON AN ISRAEL SOLDIER, THE SOLDIER HAS EVERY RIGHT TO KILL THE BOY, ACTING IN SELF DEFENSE, EVEN THOUGH HIS ASSAILANT IS A MERE LAD OF 13. SO, FOLLOWING THE SAME PRINCIPLE, IF A 10-YEAR OLD BOY HURLES A CINDER BLOCK FROM A 3RD STORY BUILDING IN RAMALLAH ON TO THE HEADS OF ISRAELIS BELOW, THEN THAT BOY TOO IS ATTACKING, AND USING A WEAPON, WHICH WHEN DROPPED FROM 3 STORIES IS INDEED A LETHAL WEAPON. THE IDF IS WITHIN ITS RIGHTS, PER ISLAMIC LAW AS OUR SHEIKH UNDERSTANDS IT, TO KILL THAT TEN-YEAR-OLD BOY. SO, FOLLOWING THIS PRINCIPLE IN ALL TOO NUMEROUS REAL-LIFE EVENTS, YOUNGSTERS AT THE EL-AQSA MOSQUE HURLING STONES DOWN UPON WORSHIPPERS AT THE WESTERN WALL (A FIVE STORY DROP) ARE FAIR TARGETS FOR ISRAELI GUARDS AT THE WALL. I, FOR ONE, AM PLEASED AND PROUD THAT THE IDF DOES NOT FOLLOW THIS SHEIKH'S INTERPREATION OF ISLAMIC LAW. Muslim leaders yesterday attacked the 29-year-old cleric, who has a substantial following in Sydney, and accused him of delivering a message contrary to that of Prophet Mohammed who said children should not be killed in war. Prominent Sydney-based imam Khalil Shami said Sheik Shady's message was 'dangerous' because it was open to being misconstrued by young Muslims. NOW THIS IS AN INTERESTING REJOINDER. CHILDREN SHOULD NOT BE KILLED IN WAR, SAYS THE PROPHET (PBOH)! WELL, THEN, WHY ARE ALL THOSE MUSLIMS IN THE TERRORIST CADRES OF HAMAS AND FATAH AND PLO AND ISLAMIC JIHAD AND EL-AQSA MARTYRS' BRIGADE PURPOSELY KILLING CHILDREN, ISRAELI CHILDRED? ACCORDING TO THE MUSLIM LEADERS OF AUSTRALIA MENTIONED IN THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH, THESE ARAB TERRORISTS, AND FOR THAT MATTER MUSLIM TERRORISTS ALL OVER THE WORLD, AND THEIR ENABLERS AND THEIR CHEERLEADERS, ARE ALL DOING SOMETHING THAT IS PROHIBITED BY ISLAM'S FOUNDER AND GREATEST TEACHER AND ETERNAL SPIRITUAL LEADER. SO, IF THE WORDS OF THIS DEPUTY SPIRITUAL LEADER OF AN AUSTRALIAN MOSQUE ELICIT SUCH HARSH CRITICISM FROM HIS FELLOW MUSLIMS IN AUSTRALIA, WHERE ARE THE PROHIBITIONS AND FATWAS AND HUQUMS AND CONDEMNATIONS FROM LIKE-MINDED MUSLIMS WORLD-WIDE AGAINST THE HORRIFIC VIOLATIONS OF MOHAMMED'S (PBOH) TEACHINGS, SUCH VIOILATIONS BEING INHERENT IN EVERY SINGLE TERROR ATTACK PERPETRATED BY MUSLIMS AGAINST CIVILIANS ANYWHERE ANY TIME? AND, FOLLOWING THE SAME LINE OF REASONING, WHY IS IT THAT ALMOST EVERY SINGLE ACT OF TERRORISM PERPETRATED AGIANST CIVILIANS (AND THUS AGAINST CHILDREN) ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD, ANY TIME OVER THE LAST 35 YEARS, HAS BEEN PERPETRATED BYA MUSLIM? CAN THEY ALL BE SO IGNORANT OF MOHAMMED'S (PBOH) TEACHINGS? 'It is very dangerous,' he said. 'Because ... he puts in their minds that they have to do this, and he prepares them for something wrong for sure.' The nation's leading spiritual Muslim woman Aziza Abdel-Halim said Sheik Shady's message diverged from Islamic teachings that prohibit the killing of children. SAME AS ABOVE. WHAT HAS THIS MUSLIM FEMALE SPIRITUAL LEADER OF AUSTRALIA'S MUSLIMS SAID ABOUT THE 40+ MUSLIM TERROR GROUPS OPERATING AGAINST BOTH MUSLIM AND NON-MUSLIM TARGETS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD? In a lecture titled Rulings on Performing Jihad, obtained by The Australian, Sheik Shady differentiates between defensive and offensive jihad and quotes the Prophet by saying anyone who fights to defend their land, soul, and wealth was considered a 'Shahid' (martyr). 'If attackers or invaders want to invade a Muslim country or attack a Muslim country then it's obligatory on every Muslim ... to fight and protect the country,' he says. Sheik Shady says while the Prophet condemned the killing of children, 'if they are involved then you have to stop them'. 'If you have a child carrying a knife and coming to you, or a sword and coming to kill you in the middle of the battle, they (the fighters) are going to look at him and say 'the Prophet said not to touch him' -- no, that's wrong.' Sheik Shady, who is lecturing in Britain, yesterday defended his message on jihad, saying it was a part of a series of lectures delivered in 2002, before the Iraq war -- and focused on the collection of the traditions of Mohammed -- although a copy of the lecture appears on his website dated May 2004. He said the lecture was delivered to 60 young men who were advanced in Islamic studies and would not take it out of context and was 'not an open lecture', despite being on his website. 'When I said children, I did not mean, of course, if you're going to get a five- or seven-year-old coming to attack you, you can stop him,' he said yesterday. 'I was talking about self-defence. If you get attacked by someone, then you have the right to defend yourself. It doesn't mean you go kill them, especially if it's someone young.' AH. AN IMPORTANT EMENDATION. 'IT DOESN'T MEAN YOU GO KILL THEM'. HMMM. HIS EARLIER STATEMENTS COULD HAVE FOOLED ME. SO, JUST WHAT DOES THE GOOD SHEIKH HAVE IN MIND? IF YOU CAN DO SO WITHOUT GETTING YOURSELF KILLED, THEN YOU ARREST THE CHILD, AND TAKE HIM BEHIND THE MOSQUE FOR A SPANKING? UNCLEAR....BUT WHAT IS CLEAR IS THAT WHEN PUT ON THE SPOT, THE BELEAGUERED SHEIKH TRIES TO PUT SOME MORE ACCEPTABLE SPIN TO HIS TEACHINGS. Sheik Shady said that while it was obligatory for all Muslims to defend an Islamic nation under attack, there were no Muslim countries living under Sharia law that were currently under attack. AH. WAIT. NOW I AM REALLY CONFUSED. IS ALL OF THIS PURELY THEORETICAL? IF THERE IS NO MUSLIM COUNTRY LIVING UNDER SHARI'A THAT IS CURRENTLY UNDER ATTACK, THEN WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF HIS LESSON ON KILLING CHILDREN? OR....IS HE JUST BACKTRACKING TO TRY AND MAKE HIMSELF LOOK MORE MODERATE AND LESS LIKE A PSYCHOPATHIC CHILD-MURDERER-WANNABBEE? BUT HE DOES MAKE AN IMPORTANT DISTINCTION HERE. IF THERE WERE A MUSLIM COUNTRY LIVING UNDER SHARI'A LAW WHICH WAS UNDER ATTACK, THEN IT WOULD BE OK TO KILL THE CHILDREN OF THE ATTACKERS, IF THEY WERE INVOLVED IN THE ATTACKING. THUS, BY LOGICAL EXTENSION, IF THERE WERE A MUSLIM COUNTRY NOT LIVING UNDER SHARI'A LAW, THEN IT WOULD NOT BE OK TO KILL THE CHILDREN OF THE ATTACKERS. SO, BACK TO ISRAEL: SINCE THE PA IS NOT (YET) UNDER SHARI'A LAW, IT IS NOT OK FOR THE PALESTINIAN TERRORISTS TO KILL ISRAELI CHILDREN....BUT THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE DOING OR TRYING TO DO, EVERY DAY, MULTIPLE TIMES PER DAY. I WISH WE COULD GET THIS SHEIKH TO GO AND PREACH TO HAMAS. 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 |
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DAYTON PLAN: BENCHMARKS WON'T WORK IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Posted by Bryna Berch, May 9, 2007. |
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The good news is that Condi Rice has shown herself to NOT be presidential material. She is a gofer, a step-and-fetchit. She's been told to carve out a "Palestinian" state and that's what she's bound and determined to do -- that it is unrealistic and that it won't last as long as the Gaza greenhouses when the Jews left Gaza doesn't bother her at all. She has a task to do -- da da dum da -- and that is her mission. Until someone else in power hands her another task. She's pathetic! This was written by Yaakov Katz and it appeared today in
www.Jerusalem Post.com
and is archived at
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The word "benchmarks" is heard quite frequently these days in IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) corridors. The benchmarks in question refer to dates set in a new American plan -- drafted by US Security Coordinator Maj.-Gen. Keith Dayton and Ambassador to Israel Richard Jones -- aimed at improving security and easing restrictions on movement in the Palestinian territories. The plan, which was approved by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, stipulates precise dates for when its clauses must be implemented. In addition to requesting that Israel allow the supply of weapons, ammunition and other equipment to security forces under the control of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the plan requires Israel to lift roadblocks in the West Bank and to link Judea and Samaria with the Gaza Strip by allowing free passage between them. In return, the PA is required to stop Kassam rocket attacks as well as to prevent arms smuggling across the Philadelphi Corridor running between the southern Gaza Strip and Sinai. # US: Benchmark paper only informal For Israel, the plan is not simple to digest, and some defense officials have even gone as far as to call it disastrous. The benchmarks are no different than the stages set in the US-backed road map, which never really moved past phase one due to Abbas's inability to stop Palestinian terrorism. The growing assessment within the defense establishment is that the new plan will ultimately fail. It demonstrates, senior defense officials said, a basic lack of understanding by Dayton and the rest of the US administration as to what is needed to obtain a lull in the Kassam rocket attacks. Dayton was appointed as security coordinator to Israel and the PA in 2005 and has since focused most of his efforts on training Abbas's "Presidential Guard." His thinking, the defense assessment reads, is no different than the way America operates in other places in the world, particularly in Iraq, where it sets goals and tries to achieve them while ignoring the outcome. "What happened in Iraq should show the US that they need to come up with better ideas concerning the Israeli-Palestinian issue," a Defense Ministry official said this week. Part of the plan has received the support of central officials in the defense establishment. Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh, who is on friendly terms with Dayton, is a major proponent of the clause that calls on Israel to allow the provision of weapons and ammo to Abbas's Presidential Guard. Sneh's support, however, ends there, and in closed-door meetings he has declared firm opposition to the other clauses calling to link Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the lifting of roadblocks. On Thursday, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and Sneh will meet with Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin to decide on the defense establishment's official position, which will be presented at the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday. The strong opposition to these clauses stems from a concern within Israel that the creation of a link between Gaza and the West Bank would achieve one result -- a strengthening of Hamas. Terror in the West Bank is at its lowest level since the outbreak of violence in 2000. This isn't because the Palestinians aren't trying. In 2006, 45 Palestinians were caught by the IDF with suicide bomb belts strapped to their chests and on their way to blow up somewhere in Israel. The thwarting of these attacks has to do with several basic principles, a primary one being a complete separation between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The IDF is allowed to operate freely in the West Bank and soldiers enter terror capitals like Nablus, Tulkarm and Jenin on a nightly basis to hunt down Hamas and Islamic Jihad fugitives. Last month, the IDF succeeded in breaking up an attempt by Hamas to create an army in the West Bank like the one it has in the Gaza Strip. It has also foiled numerous attempts to manufacture and fire Kassam rockets from West Bank cities, mainly due to its presence there, but also because of the separation from Gaza that prevents the transfer of technology, know-how, weaponry and terrorists between the Palestinian territories. Israeli defense chiefs fear that the new American plan -- which calls for the safe passage of Palestinian vehicles from Gaza to the West Bank -- will undermine this success and create an upsurge in terrorism in Judea and Samaria. The defense chiefs would first like to see Abbas stop the Kassams and the weapons smuggling before Israel makes additional concessions to a PA that has already proven its inability to deliver the goods. After almost two years in Israel, Dayton is beginning to learn that in the Middle East, benchmarks alone won't do the trick. Editor's note: This comment from a reader of the original article sums it up well: 8. THIS PLAN IS INSANITYand Richard from USA advised 2. Simply do not comply. No-one else does -- and the consequences are nil. And stop scrapping your own weapons systems. |
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PLEASE CONTINUE TO CALL THE WHITE HOUSE EVERY DAY ON BEHALF OF JONATHAN POLLARD
Posted by Lee Caplan, May 9, 2007. |
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Sholom everyone. When I called the White House this morning and asked that President Bush please free Jonathan Pollard, I was told by the woman who answered the call that they are tracking this item and will report on it to the President. When I questioned her regarding her comment, she told me that the issue of Jonathan Pollard is on the pre-printed sheet which is given to all the comment line operators so that they can check it off when someone calls about this issue. Clearly, the calls to the White House are having an effect! So please continue to call the White House every day, and call multiple times if you can, at 202-456-1414 or 202-456-1111 and ask that President Bush please free Jonathan Pollard. Every single call means another check mark which IY"H brings Jonathan that much closer to being able to live the rest of his life with his wife Esther in Israel. In addition, let's not forget that eight Israelis continue to be separated from their country and their families, imprisoned by terrorist organizations and regimes that don't know the meaning of treating people in a civilized manner. Please call the White House daily, and call multiple times if you can, and ask President Bush to do everything humanly possible to secure their release, emphasizing that one of the five being held by Syria is an American citizen by the name of ZACHARY BAUMEL. Please ask President Bush to pressure Syria, Iran, and the Palestinian terrorist organizations under their control to release these men at once! This comes from Daled Amos
HOW TO OBTAIN THE RELEASE OF REGEV AND GOLDWASSER: Contact Lee Caplan at leescaplan@yahoo.com |
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THE KHAZAR MYTH AND THE NEW ANTI-SEMITISM
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 9, 2007. |
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My article was published in the Jewish Press
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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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il |
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POLICE FAIL TO PROTECT JEWS
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 9, 2007. |
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WHAT TO WATCH OUT FOR IN JOURNALISM A good journalist reports the facts faithfully. When he suggests why and how events unfolded, he has turned to speculation. If expert in the subject, his analysis can be useful. If he is not, but attempts to prescribe what should happen or have happened, he is on slippery ground (MEF news, 4/25). WHAT IS ISRAELI GOVERNMENT FOR? The State Controller of Israel keeps reporting additional corruption by Ehud Olmert (IMRA, 4/25) who seems to know nothing but influence peddling. As PM Olmert's popularity sinks to unprecedented depths, calls for his resignation rise to unprecedented heights. The Knesset could invoke a new election, but fears losing seats. (They have other alternatives but not the imagination to exercise them.) If Olmert loses his position, he likely would finally be prosecuted. He may be desperate to retain power. He can buy a little time by another war. During a short war, the country is preoccupied and less likely to call for his resignation. Olmert was warned that Syria may assault Israel, again. Now he is warning of it, but he has been appeasing the Arabs and the US. He may arrange with the US to get caught 'by surprise,' and just before the IDF could oust Syrian invaders from the Golan, accept a US/UNO ceasefire. This would satisfy the leftist Attorney-General. And if the Syrian onslaught is worse than expected. 'Oops.' Such is a scenario posed by Winston Mideast Report, 4/25). Attorney-General Mazuz sits on those reports, as he sat on evidence of egregious corruption by Sharon, while rushing to frame peacefully protesting settlers. Mazuz is more corrupted and corrupting than the elected politicians. The Knesset should curb his power, expanded illicitly at Knesset expense, and replace him. ROLE OF POLICE IN ISRAELI CIVIL WAR About 150 Haifa Jews, including young children, came to celebrate Israeli Independence Day, in a forest. Unknown to them, Arabs were marking the same day nearby as a catastrophe for the Arab attempt to commit genocide. Hundreds of Arab youths on horseback accosted the smaller group of Jewish families. Thousands of Arabs joined them. The Jews repeatedly telephoned police, who repeatedly assured them help was on the way. But the police dallied, until the two ethnic groups were fighting. Even then, only six police came (Arutz-7, 4/25). Failure to protect Jews is almost as bad now as when the antisemitic British were the police. In the struggle to control the country, the government appears more or less on the side of the Arabs. 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@verizon.net |
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MS. LIVNI THE DREAMER
Posted by Sorge Diaz, May 9, 2007. |
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I published this article on my website:
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In a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, Israeli academic Fania Oz-Salzberger quotes Israeli politician Tzipi Livni parroting a "vision for peace" that may well be called "the conventional wisdom", if not in Israel, at least amongst the bien-pensant intelligentsia all over the world: "Unlike her former Likud friends, she chose to face reality: A very large Palestinian minority within Israel's final borders would kill off either its Jewish or its democratic character. A generous territorial compromise is her way to square the ensuing circle. This was Kadima's initial raison d'etre, before it slalomed into Lebanon and corruption charges." This is exactly wrong. Israel is in no position to choose between its Jewish and its democratic character. It cannot solve this dilemma through "a generous territorial compromise." Israel must, before engaging in daydreaming, win the fight for its very existence. But that is what is truly maddening about the political scene in Israel and elsewhere; only political fantasies are politically acceptable. Israel must save its democratic character at any price -- if that price is military and political security, well, though. Democracy is the new golden calf before which all of Israel must bow. Ms. Livni's plan, over which Mrs. Oz-Sulzberger fawns, is the pinnacle of political stupidity, one of the finest achievements of human self-delusion. She wants to trade land for peace, but pays no attention to whether the plan can succeed at all. To achieve peace, you must first check whether peace is possible. All "land-for-peace" deals are dangerous by their very nature. After they are consummated, there are no guarantees the party getting the land will honor its political commitments. Words are cheap, while land is expensive. The trustworthiness of your political opponent is crucial if peace -- or even "peace" -- is to be achieved. You don't give diamonds to a thief. And you don't give diamonds to Islam, period -- Islam commands Muslims to be political caravan robbers. Islam is not merely a religion, but a way of life and ideology of conquest. Trusting an Islamic country is pointless, since Islamic Law demands perpetual warfare against the unbeliever. This is no mere rhetoric; Islamic Law does not allow for perpetual peace treaties, only for truces up to a maximum of ten years. A good Muslim ruler, after the treaty has lapsed, must then renew Jihad warfare in order to "bring the gift of Islam" to the unbelievers. Notice it doesn't help to sign the treaty with a "bad" Muslim ruler: he might "get Allah" later and fulfill his religious duty, or he may be replaced by a different leader who takes the religion seriously and you'll have warfare in your hands anyway. Ironically, the only thing that can bring peace in the short term is the internal strength of the infidel -- Islamic Law does allow the renewal of truces when the infidel is militarily strong. Giving up land for a false peace, to the extent that it makes Israel weaker, not stronger, makes war more likely, not less. Ms. Livni, of course, wouldn't listen to any of this. She does not want to listen to reality at all. Listen to her on the nature of the "Arab-Israeli" conflict: [Ms. Livni] lashes out against what she calls "attempts to theologize the conflict. I cannot solve a religious strife," she says, "but I can solve a conflict between nations." This assumes, of course, that perceptions can always and everywhere trump reality. To be blunt, there is no need to "theologize" the conflict; the conflict is already as theological as it can be. Islamic Law demands that all of Israel be returned to the bosom of Islam, and there is nothing Ms. Livni can do about this theological reality. She does not want to deal with the political and practical consequences of accepting it. Her so-called moral vision is more important to her than the future of her people. So, I must ask our Israeli readers -- don't listen to this woman, don't listen to those who want "peace, peace!" when there is no peace to be had. Severe, grievous consequences usually follow the pursuit of the impossible. The future of your nation is at stake. Contact Sorge Diaz by email at sld1776@gmail.com and visit his website: http://www.westernresistance.com/ |
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THE US AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 8, 2007. |
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This was written by Patrick Poole and it was published in
American Thinker |
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Western media and Beltway foreign policy establishments are engaged in a push to rehabilitate the image of the Muslim Brotherhood in order to convince US diplomats to initiate a dialogue with the organization. The Muslim Brotherhood has spawned virtually every single Islamic terrorist outfit in the world. But one of their central claims these days is that the Brothers long ago rejected the "offensive jihad" ideology of their leading theorist, Sayyid Qutb, found in his 1964 book, Signposts. Invariably, they cite the circulation and later publication of Hassan al-Hudaybi's Preachers, Not Judges, during the late 1960s and 1970s in Egypt, as proof of the Brotherhood's break with Qutbian jihadist ideology. The late Hudaybi's status as the second Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, to which he was appointed after founder Hassan al-Banna's assassination in 1949, is invoked as further evidence of the book's ultimate authority as the organization's official philosophy and methodology. The problem with the apologists' narrative is that scholars over the past decade have discovered that Hassan al-Hudaybi did not author Preachers, Not Judges, and its target was not Sayyid Qutb, who is never mentioned in the text itself or even in the footnotes. Contrary to the claims of the apologists that Preachers, Not Judges has represented the ideological core of the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1960s, Qutb's Signposts remains a standard part of the organization's introductory membership curriculum (including the Muslim American Society in the US), making Signposts one of the top-selling books in the Muslim world and appearing in numerous translations, while Preachers, Not Judges has not been reprinted in Egypt for more than three decades, and hasn't appeared in print anywhere in the Arabic world since 1985. Furthermore, Hudaybi, who did not leave much in the way of writings behind (one observer, Muslim Sister Zaynah al-Ghazali, remarks that he "had rarely left books or a trace of his thoughts on paper"), made absolutely no effort to promote the book that has since been attributed to him. To the contrary, he advocated positions much in line with Qutb's philosophy, and in fact, it was Hudaybi that was responsible for explaining Qutb's book, authorizing its publication (since Qutb himself was in jail), and recommending it to the Brotherhood's followers. Perhaps the most recent example of this appeal to Preachers, Not
Judges as proof of the Muslim Brotherhood's ideological
rehabilitation can be found in last week's edition of the New York
Times Magazine
Qutb remains a heroic figure for many Egyptians. But Ibrahim Hudaybi, the young activist who sent me the text message about the arrest, pointed out to me when we met the next day that his own grandfather, Hasan Hudaybi, who replaced al-Banna as supreme guide and was jailed along with Qutb, wrote a book from prison, Preachers, Not Judges, designed to reassert the brotherhood's commitment to peace and to open debate... Hudaybi wanted to see the brotherhood deal explicitly with the legacy of Qutb, even if doing so might not play well in the hustings. Other, more senior figures I spoke to insisted rather implausibly that Qutb had been misunderstood; but all swore by the philosophy of tolerance and the program of gradual reform laid out in Preachers, Not Judges. (James Traub, "Islamist Democrats," New York Times Magazine [April 29, 2007]) One immediate problem with Traub's representation of Preachers, Not Judges is that the book has absolutely nothing to say about "the brotherhood's commitment to peace and to open debate", nor does it elaborate a "philosophy of tolerance and program of gradual reform". This isn't the argument of the book, which is instead directed towards the theological arguments of Pakistani Islamist writer, Maulana Mawdudi. This is indicative of a common problem among those making positive assertions about the text -- virtually none of them speak or read Arabic, the only language in which the book has appeared. It should be noted that most, if not all, of those advancing these claims are merely repeating the argument made by Nixon Center fellows Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke in their highly-controversial article in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs, "The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood". [Editor's Note: See feature articles on the Foreign Affairs article and other articles on the Muslim Brotherhood on Think-Israel's home page for March-April, 2007.] At the heart of Leiken and Brooke's argument are the dual assertions that the group has "rejected global jihad" and that it "embraces democracy". To support their first claim, they invoke Preachers, Not Judges as the primary piece of evidence of the organization's alleged rejection of their Qutbist past: One issue of enduring concern is Qutb's ambiguous legacy in the Brotherhood. Critiquing "the martyr," as Qutb is known, requires a surgeon's touch: he died in the service of the organization yet had strayed far from the founder's vision. Even Hudaybi's Preachers, Not Judges, an indirect but clear refutation of Qutb, never mentions him. Today, the Brotherhood lionizes Qutb, admittedly a major figure whose views cannot be reduced to jihad. But it straddles a barbed fence in embracing Qutb while simultaneously arguing that his violent teachings were "taken out of context." What lessons will younger members tempted to radical action draw? ("The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood", p. 113) To their credit, they admit that Qutb is nowhere mentioned in the book, but nonetheless contend that Qutb was still the "indirect" subject without identifying any supporting evidence. Elsewhere in their article, Leiken and Brooke spin a story of Hudaybi's soul-searching and intellectual labors while in prison in the 1960s, finally arriving at the conclusion that Qutb was in error: But from his own cell, Hudaybi disputed Qutb's conclusion. Only God, he believed, could judge faith. He rejected takfir (the act of declaring another Muslim an apostate), arguing that "whoever judges that someone is no longer a Muslim ... deviates from Islam and transgresses God's will by judging another person's faith." Within the Brotherhood, Hudaybi's tolerant view-in line with Banna's founding vision-prevailed, cementing the group's moderate vocation. (p. 110) In my contributions to this ongoing debate, I have previously noted ("Showdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, Part 1") that Hudaybi's initial response to Qutb's jihadist manifesto, Signposts, was to hail it as the ideological future of the organization. The French Islamic scholar, Gilles Kepel, describes his excitement: Hudaybi himself (whose opinion became far more measured after 1966) declared that the book vindicated all the hopes he had placed in Sayyid Qutb, who now embodied "the future of the Muslim mission" (da'wa). (Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh [University of California Press, 1993], p. 30) Scholars agree that Preachers, Not Judges was born out of the prison experience of the Muslim Brothers during the 1960s, during which time Qutb and several other Brotherhood leaders were executed. But recent research and new evidence over the past decade have revealed that the circumstances through which the book came about are radically different than what is represented by the Muslim Brotherhood's defenders in the West. One of the recognized scholars on the topic of Preachers, Not Judges is Barbara Zollner, Director of Islamic Studies at Birbeck College, University of London. Not only is the book the topic of her PhD dissertation, but she has a volume on the subject, The Muslim Brotherhood: Hasan al-Hudaybi and Ideology, which is due to be published by Rutledge early next year. At a conference held at Georgetown University in March on the theme
of "Islamist Politics: Contemporary Trajectories in the Arab World"
There are a number of writers who argue that Du'at la Qudat, when it was published in the 1970s, to be exact in 1977, that it is an evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood's turn away from radical thinking, and that it evidences a shift of the Muslim Brotherhood's stance towards a centrist Islamist ideology... What I want to say today are two things. Overall my argument is that Preachers, Not Judges was not written by Hassan al-Hudaybi, and secondly, it is not written as a response to Sayyid Qutb. Dr. Zollner also challenges the claims that the Brotherhood had somehow rejected Qutb based of the group's continued and present promotion of his works, including Signposts: There is an oversimplification of the historical context, because as we know all you have to do is go on their [the Muslim Brotherhood] website today you still have a sub-section where Qutb is referred to and reference is made to his work; Qutb is still held in the Brotherhood's memory, the Brotherhood did not turn away or against Qutb. To say that it that the Muslim Brotherhood issued a refutation in the 1970s rejecting Qutbian thinking, that would contradict exactly that. So I would say that it is more in response to an inner conflict, but it is also a truce, the beginnings of a truce, with Abd' al-Nasser's regime... What Zollner's research has found is that rather than being the product of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership, the book was a collaborative effort by the Egyptian security apparatus and scholars of Al-Azhar University. She cites the testimony of security officials and Brotherhood leaders at the time about the true circumstances of the book's appearance. As the jailed Brotherhood leaders were waiting for signatures on their pardons, the secret service became aware that some among their group had adopted a "moderate" posture as part of a deliberate plan of taqiyya (deception). The authorities responded with the creation of the text of Preachers, Not Judges to respond to the accepted ideology of the group, which was then handed off to the jailed Brotherhood leadership through Hudaybi's son, Ma'mun, with the intent of providing ideological "encouragement" to the prisoners (or more likely, an "imposed truce" by the Nasser regime). An Egyptian scholar, Sayed Khatab, in a 2002 Middle East Studies article on Qutb's ideology, cites the memoirs of Brigadier General Fu'ad Allam, head of the security apparatus during the period when the Brotherhood's leadership was imprisoned, providing further details on the background of the creation of Preachers, Not Judges. The following account is from Allam's tell-all memoirs, which originally appeared in the 1990s in serialized form in the Egyptian daily, Rose el-Youssef. In the mid sixties, Abd al-Nasser decided to release all Muslim Brothers who were in jail at the time. However, the security Authorities (sulutat amniyyah) opposed the decision due to the security policy then in place. Around this time, we obtained information that the Brothers who were brought to jail in 1965 were of three groups, comprising followers of al-Banna, the followers of al-Hudaybi, and the followers of Sayyid Qutb. There was no disagreement among them; they were all agreed that contemporary society was in a condition of jahiliyyah that must be changed to establish the Islamic state. Exactly when an Islamic state should be established varied amongst the three groups... Allam qualifies that several prominent leaders, including Sayyid Qutb's brother, Mohammad (who would remain an important Brotherhood ideologue and later mentor Osama bin Laden while teaching at King Abdel-Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia), quickly rejected the arguments of Preachers, Not Judges, not long after they were released from prison, which is evidence that the jail-house acceptance of the text for some was more for pragmatic than ideological reasons. Shukri, one of those identified as having embraced the program outlined in Preachers, Not Judges, would found the Ja'maat al-Islamiya (Society of Muslims), which would later be known as al-Takfir wa al-Hijra (excommunication and emigration), which would take Qutb's thought to its most extreme. As Khatab states in his own analysis, Hudaybi continued to advocate the essence of Qutb's jihadist teachings: There has been no response to this revelation from either Ma'mun, the son of al-Hudaybi, or from al-Azhar, and there is no reason to reject this new information. Al-Hudaybi, like others of his brothers, believed that Islam is a religion and state. He, like others, described the society of their time as a 'society of jahiliyyah that should be changed and an Islamic state be established'. (Ibid, pp. 150-151) In an earlier article published in 2001 in The Muslim World, Khatab noted both that Hudaybi affirmed Qutb's teachings and never promoted the book that was attributed to him: Al-Hudaybi accepted the theory and practice, namely the book Ma'alim [Qutb's Signposts -- P] and its milestones and recommended them for his group. It is noteworthy that al-Hudaybi did not recommend the book Da'ah wa Laysa Qudah [Preachers, Not Judges -- P], which was attributed to him. (Sayed Khatab, "Al-Hudaybi's Influence on the Development of Islamist Movements in Egypt," The Muslim World 91, 3/4 [Fall 2001], p. 468) Based on the witnesses, such as Fu'ad Allam and other first-hand accounts, who attest to the book not authored by Hudaybi, Khatab examines the argument of Preachers, Not Judges and concludes that the ideology it espouses was directly contrary to Hudaybi's beliefs: Du'ah wa Laysa Qudah (Preachers, Not Judges) was written to claim that hakimiyya (sovereignty) is not a Qu'ranic term mentioned in the Qu'ran. However, the term hukm (from hakama, to govern or to judge) is a Qu'ranic term repeatedly mentioned in the Qu'ran. The author's analysis seeks to separate the term hakimiyya from the term hukm and then denies the Qu'ranic word group of hukm any political connotation. This perspective views Islam as simply a religious without the right to govern and order human life or to organize the daily affairs of the Muslim, a point directly opposite to al-Hudaybi's ideological position...According to this information the book is not al-Hudaybi's and he did not write a single word of it. (p. 465; emphasis added) Khatab suggests that scholarly accounts of this period written prior to this new evidence that assume Hudaybi's authorship of Preachers, Not Judges should be considered "doubtful" and need to be approached "carefully". These evidences raise some important questions in the current debate in the West over the Muslim Brotherhood: is it the case that the journalists and Beltway wonks appealing to Preachers, Not Judges as proof of a "reformed" Brotherhood are simply ignorant of most of the scholarship over the past decade on this topic, or have they determined to bury this evidence with their silence in the hope that it will be ignored? If the former, we have cause to question their credibility as self-appointed experts on the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, and we also have to acknowledge their gullibility in accepting unquestioned the propaganda put out by the group; if the latter, their pretended objectivity is little more than the component of the official duplicity that characterizes the Muslim Brotherhood's long-standing operational methodology. Only they can tell us which it is. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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CRITICAL LESSON
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 8, 2007. |
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A lesson not learned: Maj.-General (res) Yaakov Amidror has done a briefing for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs entitled, "Strategic Lessons of the Winograd Report." Put simply, he says for six years we thought it was OK to ignore the build-up of weaponry by Hezbollah, as long as it was kept quiet at the border. And now the same thing is happening with Gaza: "Hamas is getting stronger as it organizes itself, digs fortifications underground, and builds up its military capabilities. Israel will have to ask itself whether it is preferable to delay the confrontation with Hamas, because meanwhile there is quiet or a temporary truce or some other illusory understanding. We are likely to find ourselves in exactly the same position in Gaza that we created with respect to Lebanon. http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=0&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=
~~~~~~~~~~ The IDF has presented to the Cabinet a contingency plan for Gaza (in lieu of a major invasion): -- Create a buffer zone on the Palestinian side of the border with Gaza to allow a temporary IDF presence and keep terrorists at a distance. Olmert has not approved this. He will convene the Security Cabinet next week to discuss the growing military power in Gaza and proposed IDF plans to counter it. One gets the feeling that the day of reckoning here is coming, that it is inevitable. ~~~~~~~~~~ According to Israel Radio today, the spokesman for Izzadin a-Kassam, the armed wing of Hamas, warned that if there is an IDF incursion into Gaza, Shalit's life will be in danger and he may even be killed. Hamas later denied the statement. Yisrael Katz (Likud) has absolutely the right idea: Olmert should tell Hamas that if Shalit is killed Haniyeh will be assassinated. Enough of the bad guys calling the shots. ~~~~~~~~~~ The US, according to Haaretz, is nervous about the possibility of a major IDF operation in Gaza and is hoping that security forces loyal to Abbas will act against the terrorists so that an IDF incursion won't be necessary. This is not a joke, this is what they hope. I wrote the other day about how these forces are reluctant to fire upon other Palestinians. The security forces of Abbas did do one thing the other day: They located a smuggling tunnel near Rafah and covered it with cement (although I didn't hear about any terrorists associated with the tunnel being caught). Aaron Lerner of IMRA says, with considerable wisdom, that this is a pointless exercise and that the pouring of cement over a tunnel entrance simply provided a photo op: Look world, we're doing what we're supposed to do! Remember that this is just one tunnel, and there are dozens. If the benchmarks provided by the US were serious, declares Lerner, they would include such items as destruction of training camps and specifically identified fortifications; closing down of the rocket factories; and confiscation of rockets, weapons, and explosives. All of this can be quantified. The point is that, even if all smuggling were halted (and it won't be), there is enough going on inside of Gaza to constitute a very genuine threat to us. But this is conveniently ignored. Please, keep in mind as you hear news, that if the terrorists were to stop launching rockets (temporarily, while still possessing them) and stop bringing in new weaponry, they would be given a respite -- no IDF ground operation, for sure, and almost certainly a halt on targeted assassinations and the like. But during this time they would be able to continue to train their forces, build their bunkers, build more weapons and rockets inside of Gaza -- with even greater ease. And no one would say a word. No smuggling? No rockets fired? Hey, great! This is the situation that Gen. Amidror is addressing. As long as the risk to us sits there in Gaza, unimpeded, we are not in a good situation even if there is apparent quiet. ~~~~~~~~~~ I will add that this scenario dovetails precisely with Muslim Arab military practice. They have well-established policies of signing peace treaties (as Muhammad himself did) and calling ceasefires (called hudna) temporarily to give them a chance to regroup. Too bad those making policy -- including most specifically here the US State Department -- don't seem to have noticed this. There is all too little attention paid to Muslim Arab mindset. ~~~~~~~~~~ "For several weeks now the Gaza Strip has been burning," writes Avi Issacharoff in Haaretz. He's not talking about Hamas-Fatah tensions, but, rather, battles between large groups, often affiliated with clans and leveraging for economic advantage. I reported on the beginnings of this phenomenon right after the "disengagement." Areas of land that were supposed to be used for public projects were co-opted by armed clans, and the PA was powerless to do anything about it. "Nearly every day for the past two weeks, men, women and children have been killed in Gaza." Approximately 100,000 men in Gaza possess weapons. Additionally there are attacks by fanatical religious al-Qaida affiliated groups, often aimed against symbols of the West such as Internet cafes and libraries. The media, which is eager to track violence between political factions or between Palestinians and Israelis, is largely ignoring this, says Issacharoff. Even more significantly, the so-called human rights organizations are ignoring it. Groups that scrupulously monitor Israeli roadblocks are silent here, even as women are victims of "honor killings." ~~~~~~~~~~ Speaking of the duplicity of "human rights" organizations, let me here mention Betselem -- an Israeli group founded in 1989 to monitor Israeli behavior in the "occupied" territories. I was present at a left wing conference a few years ago, at which the executive director of this group publicly acknowledged that they use human rights issues for a political agenda. Their material, which receives wide coverage, is often slanted and unreliable; Betselem is known, for example, for a practice of taking eye witness "accounts" without documentation or corroboration. Now Betselem has issued a report regarding Israeli torture of security detainees. Know, if you should see this, that it is not a reliable report. The Israeli Ministry of Justice has put out a lengthy letter as a rebuttal to this report, which it says is "fraught with mistakes, groundless claims and inaccuracies."
For details, see:
Please be aware, as well, that The New Israel Fund supports Betselem. ~~~~~~~~~~ Well, Condoleezza Rice has made a smart decision: She's cancelled her trip here, planned for next week. Too much political turmoil. We should not think, however, cautioned State Department Sean McCormack, that this means there will be reduction in focus on helping the process along: "...we're working closely with the government of Prime Minister Olmert, as well as partners on the Palestinian side." ~~~~~~~~~~ On the political front: The Labor party is in a place of turmoil and indecision with regard to staying in the coalition. The meeting of its Central Committee, which was supposed to take place Thursday, has been postponed, and today Barak held a brief press conference. I wish it were possible for me to report with coherence on what Barak said, but there are inconsistencies or, perhaps better put, deliberate ambiguities. Put briefly: Barak thinks Olmert has to assume responsibilities for failures and quit. If he -- Barak -- wins the Labor primary at the end of the month, and becomes party leader, he will consent to having Labor in the coalition with Kadima only if Olmert resigns. However, Barak is willing to serve in a transitional government as defense minister. Because, after all, there has to be a period of transition -- after which there would be a reformulated coalition or Kadima would call for elections. And he did say at one point that he would serve as defense minister in the coalition so he'd be meeting his obligation. And during that transition time he would be able to lend his considerable expertise to carrying out Winograd reforms. If Olmert doesn't agree to resign by the time of the Labor primaries, Barak will work towards early elections. Got that? The part about early elections surprised me, because were this to happen, Barak wouldn't serve in any government capacity because there would be a Likud coalition. Doing this for the good of the country? Barak? When asked by a member of the press whether he should also take responsibility for failures, according to what Winograd addressed, he had no comment. Barak is not a humble man. Ofir Pines-Paz, a fellow candidate for Labor leadership, commented that: "Barak has stopped keeping silent quietly and he is now keeping silent out loud. He is making opposing statements." I rather liked that. ~~~~~~~~~~ To hedge his bets, Olmert has been negotiating the entrance into the coalition of Degel Hatorah (banner of the Torah), a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) group -- in this instance Ashkenaz, non-Hasidic -- that is part of United Torah Judaism. Seems the issue for Degel Hatorah is promotion of an education bill that would enhance support for their schools. This is what I hate about coalition politics. To some this is no more than business as usual. For me this is a form of political prostitution. Degel Hatorah, I assure you, is not ideologically in line with Olmert. ~~~~~~~~~~ I have had this for a couple of weeks, thanks to Sam Freedenberg.
This is a link to a photo. It will speak for itself. Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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SOME OF MY NEIGBORS SEEM TO BE TERRORISTS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 8, 2007. |
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This was posted by Judith Apter Klinghoffer on the History and
New Media blogsite:
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I woke up to the news that 6 Muslim extremists living in Cherry Hill were arrested for plotting terrorist attacks on Fort Dix where some of my other neighbors as well as some of my former students work and train. Michelle Malkin posts parts of the FBI affidavit. It is not pretty. Four are Kosovar Albanians, brothers and illegal aliens (Dritan, Eliver and Shain Duka)and Agron Abdullahu were from the former Yogoslavia. Oh, yes, Fort Dix is the place chosen as a safe heaven for 20,000 Kosovar Albanians by the US military in 1999. Al Qaeda and Iranian extremist activity in the former Yugoslavia is well documented both before and after the Clinton administration went to war on their behalf. As I wrote in Why is Richard Clark seething? it was part of its anti-Islamist strategy and that strategy, as Julia Goren explained earlier this month is not yet dead. The other two, Serdar Tatar, a pizza deliverer whose family owns a pizzeria near Ft. Dix, is from Turkey and Mohamad Shnewer is from Jordan. I wonder if I ever bumped into any of them in the supermarket or the mall.
In the picture to the Left, the organizers are left to right: Alan Respler, JCRC Executive Director; Farhat Biviji, Muslim lecturer; Rabbi Lewis Eron, Jewish lecturer; Gloria Mazziotti, co-chair of the Catholic Jewish Commission and co-chair of the Breaking Bread program committee; Msgr. John Frey, Roman Catholic lecturer; and Zia Rahman, managing director of the Voorhees American Muslim Society and a co-chair of the three-way dialogue group. http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:5jUSzSkjpJsJ:www.jcrcsnj.org/ +jewish+muslim+catholic,+south+jersey&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&ie=UTF-8 Last July a number of us participated in the Turkish Interfaith Dialogue Center interfaith trip to Turkey. We were not only of different faiths but we were hosted by Turkish families and viewed Turkish sites of special interest to Jews, Christians and Muslims. It was wonderful. This past weekend I was invited to participate in a ground breaking for a new mosque in Cherry Hill. I could not make it but many of my Christian and Jewish friends did. Indeed, I feel bad for our Muslims friends who have worked for this mosque for years. This news must break their heart even more than it breaks ours. We are having our annual community gothering later this month. The plans will have to be revamped. It is not going to be easy but it has never been more important. We are in the midst of a vicious war on terror. Muslims are also in the midst of an all important struggle for the future direction of their faith. Dan Pipes and Sudheendra Kulkarni write about the march of a million moderates in Turkey and Pakistan. But recent PIPA polls also showed that while large majorities of Muslims reject attacks on civilians, they do not reject attacks on soldiers. I suspect that is the reason for the planned attack on Fort Dix. We need a moderate Muslim organized march in Cherry Hill. American Muslims must make it clear that American soldiers are their soldiers and they do not support attack on our sons and daughters in the military. I will gladly march in support of my friends but I cannot march instead of them.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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JIHAD IN JERSEY?
Posted by Gary Bauer, May 8, 2007. |
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The news today is being dominated by reports that six "Islamic radicals" were arrested last night for planning to attack and kill U.S. soldiers stationed at Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey. According to various reports, four are believed to be ethnic Albanians, one was born in Jordan and one was born in Turkey. Three are illegal aliens. The "good news" is that the FBI was reportedly tracking this cell for more than a year, thanks to a concerned citizen who turned in a suspicious videotape of the men shooting at a firing range and yelling "Allah Akbar." As a result of this tip, the Joint Terrorism Task Force initiated a surveillance probe and successfully infiltrated the cell. A sting operation was set up where the jihadists thought they were going to purchase Russian AK-47s to be used in their assault on Fort Dix. According to a statement released by the U.S. Attorney's office, "Their alleged intention was to conduct an armed assault on the army base and to kill as many soldiers as possible." The "bad news" is that some law enforcement officials were quoted in a CNN report attempting to downplay the significance of the arrests and the plot. Here is an excerpt of the CNN story: "While authorities are glad to have arrested them, the individuals are 'hardly hard core terrorists,' one law enforcement source said. Another source said that while the allegations are 'troubling,' they are 'not the type that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up.'" Once again, when they take down an Islamic plot those charged with protecting us seem to be more interested in putting some sort of politically correct spin on it, downplaying the significance. Why are these "law enforcement sources" trying to convince us that it's really no big deal that foreign jihadists were planning to attack a U.S. Army base? The "authorities" quoted by CNN are either ignorant or incompetent. The FBI's affidavit states that these thugs watched jihadist recruiting videos, including the "last will and testament" of several 9/11 hijackers, laughed at footage of U.S. Marines being blown apart in IED attacks, trained in the Pocono Mountains, obtained maps of Fort Dix and wanted to kill at least 100 soldiers! If that doesn't make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, there's something wrong. The lives of our soldiers, their families and innocent civilians
who could have been caught in the crossfire deserve more respect than
that.
UPDATE: More Thoughts on Jersey Jihadists If past patterns hold, in a few days the story of the six men arrested in New Jersey on charges of plotting a massacre of U.S. troops at Fort Dix will drop out of the news. It shouldn't. Here are two lessons the plot holds for big media, left wing politicians and Americans ready to "cut and run" from the struggle against Islamofascism. Lesson One: Our best defense against domestic enemies already in the U.S. is an involved citizenry. The plot was uncovered because an unnamed store clerk became suspicious of the contents of a tape the men dropped off that they wanted to convert to a DVD. The clerk's vigilance went against the grain of political correctness. He risked being laughed at. He could have been sued for "racial profiling." The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) has already filed suit against airline passengers who were concerned about the suspicious behavior of six imams on their flight. But when legislation came before the House of Representatives to protect citizens who do come forward from lawsuits like CAIR's, 121 liberals voted against it. We should tell groups like CAIR to "take a hike" and make it clear we want our citizens to err on the side of vigilance. Lesson Two: We can and will continue to have the debate about whether Islam is a "religion of peace" or not. But here's the bottom line: self-described Islamists are at war with us. They have killed us and are planning to kill more of us in the name of their faith. I welcome every Muslim who wants to join us and fight these thugs -- I hope many of them will. But, in the meantime, we have to clear the cob webs out of our head and get on with the business of defeating these murderers. How were these six men radicalized? What mosque did they attend and what was being taught there? This is simply the latest in a string of incidents: March 2006, Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, an Iranian student at UNC tries to turn a rented SUV into a weapon of mass destruction by driving into a crowd of students. He later told the court that he was "thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah." July 2006, Naveed Afzal Haq opens fire on a Jewish community center in Seattle, killing one and wounding several others because, "I want these Jews to get out." August 2006, Omeed Aziz Popal targets San Francisco pedestrians with his SUV, killing one and sending 18 more to the hospital. February 2007, Sulejmen Talovic, an 18 year-old Bosnian Muslim, opens fire at a shopping mall in Salt Lake City, killing five. Oh, and one more thing: At least three of the men arrested in the plot to attack Fort Dix were in the U.S. illegally! Ironically under a lot of the "amnesty light" immigration proposals being pushed by Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and yes, even the White House, they could have become citizens. We've got to stop the lunacy! Fox News reports today that federal investigators are trying to determine how the three Duka brothers, half of the "Fort Dix Six," got into this country. There is speculation that they may have been smuggled across the border. Two years ago, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that illegal aliens from Middle Eastern countries were coming into the U.S. with false identities. Any debate on immigration "reform" must make U.S. national security its top priority by first securing our borders. Then we should start seriously considering ways to keep Saudi-funded Wahabbism and radical Islamists out of the country. Christian Martyrdom A few weeks ago three Christians working at a Bible publishing house in Turkey were brutally murdered by a group of young Islamofascist University students. Reports indicate they were tortured for three hours before finally having their throats slit. U.S. media generally relegated the story to the back pages. I can only imagine what the head lines would be if a group of Evangelicals or Jews had murdered three Islamists. But we don't murder in cold blood. Our friend Chuck Colson did a moving radio editorial on the funeral for the three men. He reported that as one coffin was brought into the churchyard five hundred mourners broke into a chorus based on the book of Lamentations: "The compassion of the Lord never fails; His mercy never ceases." One of the men's wives quoted Christ on the Cross, saying of her husband's killers, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." If you want to help Christians working in Turkey, you can get information on Chuck Colson's web site -- www.breakpoint.org. < This comes from Gary Bauer of the American Values organization. Contact them by phone at 703-671-9700 or by fax at 703-671-1680. |
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WHERE ARE YOU WINSTON CHURCHILL?
Posted by Lawrence Uniglicht, May 8, 2007. |
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As confidence in a democratically elected leadership erodes, ability to lead effectively and judiciously is compromised. Ehud Olmert survives three no confidence votes on 05/07/2007 in the Israeli Parliament, still his tenure as an effective Prime Minister remains in doubt. Indeed, at least Israel and other parliamentary democracies have a mechanism to remove failed leaders, a mechanism to begin a reversal of negative psychological as well as tangible momentum in a nation. The United States has no truly equivalent tool imbedded in its governmental infrastructure. Of course, high officials including but not confined to the U.S. President and Vice President, risk impeachment proceedings, but that is very rarely implemented, and indeed even more rarely successful in bringing about change. Early elections, occasionally held within parliamentary democracies, do not occur in the United States, at least at the level of the White House. Rules of succession are in order if say the president resigns, can no longer perform his duties, or is no longer with us. Rules of succession do not necessarily bring about the change needed to cope with the crisis of failed or fallen leadership, as the party in power can remain in power, thus may not reflect the will of the people. The United States populace currently is beset with little collective confidence in its national leadership, especially current stewards of its White House. No doubt, the chaotically evolving Iraq war, mismanagement during and after devastating hurricanes pummeled New Orleans and the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, lobbying and corruption scandals mostly related to and generated by Republican politicos, and a variety of other issues have created this lack of faith. Republicans paid sorely in the recent Congressional elections, but the White House, except for its Secretary of Defense, has remained pretty much intact, yet substantially weakened. A parliamentary system, allowing votes of confidence, might have altered that landscape even more. Indeed, a weakened White House bodes poorly for America's allies, especially Israel. Would a U.S. Administration, in need of bolstering its domestic as well as world image, try to morph its head of state into a can-do president by leaning on Israel to sacrifice land for a meaningless promise of peace from wily Arabs, enhancing a potentially tattered legacy for that man presumably in charge? Might U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice exhort Prime Minister Olmert, or any other Israeli leader, to in effect sacrifice his or her good sense by giving Abu Mazen; Holocaust trivializer, Arafat understudy, and all around well-dressed smoothie; whatever he wants? Might a less potent White House, in need of domestic tranquility, aggressively pursued by a Democratically led Congress, plunge into desperate strategies in regards to Iran or Syria, attempting to turn things around? Might Bush and company, battleships deployed near the Persian coast, initiate another war in the volatile Middle East, despite recent intelligence estimates indicating Iran is well-armed with perilously potent technology, further suggesting such aggression could be catastrophic as proxies worldwide would likely perpetrate lethal homicidal/suicidal acts of martyrdom? Might an inordinate number of such acts be focused on Israel, Israeli and American interests, or within the United States itself? Might today's intelligence logically imply that strong posturing is indeed preferable to actually taking a precipitous plunge into catastrophe canyon? Weakened insecure leaders are more likely than confident leaders to roll the dice, especially those with swagger that are used to having their way, in an attempt to regain control. No doubt, the preemptive arrest on 05/08/2007 of Islamic militants planning to murder soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey should be a wake up call to all Americans, proving their nation has been infiltrated by scum of the Earth, willing to do anything in the name of a delusional mutated God, born of hatred spewed by malignantly interpreted Koranic verse? If ever that superpower nation needs assertive but not reckless leadership it is now! Partisan politics must be abandoned at this juncture, especially when another ill-conceived war could spread like wildfire, imperiling the entire world. The most effective way to implode the two competing major heads of the Islamic Medusa, Iran as well as Wahhabi madrassa financing Saudi Arabia, consequently cutting off funding to cells of metastasizing terrorists, is for Western and Eastern industrial nations to cease buying OPEC oil! Non-Muslim sources will have to temporarily pick up the pace of oil production, while prescient movers and shakers worldwide concurrently rebuff special interests such as Big Oil, open their wallets, and seriously strategize a way to enable the world's keenest minds to develop cheap and efficient alternative energy sources, pronto, as if the existence of civilized mankind was at stake. What other rational choice is there? It is imperative that strong leaders, comprehending the plight radical Islam presents to the human species, 'seize the day'. Feckless leaders, obsessed with other concerns, must not be obstructionists. Where are you Winston Churchill, when you are ever needed to coordinate this daunting plan of attack? Lawrence Uniglicht is a career civil servant, working for the Social Security Administration. He advocates for the State of Israel with an American perspective. He writes, "Advocating for the disrespected underdog has been my passion, no doubt Israel falls into that category." Contact him by email at luniglicht@snip.net |
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IT'S THE OIL, STUPID
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 8, 2007. |
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The nest of the Dragons is the place where Terrorist's eggs are laid and where brood upon brood is hatched and raised from this nest. I speak of Iran, Syria specifically. To kill the Dragon and burn its nests is the only solution for the victimized Free West. Time is of the essence as more of these monstrosities hatch and grow to full maturity. The Dragons of Islam are flesh eaters and only human flesh satisfies their appetites! This article is called "It's the Oil, Stupid" and it is by Victor
Davis Hanson. It appeared April 12, 2007 in |
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It is usually silly to offer a single solution to complex problems. But it's hard not to when looking at the serial savagery in Iran and the Arab world. Oil -- the huge profits it provides and the insidious influence it gives those selling it -- explains most of the world's worries over the Middle East. No, that does not mean the United States is fighting in Iraq to get control of its petroleum. For all the charges of "No blood for oil," the American occupation has neither been able to reverse a decline in oil production in Iraq nor alleviate skyrocketing oil prices worldwide. And, recently, the first new contracts of the now-transparent Iraqi oil ministry went to non-American companies. What it does mean, though, is that the vast imported-petroleum needs of the West, India and China, and the resulting huge profits that pour into oil-exporting states, have super-sized the Middle East's problems. Currently, much of the Islamic world is struggling to come to grips with modernity and globalization. Yet while the West pays little attention to disenchanted Muslims in India, Indochina or Malaysia, we focus our attention on Iranian and Arab radicals. They alone, thanks to oil, have the cash to fund jihadists and hate-filled madrassas. The Palestinian problem illustrates this point. Since Israel's occupation of land taken after the 1967 war, much of the world has seen this issue as threatening to regional and global peace. Such old territorial disputes are, of course, common -- and go relatively unnoticed -- throughout the world. Japan's Kurile Islands are still held by Russia. Tibet has been absorbed by China. Nuclear Pakistan and nuclear India fight over Kashmir. The list goes on. Yet it's the anger over the tiny West Bank that in the past caused the Arab patrons of the Palestinians to embargo oil to the West and create long gas lines in Europe and America. As a result, a single suicide bomber from Jericho earns more press than anonymous thousands slaughtered in Darfur. Today, terrorists operate from East Timor to Peru. But global anxiety has been continually focused on Middle Eastern terrorists, from the Palestinian assassins and hijackers of the 1970s to al-Qaida's suicide bombers. These killers alone have had the means to disrupt the Western way of life. Take away Hezbollah's Iranian petrodollars and it could never afford weapons and foot soldiers to slaughter Westerners in the Middle East and beyond. An oil-rich Saddam Hussein was a threat only because he had purchased more military hardware than is owned by most European powers -- and used it to attack oil-exporting neighbors in a bid to control more of the world's petroleum reserves. In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is confident that powerful nations abroad will overlook his thuggery in hopes of getting a chance to buy his country's oil -- or in worry that any tension would send world prices even higher. Ahmadinejad also knows -- and fears -- that without supporting terrorists or trying to acquire a nuclear bomb that he'd be just another tinhorn loudmouth like Cuba's Fidel Castro or Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. At the same time, vast oil profits do little to help -- and probably much to harm -- Middle Eastern countries. Unlike in places where economic achievement is the result of savvy business leaders, a hardworking labor force and a literate public, tribal hierarchies in the Middle East simply metamorphosed into billion-dollar nations by virtue of sitting atop crude oil. One result is a big inferiority complex in the Middle East. There is always the fear that gas and oil reserves will dry up, leaving a Libya, Iran or Saudi Arabia with as much global attention as a Chad or Bulgaria. Another result is unstable societies. When nations acquire collective wealth gradually through their own industry, a middle class can arise. But in the Middle East, a few tribal and religious sects with oil are fabulously wealthy; most everyone else is abjectly poor. Illegitimate monarchies and jittery dictatorships -- always in fear of coups, terrorists and revolutions -- depend upon oil-needy foreigners, trading scarce oil and endless petrodollars for export goods and protection. If the United States could curb its voracious purchases of foreign oil by using conservation, additional petroleum production, nuclear power, alternate fuels, coal gasification and new technologies, the world price might return to below $40 a barrel. That decline would dry up the oil profits of those in the Middle East who now so desperately use them to ensure that their own problems must also be the world's. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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SURVEILLANCE IN MOSQUES: PROBLEMS AND ISSUES BY THE FBI
Posted by Marion D.S. Dreyfus, May 8, 2007. |
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I attended a Fordham Law School talk on "Surveillance in Mosques." The Panel consisted of a female FBI agent (Muslim), a professor on the law involving surveillance, and a tall, thin, red-headed Irish Catholic convert to Islam. Afterwards, I confronted some of the "students" in the audience, sharing with them that though Cho Seung-Hui was the sole Korean who had ever done anything 'bad' in the US history (aside from car accidents and stuff), Koreans in this country have been pronounced in their apologies and expressions of sorrow for what Cho perpetrated. I was not a popular figure, though they hastened to riposte anything I said that was even tangentially critical. Their overall feeling was one of arrogant master-race kind of thing. They were scrupulous at denying, despite my insistence and explanation for same, that "Ismail Ax" meant anything at all on Cho's arm. They brought up the ramblings of that 'mad Korean,' and tried to prove their nonexistent point that "No one knows what Ismail Ax' "means -- though of course we all know that Hebrew is Ishmael, and Arabic is Ismail. Hebrew is the ram's horn. Arabic is the ax. They tried to make him exclusively mad, Christian mad, not Muslim mad. They were not happy to hear that I knew more than to listen to their mendacious excuses. He brought up, they expostulated, Jesus Christ! I mentioned that JC is a prophet in their religion too, but the arm tattoo meant more than a mere happenstance of verbal meandering. Why is it, I asked these fahbrente muslims, that after 9/11, nobody of the American Muslim community did that apology or sorrow thing? Why is it, though they told me that "CAIR and lots of other" (misleading and fake) community outreach Muslim orgs supposedly put out fatwas after the destruction, their fatwas were vague and nonspecific, and never apologized or expressed grief for the lost dead? And never condemned the Saudis or the men responsible...? Oh, no!, they rejoindered, the media would not be interested in carrying any of their apologies... What rubbish. On the contrary, Americans and American media had hunted for any shred of a sign of apology -- and not glee -- after all those deaths. I reminded them that man-bites-dog (Arab Muslims apologizing to the country instead of pleading injury and fear of retaliation, which the FBI woman said was the very first and second and third response of her colleagues and family and friends' responses) would indeed have been terrific, and would have been on all the media, contrary to what these whitewashers and apologist-hypocrites were earnestly trying to convince me of. I asked a Muslim woman from Poughkeepsie why a Reformation has not come, when the enlightened religions had had theirs some centuries ago. Oh, and on the subject: Why is it still okay to beat one's wife, infibulate one's daughters, and murder a raped woman? No, no, I was told, with some exasperation. The Book cannot be altered, but you can choose not to follow these religious dicta. In fact, early in May, 5:30 pm, I am going to a seminar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on "Domestic Violence & Islam: Muslim responses to D.V." (Speakers: Prof. Edw. Snajar and Muhammad Yaseen) Sure. Men can choose not to strike their wives. The pure beauty of Shari'a, Poughkeepsie exhaled at me, is so wonderful, ..."though US jurisprudence is so much more...reliable and dependable...". Such rot, in everyone one encountered -- fear of acknowledging all the evil perpetrated by these people. The convert tried to criticize the FBI for "spying" in mosques, but I pointed out that the topic of the evening was quite different, that the title of the panel was Surveillance in Mosques -- and spying is nowhere near the meaning of surveillance, which implies danger and potential or demonstrated past mayhem from the surveilled. He acknowledged that I had a point. Although the moderator had seen my hand up for a lot of questions, she never saw fit to recognize me. Every time I am at one of these 'delicate' topics handled by Fordham Law, in fact, they seem to make it a policy never to recognize me. I have to remember to maintain a zomboid, kewpie look, so I neither intimidate nor instill fear. My colleagues tell me I have the look of 'trouble' on my visage. I ended up unconvinced of their sincerity as to feeling bad for the Americans who had perished. Instead, they turned their lasered condescension and superiority on me, since I was the only one, it appeared, willing to confront them on their assertions that they had been rallying and marching in support "all over the country," but somehow, somewhere, not a single medium of news exchange had managed to catch their regrets and so-deep expressions of solace for the innocents who lost their lives. As if. Marion Dreyfus is a writer and travelor; she has taught English in China on the university level. She can be contacted at mdreyfus@nyc.rr.com |
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IS THE UNITED KINGDOM ISRAEL'S MOST DANGEROUS ENEMY?
Posted by Eliyahu mTsiyon, May 8, 2007. |
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Here is information on British policy towards Israel -- and in
favor of Hamas -- from an Italian newspaper translated into English.
The translation was posted on
There is an update by Melanie Philips at the end of the article. |
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This post's headline must sound absurd, bizarre -- even insane -- to many readers. But if we study the history of British governmental and semi-official actions regarding Jews and Zionism since 1920, then this conclusion becomes likely, although not everyone would be convinced. The first thing to do is to detach the grand flowery words of politicians and "statesmen" from their actual policy. In the American context, George W talks of a "war on terror." However, in fact, he has often favored terrorist movements and their enablers, including their financiers, such as the Saudi royal family who have in turn favored many American officials and ex-officials involved in US Middle Eastern policy with jobs and money and other gifts. Just lately, George's secretary of state, Miss Condi, has submitted demands that Israel remove checkposts in Judea-Samaria, an action which would facilitate terrorist attacks on Jewish Israeli civilians. Is Rice unaware that the various Arab mass murderous terrorist groups are in a very aggressive state of mind now, chomping at the bit for more chances to attack Israel?? Which they themselves frankly admit. Only Miss Condi doesn't seem to hear. So much for the gap between fine words and reprehensible deeds on the part of US diplomacy. The British are past masters at the art of duplicity, hypocrisy, and playing off one side against the other. They have perfected the gambit of "let's-you-and-him-fight." Meanwhile the British sit on the sidelines and claim to judge others' morality. They are also masters of propaganda and its big sister, psychological warfare. The mainstream media in the USA and in much of Western Europe overlook the real situation, preferring paranoid fantasies of total USA support for Israel or even "Jewish Neo-Con" or "Zionist" control of Western policy. The British "leftist" press organs like the Guardian, the Independent, and the BBC may be the worst. In any event, the Italian newspaper Il Riformista, organ of the Italian Movimento per le Ragioni del Socialismo [close to the Italian Radical Party], is more truthful than most of the English-language press in the UK and USA. See right there, a good reason for Americans to learn foreign languages. Otherwise you will not know what is really going on outside the USA. Il Riformista, in an article from July 2005, gives us a glimpse of anti-Israel policy planning in the British Foreign Office. Bear in mind that when the July 7, 2005, mass murder bombings took place in London, Blair was hosting a G8 [the eight major industrial countries] meeting at Gleneagles in Scotland. These terrorist attacks allowed Blair to present a surprise at the G8 summit with a helpful sense of urgency. Note what the surprise was: For Months Blair Has Been Pondering a Surprise Dialogue with Hamas and a Marshall Plan No doubt, it was well worth the 3 billion dollars, to obtain in exchange a condemnation by mass murdering terrorists of acts of terrorist mass murder committed by others. But did all of Britain's pandering to Hamas change the nature of the beast? We won't insult the reader's intelligence by answering the question. But let's consider other implications of the information in this article. As early as late 2002, Alastair Crooke of the British East Jerusalem consulate had been meeting with Hamas leaders. This was two years before Arafat died and more than three years before Hamas won -- or supposedly won -- elections to the palestinian authority legislative council. We know from other sources that Crooke was encouraging talks in Cairo between Hamas and Fatah and Egyptian authorities. All that time, Crooke and his superiors in London were not troubled by the explicit genocidal threats against Jews and Israel in the Hamas charter. From late 2002 till today, the Hamas has not changed its principles, its genocidal goals or its mass murderous methods. The Hamas has stated its position rather frankly over and over. Either the British foreign affairs specialists have a hard time understanding what those goals, principles, and purposes are -- as if they had no experts who understood Arabic -- or the British policy planners in the Foreign Office don't really care. Going by the British record of policy towards Jews since the 1939 "White Paper on Palestine," one concludes that the British don't care or perhaps even support the Hamas' hatred of Jews for their own reasons. It is also noteworthy that the British Foreign Office had great influence over other great powers at the July 2005 G8 summit meeting. Tony Blair even obtained American acquiescence to his supposed emergency allocation for the palestinian authority. At the same time, reasonable people understand that showering money on mass murderous terrorists does not lead them to be peaceful but to intensify their attacks -- which have already elicited incentives in the form of the allocations. Update by Melanie Philips, May 2, 2007: Last February, Tony Blair suggested that the British government might be prepared to do business with 'the more sensible elements of Hamas' in order to restore negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. This was about as rational as suggesting in 1942, say, that one might do business with the more sensible elements of the SS. Note that Tony Blair's position was more dangerous than that of two Arab leaders -- at least in this regard. Can our conclusion about the UK as an enemy of Israel be justified?
Eliyahu m'Tiyon's website address is http://ziontruth.blogspot.com
This article is archived at:
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TOMB OF KING HEROD DISCOVERED AT HERODIUM BY HEBREW UNIVERSITY ARCHAEOLOGIST
Posted by Avodah, May 8, 2007. |
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This comes from IMRA: Independent Media Review and Analysis, Website: www.imra.org.il |
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News Release
Jerusalem, May 8, 2007 -- The long search for Herod the Great's tomb has ended with the exposure of the remains of his grave, sarcophagus and mausoleum on Mount Herodium's northeastern slope, Prof. Ehud Netzer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Archaeology announced today. Herod was the Roman-appointed king of Judea from 37 to 4 BCE, who was renowned for his many monumental building projects, including the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the palace at Masada, as well as the complex at Herodium, 15 kilometers south of Jerusalem. Herodium is the most outstanding among King Herod's building projects. This is the only site that carries his name and the site where he chose to be buried and to memorialize himself -- all of this with the integration of a huge, unique palace at the fringe of the desert, said Prof. Netzer. Therefore, he said, the exposure of his tomb becomes the climax of this site's research.
The approach to the burial site -- which has been described by the archaeologists involved as one of the most striking finds in Israel in recent years -- was via a monumental flight of stairs (6.5 meters wide) leading to the hillside that were especially constructed for the funeral procession. The excavations on the slope of the mountain, at whose top is the famed structure comprised of a palace, a fortress and a monument, commenced in August 2006. The expedition, on behalf of the Institute of Archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was conducted by Prof. Netzer, together with Yaakov Kalman and Roi Porath and with the participation of local Bedouins. The location and unique nature of the findings, as well as the historical record, leave no doubt that this was Herod's burial site, said Prof. Netzer. The mausoleum itself was almost totally dismantled in ancient times. In its place remained only part of its well built podium, or base, built of large white ashlars (dressed stone) in a manner and size not previously revealed at Herodium. Among the many high quality architectural elements, mostly well decorated, which were spread among the ruins, is a group of decorated urns (made in the form of special jars that were used to store body ashes). Similar ones are to be found on the top of burial monuments in the Nabatean world. The urns had a triangular cover and were decorated on the sides. Spread among the ruins are pieces of a large, unique sarcophagus (close to 2.5 meters long), made of a Jerusalemite reddish limestone, which was decorated by rosettes. The sarcophagus had a triangular cover, which was decorated on its sides. This is assumed with certainty to be the sarcophagus of Herod. Only very few similar sarcophagi are known in the country and can be found only in elaborate tombs such as the famous one at the King's Tomb on Selah a-Din Street in East Jerusalem. Although no inscriptions have been found yet at Herodium, neither on the sarcophagus nor in the building remains, these still might be found during the continuation of the dig. Worthy of note is the fact that the sarcophagus was broken into hundreds of pieces, no doubt deliberately. This activity, including the destruction of the monument, apparently took place in the years 66-72 C.E. during the first Jewish revolt against the Romans, while Jewish rebels took hold of the site, according to Josephus and the archaeological evidence. The rebels were known for their hatred of Herod and all that he stood for, as a "puppet ruler" for the Romans. The search for Herod's tomb, which actively began 30 years ago, focused until the middle of 2006 at Lower Herodium, in an area which was, no doubt, especially built for the funeral and burial of the king -- the "Tomb Estate." In order to reveal there the remains from Herod's days, the expedition was "forced" to first expose a large complex of Byzantine structures (including a church), an effort that demanded many years of digging. The Tomb Estate included two monumental buildings and a large ritual bath (mikveh) as well as the large route (350 meters long and 30 meters wide) which was prepared for the funeral. When no sign of the burial place itself was found within the Tomb Estate, the expedition started to search for it on the slope of the hill, although there seems to be no doubt that the initial intention of the king was to be buried in the estate and that only in a later stage of his life -- apparently when he grew old -- did he change his mind and asked to be buried within the artificial cone which gave the hill of Herodium its current volcano-shape. The main historical source of the Second Temple's days, the historian Josephus Flavius, has described the site of Herodium in detail, as well as the funeral in the year 4 BCE, but not the tomb proper. He wrote as follows: "The king's funeral next occupied his attention. Archelaus, omitting nothing that could contribute to its magnificence, brought forth all the royal ornaments to accompany the procession in honor of the deceased. The bier was of solid gold, studded with precious stones, and had a covering of purple, embroidered with various colors; on this lay the body enveloped in purple robe, a diadem encircling the head and surmounted by a crown of gold, the scepter beside his right hand. Around the bier were Herod's sons and a large group of his relations; these
were followed by the guards, the Thracian contingent, Germans and Gauls, all
equipped as for war. The reminder of the troops marched in front, armed and
in orderly array, led by their commanders and subordinate officers; behind
these came five hundred of Herod's servants and freedmen, carrying spices.
The body was thus conveyed for a distance of two hundred furlongs to
Herodium, where, in accordance with the directions of the deceased, it was
interred. So ended Herod's reign."
Prof. Netzer started his archaeological activity at Herodium in 1972, at first on a small scale. The scope of his work widened with the decision to turn Herodium (the mount together with Lower Herodium) into a national park, which was due to occupy 125 acres. (Until that stage only the mount was proclaimed as a national park and was operated by the Nature and Parks Authority.) The enlargement of the park started in 1980; unfortunately the activity at the site stopped as a result of the first Intifada, but not before the complex of tunnels from the days of Bar-Kokhba, within the mount, were opened to the public. The archaeological excavations at the site, which also stopped in 1987, were renewed 10 years later and continued until 2000, and after a second break, were renewed at the end of 2005. Prof. Netzer gained his first "intimate" acknowledgement of Herodian architecture while joining Prof. Yigael Yadin (in 1963-66), in his expedition at Masada. Netzer's Ph.D. dissertation in archaeology, guided by Prof. Yadin, brought him to initiate excavations both at Lower Herodium and at Jericho -- at the complex of Hasmonean and Herodian Winter Palaces. (The site at Jericho, following Netzer's excavations, includes three palaces of Herod and a hitherto unknown large complex of Hasmonean winter palaces). Additional Herodian structures in other parts of the country were also uncovered by him. He has written various books and articles on the topic of Herodian architecture. Yaakov Kalman, archaeologist and farmer, participated in many excavations throughout the country and took an active part in Netzer's excavations at Masada, Jericho and Herodium. Roi Porath took an active part in the survey of the Judean Desert caves and has many significant finds in his record. The current excavations benefited from donations of private individuals, and the assistance of the Israel Exploration Society and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. Photos of Herodium available via e-mail upon request. For further information:
Contact Avodah by email at avodah15@aol.com
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EXTRA-JUDICIAL EXECUTIONS? SADDAM HAD WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 8, 2007. |
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"CLIP & SAVE"
After the P.A. fired a greater number of rockets at Israel than usual, Israel threatened to fight back. Defense Min. Peretz expressed the usual empty Israeli bombast. Recording his bluster, IMRA remarked, "clip & save" (4/22). The remark indicates doubt that Peretz will fulfill his threat and will need to be reminded of it. It's a safe bet, bombast being typical. "EXTRA-JUDICIAL" EXECUTION? The Palestinian Center for Human Rights calls some recent slayings of Arabs in the P.A. "extra-judicial execution" and an "escalation." Dr. Aaron Lerner remarks, "When Israeli security forces go after terrorists in the West Bank, the preference is to capture them. After all, a captured terrorist can provide vital information towards capturing even more terrorists. Israeli prisons are full of terrorists to illustrate the point -- as are the literally daily announcements of successful operations capturing terrorists." "The terrorists killed in these operations were not 'extra-judicial executions' -- they were terrorists who decided to fight instead of join their fellow terrorists in prison." A way by which Arabs "can avoid such incidents in the future that PCHR doesn't mention: stop engaging in violent 'resistance' -- honor the promise Yasser Arafat gave in return for the start of Oslo." (IMRA, 4/22.) Following the rules of war is not "extra-judicial." Neither is a firefight "execution." Nor do vigorous responses to Arab attacks, escalating ones and terrorist ones at that, require explanation from Israel nor give the Muslims justification for complaining about them as "escalation." It's war. WESTERNERS LEGITIMIZING HAMAS Westerners such as journalist Robert Novak (who has taken the Arab side for years) accept Hamas' assurances in English that it wants peace and ignore its statements in Arabic about plans to "slaughter the Jews." For example, Ismail Radhwan preached on P.A. TV "that Islamic tradition dictates that Muslims must fight and kill the Jews." Another Hamas preacher said, "America and Israel will be annihilated, Allah willing." Diplomats from Norway, Switzerland, and China said they will deal with Hamas (Steven Stalinsky of MEMRI, NY Sun, 4/25, p.5). Mr. Novak has expressed indignation against Israel, but he accepts enemies of his own country. SADDAM HAD WEAPONS OF MASS-DESTRUCTION This is quoted verbatim from:
It's a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It's also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there never were any WMD programmes in Saddam's Iraq to justify the war ostensibly waged to protect the world from Saddam's use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong. Saddam's WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don't know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, 'lost' his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam's WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war. You may be tempted to dismiss this as yet another dodgy claim from a warmongering lackey of the world Zionist neocon conspiracy giving credence to yet another crank pushing US propaganda. If so, perhaps you might pause before throwing this article at the cat. Mr Gaubatz is not some marginal figure. He's pretty well as near to the horse's mouth as you can get. Having served for 12 years as an agent in the US Air Force's Office of Special Investigations, Mr Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was hand-picked for postings in 2003, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Nasariyah in Iraq. His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against US forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies. Between March and July 2003, he says, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq -- two within Nasariyah, one 20 miles south and one near Basra -- which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear programme and UN-proscribed missiles. He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true. This was, in the first place, because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them. Three of them were bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates. They had been constructed through building dams which were removed after the huge subterranean vaults had been excavated so that these were concealed beneath the river bed. The bunker walls were made of reinforced concrete five feet thick. 'There was no doubt, with so much effort having gone into hiding these constructions, that something very important was buried there', says Mr Gaubatz. By speaking to a wide range of Iraqis, some of whom risked their lives by talking to him and whose accounts were provided in ignorance of each other, he built up a picture of the nuclear, chemical and biological materials they said were buried underground. 'They explained in detail why WMDs were in these areas and asked the US to remove them,' says Mr Gaubatz. 'Much of this material had been buried in the concrete bunkers and in the sewage pipe system. There were also missile imprints in the area and signs of chemical activity -- gas masks, decontamination kits, atropine needles. The Iraqis and my team had no doubt at all that WMDs were hidden there.' There was yet another significant piece of circumstantial corroboration. The medical records of Mr Gaubatz and his team showed that at these sites they had been exposed to high levels of radiation. Mr Gaubatz verbally told the Iraq Study Group (ISG) of his findings, and asked them to come with heavy equipment to breach the concrete of the bunkers and uncover their sealed contents. But to his consternation, the ISG told him they didn't have the manpower or equipment to do it and that it would be 'unsafe' to try. 'The problem was that the ISG were concentrating their efforts in looking for WMD in northern Iraq and this was in the south,' says Mr Gaubatz. 'They were just swept up by reports of WMD in so many different locations. But we told them that if they didn't excavate these sites, others would.' That, he says, is precisely what happened. He subsequently learnt from Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also known to these intelligence agencies. The worst-case scenario has now come about. Saddam's nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands of a rogue terrorist state -- and one with close links to Iran. When Mr Gaubatz returned to the US, he tried to bring all this to light. Two congressmen, Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Curt Weldon, were keen to follow up his account. To his horror, however, when they tried to access his classified intelligence reports, they were told that all 60 of them -- which, in the routine way, he had sent in 2003 to the computer clearing-house at a US airbase in Saudi Arabia -- had mysteriously gone missing. These written reports had never even been seen by the ISG. One theory is that they were inadvertently destroyed when the computer's database was accidentally erased in the subsequent US evacuation of the airbase. Mr Gaubatz, however, suspects dirty work at the crossroads. It is unlikely, he says, that no copies were made of his intelligence. And he says that all attempts by Messrs Hoekstra and Weldon to extract information from the Defence Department and CIA have been relentlessly stonewalled. In 2005, the CIA held a belated inquiry into the disappearance of this intelligence. Only then did its agents visit the sites -- to report that they had indeed been looted. Mr Gaubatz's claims remain largely unpublicised. Last year, the New York Times dismissed him as one of a group of WMD diehard obsessives. The New York Sun produced a more balanced report, but after that the coverage died. According to Mr Gaubatz, the reason is a concerted effort by the US intelligence and political world to stifle such an explosive revelation of their own lethal incompetence. After he and an Iraqi colleague spoke at last month's Florida meeting of the Intelligence Summit, an annual conference of the intelligence world, they were interviewed for two hours by a US TV show -- only for the interview to be junked after the FBI repeatedly rang Mr Gaubatz and his colleague to say they would stop the interview from being broadcast. The problem the US authorities have is that they can't dismiss Mr Gaubatz as a rogue agent -- because they have repeatedly decorated him for his work in the field. In 2003, he received awards for his 'courage and resolve in saving lives and being critical for information flow'. In 2001, he was decorated for being the 'lead agent in a classified investigation, arguably the most sensitive counter-intelligence investigation currently in the entire Department of Defence' and because his 'reports were such high quality, many were published in the Air Force's daily threat product for senior USAF leaders or re-transmitted at the national level to all security agencies in US government'. The organiser of the Intelligence Summit, John Loftus -- himself a formidably well-informed former attorney to the intelligence world -- has now sent a memorandum to Congress asking it to investigate Mr Gaubatz's claims. He has also hit a brick wall. The reason is not hard to grasp. The Republicans won't touch this because it would reveal the incompetence of the Bush administration in failing to neutralise the danger of Iraqi WMD. The Democrats won't touch it because it would show President Bush was right to invade Iraq in the first place. It is an axis of embarrassment. Mr Loftus goes further. Saddam's nuclear research, scientists and equipment, he says, have all been relocated to Syria, where US satellite intelligence confirms that uranium centrifuges are now operating -- in a country which is not supposed to have any nuclear programme. There is now a nuclear axis, he says, between Iran, Syria and North Korea -- with Russia and China helping to build an Islamic bomb against the West. And of course, with assistance from American negligence. 'Apparently Saddam had the last laugh and donated his secret stockpile to benefit Iran's nuclear weapons programme. With a little technical advice from Beijing, Syria is now enriching the uranium, Iran is making the missiles, North Korea is testing the warheads, and the White House is hiding its head in the sand.' Of course, we don't know whether any of this is true. But given Dave Gaubatz's testimony, shouldn't someone be trying to find out? Or will we still be intoning 'there were no WMDs in Iraq' when the Islamic bomb goes off? 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@verizon.net |
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STRATEGIC LESSONS OF THE WINOGRAD COMMISSION REPORT
Posted by Daily Alert, May 8, 2007. |
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These are excerpts from an article by Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov
Amidror and published by Institute for Contemporary Affairs/Jerusalem
Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), Vol. 6, No. 29, May 7, 2007. It is
archived at |
Implications for the Gaza Strip
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 |
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ISRAEL'S SUMMER WARS
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 8, 2007. |
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This is one of the most wonderful pieces I have read in a while, reprinted here in full, from http://sandbox.blog-city.com/israel_lebanon_war_juan_cole.htm Martin Kramer is definitely one of the funniest web commentators around: |
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"The Israelis tend to launch their wars of choice in the
summer, in part because they know that European and American
universities will be the primary nodes of popular opposition, and the
universities are out in the summer. This war has nothing to do with
captured Israeli soldiers."
Chief of Staff: Good morning. At the top of the agenda, I want us to take up a crucial issue, related to the timing of our planned operation in Lebanon. We've already considered several key factors: the preparedness of our troops, the situation on the ground in Lebanon, coordination with the Americans. But there's a paramount matter that I want to revisit before we present the plan to the Cabinet. It's the academic calendar in foreign universities. Neutralizing anti-Israel professors has always been a key ingredient of our strategy. We all know how vastly influential they are: just think of Juan Cole, Rashid Khalidi, Norman Finkelstein. So part of our strategic doctrine in past years has been to launch operations in summer, when academics are non-operational. Even the French work harder in summer. That's partly why two of my predecessors chose June to launch the Six-Day War and the 1982 Lebanon war. But it's an issue I feel we should revisit. We take a slice of our strategic doctrine from the Americans. Our own intelligence was surprised three years ago, when the Pentagon informed us that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be launched in March, smack in the middle of the academic year. All our early estimates assumed that the Americans would hold off until after the last graduation ceremonies in June. For our discussion today, I've invited Gentleman C, head of Middle East 101, the Mossad unit that tracks American and European academics. I think we'd all benefit greatly from his insights in planning the timing of our operation. Gentleman C, why don't you give us a quick summation of your analysis? Gentleman C: On the table before each of you, you'll find a comprehensive study compiled by Middle East 101, looking at the academic year factor in Israel's wars since 1948. What we've done is a statistical comparison of the amount of anti-Israel verbiage expended by American and European professors in all of Israel's wars. I draw your attention to Table 8. You'll see that in every war, our military operations have taken less incoming criticism during summer months. We call this the "Away From My Desk" effect. Professors on summer break are less likely to write op-eds and show up in the media. There aren't any students to attend their campus teach-ins, and there's no student press to cover them. Bottom line is that summer remains an ideal time to launch a war. The operational readiness of academe is at its lowest. Director of Military Intelligence: May I? I have a lot of respect for my opposites in the Mossad, and especially Middle East 101. They do fine work. And I take my beret off to their targeted character assassination of Juan Cole. If it weren't for the Mossad's clandestine efforts, Cole would be at Yale. As you know, it's vitally important to keep people like Cole outside the 200-kilometer-radius security zone we try to maintain around New York City. Chief of Staff: Here, here. Director of Military Intelligence: That said, we in Military Intelligence don't share the Mossad's assessment of the "Away From My Desk" effect. It may be true that the professors manage to fire off more rounds of criticism during the academic year. But these are mostly short-range projectiles--teach-ins and classroom agitprop that don't have a range beyond the campus. Most academics are too preoccupied during the school year to get off medium- to long-range op-eds in the New York Times or The Nation. They're too busy preparing lectures, fixing syllabi, keeping office hours, or quashing rivals in faculty committees. We think that during the summer, the quality and range of attacks against us actually increase. You've got professors with lots of time on their hands, and the more senior, tenured ones are looking for distractions from their bigger projects. In particular, we think a summer war could expose us to sustained assault by academic bloggers. GOC Southern Command: I thought sustained blogging by a professor was pretty much tantamount to a suicide bombing. Director of Military Intelligence: There's ample evidence for that. But we're talking about a group of highly ideological and thoroughly indoctrinated fanatics. They're quite willing to sacrifice career prospects in order to advance the cause. The tenured ones, of course, think they've already died and gone to heaven. They spend most of the year in classrooms full of near-virgins. It's almost impossible to deter a tenured professor. We think the ideal time for an operation is the very first month of the fall semester, in September. This is crunch-time for professors, who've got to get all their courses up and running, make sure textbooks are in the stores, solve scheduling conflicts, and suck up to new deans and chairpersons. About the only thing professors manage to put on paper in September is their signatures on drop/add forms, and maybe the occasional petition. GOC Home Front Command (with alarm): September? We're not going to launch a war of choice right in the middle of the Jewish holidays, are we? Gentleman C: With all due respect, I think my friend from Military Intelligence underestimates the travel factor in summer. Middle East 101 tracks the movements of professors throughout the world. The highest-caliber ones are the most likely to disappear in summer for weeks on end, on "research" trips to London or Provence. We know from intercepts, and satellite surveillence shared with us by the Americans, that a lot of them aren't even near a library or archive. Their spouses have real jobs and need real vacations. We've seen major blogs shut down entirely for the better part of the summer. Director of Military Intelligence: Maybe, but a lot of these professors travel in summer to the Middle East--Beirut, Damascus, Amman. If we launch a summer operation, they'll suddenly become on-site resources for the media. If they have to evacuate Lebanon, that becomes a story in itself. Let's not forget how Rashid Khalidi got started: Beirut, summer of 1982. Gentleman C (with irritation): Well, who was it who let Khalidi escape from Beirut? Director of Military Intelligence (raising voice): Oh? Who authorized Edward Said to make a visit to Israel? You didn't have to be a prophet to predict the outcome of that. Chief of Staff: Gentlemen, please, let's not get sidetracked by past mistakes. Lord knows we've made plenty of them--bungling the recruitment of Joel Beinin, letting Ilan Pappe do cushy reserve duty, and the list goes on. Look, I'd like to continue this discussion all morning, but we do have other issues on the agenda, like the extent of air power we'll need to dislodge Hezbollah. I see the Commander of the Air Force is looking at his watch. Too bad we can't solve the campus problem with air power. Commander of the Air Force (dryly): Don't say can't. We haven't tried. Chief of Staff: Well, I'm going to conclude this discussion. My view is that we should stick with what's worked for us in the past. We'll propose to go in summer. If we ever do a complete overhaul of doctrine, we can reconsider. But I think Gentleman C has made a compelling case, and the empirical data speak for themselves. Agreed? Director of Military Intelligence: Let the minutes show that I think otherwise. Chief of Staff: Duly noted. Oh, and by the way, Gentleman C, what's your assessment of what Juan Cole might do when we move? Gentleman C: There's some debate in our shop as to whether he'll stick to Iraq, or blog furiously about Lebanon. If he Lebanonizes his blog, it'll be a problem for us, but it'll take some heat off the Americans. They'll be grateful, and we can trade on that for things we need. Like bunker-busters. Chief of Staff: Splendid. Juan Cole might turn out to be one of our biggest assets. "The work of the righteous is done by others." (Laughter around the table.)
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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.
Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
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ANCIENT SPLENDOR (MYSTERIOUS GLORY)
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 8, 2007. |
| This essay was written by Batya Dagan and has been translated from the Hebrew. |
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I do not know what dictionary you are using, but in my dictionary the word "settler" is a beautiful one and the "settlement" concept is nothing but a lovely and positive expression. These words came out of the Zionism belly; these are legal and factual words. The early (Jewish) laborers' settlements' movement was considered the one to have realized Zionism. It considered itself superior to the city dwellers. However the truth to be told is that this movement realized the Zionistic dream. Wherever you settle on our forefathers' land you realized not only the Zionistic dream but also the ancient prophecy: "and the children shall return within their borders." Judea and Samaria are an integral part of the bequeathed land of Israel. We were robbed of the West Bank when, during the Independence War, the Jordanian army with the help of the British put their hands on this territory. But that does not mean that we lost the West bank for eternity. We lost the Bank in a war and we returned it in a war the Jordanians declared against us. Now it is again, ours. And who ever resides there sits on our land. We are not naïve and we understand that during the nineteen years when Jordan held to the West bank Jordanian Arabs moved and settled there. Not too many but some did settle. No one then dreamt of establishing a Palestinian State. How all of a sudden these Jordanian Arabs turned to be Palestinians deserving their statehood is a puzzle whose solution is simple: the Arabs, the Europeans, the United Nations (U.N.) and the Hellenized (non believers) among the Israelis simply hate for there to be a State of Israel. When one listens to Raphaella Segal from Kedumim one truly senses the ancient splendor. Raphaella puts our history and the present status on its feet; it is solidly and strongly inserted into the homeland soil. Raphaella explains that Kedumim is the first Jewish community (settlement) in Samaria; the community that opened the road (Showed the way) to many other settlements. True Zionism; colonizing, settling the land. Zionists like Raphaella defend with their bodies the city dwellers sitting on their balconies between Natanyia and Tel Aviv. In the past Gush Katif did the same but the city dwellers by the sea did not take the time to understand and admit or defend those defending them. Now everyone knows. All the Hellenized now admit that the Qussam rockers falling on the towns near Gaza represent the shame, disgrace and failure and of no other such paradigm, of Israeli leadership. The expelled Gush Katif greenhouses' water pipelines that were left behind were returned to Israel in a new form of Quassam rockets. What a beauty! Wow! A great source of pride to the Hellenized city dwellers that had dream plans for the terrorists and they are now looking for those dream plans in the dark. Because they disappeared and instead what surfaced was the shocking reality that Gaza today is the Hamastan, Iranistan and Hezbollahstan and it is full of wickedness, evil and murder. After the Six Days War Raphaella's family saw the glorious victory as a sign and indication to get up and go settle the land that was retuned to its home. Seven times they ascend and seven times the Hellenized drove them out. However the tenacity, stubbornness and persistence won and the government finally gave in. Raphaella's settlers' family was left to stay in the military camp that was already there. Life was not easy but the building spirit, the sacrifice and the hope did not leave them and not even for a moment. Stubbornness; the Bible tells us that we, Jews are stubborn and determined nation. OK. Here is for you a good thing. With stubbornness, with their clenched teeth they clutched to the land and they do not move! Today, there are one hundred and fifty Jewish communities (settlements) in the West bank. Let us see Olmert's Hellenized government trying to remove the city dwellers, sitting on their verandas and beaches, defense line. Among them you will find religious and non religious. High tech; musicians and an orchestra. Excellent schools and care for disable children. Kedumim is flourishing but it also remembers the terror and the fear. The father who laments his son who he lost in a terror attack says: we have done the right thing. We are in the right place. We regret nothing. If the government does not take care of her citizens' welfare all that is left is for the citizens to take care of the nation's welfare and its future. Kedumim and the colonization (settlements) movement in the West Bank is growing. Peace Now and the Arabs do not fear the Hellenized government. They do however fear Gush (block) Emunim (Faith) Zionist pioneer settlers. They notice these people strength and might. They see the youth growing there. Wonderful youth, courageous, pure, Zionistic, ready to sacrifice and the Arabs know this is the future of Israel. The second generation remained attached to the settlements. No one leaves. If they do eave they go and build new communities, new settlements in Samaria and Judea. Ninety five soldiers from the Samaria and Judea communities fought in the Second Lebanon War. Have you ever heard of more Zionism than this Zionism? There is no despair there. There they know what life is all about and for what one sacrifices life. After reading this article you may have the urge to send your contribution. Raphaella Segal and the entire Kedumim community welcome your generosity. Bless Kedumin and you too! |
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PEARS AND APPLES?
Posted by Batya Medad, May 8, 2007. |
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Or maybe it's more like string beans and bananas?
According to this Newsweek article, the American public isn't really happy with their politicians vying for the Presidency. Israelis aren't crazy about our choices either. In some way they're all the same, insulated by self-serving staff and led by pollsters. The need for millions of dollars to cover campaign expenses and pay all those salaries have made politicians all over the world, marketing-sensitive puppets, rather than inspiring ideologues. Abraham Lincoln could never have been elected in today's world. His plain face and long speeches wouldn't go over well on the media. Pictures of FDR being lifted into his wheelchair would make the front pages, and JFK's casual affairs would be prime time news. Americans vote for politicians who are like their plastic-wrapped individual slices of cheese. In Israel, it's harder to "wrap" the politicians, since within minutes you can find someone who went to the same nursery school, youth movement, army unit or doctor. The rules are getting tougher as Katzav and Ramon have discovered the hard way. I have another question. Does Israel need the same sort of politician they have in the United States? The United States is considered as "the leader of the free world." Its security is firm. Its existence isn't in danger. No matter who's elected the next president, it really won't make any difference in substance. The "War in Iraq" is a skirmish, thousands and thousands of miles away from its borders. Yes, soldiers are being killed, but not in numbers which affect more than their families and friends. And as the politicians say, America did not have to start that war. The United States was not in any danger. Personally, I can't understand why thousands of Iraqis and Americans had to die to give Sadaam Hussein a "fair trial." He was executed, and people are still dying. In Israel the stakes are bigger, much bigger. Our country is being threatened by the Arabs on our borders and even further afield. They've already, in the 59 years the State of Israel has existed, started wars and kept up rocket and terror attacks all the time. We don't need pre-packaged politicians with American election advisers. That's how Hizbullah had such an easy time arming South Lebanon to attack us last summer. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is actually running again, at the advice of his American advisor, campaigned that he would withdraw the troops if elected. That's what he did, and to "sweeten it" for the terrorists, he did it so quickly that enormous quantities of expensive military equipment was left for the terrorists to use against us. For some peculiar reason, the Winograd Report glossed over it, just blaming those who were running the country last summer. Israel does not need well-coiffed politicians or those who've had plastic surgery to make their eyes seem more open and alert. We need true patriots who see the needs of our embattled country before any other considerations. That's the only type of person who can truly lead us. G-d willing 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 |
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GERSHON BASKIN'S BUNGLED BLATHER BELIES BLATANT BEFUDDLEMENT, OR BESPEAKS BIGOTRY
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 7, 2007. |
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Dr. Baskin's article below presents us with quite a conundrum. Hamas vows to thwart all peace efforts (Israel Today: 5/6/07)
and uses Mickey Mouse to teach hatred to Palestinian children so that the continuity of the conflict is assured across generations and across centuries (Israel Today, 5/7/07)..... and continues to pound Sderot with qassams (Israel Today, 5/7/07)... and announces that it will never halt the rocket fire (MEMRI, 5/7/07) and has the support of a very large plurality or majority of Palestinian people per the Palestinian poll (MEMRI, 4/2/07) and has decided to declare to the world that Hamas will be doing the world a favor if it succeeds in its plan, its religious commitment, its mission from Allah, to exterminate all Jews all over the world (PMW, 5/3/07).... and has decided that the new American plan "..is a joke" (MEMRI 5.7.07)...... ...while Israel continues to uphold the one-sided cease-fire, continues to offer to use the Saudi peace plan as a starting point for negotiations, maintains the basic Kadima platform of land for peace, and faces nothing but Arab rejection and threats of genocide. BUT...Dr. Baskin thinks that Israel will be losing a millennial opportunity if Olmert does not show some spine and get out there and make peace. Dr. Baskin seems oblivious to the reality of Hamas' unaltered and uncompromised goal of Israel's destruction, and to Abbas' agreement to cede to Hamas all real power in the PA, and to Hamas' rejection of all negotiations, all compromises, all treaties. I can't figure it out. Can Dr. Baskin be really so galactically ignorant, so blatantly befuddled, or does he merely hope that the rest of us are (and thus won't notice his obvious anti-Israel bigotry)? David Meir-Levi PS. I have invited Dr. Baskin to respond to my criticisms. But he cannot: It seems that he is too busy to do so. Below is Gershon Baskin's article entitled "Failure to act is not an
option." It appeared today in The Jerusalem Post
My interspersed comments are in CAPS. Below his article are several relevant articles. |
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Whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resigns now or after the final Winograd report is issued is only a question of time. The political earthquake in Israel is but one more piece of evidence that Israeli democracy has become dysfunctional. Will this prime minister, who is already under investigation for multiple cases of alleged fraud and corruption, be in a position to devote any real time to the challenges that face Israel today? The answer is actually not completely negative. There is a small, albeit unlikely chance that Olmert may suddenly adopt a more aggressive peace-making platform as a way to divert public attention from his own decline. It is more likely though, that Olmert will launch an aggressive ground operation into Gaza in order to achieve the same shift in public attention. Olmert will find great legitimacy among the public to launch that attack as well as support within the army, which is waiting for a chance to redefine Israeli deterrence in the hearts and minds of the Arabs. Olmert will claim that 'we are cleaning up Gaza' because the Palestinian Authority is incapable of doing it and the Israeli mission will aim to remove the military threat and to put an end to the Kassam fire into Israel. ISRAEL WILL not clean up Gaza and the Kassams will not cease as a result of Israeli military actions. ODD. HOW CAN HE KNOW THAT? The direct impact, however, of such an IDF incursion into Gaza will be the likely final decline of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. He can only survive if there is momentum on the political front of providing his people with a political horizon. EVEN ODDER. ABBAS FORMALLY ALLIED WITH HAMAS AT THE MECCA CONFERENCE. HOW CAN ANYONE PIN HOPES FOR PEACE ON HIS SURVIVAL? The Israeli political system continues to flounder absent real leadership. The Palestinian leader, though a world-class statesman cannot impose his will on a dysfunctional Palestinian political system. "WORLD-CLASS STATESMAN"? ODDER STILL. I THINK THAT DR. BASKIN IS THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD WHO HAS EVER ELEVATED ABBAS, MORE COMMONLY CONSIDERED "ARAFAT IN A SUIT AND TIE," TO SUCH A LEVEL. And the US president is in the declining period of his administration. We are facing the final moments of the possibilities for Israeli-Palestinian peace. "FINAL MOMENTS"? SEE MY COMMENTS BELOW. This is another defining moment. If the current leadership structures cannot move forward toward producing an agreement or accepting a framework for reaching an agreement, then it is very likely that a new right-wing alliance will emerge in Israel that will face a Palestinian political system which is completely dominated by Islamic radicalism. When that happens, we will be entering in a new era of Israeli-Palestinian relations that will be defined as the struggle for identity and democracy within a singular territory for both peoples. THIS IS A FALSE STATEMENT. THERE IS NO STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY, NOR FOR DEMOCRACY. THE STRUGGLE IS, FROM THE PALESTINIAN SIDE, TO DESTROY ISRAEL. AND FROM THE ISRAELI SIDE THE STRUGGLE IS TO THWART THE PALESTINIAN SIDE'S GOALS WHILE KILLING AS FEW CIVILIANS AS POSSIBLE. This will be the final end of the Zionist enterprise. NOW THERE IS A NON-SEQUITOR IF I EVER HEARD ONE. ISRAEL'S VICTORY WILL NOT BE THE END OF THE ZIONIST ENTERPRIZE....BUT A PALESTINIAN VICTORY WILL BE. DUE TO the urgency of the situation and the possible end of any chance of Israeli-Palestinian peace within the two-state solution framework, the international community within the Quartet mechanism, along with the 'Arab Quartet,' with the inclusion of the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, must hammer out a solution that can only be based on the combination of the Clinton parameters and the Arab peace initiative. "ARAB PEACE INITIATIVE"? WHAT ARAB PEACE INITIATIVE? THE MECCA ACCORDS IN WHICH ABBAS AND HANIYEH AGREE TO JOIN FORCES IN ORDER TO BETTER DESTROY ISRAEL? OR THE REVITALIZED 2002 SAUDI PEACE PLAN, WHICH IS A DEMAND FOR ISRAEL'S UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER? This combination provides political assurances for both sides that make permanent status negotiations feasible. Israel gains the understanding that the 1967 lines specified in the Arab Peace initiative are not the final borders but the starting point for negotiations on territorial swaps that enable the Palestinians to understand that they will receive 100% of the 22% of Palestine (the pre-1967 lines). Furthermore, Israel will be able to understand that the effective right of return of refugees will be to the Palestinian state or to territories that are within the framework of the swaps, e.g. on lands that were previously within the sovereign borders of Israel that will become part of the Palestinian state. HE HAS JUST MADE UP THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH....OUT OF THIN AIR. NEITHER THE MECCA PLAN NOR THE SAUDI PLAN OFFERS ANY OF THE ABOVE. HAMAS ABBAS AND HEZBOLLAH AND ALL OTHER VOCAL TERROR GROUPS ARE CLEAR THAT THE END GOAL IS THE DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL. THE SAUDIS ARE CLEAR THAT ISRAEL MUST ACCEPT ALL CONDITIONS PRIOR TO ANY ARAB AGREEMENT TO NEGOTIATE.....NO CHANGES, NOT A JOT NOR A TITTLE....UNTIL ISRAEL FULFILLS ALL OF THE ARAB REQUIREMENTS. WHAT OCCURS TO MOST OF US, OF COURSE, BUT DOES NOT SEEM TO BE SURFACING ON DR. BASKIN'S RADAR SCREEN IS: IF ISRAEL GIVES YOU EVERYTHING YOU WANT, IN ADVANCE, THEN WHAT EXACTLY WILL YOU BE NEGOTIATING ABOUT? Israel will also have it demands for end of conflict and finality of claims recognized by the international community and the Arab world through the acceptance of the Clinton parameters. Palestinians will enter the process with the understanding that Arab and Muslim Jerusalem will be returned to Arab sovereignty, that the Palestinian independent state will be finally established and that the Israeli occupation will end. The Arab Peace initiative provides regional backing and promises of support and full peace beyond the Israeli-Palestinian borders. HOW DOES HE KNOW ALL OF THIS? NONE OF THIS IS INHERENT IN ANY PEACE PLAN CURRENTLY CURRENT. The international community through the two quartets should prod the parties to issue declarations accepting the two frameworks -- Clinton and the Arab peace initiative -- as the basis for renewed bilateral negotiations that will be assisted by the international community. MAYBE THEY SHOULD PROD, AND MAYBE NOT...HARD TO TELL; BUT MORE IMPORTANT, WHAT GOOD HAS PRODDING THE ARAB SIDE EVER DONE IN THE PAST? WHAT GOOD HAS EVER COME FROM INTERNATIONAL GUARANTEES, FROM THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY, FROM THE UN? The international community must demonstrate its commitment by providing mechanisms for implementation assistance, facilitating, monitoring and verification of the agreements that will be reached. Once such declarations are issued the Arab League should then issue a declaration affirming that the Israeli and Palestinian moves serve as the first step toward the implementation of the Arab peace initiative and at that point it would be helpful if the Arab leadership took more bold actions that would further encourage the process forward. IT IS NICE THAT HE HAS THE SCENARIOS WORKED OUT IN HIS HEAD.....NOW IF ONLY HE COULD TELL THE VARIOUS PLAYERS WHAT TO DO, AND THEY WOULD OBEY HIM....THEN HIS ASSERTIONS MIGHT AT LEAST MAKE SOME SENSE. LAST WEDNESDAY, Palestinian chief negotiation Dr. Saeb Erekat and Construction and Housing Minister Meir Sheetrit agreed that the time necessary for reaching a full permanent peace agreement is a matter of months. All of the issues can be resolved, they both said over and over. It is a well known fact that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians agree to the definitions of peace within Clinton parameters and the Arab peace initiative, but they do not believe that there is a similar view on the other side or the ability to implement peace by the other side. SO, EVEN AS QASSAMS FALL DAILY, SUICIDE BOMBERS ARE LAUNCHED WEEKLY, AND ALL HAMAS LEADERSHIP CONTINUES TO DECLARE THAT THEIR ULTIMATE GOAL IS THE GENOCIDE OF ALL JEWS EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD (AND MOST RECENTLY DECLARED THAT THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY SHOULD THANK THEM FOR RIDDING THE WORLD OF JEWS)....DESPITE ALL OF THAT, DR. BASKIN FEELS THAT WE ALL SHOULD TRUST THE NICE WORDS OF SA'EB EREKAT. The public is wrong on the first part of correct on the second. The ability to implement any peace agreement by both sides, as we have seen until now, cannot be done without significant international engagement on the ground that will also provide for real dispute resolution mechanisms when the inevitable disputes arise. International engagement -- and a presence on the ground -- would provide guarantees for demilitarizing the arena, on both sides of the conflict, as well as real concrete assistance to the Palestinians in their urgent need to disarm militias, to rebuild their governance and to reinstate the rule of law, particularly in Gaza. MAYBE DR. BASKIN IS TOO YOUNG TO REMEMBER THE 1956 AGREEMENTS FOR A DE-MILITARIZED SINAI, WITH UN AND USA PEACE KEEPERS, ALL OF WHOM EVAPORATED WHEN NASSER SNAPPED HIS FINGERS ON 5/15/1967. PERHAPS HE IS TOO YOUNG TO RECALL THE ROLE OF THE UN IN LEBANON, ASSISTING THE PLO IN THEIR TERROR WAR AGAINST THE ISRAELIS OF THE GALILEE FOR 10 YEARS. PERHAPS HE HAS NOT BEEN READING ANY LOCAL NEWSPAPERS AND DID NOT NOTICE THAT THE UN FORCES DID THE SAME THING THIS TIME AS WELL, HELPING HEZBOLLAH AGAINST ISRAEL IN THE MOST RECENT LEBANON WAR. There is no need to wait for Olmert to step down. Olmert will find support within Kadima for this process and his successor can continue it. As long as Olmert holds on the reins of authority he holds the full responsibility and obligation to act as a leader. This is his only chance to make a positive mark on history and to serve the long term interests of Israel and the Jewish people. THE PROBLEM HERE IS NOT THAT 'HE WHO DOES NOT REMEMBER HISTORY IS DOOMED TO REPEAT IT". THE PROBLEM IS THAT ANYONE WHO LISTENS TO DR. BASKIN'S IMAGINARY SCENARIOS IS GOING TO DOOM ISRAEL. "Hamas vows to thwart peace efforts"
The Hamas terrorist organization at the weekend vowed to use its political power in the Palestinian Authority and its armed forces on the ground to thwart an American initiative to move the region closer to peace. Last week, the Bush Administration published a list of benchmarks for the implementation of Israeli and Palestinian peace obligations. On Friday, overall Hamas leader Khaled Mashal said from his headquarters in Damascus that the plan was 'a farce,' and insisted that Israel's removal of military roadblocks would not be met by a reciprocal cessation of Palestinian terrorist violence. A day later, Gaza-based Hamas spokesman Fawzi Baroum said his group had rejected the American plan and would 'work to make it fail by any means and by all means.' The Hamas-affiliated Popular Resistance Committees added in a statement carried by Ha'aretz that the fulfillment of peace commitments 'does not serve our people's interests.' Israeli officials said they could not adopt the American document in its current form due to ongoing security concerns stemming from the Palestinians' inability and unwillingness to curb terrorist violence against the Jewish state "Palestinian 'Mickey Mouse' teaches kids to hate"
The newest Palestinian television children's program host bears a striking resemblance to Mickey Mouse, providing the show with instant success and a large and attentive audience of youngsters in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. But the message being disseminated by Farfur the Mouse differs significantly from that of the American original. In a recent episode translated by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), Farfur intersperses common sense lessons and childish quips with virulent anti-Israel propaganda. Israel represents an 'oppressive invading Zionist occupation' that must be 'resisted' at all costs, Farfur teaches the children. The fuzzy mouse's co-host, Saraa, adds that one day the children watching will find themselves answering to Allah for how much or little they did to protect the Al Aqsa Mosque from the Jews. Farfur and Saraa go on to explain to their young audience that Islam will one dominate the world, and that the children must be sure to pray in the mosque five times a day until every knee bows to Allah. PMW director Itamar Marcus notes that 'using a character based on an appealing, world famous and beloved icon like Mickey Mouse to teach Islamic supremacy and resistance as Islamic duty is a powerful and effective way to indoctrinate children.' "Gaza rockets pound Sderot"
Gaza-based Palestinian rocket crews pounded the southern Israel town of Sderot Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, leaving two people moderately wounded and many others suffering from shock. On Sunday afternoon, three rockets hit the working-class town, one of them landing just a few feet from a local gas station. A 24-year-old gas station attendant was evacuated to a nearby hospital after shrapnel from the rocket pierced several parts of his body. Another man had his hearing impaired by the blast. Early on Monday morning, another rocket struck a house adjacent to a kindergarten in Sderot. The attack occurred as children were making their way to the facility. Damage was caused to both the house and the kindergarten, but, miraculously, there were no physical injuries. At least four people, however, were treated for shock, including a woman who lost consciousness. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officials told Ynet that Israel's military policy in the area may soon be altered. 'The way things look now, we may have to increase activity (in the Gaza Strip) very soon ... no more sitting around,' said one official. Over the weekend, unnamed IDF officials who spoke to the Yisraeli daily newspaper complained that while the army has operations plans to deal decisively with the Gaza-based terrorist infrastructure, the government will not give the green light until the terrorist rocket attacks actually result in deaths. "4 Qassams land in Negev Sunday morning"
Rockets fired from Gaza land in open areas in western Negev; no injuries or damage reported. Five Qassams fired at Israel during weekend, one hits house in Sderot on Saturday. Meanwhile, Hamas refuses to halt Qassam attacks Four Qassam rockets landed in open areas in the western Negev Sunday morning. No injuries were reported in the attack. During the weekend, five Qassams were fired at Israel. Two rockets landed in Sderot on Saturday, one hitting a house whose inhabitants were out at the time of the strike. No one was injured. The town's residents reported that the Color Red alert system did not go off during the attack. On Friday, three rockets landed in open fields in the Negev. Hamas' political leader Khaled Mashaal declared this weekend that his organization would not agree to halt rocket fire on Israel in exchange for an easing of travel restrictions on the Palestinians. Mashaal was referring to a US document proposing a May-to-August timeline for easing Palestinian movement and mproving Israeli security. 'I swear it's a joke ... The equation has now become: dismantling the checkpoints, in exchange for (giving up) resistance,' he said. 'This has become the Palestinian cause'. Visit The MEMRI Blog at www.thememriblog.org *Clip # 1441 -- Hamas Representative in Lebanon Osama Hamdan: We Will Not Accept a Solution in Which Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre Will Remain Israeli Cities The following are excerpts from an interview with Hamas representative in Lebanon Osama Hamdan, which aired on Al-Manar TV on April 2, 2007. Osama Hamdan: We in the Hamas movement will not accept any solution that would deny us our rights or detract from our principles. In other words, I will not accept a agreement saying that at the end of the day, Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre are Israeli cities, and part of the Israeli land. It should, at the very least, say that these cities cannot be liberated or regained today, but I will not accept any solution that prevents any future Palestinian generation from acting to liberate and regain the rest of the Palestinian land, if the current generation is incapable of accomplishing this. "NEC Poll:"
6.3% peace with Israel top priority,
NEC Poll (Near East Consulting: a Palestinian polling company)
Poll conducted by the Near East Consulting Institution via telephone, between the 25th and 27th of April, 2007. 834 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were interviewed. Results: -- www.neareastconsulting.com/surveys/all/p24/ Level of concern about the current situation.
Main reason behind your feeling of concern.
Level of depression.
Main need of your household.
Reception by you or any household member of assistance in the past six months.
Main type of assistance that you or your household received in the past six months.
The assistance provider.
Level of satisfication with the assistance that you or your household
received.
Feeling of security.
Trust in Abu Mazen vs. Ismael Hanieh.
Will the National Unity Government succeed in lifting the sanctions on the Palestinian Authority?
The most important priority of the next government.
Will the crisis between Fateh and Hamas end?
Will the plan to restore security by the foreign minister Hani Qawasmi
succeed given the current security situation?
Factional trust.
Support or opposition to a peace settlement with Israel.
Is there a peace partner for Palestinians in Israel?
Is there a Palestinian peace partner?
Will meetings between the different parties help in a peace settlement with Israel?
Should Hamas maintain its position on the elimination of Israel?
Support or opposition to extending the ceasefire agreement with Israel to include areas that were not included before.
Should Hamas take all measures possible to reach a peace agreement with Israel?
Would your opinion about Israel's right to exist change if there was a
two-state solution whereby Palestine is on the land occupied in 1967?
Level of concern about the current situation.
Main reason behind your feeling of concern.
Feeling of security with respect to yourself, family, and property.
Will the plan to restore security by the foreign minister Hani Qawasmi
succeed given the current security situation?
Poverty (incl. hardship cases).
Poverty all.
Labor force.
Palestinian Media Watch Bulletin -- May 3, 2007 Hamas: "The extermination of the Jews is good for the inhabitants of the worlds." by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook The extermination of Jews is Allah's will and is for the benefit of all humanity, according to an article in the Hamas paper, Al-Risalah. The author of the article, Kan'an Ubayd, explains that the suicide operations carried out by Hamas are being committed solely to fulfill Allah's wishes. Furthermore, Allah demanded this action, because "the extermination of the Jews is good for the inhabitants of the worlds." The killing of innocent Jews by terrorist attacks is portrayed as Allah's plan for the benefit of humanity. It should be noted that Hamas's justification for the extermination of Jews, both as God's will and for the benefit of humanity, echoes Hitler's words in Mein Kampf: "In this case the only salvation remaining was war... If the Jew with the help of his Marxist creed is victorious over the peoples of this world, then his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity... Thus I believe today that I am acting according to the will of the almighty Creator: when I defend myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." (Mein Kampf) In another parallel to the Nazi genocide of Jews, the writer says he wants to be sure that "everyone will know" that these murderous actions are "not of [Hamas's] own accord"-- an echo of the Nazi war criminals' repeated justification of their actions with the defense that they were only following orders. The fact that these orders are said to be divine in nature makes Hamas's justification for the murder of Jews even more ominous. Following is the excerpt from the Hamas article: 'We find more than once condemnation and denunciation to the resistance operations and bombings [suicide attacks], carried out by Hamas and the Palestinian resistance branches. There is no other choice but to use restraint regarding the condemnation, the attaching of the label of terror [to 'resistance'], and the assembling of conferences [for] condemnation [of the attacks]. 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 |
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POLITICS
Posted by Arlene Kushner, May 7, 2007. |
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Yesterday I wrote about reports that Barak had struck a deal with Olmert in which he agreed to save the coalition. There was talk about his assuming the defense ministry, but Barak aides were saying this wasn't the case. Well, today we're seeing more of same. The word is that Barak has promised to keep the Labor party from pulling out of the coalition for the short run. This fascinated me, as many in Labor are anxious to pull out. What, precisely, is the clout that Barak has? Seems the answer may be money, scads of money. He doesn't have much else going for him. We'll see... On Sunday the Central Committee will meet to decide on this. And still the Barak camp is insisting that he wouldn't serve in an Olmert government after Winograd. If that is truly the case, then he would support pulling out were he to win the leadership race. ~~~~~~~~~~ Livni? She's a piece of work all together. After her challenge to Olmert, and rumors that he would dump her for saying he should resign, he changed his mind and decided to keep her. They had a meeting and all was just peachy keen. Right? Today, Livni challenged Olmert again, without mentioning his name, at a press conference. What she did, actually, was criticize the fact that no meeting has been called to discuss the threat of Gaza. She didn't like it, she said, that she hears about experts' opinions via the media. How long will Olmert tolerate this? Explained Livni, "I am [in the government] for a reason and a purpose and the purpose is the diplomatic process. I plan to develop processes." Oi vey! Move this lady out. She's dangerous. ~~~~~~~~~~ And Olmert? He met with his Kadima faction today and outlined government plans. In the coming months, he said, he will seek to revive peace talks with the Palestinians. This man should have been gone yesterday. You can't get much more lame duck than he is, and yet he's planning for months ahead. The two of them -- the prime minister-foreign minister duo -- are unreal. I still get the feeling that they're in an alternate universe. With all of the increased violence, the growing radicalization and instability of the PA, how can they be thinking diplomatic interaction and peace talks? ~~~~~~~~~~ Shimon Peres has announced that he will run for the presidency, even if there is a closed ballot. His supporters had tried to change the voting rules, so that there would be an open ballot -- the assumption being that this would enhance party discipline. I'm still hoping Rivlin will make it. ~~~~~~~~~~ Three no-confidence votes -- advanced by National Union/NRP, Meretz, and Likud -- all failed to pass in the Knesset today. What I found most interesting about this vote, however, is that discipline was not maintained in the Labor party and several individual members decided to abstain. Even some Labor members who had already voiced the opinion that Olmert should resign simply abstained. Here is the politics of the situation: If Olmert were to resign, then the process I described previously would ensue: the acting president would select an MK -- very possibly from Kadima -- to put together a new coalition. This Labor would happily live with. But if there is a no-confidence vote, the country goes to elections. And Labor is terrified of elections because Likud would almost certainly come in. So, Labor members who want to see Olmert out register only a tepid protest by abstaining. They are not about to support a no-confidence vote that would bring in the right wing. Olmert is playing the "Bibi" card as his trump, saying that people opposed to him will end up with Netanyahu. Sigh... Note: the situation might play out a bit differently if Labor were to pull out and make the coalition collapse. ~~~~~~~~~~ The Kassams keep coming. Two people in Shaar Hanegev were wounded at a gas station yesterday, and this morning a rocket hit next to a gan -- a day care center -- in Sderot, thankfully before the children arrived. Defense officials say there will be further pinpoint attacks inside of Gaza, but no ground operation. My sense of it is that the IDF is itching to hit hard but is being held back (and boy is this déjà vu). Peretz and Olmert both went on record as saying that we can't have restraint forever and I'm sure that will deter the terrorists. An Israeli Air Force jet fired a missile into Gaza today at a car in northern Gaza that was filled with Kassams and carrying terrorists planning to launch the rockets. The terrorists got out, one sustaining wounds, before the car exploded. Islamic Jihad said their people in that car were on a "holy mission." ~~~~~~~~~~ Return to Syria. Yesterday I wrote about this terrorist-supporting state amassing weaponry at its border with Israel. Today I read about Syria's desire to restart peace negotiations. I have used the word schizoid with regard to this situation, and so it seems. But there's an answer: Head of the National Security Council today told the Knesset that Damascus's desire for negotiations stems from a desire to improve its standing in the international community. It's the process they're after, which would take pressure off of them, not peace itself. ~~~~~~~~~~ "Guiliani, McCain say they would defend Israel from Iran," declared the headline on a Jerusalem Post story yesterday. Sounds promising. But inside I read this: "Asked what would be the 'trip wire' in a decision to strike Iran, Arizona Senator John McCain replied: 'If they acquire those weapons and our intelligence tells us this is a real threat to the State of Israel and other states in the region.'" Wrong answer. If this is the best he would do, it's fairly worthless. Once Iran has those nuclear weapons, it's too late. Guiliani's answer seemed better: "The...use of military force against Iran would be dangerous...The only thing worse would be Iran being a nuclear power." Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info |
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SHIMON BAR NONE
Posted by Zalmi Unsdorfer, May 7, 2007. |
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No drama in Israeli politics is complete without the cameo appearance of its oldest and most experienced exploiter of all crises for his own benefit and advancement, Shimon Peres. Few knew Peres in politics and in private more intimately than the late Yitzchak Rabin. Rabin famously described Peres as an inveterate schemer and liar. Just as he was scheming to take over the presidency from the besieged Moshe Katsav, a new opportunity presented itself in Olmert's difficulties last week. The wily architect of the Oslo carnage wasted no time. Within hours of praising Olmert as "one of the best prime ministers there has ever been" he was reported to be plotting with Yossi Beilin to take over the leadership of Kadima. The idea is that Beilin's Meretz-Yachad party of the Left will join the coalition and replace the ultra-right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party's support which Avigdor Lieberman would no doubt withdraw in protest. Once he supplanted Olmert as leader, Peres would shell out the appropriate goodies to coalition members to assure their complete support. To keep the Labor party on board he only needs to promise more land to the Palestinians. To keep Meretz happy he would promise to throw more Jews out of their homes. And to keep Shas to heel, well as usual ... it's only a question of money. As for the Gil pensioners' party, they will go on supporting any government as long as the cries of evicted settlers don't disturb their afternoon nap. Peres is the consummate schemer, bar none. He has shown the world how far you can get by losing elections. Indeed, he might today be congratulating Segolene Royale on losing the French election. "Cherie, if you learn my technique, I can have you sitting in the Elysee Palace within a 12-months." Peres is as happy grubbing around in the filth of corrupt politics as Olmert seems to be in its equivalent in the business world. But he is at his most dangerous when given the power to dismantle Israel as a Jewish state. This sinister agenda is tellingly revealed by an exchange with an interviewer for Haaretz after his election defeat by Netanyahu in 1996:
Contact Zalmi at zalmi@zalmi.net |
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DON'T SEND A BARKING DOG TO NEGOTIATE
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 7, 2007. |
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Recently, Defense Minister Amir Peretz met with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates April 18th to discuss vital weapons transfers and other highly technical issues. It would have been better to have sent a barking dog than have this non-military imbecile to represent Israel' s vital interests. Peretz is a man of limited intelligence and zero understanding of weapons' systems. Within that vacuum of knowledge, Peretz never did nor could understand the give and take of Israel's complex relationship with the U.S. Worse yet, Peretz was meeting with a man (Gates) whose attitude toward Israel was in line with James Baker, no friend of Israel or Jews. Sending a Labor organizer who doesn't speak or understand the nuances of English was the peak of stupidity. Not surprisingly, Peretz was the choice of another rank amateur, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. These imbeciles, in order to keep upright, must lean on each other like two drunks staggering. The loser was, of course, Israel and her people. Because of the bumbling of these two and the lost war against the Hezb'Allah, the confidence level of the Americans, with respect to Israel's reliability in battle plummeted. The following was printed in U.S. Defense News of April 23rd: "Meeting Disappoints Israelis" For Israeli officials who were hoping to restore the policy-driven bureaucratic intimacy between the Pentagon and Israel's Ministry of Defense, the April 18th meeting in Tel Aviv between U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Defense Minister Amir Peretz proved anticlimactic. Despite Gates' positive public remarks on the importance of bilateral defense ties, Israeli officials characterized the visit -- the first by a U.S. defense secretary in nearly 8 years -- as disappointing. "Gates defended the U.S. intent to push through Congress an arms package to Saudi Arabia that Israel opposes. He also was skeptical about Israeli proposals for U.S. military assistance in halting arms smuggling from Egypt into Gaza and from Syria into Lebanon, sources said. Perhaps most disappointing, MoD (Ministry of Defense) officials said, was Peretz's inability to extract a commitment to end residual obstacles blocking joint development and Israeli procurement requests stemming from Washington's continued concern about Israeli arms sales to China." (1) This was not the first time that Israel has sent negotiators who were wholly unprepared to meet their American counterparts. I recall when Ariel Sharon sent Abrasha Tamir to America to negotiate important matters. He failed because he was not only ill-prepared, he could not counter American objections in real time. I also recall Gen. Menahem (Mendi) Meron commenting that Israelis often talked themselves into a deal -- and then kept on talking themselves right out of that same deal. For better or worse, Israel is attached to America with an umbilical cord as a life line. However, many of those influentials and decision-makers in Washington are deeply connected to the Muslims Arab oil interests and are not about to cut the cord with a sharp knife, if they can. As you read this, please know that Condoleezza Rice, on behalf of George W. Bush (with James Baker haunting the shadows) is pushing for "improvements" on Israel to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen). It is being reported as "modest goals" so, you can take that to mean arm-twisting. Keep in mind that the Gates-Peretz meeting and the decision to furnish Saudi Arabia with precision-guided bombs (which only Israel has in the Middle East now), while the U.S. promises to keep Israel's technical edge superior to the Muslim Arab countries is indicative of Israel's failed strategic thinking at the highest levels. Clearly, the U.S. was counting on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to respond promptly when Condi jerks his leash. Part of Condi's "modest" proposals was that Israel was supposed to remove the check points so the Hamas and Fatah terrorists can freely roam the Land. This includes implementing the idea of Palestinian Arab Muslims crossing Israeli territory in bus convoys from Gaza so they could visit their relatives in the 7 cities given over to Yassir Arafat in the ongoing Oslo debacle. Another "modest" demand is for Israel to allow regional suppliers of arms to reach forces, loyal to Abbas who is also head of the Fatah branch of the PLO. These weapons would come from Gaza, no doubt, through Egypt as has been the practice. No doubt, Rice would offer those worthless guarantees that the weapons would NOT be used against Israel and that the Bus Convoys of Palestinians would have not terrorists among the passengers. Rice goes on to reassure Israel that a well-armed Fatah would be deployed to halt the continuous firing of Kassam rockets into Israel during this so-called truce offered by Hamas and Fatah -- which they break often, daily. The American Arabists were counting on keeping Olmert in power but, just in case, he is kicked out of office, they are shifting some of their bets to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to carry forward the revised Oslo evacuations of Jews from their homes, farms, businesses, factories, schools, synagogues and even their cemeteries. Meanwhile, Abbas told Rice and the E.U. that, if the line of charity is not restored to the Muslim Arab Palestinians, including both Fatah and Hamas, he would resign. I guess he would have to go back to his old job under Yassir Arafat as the facilitator of terrorist operations and fund arranger as he did in the Munich Massacre of Israel athletes at the Olympics. In the meantime, Rice is desperately trying to please Saudi Arabia and King Abdullah's plan to push Israel back to her 49/67 Armistice Lines. As the female Chamberlain of our time, Rice is doing her best to give Bush an illusory legacy that he brought peace to the Middle East by subverting America's ally, Israel, and then scooting out of Iraq, claiming victory. P.S. WHILE WRITING THIS, IT WAS REPORTED THAT PERETZ WILL STEP DOWN AFTER THE LABOR PARTY PRIMARIES. ### 1. "Meeting Disappoints Israelis" U.S. Defense News April 23, 2007 Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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REVIEW ON SHIFRA SHOMRON'S NOVEL ON GUSH KATIF
Posted by Yisrael Medad, May 7, 2007. |
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Grains of Sand: The Fall Of Neve Dekalim
The Fall of Neve Dekalim was written by expellee Shifra Shomron and depicts the life of an Israeli family living in Gush Katif from pre-Intifada until Disengagement. We are indebted to Shifra Shomron for her exquisitely texted "Grains of Sand" in which she retells the personalized story of the human wealth that was dealt a mortal blow when the Gush Katif communities were evacuated and their Jewish inhabitants expelled. What had been left behind is in this book: lively family life, community spirit, moral values, material and religious success as well as the heroic fortitude in the face of terror, the anguish in the realization that Israel's then political leadership was insensitive to its policy errors as well as devoid of vision. This is a riveting people-book: from the everyday details of life to the national panoply of events, from the private thoughts, confidences and doubts to the public confrontations over issues of Jewish national endeavors and the still necessary pioneering character that highlighted Israel's previous victories and successes. The reading of her book, I believe, will ensure an eventual return to the dunes and hothouses of Katif. Yisrael Medad is Information Resource Director at Menachem Begin Heritage Center, Jerusalem |
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ANOTHER PROTECTION RACKET?
Posted by Professors for a Strong Israel, May 7 2007. |
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Professors for a Strong Israel warns against a new "protection racket" being set up between the extreme Left and Ehud Olmert. Ariel Sharon was protected "like a citron in silk" by the Leftist press as long as the Gaza expulsion was progressing. Now Olmert is to adopt policies demanded by the extreme Left including the expulsion of more Jews from their homes in return for protection from the long arm of the law and from the threat of new elections. This is the only way to understand the speech by writer Meir Shalev at the mass demonstration on 3 May; the statements made by the head of Peace Now in a Ynet interview on 4 May; and statements by writer A. B. Yehoshua in an interview on Kol Israel on 6 May. This is a serious matter. It is extremely dangerous to permit fateful decisions to be made by the government under the influence of political blackmail. Professors for a Strong Israel calls on the Attorney General to continue enforcing the law and to continue his investigations of Ehud Olmert. He must not join the protection racket, Olmert must not become the new "citron." Contact Professors for a Strong Israel in Israel at 050 551 8940 or write Benjamin Svetitsky at bqs@julian.tau.ac.il |
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VIVE LA FRANCE
Posted by Devin Sper and Sivan Raine, May 7, 2007. |
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For years France has been frustrated in her desire for a role in world leadership. Unable to compete with the United States in military or economic power an embittered French elite became instead apologists for America's Islamic detractors. With the election of the pro-American, pro-Israel, Nicolas Sarkozy, France has rejoined the Western world. Indeed she has now demonstrated more backbone in standing up to Islamic fascism than Germany, the U.K. or any other Western European country. By bravely defying the Islamist onslaught, France is restored not only to the West but to a position of moral leadership within it. Needless to say, there is once again reason for hope among the Jews of France, indeed the Jews of all Europe. Having stared in disbelief as the horrors of the 1930s threatened to repeat themselves; the Jews of Europe today breathe a collective sign of relief. The specter haunting France was that continued unrestricted Arab colonization would inevitably turn the entire country into an extension of North Africa. Following the Muslim riots and anarchy of November 2005 however, the French people are feed up with Islamic fascism and stand ready to defend their civilization. They have the power to do so since Muslims still make up less than 10% of the population of France and, as the election of Nicolas Sarkozy demonstrates, they have the will. This is more than a turning point in the history of France; it is a turning point in the history of Europe and by extension of Western civilization. The balance of power has now tipped away from Europe's anti-American elites and apologists for Islamic fascism and towards the defenders of Western democracy. The previously isolated British Prime Minister Tony Blair is now joined by German's new Chancellor Angela Merkel and a new, equally pro-American President of France. The three major Western European powers and the United States are now all led by capable leaders determined to defend Western Civilization and liberal democracy. Since only a determined and united Europe can successfully resist Muslim colonization the European Union may turn out to be a bulwark of Western civilization rather than the agent of its demise. This shift in the balance of power is also significant from the American point of view. The U.K., France and Germany can now be expected to support, rather than obstruct U.S. efforts to sanction Iran in the U.N. Security Council. Western Europe will no longer criticize the United States for standing her ground in Iraq or anywhere else she chooses to draw a line against Islamic fascism. All this will no doubt have a sobering effect on those, like Iranian President Ahmadinejad, plotting the overthrow of the West through a strategy of divide and rule. Equally significant is the blow that the election of Nicolas Sarkozy deals to the views of their Western apologists. American politicians of the left can no longer argue that the Untied States should emulate Europe and abandon the war against Islamic fascism. Such a position becomes untenable now that all major Western European nations look to the United States as their economic and political model, indeed their salvation. As an American and as a Jew, I never thought I would say this but: Vive La France! God bless the brave citizens of France who have this day defied the wrath of the Muslim mob, defied Al-Qaeda terror, defied their own supercilious elites, and restored France to the West. Devin Sper is a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Middle East Studies and author of The Future of Israel, winner of a 2005 GLYPH award. Sivan Raine is writer and editor of The Future of Israel. |
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PLEASE HELP LEE KAPLAN FIGHT THE ISM
Posted by Barbara Sommer, May 7, 2007. |
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This is a message from Lee Kaplan. If you google the sites listed below, he'd appreciate it if you contact him at leekaplan@worldnet.att.net and tell him. |
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My work at stopping the ISM has been very effective. Today I received notification I got UC Riverside to cancel the national Al Awda Conference on campus. This occured after I showed links between the American Nazi Party and Al Awda. However, the ISM has been after me on the Internet. They did what is called a google bomb and got my archive of work delisted from number one under Lee Kaplan. I am asking a simple favor of all of you: Please click on these three links: http://www.frontpagemag. com/Articles/ authors.asp? ID=2106 The increased traffic should put me back in the number one and two spots. I'd appreciate this help from you so I can continue my work helping Israel and America. Thank you
Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@worldnet.at.net |
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MULTI-CULTURALISM OF EURABIA
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 7, 2007. |
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Israel's Left, by following the so-called Multi-Culturalism of Eurabia, is becoming weaker by the day. Europe is in free fall as it dilutes its Christian past with acceptance of Islam into its body politic. As Europe morphs into Eurabia, we see the same warped mind-set adopted by Israel's Left -- under the veneer of Multi-Culturalism. While the Europeans and Leftist Israelis are failing to maintain the safety of their citizens and sovereignty of their countries, the Muslims are not agreeing to end terror. They see the pleading to end terror as weakness by the failing nations. The Muslim and Arab maintain their solidarity and do not blend with what they perceive of as the effeminate culture of Multi-culturalism. The Muslims keep separate and apart -- with one goal in mind, namely, to conquer by the sword and convert all others to Islam in order to create domination of the World by Islam with a Global Islamic Caliphate. On this matter they remain steady while their intended victims wallow in self-degradation, slavishly honoring and appeasing their dedicated Muslim adversaries. This perceived effeminate weakness is not lost on the male-dominated Islamists as they expand their expectations of conquest and victory over their frightened, whining and compliant adversaries. As the Islamists use any weapon from bombs to babies, the Eurabians and the Israeli Leftists plead for understanding, begging their Muslim adversaries to please cease terror and join their illusionary brotherhood of peace and accommodation. What we are seeing today is the pre-conversion of a weak Christian Europe and Jews of the Left who appear ready to be absorbed into Islam. They cover their embarrassing surrender to Islam by telling all that they are merely demonstrating that humanity is one in common and all can live together, in peace. But, the Islamic faith of the Muslims cannot abide such a mixing of faiths and so while one side whines, snivels and genuflects, the other side wields a whip, a sword and explosive belts, demanding obedience. However, to keep a semblance of dignity even as they crawl and apologize for their national memory of who they once were, the appeasers bleat about how they are saving humanity. Multi-culturalism has become the "cover word" for surrender and acceptance of the savage faith of Islam which is characterized by blood-lust. They want to win by conquering with violence NOT by peace agreements. Perhaps another 9/11, far greater than the original, will shock the Eurabians or the sleep-walking Arabists in America into a survival mode. Regrettably, up until now, there have shown a great reluctance to come to grips with the Muslim culture which has remained focused on absorbing or destroying the Judeo-Christian civilization globally. Although there is an irrefutable display of this clash of civilizations, the West pretends it is not happening. The West is reluctant to meet Islam on the field of battle. Some of the Europeans, as is their wont, have tried to appease the Islamists by joining them in the xenophobic hatred of the Jewish State and the Jews. This, of course, happened before, as when the European nations joined Hitler against their own Jews -- as Hitler's armies were conquering their countries. It is not so different today as we observe Eurabia and Russia selling arms and nuclear capability to Ahmadinejad of Iran who, like Hitler, plainly states that Islam will one day rule the free West and the rest of the world, thereby promising to defeat their suppliers of arms. Islam, driven by the Mullahs interpretation of a Koranic mandate tells all Muslims that they may use any weapon, any agreement or lie to conquer the "infidel" (any non-believer in Islam). While they are blowing up the globe, their most fearsome weapon is immigration as they flood Europe and America with Muslims until they reach a "critical mass". Then the Muslims breed more Muslim babies, the next generation of suicide bombers, whom they teach to hate and kill as early as age 3. They flood our western schools of higher learning while encouraging other students to adopt their ways of subverting their host country. Thanks to the Arabist State Department, Muslim immigrants with special visas, choose classes in nuclear physics, chemistry and biology -- all of which have proven useful to their country of origin where what they learned can be added to the arsenal aimed at our destruction. Nations are very much like the humans which inhabit them. When the inner immune system is healthy, it can drive off invading viruses, bacteria, cancer, etc. When it weakens, all these harmful things are waiting to invade and destroy the host. Nations open themselves up for invasion as they exhibit signals that they are weak, purposeless, ripe for conquest. Islam is that virus which has been waiting for the West to show signs of vulnerability and weakness. Here I include Europe, America and Israel, among others. One area to ponder is the softening of a civilization in a kind of feminizing of conflict. Islamic historian Bernard Lewis analyzed Osama Bin Laden's view of Islam's war with the then Soviet Union and the later war with America. Dr. Lewis says that "In [Osama] Bin Laden's perception the Muslims have met, defeated and destroyed the more dangerous of the 2 infidel superpowers -- the Soviet Union [in Afghanistan]. Dealing with the soft, pampered and effeminate America would be an easy matter." (1). It appears as if the Europeans have taken on the notion of a weak, effeminate society with its testosterone so low there is no combative energy left to face any enemy, let alone the testicle-driven society of Islam. Regrettably, Dr. Lewis is correct about some parts of America as we observe the Democrats through the voice of Nancy Pelosi, meeting and shaking hands with but unwilling to engage in combat against her adversaries. Perhaps the world is drifting toward a effeminate, non-combative approach against enemies who are yet loaded with testosterone. Is that why we see Nancy Pelosi, Condoleezza Rice, Andrea Merkel of Germany, Tzipi Livni of Israel, Hillary Clinton pushing to the front claiming Amazon position but unable to combat Islamists? (Just an area to ponder.) Israel, through her pacifistic Leftists, seems ready to follow Eurabia in their loss of purpose. Granted, the pro-Arab State Department in linkage with the Bush need for an historical legacy, drives and manipulates the accommodating Jewish Left. Here again, the illusion to a weak, effeminate logic seems applicable. I am reminded of the psychology of the beaten wife who time and again goes back to her wife-beating husband. Illogical, but it happens frequently. The Muslim Arabs attack again and again while the Leftists just as frequently go back to continually try to appease them. [In anticipation of receiving objections from my female readers of using the concept of feminism as a negative to allude to nations' unwillingness to face their adversaries.... Many women have far more courage than their male counterparts in government. Feminism as used here, portrays the perception by Muslims and especially the radical Islamists in their male dominated world. Observe women in Saudi Arabia, the Taliban, Iran's mullahs who all keep women as chattel and weak, with their bodies wrapped in burkas and veils, not educated, not able to work outside their homes or drive and, in many countries, forced to undergo genital mutilation. For Muslims, men are dominant and castigating a man as effeminate is a deep insult. Therefore, perceiving of their adversaries as effeminate and weak, bolsters their own self-perception or image as strongly masculine and great warriors. Eurabia falls; American appeases; Israel's Left makes agreements and all plead for peace in the name of Multi-Culturalism. The Muslim Islamist makes his case and is likely to win the war by the jihad (Holy War) sword, if we don't wake up. ### 1. "The Third Islamic Wave" by Dr. Bernard Lewis World Jewish Digest May 2007 Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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PACE U. REJECTS DHIMMI STATUS
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 7, 2007. |
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ABBAS PROPAGANDA Hamas justified its firing of dozens of rockets at Israeli cities as retaliation for Israeli raids on "innocent citizens" of the P.A. (IMRA, 4/24). The spokesman for Abbas condemned an Israeli "crime" of murdering three citizens in Jenin. Other Arab reports admitted, however, that the three were "militant operatives" belonging to the main terrorist organizations, and were shot after they opened fire upon Israeli police (IMRA, 4/21). "innocent victims" or guilty terrorists? P.A. claims are false. Disregard them. FREE SPEECH VICTORY AT PACE U. The Hillel Foundation has shown a documentary, Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, at dozens of colleges. Hillel planned another screening at Pace University. The Muslim Students Association protested to the University. A dean there then threatened two Hillel members with making them police suspects about something else, if they persisted. When the controversy became publicly known, the University website questioned the honesty and accuracy of the head of the Hillel chapter and suggested people spread the word. He was engendering hostility against Hillel and Jews there. ZOA chided the University. The University apologized and the screening took place (IMRA, 4/21). It is unfortunate that some universities submit to Islamist demands not to let them be exposed. The university response should encourage revelation and allow debate. Pace had been intolerant of the decent in the name of tolerance. BESIDES BLAMING FOREIGNERS The Lebanon Star admits that many Arab states are dysfunctional. Warlords, gangsters, militias, and tribal leaders compete for power. Iran, Turkey, and Israel intervene, exacerbating the Arabs' problem, the Star claimed (IMRA, 4/21). Iran seeks to dominate. Arabs attack Turkey and Israel, which then defend themselves at the source. I guess its progress when the Arabs admit primary responsibility for their problems, instead of blaming them entirely on outsiders. AMI AYALON'S LACK OF ETHICS Margalit Har-Shefi was imprisoned for not warning that Yigal Amir planned to murder PM Rabin. (The secret service agent who incited him was not indicted for it.) Now Ami Ayalon, running for PM, admits that as head of Mossad, then, he knew she didn't think murder intended. He was unethical to let her be wrongfully convicted and he evinces no shame now in admitting what he did (IMRA, 4/20). 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@verizon.net |
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PREPARING FOR THE NEXT WAR
Posted by Daily Alert, May 7, 2007. |
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This was written by Guy Bechor and it appeared on the Ynet News website
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Crucial Questions Remain Unanswered In Face Of Imminent Threats While Israeli society is busy as usual with internal battles, cruelly tearing off limbs regarding the past and with self hate whose origins are hard to fathom, the imminent threats are clearly visible. Yet through astounding blindness they are not being discussed in the public discourse. The Iranian deputy interior minister is explicitly warning Israel that in the event of an American attack, Iran would fire tens of thousands of missiles at Israel; Syria is moving and positioning thousands of missiles close to the border with Israel; Hizbullah has completed the deployment of its missiles and rockets arsenal, which is capable of striking at the heart of the country and Hamas has transferred tons of explosives and missiles into the Gaza Strip in an attempt to create a balance of power. Even the timetable is clear: Somewhere in August -- then the US will have to decide whether it will launch a large-scale military assault against Iran or not, and this is when Iran is likely to activate its regional satellites. But here we are continuing to squabble about nonsensical matters. The Winograd Commission could first and foremost be instrumental in sounding the warning bells ahead of a future military confrontation that could prove to be much harsher and more painful then that of last summer; the commission could analyze the conclusions of the last war in order to better prepare for future eventualities. Yet no one is doing this: They are all busy looking for heads to roll. The Winograd Commission is leveling criticism at the leadership and the public for turning a critical blind eye. Isn't the exact same syndrome repeating itself right now? Worse than that, let's assume that the government and its senior officials quit. Will the timetable created here tie in with the Middle East's timetable of threats? Would Iran oblige us by waiting for a new prime minister and defense minister to take up office in Israel before launching an attack? Is IDF ready for war on several fronts? It is clear to almost every citizen that Amir Peretz was not suitable and is not suitable for the post of defense minister. He should immediately remove himself from office and let another take his position. In the short amount of time that remains the new guy will get the military into shape ahead of the next battle, which could prove to be existential. Time is short, and therefore we don't have time for an absolute change of government and a prolonged election campaign. We simply don't have that luxury. The new prime minister, defense minister and chief of staff would be well advised to ask themselves the questions that were not asked by the Winograd Commission: Is the IDF currently prepared for the possibility of war on several fronts? Is the State of Israel prepared for the possibility that it would have to resort to the bomb shelters? Is the home front -- which will turn into the front line -- adequately protected? Can Israel respond to an all-out attack? Does it have its own missile arsenal? Can it create adequate deterrence against Iran and other terror organizations? Is there and will there be coordination with the US regarding various defense scenarios? Will the electronic media's foul-ups be repeated in the next war? But these questions are not being asked, and the fool's ship is continuing to unyieldingly sail towards the unknown. Yet nonetheless, one positive aspect may emerge from the potential threat that may be approaching. Perhaps, this time too, our enemies will save us from a crueler enemy, namely ourselves. 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 |
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CLAIMS IN B´TSELEM/HAMOKED REPORT LACK CREDIBILITY
Posted by NGO Monitor, May 7, 2007. |
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On May 6, 2007, Israeli NGOs B'tselem and HaMoked released a lengthy report claiming that the Israel Security Agency continues to torture security detainees in violation of a 1999 High Court decision. (NGO Monitor has documented the activities and credibility problems in previous reports published by these politicized NGOs, whose many donors include European governments and the New Israel Fund.)
In response to the report, the Israeli Ministry of Justice (MOJ)
issued a nine page letter (Hebrew, English) detailing the questionable
methodology and lack of verifiable sources. The letter notes that the
report is "fraught with mistakes, groundless claims and inaccuracies."
This public rebuttal reflects an important development in Israeli
government policy with respect to such politicized NGO reports.
Excerpts:
To read the MOJ's letter in full, click
See also: Dan Izenberg, "'Shin Bet interrogation methods illegal',"
Jerusalem Post, May 6, 2007
The NGO Monitor organization (www.ngo-monitor.org) promotes
critical debate and accountability of human rights NGOs in the Arab
Israeli Conflict. Contact the NGO Monitor by email at
mail@ngo.monitor.org. Their website address is |
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PALESTINIAN PHOTO OP POURING CEMENT IN TUNNEL ILLUSTRATES EMPTINESS OF US BENCHMARKS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 7, 2007. |
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This is an excerpt from IMRA, from an article written by Dr. Aaron
Lerner |
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Break out the champagne! In no time at all the PA has succeeded in producing the most demanding photo op required by the U.S. schedule of benchmarks:
So? Break out the champagne? No. Revise the benchmarks so that instead of requiring only photo ops
present a timetable for Palestinian Authority actions destroying a
specific list of hard targets (training camps, specifically identified
fortifications, etc.). Require also closing down the rocket factories,
and confiscation of rockets, weapons, explosives, etc. and transfer of
the contraband over for removal/destruction. What with the huge
quantities in the area, it would be possible to include readily
achievable numerical goals.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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THEY ARE WAITING FOR OUR BABIES TO BE MURDERED BEFORE REACTING! QASSAM LANDS NEAR SDEROT KINDERGARTEN
Posted by Sergio Tessa (HaDaR), May 7, 2007. |
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This was written by Shmulik Hadad and published today in Ynet News
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A Qassam rocket fired from the northern Gaza Strip landed Monday morning near a private house in the southern town of Sderot, causing damage to the building.
A number of people suffered from shock, including a woman who lost her consciousness. A kindergarten is located not far from the landing site. Sderot residents said that the fact that no one was physically hurt was a miracle, as children were making their way to the kindergarten. The al-Quds Brigades, the Islamic Jihad's military wing, claimed responsibility for firing the rocket. According to the Jihad, they fired a medium-range 'Quds' rocket. The organization said that the rocket fire was a response to Israel's operation in the West Bank. The group also claimed responsibility for firing a mortar shell at an IDF post in Kissufim. Angry residents Haim Buskila, whose sister's house was hit by the rocket, said, "I live close by and we heard the explosion. I ran quickly to see if everything was okay at my sister's home. Although there were no injuries, she is suffering from heavy mental damage and so are we. We have no fortified rooms and we feel like rabbits in a cave -- every time you take your head out you are afraid to get hurt." According to Buskila, "Our life is on the stake, while the leaders are fighting whether to remain in offer or not. Which other country would allow its city to be bombed like this? Are we no longer important? Where is the solidarity? Where is the State? People are already talking about an underground organization which will rise and bomb them back. Gaza should be erased. If they are crazy, we shall also act crazy." The Qassam barrages fired at the western Negev increased over the weekend, and particularly on Sunday. Angry residents arrived at the landing site, including Albert Gabay, a local journalist and activist. "I have a 1.5-year-old child and I am very worried. My wife wants us to leave, while I am connected to this city and am torn between the need to defend my family and the desire to stay here," he said. Avi Farahan, a Gush Katif evacuee who lives in Sderot, said that he would resume his petition to the High Court calling for fortification for every resident. "We are now determined more than ever with this petition, particularly when we hear officers who want to act and are stopped by the army," he said. Seven rockets launched from the Strip landed in the western Negev on Sunday -- six in open fields, and one nearby an industrial area, meters away from a gas station. One man was moderately injured from shrapnel, and four others were treated for shock. Following an increase in Qassam rocket fire towards Negev communities over the weekend, military forces are soon to change their operational policies in the Gaza Strip, according to IDF sources. "We are preparing, and willing to up the ante with regards to offensive and foiling operations in the Gaza Strip. The way things look now, we may have to increase activity very soon ... no more sitting around," a senior security official told Ynet. Despite these estimates, senior officials avoided expressing a clear opinion with regards to the type of action the IDF should take in Gaza. "That is a decision for the political echelon to make, and we will carry out whatever is necessary," the officials said.
Contact Sergio Tessa at HaDar-Israel@verizon.net
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FROM PROSCIUTTO IN FLORENCE TO HUMMUS IN ABU GHOSH -- AND BACK
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 6, 2007. |
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For us Jews to have a home is half messianic times. For a Jew to become a citizen of the Jewish State of Israel is a relief beyond belief. And why is that? Here is how the line of events sequence goes: To become an citizen of the State of Israel you have to appear at the Israeli Interior Ministry office; your heart beat will go along with a great deal of excitement; your will have a feeling of rebirth. Having the Israeli blue identification card leaves one complete. When living in the Diaspora on many occasions one will find it better to keep Judaism out of conversation, but having an Israeli identity you have friends you can talk with about the Jew in you. Now, when you think of Judaism, there is no longer the need to see just the Holocaust. Being an Israeli is a full "package" of the Hebrew language, music, literature, culture, a country with a lot of problems, but also with a future. The old Diaspora identity one had carries has been broken off like a dry twig and a new identity was born. By the time the Hebrew begins rolling off your tongue, you will finally understand that there is no longer a need to worry about being a Jew as you may have then, in the Diaspora. Israel is one place where your Jewish identity and culture are well-preserved. Even though it may have always been made clear to you that your fate was to continue the tradition, because Israel exists there's no longer a need to worry too much about this. There is now a home for Jewish culture and for Jews themselves. It's something that is self-evident and an astonishing fact -- perhaps not always appreciated by those born in it -- but is most precious of all for those who come from the outside. Israel is importance as a Jewish state, the only place in which the future of the Jews is assured. Do young Jewish people understand this? Do they identify and immediately turn into supporters of Israel, despite all the defamation of the state that they have heard from all sides? I hope so. If the question arises: Do you feel more Israeli than, American, than Italian, than British, more than whatever country you reside in? And the response should be: Just as man is one, so, too, his identity is one and cannot be divided into parts or weighed. Think of a blender that is always turning, grinding and whirling. That is what identity is like. It is made of many components that we throw into it day after day, and each of them contributes to the identity, enriches it and turns a person into who he or she is. Identifying with Israel and perhaps being an Israeli citizen can free you from the problematic nature of being a Jew. It will release you from the worry of surviving as a Jew. You can now feel like a citizen of the world, and only circumstances determine your location. No matter where you are, you will always carry this song in your heart, "I want to go back to the best days in Israel." And you will, go visit again, and again, and again, and again! This was written by Shulim Vogelmann and it was publishedd in
Haaretz |
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A young Italian Jew comes to Israel, picks up the language, witnesses a terror attack, meets a sabra girl, enlists in the army - and stops worrying about being a Jew I open my eyes and the hot sun is flooding the room, as a lovely spring day wishes me good morning. I get out of bed and walk over to open the window. A crisp breeze washes my face and the view warms my heart. I lean on the windowsill and take up the position of a lecturer. It is no lecture that emerges from my mouth, though, but a satisfied sigh and deep breaths. Across from me is the greenish dome of the synagogue, standing like a mosque in the middle of the quarter. A Sunday of reading and lounging on the sofa awaits, seasoned with a light meal and a short walk to get some air. On my way to the shower, I press the play button on the stereo and a clear female voice takes over the entire apartment. The words penetrate my veins, my soul, and under the flowing water I sing with her: "I lived among you like a wild plant." From Florence, I fly 10 years back, and longer still, on the wings of my longings. I was born on September 20, 1978, in a hospital in Florence. A few more children came into the world in the same place on that day, but I was almost certainly the only Jew born in the city. I was apparently the only one whose picture was published in the paper, just because he was born. True, it was an insignificant newspaper of the 900-member Jewish community, but all the same -- a picture in the paper. I studied at a Jewish school only until age 10, and then they decided to shut it down because of a shortage of students. We, the students of the sole, and last, class of the school, numbered eight in total. There were only three girls among us. At the gate of my new school, a public school, a stream of girls my age, smiling, passed before me. I couldn't believe my eyes. And as soon as I walked through the gate after them, I left the world in which I had previously been imprisoned, the world of the Jewish community, and found myself surrounded by non-Jewish friends. At that point, Judaism was a private matter that I tried to keep to myself. I had no desire to reveal it, because I didn't want to feel different from the others, and I really didn't want to find myself the center of attention. And I certainly did not want to become entangled in a thicket of questions, which would inevitably end up with my being forced to talk about my grandfather and the Holocaust. But you can't stay hidden in Italy with a name like Shulim Vogelmann. I simply had no choice. Every time a question on the subject came up, I would answer the following way, in the hope that my response would not lead to additional inquiries: "I'm Italian just like you, but just as you're Christian, my religion is Judaism." And between the words, images of the Holocaust appeared in my imagination, along with thoughts of my grandfather who survived, and from whom all I have left is his name. This is what my life as a Jew in the Diaspora was like: a lot of thoughts about the Holocaust, which did not find their way out. I felt that the subject was personal and that there was no one for me to talk to about it, no one who would respond, no one among my friends who would identify. What remained was the nagging presence of one thought: Stay Jewish, because few Jews are left. But beyond this aspiration of survival, elementary and existential, I didn't know how to explain to myself why it was so important for me to be concerned about my Jewishness. Aside from the meaningless prayers on Yom Kippur and the exhausting Passover seder, I had no decisive reason to cling to our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (and our foremothers, of course). On the contrary, there were reasons to feel dispirited -- like the prohibition on eating pig products, the last trace of religious observance that remained in my family. It wasn't easy seeing my friends fill up on prosciutto while my stomach stayed empty. One bag and a lot of curiosity Only once did I manage to taste what was then the secret fantasy of my palate. At the birthday party of a Jewish friend I saw a roll with pink meat peeking out. I couldn't imagine that in a Jewish home it would be permissible to eat pig products. It must be salmon, I said to myself. After one bite I realized that something wasn't right here, but as a fervent Jew I saw fit to eat another eight sandwiches, in order to judge whether they really contained non-kosher meat. I strayed from the path that one time, but an incomprehensible, yet utterly clear, thought had clung on all along: I am like others, but also a little bit different. When I finished high school, I was overtaken by a strong desire to go on a trip instead of heading straight to university. But where? It seemed that the huge picture of the Western Wall that hung in the hallway of my parents' home had influenced me more than I imagined. Certainly it was accompanied by many other signs, sentences that were said and forgotten, and dormant aspirations waiting to rise. All these contributed to the fact that my direction was marked; the writing was on the wall. All that was left for me to do was to decide yes or no. I went on my way. I landed at Ben-Gurion International Airport in August 1997 with one bag and an invigorated curiosity to discover what it was all about: a Jewish state with outstanding weather. A rude taxi driver dropped me off at the entrance to beginner's ulpan (Hebrew study program), and I plunged right into the alphabet and invested a few good years in learning the language. I met a nice sabra girl, planted a tree on a hilltop while wearing a kova tembel (a bucket hat), embraced good friends, and enjoyed sitting in a living room immersed in smoke and speaking Hebrew all night long. On Holocaust Remembrance Day I stood during the siren, and for the first time in my life I didn't feel alone with the pain of memory, closed off in sadness within a private, tender ceremony. I was among my own people. I went to university, witnessed a terror attack, and started to think about death. A few months later, I was already used to such thoughts. At night I drank beer and realized that there are also Palestinians and that we're not just victims, but also know how to shoot, for defensive and offensive needs, for good or for bad. Moreover, I internalized the concept that the state is Jewish but that it does not belong to Jews, because Arabs also live in it. I saw the Israeli movies "Halfon Hill Doesn't Answer" and "Late Summer Blues," I read Sami Michael and Yehoshua Kenaz, I listened to Matti Caspi and Meir Ariel, I pasted a bumper sticker on my car that read "War is gross," and I traveled in the Galilee and became more and more attached to the scenery that hadn't been part of me but is now mine. On Saturdays I drove to Abu Ghosh to eat hummus and felt secular. I also traveled to the Sinai, stepped on a sea urchin, and felt bad. I wandered around my neighborhood in clogs and joined the army, because without that I won't really be what I want to be. I fired a few bullets and went on weekend leave. The three yellow letters on my uniform shirt did me good, because I knew that my grandfather would have been proud of me. Sometimes I felt that it was a little pathetic, and all the symbols and ideology weighed heavily on me, didn't suit my personality. But I also knew that this was a transition period, that I was young and would have plenty more time to become more moderate or criticize things. And finally, I ran up to the third flight of the Interior Ministry building. My heart beat with excitement, but the clerk was indifferent. I realized that here I'm not the only one, and no one will put my picture in the paper just because I moved to Israel. Nonetheless, the feeling was one of rebirth. I left the Interior Ministry with a blue identification card whose number I immediately memorized. I felt complete. Six years had passed since I landed here, and the world that came before is as distant as the memory of childhood. Now I have friends I can speak to about the Jew within me. Now, when I think of Judaism, I no longer see just the Holocaust. I have a language, I have new music, I have new literature, culture, a country with a lot of problems, but also with a future. I even have a soccer team (Hapoel Jerusalem). My old identity has broken off like a dry twig; a new identity was born, and the noise is that of an egg being cracked open. By the time Hebrew began rolling off my tongue, I finally understood that there was no need to worry about being a Jew as I did then, in the Diaspora, in Florence. There is one place where my Jewish identity and culture are well-preserved, and even though the most active institution in our community is the nursing home, and even though my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor and it was always made clear to me that my fate was to continue the tradition, there's no need to worry too much, because Israel exists. There is a home for Jewish culture and for Jews themselves. It's something that's self-evident and not always appreciated by those born in it -- an astonishing fact, and the most precious of all, for those who come from the outside. After six years of discovery, self-formation and a lot of fun, I returned to Italy. I decided to go back and work in my family's publishing house, which brings out books on Jewish topics. I didn't want this enterprise, a wellspring of Jewish culture, to stop carrying out its important mission. I chose -- and the decision was not easy -- to be near the publishing and far from Israel. At least, I tell myself, we are also a Zionist enterprise. True, it's a small publishing house, but it will always be home to Jewish books. In order to retain a tighter connection with Israel and with Hebrew, I am editing a series of Israeli books and translating some of them. Upon my return to Italy, I felt the need to put all the experiences I underwent in Israel into a book. Through writing, I wanted to organize everything within myself, and perhaps explain to others what the State of Israel is and its significance to the Jews. The book is called "Mentre la citta bruciava" ("While the City Burned"). That is a sentence from my grandfather, whom I never knew. But according to my father's stories, every night at dinner, my grandfather would say: "When I write my autobiography, I'll begin it like this: 'I was born on a train while the city burned.'" He never got the chance to write it. Now I present the book at all kinds of events and in schools. Through my own personal experience, I try to transmit to young people my perspective on Israel's importance as a Jewish state, the only place in which the future of the Jews is assured. Do they understand? Do they identify and immediately turn into supporters of Israel, despite all the defamation of the state that they have heard from all sides? I have my methods. Readers have asked me many times: Do you feel more Israeli or more Italian? I respond that that's not the right question. Just as man is one, so, too, his identity is one and cannot be divided into parts or weighed. Think of a blender that is always turning, grinding and whirling. That is what identity is like. It is made of many components that we throw into it day after day, and each of them contributes to the identity, enriches it and turns a person into who he is. In my case, I am an Italian, a Diaspora Jew, an Israeli and many other things. All these contribute to my identity, and I am a mixture; it's that simple. Other times they ask me: Why did you return to Italy if you had it so good in Israel? And I respond that ideas are in the head, not on the ground. I tell them that now, now that Israel has freed me from the problematic nature of being a Jew and now that I have become convinced that there is no more need to worry about my survival as a Jew, now I feel like a citizen of the world, and only circumstances determine my location. But inside, something is screeching and I hear a whisper: You little liar! If you didn't love your books so much, you would now be sitting in a garden beneath the Jerusalem sun. What can you do? Life is luck and choice. Apparently, they won't let me light a torch on Independence Day. I come out of the shower, towel myself down and sing: "I want to go back to my best days..." -- in Israel. Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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HAMAS STEALS MICKEY MOUSE IMAGE TO TEACH HATE AND ISLAMIC SUPREMACY
Posted by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, May 6, 2007. |
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Hamas steals Mickey Mouse image to teach hate and Islamic supremacy
The squeaky-voiced Mickey Mouse lookalike, named Farfur, is the star of a weekly children's program called Tomorrow's Pioneers on the official Hamas TV station (Al-Aqsa TV). Farfur and his co-host, a young girl named Saraa', teach children about such things as the importance of the daily prayers and drinking milk, while taking every opportunity to indoctrinate young viewers with teachings of Islamic supremacy, hatred of Israel and the US and support of "resistance" -- the Palestinian euphemism for terror. Farfur tells children that they must pray in the mosque five times a day until there is "world leadership under Islamic leadership." The earnest and soft-spoken Saraa' explains that the nucleus of this world Islamic leadership will be from "all of Palestine," i.e., including Israel. Farfur refers to Israel as "the oppressive invading Zionist occupation," which the children must "resist." In a religious warning that is striking, considering the young age of the target audience, Saraa' announces that after death, the children will have to answer to Allah for what they did or did not do for the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, and for Palestinian prisoners: "I remind you that Al-Aqsa and the prisoners are a responsibility on our shoulders, and Allah will ask us on Resurrection Day what we gave for their sake." The writing in this show is quite sophisticated. Farfur's performance is unquestionably funny and entertaining, as is the character's comic timing. For example, as he rhymes off a list of world figures, he chirps: "We will win, Bush! We will win, Condoleezza! We will win, Sharon!" Then, without missing a beat, he quips, "Ah, Sharon is dead" (sic), reinforcing his message that the plan for world domination is progressing. Using a character based on an appealing, world famous and beloved icon like Mickey Mouse to teach Islamic supremacy and resistance as Islamic duty is a powerful and effective way to indoctrinate children. The effectiveness of this program is heightened by including child viewers, who phone in to the show and recite poems with images of hate and violence; for example, "We will destroy the chair of the despots, so they will taste the flame of death;" and, "Rafah sings 'Oh, oh.' Its answer is an AK-47. We who do not know fear, we are the predators of the forest." It is unclear what screening process, if any, is used in the selection of the poems to be recited. Either the themes are selected by the screeners, which reinforces the hate orientation of the program, or they are the initiative of the children and parents, which demonstrates the great success of the show's hate messages. * * * Below are some excerpts from three recent programs: Farfur: "We are setting with you the cornerstone for world leadership under Islamic leadership. Isn't it so, Saraa'?" Saraa' "Yes, our beloved children." Farfur: "You must be careful regarding your prayer and to go to the mosque for all five [daily] prayers. I say, in the mosque and in the first rows, until we can lead the world." Saraa' "We remind you that we, the great ones, started this program to lead this world. The nucleus, with the will of Allah, will be from here, from Palestine. We will carry the concern of this [Islamic] nation that awaits us." Farfur: "From Palestine, oh Saraa', what do you mean? From Gaza, Jerusalem, Ramallah, or from all of Palestine?" Saraa' "Yes, from all of Palestine" [i.e., includes Israel -- editors]. Farfur: "If so, my beloved young ones, with the will of Allah, we will lead the nation from here, from Palestine." Saraa' "Our beloved children, many say that we had glory [in the past], and we had culture, and the Muslims had greatness and respect. But with the will of Allah, we, tomorrow's pioneers, will restore the glory of this nation." Farfur: "Yes, we, tomorrow's pioneers, will restore to this nation its glory, and we will liberate Al-Aqsa, with Allah's will, and we will liberate Iraq, with Allah's will, and we will liberate the Muslim countries, invaded by murderers." Saraa' "Yes, they are children occupied by the Jews, but with the will of Allah, we will resist and protect against the Zionist occupation." Farfur: "Until we win, with the will of Allah, we will resist until we win."
* * * Saraa' "...We remind you that we will lead this world, and the center of the leadership, with the help of Allah, praise him, is from here, Palestine, and will burst out across the world..." Girl: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Boy: "Doctor." Saraa' "You see, Farfur, everyone is ambitious and wants to lead the world. You... want to lead the world, Ahmad?" Ahmad: "Yes." Saraa' "It's important..." Farfur to the girl: "Fatima, you hear me? What do you say to the prisoners in the prisons of the oppressive invading Zionist occupation...?" [Esraa' sings a song, Farfur is delighted until the words] "...we will surrender ourselves..." Saraa' "Esraa', it's not a good song. Why?" Esraa': "Because it has surrender." Saraa: "We don't surrender, we want to resist against the enemy, isn't it so, Farfur?... We want to resist against the enemy, and we don't want to surrender." [Farfur compares Abu Jahal, who was the most prominent enemy of Muhammad in Mecca, to Sharon] Farfur: "Allah willing, this country, its children, its men, its women and its elderly -- will win -- we will win, brothers. We will win, Bush! We will win, Sharon! Ah, Sharon is dead. We will win, Mofaz. Mofaz left. We will win, Olmert, we will win Condoleezza ... we will win." Saraa' [Final words] "...I remind you that we are the ones who will carry the concerns of this [Islamic] nation, and we will lead this world, and I remind you that Al-Aqsa and the prisoners are a responsibility on our shoulders, and Allah will ask us on Resurrection Day what we gave for their sake."
* * * The hostess explains to Farfur that one must aspire to memorize the entire Quran... "Because we want to lead the world, so [therefore] we want to memorize the [entire] Quran." [The girl Harwa recites a song:]
Another child, Muhammad, reads lines from a poem:
Update. May 13, 2006 (Ezra HaLevi, Arutz-Sheva) According to a report by Palestinian Media Watch, Hamas Palestinian Authority Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti lied about removing a Micky Mouse preaching global Jihad from PA TV. The Micky Mouse look-alike, named Farfur, regularly appeared on PA's Al-Aksa TV station until last week, when Arutz-7 published a Palestinian Media Watch report on the Islamist mouse, reprinted around the globe and drawing condemnations from politicians as well as members of Walt Disney's family. PA Minister of Information Mustafa Barghouti issued a public statement that the show would be taken off the Hamas TV network until it could be reviewed. His commitment was reported worldwide, but Farfur appeared Friday on his regularly scheduled "Tomorrow's Pioneers" program, preaching global domination of Islam. Farfur was joined by a young girl names Saraa, as well as Hazim, an adult "who delivered most of the show's messages about Islamic supremacy," according to PMW. Hazim told the viewers of the children's television show that Islam will spread all over the world, "including Spain," and that the spread of Islam is for the world's benefit. He said the "massacres in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine will be replaced by love and justice under Islamic rule." "It appears from today's broadcast that the Hamas or PA officials
who oversaw today's show were concerned only with neutralizing the
dialogue spoken by the Mickey Mouse character, Farfur, and not with
moderating the show's content," PMW's Itamar Marcus and Barbra
Crook said. "It is as if they decided that the show's messages,
which also promote hatred of Israel and the US, are completely
acceptable -- as long as the more inflammatory comments are not coming
from the knockoff of Disney's beloved mouse."
Itamar Marcus is director of PMW -- Palestinian Media Watch --
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TURKEY'S MILITANT MUSLIMS SHOULD WORRY WEST
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 6, 2007. |
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This was written by Con Coughlin and it appeared May 4, 2007 in UK Telegraph. |
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Inside abroad Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey, was no friend of Islam. Late at night, and in his cups, Turkey's iconic leader would often refer to the nation's Islamic past as "a necklace of corpses" that defiled the new state he was trying to create from the ruins of the Ottoman empire. The 15 years he governed the country is most remembered for the almost obsessive purge he undertook of the country's Muslim identity as he sought to create a society more attuned to the ways of modern Europe. The Caliphate, the body that had governed the Muslim world for four centuries under the Ottomans, was unceremoniously abolished within months of the creation of the modern Turkish state. The minarets of the country's mosques were silenced by a ban on the muezzin broadcasting their daily prayers, and the more radical madrassas were closed. Anyone who turned up at Ankara's city walls in dress deemed to be too Islamic in nature was unceremoniously sent back to the provinces. Sharia law was replaced by a penal code modelled on that of Switzerland and the emancipation of women was encouraged by laws that banned the wearing of veils. Arabic script was replaced by the Latin alphabet, and the centuries-old ban on alcohol was lifted. It is hardly surprising, then, that the crowds of demonstrators who have been protesting at the country's creeping Islamisation should carry banners bearing Ataturk's intimidating features. The crude attempt by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country's crypto-Islamic prime minister, to secure the presidency for a practising Muslim, Abdullah Gul, the current foreign minister, has provoked such outrage that the nation's military elite, who regard themselves as standard-bearers of Ataturk's legacy, threatened to stage yet another military coup. That deeply disturbing prospect has -- for the moment, at least -- been averted by Erdogan's decision to call an early election this summer to decide the issue by democratic means. But with Erdogan's Justice and Development party, which is deeply rooted in the country's burgeoning Islamic constituency, riding high in the polls, a return to the kind of military dictatorship that plagued Turkey's political development throughout the 20th century cannot be ruled out. Turkey's military establishment is Kemalist to the core, and the mere suggestion that the country might appoint a president whose wife insists on covering herself with a veil for public functions would be enough to have them taking to their tanks. Despite Erdogan's insistence that he has no desire to dilute the country's distinctive secular character, the hawkish generals have viewed him as an Islamist in disguise in the three years since he came to power. They, together with the millions of Turks who are at ease with the country's secular outlook, are concerned at the growing influence Islam is having on Turkish society. Ten years ago it was normal to see groups of young girls in school uniforms on the streets of Istanbul. Today they have virtually disappeared, to be replaced by women wearing headscarves. During the holy Islamic month of Ramadan it is not uncommon for street fights to break out between religious Muslims objecting to their secular compatriots lighting a cigarette during the daytime fast. Turn on any television or radio debate in Turkey these days and the main subject of discussion most likely concerns the threat Islam poses to the country's future. "Do you want us to become another Iran or another Afghanistan?" one frustrated secularist demanded of an Islamic supporter during a Turkish radio station phone-in earlier this week. Given Turkey's geographical location, it is hardly surprising that it is susceptible to the threat of radical Islam being imported across its south-eastern borders. And even though Justice and Development's Islamic agenda is mild compared with that on offer in neighbouring Iran, Erdogan's failed attempt to criminalise adultery -- it was vetoed by the current president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer -- has done nothing to allay the suspicions of those determined to maintain the Kemalist settlement. The mounting polarisation between Turkey's devout Muslims and its secular, mainly urban, elite should be a matter of grave concern for the West, which has often sent Ankara conflicting signals about its value as an ally. In military and strategic terms, Turkey has long been regarded as a key asset, particularly after the September 11 attacks put it on the front line of Washington's various campaigns to root out Islamic terrorists and confront rogue states. Yet Turkey's enthusiastic attempt to join the European Union has received a decidedly lukewarm response, with many member states expressing strong reservations about welcoming 70 million Muslims into an alliance whose population is more familiar with the tenets and traditions of Christianity. The various delaying tactics Brussels has employed to postpone Turkey's entry, from doubts over its economic viability to Ankara's obstinacy about opening its ports to Greek Cypriot vessels, has not only succeeded in dampening the Turks' excitement about the whole venture, but has encouraged an upsurge in nationalistic fervour that underlies the country's current travails. Accusations that the West's Islamophobia is responsible for blocking Turkey's entry to the EU have, perversely, increased support for Islamic groups that seek to accentuate the country's historic Muslim character. Brussels' procrastination has also seen a revival of the ultra-nationalist groups that regard Cyprus as their cause célèbre, and are not afraid to use violence against anyone accused of "insulting Turkishness". January's murder of Hrant Dink, the Turkish-Armenian journalist who accused the Turks of committing genocide against the Armenians during the First World War, is symptomatic of the paranoia and isolationism that is sweeping the country, and now threatens the long-term stability of a key Nato ally. The EU's patronising treatment of Turkey's membership application has certainly not helped to placate this siege mentality, and explains why so many Turks now seek to invoke the spirit of Turkish nationalism espoused by Ataturk. But these are dangerous currents. The generals, not the politicians, are the true keepers of the Ataturk flame and, like the country's founding father, they will not stand idly by if the Turks attempt a return to their old Islamic ways. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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WHERE THE NAZI "BIG LIE" ENDURES
Posted by Daniel Pipes, May 6, 2007. |
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Why today's Arab anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda strongly resembles that of the Third Reich. "If today's Arab anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda strongly resembles that of the Third Reich, there is a good reason." So writes Joel Fishman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in "The Big Lie and the Media War against Israel," an insightful piece of historical research. Fishman begins by noting the topsy-turvy situation whereby Israel is perceived as a dangerous predator as it defends its citizens against terrorism, conventional warfare, and weapons of mass destruction. A 2003 survey, for instance, found Europeans seeing Israel as "the greatest threat" to world peace. How did this insane inversion of reality -- the Middle East's only fully free and democratic country seen as the leading global menace -- come to be? Fishman's answer revisits World War I, which is not a surprise, as post-cold war analysts increasingly recognize the extent to which Europe lives still under the shadow of that disaster, whether in its renewed policy of appeasement or its attitudes towards its own culture. Back then, the British government first exploited advances in mass media and advertising to target both the enemy's and its own civilian populations, hoping to shape their thinking. The Central Powers' publics heard messages designed to undermine support for their governments, while Entente publics were fed news reports about atrocities, some of them false. Notably, the British authorities claimed that Imperial Germany had a "Corpse Conversion Factory" (Kadaververwerkungsanstalt), that plundered enemy dead soldiers' bodies to produce soap and other products. After the war's conclusion, when the British learned the truth, these lies left a residue of what Fishman calls "skepticism, betrayal, and a mood of postwar nihilism." This British disinformation campaign had two disastrous implications for World War II. First, it prompted the Allied public to be skeptical concerning German atrocities against Jews, which bore a close resemblance to the imaginary horrors the British had disseminated, so that reports from Nazi-occupied territories were regularly discounted. (This explains why Dwight D. Eisenhower arranged for visits to the concentration camps immediately upon their liberation, to witness and document their reality.) Second, Hitler admiringly noted the British precedent in his book, Mein Kampf (1925): "At first the claims of the [British] propaganda were so impudent that people thought it insane; later, it got on people's nerves; and in the end, it was believed." A decade later, this admiration translated into the Nazi "Big Lie" that turned reality on its head, making Jews into persecutors and Germans into victims. A vast propaganda machine then drummed these lies into the German-speakers' psyche, with great success. The defeat of Germany temporarily discredited such methods of inverting reality. But some escaped Nazis carried their old anti-Semitic ambitions to countries now at war with Israel and attempting to murder its Jewish population. Thousands of Nazis found refuge in Egypt, with smaller numbers reaching other Arabic-speaking countries, notably Syria. Fishman examines particularly the case of Johann von Leers (1902-65), an early Nazi party member, a protégé of Goebbels, a lifelong associate of Himmler, and an overt advocate of genocidal policies against Jews. His 1942 article, "Judaism and Islam as Opposites," lauded Muslims for their "eternal service" of keeping Jews "in a state of oppression and anxiety." This von Leers escaped Germany after 1945 and a decade later turned up in Egypt, where he converted to Islam and became political adviser to Nasser's Department of Information. There, Fishman recounts, he "sponsored the publication of an Arabic edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, revived the blood libel, organized anti-Semitic broadcasts in numerous languages, cultivated neo-Nazis throughout the world, and maintained a warm correspondence encouraging the first generation of Holocaust deniers." Such groundwork proved its value after Israel's historic victory in the Six Day War of 1967, a humiliating defeat for both the Soviet Union and its Arab allies. The subsequent Soviet-Arab propaganda campaign denied Israel the right to defend itself and inverted reality by relentlessly accusing it of aggression. Precisely as Hitler had analyzed in Mein Kampf, if these impudent claims were at first thought insane, in the end they were believed. Today's political madness, in other words, is directly linked to yesterday's. Might some of today's anti-Zionists be ashamed to realize that their thinking is, however repackaged, but an elaboration of the genocidal deceptions espoused by Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler? Might they then abandon these views? This comes from the Aish Organizationwww.aish.com/jewishissues/mediaobjectivity/Where_the_Nazi_-Big_Lie-_Endures.asp This article originally appeared in the New York Sun. |
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IT'S ALL IN THE TIMING...
Posted by Gerald A. Honigman, May 6, 2007. |
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I'm a reasonable sort of guy...really. I'm all for logic, exchange of ideas, and so forth. In fact, I'm often accused of being too loquacious...if you know what I mean (my publishers certainly do). Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice was at Sharm el-Sheikh on May 3rd attending an international what-to-do-about-Iraq conference. The Syrians have been pressing for better ties with the United States -- ties soured due to their murderous shenanigans in Lebanon and Iraq contrary to Washington's desires. Notice I left out their actions involving Israel. Not an accident... Secretary Rice met with her Syrian counterpart, Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem, the first high-level contact in a few years. This marked a turnaround from the previous approach which required a change in Syrian behavior first. While this was recommended earlier by the Baker-Hamilton Commission (see http://www.britanniaradio.co.uk/?q=node/375), it had largely been placed by the Bush administration onto the backburner until a marked change in Syrian behavior was forthcoming. The Syrians or their local stooges have been eliminating one Lebanese leader and patriot after another who dared oppose Damascus's vision of Lebanon as being merely its western province. Additionally, good evidence points to Syria as being the haven for both Saddam's missing WMDs and "militants" crossing the border into Iraq. So, Washington has good reason to be miffed. But, as I said above, what's wrong with a chat? In theory, perhaps nothing... But in this case the logical outcome of such dialogue is indeed a problem. The mid-19th century British Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, once said something to the effect that nations don't have permanent friends...just interests. Keep this in mind. The New York Times report about Rice's meeting quoted American officials as stating that they do not plan to trade away Lebanon for Syria's help in Iraq. As State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, put it, "The Lebanese people have no better friend than the United States." Now, who could find fault with that statement? Certainly not me. But here's the problem... The State Department has long known what carrot of choice would be used at the proper moment -- and it ain't Lebanon. As I had written much earlier, despite Syria's deadly hegemonic attitudes and actions towards what it sees as its Lebanese "province;" despite its appalling treatment of Kurds, native Jews, and others; despite its support for terrorists undermining Iraq's attempt at democracy; despite the great likelihood that many of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction found their way to Syria; despite Damascus' support of major terrorist organizations whose aim is the destruction of the Israel and giving safe haven to those organizations within its own borders; despite its record as mass slaughterer of any and all who decent, author of the infamous "Hama Solution;" etc., etc., and so forth...America would be squeezing the Jews right now -- not the Syrians -- if circumstances were just a bit different. You see, it's Israel -- not Lebanon -- who the Foggy Folks have in mind as the main sacrificial offering. Keep in mind that not long ago Israel had suggested, itself, that it wanted to resume negotiations with Syria -- the nation which, along with Iran, used Hizbullah last summer in a proxy war against Jerusalem. The Foggy Folks demanded that the Jews not do this. The time was not yet ripe as far as America -- or least the State Department -- was concerned. To hell with what the Jews felt their own, on the scene and in the bull's eye interests required. But now, things have taken continuous turns for the worse in Iraq -- despite Washington's honorable efforts. Any "progress" will most likely not survive an American withdrawal. So now, it's time to bring out the icing on the cake as far as Syria is concerned... Former Secretary of State James Baker III pledged to Assad I, butcher of Damascus, during George I's administration, a total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. George II made Baker, Bush close family friend and quail hunting
partner (whose law firm represents the Saudis and other Arabs as
well), his Special Middle East Envoy. Baker has worked behind the
scenes for decades -- among other things, taking good care of all of his
and his buddies' lucrative Arab petrodollar connections (Condi even
has an oil tanker named for her in the Chevron fleet). Additionaly,
Baker has a most definite Jew problem as well (not that he's
unique -- especially in the circles he hangs out in). See
Note that upon the breakup of the Ottoman Turkish Empire after World War I, the Golan was part of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine until Britain and France did some imperial trading. The territory had changed hands often throughout the centuries. Jews also had a long history here. Recall how Syria used the Heights to rain death and terror on Israelis below prior to the 1967 War -- which it also largely instigated. And, in 1973, Israel was attacked on its holiest day,Yom Kippur, from the Syrian side of the Heights as well. This time, the combined Arab assault almost succeeded in Israel's destruction. Today, the Syrians have even better weaponry and the same murderous intentions as far as Jews are concerned. Not long ago, an Israeli Prime Minister offered, as was done after 1967, an almost complete return of the Heights in exchange for true peace. The exception would cover a tiny stretch of land protecting Israel's water sources. Think about what usually happens to such land when others are attacked from it. Are the victims that generous and understanding in the aftermath of wars launched from those territories aimed at their very destruction? Think about how much territory -- including land acquired by the United States far away from home -- has changed hands this way... Israel currently controls the passes Syrian tanks would use to roll down hill to kill Jews. From the Heights, Israeli artillery can send Assad II and friends a calling card if need be. Right now Syrian artillery and gunners can't do this anymore to Jews. And right now Israel is assured that an enemy sworn to its death will not be in control of its water supply. That's what's at stake with America's forthcoming new approach with Syria. What would America do with such an enemy (need I ask)? A key element in Baker's recent Commission's plan involved the resurrection of his old idea to appease Arab dictators -- in this case Syrian ones -- at the Jews' expense. Numerous politicians and military experts who have visited the Golan and have seen what Israel is up against have said that a complete Israeli withdawal from an area so vital to its security -- given the nature of the enemy it faces, in particular -- is both unreasonable and suicidal. Those who hold that a return of the Golan to Syria will bring peace are the fools' fools. But, in the State Departments's case, foolishness has nothing to do with it. The Foggy Folks know the Syrians very well. So, it's even worse. No friends...just interests. The ball is now in Israel's court. Olmert and his suicidal gang must go. New elections are a must, and Israel must, unfortunately, once again learn how to say "no" when its own vital interests are at stake...even if it must say it to its best friend. Too bad another American President has allowed it to come to this point. Others, like Ronald Reagan, understood that U. N. Security Council Resolution 242 did not expect Israel to withdraw to its 1949 Auschwitz/armistice lines and was entitled to secure and defensible borders. Reasonable compromise was the ticket. Unfortunately, George II, by apparently allowing the State Department (which opposed Israel's rebirth in the first place) to once again have its way with the Jew of the Nations -- is proving Lord Palmerston right once again. He had many of us fooled. 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 |
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MAY 1967 VERSUS MAY 2007 -- HAS THE MIDDLE EAST CHANGED AT ALL?
Posted by Yid with Lid, May 5, 2007. |
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This Shabbos, I was sitting on my easy chair reading the Jewish Week when to my surprise I found inside a special section celebrating the 40 years since the Six Day War. With everything else going on in Israel, it slipped my mind that the 40th anniversary of this world-changing event was just a month away. But by looking at the two together you can see how similar today's events are to those of May 1967. Back in May 1967 there was a Mid-East Peace Plan being offered by the Arab League -- just like today. Most of the elements were the same as the Saudi Plan voted on by the Arab League just a few weeks ago. For example land for peace. Both plans offered the Jews a chance for peace if they would just get out of occupied territory. Forty years ago everything between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea was considered occupied territory. Today Fatah, which is run by the moderate Abbas and Hamas, the dominant party in the Palestinian Authority Government, both have the same definition of "occupied territory" as the Arab League 40 years ago, ALL of Israel. The Right of Return. Back in 1967, when the Armies of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt were poised to attack Israel, they didn't demand a right of return like today, they offered one. They gave the Jews in Israel the right to return to the country their ancestors came from, before the Arabs attacked and drove the rest of the Jews into the sea. Jerusalem as Capital of a Palestinian State. That wasn't a problem back then. Amman Jordan was the capital of the Palestinian State. Part of Jerusalem was the capital of Israel. Besides the peace efforts there are other similarities between May 2007 and May 1967. For example, back then Jews were were not allowed on the Temple Mount by the Palestinians. Today Jews are not allowed on the Temple Mount by the Israeli Government. The Straits of Tiran: On May 22, 1967,Egypt announced it was closing the Straits of Tiran to all Israeli shipping. This meant that Israeli shipping trade with countries to the east such as India for example had to travel all around Africa to get there. As reported in DEBKA today, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are building a bridge across the Straits. This will not only allow Israeli ships to be attacked from above, but it gives the Saudi Army a land route into the Sinai opening up another front against Israel. Forty Years ago The Arab League had a plan to establish mid east peace. It wasn't called the Saudi Plan then, it was called driving the Jews into the sea. Despite the name change the basic plan remains the same. Just like 40 years ago when Israel faced enemies from within Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Today Israel faces Hezbollah from Lebanon, Syria, Fatah from what used to be Jordan and Hamas from what used to be Egypt. Its almost like nothing has changed. Well actually -- a few things have changed. Forty years ago Israel had a Strong Prime Minster in Levi Eshkol, brilliant Foreign Minister in Abba Eban, and an heroic Defense Minister in Moshe Dayan. Today the Jewish State is in the hands of three stooges Olmert, Livni and Peretz. Forty years ago Israel had confidence and swagger. Today that bravado has been dampened by this past summer's war in Lebanon. Israel needs to regain the confidence she had in 1967 in order to survive the threats she faces today. The only way for Israel to survive the threats she faces today is to replace her weak leadership Keep the pressure on. All three of the stooges:
Contact Yid with Lid at yidwithlid@aol.com |
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TENET ACCUSED OF LYING IN MEMOIRS: Former CIA chief claims he nixed deal to free Jonathan Pollard
Posted by Justice for Jonathan Pollard, May 5, 2007. |
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This was written by Aaron Klein and it was published yesterday on
World Net Daily
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JERUSALEM -- Former CIA Director George Tenet's claim that he is responsible for nixing a deal to free imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard has been contradicted by a number of sources, including some who say Tenet personally told them otherwise. In his recently released memoirs, "At The Eye of the Storm," Tenet asserts he prevented the release of Pollard during the U.S.-backed Wye River negotiations in 1998 in which then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ultimately agreed to withdraw from parts of the West Bank and free 750 Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons. The talks were brokered by President Bill Clinton, who promised he would free Pollard if Netanyahu signed the deal. According to Netanyahu and former Israeli Cabinet Secretary Dan Naveh, as well as public on -- record statements of key Wye participants, Pollard's promised release was as an integral part of Israel's signing the accords. Tenets writes he told Clinton he would resign if Pollard were freed, explaining his personal prestige would be damaged since his CIA colleagues would assume he helped to broker the deal. "If Pollard was in the final package deal, no one at CIA headquarters would believe I had nothing to do with it," wrote Tenet in his memoirs. He wrote his career would be "destroyed" if he agreed to the release of Pollard. But Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, previously told media he received a phone call from Tenet immediately after the Wye deal was signed in which Tenet denied he had ever threatened to resign if Pollard were freed. "He truly was very emotional and very upset about it," Hoenlein said. "He said that was not the way he did things, and from our experience, that was not the way he did things." Tenet's version of events are also contradicted by former U.S. envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross, who played a key role in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in which Pollard's release was reportedly pledged. In his book, "The Missing Peace," Ross writes that at the Wye summit, Clinton asked him if freeing Pollard would be important to Israel. "Yes," Ross writes he replied, "because he is considered a soldier for Israel, and there is an ethos in Israel that you never leave a soldier behind in the field." But Ross writes he cautioned the president against releasing Pollard until greater concessions from Israel could be secured during final status talks. "[Pollard's release] would be a huge payoff [for Israel]; you don't have many like it in your pocket ... You will need it later, don't use it now," writes Ross. Israeli sources close to the Wye Accords told WND Clinton took Ross' advice but needed an excuse to break his promise to free Pollard. The sources claim Clinton orchestrated Tenet's threat to resign, which became a plausible explanation for not releasing Pollard. Pollard's wife, Esther, told WND: "When Clinton reneged on the U.S. commitment to free Jonathan as an integral part of the Wye accords, an excuse was fabricated claming Tenet threatened to resign. This was not only untrue, it was a ridiculous excuse. Its implausibility was vividly demonstrated a few months later when Clinton freed FALN terrorists over Tenets' vehement objections and actual threat to resign." Pollard was referring to Clinton's releasing in 1999 of 14 members of the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puerto Rican terror group over the objections of the president's cabinet, Congress, Senate and a threat by Tenet to resign. Tenet ultimately didn't step down. Naveh, who was a high-ranking Israeli official at Wye, said Clinton's pledge to free Pollard was not a personal promise made to a particular prime minister. ... This was a promise made to the state of Israel and to the people of Israel." Larry Dub, Pollard's Jerusalem attorney, called Clinton's pledge at Wye "binding upon successive administrations until fulfilled." 'Twenty-two years in prison is a long time' From his prison cell in Butner, N.C., Jonathan Pollard relayed his response to Tenet's book to WND: "A decade has passed since Wye. Ross has publicly called for my release in recent months; so has former head of the CIA James Woolsey. Twenty-two years in prison is a long time. Pollard, an Israeli agent who worked as a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy, was arrested in 1985 and indicted of one count of passing classified information to an ally, Israel. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in spite of a plea agreement that was to spare him a life term. Pollard's sentence is considered by many to be disproportionate to the crime for which he was convicted -- he is the only person in the history of the U.S. to receive a life sentence for spying for an ally. The median sentence for the offense is two to four years. The unprecedented sentence was largely thought to have been driven by a last-minute secret memorandum from Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, in which he accused Pollard of treason -- a crime for which he was never indicted -- and claimed Pollard harmed America's national security. But even Weinberger, who died last year, conceded just prior to his death the sentence may be about something else. Weinberger said the Pollard issue "is a very minor matter, but made very important. ... It was made far bigger than its actual importance." Pollard previously told WND the information he passed to Israel forewarned the Jewish state about the build-up of unconventional weapons of war in neighboring Arab countries, including by Saddam Hussein for use against Israel. Contact Justice for Jonathan Pollard at justice4jp@gmail.com |
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FINKELSTEIN'S BIGOTRY
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 5, 2007. |
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This was written by Alan M. Dershowitz and it appeared yesterday in the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117824380227591804.html). Mr. Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of "Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways" (Norton, 2006). |
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In her 1951 best seller, The Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy fictionalized a failed academic who, realizing he wouldn't get tenure, became a communist so that he could claim that he was being denied tenure because he was a Red rather than a lousy scholar. A version of that ploy is being used today. Norman Finkelstein brags that "never has one of [his] articles been published in a scientific magazine." By his own account he has been fired by "every school in New York," including Brooklyn College, Hunter and NYU. His chairman at one of these colleges said that Mr. Finkelstein was fired for "incompetence," "mental instability" and "abuse" of students with politics different from his own. His prospects seemed bleak, so when radical Islamist Aminah McCloud -- a follower of Louis Farrakhan -- helped him land a job at DePaul, a school that Mr. Finkelstein describes as "a third-rate Catholic university," he accepted "exile." His prospects did not improve when he wrote a screed against Holocaust survivors called "The Holocaust Industry." The scholar whose work on the Holocaust was the "stimulus" for this volume, University of Chicago professor Peter Novick, warned that: "No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites. ...[S]uch an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention." Nor was he helped when New York Times reviewer Prof. Omer Bartov, an authority on genocide, characterized his book as "a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' . . . brimming with indifference to historical facts, inner contradictions, strident politics . . . [I]ndecent . . . juvenile, self-righteous, arrogant and stupid." On the other hand, Mr. Finkelstein is supported by hard-leftists like Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn. They regard him as a scholar in a class with Ward Churchill (the Colorado professor who called the 9/11 victims "little Eichmanns") -- a characterization with which I would not quarrel. Facing tenure denial, Mr. Finkelstein opted for a tactic that fit the times. He expressed views so ad hominem, unscholarly and extreme that he could claim the decision was being made not on the basis of his scholarship, but rather on his politics. Mr. Finkelstein does not do "scholarship" in any meaningful sense. Although his writings center on Israel (which he compares to Nazi Germany) and the Holocaust, he has never visited Israel and cannot read or speak German -- precluding the possibility of original scholarship. Prof. Bartov characterized his work as an irrational Jewish "conspiracy theory." The conspirators include Steven Spielberg, NBC and Leon Uris. The film "Schindler's List," Mr. Finkelstein argues, was designed to divert attention from our Mideast policy. "Give me a better reason! . . . Who profits? Basically, there are two beneficiaries from the dogmas [of Schindler's List]: American Jews and American administration." NBC, he says, broadcast "Holocaust" to strengthen Israel's position: "In 1978, NBC produced the series Holocaust. Do you believe, it was a coincidence, 1978? Just at this time, when peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt took place in Camp David?" He argues that Leon Uris, the author of Exodus, named his character "Ari" in order to promote Israel's "Nazi" ideology: "[B]ecause Ari is the diminutive for Aryan. It is the whole admiration for this blond haired, blue eyed type." (Ari is a traditional name dating back to the Bible.) He has blamed Sept. 11 on the U.S., claiming that we "deserve the problem on our hands because some things Bin Laden says are true.") He says that most alleged Holocaust survivors -- including Elie Wiesel -- have fabricated their past. Like other anti-Semites, Mr. Finkelstein generalizes about "the Jews"; for example: "Just as Israelis ... courageously put unruly Palestinians in their place, so American Jews courageously put unruly Blacks in their place." He says "the main fomenters of anti-Semitism "are 'American Jewish elites' who need to be stopped." Normally, no one would take such claims seriously, but he boasts that he "can get away with things which nobody else can" because his parents were Holocaust survivors. And then, of course, there is me. In a recent article, "Should Alan Dershowitz Target Himself for Assassination?" Mr. Finkelstein commissioned a cartoon by a man who placed second in the Iranian Holocaust-denial cartoon contest. The Hustler-type cartoon portrayed me as masturbating in joy while viewing images of dead Lebanese on a TV set labeled "Israel peep show," with a Star of David prominently featured. Mr. Finkelstein has accused me of not having written "The Case For Israel" but when I sent his publisher my handwritten draft, they made him remove that claim. He has accused virtually every pro-Israel writer, including me, of "plagiarism." I asked Harvard to conduct an investigation of this absurd charge. Harvard rejected it, yet he persists. The final part of Mr. Finkelstein's quest for tenure is to blame his tenure problems on "outsiders." He claims that I intruded myself into the DePaul review process, neglecting to mention that I was specifically asked by the former chairman of DePaul's political science department to "point [him] to the clearest and most egregious instances of dishonesty on Finkelstein's part." I responded by providing hard evidence of made-up quotes and facts -- a pattern that should alone disqualify him from tenure. Nevertheless, Mr. Finkelstein's radical colleagues voted for tenure, having cooked the books by seeking outside evaluations from two of his ideological soulmates. The dean, however, recommended against tenure. Mr. Finkelstein then used my letter to stimulate a "Solidarity with Finkelstein" campaign. Like the character in the Groves of Academe, Mr. Finkelstein generated protests by students and outsiders. He has encouraged radical goons to email threatening messages; "Look forward to a visit from me," reads one. "Nazis like [you] need to be confronted directly." He has threatened to sue if he loses -- while complaining about outside interference. No university should be afraid of truth -- regardless of its source -- especially when truth consists of Mr. Finkelstein's own words. Whether or not he receives tenure, Mr. Finkelstein will persist in his unscholarly, ad hominems against supporters of Israel, Holocaust survivors and the U.S. But for the time being, the question remains: Will his bigotry receive the imprimatur of the largest Catholic university in the America? 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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il |
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INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT RECRUITS WESTERNERS TO FIGHT ISRAEL
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 5, 2007. |
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This comes from the May 2, 2007 geostategy-direct website
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Palestinian insurgents have been recruiting Westerners to join the fight against Israel. Westerners and other foreigners are being used as human shields, weapons and money couriers, and as provocateurs to portray Israel as an aggressor. Much of the recruitment of Westerners takes place in universities in the U.S. and Europe by the International Solidarity Movement*. ISM is run by Palestinians tied to Fatah and Hamas and includes relatives of Palestinians educated abroad. Every few weeks, ISM brings volunteers to Israel disguised as tourists and provides them as cannon fodder for Palestinian terrorists. The indoctrination begins in the West with classes that teach foreigners to hate Jews and the Jewish state. ISM, which includes more than a handful of Jews, demonizes the Jewish state and teaches recruits how to attack Israeli civilians and soldiers while avoiding arrest. The recruits are told that their governments would quickly pressure Israel to release anyone arrested. ISM wants to bring thousands of foreigners to disrupt the Jewish state for what it terms the 40th anniversary of the military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The group ignores the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and the daily Palestinian missile attacks on Israel since. "When international volunteers are absent, the Israeli army uses lethal tactics of repression, such as live ammunition on unarmed protesters," ISM said in an appeal for volunteers. "Your presence means Palestinians can peacefully protest without being threatened with death." The current ISM effort is to attack Jewish communities in the West Bank, particularly the Jewish community in Hebron. ISM brings foreign volunteers to harass Israeli soldiers and civilians, provoke violence and then film the Israeli response for media in their countries. [* Editor's Note: The ISM is an extremist pro-Arab activist group that was founded in 2001 by Palestinian Arabs -- George Rishmawi, Ghassan Andoni, George Qassis -- and an Israeli who now lives in Gaza, Neta Golan, plus Adam Shapiro, an American Marxist Jew who acted as human shield for Yasser Arafat, and his Arab-American wife Huwaida Arraf. It has been well-funded from its beginning by the pennies, nickels and dimes of peace lovers everywhere OR by a rich Arab countries -- pick one. It spouts peace but has declared war on Israel, no holds barred. Rachel Corrie was -- depending on how you view it -- an ISM recruit? a devotee of world peace? a dupe of the ISM? crushed by an Israeli tractor? or snuffed in an Arab ambulance taking her to an Arab hospital after she slipped and fell? One irony -- if it is irony and not natural progression -- Adam Shapiro initially worked in Seeds of Peace, which purported to bring together Jews and Arabs to dialogue. (As someone quipped: Jews to dia, Arabs to log it in.)] Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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"CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN!"
Posted by Lawrence Uniglicht, May 5, 2007. |
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U.S. President Bush asserts Israel suffered a "strategic defeat" in the 2006 war against Hizbullah. Iranian lapdog Hassan Nasrallah, high muckamuck of Hizbullah, jumps for joy, albeit his main claim to fame during that conflict was an uncanny ability to fit his corpulent butt in a bunker, out of harms way. Pompous Persian Jew-despising Holocaust denying potentates, especially Mahmoud AhMADinejad, also revel in such an admission. Furthermore, a prisoner trade between the United States and Iran, former FBI agent Robert Levinson for one or two Iranian Revolutionary Guards and perhaps an Islamic guardian or three to be named later, suggests an easing of tensions between the two foes. Might Israel's formidable ally, for old times sake, perhaps throw Israel a bone too after kicking her in the teeth, twist an arm or three, and secure the release of kidnapped soldiers Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser, and Eldad Regev from the contemptuous clutches of Iran's proxy terrorists, or is that simply not in the cards? Then again, why should Israel, led by a weakened Prime Minister and his muddled Kadima party, be dealt aces when she cannot even get her own foolish house in order? If the Jewish State will not reinvent herself, traumatized justifiably or unjustifiably by a perceived botched attempt to vanquish a mortal enemy, into a world class player in a global high stakes poker match, how might she expect to wield any clout at all? The U.S. straddles Iran's coast with menacing battleships, so Persian leaders must let the world's superpower ante up, thus seriously contemplate offers made by the military juggernaut. Furthermore, intelligent Iranian movers and shakers must feel some pressure to rid their regime of its religious lunatic president, deluded by his imaginary Imam, losing all credibility with sane power brokers by holding a despicable Holocaust denial conference. Let us also not ignore the fact that saber rattling anti-Semite Hugo Chavez, Iran's partner for now, attempts to conquer South America, kick out Big Oil, and most perilously for OPEC Muslims and kindred spirits perhaps contemplates crossing a sacred line in the sand to become head honcho in fixing oil prices worldwide. Does such a rising star not affect the thinking of Middle East robed rogue schemers, not likely willing to cede a huge chunk of their action to any non-Muslim Latino? It's using or threatening to use perceived power, military or economic, that stirs an autocratic Muslim's teapot. Alas, what about Israel? In her present state of outer world perceived self-deprecation, self-flagellation while she airs her dirty laundry, bashing but not replacing her leadership, what threat does Israel pose to her ever-hostile neighbors? Irregardless of the Jewish State's dynamic economy, state of the art technology, and indeed formidable military prowess; unless she flaunts it, flexes her muscles, soars a jet or two near Persian or Syrian airspace, in effect struts her stuff, why wouldn't outsiders believe that Israel is weak, willing to be disrespected, perhaps willing to cede territories in fact justifiably secured in 1967 while vanquishing Arab foes yearning to annihilate her? Israel already foolishly surrendered Gaza; why not her so-called West Bank, why not the eastern sector of Jerusalem, and why not the Golan Heights for starters? What will it take to convince Israel she must get tough, stop licking her self-inflicted wounds, stop beating her beleaguered body to a psychological pulp? No doubt, Israel's fate is in her own hands, but when will she realize the obvious? When will she become more aggressive than her aggressive enemies, also proving to her careless friends she is a power to be reckoned with, not willing to be kicked in the teeth? Israelis must begin fighting back, bolstering their nation's image. For starters, why not transmit via the Internet and satellite, throughout the Arab world, especially in Lebanon, a degrading image of Nesrallah cowering in a bunker? Explain in Arabic and Farsi that Israel was not able to defeat Hizbullah because cowardly Arab troops hid behind Lebanese civilians, including women and children, thus Israeli soldiers were morally obligated to demonstrate restraint; otherwise they could have cleaned Hizbullah's clock. Furthermore, let the Arab and Persian world know that ordinary Israelis have the right to protest against their leaders, contrary to the heavy handed policies of most Arab nations. However, stress that recent protests against Olmert were for reasons other than a 'defeat' by Hizbullah. Emphasize that the Israeli Prime Minister and his advisers, both civilian and military, should have crafted a better war strategy, having failed in securing the release of kidnapped Israeli soldiers, having perhaps made other mistakes, but never suggest Israel lost a war. Rather assert the Jewish State did not meet all of its objectives. Bush's statement, casting Israel in a most unflattering light, indeed as a 'loser', was likely done to benefit Hizbullah benefactor Iran's propaganda machine in expectation of quid pro quo to benefit his administration. Additionally, might 'land for peace' negotiations rear its ugly head yet again, directed by Israel's formidable 'ally' for less than altruistic reasons, indeed to garner self-serving kudos from an Arab world? True friends do not exploit each other, thus Israel must absorb the equivalent of being smashed in the head by a two by four, and learn a most essential lesson, described by the enduring phrase, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." Let no outside captain steer Israel's ship of state, lest her hull be smashed into rocks, sometimes intentionally. Perhaps it is time for Captain Netanyahu to take charge. Let the clarion call 'Captain my Captain' resonate from throngs of Israelis, and let Bibi answer that call, and 'seize the day!" Lawrence Uniglicht is a career civil servant, working for the Social Security Administration. He advocates for the State of Israel with an American perspective. He writes, "Advocating for the disrespected underdog has been my passion, no doubt Israel falls into that category." Contact him by email at luniglicht@snip.net |
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IF YOU'RE GOING TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL, DO IT RIGHT
Posted by Fred Reifenberg, May 5, 2007. |
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Following a decision by the National Union of Journalists in the UK (A trade union) to boycott Israel, many British journalists across the board ridiculed the decision, some even cancelled membership, but by far the most interesting article to come out of all this is the one below. This was written by Barry Shaw, who writes the email 'View from Here' column from Israel. It appeared December 26, 2006 in Front Page Magazine (http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26175). Contact him at netre@matav.net.il |
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OK. So I understand that you are ticked off at Israel, and in love with the Palestinians. That's fine with me, as long as you have truly weighed all the facts.(bs) So, you want to boycott Israel????? I'll be sorry to miss you, but if you are doing it -- do it properly. Let me help you. Check all your medications. Make sure that you do not have tablets, drops lotions, etc., made by Abic or Teva. It may mean that you will suffer from colds and flu this winter but, hey, that's a small price for you to pay in your campaign against Israel, isn't it? While we are on the subject of your Israeli boycott, and the medical contributions to the world made by Israeli doctors and scientists, how about telling your pals to boycott the following..... An Israeli company has developed a simple blood test that distinguishes between mild and more severe cases of Multiple Sclerosis. So, if you know anyone suffering from MS, tell them to ignore the Israeli patent that may, more accurately, diagnose their symptoms. An Israeli-made device helps restore the use of paralyzed hands. This device electrically stimulates the hand muscles, providing hope to millions of stroke sufferers and victims of spinal injuries. If you wish to remove this hope of a better quality of life to these people, go ahead and boycott Israel. Young children with breathing problems will soon be sleeping more soundly, thanks to a new Israeli device called the Child Hood. This innovation replaces the inhalation mask with an improved drug delivery system that provides relief for child and parent. Please tell anxious mothers that they shouldn't use this device because of your passionate cause. These are just a few examples of how people have benefited medically from the Israeli know-how you wish to block. Boycotts often affect research. A new research center in Israel hopes to throw light on brain disorders such as depression and Alzheimer's disease. The Joseph Sangol Neuroscience Center in the Sheba Medical Center at Tel HaShomer Hospital, aims to bring thousands of scientists and doctors to focus on brain research. A researcher at Israel's Ben Gurion University has succeeded in creating human monoclonal antibodies which can neutralize the highly contagious smallpox virus without inducing the dangerous side effects of the existing vaccine. Two Israelis received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doctors Ciechanover and Hershko's research and discovery of one of the human cells most important cyclical processes will lead the way to DNA repair, control of newly produced proteins, and immune defense systems. The Movement Disorder Surgery program at Israel's Hadassah Medical Center has successfully eliminated the physical manifestations of Parkinson's disease in a select group of patients with a deep brain stimulation technique. For women who undergo hysterectomies each year for the treatment of uterine fibroids, the development in Israel of the Ex Ablate 2000 System is a welcome breakthrough, offering a noninvasive alternative to surgery. Israel is developing a nose drop that will provide a five year flu vaccine. These are just a few of the projects that you can help stop with your Israeli boycott. But let's not get too obsessed with my ducal research, there are other ways you can make a personal sacrifice with your anti-Israel boycott. Most of Windows operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel. So, set a personal example. Throw away your computer! Computers should have a sign attached saying Israel Inside. The Pentium NMX Chip technology was designed at Intel in Israel. Both the Pentium 4 microprocessor and the Centrum processor were entirely designed, developed, and produced in Israel. Voice mail technology was developed in Israel. The technology for the AOL Instant Messenger ICQ was developed in 1996 in Israel by four young Israeli whiz kids. Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R. & D. facilities outside the US in Israel. So, due to your complete boycott of anything Israeli, you can now have poor health and no computer. But your bad news does not end there. Get rid of your cellular phone. Cell phone technology was also developed in Israel by MOTOROLA which has its biggest development center in Israel. Most of the latest technology in your mobile phone was developed by Israeli scientists. Feeling unsettled? You should be. Part of your personal security rests with Israeli inventiveness, borne out of our urgent necessity to protect and defend our lives from the terrorists you support. A phone can remotely activate a bomb, or be used for tactical communications by terrorists, bank robbers, or hostage-takers. It is vital that official security and law enforcement authorities have access to cellular jamming and detection solutions. Enter Israel's Net line Communications Technologies with their security expertise to help the fight against terror. SO ALL THE NOISE ABOUT THE USA LISTENING TO OUR PRIVATE TELEPHONE CALLS, YOU SHOULD KNOW IT IS ISRAEL WHO IS DOING THE LISTENING FOR US. A joint, nonprofit, venture between Israel and Maryland will result in a 5 day Business Development and Planning Conference next March. Elected Israeli companies will partner with Maryland firms to provide innovation to the US need for homeland security. I also want you to know that Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world. Israel produces more scientific papers per capita -- 109 per 10,000 -- than any other nation. Israel has the highest number of startup companies per rata. In absolute terms, the highest number, except the US., Israel has a ratio of patents filed. Israel has the highest concentration of hi-tech companies outside of Silicon Valley. Israel is ranked #2 in the world for venture capital funds, behind the USA. Israel has more museums per capita. Israel has the second highest publication of new books per capita. Relative to population, Israel is the largest immigrant absorbing nation on earth. These immigrants come in search of democracy, religious freedom or expression, economic opportunity, and quality of life. Believe it or not, Israel is the only country in the world which had a net gain in the number of trees last year. Even Warren Buffet of Berkshire-Hathaway fame has just invested millions with Israeli Companies. So, you can vilify and demonize the State of Israel. You can continue your silly boycott, if you wish. But I wish you would consider the consequences, and the truth. Think of the massive contribution that Israel is giving to the world, including the Palestinians -- and to you -- in science, medicine, communications, security. Pro rata for population, Israel is making a greater contribution than any other nation on earth. We can't be all bad...
See Fred Reifenberg's photo art on his website:
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ARYEH ELDAD -- A MENSCH
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 4, 2007. |
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Below is an interview with Dr. Eldad, who is a strong zionist, a
humanitarian and a real mensch. He is a jewel in Israel. It is from
the Crazy Zionist website [Editor's note: Dr. Eldad was one of the doctors who, with no payment, treated an Arab girl who'd had a kitchen accident and was severely burned. Unfortunately, the story doesn't have a Hallmark ending. She repayed the kindness of the Israeli doctors by trying to blow up the hospital in which she received treatment. See http://www.think-israel.org/oct05bloged.html#oct05.127] |
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Last night I had the pleasure and privilege of spending an evening with Dr. Aryeh Eldad, MK National Union Party, at a small parlor meeting in the home of a friend. His party in Knesset is the only one currently which opposes making any land concessions to the arabs. Dr. Eldad is a world-class physician who specializes in treating burn victims, and had a decorated military career in the IDF, advancing all the way to the level of Brigadier General. Recently, he has helped launch the Amichai youth movement to advance Zionism and educate the kids about of the the Land of Israel's rich Jewish history. I have to say that Dr. Eldad is an exceptionally approachable, passionate and genuine man. He doesn't sugar coat or pull any punches like American politicos usually do. Also, unlike the vast majority of today's national Zionists, he is completely secular in both style and appearance. What he clearly seems to be hoping to do is make more secular Jews see that they can be in favor of policies of a Greater Israel (the Land of Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea), too, without feeling they don't belong in the movement. This is a very, very difficult task, however, as the evening would eventually help to demonstrate. The gathering included mostly liberal leaning Jews who get knee-jerk offended by any suggestions of transferring the Palestinians to Jordan and declaring Israel a state where only Jews can be citizens. They were polite and quiet, for the most part, that is until MZ riled things up after the lecture was over -- but more on that later. Here are some of the very interesting points that Dr. Eldad offered during our shmoozing and Q/A periods. MZ: Dr. Eldad, about the fractured status of the rightwing in Israel -- what can be done to improve it's chances of ever gaining a majority? Dr. E: The best we can hope for right now, in the next elections, is to have Netanyahu win a majority that depends on our party for a coalition majority. If that happens we can drive policy in the right direction. MZ: Bibi? He has hardly been a rightwinger towards the arabs. In fact, Likud today is virtually indistinguishable from Labor in how they approach the moslem problem. Dr. E: True, but Netanyahu is weak and maliable. When we were voting on the disengagement from Gaza, Sharon sat like a rock for six hours waiting for his votes to come through, while Netanyahu ran around sweating and panicked not knowing what to do. He literally changed his position four times. He is weak and can be pushed to whichever is the stronger political tide. If we on the right have the stronger political influence, he will fall into line with us. We can use his weakness to our advantage. MZ: What do you think about Ehud Olmert? Dr. E: He is going to go down soon. He has been caught so deep in corruption that nothing can save him. The Winograd Commission will be reporting their results within the next two weeks on how he mishandled the war in Lebanon, and at that point there will be new elections. He is a criminal and must be run out of politics permanently, if not sent to prison. MZ: How is your broken arm feeling since you were attacked by Olmert's police in Amona? Dr. E: It was actually not broken, what they did was grab me by the thumb and twist it back as far as they could until they heard it snap causing serious ligament damage. MZ: My God...I can't even imagine. In America that's like a Senator being beaten at the order of the President. I remember seeing the pictures of Effie Eitam bloodied up badly, too. Do you think that Olmert will still try and expel the Jews from Judea and Samaria and divide Jerusalem? Dr. E: No. His popularity rating is right around the percentage of fat in lowfat milk [he's at 3% in the latest popularity polls] and will not be able to call for anything like that while he is so weak. Besides, now the polls reveal 59% of Israelis think retreating from Gaza was a terrible mistake, and without popular support Olmert can do nothing. I also told Emir Peretz to his face: If you try to remove even a single settlement from Judea or Samaria, what you saw in Amona will seem like nothing compared to the uprising that you will face if you dare attempt such a thing. MZ: What must be done to turn the political tide and make the rightwing a force again in Israel? Dr. E: Today, of the new soldiers entering the IDF 50% have NEVER BEEN TO JERUSALEM! Keep in mind, we are not talking of America where someone from Oregon may have never made it to Washington DC because of the great distance. In Israel, over 70% of the population lives within 1 hour of Jerusalem! Our worst enemy is not the left or the arabs right now, it is apathy. We need to instil pride in Zionism back to our youth, because we cannot survive if people think the work ended when Israel became a state and now we can just relax. MZ: What do you believe must be done to solve the arab problem in Israel? Dr. E: First of all, you must understand that the two state solution is dead. The arabs don't want it, we don't want it, nobody wants it. However because Sharon pushed President Bush into accepting his desire to give them a State of their own in Judea, Samaria and Gaza we have to listen to Condolizza Rice come and talk to us about that plan. It is absolutely dead. So, we can either just have a multinational state of all of its people that is not Jewish, and if the Arabs manage to eventually vote the Jews out, fine, or we must do something else entirely. The only solution to keeping the state Jewish is to make all of the land West of the Jordan river Jewish and the land east of the river Palestine. We will make it attractive for all sides financially, make the transfer beneficial to them for jobs and income, and then we'll be able to have peace. Those arabs who do not want to leave Israel, and are not criminals of the state, will be able to stay as residents but they will not be citizens. Ctizenship is only for Jews. These arabs can vote for elections in Jordan/Palestine as visitng resident citizens currently out of their country. This is the only way. MZ: Thank you so much, Dr. Eldad! You were fantastic, and speaking with you has been an incredible honor.
Now, after Dr. Eldad was finished with the lecture we all resumed coffee and shmoozing. At this time, I began a conversation with a wonderful, brilliant friend of the family and another friend of his who I've never met, about Dr. Eldad's discussion and his policies. WHAM! They began right off the bat with "he's a rightwing extremist, his positions will never be tolerated by Israelis, his agenda is crazy, yada, yada, yada... Now, I asked right away why would they say that? "Oh, because you can't just shove them on cattle cars and ship them out. You want them on cattle cars leaving at gunpoint?" I responded by saying, "Well, if you mean me in the singular I'd personally be thrilled to be pointing my gun at the moslems and forcing them out of Israel, and I'd have no problem at all killing every single one of them who tried to forcibly to resist." Then I was told how it is only the tiny minority of moslems who are bad, and how moslems really just want to make a living and build white picket fences and don't want to hurt anyone, yada, yada, yada... So, I took it upon myself to ask them: "Why are you so bigoted against moslems? Aren't they just like everyone else in that they have pride? Don't you think they all believe the land is rightfully arab and that the Jews stole it from them? Don't you think that they stand for more than just a picket fence and they want that land for themselves at least as much as Jews want it for ourselves? You think they renounce their claim to the country because of a picket fence? "No! If anything, they want it MORE than we do! Our brethren in Israel are so apathetic and tired of conflict that they are willing to just resign themselves to defeat, while the moslems are willing to do anything, whatever it takes, to take it back for themselves. You think they like knowing the land they claim is theirs is called a Jewish state? That their national anthem is Hatikvah? That they like the Mogan David on their national flag? They may not say it to your face all of them, but not one of them likes it and all of them would throw us into the sea in a heartbeat to get the land back they say belongs to them. "We either will fight for it like it is the most important thing to our existence or we shall cease to exist. When two sides say one thing belongs to them, it is resolved only when one of the two are defeated. As long as we keep giving our property away we are being beaten and they are winning. We must annex all of the land west of the river, take away their citizenship, and give them a country east of the river, period. They must go if we hope to stay." At this point Dr. Eldad was turning beat red with anger overhearing my argument with these guys, and came over with guns blazing. Let's just say by the time he was done tearing apart their arguments the only thing left was a few cleared throat chuckles, a sheepish acceptance of the idea on their parts, and a feeling of great satisfaction and pride on my part! In the end, we all parted as friends. But, it was one of the
greatest experiences of my life going toe-to-toe in a political fight,
with Aryeh Eldad standing right beside me, shoulder-to-shoulder, as an
ally who had my back. I'll never forget it.
-MZ
Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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MUST OUR SOLDIERS BE SACRIFICED TO INCOMPETENCE AGAIN?
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 4, 2007. |
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Since it is Israeli soldiers who were sent to their deaths by an incompetent Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and equally incompetent Defense Minister Amir Peretz, the soldiers should have the unrestricted rights to say what they think. Why wait for these bumbling, self-serving politicians to manipulate the public? Why wait for the political party called the Leftist Media to play their usual roles as a Fifth Columnists and adversaries to the Israeli people? Let the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) shrug off those restrictive rules (concocted by the politicians), to show up in numbers at the Prime Minister's office and have their say. While civilians pay a high price for incompetent politicians, it is the IDF who must go to the front and face the enemy in fire, blood and explosions. This isn't merely a matter of voting but a matter of their lives and deaths. Why risk one's life when the decision-makers are under investigation for criminal conduct, corrupt in their judgements, lusting to either line their pockets or advance their party's profits and perks? They make laws in anticipation of being caught and, through these laws, they protect themselves. I would like to hear from the young soldiers who must protect the Jewish nation but, expect their leadership to be professional, as they should, to minimize their risk. Clearly, Olmert and Peretz have failed all of their obligations. If things were done fairly, Olmert and Peretz would today be in prison for all the soldiers killed by their incompetence. There must be no forgiveness for a government that kills its soldiers -- nor should this government be left in power to do it again. Israel has what is called a citizens' army, where civilians are on call to join their units and fight for the nation when needed. Let the soldiers and civilians (both the young and those older, now in the reserves) show up in Jerusalem and demand a change in government within the day. Let the corrupt politicians run in fear like roaches that flee when the lights are turned on! It is well known in such armies as Israel's and America's that you must be able to rely upon your partner to protect your back. How must Israeli soldiers feel when their "Political Commander" (the Prime Minister) is only concerned with protecting his own back? Most Israelis (even Leftists) agree that the Olmert/Kadima regime is the most corrupt and incompetent the nation of Israel ever had responsible for their well-being. Would any of you readers want Ehud Olmert or the Kadima politicians protecting your back in a war? On Thursday May 3rd those urging Olmert to "go home" and leave his office of PM held a massive rally at Kikar Rabin in Tel Aviv with at least 150,000 protesters. Tens of thousands of Israeli citizens from the Left and Right demonstrated against Olmert and demanded his resignation. Olmert so far refuses to resign, claiming only he is able to implement the corrections which the Winograd Commission described as "severe".....in their brief, interim report. Clearly, it is time to march "en masse" to Jerusalem and pound on the doors of Government, demanding that it resign, to sweep the slate clean and begin anew. It is past time to break the self-serving laws of corrupt politicians, who mandate that serving soldiers may not speak or act publically in defense of their own lives. Israel must just adopt new rules where soldiers are not silenced, depriving them, in their roles of citizen-soldiers to speak their mind. It's time for all military units and their families to go to Jerusalem, given it is their lives on the line. With a high probability, war is coming this spring or summer. Would any soldier or civilian, want Olmert, Peretz or any of the other Kadima Party mob covering their backs? Plainly, this group of miscreants, not only do not give a damn for the Jewish soldiers or all the Jewish people, clearly they have no love for the Jewish nation herself. Olmert and those other thugs wish to stay in office for whatever time they can squeeze out of the Cabinet and/or the Knesset. Can you imagine Olmert and Peretz once again managing another war with the same imbecilic incompetence they demonstrated in the last Lebanon fiasco -- as described so "severely" by the Winograd Commission? But, the twisty lawyer, Olmert, tells us he must stay in office so he can implement the corrections delineated in the Winograd Report. One is reminded of a criminal who has been caught and tells the judge to free him immediately so he can correct the damage he has done. Presently, the rich and famous, when they are caught with drugs, shooting someone, crashing their cars while drunk, immediately head for a rehabilitation institute (that looks like a country club) where they will "correct" the error of their ways without going to jail. Is Olmert going to fix his mistake by staying in office of being instrumental in the deaths of 119 soldiers and 39 civilians, as well as the wounding of 400+ soldiers and 1,489 civilians? Perhaps it would be best to suggest that Olmert, Peretz, Livni, etc. offer the gesture of "Sepaku" (otherwise known as "Hari Kari") a ritual suicide practiced in old Japan as an apology for shaming oneself, one's family and honorable ancestors. (But, Jewish law doesn't permit suicide.) IF the Israeli people permit Olmert's delaying tactics in order to hold office as long as he can, then sadly, the people will have chosen to sacrifice the nation and themselves. There will be no one else to blame but themselves IF they let these crooks get away with murder -- again. How can we forgive Olmert sending our Israeli soldiers to needless deaths again -- so carelessly? Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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RICE SIDES WITH ISLAMISTS IN TURKEY
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 4, 2007. |
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This was written by Robert Spencer and it comes from today's Jihad
Watch website:
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Rice once again demonstrates her astounding myopia. She wants to protect democracy above all things, and may end up with yet another Islamic state for her pains. "Turkey warned to keep army out of political dispute," by Christopher Torchia for Associated Press, ISTANBUL, Turkey -- The United States and European Union on Wednesday warned Turkey, a NATO member and close ally, to prevent its military from defying civilian leaders in a conflict between the Islamic-rooted government and the secular establishment. Fears of a coup have ebbed with the prospect of early general elections, but the military's threat to intervene in the showdown and stamp out any sign of political Islam has confirmed its traditional role as a key player in Turkish politics. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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THE FRUITS OF HIZBULLAH'S VICTORY
Posted by Emanual A. Winston, May 4, 2007. |
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Caroline Glick, as a candidate, would benefit any Political Party as an extraordinary analyst locally and on the international scene. What a benefit to the Likud Party as Foreign Minister. Her probing view is refreshing as it is exacting. Glick outclasses in thought Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni by light years. More to the point, she could not be rolled over by American's Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice or any other political opportunists. Let us solicit Caroline Glick as Likud Party's Foreign Minister. This article by her appeared in today's Jerusalem Post.
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US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice strikes an eerie resemblance to her predecessor Madeleine Albright these days. Rice's visit to Egypt, where she jumped at the chance to meet with her Syrian counterpart and spoke dreamily of her desire to meet with an Iranian official with direct ties to Iran's dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called to mind Albright's boogie-woogie with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il in the waning days of the Clinton administration. In Sharm e-Sheikh, Rice is clearly looking for a way to forge a US surrender of Iraq to its nemeses Iran and Syria. So it is that American commanders in Iraq are barred from noting publicly that the Iranian and Syrian governments are directing the war and killing their soldiers. Rice's embrace of surrender extends to her position on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Rice and her State Department colleagues oppose both striking Iran's nuclear installations and providing assistance to regime opponents inside Iran who seek to overthrow the regime in order to prevent the mullahs from acquiring nuclear weapons. All they want to do is negotiate with the ayatollahs. They have no other policy. So too, in recent months the US has embraced the Palestinians. Although the speaker of the Palestinian legislature Ahmad Bahar just made a televised appeal to Allah to kill every Jew and American on earth, Rice insists on transferring $59 million in US taxpayer money to the Palestinian security forces. So too, last week the State Department dictated a list of security concessions that Israel must make to the Palestinians over the next eight months regardless of whether the Palestinians themselves cease their attacks on Israel, or for that matter, regardless of whether the Palestinians maintain their commitment to annihilating the Israel and the US. Rice's shepherding of the US to strategic defeat against the jihadists in the Middle East extends to Africa as well. In Somalia, the US now supports the unity government in spite of the fact that the Al-Qaida-backed Islamic Courts Union is a member of the government. So too, Rice's embrace of failure extends to Asia where she accepted a nuclear armed North Korea and even agreed to give Pyongyang money. Rice's uncontested control of US foreign policy is one of the ancillary results of the Second Lebanon War last summer. Israel was not the only loser in that war. Its stalwart allies in Washington, who battled Rice and her State Department colleagues in support of an Israeli victory, also lost. Those supporters, commonly referred to as the neoconservatives, were led by their chief, President George W. Bush. The Second Lebanon War placed the true nature of the global jihad in stark relief. By waging a proxy war with Israel through Hizbullah and the Palestinians simultaneously, Iran and Syria demonstrated clearly that the war against Israel is not a unique war, but rather a key battleground of the global jihad whose forces are fighting the US and its allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout the world. More than any war before, the Second Lebanon War demonstrated Israel's vital importance as a US ally. And Israel's decision not to fight that war to victory played a key role in the neoconservatives' defeat by Rice and the Washington establishment. Today, Israel is immersed in a political maelstrom in the aftermath of Monday's publication of the interim report of the Winograd Committee's investigation of the war. Although it is impossible to know at this juncture how things will pan out, the identities and goals of the competing forces are already clear. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will not leave office voluntarily, and his party and most of his coalition partners will back him in his fight to retain control of the government. The Labor Party, and the Left in general are trying to reenact their political maneuvers in the wake of the collapse of the peace process at the Camp David Summit in 2000. Those maneuvers kept the Left in power with its peace narrative intact. As is the case today, in 2000 the public demanded an accounting by the government after its leftist ideology brought about a collapse of the peace process and the onset of the Palestinian terror war. Rather than respect the public's demand, the Left joined forces with then Likud chairman Ariel Sharon to block general elections. Together they placed all the blame for the failure of the Camp David summit on Ehud Barak, and formed a new unity government led jointly by Shimon Peres and Sharon. Today, as then, the Left seeks to place all the blame for its ideological failure in Lebanon and Gaza on Olmert and to replace him with his deputy Shimon Peres. MK Ami Ayalon, the frontrunner to become the next Labor party chief, stated this outright on Tuesday. As was the case in 2000, so too today, the Right, led by Likud Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu, is having a hard time figuring out how to force the Knesset to do the people's bidding and call new elections. Today, as then, the Right does not have the votes in Knesset to win a no-confidence vote against the government that would foment new elections. The Winograd Report is not the cause of the current storm. The current storm is a direct continuation of the public protests which erupted immediately after last summer's war ended so abysmally. It was the formation of the Winograd Committee that suspended those protests. And it was the completion of its interim report that unleashed them again this week. The Winograd Report's devastating critique of Olmert, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and former IDF chief of General Staff Dan Halutz for their incompetent management of the war is not particularly interesting. In pointing out their failures, the commission's members did not tell us anything we didn't know eight months ago. Indeed, far from clarifying matters, the report's concentration on the personal failures of the three men serves mainly to strengthen the Left's push to place all the blame for the war's dismal outcome on the personal incompetence of Israel's leaders. This it does by deliberately ignoring the ideological and cognitive failure of the government and the Israeli establishment as a whole. It was this failure that led to the war and to its dismal outcome. In so constructing their inquiry, the Winograd Committee protected the narrative of the Israeli Left from public scrutiny and rejection. At first glance the report reads like an ideological indictment. The commission wrote that a great portion of the blame for the lack of preparedness of both the government and the IDF was rooted in the belief that "the era of big wars had ended." Yet that belief did not stand on its own. It is rooted in the Left's peace ideology. This ideology maintains that even if a country is forced to fight a war, the aim of the war is to remain at the starting gate and give the enemy what it wants, not to defeat it. The belief that the era of wars is over stems directly from the Left's ideological commitment to the belief that everyone is a potential negotiating partner. The report demonstrates that from the outset of the war, it was this view that informed the decisions of both the government and the IDF. The report relates a notable exchange between Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Halutz during the cabinet meeting on July 12 when the decision to go to war was made. Livni asked Halutz, "What is victory?" Halutz responded, "There is no victory here....What we need to do is to respond with a sufficiently strong reaction that will call the international forces to get involved and to intervene at the proper intervention points in order to place pressure on the right forces." Livni testified before the commission that the next day the Foreign Ministry began preparing position papers setting out the government's preferred end state: foreign forces on the border separating the IDF from an undefeated Hizbullah. The Winograd Committee members' adherence to the Left's worldview comes across clearly in their praise for UN Security Council Resolution 1701 which set out the conditions for the cease-fire. The report maintains, "Resolution 1701 and the processes that fostered it reflect some important achievements for Israel. Hizbullah isn't sitting on the border, and its ability to initiate attacks on soldiers or northern communities has been significantly downgraded. It is possible that the decision, and the processes that engendered it, can provide an opening to positive regional developments." By claiming 1701 an achievement, the Winograd Committee pulled the rug out from under the entire rationale of their criticism of the war. After all, the aim of war is to improve a state's position vis-a-vis its enemy. If Israel achieved this goal towards Hizbullah through Resolution 1701, then the rest of the report's critique of Olmert, Peretz, Halutz and the rest of the government and military makes little sense. At the most they are guilty of bumbling Israel to victory rather than leading us there in an orderly fashion. If 1701 was an achievement, then far from attacking them, the report should be applauding them. The Winograd Report states repeatedly that the commission was formed due to the public's sense that the war had been lost and its concomitant demand for an accounting by the government. Yet, the public's sense of defeat is borne out by the text of Resolution 1701. Resolution 1701 places Israel, a sovereign state, on the same level as Hizbullah, an illegal terrorist organization. The resolution gives international legitimacy to Hizbullah's continued existence as an Iranian-run sub-national paramilitary organization in Lebanon. Indeed, it makes no mention of either Syria or Iran in whose service Hizbullah fought and at whose pleasure Hizbullah exists. The international forces that Israel was so keen to see deployed along the border today serve as a buffer protecting Hizbullah from the IDF and allowing it to redeploy its forces in South Lebanon and rearm without fear of the IDF. So what comes across most clearly in the Winograd Report is the committee members' desire to ignore the fact that the Second Lebanon War was a war of ideas no less than a war on the battlefield. Last summer Israel had the opportunity to expose the truth about the nature of the war being fought against it. It had the opportunity to assert itself as a vital ally of the US. It had the chance to defeat the leftist narrative of peace which claims that there is no difference between the IDF and the terror forces attacking Israeli society and so there is no reason to seek to defeat them; and which claims that the war against Israel is not connected to the global jihad. It is too early to know how the political drama now unfolding in Israel will pan out. But what Rice's current misdirection of the war on all fronts, and the emboldening of Israel's enemies and the forces of global jihad throughout the world show clearly is that last summer Israel lost two wars, not one. And if we wish to win the next war, replacing the government will be insufficient. We also need to dump the leftist narrative of peace which brought us both our current crop of failed leaders, and last summer's defeat. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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PBS ACCUSED OF SAME TACTICS RADICAL MUSLIMS USE AGAINST MODERATES
Posted by Jerry Jonas, May 4, 2007. |
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This was written by Kevin Mooney,
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
It is archived at
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(CNSNews.com) -- Public Broadcasting Service officials who have refused to air a documentary on moderate Muslims are using the same tools of suppression and censorship Islamists employ to stymie debate, a documentary-maker charged Tuesday. "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center," a 52-minute, taxpayer-funded documentary, was originally slated to be screened as part of an 11-part PBS series called "America at a Crossroads," examining post-9/11 challenges facing the nation. The series began airing for the first time last week on WETA, the Washington, D.C., PBS affiliate, but "Islam vs. Islamists" has been dropped from the lineup. Hollywood veteran Martyn Burke of ABG films co-produced the film with Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, and Gaffney's CSP colleague Alex Alexiev, who specializes in Islamic extremism. The film, which cost more than $600,000 to produce, focuses on conflicts that have erupted within the Muslim community in the U.S., Canada, Denmark and France. The producers held a private screening in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, joined by three of the "anti-Islamist Muslims" featured in the film -- Danish parliamentarian Naser Khader, Islamic Forum for Democracy President M. Zuhdi Jasser, and French-Algerian journalist Mohammed Sifaoui. Also attending on behalf of the Islamic Supreme Council of America was Hedieh Miramahdi. Burke told the audience that PBS and WETA advisors and producers had objected to the participation of conservatives Gaffney and Alexiev. A "bitter fight" ensued over the content of the film, and the PBS/WETA criticisms became increasingly "hysterical," he said. "PBS is doing what the Islamists are doing," Burke charged. "They are silencing these people [Muslim moderates]." The producers said PBS replaced their film with another one, "The Muslim Americans," which Gaffney called "a triumph for the Islamists," saying it promoted a perspective in line with that of America's enemies. For his part, Alexiev claimed that the replacement film paints a "fawning portrait" of U.S. organizations with extremist ties. Alexiev also noted a conflict of interest: He said the replacement film was produced by Robert MacNeil, who also hosts the "Crossroads" series. MacNeil was therefore allowed to produce his own film and at the same time was "the key guy who decided what gets cut," he claimed. PBS spokesman Joe Deplasco told Cybercast News Service the Burke-Gaffney-Alexiev film was unfinished and could not be shown. He said he was aware of their arguments, but declined to comment on them, referring further queries on the subject to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) -- a private body funded by the federal government to promote public broadcasting through PBS. CPB officials did not return calls Tuesday. Asked about "The Muslims in America," Deplasco said the decision to include it in the series was made for sound reasons. As the "Crossroads" project went forward, he said, the PBS-WETA producers felt that there "something missing" about everyday Muslim life. Consequently, they decided to use "The Muslim Americans." Deplasco said films that did not make the cut for the series may still be considered for airing later as "stand alone" pieces. But the "Islam vs. Islamists" filmmakers contend that their product is complete and in no need of further editing. "We are at the end of the road with PBS," Gaffney said. "They have rejected the film we have made; they are insisting on structural and textual changes that would essentially eviscerate the message." The next step, Gaffney explained, was to ask the CPB to relinquish distribution rights to the film so it can be viewed by the American people "in another medium." In a letter to the CPB board last March, Burke, Gaffney and Alexiev said criticism of their film was based on a serious, perhaps willful misinterpretation of its message and its method. Roger Aronoff, a media analyst with Accuracy with Media, told Cybercast News Service Tuesday that while he has not seen the film that PBS refuses to air as part of the series, his organization has had "issues with PBS over the years." The broadcaster, he said, has "a long record of airing primarily left-leaning documentaries." "The fact that they aired other documentaries as part of the 'America at a Crossroads' series that arguably represent a conservative point of view gives them some plausible deniability when they say that [neither] Gaffney's viewpoint nor his association with an advocacy group is why they shelved his film," Aronoff said. "But Gaffney's film, according to reports, represents an important point of view that needs to be heard." "It is for just these types of situations that we have long advocated that tax dollars and politically biased programming do not mix," he added. "Do we really want political appointees deciding what views deserve airing, and which do not? No. Let's let the marketplace decide." Contact Jerry Jonas at jdjonas@yahoo.com |
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ISRAEL WEST OF THE JORDAN
Posted by Chuck Morse, May 4, 2007. |
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The two state solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict is dead. It died the day the Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza democratically elected Hamas to power, a party that openly declares its intention to destroy Israel. The Palestinians have spoken and they have rejected the two state solution. They've rejected peace with Israel. Rather than prolong a charade that would, if implemented, be a recipe for perpetual war for both Jews and Arabs, the State of Israel should annex the West Bank and Gaza granting local autonomy to law-abiding Arabs living there. An argument could have been made back in the 1990's, during the years of the Oslo peace process, that this position was somehow "right wing." Back then I supported the Oslo process and the two state solution even though I didn't really believe it would work. I did, however, very much want it to work if it meant peace for Israel. I was sick and tired of seeing Jewish men, women, children, and Holocaust survivors blown to smithereens simply because they were Jews living as emancipated citizens in their own country. Israel is caught between the blades of a giant scissor. The upper blade is the so-called moderate Arab states, led by the Wahabi inspired Saudi's. They offer to recognize Israel if she retreats to the 1949 armistice lines, ethnically cleanse the West Bank of all Jews, and allow millions of Arabs to settle inside the remaining rump state. The lower blade is Europe and Russia. They also want Israel to retreat to the cease-fire lines that were once referred to by Israel's liberal Foreign Minister Abba Eban as "Auchwitz lines." The western democracies buy into the deception that another Arab state in the Middle East, one that would be carved out of the heartland of tiny Israel, would appease terrorists and insure a steady flow of cheap oil. In 2005, hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon authorized the complete withdrawal of Israel from Gaza, a withdrawal that included the stripping of all Jews from the area. Gaza was then handed over, ethnically cleansed of Jews, on a silver platter to the Palestinian Authority with further concessions planned on the West Bank. Gaza thus became, de-facto, a sovereign state. Yet Gaza, rather than choosing to live in peace, and focusing on the welfare of its people, immediately started firing missiles into Israel. These unprovoked acts of war were followed by the election of Hamas, which calls for the complete annihilation of Israel. This was followed by the military invasion of Israel and the abduction of Israeli Sergeant Gilead Shalit, on Israeli soil. According to an official Israeli army spokesman, Gaza is constructing tunnels and underground bunkers, smuggling ground-to-air missiles and military grade explosives across the Egyptian border, and training 10,000 new fighters known as the Executive Force. Gaza is clearly planning an invasion of Israel. In self-defense, Israel should respond to the aggression by putting an end the delusion that a peaceful Arab state will ever be established west of the Jordan River. The Arabs were not always hostile to Israel. In February of 1919, in the aftermath of World War I, the Hashemite Emir Faisal of Syria, the recognized leader of the Arab world, signed an agreement with Chaim Weizmann, the recognized head of the Zionist movement, recognizing Israel on behalf of the Arab world. In a letter to Felix Frankfurter describing this agreement, which is an addendum to the Paris Peace Conference, Emir Faisal wrote, "We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home... We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference (the Balfour Declaration) and we regard them as moderate and proper." Faisal and many other fair-minded Arabs and Muslims at the time accepted Israel's modest aspirations. Islamic extremists, starting with Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was appointed Mufti of Jerusalem by British authorities, brutally suppressed the Arab moderates then and his progenitors continue to do so now. The Mufti spent World War II in Berlin where was treated as the exiled head of a Nazi-Islamic State. The Mufti, a participant in the Holocaust, transported anti-Semitism into the Middle East during and after the war. Faisal, considered to be a direct descendent of the Prophet Mohammed, was in complete accord with Islam when he recognized Israel. The Qu'ran, the Holy book of Islam, states the following: ... "the words of Moses to his people. He said: 'Remember, my people, the favors, which Allah has bestowed upon you.... Enter, my people, the holy land which Allah has assigned for you.' (Sura V) ..." "When the promise of the hereafter cometh to pass (at Judgment Day) we shall bring you as a crowd gathered out of various nations." (Sura XVII: 104) Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, recognizes the Jewish claim on the land "which Allah has assigned for you." Arabs have sovereignty over 20 states, many rich in oil. In 1919, Faisal envisioned an alliance between the Jews and the Arabs. He wrote to Frankfurter "Dr. Weizmann has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews welcome in return for their kindness. We are working together on a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another." It is time to ask Arabs and Muslims of good will to revisit that enlightened vision and to work with a strong Israel, existing within its present natural borders, on creating a modern, prosperous, and more democratic Middle East. This essay was published May 1, 2007 on Chuck Morse's website:
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INTELLIGENCE INFO FROM THE CROISSANT ISSUE #6
Posted by Olivier Guitta, May 4, 2007. |
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The Croissant Issue #7 is now available. It contains articles on Islamists in France; specificities of Morocco's terrorist cells; the Taliban's new multimedia offensive; a new undetectable generation of suicide bombers; stormy relations between Baghdad and Tehran; and much more. Below are excerpts from The Croissant Issue #6. |
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Sahara: refuge for Islamists I- GEOGRAPHY: 1- Area covering thousands of kilometers, going from the Atlantic ocean to Chad
a) Mohamed Abdellahi Ould Dah, (Mr anti-terrorism) in Mauritania, exhibits 2 maps: 1st: border area between east Mauritania and Mali; 2nd: Timbuktu area in Northern Mali. II- "INHABITANTS": For a long time it was left to: Tuaregs and smugglers Financial pressure on Iran is gaining traction US STRATEGY: PUT FINANCIAL PRESSURE ON IRAN: 1- Another front in the standoff against Iran: the financial realm: - A more discreet fight: putting pressure on: banks and large multinationals dealing with Iran, in particular in the energy sector 2- Banks: - Major evolution: according to diplomats and economical experts, not a single European bank now ventures in financing large projects in Iran 3- Multinationals: - The US did not follow the strategy of the 1990's [of using a domestic law sanctioning companies (US and foreign with offices in the US) doing business with Iran] Iraq: Algerian Jihadists ALGERIAN JIHADISTS: 1- Afghanistan: according to a 2002 UN report: Algerians are second to the Saudis in the number of pro Taliban militants in Afghanistan arrested by Pakistani security services 2- Iraq: a) arrests: Lebanese militias rearming ARE LEBANESE MILITIAS REARMING? 1- Fearing a new religious conflict, Lebanese militias are recruiting elements and think about rearming: According to a Western diplomat: "it does not mean heavy artillery but some leaders are seeking to purchase anti-tank weapons for street fighting" 2- According to ex Interior Minister, Ahmad Fatfat (who is close to prime Minister Fuad Siniora): - "the street is ready but for the time being no one would benefit from starting a civil war" Olivier Guitta is a foreign affairs and
counterterrorism consultant based in Washington, D.C. He speaks four
languages, including Arabic; he has long experience in international
banking and portfolio management; he has a solid reputation for
significant articles in serious journals and newspapers; and he is a
contributing editor for the prestigious counterterrorism blog: He has recently launched The Croissant (http://www.thecroissant.com/), a foreign affairs and counterterrorism newsletter. The first two issues are free and can be accessed directly: First Issue and Second Issue. |
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NEW ISRAEL FUND PROMOTES TERRORISM
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 4, 2007. |
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SAUDIS HAVE IT BOTH WAYS Saudi Arabia's application to the World Trade Organization, which sponsors free trade, was approved conditional upon its ending a boycott of Israel. S. Arabia promised the US it would stop boycotting Israel. Now a member, S. Arabia nevertheless continues boycotting Israel. Some Members of Congress are objecting (IMRA, 4/20), China joined the WTO, too, and violates its conditions for free trade. It heavily subsidizes exports and it violates international patents. Who will expel those scofflaws? THE SECURITY FENCE Foreign Min. Livni defends the security fence as making withdrawal possible by separating the two faiths. No, what made withdrawal possible was a media that promoted it, a government that ignored its disadvantages, and a Prime Minister who implemented it to avoid prosecution (IMRA, 4/18). The fence does not separate the Muslims from the Jews. Rockets can be fired over the fence. A million Muslims, not fenced in, live in Israel. Members of both faiths are on both sides of the fence in Judea-Samaria. Jews fenced out or whose fence makes them sitting ducks for terrorists in the surrounding hills become more vulnerable to terrorism. I think the government deliberately puts them into that position, for it has continued Sharon's policy of viewing the drying out and the cutting off of Yesha Jewry as if it were a war and those Jews, the enemy. Withdrawal has boosted terrorism. Withdrawal means ceding major Jewish patrimony, so it is unethical, too. It also enables Arab military forces to get nearer to Israeli cities. It deprives Israel of strategic depth and about a third of its water supply. It is not feasible. NEW ISRAEL FUND (NIF) PROMOTES TERRORISM The New Israel Fund subsidizes political correctness and treason in Israel. Its money floats Marxist groups working to eradicate Israel. It paid for the legal defense of the convicted terrorist, Marwan Barghouti. It initially conned the Smithsonian Institute into setting up a program to commemorate Israel. Whom did it NIF choose to represent Israel? MK Azmi Bishara, the Arab who travels illegally to Syria and Lebanon, where he encourages their war on Israel. The new Israel that the fund promotes is "Palestine" (Prof. Steven Plaut, 4/18). Perhaps for cover, NIF donates a little to non-political charities. 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@verizon.net |
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U.S. BRAZENLY TRAMPLES ISRAEL'S SOVEREIGNTY
Posted by Marcel Cousineau, May 4, 2007. |
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Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death, and
with hell are we at agreement; when the overflowing scourge shall pass
through, it shall not come unto us: for we have made lies our refuge,
and under falsehood have we hid ourselves: And your covenant with
death shall be disannulled, and your agreement with hell shall not
stand; when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, then ye shall
be trodden down by it. Is Ameirca about to be disannulled? America has crossed the threshold into overt evil, making war against God. What other nation under the guise of friend and peace could threaten Israel's survival ? None. Israel can say no the the E.U.,the U.N. but has been incapable of saying no to her 'only friend and ally.' The U.S. has truly become a TREACHEROUS evil empire. After all the evidence is in of Palestinian/Islamic intent towards Israel and the Jews, the U.S. President continues to push Israel into a suicidal pact. Truly a covenant with death and hell. If Israel does not stand up now to this interference, she's in serious trouble. The U.S. is falsely protrayed as Israel's only ally and Israel is snared into obeying her only friend and ally. A devious trap Satan has sprung on the Jews which has worked well until now. My prayer is that God intervenes and stops the bully dead in his tracks. I have no doubt Israel's God will respond and humble this evil, arrogant, meddling empire to the dust. Why are lovers of Israel so pathetic and silent on this subject? When will Israel say: "ENOUGH!"? The document sets a schedule for removing roadblocks and opening passages in the territories and upgrading the Palestinian forces loyal to PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas. Israel is also urged to approve requests for weapons, munitions and equipment required by defense forces loyal to Abbas. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to arrive on May 15 to discuss implementing the plan. Officials in the defense establishment object to several issues in the document, especially the demand to expand the operation of the passages in the Gaza Strip and the removal of many roadblocks in the West Bank... These officials believe that the benchmarks involve security risks... The document, which Haaretz has obtained, sets a rigid timetable for implementing measures on either side. The document was written by the U.S. security coordinator, Major General Keith Dayton, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dick Jones and U.S. Consul-General in Jerusalem Jacob Walles. It was sent to Washington, where it was approved by Secretary of State Rice before it was presented to Israel and the PA. However, both Israel and the PA's official answer to the document is still pending. The document demands, among other things, that Israel approve and support in an "immediate and ongoing" manner the requests of U.S. security coordinator Dayton for the provision of required armaments, ammunition and equipment for security forces under the control of and reporting to the PA chairman in the West Bank and Gaza. Each clause is accompanied by a precise timetable for implementation. For example, Israel and the PA are required to establish, no later than July 1, 2007, a bus convoy service operating five days a week between the Erez checkpoint at the entrance to the Gaza Strip and the Tarqumiya roadblock at the entrance to Hebron for passengers from Gaza and the West Bank Marcel Cousineau can be reached at up2zionsg8@yahoo.com.
Or visit
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WHY'S A NICE GUY LIKE YOU DOING A TERRORIST ACT LIKE THIS?
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 4, 2007. |
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This was written by Robert Spencer and it appeared in FrontPageMagazine.com |
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According to former Detroit Public Schools Superintendent Eddie Green, Kifah Jayyousi is "a great guy, one of the nicest people I've ever met." While Green was superintendent, Jayyousi oversaw the Detroit school district's capital improvement program, which had a $1.5 billion budget. Jayyousi is now charged, according to the Detroit Free Press, with "conspiring to kidnap, maim and murder by providing money, recruits and equipment for Islamic struggles in Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya from 1993 to 2001." He could get life in prison. Christopher Paul, a martial arts instructor at a mosque in Columbus, Ohio, is also a terrific guy. Ahmad Al-Akhras, vice chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations chapter in Columbus, said: "From the things I know, he is a loving husband and he has a wife and parents in town. They are a good family together." Yet now Paul, a Muslim, has been charged, according to Associated Press, with "providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to provide support to terrorists and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction." He is accused of training with Al-Qaeda in the early 1990s, training people for violent jihad attacks on targets in Europe and the United States, and more. But another one of Paul's friends, Hisham Jenhawi, was skeptical: "I don't think it's even close to his personality to act upon something like that. He's a very kind person. You would meet him on the street and he would want to hug you with the heart that he has." One of his neighbors, Mike James, added: "He seemed like a nice guy, always waving..." This kind of thing is nothing new. A friend remembered Gokhan Elaltuntas, a Muslim who carried out a suicide bombing on a synagogue in Istanbul in 2003: "We went partridge hunting together. I still cannot believe how such a quiet person could have been involved in an incident like this." A friend of Naveed Haq, the jihadist killer who murdered one and wounded five at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle in July 2006, described him as "pretty much just a normal guy....He was the kind of guy when you talked to him he was always laughing." According to a Southern California friend of Raed Albanna, who killed 132 people in a suicide attack outside a medical clinic in Iraq in 2005, "He was into partying. We hit some pretty wild clubs in Hollywood." Frank Lindh, the father of John Walker Lindh, a.k.a. Suleyman Al-Faris, the convert to Islam from Marin County who joined the Taliban and was captured in Afghanistan fighting against American troops, has said: "In simple terms, this is the story of a decent and honorable young man embarked on a spiritual quest." Great guys all. Some partied and some embarked on a spiritual search, but they all ended up in the same place, committing acts dedicated to furthering the cause of jihad, or facing charges of having done so. One clue to this phenomenon may come from jazz musician Tarek Shah, who recently pled guilty to providing martial arts and hand-to-hand combat with weapons training to Al-Qaeda operatives. In 2004 Shah told a man he thought was a fellow jihadist but who turned out to be an undercover agent, "I could be joking and smiling and then cutting their throats in the next second." Or they may be genuinely decent fellows. It was the Nazi genocide mastermind Heinrich Himmler who told a group of SS leaders: "Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet -- apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written..." Were these SS mass murderers really decent fellows? To their friends and family, they probably were. After all, they weren't interested in undifferentiated mayhem. They were adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that convinced them that the murders they were committing were for a good purpose. As far as they were concerned, their goals were rational and good, and the murders were a means to that goal. It was not just a noteworthy achievement, but a necessity, for them to remain "decent fellows," for they were busy trying to build what they saw as a decent society. That their vision of a decent society included genocide and torture did not trouble them, for it was all for -- in their view -- a goal that remained good. Today's jihad terrorists are likewise the adherents of a totalitarian, genocidal ideology that teaches them that murders committed under certain circumstances are a good thing. And those murders, here again, are not committed for their own sake, but for the sake of a societal vision hardly less draconian and evil than that of Hitler, but one also that portrays itself as the exponent of all that is good -- as the Taliban showed us. But the continued reference to such people as "terrorists" pure and simple, and the refusal of the media and most law enforcement officials to examine their ideology at all, only reinforces the idea that these people are raving maniacs, interested solely in chaos for its own sake. The society they want to build, and the means besides guns and bombs that they are using to build it, so far remain below the radar screen of most analysts. These people are just "terrorists," interested only in "terror." And so we're continually surprised when they turn out to be nice guys after all. Decent fellows. Like the SS. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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MUSLIMS FLEX MUSCLES ON ALL FRONTS
Posted by Janet Lehr, May 4, 2007. |
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Propaganda Lesson one: go on the offense Lesson two: assume victory by relating all manner of false claims as genuine. Fire your guns to announce your presence, have your media blare your mis-truths, keep your opponents off balance thru random acts of terror, kidnap and behead journalists. 1>Muslims continue their program of destruction of artifacts of other religions and civilizations. 2>Say What? AUSTRALIA is a Muslim nation, the head of Prime Minister John Howard's Muslim advisory board says. If we didn't understand propaganda before, Hitler taught us the value of the 'big' lie. 3>Creeping Shariah. Footbaths for Muslims installed in Kansas City Airport bathroom. Cabbies at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport recently caused a stir when they refused to carry passengers possessing alcoholic beverages or accompanied by seeing-eye dogs. What happened to the American melting-pot? Where's my Mikvah? The Destruction Of The Artifacts Hugh Fitzgerald
Some 35,000 petroglyphs located in Pakistan's Indus River area will soon be flooded by a giant dam. An archeologist from Heidelberg is trying to save as much as he can before encroaching modernity destroys the remote area's cultural history." -- from this article The destruction of pre-Islamic and non-Islamic artifacts, which took place everywhere that Islam conquered, continues to this day. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan, with Pakistani and Saudi help, was not a unique event, but merely an event that happened to take place in the last decade rather than a century or two ago. And it took place in 2001, not 1901 or 1801, because the explosives and technical know-how (Pakistani and Saudi "engineers") had become available. The Nazi soldiers who left explosives in trees along the streets of Florence as they retreated, and were obviously hoping to blow up a good part of that city, are the only ones comparable to the Muslims in their willingness to destroy art and artifacts. The entire city of Constantinople might have been destroyed, had the Young Turks had their way. In Alan Moorehead's "Gallipoli" (the anniversary of that battle just passed) one reads the following: "...the more ruthless of the Young Turks had already made their own arrangements for destroying the city rather than let the Allies have it. If they themselves had to go then all should go. They cared nothing for the Christian relics of Byzantium, and regarded patriotism as a higher thing than the lives of people who lived in the tumbledown wooden houses in Galata and Stamboul and along the Golden Horn." (p. 73). "They cared nothing for the Christian relics of Byzantium..." The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas was no different from the 1350-year destruction of non-Muslim (and by the "pure" Wahhabis, even of Muslim) sites. The world has seen the destruction of the Greco-Bactrian culture of Central Asia, of the Hindu and Buddhist temples in Hindustan and in the East Indies (now Indonesia), of the monuments of pre-Islamic Persian civilization, of the Orthodox and Catholic churches of the Balkans, Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, of the art work of every kind that has been destroyed by Muslims or at least vandalized not quite to the point of total destruction, as in the case of Hagia Sophia, where crucifixes were ripped off walls, and paintings defaced, and statues destroyed. All this has to be remembered. So why was it that the Bamiyan Buddhas managed to survive? They managed to survive because they were so huge, and so hard to attack. But modern technology, the technology of destruction, has been exploited by Muslims to the fullest. And it was this ability to use that technology that allowed, at long last, the unfinished business of the Bamiyan Buddhas to be finished. The crocodile tears that flowed so copiously afterwards for the sake of Western news outlets, and nowhere more copiously and crocodilily than in Saudi Arabia, were taken by some to be real. There is no end to Infidel ignorance. Just open the book on what is halal and what is haram by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most widely read Sunni cleric now on the planet. What does Qaradawi say about statuary? And what Hadith does he quote? And who do you think said, and for all time, that he wouldn't enter a house that had a dog or a statue inside -- leading Muslims who consider that man the Perfect Man, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, to believe that they must either deface or, ideally, completely destroy, all examples of statuary? If it was bad enough for Muhammad, it is bad enough for me. Nothing else needs to be known. Was it known, was it reported? Did any story that appeared anywhere in the major newspapers of the West about the destruction of the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan explain that the Saudi expression of disapproval was completely phony, and that statuary is banned in Islam because of what Muhammad supposedly said some 1350 years ago? Why can't newspapers fulfill their most elementary duties? Why do they report, but almost never explain, when they report on anything involving Muslims or Islam? Why are we left so unsatisfied, so confused, so in the dark, when the explanations are quite easy and readily available? Why? Australia A Muslim Nation AUSTRALIA is a Muslim nation, the head of Prime Minister John Howard's Muslim advisory board says. Dr Ameer Ali says most Australians practise Muslim values but the Muslim community is being alienated and disadvantaged by Islamophobia. Dr Ali said multiculturalism was Australia's destiny but Muslims, as latecomers, were being disadvantaged. "We would like to remain in this country as citizens like anybody else, but with cultural individuality preserved," he said. "We want an Australia which is like a fruit salad with a nice juice in it, not a mega fruit juice." Before addressing a conference on national identity today, Dr Ali said Muslim values were practised in Australia. "When I go abroad, they ask me where do I come from? I say I come from a Muslim country," he said. "Which country, they say. Australia. "That's not a Muslim country. Yes it's Muslim country. "For the value that my religion preaches, these people practise. "So I see Islam here but (the people) may not be Muslims, but in (other) countries I see Muslims but not Islam. For Many Years Airports Have Had Interfaith Centers "Why are we constructing places of worship for them [Muslims] inside our airports?" said an airport official who requested anonymity. "Why are we catering to their [Muslim] rituals? We don't do it for any other religion." Cabbies at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport recently caused a stir when they refused to carry passengers possessing alcoholic beverages or accompanied by seeing-eye dogs. Alcohol is forbidden in Islam, and dogs are considered unclean. There are approximately 250 taxicab drivers operating at KCI Airport in Missouri, one of the largest airports in the U.S., linking some 10 million passengers between mid-America and other U.S. cities. Approximately 70 percent of the drivers are of Middle Eastern heritage and practice the Islamic faith, sources say. In a cleansing ritual known as ablution, Muslims are required to wash their feet before praying to Allah five times a day. They often complain that public restroom sinks do not accommodate their needs. Floor-level basins make it easier for them to perform their foot-washing ritual. KCI Airport Police are responsible for cab drivers, including the holding areas of the building. The KCI Aviation Department, which oversees the police, recently expanded the taxicab facility restroom area to include the construction of four individual foot-washing benches. The cost of the project is not immediately known. A spokeswoman for the engineering department said she could not break out the figures. KCI Airport Police Capt. Jim Harmon declined comment, explaining, "This is a touchy subject." But, non-Muslim, will, at some point, use the foot wash facility. The Muslim cabbies will be furious, violent, and claim more victimization and Islamophobia. They will holler, gain support of the ACLU, evoke sympathy and finally ennui will overtake a tired populous and they will advance one step closer to Sharia in America. Janet Lehr is editor/publisher of a daily e-mail called "Israel Lives." She can be contacted at israellives@gmail.com |
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A QUESTION OF CIVILITY
Posted by Michael Devolin, May 3, 2007. |
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Charles Dickens wrote, "My ideas of civility were formed among heathens." Similarly, the Western governments now accommodating Islam's followers are faced with the encroaching dilemma of discerning publicly and with appropriate civility between the so-called "moderates" and the "terrorists" of this loud religion. Who to condone and who to condemn? One problem is that the line between the moderate and the terrorist of Islam are blurred beyond recognition. Another problem is, how much civility should Western governments cede enmasse to those whose religion denigrates our Judeo-Christian, democratic way of life as corrupt and "satanic"? How to preserve the distance between state and religion when accommodating the followers of Islam, whose shibboleths forbid the dualism of the spiritual and the temporal that exists in Western style democracy? As Samuel P. Huntington wrote, "In Islam, God is Caesar." In Islam, there is only Islam. And if Islam's Muslim terrorists have their way, the Magna Carta concept of "the law of the land" adopted long ago by Western civilizations will be usurped by Islam's religiously enforced Sharia law -- whether we like it or not. Of course, the apologists and the multiculturalists will tell us that Islam should not be held accountable for the blood-letting committed by terrorists even though, without exception, the terrorists are Muslim. So how to accommodate Islam and its adherents when we cannot know until after the fact--when it is too late--who is the Muslim terrorist and who is not. In a document issued by Britain's Department of Education (The Guardian, November 18, 2006) as guidance to enable university students and faculty to identify those Muslims with extremist views, the point is made that, "It can be entirely legitimate to hold a view that is radical or extreme...however, it becomes unacceptable when individuals develop extremist ties that lead them to espouse, advocate or even undertake or facilitate violent acts that deliberately undermine good campus and community relations." However, the imbroglio Islam has imposed upon the West is the reality that those Muslims who hold views which are "radical and extreme" are driven compunctiously by these same views to "undertake or facilitate violent acts." The proverb, "Give them an inch and they take a mile" is applicable to the perilous situation Western democracies now find themselves in as regards their Muslim immigrants. Samuel P. Huntington writes that, "The intracivilizational clash of political ideas spawned by the West is being supplanted by an intercivilizational clash of culture and religion." Within the continent of North America (Europe is already Islam's downed and wounded animal), Islam is at the centre of this "clash of culture and religion." Islam's religious and political activists are slowly and insidiously transmogrifying the Judeo-Christian cultures of both Canada and the United States into a multicultural nightmare from which we may never recover. The National Post's Jonathan Kay opines (April 24, 2007) that, "The reason multiculturalism now seems like such a fraud is that experience has taught us that old-school racism has nothing on the sort of hatreds brought into this country by the immigrants themselves: hatred toward homosexuals, toward heretics, toward 'loose' women and, most importantly, toward each other." He also mentions in the same article Farhan Mujahid Chak, a Muslim Liberal party candidate in Western Canada who, it was recently discovered, had written and published some very nasty statements about Israel, India and France. Mr. Kay goes on to say that Chak, "like all the rest of us, is a product of his cultural mix -- which in his case includes a global Muslim culture that has become suffused with terror apologism, conspiracy theories and anti-Western animus. To the extent multiculturalism is supposed to preach 'tolerance,' this unappetizing stew is what we're being asked to tolerate." I'm not a pluralist, plain and simple, nor am I an advocate of the ecumenical madness promoted by the politically correct of this world whose so-called "experts" would have me welcome with open arms into Canada those whose religion (Islam) prohibits non-Muslims from the same privilege in Saudi Arabia. Such religious zeal and hypocrisy is described so succinctly in Louis Simpson's poem 'Searching for the Ox': "They will send me off to Heaven/when all I want is to live here on earth." I refuse to condone a religion (in this case Islam) as being salubrious when its every manifestation -- past and present -- is one of violence and bloodshed. I do not condemn religion per se, but only those ideologies commanding its followers to throw stones at others (to borrow a phrase from Wafa Sultan). I despise those religions whose desired efficacy is to obviate a tolerance of all others. It becomes immediately evident in this light that even the best and the brightest of Islam are not qualified in the least to teach the non-Muslim world about religious tolerance, precisely because of the violence and bloodshed that seems to follow this religion wherever it goes; precisely because its best and the brightest, who should know better, have chosen Islam as their religion. Tolerance must be taught only by those whose history and religious traditions establish them as a tolerant people. George Eliot touched on this with his words, "The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision." It is my opinion that only the Jewish people and their Judaism are qualified for such a needful task. The Muslim world and their Islam are least qualified, obviously. It is because of Islam and for no other reason that we are hearing so much in the news today, both in Canada and the United States, about "national security." What I'm driving at here is that in order to preserve our Judeo-Christian identity in North America, and to curtail the spread of Islamic terrorism within the continent of North America, we must begin to deny entry into our respective countries certain religious on the basis of their religion: Those who adhere to religions historically exhibiting violence, bloodshed, and parochialism without North America should be denied the opportunity to exhibit such uncongenial vices here, within North America. I'm fearful for Canada and the United States, that we could become transmogrified by the invidiousness of Islam, as have so much of the continent of Europe. France is lost. England is lost. Holland is lost. Belgium is lost. So many European countries lost to the religious militancy and social upheaval common to Islam. And all because European countries tried, in good faith -- imprudently, as it turned out -- to accommodate the adherents of a religion who are notoriously unaccommodating to non-Muslims in those countries like Saudi Arabia where Islam is the predominant religion. I am fearful that the democracies of North America are in the process of making the same mistakes. May we have the presence of mind to preserve our Judeo-Christian culture and traditions. May we turn away the sophists and sycophants and apologists of Islam (and all other violent religious) with the words of that great American president Harry S. Truman, who said, "We believe in the unity of free men. We believe in the unity of great causes. We don't believe in the unity of slaves or the unity of sheep being led to the slaughter." Michael Devolin is a Noachide and lives in Canada. Contact him at devolin@reach.net |
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NEW POLL ON IRAN AND ISRAEL
Posted by David Meir-Levi, May 3, 2007. | |
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Here's some good news. It looks like the American public, at least that part of it which was polled, is a lot smarter than Jimmy Carter, or Baker-Hamilton, or Walt-Mearscheimer, or maybe even smarter than Condi Rice and George Bush 2. | |
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The Israel Project Bipartisan POS/Greenberg Opinion Elite Poll on Israel and Iran Shows:
Washington, D.C. -- A new poll (Word document, Powerpoint) commissioned by The Israel Project (TIP) shows that Israel's image is at a five-year high among U.S. opinion elite. When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of one to 100, in which 1 meant 'very cold or unfavorable' and 100 meant 'warm/very favorable,' Israel received a 'warm/very favorable' rating from 63 percent of elite and an average or mean rating of 66. That was an increase of 13 points from a 'warm/very favorable rating' from 50 percent and a mean of 61 percent in May 2006. Iran was rated negatively by 71 percent of those polled and received a positive rating from only 11 percent, with an average or mean rating of 28 percent. Hamas received a cool rating from 71 percent, a warm rating from 6 percent and an average or mean rating of 23 percent on a scale of one to 100. Support for Israel in the conflict with the Palestinians is also at a five-year high, with 65 percent supporting Israel, while support for the Palestinians remains at 10 percent. This is the largest spread recorded between support for Israel and support for the Palestinians in recent years. Additionally, fully 84 percent of U.S. opinion elite consider Israel one of the United States' strongest allies, an increase of 7 percent since October 2005. 'This poll reinforces the remarkably strong ties Americans have with Israel,' Public Opinion Strategies Co-Founder Neil Newhouse said. 'Support for Israel among American opinion elite has reached its highest level over the last five years, and more than eight of ten believe that Israel is one of our strongest allies.' Opinion elite agree that even though the Palestinians have formed a unity government with both Hamas and Fatah, the United States should not resume sending aid to the Palestinian Authority until the government 'ends the culture of hate (72 percent) and 'Hamas recognizes Israel's right to exist and denounces terrorism' (75 percent). There is a clear sense that Israel is threatened by hostile neighbors that do not accept Israel's right to exist. Of those polled, 85 percent agree that 'The Arab countries around Israel are hostile to its existence,' while only 11 percent disagree. By a margin of 80 percent to 18 percent, those polled agree that 'Israel is a small and vulnerable country threatened by hostile neighbors' and 76 percent agree that 'The Arabs don't really accept Israel's right to exist' versus 20 percent who disagree. Accordingly, 73 percent of those polled agree that 'Islamic extremism' is 'more responsible for instability in the Middle East' than 'Israel and its policies' at only 12 percent. On the issue of Iran, opinion elite overwhelmingly believe that of all countries, Iran is the most serious threat the United States (92 percent) -- even greater than North Korea, Syria, Sudan and Venezuela. Nearly three-fourths of those polled believe that 'Iran should be stopped from developing a nuclear weapon,' while only 21 percent believe that 'as an autonomous nation, Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons.' 'People are clearly concerned about Iran,' TIP Founder and President Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi said. 'And they have good reason for this, because Iran is the world's largest state sponsor of terror.' Additionally, 71 percent of opinion elite believe that investing money in companies that do business in terrorist-sponsoring countries such as Iran is 'unacceptable.' An additional 21 percent believe that 'it may be acceptable for others but not for you personally,' while only six percent believe it to be 'acceptable.' In recent months, a number of states have begun considering adopting policies against investing state monies in terror-sponsoring countries such as Iran. Florida, for example -- following the model of economic pressure that worked to peacefully change the policies of South Africa -- this week may become the first state to pass terror-free investing legislation focusing on Iran and Sudan. 'This is an important step to peacefully change the policies of Iran and Sudan,' Mizrahi said. 'Hopefully this will save many lives.' The poll of 500 U.S. opinion elite was conducted by telephone April
16-19, 2007 for The Israel Project by Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion
Strategies in conjunction with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. The
margin of error is +/- 4.38 percent. The May 2006 poll also referenced
above was conducted by telephone May 22-25, 2006 for The Israel
Project by Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies in conjunction
with Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. The poll consisted of 500
opinion elite.
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
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HOW TO KEEP OLSO DIVESTMENT OPERATIONAL WITH PM LIVNI
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 3, 2007. |
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The Kadima and Labor Parties in Israel have been burning the midnight oil over the imminent political demise of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz. The concern is that their "Evacuation Plan" (which Olmert calls euphemistically his "Convergence Plan") which is intended to drive the Jews out of Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley and all of Jerusalem controlled and desecrated by Jordan from 1948 to1967 so, the "Oslo Accords Plan" may NOT be compromised. With its main implementer, Ariel Sharon, facing his maker and Olmert about to be divested of power, they need a replacement to continue the "Oslo Evacuation Syndrome" as they planned. Shimon Peres would like to be that replacement but, he is too old and well known as the inspiration of Oslo and all that went before that, under his guidance. The next person to continue Oslo under whatever new title will suffice to trick the people. The person considered most likely to be selected to carry on Oslo 3 will probably be Tzipi Livni. She has already spoken her intentions and approval of forcibly evicting the Jews from all the above vulnerable parts of Israel, in deference to creating another Arab Muslim Palestinian State despite the Global Terror base in Gaza and the Hamas pledge to destroy Israel. I realize that this is confusing but, it goes something like this: Prior to the early 1980s, the U.S. State Department was anxious to please the Arab Muslim oil nations' leaders especially in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran and, even Egypt. The method chosen was to support Yassir Arafat in his war against Israel. Part of this was to recruit Israeli Leftists who agreed that Israel must abandon Land won in wars which were initiated by the Arab Muslims to eliminate the State of Israel and all the Jews. The pro-Arab U.S. State Department found willing ears with the Left, particularly Shimon Peres, Yossi Beilin, Yitzhak Rabin and the so-called intelligentzia, e.g. Left-leaning professors. While all of this did not start in earnest until the early 1980s when Peres and cohorts met (illegally) with Arafat to plan the forced evacuation of Jews east of the "green line" in stages. Their techniques, methods and M.O. (Modus Operandi) included reductions in services, non-approval of building permits, slow installation of water, electric and sewer lines. Then there was the "phase" of the plan to offer "compensation" to lure those settlers who had moved to the "territories" because it was cheaper to live there and more open than the cities. That was to be followed by special Israeli troops "YATOM" forcing departure, as was carried out in Gush Katif/Gaza, 4 northern communities in Samaria, and violently implemented in places like Amona. Then the effort was to shift to Arafat's PLO to make road travel in the "territories" extremely dangerous so as to terrorize the settlers to move out. This was to be accompanied by the removal of Army and police checkpoints and road patrols. Clearly, Rabin and Peres were working hand in hand with Arafat -- with the Arabist State Department hovering in the background. Their efforts failed that time but, the plan of evacuation merely went into hiding, under cover and was conducted at a lower level. The next peak of significance was Oslo 1 & 2 and the Wye Accords which abandoned Israel's military control over 7 cities to Arafat's Palestinian Authority. The unprofessional Oslo plan brought no peace, just murder by terrorists and only increased Arafat's expectations as he launched Intifada 1, followed by Intifada 2. More than 1700 Israelis were murdered by Arafat's terrorists, with thousands more injured, many maimed for life. However, Israel's Leftists in politics and media remained in collaboration with the U.S. doctrine of appeasement. Meanwhile, terror continued while the U.S. paid hundreds of millions of American taxpayers' dollars to Arafat, in addition to arming his forces. Barak, in collaboration with President Clinton, ran out of Israel's security zone in Lebanon in the middle of the night. That vacuum was filled by the Hezb'Allah terrorists, supplied with arms by Iran through Syria which peaked with the launching of 4,000 Katyusha missiles into Israel. There were interim phases of appeasement as then PM Ehud Barak make every effort to give up 90% of what Arafat demanded, including Judea, Samaria, the Jordan Valley, the Golan Heights and most of Jerusalem that held the holy sites -- as well as those Jewish neighborhoods that had been under Jordan's control from 1948 to 1967. These areas were supposed to be made "Judenrein" (free of Jews). No one believed the great warrior Arik Sharon, had joined the Oslo group as he adopted their their evacuation plans by abandoning 21 communities in Gush Katif in Gaza plus 4 from Northern Samaria. Sharon abandoned 10,000 Jewish men, women and children, destroying their homes, farms, businesses, factories, schools, synagogues and even their cemeteries -- brutally. As predicted by many prognosticators -- including us -- Gaza has turned into a massive growing Global Terror base, home to many of the worst Terrorist organizations. Prime Minister Olmert was a significant player in the forced evacuation of the Jews from Gush Katif/Samaria. When Sharon was put down by his second and massive stroke, Olmert moved into a position of strength. He literally adopted Sharon's theme whole, saying that he too was prepared to "make painful sacrifices in the name of the Jewish people". Olmert pledged to continue the plans of evacuation as earlier mandated by Olso 1 and 2, Wye....etc. However, after he and Peretz produced one of the greatest failures in responding to the Hezb'Allah Rocket attacks, Olmert went underground as some of his predecessors had done over the years to keep Olso alive. He relied upon on Israel's known proclivity to quickly forget what politicians do and leave him in power to decide Israel's current life-and-death issues. The conclusion you may draw is that, successive Israeli governments had adopted a "war" protocol against the Israeli people, in favor of the Palestinian Arab Muslims. It really didn't matter whether it was the Left or Right as both were manipulated by the Arabist State Department. Granted, the Left was a far more dedicated adversary and much closer to Arafat and his goals. Later they were actually Arafat's collaborator, even when they make the switch over to his 40 year partner-in-terror, financier and successor Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen). There were many levels of subversion as Shimon Peres worked with the Europeans while Beilin worked with the Swiss for what came to be known as the "Geneva Accords". Whatever the title, the end product was to drive Israeli Jews out of the territories -- first Gush Katif and soon after Judea and Samaria. Not too much longer, the Muslim world will demand the Golan Heights for which Olmert has been working for some time. Then the Syrians will get the State Department to push Israel into sacrificing the Golan Heights for "Peace In Our Time". The E.U. (European Union), U.N. (United Nations), Russia and the Quartet all knew that, should the Arab Muslims Palestinians ever gain control over Samaria and Judea, their Kassam rockets and Katyusha missiles would devastate Israel's cities and population, 80% of which is pressed up close to the sea. Regrettably, the Left, including some on the Right who adopted the Oslo Plan, could not grasp how they made the eventual elimination of the State almost inevitable through their machinations. Now with Olmert, Peretz and Kadima close to being disabled, a desperate effort is being made to rescue Tzippi Livni and Kadima from going down with Olmert. (Note! Livni is reportedly recommended that Olmert resign so she could be candidate of choice to replace Olmert. You will, no doubt, see some in Kadima making bold statements demanding the resignation of Olmert, merely to put some space between them and Olmert. Keep in mind that most of the Kadima Party members were the same party jumpers out of Likud. No honor, no loyalty, no ethics among this crowd who came out of the closet when Sharon and Olmert jumped ship. Now the ship is going down and, as the saying goes: "Rats know when to leave a sinking ship." With that last gasp, they will try to make Tzipi Livni the heir to Olmert, despite the fact that she doesn't speak English well enough to be understood and respected by international decision-makers. She doesn't understand how to promote a pro-Israel foreign policy that will defend the Jewish State. And she has the same "Evacuation Policy" as Olmert, Sharon, Peres and Peretz. Watch the under-the-table money pour into Livni's coffers from Condoleezza Rice, the State Department and the channels tended by U.S. Intelligence. Don't be surprised if the Saudis, Syrians and Iranians find a way to fund Kadima and Tzipi Livni as their choice for a manipulable Prime Minister. If Olmert is convinced to resign, Livni could be simply appointed his successor and either fill out his term of office or be their long enough to complete their dirty work of uprooting Jews from Judea and Samaria, the Golan, Jordan Valley and the most holy parts of Jerusalem. Then, she might stand for election upon her "accomplishments". Clearly, Olmert will have to be bribed to resign and the questions will then be: Who puts up the money and deals? I have given you only a glimpse of what has been an adversarial relationship between Israel's various governments and their victims, the Israeli people. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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A RISING TIDE OF FURY
Posted by UCI, May 3, 2007. |
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This article was written by Tony Blankley served as press secretary
to then Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich.
He is the author of The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of
Civilizations?
This appeared yesterday on Townhall.com
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Whenever I refer to the threat of radical Islam, I am inundated with e-mails chastising me for unjustified alarmism (that is the polite description of the missives). This week, even the esteemed and often accurate British Economist accused me, by name, of overestimating the threat and being alarmist on the topic. Not only do I hope they are right, but I regularly monitor the news for evidence of my error; for I have long taken to heart and applied to myself the advice that Oliver Cromwell gave to the Scottish Presbyterians: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." Nonetheless, while Muslim attitudes across the world are dynamic, and subtle inflections of thought are not easily captured by polling, the news continues to be not encouraging. Last week, the respected University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), released its most recent survey of Muslim attitudes on America, terrorism and related topics. They surveyed attitudes in four representative Muslim countries: Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and Morocco. On the question of America's influence in the world, from a low of 60 percent in Indonesia to a high of 89 percent in Egypt, they answered that most or nearly all of what happens in the world is controlled by the United States. And how do the world's Muslims see (what they believe to be) our all-powerful objectives? From a low of 73 percent in Indonesia to a high of 92 percent in Egypt the Muslims believe that America's goal is "to weaken and divide the Islamic world." Fairly assuming that these four countries' populations represent worldwide Muslim views in Islamic countries, in other words, about 80 percent of the 1.4 billion Muslims or about a billion souls see America as hostile or an enemy to Islam. Between 61 percent and 67 percent of the polled Muslims also thought that America's goal was to spread Christianity in the Middle East. Given that Islam teaches that Muslim converts to other religions must be executed, this purported American objective is probably not well received. What do they think is our primary goal in the war on terror? Between 9 percent-23 percent believe it is to protect ourselves from terrorism. Between 53 percent-86 percent believe it is to weaken, divide and dominate the Islamic religion and people. What percentage of the polled Muslims is in favor of terrorism attacks on civilians (and note the question doesn't say American civilians -- which presumably would be more popular than attacks on even Muslim civilians -- as the general form of the question suggests)? To varying degrees, 27 percent of Moroccans, 21 percent of Egyptians, 13 percent of Pakistanis and 11 percent of Indonesians approve of terrorism attacks on civilians -- and not just American civilians. Extrapolating those percentages to the world Muslim population, roughly 250 million Muslims may approve, under some circumstances, of terrorism attacks on civilians generally. One might reasonably guess a somewhat larger number would favor it if limited to American victims. Of course, as the study points out, "Large majorities (57 percent-84 percent) in all countries oppose attacks against civilians for political purposes and see them as contrary to Islam." We must be grateful for such mercies. But when, to fairly extrapolate these numbers, about a quarter of a billion Muslims are in favor of civilian terrorist attacks, I think prudent people are entitled to be alarmed at the magnitude of the threat. It should be remembered that a majority of Germans never voted for Hitler. His high watermark was about four in 10 -- and that probably over stated his true level of support. Indeed, only a minority of American colonists supported our noble revolution. Anytime a revolutionary cause -- and particularly one that is culturally and violently aggressive -- reaches a certain critical mass, its target runs the risk of losing the support of the majority who are not revolutionary, but are susceptible to being intimidated by the revolutionary minority. Whether the radical percentages measured in this report constitute a critical mass or not is certainly conjectural (please see the full report online for other intriguing data that are generally in line with these samples). Importantly, attitudes can shift either way over time. And most importantly, we have not had -- even remotely -- a national debate on what policies are best judged to reduce radical sentiment in the Muslim world, while also protecting us from potentially imminent terrorist attacks. Rather, we are still having a jolly old time deciding whom amongst us to skin for our past mistakes. The president's critics are fond of pointing out that America's participation in World War II was shorter than the current Iraq struggle. Of course it is also true that given the longevity of our current finger pointing, if this were World War II, it would be 1946, and we would still be trying to figure out whom to fire over Pearl Harbor. Let us, at least, now be resolved to not permit any candidate for president -- Republican or Democrat -- to get away with merely criticizing past decisions and policies or offering simplistic slogans on the War on Terror (or whatever other term people prefer for the global jihad threat to the West). Let's insist that they each discuss in depth their understanding of the threat and their considered and detailed strategy for protecting us in the future. Winston Churchill warned when he took over government in 1940: "If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future." And, as an official alarmist, let me assert that the data, such as above, suggests that our future is quite losable if we persist in ignoring the regrettable realities pregnant within it. 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!" |
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EUROPE (FINALLY!) GETS THE WAR ON TERROR
Posted by UCI, May 3, 2007. |
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This was written by James Lewis and it apeared in the American Thinker. He blogs at http://www.dangeroustimes.wordpress.com |
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Two headline-grabbing signals came from Europe this week, one from Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany, and the other from Nicolas Sarkozy, the presidential front-runner in France. Both show a new desire to heal the Atlantic alliance, which has been badly strained in the last several years. The media on both continents naturally blame the Bush Administration for the breach; but there is no doubt that ex-Chancellor Schroeder and outgoing President Jacques Chirac exploited and worsened policy differences for their own political gain. Their aim was to separate Europe from America, in order to build up their own power by way of the European Union. Chirac was scheming to become the first full-term president of the EU. Schroeder kept his office by scapegoating the Bush Administration. The EU Constitution was supposed to carry it all over the top, and the European Union was supposed to sail into everlasting paradise. Breaking away from America was the key. Well, it didn't happen that way. One signal of new realism in Europe is a public call by the German news magazine Der Spiegel to tone down the over-the-top anti-American cat-calling that has obsessed the German press in recent years. That was followed by two major puff-pieces for Chancellor Merkel's effort to reconnect with America. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy has started what he hopes to be his final sprint to the Presidency by criticizing the "1968 generation," which includes all the recent leaders of the EuroLeft. "1968" refers to the year of student rebellion that brought people like Schroeder and Joschka Fischer to power, just as in the United States the Sixties Left launched Bill and Hillary Clinton. Both Merkel and Sarkozy are "welfare-state conservatives" rather than ideologically pure socialists. They can see clearly the suicidal limits of the multiculti Left, particularly its support for uncontrollable millions of anti-Western migrants, fresh dependent voters for the welfare state. They also see the looming fiscal limits of the social welfare state, as the Euro Boomer generation retires while a host of poorer nations are joining the European Union. Those nations cannot get the massive handouts that were routinely channeled to France. The money isn't there. The word "cynical" and "immoral" were used by Sarkozy recently to describe the Boomer Left. Europe's vacation from reality is reaching its natural limits, and public opinion is sobering up fast. Most important, Europe can no longer deny the Islamist threat. The War on Terror isn't just George W. Bush's private phantasmagoria any more. Nicolas Sarkozy as French Minister of Interior has had to deal with two years of nightly riots by thousands of ethnic Muslim adolescents. The rioters are French citizens and cannot be expelled. They are not devout Muslims, but rather classically alienated young males who are easy prey for jihadist propaganda --- just as alienated young men were natural recruits for absolutist ideologies in previous generations. Islam, Communism and fascism provide much the same kind of gratification. Islamists view women as either family chattel or whores to be preyed on; there are no free, respectable women in their eyes. So they are imbued with very different values from their middle-class European peers. Smaller versions of the French riots have erupted in the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway. Germans fear a spread of anarchy to their own Muslim population. The link between terror and nuclear threats is now undeniable. Nobody doubts what Ahmadinejad wants --- since he repeats it in public at every opportunity. London newspapers have reported "dirty nuke" terror plots that were stopped in time. But it is not a comforting bit of news. Even the UK Guardian is beginning to see the writing on the wall. Europeans are aware of the spread of nuclear technology from Pakistan and North Korea to Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Today Paris is only fifteen minutes away from an Iranian ICBM attack. That threat will not materialize until Iran obtains nukes, but that may be only a matter of time. So the Europeans might not say it out loud, but they finally "get" the War on Terror --- six contentious years after the Twin Towers fell. They still hope that a Democrat will be elected in 2008, because they are more comfortable with a European-style socialist in the White House. But given the common threat to civilized countries, they are prepared to work with the US either way. Hillary as president may declare the end of the words "War on Terror" --- for PR purposes --- but in truth, everybody knows that the anti-jihad struggle must be either won or lost, and the West cannot afford to lose. Angela Merkel was visibly shocked by Ahmadinejad's open threats of a nuclear Holocaust against Israel last year. She has signaled very clearly that Germany takes the Iranian threat very seriously. While Jacques Chirac still believed that France could buy off Middle East tyrants, Nicolas Sarkozy seems to be more grounded in reality. Europe, in blissful pursuit of the fantasy of eternal peace and prosperity without having to even pay for its own defenses, may return to realism in Paris and Berlin. In Russia, Vladimir Putin is happy to sell nuclear power plants to Iran, but he cannot tolerate the rise of a nuclear martyr regime at his southern border. Putin will publicly resist US anti-missile defenses against Iran, but privately he hopes to pressure the West to allow Russia to join missile defenses. Every advanced nation will need such defenses in the coming decades, and Russia lacks the expensive technological edge to make effective anti-missile systems on its own. While the Russians are making angry noises about US anti-missile installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, in fact they cannot believe that the West is a real threat to them. NATO never dreamed of invading Russia during its greatest period of weakness, and there is no reason to suppose it would do so today. As Condi Rice just said, the very idea is ludicrous. So Putin wants to bluster and threaten for the best deal he can get. In the end, he sees far greater danger from nuclear jihad than from NATO. The US would be wise to attempt to bring Russia into the Western defense perimeter, while continuing to pressure Putin to act more responsibly at home and abroad. It will not be easy, but a shared anti-missile defense agreement would be a powerful incentive for better Russian behavior. Russia has always been torn between the West and its long history of Asiatic autocracy. It should be possible to encourage Russian Westernization against a common threat. Bottom line: We are beginning to see a reconstruction of the Western alliance after a decade of unprecedented propaganda attacks from the European Left. That does not mean that Europe will be subservient to the US as it was in the 1950s and 60s. Europe will try to stay neutral in any nuclear standoff between the US and Iran, even though it also wants to be protected against Iranian blackmail. Ideally, Europe wishes to control America as its own foreign legion; but Americans would be fools not to demand commensurate contributions from the 450 million people of Europe. Today Europe pays less than half of what we do for defense, but they still expect to be protected by us. That is an exploitive and one-sided arrangement. France and Germany must do much more for the common defense. Chancellor Merkel has signalled her intention to continue pursuing EU unification. The British military are being radically cut back, with the aim of reinvesting UK budgets in a EU-centered military. So the EU will try to continue its massive bureaucratic expansion in the coming decades. Nevertheless, the fact is that Europeans do not trust themselves to exercise a muscular foreign policy in the Middle East. If German fighter jets bombed Iran or Iraq, ancient European fears of a revived Prussianism or Hitlerism would arise automatically, justified or not. The US can simply do things Germany will not be able to do for the foreseeable future. And nobody trusts the French not to be cynically self-serving. In spite of anti-American rage, therefore, in military affairs Europe reluctantly trusts the US and Britain more than it does itself. But it does not want to repeat the helpless experience of being caught between two nuclear superpowers, as it was during the Cold War. This is understandable. But technology now seems to promise a solution. The greatest difference from the Cold War is the growing availability of effective strategic defenses. The offensive edge in nuclear warfare is slowly being whittled away. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is therefore likely to be superseded by a more normal balance between offense and defense. Effective defenses make life a lot safer. But it will take adequate expenditures and a lot of realism spread defenses to all of Europe, and the continent must be told to carry its part of that financial and military burden. The next US Administration will make a great public to-do about reconciliation with the sadly offended Europeans. A Giuliani or a Hillary administration would be wise to engage in a public peace dance with the continent. But we must not be fooled into believing that Europe does not serve itself first. Over the longer term the EU still aims to emerge as an autonomous superpower, in competition with the United States. The European Left is extremely powerful, and it has indoctrinated four successive generations into wanting a United States of Europe. Such ambitions can be carried out in a rational and civilized way, but Europe's anti-American hysteria should not be indulged. The US has a tendency to overlook verbal slander by our nominal allies. But over the longer term, such "allies" are ambivalent at best, and should not be treated as friends. We should not reward sabotage. It seems that Europe's peace-now-and-forever fantasies will be postponed in the coming decades, as the West engages in a more cohesive struggle for survival against nuclear Islamist threats. There is no alternative. In retrospect, the Bush Administration may look much like the Truman Administration, which first confronted the Stalin challenge in the Cold War. George W. Bush is a conviction politician just as Harry S Truman was. He has taken his stand, and it will have historic impact, just as Truman's did. The early years of the War on Terror have been a watershed. Nations around the world have been forced to open their eyes and make their choices. They are doing so now, not because they have been talked into it by George W. Bush, but because they have come to see the same reality he does. Nobody said leadership was going to be easy. That does not mean that present US policy is going to work without course adjustments. The Iraq War may turn out to be much like the Korean War, a test of American resolve, and also of the limits of American commitment to an important but remote war. At the end of the Korean War, American forces withdrew from North Korea but not from the South. Because of that American willingness to hold firm, South Korea grew into a formidable bulwark against Asian Communist expansion, as it remains to this day. China's new prosperity can be attributed to the democratic capitalist successes of South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan, all of them dependent upon American support. We cannot predict the outcome in Iraq, but somewhere in the Middle East a defensible line will emerge against jihadist Iran, and perhaps against newer threats. Europe imports far too much oil from the Gulf to evade the obvious: A vital need for a renewed alliance with the United States against totalitarian aggressors with strategic weapons. Call it Cold War Two --- if we are lucky and keep our wits. But we must expect continental Europe to play a more active and constructive role for its own defense than it did in the last sixty years. 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!" |
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ARMS CONTROL, OLMERT STYLE
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 3, 2007. |
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ISRAELI DIPLOMACY Israeli diplomats assert that the P.A. should stop smuggling weapons into the P.A. and firing rockets at Israel. Sec. Rice suggests that there be benchmarks for P.A. compliance with the peace agreements, compliance being required for further and final agreements. Instead of devising benchmarks, Israel has been tolerating an illegal P.A. military build-up, and objects just to their using those arms (IMRA, 4/15). Possession is for use! Sincere and sensible agreements would have contained the benchmarks, letting the world would see that the P.A. is violating the conditions for peace. EXCUSE BY HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH (HRW) The heads of HRW disproportionately and falsely condemn Israel (while the Arabs commit many war crimes). They condemn Israel in the same terms that describe Nazi war-making. They try to exempt their distortions and unfairness from criticism by stating that their fathers fled from the Nazis. Their story does not make them objective; it is just a poor excuse for not being objective. It is the same excuse given by anti-Israel writer, Norman Finkelstein. HRW director Kenneth Roth concludes that "military force alone is not enough to combat the world's evils." What sophistry! No intelligent person thinks that force, alone, is the solution. (The problem is that many people think that force cannot contribute to the solution; therefore they find no solution.) The real lesson of the Holocaust is that the Jewish people must be able to defend itself. When these misguided Holocaust survivor descendents, with HRW's $50 million budget, try to draw the conclusion that Israel behaves like the Holocaust perpetrators, they turn the Holocaust on its head (IMRA, 4/15 from Gerald Steinberg). Those descendents behave like the propagandists who perpetrated the Holocaust. PM OLMERT'S ARMS CONTROL With Israel's consent, the US is arming Fatah, although Abbas is combining the Fatah and Hamas militias, including the ones that fire missiles at Israel. PM Olmert approves that the newly armed Fatah gangs patrol the routes through which arms were smuggled to them (Arutz-7, 4/16). Olmert's logic is like arming the thieves and commissioning them to guard the warehouse. How come those who call Bush stupid don't think of Olmert, too? 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@verizon.net |
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BIAS AT THE "ASSOCIATION FOR CIVIL RIGHTS IN ISRAEL"
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 3, 2007. |
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INN today carries a news report on yet another one-sided biased "report" coming out of the misnamed Association for Civil Rights in Israel or ACRI. The "Association" is for Civil Rights for everyone except Jews. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) is an anti-democratic extremist group that does not endorse free speech. ACRI, like B'tselem, Physicians for Human Rights and many other assorted splinter far-left, anti-Israel, pro-PLO groups in Israel, pretends it is nothing more than a neutral human rights watchdog but this is an Orwellian lie. (B'tselem by the way distributed a special brochure this week via Haaretz in which it claims to prove that Gaza is still "occupied" by Israel because Israel refuses to let the Hamas import weapons freely at the entrance points into the Gaza Strip. Importing explosives -- now THERE is a human right B'tselem can get all indignant over.) Its latest "report" is a one-sided attack on the Jews in Hebron. As usual. the ACRI just can't seem to locate any acts of violence against Jews by Arabs. And self-defense is definitely not a civil right of Jews in the eyes of ACRI. ACRI is an extremist anti-Israel group that only cares about "human rights" when "defending them" is part of delegitimizing Israel (such as in this case). It has never heard of a human right for Jews not to be murdered by terrorists. Think I am exaggerating? The president of ACRI, Sami Michael, best known for romanticizing communism, was cited in Haaretz (Oct 21, 2004) as justifying Palestinian terror attacks against Jewish Israelis. Here are his words as quoted by Haaretz: Michael understands the Hamas members who are fighting these Jews, who stuck a wedge down their throats. In an interview published in the latest issue of New Horizons, a monthly on society and the state published by the Berl Katznelson Foundation, Michael rejects the definition of Hamas fighters as "terrorists." "Imagine the feeling if I woke up tomorrow and saw this neighborhood, which we inhabit, forcibly conquered by the Syrians, and they established settlements here, and in order to go to the bus station, I needed permission from the Syrian army. How would I feel?" the author from Haifa asked. "If I fight them, I will be considered a terrorist. Why am I a terrorist? Why do we call Hezbollah or Hamasniks terrorists? Why? Because he fights on his own territory? Suddenly, aliens, occupiers, land on him and tell him: "Your house is ours. It's his land, he and his forefathers were born here, and the settlers say: We will never leave ... How would you respond to this?"
So, I contacted ACRI and asked them to take up my case and denounce the Ben-Gurion extremists' tactic of trying to use SLAPP litigation as a bludgeon to suppress free speech for non-leftists. There can be no clearer opportunity for those who value free speech as a human right to denounce such misuse of the courts as this case. I invited ACRI to help defeat this cynical move by the leftist extremist in question, Neve Gordon of the political science department at Ben-Gurion University. The liberal Prof. Alan Dershowitz that "Neve Gordon has gotten into bed with neo-Nazis, Holocaust justice deniers, and anti-Semites. He is a despicable example of a self-hating Jew and a self-hating Israeli." In response, I got a peremptory refusal from a spokesperson for ACRI. They are not interested in defending free speech for Zionists. ** SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
SLAPP suits are anti-democratic libel suits designed to suppress
the free speech of one's critics.
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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.
Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il
This article appeared in Arutz-Sheva
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LIVNI -- THE WOULD-BE-LEADER WHO WOULD NOT LEAD
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 3, 2007. |
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This was reported by Aaron Lerner in IMRA: FM Livni was confidently striding towards the PM's chair in a bloodless coup when Meir Sheetrit reminded her that if Olmert resigns Kadima would hold primaries. The article below was written by Anshel Pfeffer and it appeared
yesterday in The Jerusalem Post
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Diplomats and journalists from overseas have been showering Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni with praise in recent months, describing her as an astute and creative stateswoman. Now they might want to ask her exactly how she expects to continue as a senior member of the government after telling the public its leader should resign. After 48 hours of carefully studying the Winograd Report, she reached a breathtaking conclusion: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert must leave, but she personally isn't going to do anything about it, and no, she has no problem continuing to serve in his administration. Whether or not Olmert decides to fire her -- and she has now given him every justification to do so -- Livni has ceased to pose a threat. Livni was quite happy to have other people do the dirty work for her. If the resigning coalition chairman, MK Avigdor Yitzhaki, had presented her with a list of 15 Kadima lawmakers prepared to call for Olmert's resignation, she would have gracefully accepted the verdict and served as their leader. But real leadership is not presented on a platter. It has to be grasped by a resolute candidate, prepared to take the plunge whatever the consequences. After this week, Livni will have trouble convincing colleagues that she has what it takes to reach the top. The potential rebels in Kadima are already casting around for a new champion. But the ease in which the nascent rebellion within the party has been put down means that they will have trouble finding one. Livni wasn't the first minister to back down. Early in the day her ally, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, who had also been seen as a potential leader of the insurrection, announced that he felt Olmert deserved another chance, at least until the Winograd Committee delivers its final report this summer. Two other Olmert rivals, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and Housing Minister Meir Sheetrit, have also been singularly silent. Olmert has long been regarded as a premier political operator, but the way the uprising was swiftly nipped in the bud was indeed a master class. The spin the prime ministers' advisers and allies began broadcasting a few hours after the Winograd Report was published was simple, but effective none the less. Forcing Olmert to resign, they said, would cause such chaos as to render elections inevitable. And elections at this point mean victory for Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu and obliteration for Kadima. The party members knew, of course, that technically the current coalition could rally around another prime minister without holding new elections, but they were afraid to take the risk. Livni, Mofaz and Dichter are all relatively inexperienced in political maneuvering and coalition-building, and their party still has virtually no grassroots support. All of a sudden, the prospect of dealing, on their own, with the leaders of the other coalition parties gave them a case of cold feet. Even a wily political fox like Sheetrit was worried that a putsch against Olmert and a premature struggle between his would-be succesors would tear the 18-month-old party apart. Very few if any of Kadima's ministers expect Olmert to last more than a few more months in power, but their collective decision seems to be that it would be better for the party if he stays on for just a bit longer. For Mofaz and Sheetrit, who plan to compete for party leader, it gives them more time to marshal their forces and to plan a campaign. Livni made it clear at her press conference Wednesday that she also plans to run in that race, but her hesitation over the past two days has cost the foreign minister her lead over her rivals. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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IN BED WITH ISLAMISTS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 3, 2007. |
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This was written by Paul Belien, who is editor of the Brussels Journal
and an adjunct fellow of the Hudson Institute.
It appeared April 11, in the Washington Times
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For almost four decades, Muslims have been the fastest-growing segment of the population in Western Europe. As a consequence, the Muslim vote is becoming ever more important. This first became apparent in the September 2002 general elections in Germany, when Socialist candidate Gerhard Schroeder beat Conservative opponent Edmund Stoiber with the slightest of margins -- barely 8,864 votes. Germany is home to almost 700,000 Turkish-German voters -- in addition to nearly 3 million non- (or rather not-yet-) voting Turkish immigrants. The Muslims voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Schroeder. They did so again in 2005, though then the native, or "German-German," vote went to the right to such an extent that it resulted in a narrow victory for Christian-Democrat candidate Angela Merkel. As time goes by, however, it will become ever more difficult to counter the Muslim voting bloc. Last year the Muslim vote tipped the balance toward the left in the local elections in both the Netherlands and Belgium. The Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies of the University of Amsterdam found that 84 percent of the Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands voted for the left, as did 90 percent of the Moroccans. In Antwerp, Belgium's largest port, the anti-Islamist Vlaams Belang party won 33.5 percent in October's local elections. Sociologist Jan Hertogen calculated that without the immigrant vote the VB would have polled 40.4 percent and would have beaten the Socialists. Most of the immigrants who came to Europe during the past decades were attracted by the generous welfare benefits that Western Europe lavishly bestows on the "underprivileged." Today, as more and more young Muslims reach voting age, European parties have begun to cater to Islamist causes. Left-wing politicians in Europe introduce separate swimming hours for women in public pools, impose halal food on cafeterias and demand that schools banish the Holocaust from history lessons. Pundits who predict that Western Europe is about to witness a shift to the anti-immigrant right are mistaken. This trend will be over by the end of the decade, when the impact of the immigrant vote will move European politics dramatically to the left. The right's chances of winning elections are dwindling. The anti-immigrant right realizes this. As Filip Dewinter, the Antwerp VB leader, said after last year's elections: "I am a realist. The number of potential voters for our party is declining year by year... In the past ten years the number of new Belgians in Antwerp -- half of whom are Moroccans -- has doubled. ... If the number of foreigners in Antwerp continues to grow by 1.5 percent a year, as it currently does, then in 20 years from now there will be more people of foreign than of indigenous extraction in this city." The Muslim vote is also bound to have a major impact on the upcoming French presidential elections on April 22. More than 10 percent of the French electorate is Muslim. Since Muslims are the youngest part of the population, representing almost a quarter of those under 20 years of age, their political importance will only grow. In some French cities already half the inhabitants are Muslims. This makes it all but impossible for the right to win in urban constituencies -- unless virtually all the indigenous "French-French" cast a right-wing vote. Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidate of the ruling center-right UMP party, seems convinced that many indigenous French might, indeed, do this. Hence, he is speaking out loudly against an Islamist takeover of French urban neighborhoods, such as the Parisian suburbs. If Mr. Sarkozy's strategy proves to be the right one, it shows that many French have come to realize that these elections offer the last chance to preserve something of the old France. Some politicians on the European far-right, however, seem convinced that the Islamization of Western Europe has become inevitable. Like the parties of the left, they hope to counter electoral decline by striking a deal with the Islamists. This explains why last week Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the anti-immigrant National Front in France, emphasized that, unlike Mr. Sarkozy, he does not want to "clean the suburbs out with a high pressure hose." Mr. Le Pen told the Muslim youths in the suburbs: "You are the branches of the French tree. You are as French as can be." We are on the eve of a crackup of the so-called European far right between pro-Islamists and anti-Islamists. This rift was one of the reasons why the Austrian Freedom Party fell apart. Within the French NF, too, traditionalist Catholics feel less and less at ease with the pro-Arab policies of those who consider America to be a greater threat to Europe than North Africa and who prefer Hamas over Israel. One might argue that anti-Semitism is at play here. But it might also be just the same political opportunism that has affected the left. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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THE BIZARRE SOLUTIONS OF DEPUTY DIRECTOR DANIEL SCHUEFTAN
Posted by Jerome S. Kaufman, May 3, 2007. |
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About 4 years ago deputy director of the National Security Studies Group of the University of Haifa, Israel, Daniel Schueftan and a contingency of fellow liberal academics from the University of Haifa gave a panel discussion at Beth Ahm Synagogue in West Bloomfield, MI. I can remember being as enraged by Schueftan's logic at the time as I am now reading his comments in the April 26, 2007 International Jerusalem Post. Just as in the Jerusalem Post article, Schueftan advised us that giving up Israeli land to the Arabs had "nothing whatsoever to do with peace: that the Arabs won't stop being terrorists; that all the Israelis have to do is maintain a sustainable majority over the Arabs: that we will be able to do with less tanks and aircraft; my concern is not whether we will have peace because we won't; the Arabs would like to undermine our national security," etc. Then Schueftan presented his solutions that, in fact, exponentially added to the problems he had just enumerated! What are Schueftan's solutions -- Just give up the land where Arabs are a majority as in Gaza and Judea and Samaria and wherever else and cut off the funds to those awful religious Israelis so they don't have so many children! Simply ignore the fact that the Arabs had shown no inclination to be content with the land that has been given to them in the past? Evidently, Schueftan learned nothing from the disasters of the Security Zone withdrawal in Lebanon and the Gaza withdrawal wherein the Arabs have just swallowed up the land and created a far more dangerous and more convenient base from which to fire missiles and kill Israeli citizens? I have always wondered what sent Ariel Sharon off on an irrational tangent giving up Gaza and starting on the surrender of Judea and Samaria? Maybe Schueftan is not just an egomaniac when he describes his earlier meetings with Sharon? Maybe he did actually speak to Sharon and initiate the "disengagement plan" in Sharon's mind? How awful for Israel and Diaspora Jewry if this "expert" continues to effect the decision making of our already impoverished Israeli leadership? Jerome S. Kaufman is National Secretary of the Zionist Organization of America. and hosts the Israel Commentary website (http://www.israel-commentary.org). |
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THE NEW CANON VERSUS THE NEW HETERODOXY; MIDDLE EAST NEWSPEAK
Posted by Steven Plaut, May 2, 2007. |
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Below are two of my articles: one recent, one from 2002 but, unfortunately, still relevent. |
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1. "The New Canon Vs. The New Heterodoxy"
As you know, the new canon emerging is that Palestinians perpetrate suicide bombings and similar mass murders because they are so desperate, their plight so hopeless, the suffering so great. It is what we hear nonstop from the Israeli Left with its captive universities and media. So to clear things up we thought we would present the New Canon and the New Heterodoxy. They go like this: NEW CANON:
NEW HETERODOXY:
2. "Middle East Translator"
We propose installing an automatic online Middle East translator chip on your machines to help you read the mainstream media news. Here are some examples of how it would work: Israeli Racism -- Translation: When Israel builds a fence or barriers to keep suicide bombers and other terrorists from murdering Jewish children and civilians Fighting against Racism -- Translation: When Palestinians randomly murder hundreds of Jewish civilians Crimes against Humanity -- Translation: Defending the Lives of Jews "Zionist Racism" -- Translation: Any attempt at Preventing The wave of Palestinian suicide bombings is against Arabs from murdering Jewish children Unilateral Action -- Israel deciding unilaterally to protect Jewish children from being murdered, without getting approval from the UN Illegal Settlement -- Translation: Anywhere Jews live Obstacle to Peace -- Translation: Israel defending its children Terrorists -- Translation: People who kill Americans in Pakistan Militants and Activists -- Translation: People who murder Jews Anti-Racism -- Translation: Ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East Patriotism -- Translation: Israeli Leftists fomenting mutiny in the Israeli army Peace Seeking -- Translation: Israeli Leftists urging people around the world to embargo and boycott Israel and Jews Moderation -- Translation: Agreeing with Arab extremists and fascists Free Speech -- Translation: Protecting the Right of Azmi Bishara to demand openly that Israel be destroyed and all the Jews murdered while denying free speech to rightwing dissidents Criminal Incitement -- Translation: Any sentence with which Israel's Extreme Left disagrees Equality -- Translation: Exempting Arabs from Israeli military conscription or national service 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. His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. Or write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il |
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MISREADING ARAB-ISRAELI DIPLOMACY
Posted by Daily Alert, May 2, 2007. |
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This is a summary of Dore Gold's article published on the Henry
Jackson Society website
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The Mecca Agreement created a fusion between the alleged moderate branch of the PA headed by Fatah leader Abbas, and Hamas that maintains links with the Muslim Brotherhood. But it did not forge a new common stance of renouncing violence, recognizing Israel, or firmly committing all Palestinian parties to previous peace agreements, as the international community has demanded. It was precisely while the U.S. was actively engaged in conflict management between Israel and the Palestinians that al-Qaeda was planning terrorist attacks. Islamist organizations, like al-Qaeda, may raise specific political grievances at times from the Balkans, Chechnya, or Kashmir, but what empirically has really helped these organizations surge in strength is their sense of victory from the battles in any of these clashes. Withdrawal in the face of radical Islam only strengthens the present worldwide militant wave and empowers its adherents. Recent apocalyptic Sunni and Shiite literature perceives the recovery of Jerusalem as a trigger to a new wave of global jihad. This doctrine predicts an imminent clash between the Mahdi -- a Muslim savior -- and the Islamic antichrist, known as the Dajjal, in the Holy City. Thus begins a new stage of worldwide violence extending to Rome and the entire West. (Henry Jackson Society) The Daily Alert is sponsored by Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and prepared by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA). |
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DOES THE LOBOTMIZED STATE DEPT OWN ISRAEL? OR JUST ISRAELI POLITICIANS?
Posted by Bryna Berch, May 2, 2007. |
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This kind of demand is what you get when you put a lobotomized State Dep't in charge of a region foreign to them in thinking and motive. The State Dept has a simple way of acting. Israel: bad; Palestinians: good. Push on Israel: OK. Push on Palestinians: no way. This is truly pathetic. Israelis "raise concerns." What they need to do is to recognize that the American State Dep't wasn't elected and the American Congress was. They have friends in Congress and none in the State Dept. So why don't they just say NO to the State Dept and why aren't they talking to Congress? David Meir-Levi commented on the timetable in an essay formatted as an open letter to President Bush: Dear Mr. President The article below is called "US sets dates for Israeli, Palestinian moves" and was written by Adam Entous for Reuters. |
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JERUSALEM, May 2 (Reuters) -- The Bush administration has drawn up an eight-month timetable setting dates for when Israeli and Palestinian leaders would complete steps meant to bolster prospects for peace talks, U.S., Israeli and Palestinian officials said. The U.S. timeline, the first of its kind presented to both sides, includes specific dates for when Washington envisages Israel letting Palestinian bus and truck convoys travel between the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank, a demand that has raised some Israeli objections. Washington, at the same time, has set dates for when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah would step up deployment of his forces and take specific measures to begin curbing rocket fire by militants, officials who have read the document told Reuters. The security moves by Abbas could bring a backlash from the armed wing of the ruling Hamas movement and other militant groups behind the rocket attacks, which, according to the U.S. timeline, would come to an end before the end of 2007. "Some of these (steps) are difficult," acknowledged Abbas aide Saeb Erekat. "But it's the right approach." It is unclear how hard the Bush administration is prepared to push the parties to complete the list of so-called "benchmarks", which are to be implemented between mid-May and the end of December. Diplomats said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was committed to the effort despite the hurdles, and that she hoped to draw up a blueprint, or "rubric", that both sides would commit to, possibly in writing. Some Israeli officials have raised concerns that Israel was being asked to ease restrictions on Palestinian movements without assurances that Abbas has completing his own commitments on security. "Both sides agreed to benchmarks," said a senior U.S. official involved in the discussions. "The benchmarks give everyone an incentive. One side gets security. The other side gets greater (freedom) of movement." Another American official said initial reports that the benchmarks would exchange freedom of movement for increased security were inaccurate. "The purpose is to create a clear basis on which to help track these particular issues," she said. Washington hopes these measures will create conditions for final status negotiations, but the obstacles are many. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has agreed to push forward with the benchmarks, could be forced out of office over his handling of last year's Lebanon war. Olmert's government has so far refused to discuss final status issues with Abbas, whose Fatah faction has joined a Hamas-led unity government that does not recognise Israel or renounce violence as demanded by Western powers. U.S. diplomats presented the list of benchmarks late last week to Israeli and Palestinian leaders but the details have not been publicly disclosed. Israeli officials said most troubling for them was Washington's decision to set specific dates for when Israel would begin allowing Palestinian bus and truck convoys to travel between the territories. "There is not conditionality. Even if they don't complete their obligations, we'll have to complete ours," a senior Israeli official said on condition of anonymity. In November 2005, Israel agreed to the convoys as part of a broader agreement brokered by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. But the Israeli official said conditions had changed and that ruling Hamas group would use the convoys to extend its power to the West Bank. In addition to allowing the convoys, the U.S. document sets specific dates for when Israel would remove roadblocks in the West Bank and extend operations at key Gaza border crossings. It also includes specific dates when Abbas would increase police and troop deployments in the West Bank and Gaza, two officials familiar with the documents said. |
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HIGH COURT: BBC MAY CONTINUE TO HIDE IT'S ANTI-ISRAELI BIAS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 2, 2007. |
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This was posted by Judith A. Klinghoffer on the Political Mavens website
Judith writes, "The news is not [good]. The boycotting of Israel is gaining momentum in Britain. I just received this news -- SPME Physicians and Medical and Public Health Task Force Studying Response to UK Physicians Call For Expulsion of IMA from World Medical Association." |
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Persistent charges that the BBC Middle East reporting is biased against Israel led the news organization to order an investigation. The 2004 report compiled by Malcolm Balen, a senior editorial adviser examined hundreds of hours of BBC radio and television broadcasts and concluded that there was no bias. But the BBC blocked the publication of the full report. Steven Sugar, a British lawyer wants to know what the BBC is Hiding? Why Sugar? He writes: First, I should explain why I have been willing to fight this case personally for the last two years, representing myself before the Information Commissioner, the Information Tribunal and the High Court. Although I am a lawyer, my field is not public law and I do not present cases in court. So I have been through a pretty steep learning curve. Why have I taken this on and what do I seek to achieve?The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is of great concern to me. I am Jewish, and although my Jewish background has been only of peripheral significance during most of my life, I have strong feelings that the world owes the Jewish people the right to live in their own country in peace and security. But for the whole 50 years of its existence Israel has been threatened with annihilation by its enemies. Of course, the Palestinians must have their state too. It is tragic that the obvious two-state solution has been so hard to achieve. So, Sugar tried to use the freedom of information law to get the report published. The information tribunal found in his favor but the High Court has overturned that ruling on the basis of a technicality with which the court itself seems uncomfortable. Mr Justice Davis, sitting in the High Court, accepted the Corporation's argument that the tribunal had no jurisdiction in a case where a public service broadcaster and the information commissioner agreed documents fell outside the scope of the act.The judge described the position as "most odd" and "potentially inconvenient in its consequence". Sugar notes: The BBC's ideological, intellectual and legal defence of its position is full of irony. All turns on the freedom to impart and receive ideas guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The public policy purposes of Article 10 are the same as those of the Freedom of Information Act. The BBC says these same public policy purposes support the exception on which they rely in declining to release the Balen report. This exception is for information held for the purposes of journalism. The BBC says this covers not just primary information collected by journalists and unpublished editorial material but reviews of broadcast output considered by those charged with maintaining the BBC's standards of impartiality. The BBC says that this is necessary in order to protect BBC journalists' freedom of expression.But it cannot possibly be right that the BBC's obligation to ensure impartial coverage must be policed only in secret for fear of prejudicing the BBC's own editorial independence. If that was right we should have no public reports at all on the subject -- maybe we shouldn't even be talking about it. It would mean that there is a fundamental contradiction between the public's right to know what the BBC, as a public body, is doing and the BBC's editorial independence. Maybe the whole idea of a public sector broadcaster is a contradiction. It gives ammunition to those who think the BBC is an arrogant, unaccountable bureaucracy which cannot reform itself and should be abolished. Let's hope his faith in essential British fairness proves well founded. I doubt it and Rory Miller's British Anti-Zionism Then and Now demonstrates that I am right to do so. She concludes: The truth is, of course, that neither Zionist actions in Palestine pre-1948 nor Israeli actions since that time have anything in common with the horrors carried out by Germany during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Nor is there any moral equivalence between Hitler's industrial slaughter of the Jews and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. The effort to portray Zionism as a Nazi ideology and Israel as a Nazi state is especially dangerous for its capacity to impact negatively on attitudes towards Israel among the British public. As Victor Klemperer, the German-Jewish academic who lived through the Nazi era, put it "words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all." And it is in these terms that one should view the findings of a January 2005 poll carried out by YouGov for the Daily Telegraph which asked respondents to rate two dozen countries on the basis of twelve separate criteria. Israel came top of the list of countries people would least like to visit or live in. It was voted the country least worthy of international respect and was thought to be one of the world's "least democratic countries". Overall Israel ranked bottom in four of the twelve categories and in the bottom five in all the remaining categories. Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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OLMERT'S FIGHT TO THE END
Posted by Boris Celser, May 2, 2007. |
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I shall fight on the beaches, I shall fight in the Knesset, I shall fight at the High Court and the Attorney General's office, I shall fight the Winegrad commission; I shall never surrender to the people's will, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this country or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our well armed and guarded Media Fleet would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the new Kadima, with all its power and might, steps forth to my rescue.
Boris Celser lives in Canada. Contact him at celser@telusplanet.net |
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IS ISLAM COMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY?; EXECUTIVE BRANCH LIES TO CONGRESS
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 2, 2007. |
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IS ISLAM COMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY? It is not compatible, according to David Bukay of Middle East Quarterly. There are no examples of democracy in Islamic states. Affirmative answers depend on speculation. The speculation is not realistic and usually is based on distorting the meaning of democracy or exaggerating consultative tendencies in Muslim countries. (Islamic states lack freedom of expression and of religion, rule of law, protection for minorities, and, usually, civilian rule.) They take statements from the Koran out of context, such as exhortations for tolerance, when the exhortations are for tolerance only for other Muslims. Problem is, government in Islamic countries is subordinate to Islam, source of their law, and is exclusivist and unscrupulous. It cannot really be democratic. For example, John Esposito asserts compatibility on the basis of platitudes such as "democracy has many and varied meanings;" and "every culture will mold an independent model of democratic government;" and "there can develop a religious democracy." (That is not scholarly but speculative.) The claim that every society can define democracy its own way is a rationalization. If democracy can mean anything, it means nothing. (The claim seems like an error of multicultural philosophy.) Saudi consultative bodies are not participatory ones but a relic of tribalism. They are not forerunners of democracy. Some Muslims cited as authorities on democracy are convicted terrorists or leaders of jihad. (Theoretically, a people could be democratic but still pursue jihad. Democracy is not all that good.) Some Islamic theorists adopt the language of democracy but not its principles (and not its practices except sometimes elections). Some Western scholars assert compatibility by mistakenly denying there is international jihad. The apologists for Islam discuss what might evolve in Islamic countries. But it didn't evolve (MEF News). Can we wait for democracy to evolve, while they wage war on us?) EXECUTIVE BRANCH LIES TO CONGRESS Congress requires that sales to Arab states not change the military balance with Israel. With every sale to the Arabs, the executive branch states that it does not affect the military balance. However, it makes no study to find out. It is lying.If those billions of dollars of arms for the Arabs did not affect the balance, then why did the Arabs buy them? (Dr. Aaron Lerner, IMRA, 4/12.) 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@verizon.net |
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WHAT COMMISSIONS CANNOT DO
Posted by UCI, May 1, 2007. |
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This was written by Caroline Glick and was published yesterday in the Jerusalem Post. |
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When thousands of IDF reservists were released from service at the end of last summer's war they were angry and demanded an accounting from the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government and from the IDF's General Staff. The reservists rightly felt that they and the country had been betrayed by failed political and military leaders who chose the wrong strategy, prosecuted it incompetently, and led the IDF and the nation to an ignominious defeat that could have been a victory if they had been less incompetent, arrogant and foolish. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert saw the thousands of reservists organizing hunger strikes and demonstrations, and families whose sons had been killed, and residents of the North all joining together. He heard their call for his resignation and he did what any self-respecting political hack would do in his position. He formed a commission. Generally speaking, commissions are formed in times of political crisis by politicians and other interested parties that wish to kick the can down the road. The hope is that by the time the commission publishes its report no one will remember the crisis that spurred its formation, and so no price will have to be paid by whoever failed in their duties and so fomented the crisis in the first place. IN THE case of the Second Lebanon War the idea for a commission came from the Left. Led in this case by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Left demanded a commission in order to prevent elections from being called. The Left understood that the Right would win elections and therefore just as the reservists were getting their footing, backed by Peace Now and Meretz, ACRI put out the call for a commission. But Olmert felt that an official state inquiry headed by the Left's favorite -- the Supreme Court -- would be a bit too risky. So he hit on the idea of appointing his own commission. That is how the Winograd Commission, which released its interim report yesterday, was born. Although this column is being written before publication of the Winograd Commission's interim report, several observations can already be made. First, it is worth noting just how narrow the focus of the report actually is. The interim report discusses the period between the IDF's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000 and the sixth day of last summer's war. By deciding to ignore the IDF withdrawal that precipitated the Hizbullah takeover of south Lebanon, the commission evaded the necessary discussion of what prompted Ehud Barak's government to make the decision that paved the way for Hizbullah's kidnappings and the eventual war. Over the weekend, Ma'ariv reported protocols of cabinet meetings in the weeks which preceded the 2000 withdrawal where then IDF chief of staff Shaul Mofaz and then IDF OC Northern Command Gabi Ashkenazi begged Barak not to go through with the withdrawal precisely because the Hizbullah buildup and aggression were so predictable. The withdrawal from south Lebanon was fomented by the Left with the propaganda support of the Israeli media and the financial support of the EU. Together, they worked to destroy the public consensus regarding the need to protect the North from Hizbullah and Iran. They propagated the lies that unilateral withdrawal would create an "invisible wall of international legitimacy" that would protect Israel from Hizbullah better than the IDF could, and that if Israel withdrew to the international border Hizbullah would abandon jihad and become a regular Lebanese political party. But the Winograd report will not discuss such things, because it conveniently decided to begin its inquiry with the period after the IDF had already surrendered southern Lebanon to Hizbullah.
THEN THERE is the seemingly arbitrary decision by the committee to extend its interim inquiry only until the fifth day of the war. Whatever the reason for this bizarre choice, it betrays the ideological composition of the Olmert-appointed committee that seeks to shift the focus away from the government's incompetence in prosecuting the war to the very decision to respond militarily to Hizbullah's aggression. On the fifth day of the war, things were still looking fairly good. The Air Force had concentrated its bombings on readily available targets and had obliterated them. Public support for the war and the government was sky-high. It was in the last four weeks of the war -- not covered by the interim report -- where the full brunt of the government's incompetence came to the fore. It was during those last four weeks that the government repeatedly refused to call up the reserves in spite of the public outcry and the tactical necessity of a large-scale ground operation. It was in the last four weeks that the government repeatedly changed its plans and goals and so sent troops into battles that had no strategic end or operational logic. It was in the two days that the government finally decided to launch the ground campaign that it knew could make no difference to the outcome of the war since it began after the UN Security Council had approved the cease-fire agreement.
ISSUING A harsh report that covers only the initial five days of the war insinuates that the war was a failure not due to bad war leadership, but rather because a wise government would have opted not to go to war at all but rather continued the business-as-usual response to post-withdrawal Hizbullah aggressions: paying ransom, releasing terrorists and burying dead Israelis. Furthermore, throughout its inquiry, the Winograd Commission ignored the very nature of war itself. War after all, is not just the military battles. It is the mobilization of the resources of society to improve the position of the state vis-a-vis its enemies. And, as Israelis know only too well, war is ultimately won or lost in the world chanceries, not on the battlefield. Yet the commission completely ignored this fact and so ignored the diplomatic campaign of the war and its disastrous conclusions. In absolute terms it could be said that the diplomatic campaign was a far worse failure than the military campaign. At least when IDF units were allowed to fight Hizbullah they defeated them. But in the diplomatic campaign Israel scored no points at all. Israel began the war in arguably the best diplomatic position it had ever enjoyed. The G-8 endorsed Israel's right to win. The US was strongly behind it. Then Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni took the helm and capsized the ship of state. Livni decided that it would be better for Israel if there were international forces deployed along the border. This was an assumption based on the same "invisible wall of international legitimacy" delusion that had failed to prevent Hizbullah from carrying out the kidnappings and missile attacks that precipitated the war in the first place. Today, as now, Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi has just explained to the government, Hizbullah has rearmed and is reinforcing its forces in south Lebanon to return them to their pre-war strength. This it does under the protective gaze of the international force Livni was so keen to see in action. And due to the Livni-midwifed UNIFIL forces, Israel now risks an international scandal if it takes action against Hizbullah. Indeed, it was only because of some fancy footwork by opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu and former minister Natan Sharansky that Livni didn't get her wish to have the entire cease-fire resolution fall under Article 7 of the UN Charter. Had that occurred it would have increased the already-present risk of any future Israeli move against Hizbullah bringing the UN-mandated international force to the defense of Hizbullah, against Israel.
ONE COULD console oneself by saying that at least there is a commission for the Second Lebanon War. Three greater strategic failures that all devastated Israel's defensive posture have gone without any scrutiny whatsoever. First, Barak's precipitous surrender of southern Lebanon to Hizbullah has avoided scrutiny not only by the Winograd Commission but by all other official bodies. The second failure also played an important role in the Second Lebanon War, but has escaped examination. This is the Sharon government's decision to hand over the Gaza Strip in its entirety to Hamas and Fatah while expelling 10,000 Jews from their homes. This not only ensconced a Hamas-Fatah jihadist army within striking range of Israel's major population centers and cemented the belief that Palestinian terrorism would bring about Israel's national collapse through the gradual handover of all Israeli territory to terrorists; it also provided a safe base of operations for terrorists to conduct operations like the kidnapping of IDF Cpl. Gilad Schalit. And, of course, the grandest of all Israeli failures was the Rabin-Peres government's decision to recognize the PLO and give it arms, land and legitimacy, ushering in the most deadly period of terrorism in Israel's history. This decision too, has never been scrutinized by a commission. But, truly, the great pity is not that no commissions were formed to investigate these failures, as the Winograd Commission was formed to investigate the Second Lebanon War. The great pity is that Israeli society has yet to find the means to conduct a true public debate of our failures that could enable learning and corrective action. If the Winograd report is to have any positive impact at all, it should be in beginning, not blocking the necessary public debate into the real sources of the failures last summer, and into the strategic failures of the Oslo process, and the withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza. All of these call out for our attention and correction. 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!" |
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WSJ COLUMNIST: US GOVT'S AL-HURRA TV PROMOTES ANTI-ISRAEL AGENDA
Posted by Avodah, May 1, 2007. |
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This was written
by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz and it appeared in Arutz-Sheva
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(IsraelNN.com) According to a column by investigative writer Joel Mowbray in the Wall Street Journal's online Opinion section, OpinionJournal.com, an Arabic-language satellite TV station operated by the United States government is promoting an anti-Israel agenda, including pandering to Neturei Karta, American racists, the Iranian dictatorship and Holocaust deniers. Mowbray reports that the station, established to present the American perspective to the Arab world, has been broadcasting reports and feature pieces that seem to feed the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel attitudes and beliefs already conspicuous throughout the Middle East. Mowbray writes that the situation has escaped the oversight of the US administration due to lack of communication. Ironically, the OpinionJournal columnist notes, the anti-Western and anti-Israel bias situation at Al-Hurra was better controlled under the previous station director, a Muslim of Lebanese background. As an example of the current bias at A-Hurra, Mowbray describes a feature story the station broadcast in January on the tiny fringe Jewish group Neturei Karta, some of whose members took part in a Holocaust denial conference hosted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year. According to Mowbray: "The Neturei Karta were presented as mainstream Orthodox Jews, and Al-Hurra claimed that they number more than one million. The story's angle is clear from the anchor's introduction: 'They always put Israeli officials in a bind, who can't seem to understand how Jews can oppose Zionism, or how a Jew can encourage Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his opposition to Israel.' Various Neturei Karta members uttered outrageous falsehoods about supposed 'Zionist' cruelty, including 'torture, detention, [and the] burning of their synagogues.' None of these libels were challenged, let alone debunked." During a December report on the Iranian Holocaust denial conference, Mowbray writes, Al-Hurra correspondents treated Ahmadinejad and the gathered Holocaust deniers "with unmistakable deference." Among those attendees whose comments went out over the air unchallenged were the well-known American racist politician and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and French Holocaust denier and anti-Semite Robert Faurisson. The former offered praise for the Iranian President and the latter told Al-Hurra viewers that the Holocaust "is completely untrue, and an historical lie." Mowbray provides more details of the December 12th Al-Hurra report from Tehran's Holocaust denial conference: "The Al-Hurra reporter... referred to those who believe Hitler killed six million Jews as 'Holocaust supporters.' He took a swipe at the handful of conference attendees who didn't deny the Holocaust, by noting that they 'didn't enforce their statements with scientific evidence.' In closing the piece, he referred to Israel as 'the Jewish state on Palestinian lands.'" It is not just denial of the Jewish past on Al-Hurra that strikes columnist Mowbray as troubling, but the platform given to Hizbullah terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah for a full, one-hour-plus speech he delivered live on December 7, 2006. In the subsequent 13-minute phone interview with a member of Lebanon's government, Mowbray tells his readers, the Lebanese official "accused the Hezbollah leader of not being anti-U.S. and anti-Israel enough." The Wall Street Journal columnist goes on to note that Al-Hurra receives an annual budget of over $70 million from the US government with almost no oversight. As Mowbray reports: "During the March 21 House Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) pressed [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice on the wisdom of providing a platform to Islamic terrorists, citing Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's Dec. 7 speech, which Al-Hurra aired live. The broadcast speech 'went on for 30 minutes,' she responded, 'followed by commentary, much of which was critical of Nasrallah.'" Mowbray believes that Secretary Rice's reply indicates that she was herself misled by Al-Hurra executives as to the nature of the actual Nasrallah broadcast. "[If] you can't get fired for using U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide a platform for Islamic terrorists and help further Holocaust denial, then wouldn't Congress and the Bush administration be communicating that pretty much anything goes?" Joel Mowbray asks in conclusion. Contact Avodah by email at avodah15@aol.com |
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WHY IS ISRAEL AFRAID TO BE ISRAEL?
Posted by Sergio Tessa (HaDaR), May 1, 2007. |
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This come from World Net Daily April 21, 2007 and it was written by Ellis Washington
(http://worldnetdaily.com/news/articl.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55324). Ellis Washington, former editor at The Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including "The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law" (2002). He has just completed the manuscript to his latest book, "The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust" (2007). |
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Excavating near the Temple Mount isn't worth fighting for.
Is there not a cause?
I am four things -- I am a black man, an American, an academic without a home, and a lover of the Jewish people and the nation of Israel. Years ago I made a vow to dedicate my career and my talents to defending the Jewish people and proclaiming the truth about this great nation. This article is my feeble but earnest attempt in this regard. The Six Day War began on June 5, 1967, 40 years ago, with a pre-emptive attack by Israel against Egypt due to Egypt's increasing bellicose, anti-Israel rhetoric, Gen. Nasser's banishment of Israel from using the Suez Canal, and troop movements that seemed poised to attack Israel's southern flank. Israel's response was so swift, fierce and legendary that by day three Israeli forces were at the base of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Later that day, Israeli armies ascended the Temple Mount by defeating a confederation of six Arab armies. Truly it was a blessed day for the nation of Israel as Gen. Uzi Narkiss hoisted up the Israel flag at their holiest site. Yet, in subsequent days, as the politicians sorted through the ramifications of the victory, there is tension, there is fear, there is hesitation, there is a lost opportunity to secure that holiest Jewish site -- a lost opportunity that may never again be seized. The actual events are narrated below: Israel conquered the Old City of Jerusalem on the third day of the Six Day War, in June 1967. The paratroopers were overcome with emotion upon entering the Jewish Holy Places from which they had been banished 2,000 years ago by the Romans. To my Israeli friends I ask: Why didn't the Jews finish the job and take over the entire Temple Mount area 40 years ago? After all, was not this their birthright? Was not this the area where in the Bible Abraham was to sacrifice his son Isaac but at the last moment the Angel of the Lord stayed his hand? Was not this the site where David, Israel's greatest king, endeavored to build the first Temple, which was built by his son, Israel's second greatest king, Solomon? Was not this the same Temple Mount where another Temple was rebuilt bigger and more gloriously in the first century A.D. by Herod the Great? Then surely if there were any site in Israel worth fighting for, worth exercising sovereignty over, for re-establishing the Temple Mount as the center of Jewish worship in all of Israel, then it was this area. Why is Israel afraid to be Israel? The Palestinians, Israel's sworn enemies and fellow countrymen, have an interesting and diabolical way of influencing the marketplace of ideas in Israel and in the international community, and imposing their will over a much stronger people, the Jews -- public policy by temper tantrum. This policy was on great display in February of this year at the Temple Mount where archeologists of the Israel Ministry of Housing are shoring up a bridge that collapsed in 2004 due to heavy snow. The Israel Antiquities Authority is concurrently excavating ancient artifacts in the area. This bridge would give the Jews access to the Temple Mount area to worship at the Wailing Wall. The archeologists have assured the Palestinians that the dig will not in any way disturb the foundation of the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque, which is Muslim's third-holiest site in the world. The response from the Muslim world both in Israel and abroad has been swift, predictable and violent. For example The Committee of Muslim Scholars and the Islamic Action Front, Jordan's largest political opposition group, immediately responded in a statement whereby they "urge[d] ... proclaiming jihad to liberate Al Aqsa and save it from destruction and sabotage from Jewish usurpers." Also, Arab regimes that refuse to concede to their demands to save the Al Aqsa mosque by force will be attacked starting with King Abdullah of Jordan, said the Islamic Action Front. For weeks now, Palestinians Muslims have executed virtually continuous attacks in east Jerusalem at or near the Temple Mount area in protest of the bridge reconstruction and archeological excavation, which in the Old City is mandated by Israeli law. For example, on Feb. 20, Arab protesters were arrested for rioting, and violence was caught on photo and video. A week later, terrorists in Gaza set off bombs near the separation barriers as soldiers approached -- and on and on and on. Israel must ask themselves this question: Why is Israel afraid to be Israel? Three thousand years ago on the wind-swept hills of Judea, Israel's future greatest king, then just a lowly anonymous shepherd boy of 16, saw the armies of Israel cowering in their bunkers listening to the daily taunts and blasphemies of this 9 foot 6 inch Philistine champion, Goliath. David, shocked at his own people's cowardice and indifference to defend their own national heritage in the face of this pagan, uncircumcised enemy that David believed in his heart could be easily vanquished, asked a most sublime and profound question -- Is there not a cause? Indeed, if Israel doesn't have a cause, yea, as Prime Minister Begin iterated, even a God-ordained right "to all of Israel," then surely no nation on earth can claim a better title to any land in its possession. Therefore, what should Israel do to be Israel? The same thing David did when he made Israel the greatest and most powerful nation at that time: 1) Conquer or neutralize all of your surrounding enemies; 2) Define and secure your boarders; 3) Withdraw membership from the United Nations, because this so-called "neutral" international organization has always been one of Israel's greatest enemies and has been complicit with Arab states to bring about Israel's destruction since the U.N. was called the League of Nations in the early 1920s; 4) Immediate deportation of all Palestinians that refuse to sign a statement of sole allegiance to Israel (a mandated loyalty oath), starting with the political leadership of Fatah and Hamas; and 5) Annex Gaza and the so-called West Bank (which is actually greater Judea) and make all of Israel one united country again. To Israel and to the Jews whom I love, I end with this message -- You have been in the wilderness for 40 years; 40 years since your great victory in June 1967 -- The Six Day War. Forty is the number of testing, of judgment, of wandering, of wandering around this sacred site of your forefathers. The Temple Mount is Israel's birthright. As boy David asked King Saul, "Is there not a cause?" Indeed, there is. Israel must reclaim all of Israel beginning with the Temple Mount, and Israel must never be afraid to be Israel again. Contact Sergio Tessa at HaDar-Israel@verizon.net |
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AHMAD AL-JABARI BEFORE KIDNAPPING SHALIT: WE HAD MANY TRYINGS TO ABDUCT ZIONIST SOLDIERS
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 1, 2007. |
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This comes from today's Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades (Hamas) Website
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1- The weapon of "abducting Zionist soldiers" is the perfect solution for liberating the Palestinian prisoners. Where is the location of this option in this stage? The prisoners case is important to us. So we worked to liberate Al Qassam members and the members of Palestinian resistance factions. The beginning was in the middle of 80th. Sheik Salah Shihada order to abduct Zionist soldiers despite of being in the Zionist jails. That happened by a message delivered to Mohammed Nimer Shratha (arrested now), who directed his group to execute the operation. The first Zionist soldier who was abducted was "Avi Sportas". Then we abducted "Elan Sadon". The operations continue till it reached to fifteen Zionist soldiers with their weapons. All of them died, except the Zionist "Alon Krivani". They snapped him. they thought him died after they investigate with him. But he survived. Then we abducted two Zionist soldiers form "Nivi Dacalim", after that we abducted "Nasim Tolidano", "Yaron Hin", "Saher Simani", "Aria Franktzal", and " Nakshon Faxman". 2- As a leader in the resistance factions, do you have the authority to use this method against the Zionist occupation? Yes, the brigades has full authority to do what can be done with this issue. Many Mujahideen were arrested during the attempts to abducted soldiers. 3- Could you tell us about the history of this weapon in the brigades? What are the restrictions? Also what are the positive results of this weapon? Hamas was established in 1987 and the Brigades found after a while. The Brigades was found before1986 without a declaration. In 1986, and I remember that the Islamic Brotherhood military forces liberated area called "hill86". It was known "Kfar Darom" settlement. The restrictions were: a- The Zionist security procedures. The Zionist were deduced the examples after every abduction incidents. b- The narrow geographic district where the Mujahideen move. c- There is no official part adopts kidnapping or hosting kidnappers, abducted and guarantee their safety. d- The PA security forces were chasing the Mujahideen and arrested instead of the Zionist Occupation. I'll give some examples: 1- In the West Bank, the preventive security by Jebril Al Rjoob arrested "Sorif Group" and delivered the Zionist soldier " Sharon Adron" to the Zionists. But about the positive results: It spreads the feel of calm that their case will not be forgotten, and we will work to liberate them. 4- Do you have any intention to kidnap Zionist soldiers during Al Aqsa intifada? Yes, there was a lot of tryings such as: 1- The group of "Yabrod" in Ramallah abducted four Zionist soldiers and took their weapons. 5- Why the Brigades didn't exchange the Zionist soldiers' body fragments with Palestinian prisoners? And really did you have any fragments? No answer, and our Palestinian people should be patient. 6- What is the future of the abduction operations in the OPT? The Future of the abducting Zionist soldier in Palestine will remain active
as long as one Palestinian prisoner in the Zionist jails.
After this interview, the Qassam members were working hard to arrest
soldiers from the military Zionist sites and succeeded in June 2006 when
arresting the Zionist soldier Gilad Shalit. Al-Qassam Brigades are ready to
arrest more as long as there are kidnapping operations by the occupation
forces.
Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com
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TWO ALLIES, TWO PERSPECTIVES
Posted by Lawrence Uniglicht, May 1, 2007. |
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Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, blasted by an Israeli governmental commission for 'a severe failure in exercising judgment, responsibility, and prudence' in regards to last summer's war against Hizbullah, clings to power by a thread. The commission accuses Israel's head politico of 'hastily deciding to go to war, neglecting to ask for a detailed military plan, refusing to consult outside the army, and setting over-ambitious and unobtainable goals.' The beleaguered leader's popularity sinks to a level lower than the Dead Sea, as Israeli protesters gather outside Olmert's home, demanding his ouster. United States President George W Bush, blasted by much of the media and his rival party for in effect 'a severe failure in exercising judgment, responsibility, and prudence' in regards to leading his nation into an Iraqi quagmire, is also in effect accused of 'hastily deciding to go to war, neglecting to ask for a detailed nation building plan, refusing to consult outside the Pentagon, and setting over-ambitious and unobtainable goals.' The beleaguered leader's popularity sinks to a level lower than the Hurricane Katrina traumatized New Orleans basin, still American protestors do not gather outside the White House, calling for his resignation or impeachment. Israelis take war personally; almost everyone serves a compulsory tour of military duty. Furthermore, wars with perceived unsuccessful outcomes, fought on or near Israeli soil, threaten the very existence of that tiny nation. Heads likely roll throughout a responsible administration, with urgency, when blame is assessed. Americans, in general, take war much less personally; relatively few serve in an all-volunteer military force. Furthermore, wars with perceived unsuccessful or unsuccessfully evolving outcomes, fought far away on foreign soil, do not threaten the very existence of that superpower. Heads do not likely roll throughout any responsible administration, at least with any urgency, when blame is assessed. Two allies, tangibly and in spirit, due to divergent circumstances, in today's world, exercise their democratic rights differently, Israel aggressively, America for the most part more passively. Additionally, each nation views the other's leaders with different perspectives and degrees of relevance. Israeli's, in general, view America as their most essential ally, and are more comfortable with President Bush and his entourage of White House leaders than are the majority of Americans. Israelis ignore, for one, the Bush family's cozy relationship with the Jew-despising Wahhabi madrassa financing Saudi royal family, focusing instead on verbal assurances given and proactive stands taken in support of their besieged nation. Most Americans, even many Jewish Americans, remain in the dark when it comes to Israeli politics or vital issues, thus many do not even know who the Israeli Prime Minister is, much less possess any opinion about him. After all, what perceived importance does he have in their lives? Indeed, Americans, for the most part, have little knowledge thus concern even regarding a variety of essential issues that truly affect their own lives. Citizens taking their own democracy and survival as a nation for granted sometimes do not stay vigilant. For example, America's own vice president Dick Cheney was a recent former CEO of and still holds stock options with a multi-national corporation Halliburton, that until recently honored construction contracts in an 'axis of evil' nuclear-emerging nation Iran, whose president held a Holocaust denial conference and yearns to 'wipe Israel off the map'. Furthermore, Iran supplies weapons to and instructs terrorists, some of which ooze into Iraq and kill or cripple American soldiers. United States law prohibits its corporations from dealing directly with Iran, yet a foreign subsidiary of Halliburton, as much a de facto part of Halliburton as the nose on one's face, cavalierly broke the 'spirit' of that law with impunity. Bizarrely, that 'patriotic' company was and continues to be awarded multi-billion dollar government contracts to do work in Iraq and elsewhere, a large number of which were and are no-bid contracts, many absorbing cost overruns and performed with shoddy workmanship. Would Israeli citizens tolerate such a questionable use of their hard earned tax payments, and would they not demand that any high government official associated with such a company be at least investigated? Alas, U.S. citizens yawn at this scandalous state of affairs, bereft of sex and violence. All citizens fortunate enough to reside in democratic nations, on either side of the Atlantic or elsewhere, must not bury their heads in the sand, must remain ever alert to any and all government machinations, lest they wake up one day to a nation they will not recognize, consequently turning their lives upside down. It can happen anywhere! Lawrence Uniglicht is a career civil servant, working for the Social Security Administration. He advocates for the State of Israel with an American perspective. He writes, "Advocating for the disrespected underdog has been my passion, no doubt Israel falls into that category." Contact him by email at luniglicht@snip.net |
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THE SHIAI 'GODLY VICTORY' PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE CONTINUES
Posted by Nurit Greenger, May 1, 2007. |
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What are the tricks ploy and craftiness the Islamic Shiai leaders developed over the years? How do they use these tactics against Israel? How Hassan Nasrallah used them in the last war and mind you with great success. This was written by Dr. Guy Bechor and is here translated from the Hebrew. |
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Is it is possible that in Iran and Lebanon we are facing a very foreign to us Shiai culture that is using us as it desires in the most cynical way and is causing us tremendous damage?
In the last one thousand years the Shiai were a small oppressed and persecuted by the majority Sunni community. As a result, the Shiai leaders developed secretive crafty ploy that the Pikah -- the religious law -- learned established general rues for. These rules were used well by the Ayatollah Kumeini and brought about the fall of the Shah and also were well used by Hassan Nasrallah against Israel and is now also being used against the entire western world in regards to the Iranian nuclear program. These crafty ploy rules are taught in Hezbollah motivation courses. The time has come for Israel to become familiar with this psychological warfare ploy. But there is much more to this. For example, there are four identified, most useful rules the Shiai use: 'Chodah' The Chodah tactic is to bring the enemy to the point is will unrealistically judge its own circumstance. The Ayatollah Kumeini admitted that in 1948 he used the Chodah tactic many times over to trap the Islamists enemy. The use of the Chodah was simple yet efficient. From the get go he declared victory against the Shah or created a sense that victory is only a matter of time. This way he gained more support and more supporters joined him until he broke the Shah's people. It was unbelievable but at the end, one of the strongest armies in the world fell ravaged at his feet. During the Second Lebanon War, Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah secretary general used the Chodah in his many speeches. He tried and succeeded to break the Israeli public spirit. He gave the Israelis the impression that Hezbollah is a mighty Middle East army and Tell Aviv, Haifa and the IDF are on the verge of breakdown and unfortunately a significant nunber of Israelis bought into this ancient trick. Today most Israelis think that they lost the war, which is what the Chodah aimed to accomplish. At the end of the war Nasrallah rushed to announce his Godly Victory, which was the way he wanted to delineate the results of the war. The one using the Chodah is Iran's president Ahmadinejad that almost daily he argues that Israel is a passing by phenomenon and soon will vanish. This claim is meant to weaken Israel and cause her citizens to run away, to cause them despair, and make the world believe in the thesis that there is no legitimate Israel. This is pure Chodah tactic that succeeded and its success continues. 'Tanephyia' Here the tactic is the take the sting out of the opponent or the enemy. In the last Lebanon War the goal was to instigate the Israeli population against its leadership and by that turn the democratic advantage into disadvantage and the Israeli might into confusion and laxity. This tactic succeeded beyond expectations. Example to Tanephyia that Ayatollah Kumeini recommended himself. During the riots against the Shiai he recommended to put children in front of the rioters. He established that a child dead from the Shiai guard fire will emphasis the "Zionistic nature of the Shiai," meaning how satanic and diabolical it is and this way the Shiai will lose its legitimacy and the support of the nation. Here the Tanephyia is using the enemy strength against itself. This is how it was during the last Lebanon War when the Hezbollah fighters used the Shiai population as human shields. For the Hezbollah dead civilians were an advantage that fetid Israel in world's public opinion...after all Kumeini himself acted that way. The way they carry on with kidnapping, the way they carried on before they released the British sailors was kind of Tanephyia to show that Britain and the west are weak and the same applies to the terror against the USA troops in Iraq. 'Tekyia' This is pretence. When Shiai is in a hostile environment he is permitted to pretend he is part of the majority. Some of the Shiai law makers decided that if one is in danger it is allowed to act this way. This is how Kumeini revolutionaries were planted among Shiai organizations to accomplish the Tekyia. Nasrallah activities in the Lebanese politics is kind of Tekyia and this is how it folds in front of our eyes. He grows stronger and arms but maintains constitutional balance. This is an ancient trick the Sunnis object to and even scorn. 'Katmahn' It is denial to one actions and opinion in spite of the fact that one continues to strive and accomplish them. Regarding the nuclear program, the present Shiai conduct and the claim their nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, is Katmahn, as it is not a real lie rather it is qualifying the denial in very small letters. For instance: "according to Islam," "according to Shari'a," etc. Kumeini admitted that he would use Katmahn in order to trap the then President Jimmy Carter and the Americans. Before the revolution, Katmahn people were in touch with William Sullivan, the US Ambassador to Iran, and told him that the "Islamic Government" will continue to maintain close relations with the USA that Kumeini never really meant to do. In order to make an impression that there will be no dramatic change in Iran after the revolution, Kumeini used words such as "Islamic Government." The way the Shiai behave in Iraq is kind of Katmahn where their religious leader Ayatollah Systani cooperates with the Americans only so he can get from them the control of the country. The Shiai will do the reckoning with the Americans Later on. If in Israel they were aware of these ancient tricks these tricks' power and influence would be greatly limited. Only that a horde of reporters of Arabic affairs cover and reflect with difficult to understand enthusiasm each simple trick and psychological warfare used against Israel. During the War, Nasrallah's live speeches against Israel were
broadcast with simultaneous subtitles, so no one is Israel missed a
trick or a ploy, in all the Israeli radio stations and on all the
television channels. The speeches were no more than the trickiest
tricks. This way Nasrallah and the Shiai's ploy joined with the anti
government media and the public swallowed the trick they fed them and
the tricks work well on them. The results are terrifying. In the last
few months one can see the depression spread in the Israeli
society...Chodah (the tactic to bring the enemy to the point is will
unrealistically judge its own circumstance)...didn't we say it
already?
Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog:
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THE TROUBLE WITH TENET; THE TROUBLE IN TURKEY; UKRAINE
Posted by Gabrielle Goldwater, May 1, 2007. |
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This comes from Gary Bauer of the American Values organization. Contact them by phone at 703-671-9700 or by fax at 703-671-1680. |
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The Trouble With Tenet To the surprise of many observers, myself included, in December 2004 President Bush awarded former CIA chief George Tenet with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his service to our country, which included presiding over the CIA during the second half of the Clinton Administration and the first half of the Bush Administration. No doubt those were difficult years for Tenet. Radical Islam was on the march -- repeatedly striking the United States in a series of attacks, all culminating in the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Since then, the United States has been on offense, liberating 50 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq. But now Tenet is making the rounds of the talk show circuit attacking the administration for invading Iraq. Tenet is particularly upset by the fact that some administration officials have defended the war by pointing to Tenet's statement that the case for war was "a slam dunk," which Tenet claims was taken out of context. Now he is jumping on the bandwagon of public opinion -- insisting that he always opposed the war and bears no responsibility for it. Tenet must have been fairly persuasive, because Secretary of State Colin Powell insisted that Tenet sit behind him during his UN presentation of the CIA's intelligence on Hussein's weapons programs. And in case you missed Tenet's appearance on 60 Minutes last night, he still defends that intelligence estimate. Ironically, some of Tenet's harshest critics are former CIA agents who are denouncing his leadership at the CIA. Half a dozen former agents recently released an open letter to Tenet in which they write, "...your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving, misleading and ... an admission of failed leadership." By the time the dust settles, I suspect Mr. Tenet may wish he had stayed silent. The Trouble In Turkey Islamist politicians, who control the Turkish government, are facing a crucial test Wednesday. As the parliament struggles to elect a new president, the Turkish people took to the streets yesterday demonstrating against the leading candidate. By some estimates, the crowd numbered in excess of one million people all demanding that Turkey remain a secular nation and that the presidential palace remain "closed to imams." The Turkish military also issued this strongly-worded statement Friday: "It should not be forgotten that the Turkish armed forces is one of the sides in this debate and the absolute defender of secularism. When necessary, it will display its stance and attitudes very clearly. No one should doubt that." That so many people would demonstrate against the Islamists in a Muslim nation is a sign of hope for moderation in the Middle East. But, demonstrating just how confused the bureaucrats of the European Union are, the EU issued a statement condemning the Turkish military. A Ray of Hope I just returned from a week in Kiev, Ukraine, where I spoke under heavy security to the inaugural Summit on Peace and Tolerance sponsored by the World Conference for Christians, Jews and Muslims, the Global Foundation for Democracy and the Ukrainian Interfaith Association. The participants represented a variety of nations and the three major faiths. Speakers included Tom Ridge, the first U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Rabbi Yona Metzger, the Chief Rabbi of Israel, former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and former Romanian Prime Minister Petre Roman. It was a grueling trip, and the sessions were long and intense, but it was worth the effort. When I spoke, I made the same arguments you have read time and time again in this daily report. Most participants agreed, but the voice of radical Islam was also represented as one Muslim professor delivered a tirade that can only be described as a justification of terrorism. But the remarks I found most hopeful were delivered by Prime Minister Bhutto, who was the first female prime minister in the Muslim world. She spoke out forcefully against radical Islam and made it clear she was sickened and angered over what extremists were doing in the name of her faith. "This is not the Islam I was taught," she said. Mrs. Bhutto has been living in exile for years out of fear of the Islamofascists, but there are strong hints she is preparing to return to her home country to fight, even if it means death. May she inspire others to be just as courageous! Gabrielle Goldwater lives in Switzerland. Contact her at III44@aol.com |
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U.S. MISCONCEPTION ON IRAQ; NEW DEFENSE SECRETARY WORSE
Posted by Richard H. Shulman, May 1, 2007. |
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THE EFFECT OF AMERICAN BEHAVIOR ON FOREIGNERS The importance of the US impels foreigners to observe American behavior. Their networks make sure they see the worse of it as if representative. What do they see? Rosie O'Donnell argues that 9/11 was a US conspiracy and the capture of British sailors was a British conspiracy. Don Imus insults Jews and bright female black athletes. Black hip-hop lyrics demean women and blacks. Speaker of the House Pelosi promotes a competing and weaker foreign policy. She donned a head scarf in a one-way tolerance of Islam. Such behavior makes good material for recruiting jihadists against an allegedly decadent and bigoted US. Nevertheless, the US must be somewhat well regarded, since it is the country that immigrants prefer (Youssef Ibrahm, NY Sun, 4/12, p.7). Will the rest of the world note what happened to Imus, and see that he is not representative of Americans? Will liberal critics of the Bush Administration be more circumspect in their criticism? Will they acknowledge that the rest of the world hates the US for a variety of reasons, not just, as they maintain, because the Bush administration tries to defend the US? U.S. MISCONCEPTIONS IN IRAQ After having been criticized for years for supporting foreign tyrannies, the US under Pres. Bush decided to stop doing so. (He got no credit for it.) He thought that democracy would end the rise of the jihadists. Instead of pursuing democracy, however, he sought a shortcut and promoted elections. In those elections, the jihadists, financed from abroad and backed by militias, dominated. Upon finding the Sunnis and Shiites clashing with each other, the US made the false assumption that one or the other side would join with the US. Thus it initially supported the Sadr militia and thought Iran and Syria wanted stability in Iraq. Now the US government thinks that because the Arab world fears Iranian nuclear development, it would become a US ally against that. But the Arabs hate the US and relish its casualties. S. Arabia made some reconciliation with Iran and accepted a Hamas regime in the P.A., so long as that regime included some Fatah members. S. Arabia strengthened ties with Russia and China and, together with Egypt (recipient of tens of billions of dollars of US military aid) called the US presence in Iraq illegal. The Arabs really want Iran and the US to destroy each other. The US is learning, however. It is destroying the Sadr militia (Caroline Glick in IMRA, 4/13). AN OPEN-MINDED LIBERAL I met a Korean war veteran who had seen the futility of certain battles and wars. Calling himself a liberal, he thought there is no justification for the present U.S. wars. He denied there is a world war now. He didn't believe that Muslims take the Koran seriously, just as Jews and Christians don't follow their Bibles 100%. I explained to him how seriously the Muslims take the Koran (whereas Jews and Christians are supposed to follow post-Biblical doctrines they developed). True, the Muslims don't always march to war. But they do now, again. The time is ripe for them, as European and Russian populations dwindle and Muslims move in, legally and illegally. After I explained to him that S. Arabia and Iran subsidize terrorism and indoctrination in mosques and schools, he started to realize the current menace to civilization is as serious as the Nazi and Communist ones. WHY WEB SITES ARE DIFFICULT TO NAVIGATE Originally, systems analysis designed computer screens. Screen presentations were orderly. Those who design web site screens know the technology, and some may know design, but few seem to understand communication. HAVING REPLACED OUR SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Unable to elect a President to their liking, Democrats pressed Pres. Bush to dismiss Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, because the Iraq war was mishandled (or was it because he understood the need to fight against Muslim enemies?). They were pleased with his replacement, who sounded appeasement-minded. The new Secretary, Gates, refuses to discuss the military option against Iran, because, he says, diplomatic measures are working. "The international community is united," he said (IMRA, 4/19) in imposing sanctions against Iran. To get this unity with China and Russia, that oppose tough effective sanctions that might do the job, means imposing mild sanctions that do not do the job. Imposing sanctions without teeth is like trying to chew almonds without teeth. In refusing to discuss military sanctions even in general terms means that our diplomacy is not backed by a credible military alternative. What a relief to Iran, which is proceeding to develop nuclear technology and boasts about it! Sec. Gates is deceiving himself and leaving the US (and Israel) vulnerable to eventual attack from Iran. He should be demanding overthrow of the Iranian regime and expansion of the Army. Isn't it obvious that ours is too small? 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@verizon.net |
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THE MEDIA'S WAR ON ISRAEL
Posted by Emanuel A. Winston, May 1, 2007. |
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The following is vital information for the Global Media which exhibits a doctrine of biased reportage across most of the reporting spectrum. With some exceptions, when reporting on conflicts in the Middle East, especially through by Arab Muslims against the Jews and Jewish State of Israel, the Media have chosen to become participating combatants, often siding with various terrorist movements in what is called "spin" or, otherwise known as misreporting the facts to achieve their personal liberal goals. It is little wonder that newspapers are up for sale as Blogs become a more reliable source of impartial news without the spin. Can the Global Media police themselves? Not likely. If such Media flagship journals like the BBC, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, NPR radio, etc. have no policy of acceptable standards for accurate reporting, why believe anything they cover?If a reporter or the corporation he or she works for consistently sides with terrorists, acting the apologist for their actions, in effect, becoming a recruiting office for new terrorists, should they not be treated as "Agents Provocateurs"? Clearly, they have knowingly joined the conflict, not a neutral observers but, rather as lethal combatants, no different from those who plan attacks, fund and supply weapons to terrorists -- only their weapon is one of encouragement and provocation. Why then should the media, who is merely one thin distance from the act of terror itself be immune to judgement and retribution? Naturally this would not include those who honestly and objectively report the news without spin. Perhaps the following article written by Mitchell Bard for FrontPageMagazine.com speaks to the reluctance -- even fear -- of journalists to write about Global Islamists where Muslim fanatics are provoked to hate, kill and maim in deference to Allah and injunctions in the Koran. This article was written by Michell Bard. It appeared April 24,
2007 in Front Page Magazine and is archived at Ruth S. King writes, "In 1983, using thirteen hours of footage from archives at Vanderbilt University, AFSI made a film "NBC goes to Lebanon" documenting the outright lying and bias in reporting about Israel and the war in Lebanon. The film actually received a good review in the New York Times |
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When Israel retaliated against Hezbollah during last summer's war, it was forced to fight two battles: one against the Lebanon-based terrorist organization, and one against a hopelessly biased global media. The first serious study of the media's behavior throughout the conflict has confirmed this impression. The study, released in February and titled "The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media As A Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict" (pdf.), was written not by a partisan watchdog organization that would be expected to arrive at these conclusions; rather, it was produced by a respected journalist, Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. In meticulous fashion, Kalb details how the press allowed itself to be manipulated by Hezbollah. He also records the mistakes made by Israel in trying to manage coverage, points out several of the outright distortions that were widely reported, and analyzes the impact of the digital media and the fundamental disadvantage a democracy such as Israel faces in a public relations battle with a non-democratic state or terrorist organization. As Kalb observes, Israel is automatically at a disadvantage in any conflict because it is an open society. "During the war," Kalb notes in the study, "no Hezbollah secrets were disclosed, but in Israel secrets were leaked, rumors spread like wildfire, leaders felt obliged to issue hortatory appeals often based on incomplete knowledge, and journalists were driven by the fire of competition to publish and broadcast unsubstantiated information." He adds that Hezbollah was able to control how it was portrayed to the world and could therefore depict itself as "a selfless movement touched by God and blessed by a religious fervor and determination to resist the enemy, the infidel, and ultimately achieve a 'divine victory,' no matter the cost." (Of course, no mention was made of Hezbollah's dependence on Iran and Syria.) Perhaps the most serious charge made by the media throughout the war was that Israel was indiscriminately targeting civilians. Groups such as Human Rights Watch made the allegation, which was then publicized uncritically by reporters. Although Israel underscored that it was Hezbollah that was using civilians as shields, the media relied on the allegations of Kenneth Roth, the executive director of HRW, who charged, falsely, that Israel's military showed "disturbing disregard for the lives of Lebanese civilians." Kalb notes that reporters should have been aware that Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, had said before the war that Hezbollah fighters "live in their [civilians'] houses, in their schools, in their churches, in their fields, in their farms and in their factories." Early in the war, indeed, reporters did note that Hezbollah started the war and casualties were a consequence of the fighting, "but after the first week such references were either dropped or downplayed, leaving the widespread impression that Israel was a loose cannon shooting at anything that moved." Kalb produces statistics that clearly show the anti-Israel bias of the Arab press. To be sure, it is not surprising that 78 percent of the stories on Al-Jazeera would label Israel as the "aggressor." Western news services, however, would be expected to show some semblance of balance. Such was not the case. For example, the BBC ran 117 stories on the war, 38 percent of which depicted Israel as the aggressor. Only 4 percent of BBC reports placed the blame for the conflict on Hezbollah. Most media stories drew a disturbing moral equivalence between the warring sides, suggesting that Israel and Hezbollah were equally to blame. In Kalb's assessment, American network coverage of the war was more intense than at any time since the 1991 attempted coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Of these stories, however, more than half focused on Israeli attacks against Lebanon. With the exception of Fox News, Kalb writes, "negative-sounding judgments of Israel's attacks and counter-attacks permeated most network coverage." Similarly, he reports that Israel was depicted as the aggressor nearly twice as often in the headlines of the New York Times and Washington Post and three times as often in photos. Israel was repeatedly criticized for alleged attacks on UN troops in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Kalb notes that the "impartial" UNIFIL web site published information about Israeli troop movements while no such information was posted regarding Hezbollah's military activities. Kalb also reiterates what media watchdogs knew all along, but journalists rarely admitted: that the media's access to stories in Lebanon was strictly controlled by Hezbollah: Foreign correspondents were warned, on entry to the tour [of a southern Beirut suburb], that they could not wander off on their own or ask questions of any residents. They could only take pictures of sites approved by their Hezbollah minders. Violations, they were told, would be treated harshly. Cameras would be confiscated, film or tape destroyed, and offending reporters never again allowed access to Hezbollah officials or Hezbollah-controlled areas. Kalb compared the terms to that of the Soviet era and said that only CNN's Anderson Cooper described the ground rules that Hezbollah imposed to try to control the story. Kalb says "all of the other reporters followed the Hezbollah script: Israel, in a cruel, heartless display of power, bombed innocent civilians. Casualties were high. Devastation was everywhere. So spoke the Hezbollah spokesman; so wrote many in the foreign press corps. Cameramen didn't need permission to film devastation, but they were warned against taking pictures of Hezbollah terrorists. "The rarest picture of all," Kalb observes, "was that of a Hezbollah guerilla. It was as if the war on the Hezbollah side was being fought by ghosts." The Herald Sun of Australia also published equally rare photos showing Hezbollah preparing to fire rockets from civilian neighborhoods, the type of visual evidence that, if widely disseminated, could have quickly discredited the inaccurate reports of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Reporters always want more access to the war and the decision makers involved, so it is not surprising that many complained about restrictions placed on them by Israel. Kalb reports, however, that reports were filled with interviews with Israeli troops, generals and officials and that "the depth and breadth of the coverage seemed to belie the common complaints about access." By contrast, he notes, "Hezbollah provided only limited access to the battle field, full access to an occasional guided tour, and encouraged visiting journalists to check its own television network, Al-Manar, for reports and information about the war." Kalb adds, "Al-Manar was to Hezbollah what Pravda was to the Soviet Union." The discovery of doctored photos used by major media during the war was a major embarrassment and Kalb skewers the press for its misuse of photographs. In addition to several frequently cited examples, he mentions a photo of a southern suburb of Beirut that appeared in the New York Times that the Times' Jerusalem bureau chief Steve Erlanger later admitted was out of context. The Times used a satellite photo showing destruction of a Beirut neighborhood that gave the impression of massive devastation throughout the city. A larger photo of Beirut would have shown that the rest of Beirut was undamaged. Nothing in Kalb's report will come as any surprise to media critics or Israel's supporters. What is shocking is that these well-documented abuses have continued for so long without the media itself taking corrective measures. The report should be required reading for journalism schools, not to mention working reporters. The serious maladies Kalb describes must be fixed if the media is to expect the public to have any confidence in its reporting. Emanuel Winston is a commentator and Middle East analyst. His articles appear often on Think-Israel and Gamla. He is a member of the Board of Directors and a research associate of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies (http://www.freeman.org/online.htm). Contact him at winstonmedia@interaccess.com |
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