Have been busy and only got around to post today.
Also today I am off to New Orleans for a week, may lag with new postings :)
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Iraq has been
liberated, not occupied (jpost letters)
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury Dhaka
Bangladesh ( 9 Nov 2003)
blitz@intrepidbd.net
Hussein Khomeni is the grandson of Iranian Shiite leader Ayatollah Khomeinie who
led the revolution in Iran and denounced the United States as the "Great Satan."
Khomeini Jr. fled to Iraq after the American forces ousted Saddam Hussein. He
now lives in the holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq. Recently, he stated
publicly that the American army in Iraq "is a liberating force that freed
Iraqis, not occupiers." He also said: "There is absolutely no freedom in Iran,
where people are suffering from a totalitarian religious rule. Just like Iraqis,
the Iranians are desperate to be free and if all other methods fail, they may
welcome American military intervention."
This statement from a person, who has been close to Iran's ruling clergy, should
be an eye-opener for the critics of the United States. People of Iraq has been
living under a regime far brutal than the Iranian regime. In fact, most Iraqis
were living under a brutal rule not different from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. The
Khmer Rouge slaughtered millions of Cambodians who are considered opposed to Pol
Pot's tyranny. Similarly, the Baathists in Iraq murdered millions of people whom
they thought opposed to Saddam Hussein's brutal yoke. The plight of the Iraqis
was made more desperate by the fact that the ordinary people did not have any
means to overthrow the brutal dictator. As Sama Hadad, a spokeswoman for Iraqi
Prospect, an Iraqi opposition group in exile, before the war wrote (www.openDemocracy.net
): "Live it up to Iraqi people to liberate themselves is a suggestion both
insulting and naive. The people of Iraq have struggled alone for three decades.
... Unfortunately, history has shown that Iraqis, despite their most noble
efforts, have been unable to get rid of Saddam and therefore require external
assistance. In fact, the only realistic method of getting rid of Saddam is
through external military intervention. This is the only way and it is a just
way."
These are the voices that should be heard than those of the critics of the
American intervention in Iraq.
----------------------------------------
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is a senior journalist, columnits, author,
political analyst and editor of Weekly Blitz published from Bangladesh. Web
Site: www.weeklyblitz.com
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Nov. 12, 2003
Bush the radical
By
DANIEL PIPES
"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the
lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe."
This sentence, spoken last week by George W. Bush, is about the
most jaw-dropping repudiation of an established bipartisan policy ever made by a
US president.
Not only does it break with a policy the US government has
pursued since first becoming a major player in the Middle East, but the speech
is audacious in ambition, grounded in history, and programmatically specific.
It's the sort of challenge to existing ways one expects to hear from a
columnist, essayist, or scholar - not from the leader of a great power.
Bush spoke in a candid manner, as heads of state almost never do:
"In many Middle Eastern countries, poverty is deep and it is spreading, women
lack rights and are denied schooling. Whole societies remain stagnant while the
world moves ahead. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does
not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence
ready for export."
This is not the first time Bush has dispatched decades' worth of
policy toward a Middle East problem and declared a radically new approach.
He also did so concerning Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict:
Iraq: He brushed aside the long-standing policy of deterrence,
replacing it in June 2002 with an approach of hitting before getting hit. US
security, he said, "will require all Americans to be forward-looking and
resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty
and to defend our lives." This new approach provided justification for the war
against Saddam Hussein, removing the Iraqi dictator from power before he could
attack.
Arab-Israeli conflict: I called Bush's overhaul of the US
approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict in June 2003 perhaps "the most surprising
and daring step of his presidency." He changed presumptions by presenting a
Palestinian state as the solution, imposing this vision on the parties, tying
results to a specific timetable, and replacing leaders of whom he disapproved.
And this time:
Democracy: The president renounced a long-accepted policy of
"Middle East exceptionalism" - getting along with dictators - and stated US
policy would henceforth fit with its global emphasis of making democracy the
goal.
He brought this issue home by tying it to American security:
"With the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and
to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo." Then, on the
premise that "the advance of freedom leads to peace," Bush announced "a forward
strategy of freedom in the Middle East."
Drawing explicit comparisons with the US success in sponsoring
democracy in Europe and Asia, he called on Americans once again for "persistence
and energy and idealism" to do the same in the Middle East.
UNDERSTANDING THE rationale behind the old dictator-coddling
policy makes clear the radicalism of this new approach. The old way noticed that
the populations are usually more anti-American than are the emirs, kings, and
presidents. Washington was rightly apprehensive that democracy would bring in
more radicalized governments; this is what did happen in Iran in 1979 and nearly
happened in Algeria in 1992. It also worried that once the radicals reached
power, they would close down the democratic process (what was dubbed "one man,
one vote, one time").
Bush's confidence in democracy - that despite the street's
history of extremism and conspiracy-mindedness, it can mature and become a force
of moderation and stability - is about to be tested. This process did in fact
occur in Iran; will it recur elsewhere? The answer will take decades to find
out.
However matters develop, this gamble is typical of a president
exceptionally willing to take risks to shake up the status quo. And while one
speech does not constitute a new foreign policy - which will require
programmatic details, financial support, and consistent execution - the shift
has to start somewhere. Presidential oratory is the appropriate place to start.
And if the past record of this president in the Middle East is
anything by which to judge - toppling regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, promoting
a new solution to Arab-Israeli conflict - he will be true to his word here too.
Get ready for an interesting ride.
The writer is director of the Middle East Forum and author of
Militant Islam Reaches America.
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Bush's Best
speech yet:
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November 6, 2003
TEXT
In Bush's Words: 'Iraqi Democracy Will
Succeed'
The
following is the text of President Bush's remakrs on the 20th Anniversary of The
National Endowment For Democracy, as transcribed by FDCH e-Media, Inc.
BUSH: Thanks for the warm welcome. Thanks for
inviting me to join you in this 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for
Democracy.
Staff and directors of this organization have
seen a lot of history over the last two decades. You've been a part of that
history. By speaking for and standing for freedom you've lifted the hopes of
people around the world and you've brought great credit to America.
I appreciate Vin for the short introduction.
(LAUGHTER)
I'm a man who likes short introductions.
(LAUGHTER)
And he didn't let me down. But more
importantly, I appreciate the invitation.
Appreciate the members of Congress who are
here, senators from both political parties, members of the House of
Representatives from both political parties.
I appreciate the ambassadors who are here.
BUSH: I appreciate the guests who have come.
I appreciate the bipartisan spirit--the nonpartisan spirit of the National
Endowment for Democracy. I'm glad that Republicans and Democrats and
independents are working together to advance human liberty.
The roots of our democracy can be traced to
England and to its Parliament and so can the roots of this organization. In June
of 1982, President Ronald Reagan spoke at Westminster Palace and declared the
turning point had arrived in history. He argued that Soviet communism had failed
precisely because it did not respect its own people, their creativity, their
genius and their rights.
President Reagan said that the day of Soviet
tyranny was passing, that freedom had a momentum that would not be halted.
BUSH: He gave this organization its mandate:
to add to the momentum of freedom across the world. Your mandate was important
20 years ago. It is equally important today.
(APPLAUSE)
A number of critics were dismissive of that
speech by the president, according to one editorial at the time. It seems hard
to be a sophisticated European and also an admirer of Ronald Reagan.
(LAUGHTER)
Some observers on both sides of the Atlantic
pronounced the speech simplistic and naive and even dangerous.
BUSH: In fact, Ronald Reagan's words were
courageous and optimistic and entirely correct.
(APPLAUSE)
The great democratic movement President
Reagan described was already well under way.
In the early 1970s there were about 40
democracies in the world. By the middle of that decade, Portugal and Spain and
Greece held free elections. Soon, there were new democracies in Latin America
and free institutions were spreading in Korea and Taiwan and in East Asia.
This very week, in 1989, there were protests
in East Berlin in Leipzig. By the end of that year, every communist dictatorship
in Central America had collapsed.
Within another year, the South African
government released Nelson Mandela. Four years later, he was elected president
of his country, ascending like Walesa and Havel from prisoner of state to head
of state.
BUSH: As the 20th century ended, there were
around 120 democracies in the world, and I can assure you more are on the way.
(APPLAUSE)
Ronald Reagan would be pleased, and he would
not be surprised.
We've witnessed in little over a generation
the swiftest advance of freedom in the 2,500-year story of democracy. Historians
in the future will offer their own explanations for why this happened, yet we
already know some of the reasons they will cite.
It is no accident that the rise of so many
democracies took place in a time when the world's most influential nation was
itself a democracy. The United States made military and moral commitments in
Europe and Asia which protected free nations from aggression and created the
conditions in which new democracies could flourish.
As we provided security for whole nations, we
also provided inspiration for oppressed peoples. In prison camps, in banned
union meetings, in clandestine churches men and women knew that the whole world
was not sharing their own nightmare. They knew of at least one place, a bright
and hopeful land where freedom was valued and secure. And they prayed that
America would not forget them or forget the mission to promote liberty around
the world.
Historians will note that in many nations the
advance of markets and free enterprise helped to create a middle class that was
confident enough to demand their own rights. They will point to the role of
technology in frustrating censorship and central control, and marvel at the
power of instant communications to spread the truth, the news and courage across
borders.
Historians in the future will reflect on an
extraordinary, undeniable fact: Over time, free nations grow stronger and
dictatorships grow weaker.
In the middle of the 20th century, some
imagined that the central planning and social regimentation were a shortcut to
national strength. In fact, the prosperity and social vitality and technological
progress of a people are directly determined by the extend of their liberty.
BUSH: Freedom honors and unleashes human
creativity. And creativity determines the strength and wealth of nations.
Liberty is both the plan of heaven for humanity and the best hope for progress
here on Earth.
The progress of liberty is a powerful trend.
Yet we also know that liberty, if not defended, can be lost.
The success of freedom is not determined by
some dialectic of history. By definition, the success of freedom rests upon the
choices and the courage of free peoples and upon their willingness to sacrifice.
In the trenches of World War I, through a
two-front war in the 1940s, the difficult battles of Korea and Vietnam, and in
missions of rescue and liberation on nearly every continent, Americans have
amply displayed our willingness to sacrifice for liberty.
The sacrifices of Americans have not always
been recognized or appreciated, yet they have been worthwhile.
Because we and our allies were steadfast,
Germany and Japan are democratic nations that no longer threaten the world. A
global nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union ended peacefully, as did the
Soviet Union. The nations of Europe are moving toward unity, not dividing into
armed camps and descending into genocide.
Every nation has learned, or should have
learned, an important lesson: Freedom is worth fighting for, dying for and
standing for, and the advance of freedom leads to peace.
(APPLAUSE)
And now we must apply that lesson in our own
time. We've reached another great turning point and the resolve we show will
shape the next stage of the world democratic movement.
BUSH: Our commitment to democracy is tested
in countries like Cuba and Burma and North Korea and Zimbabwe, outposts of
oppression in our world. The people in these nations live in captivity and fear
and silence. Yet these regimes cannot hold back freedom forever. And one day,
from prison camps and prison cells and from exile, the leaders of new
democracies will arrive.
(APPLAUSE)
Communism and militarism and rule by the
capricious and corrupt are the relics of a passing era. And we will stand with
these oppressed peoples until the day of liberation and freedom finally arrives.
(APPLAUSE)
Our commitment to democracy is tested in
China. The nation now has a sliver, a fragment of liberty. Yet China's peoples
will eventually want their liberty pure and whole.
China has discovered that economic freedom
leads to national wealth. China's leaders will also discover that freedom is
indivisible, as social and religious freedom is also essential to national
greatness and national dignity. Eventually men and women who are allowed to
control their own wealth will insist on controlling their own lives and their
own country.
Our commitment to democracy is also tested in
the Middle East, which is my focus today and must be a focus of American policy
for decades to come. In many nations in the Middle East, countries of great
strategic importance, democracy has not yet taken root.
BUSH: And the questions arise: Are the
peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of
men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism?
Are they alone never to know freedom and never even have a choice in the matter?
I, for one, do not believe it. I believe
every person has the ability and the right to be free.
(APPLAUSE)
Some skeptics of democracy assert that the
traditions of Islam are inhospitable to representative government. This cultural
condescension, as Ronald Reagan termed it, has a long history.
After the Japanese surrender in 1945, a
so-called Japan expert asserted that democracy in that former empire would,
quote, "never work."
Another observer declared the prospects for
democracy in post-Hitler Germany were, and I quote, "most uncertain, at best."
He made that claim in 1957.
Seventy-four years ago, the Sunday London
Times declared nine-tenths of the population of India to be, quote,
"illiterates, not caring a fig for politics." Yet, when Indian democracy was
imperiled in the 1970s, the Indian people showed their commitment to liberty in
a national referendum that saved their form of government.
Time after time, observers have questioned
whether this country or that people or this group are ready for democracy, as if
freedom were a prize you win from meeting our own Western standards of progress.
BUSH: In fact, the daily work of democracy itself is the path of progress. It
teaches cooperation, the free exchange of ideas, peaceful resolution of
differences.
As men and women are showing from Bangladesh
to Botswana to Mongolia, it is the practice of democracy that makes a nation
ready for democracy and every nation can start on this path.
It should be clear to all that Islam, the
faith of one-fifth of humanity, is consistent with democratic rule. Democratic
progress is found in many predominantly Muslim countries: in Turkey, Indonesia
and Senegal and Albania and Niger and Sierra Leone.
Muslim men and women are good citizens of
India and South Africa, the nations of Western Europe and of the United States
of America. More than half of all Muslims live in freedom under democratically
constituted governments.
They succeed in democratic societies, not in
spite of their faith, but because of it. A religion that demands individual
moral accountability and encourages the encounter of the individual with God is
fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of self-government.
Yet there's a great challenge today in the
Middle East. In the words of a recent report by Arab scholars, the global wave
of democracy has, and I quote, "barely reached the Arab states." They continue,
"This freedom deficit undermines human development and is one of the most
painful manifestations of lagging political development."
The freedom deficit they describe has
terrible consequences for the people of the Middle East and for the world.
BUSH: In many Middle Eastern countries
poverty is deep and it is spreading, women lack rights and are denied schooling,
whole societies remain stagnant while the world moves ahead.
These are not the failures of a culture or a
religion. These are the failures of political and economic doctrines.
As the colonial era passed away, the Middle
East saw the establishment of many military dictatorships. Some rulers adopted
the dogmas of socialism, seized total control of political parties and the media
and universities. They allied themselves with the Soviet bloc and with
international terrorism.
Dictators in Iraq and Syria promised the
restoration of national honor, a return to ancient glories. They've left instead
a legacy of torture, oppression, misery and ruin.
Other men and groups of men have gained
influence in the Middle East and beyond through an ideology of theocratic
terror. Behind their language of religion is the ambition for absolute political
power.
Ruling cabals like the Taliban show their
version of religious piety in public whippings of women, ruthless suppression of
any difference or dissent, and support for terrorists who arm and train to
murder the innocent.
The Taliban promised religious purity and
national pride. Instead, by systematically destroying a proud and working
society, they left behind suffering and starvation.
Many Middle Eastern governments now
understand that military dictatorship and theocratic rule are a straight, smooth
highway to nowhere, but some governments still cling to the old habits of
central control.
BUSH: There are governments that still fear
and repress independent thought and creativity and private enterprise; human
qualities that make for strong and successful societies. Even when these nations
have vast natural resources, they do not respect or develop their greatest
resources: the talent and energy of men and women working and living in freedom.
Instead of dwelling on past wrongs and
blaming others, governments in the Middle East need to confront real problems
and serve the true interests of their nations.
The good and capable people of the Middle
East all deserve responsible leadership. For too long many people in that region
have been victims and subjects; they deserve to be active citizens.
Governments across the Middle East and North
Africa are beginning to see the need for change. Morocco has a diverse new
parliament. King Mohammad has urged it to extend the rights to women.
Here's how His Majesty explained his reforms
to parliament: "How can society achieve progress while women, who represent half
the nation, see their rights violated and suffer as a result of injustice,
violence and marginalization, not withstanding the dignity and justice granted
to them by our glorious religion?"
The king of Morocco is correct: The future of
Muslim nations would be better for all with the full participation of women.
(APPLAUSE)
In Bahrain last year citizens elected their
own parliament for the first time in nearly three decades. Oman has extended the
vote to all adult citizens.
(excerpt missing)
(APPLAUSE)
BUSH: Champions of democracy in the region
understand that democracy is not perfect. It is not the path to utopia. But it's
the only path to national success and dignity.
As we watch and encourage reforms in the
region, we are mindful that modernization is not the same as Westernization.
Representative governments in the Middle East will reflect their own cultures.
They will not, and should not, look like us. Democratic nations may be
constitutional monarchies, federal republics or parliamentary systems.
And working democracies always need time to
develop, as did our own. We've taken a 200-year journey toward inclusion and
justice, and this makes us patient and understanding as other nations are at
different stages of this journey.
There are, however, essential principles
common to every successful society in every culture.
Successful societies limit the power of the
state and the power of the military so that governments respond to the will of
the people and not the will of the elite.
Successful societies protect freedom, with a
consistent impartial rule of law, instead of selectively applying the law to
punish political opponents.
Successful societies allow room for healthy
civic institutions, for political parties and labor unions and independent
newspapers and broadcast media.
Successful societies guarantee religious
liberty; the right to serve and honor God without fear of persecution.
BUSH: Successful societies privatize their
economies and secure the rights of property. They prohibit and punish official
corruption and invest in the health and education of their people. They
recognize the rights of women.
And instead of directing hatred and
resentment against others, successful societies appeal to the hopes of their own
people.
(APPLAUSE)
These vital principles are being applied in
the nations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
With the steady leadership of President
Karzai, the people of Afghanistan are building a modern and peaceful government.
Next month, 500 delegates will convene a national assembly in Kabul to approve a
new Afghan constitution. The proposed draft would establish a bicameral
parliament, set national elections next year and recognize Afghanistan's Muslim
identity while protecting the rights of all citizens.
Afghanistan faces continuing economic and
security challenges. It will face those challenges as a free and stable
democracy.
(APPLAUSE)
In Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority
and the Iraqi Governing Council are also working together to build a democracy.
And after three decades of tyranny, this work is not easy. The former dictator
ruled by terror and treachery and left deeply ingrained habits of fear and
distrust. Remnants of his regime, joined by foreign terrorists, continue to
battle against order and against civilization.
Our coalition is responding to recent attacks
with precision raids, guided by intelligence provided by the Iraqis themselves.
BUSH: We're working closely with Iraqi
citizens as they prepare a constitution, as they move toward free elections and
take increasing responsibility for their own affairs.
As in the defense of Greece in 1947, and
later in the Berlin Airlift, the strength and will of free peoples are now being
tested before a watching world. And we will meet this test.
(APPLAUSE)
Securing democracy in Iraq is the work of
many hands. American and coalition forces are sacrificing for the peace of Iraq
and for the security of free nations. Aid workers from many countries are facing
danger to help the Iraqi people.
The National Endowment for Democracy is
promoting women's rights and training Iraqi journalists and teaching the skills
of political participation.
Iraqis themselves, police and border guards
and local officials, are joining in the work and they are sharing in the
sacrifice.
This is a massive and difficult undertaking.
It is worth our effort. It is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes:
The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world and
increase dangers to the American people and extinguish the hopes of millions in
the region.
Iraqi democracy will succeed, and that
success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the
future of every nation.
(APPLAUSE)
The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart
of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic
revolution.
(APPLAUSE)
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and
accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us
safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of
liberty.
As long as the Middle East remains a place
where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation,
resentment and violence ready for export.
BUSH: And with the spread of weapons that can
bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless
to accept the status quo.
(APPLAUSE)
Therefore the United States has adopted a new
policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires
the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before and it will
yield the same results.
As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region
of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.
(APPLAUSE)
The advance of freedom is the calling of our
time. It is the calling of our country. From the 14 Points to the Four Freedoms
to the speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of
principle.
We believe that liberty is the design of
nature. We believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that
human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty.
And we believe that freedom, the freedom we prize, is not for us alone. It is
the right and the capacity of all mankind.
(APPLAUSE)
Working for the spread of freedom can be
hard, yet America has accomplished hard tasks before.
BUSH: Our nation is strong. We're strong of
heart.
And we're not alone. Freedom is finding
allies in every country. Freedom finds allies in every culture.
And as we meet the terror and violence of the
world, we can be certain the author of freedom is not indifferent to the fate of
freedom.
With all the tests and all the challenges of
our age, this is, above all, the age of liberty. Each of you at this endowment
is fully engaged in the great cause of liberty, and I thank you.
May God bless your work, and may God continue
to bless America.
(APPLAUSE)
END
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Nov. 4, 2003
America the unpopular
By
DANIEL PIPES
As the overthrow of Saddam Hussein showed, American conservatives
believe that preemption, the overwhelming use of force, and going it alone are
at times necessary to bolster US national security.
Liberals beg to differ. The New York Times, speaking for many of
the latter, editorializes against what it calls President George W. Bush's
"lone-wolf record [and] overly aggressive stance," saying that these risk
undermining his goals by provoking the world s enmity. All nine of the
Democratic presidential candidates raise similar criticisms, as do the AFL-CIO,
countless columnists, religious leaders and academics.
Beyond differing with the administration's specific actions in Iraq, the liberal
argument challenges broader conservative assumptions about the utility of an
assertive US foreign policy. The Bush administration, for example, was
practically alone in rejecting two treaties (the International Criminal Court,
the Kyoto Protocol) and two near-agreements (on small arms, on chemical and
biological weapons). It also took other forceful steps (such as negating the ABM
treaty with Russia and expanding NATO up to Russia s borders).
"Bush is creating new enemies faster than he is deterring old ones," is how
Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia sums up the liberal accusation -
one that he incisively refutes in the November 3 issue of The Weekly Standard.
Alexander discerns two elements to the liberal claim: other powers for the first
time feel threatened by US actions; and they are responding by taking steps
against Washington. Let's consider each of these elements.
Newly threatening: Looking back over the last half-century, Alexander notes many
occasions when other powers felt alienated from Washington.
1950s: US allies formed a West European-only bloc. France created
an independent nuclear capability.
1960s: France withdrew from NATO's military structure. Most US
allies vehemently protested the US war in Vietnam.
1970s: OPEC directed its oil weapon primarily against the
Americans to protest US policies in the Middle East.
1980s: In something of a preview of today's situation, Europeans
disdained Ronald Reagan as a simpleton and a cowboy, took to the streets in
great numbers to protest US theater nuclear weapons, and broadly opposed US
policies to build a missile defense system, reform the United Nations, and
isolate the Sandinistas. On some issues, such as the Law of the Sea treaty, they
unanimously opposed Washington's stance.
1990s: The European Union repeatedly clashed with the United
States on trade issues. It also announced the creation of a unified military
force separate from NATO.
TODAY'S TENSIONS, in short, have a somewhat familiar air to them.
Taking steps against Washington:
"Watching what people do and not simply what they say," Alexander points out,
"remains the best test of what people really think of America." However noisy
unfavorable opinion polls and rival diplomatic efforts may be, they do not in
themselves amount to a crisis. A crisis would require other powerful states to
take at least one of two steps:
Invest heavily in improving military capabilities through
enhanced arsenals and larger troop mobilizations: This has not occurred.
Alexander finds "little evidence that a build-up, as a hedge against future
American actions, is even in its earliest stages."
European Union states generally devote one-half to one-third what
Washington does to military spending, and this general proportion has not
changed in the last two years, with the exception of some small increases
designed to address new terrorist priorities.
Build explicit military alliances: Here too, Alexander finds,
"There is no evidence that cooperation between major E.U. members and Russia (or
China) extends to anything beyond opposition to an invasion already over."
The response to recent American actions has been limited to
words, and so has limited significance.
"By all the usual standards, then," Alexander argues, "Europeans
and most others are acting as if they resent some aspects of US policy, are
irritated by America's influence, oppose selected actions the administration has
taken, and dislike President Bush more than his predecessor, but remain entirely
unthreatened by the United States."
Annoyance hardly counts as enmity.
There is no persuasive evidence "that US policy is provoking the seismic shift
in America's reputation that Bush's critics detect." Translated into political
terms, this means those critics need to find themselves another issue.
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Many of the following are from israpundit.com
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GOOD NEWS ABOUNDS!!!!
Ok...I read
today that Arafat NOW wants peace with Israel.
Sharon wants to give Qurei a chance.
Mofaz and Sharon have offered a cease fire.
Powell has endorsed the Geneva agreement by letter to Yossi Beilin.
Despite Syria arming ALL of its missiles with Sarin gas warheads, the US is
pushing for sanctions which will scare the hell out of Assad.
Israelis can sleep well knowing that everything is now coming up roses for
Israel.
Hamas and Hezbollah will most likely be so inspired by the new Arafat that will
lay down their weapons and turn to rug weaving and pottery as away of life.
Life in Israel is now good. They can disband the IDF and just enjoy life!!
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Terrorism is big business
Globes Online carries a very important discussion of the ideas of
Dr Rachel Ehrenfeld
[...]She
does not study terrorism per-se, but its financial infrastructure. "Go after the
money and you'll get to the heart of the terrorist organizations," she told
"Globes". "The bottom line is that without money, there
is no terrorism, and without corruption, there is no money for terrorism."
"Globes":
How much money are we talking about?
"Terrorism
has surpassed all the Fortune 500 companies in size. The businesses of terrorist
organizations, including al-Qaida, amounts to $1.2 trillion a year. I'm not
talking about assets, only business: trafficking in drugs, arms, and women;
smuggling cigarettes and other goods; and money laundering."
Loretta
Napoleoni reached a similar conclusion in her book "Modern Jihad", also recently
published in the US. Napoleoni states that the new economy of terrorism is an
international economic system with high growth and a turnover of $1.5 trillion a
year, double the GDP of the UK.
What is done
with all this money?
"The inbuilt
purpose of every terrorist organization is to win political power at the expense
of the legitimate authorities. The objective of the Islamic terrorist
organizations is to undermine US hegemony in the world. They think that US power
highlights their own weakness and the helplessness of Muslims in general. But on
the way to achieving their ideological goals, the terrorist organizations have
made so much money that its further accumulation has become their paramount
objective, just as in any business.
"Terrorist
organizations make their money the same way any other businesses do. They invest
to generate more income, in legitimate businesses, or in initiating terrorist
attacks that will generate more business opportunities. Under their ideological
camouflage the terrorist organizations operate well-oiled money-making machines.
In other
words, we're dealing with criminal enterprises for all intent and purposes, like
the mafia or yakuza; only the methods are different, and apparently more
successful. On the criminal stock exchange, terrorist
shares bear the highest return. That's one of the reasons why ordinary criminal
organizations tend to enter into joint ventures with terrorist organizations,
such as the cooperation agreements between the South American drug cartels and
Palestinian terrorists."
How does
this business model apply to Palestinian terrorism, for instance?
"The
Palestinian Covenant contains articles that deal with funds for martyrs
relatives. These provided the legal basis for the acquisition of legitimate
businesses alongside criminal enterprises such as the smuggling and marketing of
drugs. In the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, [Palestinian Authority chairman] Yasser
Arafat had sole unsupervised control over these funds, becoming one of the
world's biggest billionaires. It's still true today."
A US
Department of Justice report states, "The PLO acquired 40% of its light arms
for its forces from revenue from heroin, hashish, and morphine base made by the
PLO at labs in Syria or in
Lebanon's Baqaa Valley."
Ehrenfeld
cites a CIA report from 1990 that, prior to the 1993 Oslo Accords, the PLO had
accumulated $14 billion from drug and arms smuggling, forging documents, and
money laundering. The British National Crime Intelligence Service (BNCIS)
estimated that in 1993-94, the total (of PLO assets - R.D.) was about $10
billion, with an annual income of $1.5 to $2 billion. The British report also
noted that PLO was, in fact, the wealthiest of the world's terrorist
organizations. Ehrenfeld claims the situation is no different now. At the
time, she says, the PLO claimed it was on the verge of bankruptcy in order to
obtain donations from countries with deep pockets and closed eyes as a reward
for its good behavior at Oslo.
Ehrenfeld's
basic public complaint is that the PLO and other terrorist organizations do not
weave their criminal webs in a vacuum. She claims that the terrorists can be
deprived of their oxygen, but corruption on a global scale from the West,
through Africa,
Asia, the Middle East to Latin America plays an essential role in abetting
terrorist organizations.
Ehrenfeld
claims that some South American countries are a classic example of the tendency
of government officials to bury their heads in the sand or hold out their hands
for terrorist bribes, and not only in the famous Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay
border area. Colombian narco-terrorists and Islamic terrorists also collaborate.
However,
Islamic terrorist organizations, like other criminal organizations, know that
the easiest and safest money is stashed in bank accounts. A legitimate cover for
terrorists' financial transactions is a sought-after goal. Hamas, an
organization that maintains a social network alongside its terrorist one, was a
pioneer in the organized penetration of the banking sector. Why try to
opportunistically embezzle from a bank, if you can own it instead?
In the
interview and in her book, Ehrenfeld relates that, in 1998, Hamas chiefs
received $20 million from Abdullah Kamal, an owner of the Saudi el-Baraka Bank
and the Islamic Bank of Jordan to establish the Bank al-Aksa in the Palestinian
Authority. Kamal has also provided a solid financial infrastructure for Osama
bin-Laden in Sudan since 1983. Ehrenfeld claims that Bank al-Aksa entered into a
number of joint ventures with Citigroup (NYSE:C), the world's largest financial
corporation, and within a short time managed to wrap its tentacles around
Citibank's Israeli branch, sharing with Citigroup its database on Israel. The
result was that Hamas members could withdraw money deposited in Bank al-Aksa
accounts in Europe or the Middle East through Citibank branches.
Until
Citibank severed its relationship with Bank al-Aksa on the basis of information
supplied by Israel and the US Department of Justice, as reported by "Globes" at
the time, at least $1 million of Hamas money was transferred through Bank al-Aksa.
Ehrenfeld says this is small change compared with the sums sent to Hamas from
Islamic charities across the Islamic world and outside it, mainly from the Holy
Land Foundation, an Arab-American foundation with branches in Illinois, New
Jersey and Texas, and which claimed to be the largest Islamic charity in the US.
The Bush administration estimates that the Holy Land Foundation raised $30
million in 2000 in the US alone. The US Department of Justice ordered it closed
a few months after September 11, 2001, hurting Hamas' sources of revenue, but by
no means drying them up.
Compared
with Hamas, Hizbullah is a Goliath. Ehrenfeld claims on the basis of Western
intelligence sources that Hizbullah's operating budget is $220-500 million a
year. At least $120 million is sent every year from Teheran. A much smaller
amount comes from Syria. The rest of the budget comes from charitable
organizations, individual donations, and from legitimate and illegitimate
businesses, including arms deals, cigarette smuggling, money forging, fraud,
robbery, providing illegal telephone services, and drug smuggling.
Ehrenfeld
claims that Hizbullah's financial network straddles the globe, from Colombia to
Canada, from Europe to Africa. In the US, Hizbullah maintains a complex
money-raising network, not all of which has been uncovered by the authorities.
An Iranian
"charity", the New York-based Alawi Foundation, has $100 million in assets in
the US, and annual revenue of $10-15 million. The FBI has set its sights on the
foundation. The little that is known about it merely hints about what is not
known, says Ehrenfeld. The fact that the US authorities have not yet entirely
decoded the mechanisms by which Hizbullah transfers money to Lebanon is more
astonishing. The mechanisms are found virtually everywhere, even in the most
respected place in the New York.
"People who
buy fake Gucci bags and Swiss watches sold by Nigerians on the sidewalks of
Fifth Avenue in Manhattan contribute to terrorism," says Ehrenfeld. "The
Nigerians are only the tip of the iceberg of the criminal mechanism that
finances Islamic terrorism. In fact, Nigerian criminal gangs are the world's
largest criminal corporation. There are Nigerian gangs that have managed to buy
legitimate businesses in the US, fronted by local whites. I know of a case in
which a Nigerian gang took over a factory making blank identification documents
for state authorities."
Although
Ehrenfeld has no illusions about the Palestinian Authority or Hizbullah, and
little hope about the Third World, she pours out her wrath on the West for its
passivity in the best case and political corruption in the worst, which
frustrates what she considers the Herculean American effort to fight terrorism.
"There is a
general trend in the world, including Europe, to challenge the US's world
standing, and in this respect, the Europeans and Arabs have a common interest,"
she says. "That is why most European countries won't wholly cooperate with the
US effort to strangle the cash flow to Islamic terrorism."
Ehrenfeld
says the root of the evil is the absence of international legal standards that
could do wonders in closing the international pipelines sending money to al-Qaida
and its cohorts in the Middle East. In the absence of such a standard, some
Western European countries - the "enlightened" ones in Ehrenfeld's ironic phrase
- ought to be included in the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) blacklist of
countries abetting money laundering. France, for example, the UK, too, and most
Eastern European states.
Ehrenfeld
says the problem is not the lack of enlightened laws of the kind filling the
Western statute books, but the lack of political will to implement them. She says the bottom line is that so long as the war against
corruption is not a paramount goal on a global scale, especially in Europe and
the Middle East, terrorism will continue to exist amongst us, regardless of the
number of terrorists captured and sent to prison at Guantanamo Bay.
?
El Al flights in Canada: None is too many
by Arthur
Weinreb
On Thursday,
October 23, a flight from Tel Aviv to Los Angeles, with a stopover in Toronto,
was diverted to Montreal before landing at John C. Munro Airport in Hamilton, 50
kilometers away from Pearson International Airport where it was scheduled to
land. Not only did the return flight again avoid Pearson in favour of Hamilton,
but the itinerary of Tel Aviv--Hamilton--Los Angeles and return was repeated by
El Al on the following day.
Officials
confirmed that a security threat mentioning Toronto was made against Israel's
national carrier. Exact details of the plan were not revealed but speculation is
that it involved the threat to attack the El Al airliner with a shoulder-fired
missile in the vicinity of Pearson International Airport. A similar attack on an
Israeli airliner took place in Kenya about a year ago.
After the
first flight was diverted to Hamilton, David Collenette, Minister of Transport
and one of Jean Chr?tien's most loyal cheerleader's, stated that he was
considering reassessing the airline's status in Canada. The Minister was quoted
as saying, " As to subsequent El Al flights, that is something we'll have to
deliberate, given the intelligence that we receive."
Collenette's
statement was a classic case of "blame the victim". A threat is made against an
Israeli airliner and the first thing the minister wants to do is to consider
"their status in Canada". Not a word from the timid Collenette about going
after these terrorists (sorry, militants) who threatened an attack in the
vicinity of Pearson. No--he went straight after Israel and its national
airline as the source of the problem.
There has been some discussion recently about the "new" anti-Semitism where
hatred against Jews is expressed as a hatred of the state of Israel. Although
Israel should not be beyond
criticism, blaming that country for one of its airline's to dare to fly into an
area where "militants" might be waiting smacks of an anti-Israel bias that
Collenette and many of his Liberal buddies have. Canada spends a lot of time at
the United Nations supporting, or abstaining in resolutions that criticize
Israel for its behaviour while remaining silent on Palestinian atrocities.
Israel, like the United States, is always fair game in this multicultural and
multiethnic country of Canada. Does anyone actually believe that if it had been
an Air France flight or a British Airways aircraft, that Collenette would have
wanted to rethink those companies' position in Canada. Not very likely.
The truth is
that the Liberal Party of Canada has not come as far as it thinks it has from
the days of Prime Minister Mackenzie King in the late 30s. When King's Deputy
Minister of Immigration, Fred Blair was asked how many Jewish refugees Canada
would take, he answered, "none is too many". Perhaps that should be the answer
to how many El Al flights should be allowed in Canada.
So, is
Collenette anti-Semitic? No. To give the Minister of Transport the benefit of
the doubt, unlike Toronto mayoralty candidate Barbara Hall, Collenette can speak
a lot faster than he can think. The timing of his "solution" to the El Al
"problem" suggests that he made his comments fairly quickly. He didn't have time
to consult dead parents or dogs the way Mackenzie King used to.
The reality is that Collenette is simply a wimp who is terrified of terrorists,
if in fact terrorists actually exist. He's the guy who got all squeamish when
faced with the possibility of having armed sky marshals on airliners. Collenette
moaned that Canadians wouldn't like the fact that law enforcement officers would
be armed in the air. As I wrote at the time, these Canadians are the same ones
who take their children to parades where the only thing that separates the kids
from Santa Clause are police officers wearing funny looking red noses and fully
loaded Glocks.
Many members
of the Chr?tien's cabinet simply lack the fortitude to take on terrorism. Along
with Collenette, who bemoans the passing of the Soviet Union, there is
Immigration Minister Denis Coderre who ceaselessly fights to protect the privacy
rights of war criminals. Then there is Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham who
frets more about the governments of dictatorial regimes like Iran and Saudi
Arabia than he does about what those countries do to Canadian citizens.
Note to Paul
Martin: We need real men and women in Canada's cabinet--not a bunch of girly
boys. How many present cabinet ministers should be retained? None is too many.
Arthur
Weinreb is a lawyer and author and Associate Editor of Canadafreepress.com
?
Adolph and Osama
Worldnetdaily is featuring excerpts from a recent book by Kenneth Timmerman's
entitled Preachers of Hate. One excerpt concerns the infamous
Durban Conference. At one point, the author reminds us of a well-known
lesson of the Holocaust:
What begins with the Jews doesn't end with Jews. That is a lesson that should
have been clear after Hitler and the Holocaust. The German Protestant theologian
Martin Niemoeller put it eloquently in a since-famous comment made to a student
who asked why no one in Germany stood up for the Jews against Nazi persecution.
"First they
came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then
they came for the trade-unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a
trade-unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because
I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to
speak up."
Shortly
afterwards, the author describes another situation in which the Jews came first:
Albert Speer
was not only the top Nazi official in charge of making Hitler's war industry
operate with deadly efficiency; he was Hitler's close confidant. Jailed in
Spandau for war crimes and crimes against humanity following his trial in
Nuremburg in 1945, Speer kept a diary that was subsequently published in English
translation. Just two years after Hitler's suicide in his Berlin bunker, in an
entry dated Nov. 18, 1947, Speer recalled the crazed Wagnerian fantasies of the
man who had just destroyed Europe and caused the death of 60 million persons:
"I recall
how [Hitler] would have films shown in the Reich Chancellory about London
burning, about the sea of fire over Warsaw, about exploding convoys, and the
kind of ravenous joy that would then seize him every time. But I never saw him
so beside himself as when, in a delirium, he pictured New York going down in
flames. He described how the skyscrapers would be transformed into gigantic
burning torches, how they would collapse in confusion, how the bursting city's
reflection would stand against the dark sky."
It all came
full circle on September 11 when Hitler's fantasies met Osama bin Laden. As Jews
have known for centuries and Americans are just learning: Marry hatred to deadly
capabilities and you get murder.
As it is
said:History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes
?
By
Edward Alexander
FrontPageMagazine.com |
November 11, 2003
"There is a great temptation to
explain away the intrinsically incredible means of liberal rationalizations. In
each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of
common sense." -- Hannah Arendt (1)
In the Winter-Spring 2003 issue of
Salmagundi, Berkeley professor Martin Jay argues that Jews themselves are
"causing" the "new" anti-Semitism. Chief among these perfidious Jews, he
names?Ariel Sharon, the "fanatic settlers" (22) and also the American Jews who
question the infallibility of the New York Times and National Public
Radio.? ("Ariel Sharon and the Rise of the New Anti-Semitism".) (5)
Unlike the late Edward Said (of whom he
writes with oily sycophancy), Jay does not deny the existence of a resurgent
anti-Semitism. On the other hand, he, in effect, dismisses its manifestations --
vandalized synagogues and cemeteries, "tipping over a tombstone in a graveyard
in Marseilles or burning Torahs in a temple on Long Island [as] payback for
atrocities [my emphasis] committed by Israeli settlers." (14). At the same
time, he ignores its more serious expressions: stabbings, shootings, murder--all
of which have been unleashed against Jews in Europe, as well as in Israel. "The
actions of contemporary Jews," Jay concludes, "are somehow connected with the
upsurge of anti-Semitism around the globe" (21), and it would be foolish to
suppose that "the victims are in no way involved in unleashing the animosities
they suffer" (17).
The academic boycotters of
Israeli universities and the professorial advocates of suicide bombing are in
the front lines of the defense of terror, which is the very essence of
Palestinian nationalism.2 But they themselves are supported by a
rearguard of fellow travelers, a far more numerous academic group whose defining
characteristic is not fanaticism but time-serving timorousness.
In the Thirties, "fellow
travelers" usually referred to the intellectual friends of Communism (a subject
well analyzed in David Caute's book on the subject3), although both
Hitler and Stalin?tried to?attract people from America and Britain who served
their purposes in the conviction that they were engaged in a noble cause.
At the moment, the favorite
cause of peregrinating political tourists is the Palestinian movement,4
and the reason why fellow travelers favor this most barbaric of all movements of
"national liberation" is that its adversaries are Jews. Jews are always a
tempting target because of their ridiculously small numbers (currently 997 out
of every 1000 people in the world are not Jews) and their image as
avaricious corrupters of the young, thieves, agents of Satan,?conspiring human
devils?and Zionist imperialists. As a representative example of the academic
fellow-traveler in the ongoing campaign to depict Israel as the devil's own
experiment station, Martin Jay is exemplary.
Although Jay's main concern
is the (supposedly) "new" anti-Semitism, his heavy reliance on the thesis of
Albert Lindemann's unsavory book, Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the
Rise of the Jews (1998). He suggests that he believes political
anti-Semitism, from its inception in the nineteenth century, has been in large
part the responsibility of the Jews themselves. Lindemann's book argued not
merely that Jews had "social interactions" (a favorite euphemism of Jay's) with
their persecutors but were responsible for the hatreds that eventually consumed
them in Europe; anti-Semitism was, wherever and whenever it flared up, a
response to Jewish misbehavior.
According to Lindemann, the
Romanians had been subjected to "mean-spirited denigration" of their country by
Jews, and so it was reasonable for Romania's elite to conclude that "making life
difficult" for the country's Jewish inhabitants, "legally or otherwise, was a
"justifiable policy." His abstruse research into Russian history also revealed
to him that whatever anti-Semitism existed there was "hardly a hatred without
palpable or understandable cause." The 1903 Kishinev pogrom, Lindemann
grudgingly admitted, did occur but was a relatively minor affair in numbers
killed and wounded, which the Jews, with typical "hyperbole and mendacity,"
exaggerated in order to attract sympathy and money; it was a major affair only
because it revealed "a rising Jewish combativeness." (As for the
Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, Lindemann apparently never heard of it, for it goes
unmentioned in his nearly fifty pages on Russia.) In Germany, Jews (especially
the historian Heinrich Graetz), were guilty of a "steady stream of insults and
withering criticism...directed at Germans"; by contrast, Hitler (who published
Mein Kampf in 1925-27) was a "moderate" on the Jewish question prior to
the mid-1930s; besides, "nearly everywhere Hitler looked at the end of the war,
there were Jews who corresponded to anti-Semitic imagery." In addition to being
degenerate, ugly, dirty, tribalist, racist, crooked, and sexually immoral, the
Jews, as depicted by Lindemann, further infuriated their Gentile neighbors by
speaking Yiddish: "a nasal, whining, and crippled ghetto tongue."6
Although Jay is by no means
in full agreement with Lindemann's thesis (as he is with that of an even cruder
polemic by Paul Breines called Tough Jews7), he is intensely
grateful to this courageous pioneer for breaking a "taboo" (18) on the
"difficult question about the Jewish role in causing anti-Semitism," for putting
it "on the table." (21) (Readers familiar with this dismal topic will be
disappointed to learn that neither Lindemann nor his admirer Jay is able to
explain the "Jewish role" in causing the belief, widespread among Christian
theologians from St. Augustine through the seventeenth century, that Jewish
males menstruate.) This is a remarkable statement to come from a historian.
Washington Irving's Rip van Winkle lost touch with history for twenty years
while he slept; Jay's dogmatic slumber seems to have lasted 36 years, since
1967, when the brief post-World War II relaxation of anti-Semitism came to an
end.
A brief history lesson is
in order here. At the end of the second World War, old-fashioned anti-Semites
grudgingly recognized that the Holocaust had given anti-Semitism a bad name,
that perhaps the time was right for a temporary respite in the ideological war
against the Jews. But in 1967, the Jews in Israel had the misfortune to win the
war that was unleashed against them by Gamal Nasser, who had proclaimed--in a
locution very much akin to Jay's style of reasoning--that "Israel's existence is
itself an aggression."
After their defeat, the
Arabs reversed their rhetoric from "Right" to "Left," de-emphasizing their
ambition to "turn the Mediterranean red with Jewish blood" and instead blaming
"the Middle East conflict" on the Jews themselves for denying the
Palestinians a state (something that, of course, the Arabs could have given
them any time during the nineteen years that they were entirely in control of
the disputed territories of "the West Bank"). Since that time what Jay calls the
"difficult question about the Jewish role in causing anti-Semitism" has not only
been "on the table"; it has provided a royal feast for such heavy feeders as
Alexander Cockburn, Desmond Tutu, Michael Lerner, the aforementioned Said,
Patrick Buchanan, Noam Chomsky, most of the Israeli Left, and scores of other
scribblers. Indeed, the New York Times, which during World War II did
its best to conceal the fact that Jews were being murdered
en masse,
now admits they are being murdered, but blames them for, in Jay-speak,
"unleashing the animosities they suffer."
The particular form given
by nearly all these forerunners of Lindemann is, of course, blatant reversal of
cause and effect in taking for granted that it is Israeli occupation that leads
to Arab hatred and aggression, when every normally attentive sixth-grader knows
that it is Arab hatred and aggression that lead to Israeli occupation. Jay is
very fierce not with Lindemann for regurgitating every anti-Semitic slander
dredged up from the bad dreams of Christendom but with Lindemann's "overheated"
(18) critics (in Commentary, in the
American Historical Review,
in Midstream). In the same manner, his outrage about suicide bombings
is not against the bombers or their instructors and financiers but against
"American Jewish panic" (23) and "Israeli toughness" (23) in reacting to them
and so perpetuating (no cliche is too stale and stupid for Jay) "the spiral of
violence" (23).
Just as Jay insinuates some
mild criticism of Lindemann, he also "qualifies" every now and then his
insistence that the Jews themselves are to blame for anti-Semitism, but always
in a way that only serves to make his core argument all the more gross and
flagrant. "Acknowledging this fact [that the Jewish victims are "involved in
unleashing" hatred on themselves] is not 'blaming the victim,' an overly simple
formula that prevents asking hard and sometimes awkward questions, but rather
understanding that social interactions are never as neat as moral oppositions of
good and evil." (17)
Like most liberals, Jay
cannot credit the existence of the full evil of the world. "In the case of the
Arab war against the Jewish state," Ruth Wisse has observed, "obscuring Arab
intentions requires identifying Jews as the cause of the conflict. The notion of
Jewish responsibility for Arab rejectionism is almost irresistibly attractive to
liberals, because the truth otherwise seems so bleak."8 Although Jay
tries to twist Hannah Arendt's well-known criticism of Sartre's foolish argument
that the Jews survived in exile thanks to gentile persecution into an
endorsement of his own foolish argument about Jewish
responsibility for
that persecution, he is himself a classic case of what Arendt called the
wheedling voice of "common sense" that lurks inside every liberal, explaining
away the "intrinsically incredible,"9 such as the fact that a people
would choose to define itself entirely by its dedication to the destruction of
another people.
For the benefit of Jay (and
others) in bondage to the liberal dogma that "social interactions are never as
neat as moral oppositions of good and evil," and at the risk of violating
decorum, I should like here to quote from the description by a physicist (Dr.
Pekka Sinervo of the University of Toronto) of what happens when a conventional
bomb is exploded in a contained space, such as a city bus travelling through
downtown Jerusalem: "A person sitting nearby would feel, momentarily, a shock
wave slamming into his or her body, with an 'overpressure' of 300,000 pounds.
Such a blast would crush the chest, rupture liver, spleen, heart and lungs, melt
eyes, pull organs away from surrounding tissue, separate hands from arms and
feet from legs. Bodies would fly through the air or be impaled on the jagged
edges of crumpled metal and broken glass."10 These are among the
little "animosities," the "social interactions" that Martin Jay says Israelis,
including (one assumes) the schoolchildren who usually fill these buses, have
brought upon themselves. Jay does take note of the suicide bombers, brainwashed
teenage Arab versions of the Hitler Youth, by administering a little slap on the
wrist to tearful Esau: "To be fair, the Palestinian leadership that encourages
or winks at suicide bombers shows no less counter-productive stupidity [than
Sharon taking action against suicide bombers]." (23) (The flabby syntax
matches the fatuous moral equation.) Thus does Jay's labored distinction between
"causation" and "legitimation" (17) or between blaming the Jewish victims and
making them responsible for anti-Semitic aggression, turn out to be a
distinction without a difference. "Tout comprendre" as the French say,
c'est tout pardonner."
But pointing out Jay's
shoddy history, Orwellian logic, and addiction to worn-out cliches about
settlements and "occupied territories" does not quite bring us to the quick of
this ulcer. Matthew Arnold used to say that there is such a thing as conscience
in intellectual affairs. An examination of the tainted character of Jay's
documentation, his "evidence," reveals an intellectual conscience almost totally
atrophied; for there is hardly a single reference in the essay to recent events
in intifada II (the Oslo War, that is) or the many responses to it that is not
unreliable, deceptive, false.
The essay starts with a
reference to the "occupation of Jenin" (12), which always lurks in the
background of Jay's ominous albeit vague allusions to Sharon's "heavy-handed"
policies and actions (23) and "bulldozer mentality" (22). The April 2002,
reoccupation of Jenin touched a raw nerve in both the academic Israel-haters
alluded to above (their boycott of Israeli universities and research institutes,
mainly a British operation, went into high gear at this point) and their fellow
travelers. As always with Jay, cause and effect are reversed, as if the actions
of firefighters were to be blamed for the depredations of arsonists. The Israeli
"incursion" into Jenin, for example, is treated by people like Jay as if it had
nothing whatever to do with the series of suicide bombings, culminating with the
Passover massacre that immediately preceded it.
Jenin was reoccupied in
April 2002, after the suicide bombing massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya on
Passover evening, March 27. Jenin was the base of the terrorist infrastructure:
most of the bombers were "educated" in Jenin, worked in Jenin, trained in Jenin,
or passed through Jenin to be "blessed" before going out to kill Jews. Of some
100 terrorists who carried out suicide bombings between October 2000 and April
2002,?23 were sent directly from Jenin. Prior to the Passover slaughter the
supposedly tough Sharon had done little more in response to the almost daily
murder of Israeli citizens than make blustery speeches and then turn the other
cheek, or bulldoze or bomb empty buildings belonging to the Palestinian
Authority. He had seemed far more inclined to the Christian precept "Resist Not
Evil" than were the putatively "Christian" ministers of Europe who were
excoriating him for that "bulldozer mentality." (It does not require a powerful
imagination to guess how France or Germany or America would deal with a "Jenin"
that dispatched murderers to butcher French or German or American citizens on a
daily basis. Of one thing we can be sure: there would have been no bulldozers
for Mr. Jay to complain of and also no 23 dead Israeli soldiers in Jenin,
because the terrorist headquarters would have been obliterated by aerial
bombing--and there really might have been not?50 dead Palestinians [most of them
fighters] in Jenin but the "genocide of thousands," the "Jeningrad" trumpeted by
Jay's favorite news media.)
Thirty Jews were killed and
140 injured at the Netanya seder table, a desecration of a holy place as
flagrant as any in recent memory. But Jay's compassion is reserved for the
victims of real "atrocities," such as "the cruel and vindictive
destruction of the venerable olive groves under the pretext that they were
hiding places for snipers" (24). Pretext? On October 30, 2002, Israel Radio
reported that the terrorist who murdered two girls, ages?1 and 14, and also a
woman in Hermesh exploited the olive trees that reach up to the community
located between Mevo Dotan and Baka al-Gharbiya some six kilometers west of the
Green Line in northern Samaria. The trees had indeed provided cover that made it
possible for the killer first to reconnoiter the area in advance--as an olive
harvester--and then to slip under the fence to do his murderous work.
Jay's congenital inability
to report anything accurately is also apparent in his allusion to Adam Shapiro,
offered as an instance of the atrocities visited by
American Jews on
people whose only sin is "criticism of Israeli policies" (22). He identifies
Shapiro as "the idealistic...American Jewish peace activist" (22). Whatever
Shapiro is, he is not a peace activist; he is a Yasser Arafat activist. A leader
of the International Solidarity Movement founded by his wife, Huwaida Arraf, his
"idealism" consisted of offering himself as a human shield (also breakfast
companion) for Arafat in Ramallah, in the hope of making it easier for the
arch-terrorist to murder Jewish children with impunity. His "criticism of
Israeli policies" consisted of celebrating "suicide operations" as "noble" and
urging that violence is a necessity of "Palestinian resistance."
One might expect that Jay
would do better in reporting on Jewish misdeeds that "cause" the release of
untidy emotions in anti-Semites when these misdeeds occur right under his nose,
so to speak. But in fact the most egregious example of deceptive reporting in
his essay is his account of an event on his own campus: the Univesity of
California at Berkeley. It reads as follows: "When literally thousands of emails
and withdrawals of substantial alumni donations to the University of California
at Berkeley followed the disclosure that a course description for an English
class...endorsed the Palestinian position, it becomes abundantly clear how
concerted the effort has become to punish dissenters from Sharon's heavy-handed
policies"(22-23). And here is the description (not provided by Jay, needless to
add) of that course, offered by one Snehal Shingavi:
"The
Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance: Since the inception of the
intifada in September 2000, Palestinians have been fighting for their right to
exist. The brutal Israeli military occupation of Palestine, an occupation that
has been ongoing since 1948, has systematically displaced, killed, and maimed
millions of Palestinian people. And yet, from under the brutal weight of the
occupation, Palestinians have produced their own culture and poetry of
resistance. This class will examine the history of the Palestinian
resistance...in order to produce an understanding of the intifada and to develop
a coherent political analysis of the situation. This class takes as its starting
point the right of Palestinians to fight for their own self-determination.
Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections."
For Jay, this polemical
balderdash is nothing more than "dissent" from the policies of Sharon, who is
not even mentioned in the description. The real culprit in Jay's eyes is not the
puffed-up insurrectionary who conceived this obscene travesty of "an English
class," but the people who have the temerity to criticize it. And somehow he
knows that, in a state where millions of people consider themselves to be
"conservative thinkers," all the objectors were Jews.11
Coming to the defense of
Jews and Israel has never been an exercise for the faint-hearted; and to do so
in a place like Berkeley, where mob rule prevented Benjamin Netanhayu (in
September 2000) from giving a lecture in the city, and where cadres of Arab and
leftist students can shut down campus buildings and disrupt final exams whenever
the anti-Israel fit is upon them, may even require a special degree of courage.
Jews who assign responsibility for anti-Jewish aggression to Jewish misbehavior
not only save themselves from the unpleasant and often dangerous task of coming
to the defense of the Jews under attack but also retain the delightful charms of
good conscience. Hitler's professors (to borrow the title of Max Weinreich's
famous book of 194612) were the first to make anti-Semitism both
academically respectable and complicit in murder. They have now been succeeded
by Arafat's professors: not only the boycotters, not only the advocates of
suicide bombings, but also the fellow travelers like Martin Jay.?
NOTES
1. Hannah Arendt,
The
Origins of Totalitarianism,3 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,
1951), III, p. 138.
2. See Edward Alexander,
"The Academic Boycott of Israel: Back to 1933?"
Jerusalem Post, 3
January 2003; "Evil Educators Defend the Indefensible,"Jerusalem Post,
10 January 2003; and ""Suicide Bombing 101,"
American Spectator
June/July 2001, pp. 28-30.
3. David Caute,
The
Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1988).
4. Martin Peretz,
"Traveling With Bad Companions," Los Angeles Times, 23 June 2003.
5. Subsequent page
references to Martin Jay's essay will be in parentheses in the text.
6. Albert Lindemann,
Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 308, 311, 291, 140-41, 496, 54.
7. Paul Breines,
Tough
Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New
York: Basic Books, 1990).
8. Ruth R. Wisse,
If I
Am Not for Myself...The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (New York: Free Press,
1992), p. 138.
9. Arendt,
Origins of
Totalitarianism, III, p. 138.
10. Quoted in Rosie DiManno,
"Unlike Victims, Bomber Died without Pain,"
Toronto Star, June 19,
2002.
11. In a well-hidden place,
n. 33, Jay acknowledges that "some of the outcry" about the course had to do
with its last sentence telling Conservative thinkers to get lost; but he is
confident that "the main reason for the response was the content of the course"
(p. 28). Another Berkeley faculty member, who teaches in the English department,
has provided me with the following description of the incident, which may be
instructive:
"I don't think that any
chairman would dare disallow such a class on political grounds for fear of PC
[Political Correctness] extortion. Of course, the crucial point--that such a
class has nothing to do with English--doesn't even enter the picture since so
many English composition classes have been politicized...that it's hard to
imagine an English chair eager to defend the teaching of grammar and logic.
Hence, the brazenness of the instructor who wrote that course description:
without the statement that conservatives were not welcome (which is
discriminatory), the pedagogy and politics of the course would have been
unassailable in the current climate.
One thing I distinctly
remember with regard to the Palestinian composition class incident was that it
coincided with a very loud anti-Israel rally--louder than the anti-war
demonstration last week."
12. Max Weinreich,
Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Hitler's Crimes Against the
Jewish People (New York: YIVO, 1946).
Edward
Alexander's most recent books are Irving Howe--Socialist, Critic,
Jew (Indiana University Press, 1998) and
Classical Liberalism and the Jewish Tradition (Transaction
Publishers, 2002).
?
French HypocriSy
Here is an
interesting comment I have copied from theradical.blogspot.com:
In response to the recent EU-sponsored poll (see Monday's posting), Le Monde
writes:
"But we leave
the realm of legitimate criticism of a government's policies when we practice--as
do certain circles in Europe--a discourse of systematic and unilateral
denunciation that demonizes Israel. This rhetoric implies that such a
systematically criminal state cannot have its place among other states. From
this criticism of a government one passes almost unconsciously to questioning
the right of that country to exist. It matters little that those who hold these
ideas are conscience of it or not, the fact remains: this spiteful, anti-Israeli
anger is nourishing a new form of anti-Semitism that is becoming apparent in
Europe."
What is so
absurd about this editorial in Le Monde is that it has been the French Left and
its mouthpiece--Le Monde--that has for years denounced the actions of the
Israeli government while turning a blind eye to the human rights atrocities
rampant in other parts of the Middle East. (And if you think that the previous
sentence suggested that criticizing Israel is anti-Semitic, read the previous
sentence again). Now, in an effort to recast itself to a public with a
short-term memory, Le Monde denounces the very actions of which it has
consistently been guilty.
The French
often believe that Americans are too quick to portray them as anti-Semitic. And
occasionally, as the Andrew Sullivan quote from yesterday points out, they may
be right (yes, I understand that Sullivan is English, but you get the point).
However Le Monde's outrage at the fact that most Europeans believe that Israel
is the greatest threat to world peace is simply hard to believe. It is also
incredibly disconcerting that the French--who, given their recent past, should
know better--can be so blind to the hateful sentiments that they have nurtured
through their one-sided, Manichean discourse. For example, it is the French Left
that has advocated boycotts--academic and economic--against Israel while
embracing Russia in the "camp of peace" and conveniently forgetting about a
bloodbath called Chechnya.
The French
have unleashed a hatred that they now seek to disown. A mea culpa is long
overdue.
?
What? No UN Resolution Condemning Murder of Arabs in Riyadh?
Saturday's
al Qaeda
attack on a Riyadh, Saudi Arabia housing complex killed 17 people and
wounded 122. Most of the victims were Lebanese, Saudis, Egyptian, and Sudanese.
5 children were killed. The UN has done or said nothing.
When
Palestinian terrorists
killed four Israeli Arabs, children, parents, grandparents, etc., in Haifa,
Israel, the UN did and said nothing.
But the UN
churns out lots of meaningless
resolutions attacking Israel, a sovereign, democratic nation that lives in
1/6 of one percent of Middle East land. Israeli Arabs can vote in Israeli
elections and
hold seats in the parliament.
Here's the
Middle East: 1 democracy (Israel) and 21 Arab dictatorships. Can the UN do the
math? No. The problem is that the UN is populated with lots of dictatorships who
want to stay in power. They won't address their own problems. They do what
history teaches: find a scapegoat -- the Jews.
So what is
the UN? Pretty much a platform for anti-Semitism -- against Jews and
Arabs. The UN won't speak out when Arabs/Muslims are savagely murdered by
terrorists. Were the Arabs killed in Riyadh and Haifa less human than other
Arab/Muslims? According to the UN they are. How can UN member states like Iran,
Syria, and Saudi Arabia pass resolutions condemning terrorism when they
themselves are terrorists and terror-sponsors? Nothing like self-incrimination.
Who weeps
for the Arab/Muslim victims of terror (besides their own families and friends)?
Not the UN. Not the left-wing. Not the Arab/Muslim dictators. Not the majority
of Europeans. Thank goodness the U.S. is still a beachhead for freedom,
fairness, sensibility, and democracy.
Cross-posted
on IsraPundit and
netWMD (www.netwmd.com)
?
Israel falls into Hizballah's trap
By Jerusalem Newswire Editorial Staff
November 10, 2003
Jerusalem (jnewswire.com) -
Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah Sunday got the Israeli government to vote for
the release of around 440 terrorists in exchange for an abducted Jewish
businessman and three Israeli corpses.
The
vote was taken the day after Nasrallah, apparently aware of Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon's determination to secure a yes-vote, upped his demands to include a
particularly loathsome killer, Samir Kuntar, on the list of prisoners to be
freed.
While
at least three senior Israeli officials, including Sharon, have insisted Kuntar
will remain in jail, the question being pondered in Israel today is whether the
premier will stick to his guns on this murderer.
Sharon's primary motivational reason for freeing the other terrorists was the
overriding principle in Judaism known as pikuach nefesh
- the saving of a life.
'None with blood on their hands'
During
Sunday's lengthy and reportedly heated debate, Sharon called on his ministers to
agree to the release in order to prevent Nasrallah from carrying out his pledge
to execute Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannenbaum if the deal did not go
through.
Tannenbaum, who was abducted three years ago - allegedly while on a drug-dealing
trip to another Arab state - has been brutally tortured by his captors,
according to reports.
Eleven
ministers rejected Sharon's argument of pikuach nefesh,
arguing that releasing the terrorists would encourage the kidnapping of more
Jews and the loss of many more lives.
Twelve
ministers voted in favor, among them Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a
former prime minister who is widely acclaimed as an authority on how to deal
with Arab terrorism. Netanyahu gave his approval on condition that no terrorists
"with Jewish blood on their hands" be included in the list.
In the
final analysis, however, it has reportedly been decided that Israel's "red line"
- according to Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom - lies between those Arabs who
killed Israelis in Lebanon, and those who committed murder inside the borders of
the Jewish state.
Heinous killer
Kuntar
falls among the latter.
Intent
on taking Israelis hostage to upset the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement,
Kuntar and two other terrorists sailed a rubber dinghy from Lebanon to the
Israeli coastal town of Nahariya and entered the home of Danny and Smadar Hadan.
While
the Arabs grabbed Danny and his four-year-old daughter Einat, Smadar hid in a
closet with the couple's second little girl, Yael (2). Terrified of being
discovered, Smadar covered the toddler's mouth with her hand, inadvertently
smothering her to death.
The
terrorists murdered her husband and Einat. An Israeli policeman who responded to
the scene was also killed before two of the terror gang were shot dead and
Kuntar was captured.
Up tall trees
Both
Sharon and Nasrallah have climbed high trees on the issue of Kuntar.
Sharon
has said Kuntar's release is "out of the question," according to Foreign
Minister Shalom.
"Hizballah
knows explicitly, and we said throughout the recent negotiations, that Kuntar is
not on the list. The Prime Minister took this decision, which in my view is
courageous and important, and has stated it in the clearest possible terms," Ha'aretz
quoted Shalom as saying Monday.
And
according to The Jerusalem Post,
a brother of Kuntar has said that Nasrallah personally promised him that his
brother was a central figure in the deal.
"Hizballah
officials also claimed that they have a letter from Israel pledging to include
Kuntar in future prisoner swap deals," reports the Post.
(Ed
note: I believe it is not inconceivable, given Nasrallah's record, that in the
end, if Israel refuses to back down, the deal will still go through, but
Tannenbaum will be delivered dead instead of alive. What is certain is that
Nasrallah will not lose face, something he knows Israel is ready to do.)
?
?
Peace,
Justice and Suicide Bombings?
By
DANIEL W. SHOAG
David Appelbaum took his 20-year-old daughter, Nava, out
for coffee on the night before her wedding day to have one last father-daughter
heart-to-heart. He had come back to Israel from a symposium in New York City on
post-9/11 emergency preparedness to see his daughter get married; but he never
made it to the wedding, and neither did Nava. A suicide bomber blew up the cafe.
Nava's fianc?, family, and friends attended her funeral instead of her marriage.
Moral people can
disagree about the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Moral people
can argue over territory, over sovereignty and over borders. But moral people
cannot condone suicide bombings. Suicide bombings, which specifically target
innocent civilians, are always wrong. No moral person could possibly say that
Nava Appelbaum or the hundreds of Israeli victims of terror like her, deserved
to die. ?One would hope that everyone, certainly everyone here at Harvard, would
agree on that.
Yet, even here, there
are student groups that implicitly condone the terror tactics of Palestinian
extremists. The Society of Arab Students (SAS), Harvard Initiative for Peace and
Justice (HIPJ), and the Civil Liberties Union of Harvard (CLUH), for example,
are sponsoring a speech tonight given by Amer Jubran. Jubran, a Jordanian
citizen who is currently facing deportation attempts by the FBI, INS and the
Department of Homeland Security, appears to express his support and even
admiration for suicide bombers and the attacks they carry out. Official
literature produced by the New England Committee to Defend Palestine, an
organization co-founded by Jubran, states that:
"Many in the United
States claim to support the Palestinians in their struggle against Zionist
oppression, and then call upon the Palestinian people to `act responsibly,' to
`renounce violence,' and to `negotiate reasonably.' That is not support ... It
is not our place to dictate the forms that the resistance to violence should
take among the Palestinians."
Jubran, apparently
not satisfied merely with softening the image of extremists, also seems to
identify with the bombers. The New York Sun reported on Jubran's remarks made at
an Oct. 25 rally in San Francisco: "`We are angry. Some of us want to throw
stones. Some of us want to blow ourselves,' he said, gesturing to his chest."
Sadly, the fact that
men like Jubran exist is not shocking. What is surprising is that there are
groups of Harvard students who feel the need to bring this type of murderous
hate to our campus. That Amer Jubran, a man who has defended those who murder
innocent civilians and violate of human rights, should be brought to speak by
the Harvard Initiative for Peace and Justice as well as the Civil
Liberties Union of Harvard is hypocritical and intolerable.
Supporters of this
event might argue that it is meant to express sympathy with Jubran in his fight
against deportation and not with his views on terrorism, yet these arguments
ring hollow. It is true that Amer Jubran has the right to free speech and I
suppose there is a possibility that the United States government has acted
improperly with regard to his deportation. These facts alone, however, do not
explain why, out of the numerous cases of civil rights abuses in the past,
Jubran was chosen (hopefully despite his beliefs and not because of them) to be
honored with an invitation to speak at Harvard. To my knowledge, HIPJ and CLUH
have never before hosted a speaker who refused to condemn violence against
civilians. In not doing so, these groups have acknowledged that there are
positions that, while protected by free speech, are so heinous that they render
a person unfit to address a civilized crowd. By inviting Jubran, these groups
are sending the message quite clearly that they do not consider the targeting of
innocent Israelis to be as offensive as the murder of others.
It is equally sad to
see SAS supporting a man like Jubran. As a member of Harvard Students for Israel
(HSI), I have seen first-hand the effort students in that group have put into
working towards reconciliation. Students for Israel has participated in
dialogues and other events with Arab groups on campus in the spirit that we are
obligated to seek a solution other than continued violence and hate. No
pro-Israel group on campus would ever invite a speaker with views analogous to
those of Jubran's.
In the words of
HSIpresident Joshua Suskewicz '05, "We see ourselves as advocates for Israel and
advocates for peace. While our members have different political views, none of
them call for senseless violence or indiscriminate murder. We would never invite
a speaker who held these views, and I am disappointed to hear about Mr. Jubran's
invitation. The prospects for peace in the Middle East, and throughout the
world, cannot be good if terrorism and the deliberate targeting of innocents are
supported. Student groups must act responsibly and avoid granting a platform or
lending support to a man who supports terrorism."
Edmund Burke once
said, "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do
nothing." Tonight I will be protesting this event at ?7 p.m. in Science Center
A. I hope you join me.
Daniel W. Shoag
'06 is an economics concentrator in Eliot House. He is a member of Harvard
Students for Israel and a senior editor of the Harvard Israel Review.
?
Feet of clay, and more feet of clay
The bastions of democracy
are going wobbly, including the Leader of the Free World [TM].
An
AP story posted today reads as follows:
Half of
Americans Say War Not Worthwhile
WASHINGTON (AP) - Amid
increasing attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq, a growing number of Americans,
including men and independent voters, say the war in Iraq was not worthwhile,
according to a survey released Monday.
Half of Americans, 49
percent, say the war was not worth it, compared to 48 percent who say it was,
according to a survey conducted this month by the Annenberg Public Policy
Center.
I fear a
repeat of Vietnam.
And this from Israel. The
government was about to introduce new accreditation procedures for the press.
Now, Israel is in retreat, according to
AP:
Israel Delays
Journalism Security Checks
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's
government on Monday suspended plans that would have required stringent security
checks for journalists to receive accreditation.
The government called off
the proposed procedures after local and foreign journalists and watchdog groups
criticized them as an attempt to inhibit freedom of the press.
...
The GPO [Government Press
Office] credentials facilitate access to government buildings and official news
conferences, and the Israeli military requires journalists to present government
press cards to enter and travel in the West Bank and Gaza.
Can anyone explain to me how
an ex-general turned into a pussy cat?
?
More on NPR's Bias:
(camera.org)
News that McDonald's heiress Joan Kroc has bequeathed $200 million to National
Public Radio comes at a time when, unfortunately, the network continues to
purvey distorted and agenda-driven Middle East coverage. NPR's financial
windfall can only underscore the importance for those concerned about
anti-Israel bias of suspending support for local public radio stations
across the nation.
Highlights of NPR reporting at the end of October and beginning of November are
indicative of the ongoing problems.
ISRAEL IN THE DOCK
NPR
reporter Linda Gradstein's November 3 "Morning Edition" story about living
conditions and grievances of Israel's Bedouin residing in the Negev town of Atir
was trademark network fare. It was almost entirely one-sided (three Bedouin
deplored Israeli policy while a single Israeli government official provided
brief "balance") and lacking important background. (Transcript below)
Gradstein's specific descriptions of the Bedouin she observes may be accurate,
but they are devoid of context. Thus she describes a "rickety school bus" and
residents "who eke out a living either as day laborers in nearby Jewish towns or
as shepherds. They live simply, eating mostly bread and vegetables. Many of the
children go barefoot. In the winter, it's bitterly cold and in the summer,
unbearably hot. There's no medical clinic in the village."
Of
the marginal success of Israeli efforts to settle the nomadic people in
established towns Gradstein quotes a Bedouin official: "...it all goes back to
decades of Jewish discrimination against the Bedouin."
Like so many NPR reports indicting Israel, this one is highly deceptive,
ignoring essential relevant information. For example:
!
Egypt and Jordan have Bedouin communities with serious problems. Where is NPR's
coverage of these nations' treatment of their impoverished Bedouin? Why is
Israel alone subject to scrutiny and criticism on the subject, and especially
without reference to the conditions of these nomadic tribes in neighboring
nations?
Indeed, conditions are often worse for Bedouin in Arab countries. In 1999, 600
Egyptian Bedouins fled Egypt to Israel. A March 23, 1999 Christian Science
Monitor story noted: "A feud with another tribe sparked their departure, but
economic and social frustration also seem to have inspired the Azazmas' exodus.
Tribal members complain of a lack of food, water, and work in Egypt, as well as
lack of schools for their children and legal rights. Though the Negev Bedouins
suffer from discrimination and a systematic attempt to force them to give up
their tents in the wilderness for Israeli-designed townships, the Azazmas who
fled Egypt think their brethren living in Israel have it easier here."
"There is no law in Egypt. Here, at least, there's a government that will be
straight with us. This is the best treatment we've ever had," said one Egyptian
Bedouin who was "impressed by the food, water and first aid the Israeli army"
provided his tribe.
!
The birth rate and polygamous marriage practices of the Negev Bedouin raise
enormous challenges for Israel. According to a July 2003 edition of the Israeli
newspaper Ma'ariv, "A prominent public figure among the Negev Bedouins says:
`Everyone knows that this high rate of natural increase is the main problem of
the Bedouin sector, but no one is doing anything. There are Bedouin who are
married to 8 wives and who are living off the allowances of some 100 children.
They give the children and the women virtually no money for subsistence, so this
results in distress, which fuels nationalism and crime.'"
Many of the "tens of thousands" of wives are acquired from Gaza and the West
Bank, a reality that has, according to an Israeli Interior Ministry official,
prompted Bedouins to say "the import of women from the territories is the
beginning of the realization of the right of return of Palestinians to Israel."
According to a March 2003 story in Ha'aretz, around 30% of Bedouin men are
polygamists.
Renowned demographer Arnon Soffer has documented the same influx of thousands of
Palestinian women taken as wives by the Bedouin, as well as the takeover of
state land by Bedouins in the Negev and the encroachment of Bedouin encampments
in sensitive military areas.
!
Despite the difficulties experienced by many Bedouin, Israel is making efforts
to address the needs of this population. Beyond government action, Ben Gurion
University has a Center for Bedouin Studies and Development and there are
unprecedented increases in the numbers of Bedouin men and women receiving higher
education.
NPR
and Linda Gradstein omitted ALL of this information, opting instead simply to
cast Israel as uniquely oppressive and callous. Segments such as this one
lacking all context are commonplace on the network and cumulatively project a
deceptively negative picture of the Jewish state.
SETTLEMENT OBSESSION
Most Palestinians, many Europeans and a small minority of Israelis believe
settlements are the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict and primary obstacle
to peace. On the other hand, the Israeli mainstream, including those who may
advocate compromise on settlement issues, see Arab rejection of Israeli
legitimacy in the Middle East and violent, hate-propelled campaigns to eliminate
the nation as the primary issue. (This is so especially in the wake of the Camp
David/Taba offer to give the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaza and
the PA's launching of a terror war as a response.)
NPR
avidly promotes the perspectives of the former, the Palestinian, European and
minority Israeli one, and has consistently for over a decade amplified that
perspective and ignored almost entirely the daily Palestinian drumbeat of
anti-Semitic invective and calls to martyrdom as well as the collusion of the PA
in violence and terrorism.
Indicative of NPR's preoccupation with blaming Israel and focusing on
settlements were repeated skewed reports on related developments given little
prominence in most other media outlets. On October 28 and October 30, NPR aired
stories on Israel's extending utilities to a number of outposts attached to
settlements. Each of the reports, which relied on statements by Peace Now,
contained editorial commentary interjected by NPR reporters themselves about
Israel violating the "road map." These accusations were reiterated without any
reference to the current status of the "road map," to Palestinian obligations
under the "road map" or to the Palestinians' outright refusal to dismantle
terrorist groups - a violation of the PA's premier requirement in the agreement.
(http://www.npr.org/news/specials/mideast/transcripts/2003/oct.html)
!
NPR speakers often sounded more like Palestinian advocates than reporters. In
the October 30 story, for example, host Melissa Block declares: "This week the
government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon confirmed plans to extend
municipal services and security protection to a number of settlement outposts in
the occupied West Bank and Gaza. The move calls into question Israel's
commitment to the US-backed road map to peace between Israel and the
Palestinians."
!
Other media outlets that covered this story presented the facts without
editorializing and bias. The New York Times' single story on the topic by Greg
Myre (Oct 29) noted, for example, with regard to Arab denunciations of the
outpost issue: "Amid continuing fighting, neither Israel nor the Palestinians
are meeting their obligations under the plan."
!
On October 30, the day of an NPR report deploring alleged Israeli failings with
regard to settlements, the U.S. Congress held hearings chaired by Senators Arlen
Spector entitled "Palestinian Education - Teaching Peace or War?"
Senators heard about Palestinian summer camps for children named after Wafa
Idris and Ayat al Akras, female suicide bombers; they heard about a soccer
tournament this fall sponsored by PA leaders in which the 24 boys' teams were
each named for "shahids" such as Yehye Ayash, the Hamas "engineer" responsible
for devastating bombings of Israelis; they heard about television and textbooks
that deny Jewish historical ties to the land of Israel.
Senator Hillary Clinton stated: "I don't believe that there has been an adequate
and consistent repudiation of the rhetoric of hate and the incitement of young
people by the authorities in the Palestinian Authority... [I]n many other
settings I've seen similar messages and they are broadcast on the Palestinian
Authority TV, played over and over again, children playing death games...It is a
real distortion of childhood and of adult responsibility."
National Public Radio ignored the hearings completely -- although such PA
hate-indoctrination is a violation of the "road map" and a fundamental threat to
peace in the region. In contrast, CNN, FoxNews and others gave it prominent
focus.
?
WHY WE KILL
JARHEADS? parody
by Red
Thrall
NEW
YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you
for joining the noble and popular Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued
an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a copy of the Chicago Reader
with the gay escort service ads removed, and an address where you can pick up
supplies of bombs and DVDs of "Bowling For Columbine." Please let your cell
leader know if you require additional paper mache materiel for constructing
giant Cheney puppets. And make sure you check the correct dependent levels on
your W-2 form, for there are serious 2003 tax consequences for
under-withholding.
You are
joining a broad and diverse and fragrant coalition dedicated to one principle:
Get Outta Da Bushes! Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein's
secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists... and special guest
general Sean Penn! We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish.
It takes a nation to hold us back. We are Flintstones Kids, 10 million strong...
and growing! Our turn-ons include long walks on the beach and direct action
against Chimpy the Resident.
Though we
differ on what kind of future our country we are fighting side by side because
there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive Bass Weejun of the U.S.
Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite Tom Delay Texas bug
exterminator lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi
and his Halliburton gang of Enron swindling WASPs who cannot see the simple
beauty of run-on sentences.
Because we
destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves
against the American invasion. Oops, sorry guys -- "our bad." Now our only
option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a
minimum risk to ourselves. That, or maybe we can reapply to Berkeley grad school
if we retake the GRE. I heard the Kaplan course helps. Anyhoo, as the Afghan
resistance to the Soviets and the American's own Revolution -- once headed by
the Artist Formerly Known As Prince -- have proven, it will only be a matter of
time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized by side projects with
Sheila E and Apollonia, and become weird Jehovahs Witnesses. As casualties and
credit card expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and
political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will be getting late
fees from CapitalOne, and a mounting five-year price tag of $500 billion, not to
mention probably 4,000 gazillion dead crackers from Oklahoma, plus all those
harassing dinnertime calls from collection agencies, and the midnight repo men.
It's not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing
to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC
production, and dividing by the remainder of $1.789 for Phillips 66 89 Octane
for a 426 Hemi with .202 heads and a a 335/360 cam with a 727 Torqueflite/ Dana
60 spool and a 10.15 dial-in, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an
average of 35 attacks each day, with a standard deviation of 6.2, how long will
it take for an American soldier travelling in the opposite direction at 2000
furlongs per fortnight to figure out that he wants to run home to his
increasingly angry mommy?
It is
inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no
easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American
uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's
vast underclass of retarded brainwashed white trash dopes. Many don't want to be
here, yet do not understand they have the moral imperative to frag their
mercenary Killbot masters who do the bidding of Dick Cheney's oil cabal of
neo-con Shriners from the Crab Nebula.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. Damn these infernal
neo-cons, forcing us to kill our would-be lumpenprole friends! They are victims,
like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington, and their lapdog Fritos Banditos
of Mexico. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that they are force fed
from Fox News and "Blogs". We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill
them until the last one has gone home to America, with a lovely parting gift of
Turtle Wax. Hey, them's the breaks oppressors.
In recent
months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental
organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A
typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by Oreo house
mammy Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists
decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help
the Iraqi people." STFU, bee-yotch! True, many aid workers are well intentioned.
However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the
invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. They are mere pod people like in
"Invasion of The Body Snatchers" and their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceive
weak-willed Iraqi civilians into thinking that Americans are popular here. Well,
they are so totally not popular, and I heard Afghanistan tell Sudan yesterday
that she saw America hanging out at the mall with Spain! Uh huh, Spain. What a
loser.
In this vein
we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to
collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation.
If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them
into puppet policemen like Lambchop or Willie Tyler and Lester or the Swedish
Chef, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering
taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and
encourage him to seek honest work, like blowing up hotels or penning a
hard-hitting intellectual comic strip for Baghdad Scene, the leading weekly
guide to the capital city's hottest nightlife and gallery happenings. If he
refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals. Dude,
I was just shittin' ya -- just go ahead and kill him anyway.
Take to
heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Desi Arnaz: "The gringo oppressor has
a lotta 'splaining to do!" If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no
popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted
Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, splattering us all over the sidewalks and
pretending it has the upper hand. Well nyah nyah nyah. We meant to do that.
To victory!
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This is in
response to this:
Rall: A Loathsome Creep
Like a
spoiled hyperactive child, Ted Rall is continuing to act out his hatred for
America in print, getting more and more outrageous as he is more and more
ignored. His latest excretion is the foulest he's written yet; reading this ugly
thing is like crawling through a sewer in Damascus:
WHY WE FIGHT.
(Hat tip: bobby.)
Dear
Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47
rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up
supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know
if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq
for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein's secular
government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and
foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country
should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are
fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and
oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their
Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend
ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our
only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a
minimum risk to ourselves.
Notice that
he published this piece yesterday: Veterans Day. Universal Press Syndicate
should cancel this bastard's contract.
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From thecounterrevolutionary:
Ghosts of Occupations Past -- the trouble brews...
Last week I published an article from the NY Times entitled "We
can lose the peace." No, it was not about Iraq, but about Germany. The next
article shows how early fascination with the perceptions of the occupied can be
misleading.
REICH GIRLS WANT RETURN OF NAZISM
By DREW MIDDLETON By Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES.
New York Times; Oct 22, 1945; pg. 3
In case you were wondering, the focus on German girls is due to their, er, close
contact with American GIs. The article goes on to say that the views of the
girls were beginning to influence the GIs themselves.
"Three times in the last week American soldiers remarked casually that perhaps
Hitler had not been so bad for Germans after all..."
Some of the girls refused to believe that Hitler was dead: "One of them told a
friend of mine, a young sergeant, that 'he will return again, you Americans will
see.'"
Please also remember the name of the reporter, Drew Middleton -- his reports
will become increasingly alarmist and shrill.
posted by The CounterRevolutionary
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Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Ghosts of Occupations Past
-- "We can lose the peace"
Inspired by the Life magazine from
Jessica's Well and the Saturday Evening Post posted by
Instapundit, I went off to the library. The New York Public Library has a
database of New York Times articles dating form 1857.
In the span of an hour, I found many articles dating from late 1945 and 1946
about the occupation of Germany. They were uniformly pessimistic. I would like
to post them here. Due to copyrights, I will only post excerpts.
WE CAN LOSE THE PEACE
New York Times; Sep 25, 1945; pg. 21
Can you imagine the Times giving this advice today?
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Palestinians Spit On Our War Dead
Palestinian
media laughs at the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq:
Pals Mock Dead Americans.
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MANY more of the following articles are from
littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog
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Euro trash
Perversity & anti-Semitism lead Europeans
to call Israel greatest threat to peace
By Alan M. Dershowitz
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According
to a new poll, Europeans regard Israel as a greater threat to peace than any
other country in the world. Among the runners-up were the United States, North
Korea, Iran and Iraq.
Syria,
Libya, Saudi Arabia and China were not even in the running.
Sometimes
a public opinion poll tells us more about those being polled than about the
question at hand. This is such a case. Having been exposed for years to virulent
anti-Israel media coverage and anti-Israel bias from their leaders, it is not
surprising that so many Europeans have had their views poisoned.
This bias
is fed by an extraordinarily successful propaganda campaign that comes,
perversely, from enemies of peace - people who engage in, or support, terrorism.
Before we
get to the causes of the international bigotry that blames everything bad on
Israel, let's look at the hard facts.
In 1947,
the United Nations partitioned Palestine into two states. The Jewish state of
Israel was allocated about half the usable land, an area in which Jews were a
substantial majority. The remainder of Palestine - other than the approximately
80% that already had been allocated to Arabs, primarily Palestinians, for the
Jordanian state - was to become a new Palestinian State. Although the new Israel
consisted of noncontiguous areas and did not include Jerusalem, where nearly
100,000 Jews made their home, Israel accepted this UN-mandated resolution.
The Arab
states, however, joined together to invade the fledgling Jewish state, declaring
a genocidal war. They lost that war, and a stronger Israel emerged.
In 1967,
Israel was threatened with imminent attack by Egypt, Syria, Jordan and other
Mideast Arab nations. It responded by destroying the air forces of the most
threatening nations without attacking any civilian targets.
After
winning the war in six days, Israel immediately accepted UN Security Council
Resolution 242, which mandated the return of certain - but not all - territories
captured during the war in exchange for guarantees of peace, recognition and
territorial integrity from the surrounding states.
At a
meeting in Khartoum, Sudan, the Arab nations unanimously rejected Resolution 242
and instead issued their infamous Three Nos: no recognition of Israel, no
negotiation with Israel, no peace with Israel. Israel thus had no peace partner
with which to exchange land for peace.
In
subsequent years, when first Egypt and then Jordan expressed a willingness to
make peace, Israel surrendered the Sinai to Egypt and those portions of the West
Bank claimed by Jordan, thus complying with Resolution 242.
In
2000-01, Israel offered to exchange more land for peace with the Palestinians.
At Camp David and at Taba, it offered approximately 95% of the West Bank and all
of Gaza to the Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem to serve as its capital,
in exchange for peace. Yasser Arafat walked away without even making a
counterproposal and ordered the resumption of terrorism - well before Ariel
Sharon made his ill-fated visit to the Temple Mount.
Israel's
actions are not those of a warmongering nation that threatens world peace but
rather of a nation that has tried harder to achieve peace than virtually any in
history.
Can the
Europeans who believe that Israel is the greatest danger to world peace name
another country that has ever given back land that was legitimately captured in
a defensive war and necessary for its own defense in exchange for a promise of
peace?
How, then,
to explain this afactual, ahistoric and immoral poll result? At one level, it is
simply the latest manifestation of millennia-old efforts to blame the Jews for
all the evils in the world. When plagues broke out in Europe, it was the Jews'
fault. When wells were poisoned, obviously, the Jews did it. When Christian
children were found murdered, who else but the Jews? A German parliamentarian
recently blamed Stalin's mass murders on the "predatory" Jewish people, and the
cardinal of Honduras has blamed the sex scandal in the Catholic Church on - you
guessed it - the Jews.
But there
is more at issue here than primitive anti-Semitism, though that surely plays a
role in some of the polling results. A generation of Europeans has been
miseducated by its own media and leaders about Israel. The United Nations has
contributed to this miseducation by condemning Israel more frequently than any
other nation, well out of proportion to its faults.
Criticism
of Israeli policies is certainly fair game, but throughout Europe, criticism of
Israel is rarely comparative, contextual or constructive. Instead, Israel is
singled out for demonization and delegitimization.
This is
all part of a systematic Palestinian effort to supplement a terrorist campaign
with a propaganda war. The poll shows it is succeeding. This very success
contributes to a lack of progress toward peace.
The
Palestinian leadership will not take the difficult steps needed to achieve peace
so long as it continues to win the propaganda war while encouraging terrorism.
Among the
greatest threats to world peace, therefore, is not Israel itself but European
bigotry against the Jewish nation.
Dershowitz
is a professor of law at Harvard. His latest book is "The Case for Israel."
Originally published on November
8, 2003
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Existence of Israel Makes Iran Seethe
Once again
Iran makes their intention to destroy Israel appallingly clear:
Existence of Israel
contrary to Iranian interests. (Hat tip:
Israellycool.)
TEHRAN, Nov
10, (AFP) -- The mere existence of Israel is contrary to Tehran's national
interests, press reports said Monday, quoting former Iranian foreign minister
Ali Akbar Velayati, now a top advisor to Iran's supreme leader.
"One of the elements of progress in a country is regional cooperation. Israel
was created to prevent unity and cooperation between Islamic countries, that is
why the existence of Israel is in contradiction with the national interests of
Iran," Velayati was quoted as saying by the conservative Ressalat newspaper.
"Today, there is a close spiritual relationship between Palestinian fighters and
the Islamic republic, and this cannot be ignored," he added, saying that the
"new step in the Palestinian struggle has been influenced by the Islamic
revolution and the Lebanese Hezbollah."
Iran refuses to recognise Israel and top officials frequently call for the
destruction of the Jewish state. But Tehran denies giving material support to
Palestinian militants.
During a major military parade on September 22, the Islamic republic showed off
six of its Shahab-3 missiles which were decorated with anti-Israeli and anti-US
slogans, including one saying Israel should be "wiped off the map".
Like the United States, Israel in turn accuses Iran of using a civil atomic
energy programme as a cover to develop nuclear weapons.
There has been mounting speculation the Jewish state's hawkish government may be
considering pre-emptive strikes against Iranian nuclear installations.
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?
UPDATE FROM
THE HATE-FEST at OSU
11/9/03 again from lgf...
Another
great day in Columbus for protesting hate and terror.
The
highlight of the between rally debates had to have been when a well pressed
lefty came out to argue with us. After 20 minutes of shouting "You don't
understand, you don't understand !" and "Let me finish. Stop interrupting me"
most definitely deflated her ego, the cops finally came over and told her she
had to go to the designated opposition area across the entryway steps or stop
getting in our faces. Well she made a point of going and standing behind the
barriers, which was o so laughable since as near as I can tell she was the ONLY
person to ever do so. Most participants snuck out to the front steps for smokes
and tried to ignore our calls for them to denounce suicide bombings. Twice more
she came out to argue her side. And guess what we found out? She was a
reporter with NPR! After that, we started repeatedly shouting for her to
tell us her name, and she said she wouldn't. You know, cuz journalists
from NPR need to be anonymous to remain impartial. If there's anyone out there
that hears her report from the conference, make sure to listen for her name, I'd really like to eMail her, as twice I asked her to denounce suicide
bombings and she wouldn't!
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"We Might Destroy the Planet"
Munir Al-Mawari,
a Yemenite columnist for the London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat,
tells the plain unvarnished truth about
what will happen
if an Arab Islamic state ever obtains nuclear weapons:
" ... The
danger inherent in WMD is the possibility that such weapons will be within the
reach of reckless regimes and terror gangs ... The U.S. possesses a huge WMD
arsenal, but has not used them since World War II. In contrast, we, the Arabs,
have threatened to destroy half the state of Israel, when we had at our disposal
a very small quantity of this type of weapon and after we used it against our
Arab brothers ... What would happen if we had real WMD at our disposal?
Considering the hatred boiling within us towards ourselves and towards the
entire world, we might destroy the entire planet ... "
Please note:
this is a liberal Arab Muslim writer, not an "Islamophobic" Westerner.
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UN: Disgusting As Always
Well, it's
November, and that means it's time for the United Nations to take down the
exhibit in the General Assembly Visitors' Lobby on the International Year of
Mountains--and put up the one exalting the
International Day of
Solidarity with the Palestinian People. That special day, when
we're all expected to feel "solidarity" with a people who consistently express
80%+ support for suicide bombings against Israeli men, women, and children, and
who danced in the streets of Ramallah, Nablus, and the West Bank on September
11, is November 29th.
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?Will Britain convert to Islam?
By PETER HITCHENS, Mail on Sunday
November 02, 2003
ould
Islam one day become the established church of Britain? Might English women
adopt the headscarves and enveloping robes of their Asian sisters, as the call
to prayer rises and falls across the slate roofs of rainswept industrial cities?
The idea is not as impossible, as bizarre or distant as you might
think. An astonishing Channel 4 programme last week - The Last White Kids --
showed two English children who live in an entirely Muslim district becoming
enthusiastic attenders at the local mosque, wrapping themselves in Islamic
draperies and learning the Koran.
Amie Gallagher, nine, and her sister Ashlene, 12, are
all-too-typical children of modern Britain in some ways, daughters of a
single-parent household where the father is absent.
In Islam they seem to have found something that would otherwise
be missing from their lives. At the mosque there is authority, certainty, even
disciplined education in the Arabic language and the Koran.
This has happened because the Gallaghers are the only white
family in a suburb otherwise completely dominated by Asian Muslims.
If they move away, as they may well do, then perhaps the two
girls' attachment to the mosque will fail. Their brother, Jake, has not followed
them down the Muslim path and has instead become even more defiantly English
than he might otherwise have done.
But this strange little story contains a warning for Britain as a
whole, as it careers ever more rapidly down the path of permissiveness which
began so gently in the Sixties and now slopes ever more steeply downwards
towards sexual chaos, drunkenness, family breakdown and the epidemic use of
stupefying drugs.
Sooner or later, as in every other era of human history, there
will be a revulsion against this licence, a desire to stop the waste, cruelty
and misery which these things bring, especially to children.
Where will that revulsion come from? In the 18th and 19th
Centuries it came from Christianity and the mighty but forgotten Temperance
movements which reacted against the squalor and misery of Hogarth's Gin Lane,
and whose effects we still just feel.
But Christianity shows little sign of doing the job a second
time. Its leaders are more concerned about foreign conflict than about domestic
misery, and more interested in the sexual tastes of bishops than in trying to
regulate the confused sex lives of Britain's young.
The Christian churches have all but disappeared from the lives of
the British people. The chapels of Wales are gaunt ruins, the great Roman
Catholic churches of the industrial North West are often empty and derelict, the
Anglicans scuttle about in their hallowed, lovely buildings like mice amid
ancient ruins, rarely even beginning to fill spaces designed for multitudes.
The choirs and the bells gradually fall silent, the hymns are no
longer sung and one by one the doors are locked and places which in some cases
have seen worship for centuries become bare museums of a dead faith.
Few listen to what these churches say. They have become exclusive
clubs, whose members celebrate bizarre rituals which are baffling to outsiders.
The Christian message is a difficult and complicated one, which
if not learned in childhood is hard for adults to understand. The Christian
ceremonies, viewed coldly by an outsider unschooled in 2,000 years of tradition,
are positively peculiar. Why would anyone eat God?
When Christianity was part of our culture and its beliefs were
handed down in homes and schools, its familiarity kept it strong. Everyone knew
Bible stories, hymns and prayers. Now it is at least as alien to many young
people as Islam, if not more so because it does not seem to be interested in
them.
But Islam is interested in them. And Islam is growing. More and
more British cities have seen the domes and minarets of smart, prominently
positioned new mosques rising in their neighbourhoods.
A large and imposing Islamic centre is now nearing completion in
Oxford, one of Christian England's holiest places. Imagine what would happen if
Anglicans sought to build a Christian centre in Qom, Isfahan, Najaf or anywhere
on the soil of Saudi Arabia, and wonder what Muslim leaders think of Christian
feebleness on such matters.
Thanks to the immigration of recent decades, Britain has a young,
energetic and swelling Muslim population which is increasingly assertive about
its faith.
Official Islam may disapprove of such things but there have even
been signs of the Muslim intolerance towards Christianity that is a nasty
feature of so many Islamic societies.
In the Bradford suburb of Girlington, not far from where the
Gallaghers live in Manningham, Asian youths tried to set fire to an Anglican
church. Soon afterwards, a Brownie pack leader was attacked in a nearby street
by young men who snarled 'Christian bitch' at her.
An isolated and meaningless incident? You might hope so, but it
would be unwise to be sure.
If you travel to these areas, you get the sense that Islam, one
of the great forces of history, long ago defeated by the armies and navies of a
mighty Christian Europe, is once again feeling its strength and finding that it
has been able to penetrate what were once the most impregnable fortresses of its
great rival.
Islam's appeal, wherever it has triumphed, has been in its
simplicity. It requires submission to some basic, straightforward rules which
are easily kept, and in return it offers that most wonderful and rare commodity,
peace of mind. To modern Westerners, its attitude towards women seems incredibly
backward and even hateful.
But as the reactions of Ashlene and Amie Gallagher show, its
discipline, safety and certainties have an appeal for girls lost in the churning
seas of permissiveness, whose own families have been weakened by the crumbling
of the two-parent family, the absence of fathers and the impermanence of
husbands, if there are husbands in the first place rather than boyfriends and '
babyfathers'.
And in most societies it is the women who sustain religions in
the home and among children. In a country in the grip of unbelief, those with
strong, clear convictions and an uncluttered message have a great advantage over
those who offer nothing but choices to the perplexed and cannot seem to make up
their minds about anything.
So if eventually Britain begins to sicken of strong lager, pools
of vomit, Bacardi Breezers, bouncers looming on every High Street, the
battlefields in the streets of many towns on Friday and Saturday nights, ecstasy
tablets, cocaine, football-worship, pregnant 12-year-olds, morning-after pills
and all that goes with them, is it possible that puritan Islam will be the cause
that benefits?
If bureaucratic police and feeble justice continue to fail to
suppress crime and disorder, will the savage but simple remedies of Sharia law
begin to appeal to the British poor, who are already weary of seeing dishonesty
triumph everywhere and lawless violence go unchecked?
Might Islam become respectable among the politically correct
middle classes, in a way that Christianity never really can, because
Christianity is always associated in this country with the conservative,
imperial past?
You will already find plenty of bright young Muslims in our
universities, many of whom are impressive and diligent students, and their
influence is bound to increase as they move into the professions.
The idea of an Islamic Britain may seem highly unlikely now, amid
what still seems to be more or less a Western, Christian society. We are used to
thinking of Islam as a religion of backward regions, and of backward people.
But we should remember that Muslim armies came within inches of
taking Vienna in 1683 and were only driven from Spain in 1492. In those days it
was the Islamic world that was making the great scientific advances which we now
assume are ours by right.
And is it any more unlikely than the things which have happened
here in the past 40 years, during which a country of peaceful, self-restrained,
lawful and rather prudish men and women has been transformed into the land of
sex and swearing on TV, ladettes, semi-legal cannabis and armed police?
If we don't respect our own customs and religion, we may end up,
as Ashlene and Amie Gallagher have done, respecting someone else's. Don't be
surprised.
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No Evidence, Except for That, Uh, Plutonium
Earlier
today the wire services were all reporting that the IAEA had found "no evidence"
of an Iranian nuclear program.
No evidence.
Just some
plutonium,
and a secret laser uranium enrichment plant.
Oh, and "a
large number of conversion, fabrication and irradiation activities involving
nuclear material."
Apart from
that, the IAEA found no evidence. None.
Unless you
count those tests during the past four years using small amounts of uranium
hexafluoride.
"Iran has
admitted that it produced small amounts of low enriched uranium using both
centrifuges and laser enrichment processes... and that it had failed to report a
large number of conversion, fabrication and irradiation activities involving
nuclear material, including the separation of a small amount of plutonium," the
report said.
Enrichment is a process of purifying uranium to make it useable as nuclear fuel
or in atomic weapons. It can be done in several ways, including with centrifuges
that separate the fissile uranium atoms through high-speed spinning or with
lasers.
In contrast to Tehran's previous denials, the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) said Iran also "acknowledged that 'a limited number of tests using small
amounts of (uranium hexafluoride) had been conducted in 1999 and 2002' at the
Kalaye Electric Company."
The report said these tests involved 4.2 lb of missing uranium hexafluoride, the
chemical form of uranium used in the enrichment process, which Iran had
previously "attempted to conceal by attributing the loss due to leaking valves."
The IAEA also said Iran had admitted to establishing a laser uranium-enrichment
plant at Lashkar Ab'ad in 2000 which it had kept secret from the U.N. nuclear
watchdog.
But let's
not jump to any hasty conclusions here.
It's still
going to take the IAEA quite a llloooonnnnggg time before they can conclude that
Iran has no nuclear program.
The IAEA
said it had "no evidence" of a secret weapons program, but that "given Iran's
past pattern of concealment, it will take some time for the agency to conclude
that Iran's nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes."
Read that
last line again; it speaks volumes.
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Iran: "Optimistic" on Bomb Chances
Iranian
"president" Mohammad Khatami is
optimistic
that the United Nations will give Iran the time they need to build nuclear
weapons.
The
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a report obtained by Reuters
Monday it had found no evidence of a secret arms bid but that Tehran had dabbled
in activity often associated with bomb-making, such as plutonium production.
"Naturally during 20 years of nuclear activities there were some failures. But
that does not mean we violated or moved outside the framework of the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)," Khatami told reporters after a weekly cabinet
meeting.
After all,
what's a little plutonium among friends? Nobody's perfect!
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Where did
all the flowers go?
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Arabs in Favor of Child Murder
Last week
the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution demanding that Israel
"protect Palestinian children." It's obvious to any unbiased observer that
Israel never deliberately targets Palestinian children, although it is true that
sometimes children are caught up in battles or, more often, used as shields by
terror gangs. Sometimes they are even killed by Palestinians themselves, and
then the deaths blamed on Israel, as in the case of Mohammed al-Dura.
On the other
hand, Palestinian terrorists deliberately and cold-bloodedly shoot little girls
hiding under beds and babies eating with their families, and blow up
schoolchildren on buses, and murder teenagers in nightclubs and pizza
parlors--but today Arab nations announced that
they will oppose a UN
resolution introduced by Israel condemning Palestinian terrorist
attacks targeting Israeli children.
Palestinian
envoy Nasser al-Kidwa said Arab delegates, meeting at UN headquarters, concluded
the Israeli draft had been written "as a bad joke" and should be voted down.
"Frankly, we were not amused," al-Kidwa told reporters after the meeting. "This
is an anti-Palestinian resolution, much more than it is a pro-Israeli children
resolution."
"The Europeans say they will abstain. I can't see anybody voting in favor of
this," he said. "We hope they [the Israelis] will wake up and forget about
this."
Scum.
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Rajoub to Arabs: Resist US in Iraq
Palestinian
Authority National Security Adviser Jibril Rajoub, otherwise known as a
"terrorist thug," called for Arabs to rise up and kill as many Americans as
possible in Iraq:
Rajoub to Arabs: Resist
US in Iraq. Such lovely people. Let's send them some more money.
"This US
administration is unreliable and unrealistic and does not deal with the Arabs
and their aspirations with the minimum level of respect," Rajoub said in an
interview with the Saudi daily Al-Jazeera.
"This requires a unified Arab position to mobilize all energies and capabilities
to face the American aggression.
"The Americans are behaving as if they rule the entire world like policemen and
modern imperialists. We need to confront this biased American stance through an
active Arab role." ...
"The American administration is now threatening all the Arab regimes by
demanding changes," he said. "I believe that many Arabs should draw conclusions
from their continued support for the American aggression against Iraq.
"This doesn't mean that we consider Saddam Hussein to be a respected figure," he
said.
"On the contrary, he's a fascist," he added. "But the US didn't go to war in
order to topple Saddam; they launched the war with the aim of taking control
over Iraq's resources and capabilities and dominating the entire Middle East so
as to provide security for the Israelis. It's time for the Arabs to wake up and
rise. They must strengthen the Iraqi resistance against the American
occupation."
Rajoub's anti-American sentiments follow attacks by PA commentators and
officials over the weekend on US President George W. Bush for calling for
greater democracy in the Middle East. Palestinian newspapers are full of
cartoons and articles mocking the US losses in Iraq and praising the attacks on
US soldiers. ...
"This [US] administration is a fascist and right-wing administration," he said.
"It is run by a group of right-wing fascists. The word "Arabs" provokes and
disgusts them. Their policies are hostile to the Palestinians, and this has made
them biased first and foremost to Israel. Most of the meetings that took place
with the Americans were marginal and unimportant."
?
Monday, November 03, 2003
Underreported story of the
day....
From today's Wash Post: "Seized
Intelligence Files Spur U.S. Investigations"
BAGHDAD, Nov. 2 -- The CIA has seized an extensive cache of files
from the former Iraqi Intelligence Service that is spurring U.S. investigations
of weapons procurement networks and agents of influence who took money from the
government of Saddam Hussein, according to U.S. officials familiar with the
records.
The Iraqi files are "almost as much as the Stasi files," said a senior U.S.
official, referring to the vast archives of the former East German intelligence
service seized after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The records would stretch 91/2 miles if laid end to end, the officials said.
They contain not only the names of nearly every Iraqi intelligence officer, but
also the names of their paid foreign agents, written agent reports, evaluations
of agent credentials, and documentary evidence of payments made to buy influence
in the Arab world and elsewhere, the officials said.
The officials declined to name individuals who they believe received funds or to
name the home countries of the alleged recipients. One official said the
recipients held high-ranking positions and worked both in Arab countries and in
other regions. A second official said the payments were the subjects of "active
investigations" by U.S. government agencies.
The recipients of the Iraqi funds were described by U.S. officials not as formal
intelligence agents, but as prominent personalities and political figures who
accepted money from Iraq as they defended Hussein publicly or pressed his
causes.
Can't wait to see the results.
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Now to Jpost.com
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Nov. 12, 2003
Bush's Iraq exit strategy
By
LARRY DERFNER
Iraq is turning out to be a tragedy of much greater depth than
either the pro-war or anti-war camps, with their shallow certainties, are
prepared to deal with.
Hardcore Western leftists still can't get interested in anything
going on in that country except American "imperialism." Having endured the
embarrassment of Iraqi jubilation at Saddam Hussein's ouster, they're back in
the ballgame now with things going badly for the US, and they're raising their
voices for immediate withdrawal.
Those who want to sound responsible say the US should hand the
job over to an international force - as if any country that's stayed out of the
fighting so far wants to send thousands of troops to Iraq now.
There are two main reasons why America can't withdraw from Iraq
in the shape it's currently in. One is that this would give spectacular impetus
to al-Qaida and the rest of the world jihad movement.
The second reason is that it would open the way to a bloodbath in
which Iraqis who didn't oppose the US were slaughtered by those who did.
That's what happened to masses of Shi'ites and Kurds after the US
finished up the 1991 Gulf War; for America to let that happen again, with the
experience of 1991 behind it, would be just too great a crime.
So failure, as the Bush administration puts it, is not an option.
The problem, though - the tragedy - is that success may not be an option,
either.
What would have to happen for Iraq to be a success story? I'd say
the country would have to become unfriendly territory for America's violent
enemies, and be in strong enough and trustworthy enough Iraqi hands for the US
to be able pull out its troops, or all but a relative few of them, in the
knowledge that success was secure.
For the sake of brevity, if not precision, let's call that
democracy.
It's nowhere in sight. There's a controversy on now about whether
the strongest fighting force in the world can overcome the Iraqi resistance, but
there's no controversy about whether moderate Iraqis can do it themselves.
They'd survive about as long as the anti-communist regime in South Vietnam
survived after the last US helicopter flew off: no time at all.
The consensus is to stay the course, to finish the job. But Iraq
is getting harder for America, not easier. The guerrillas are getting bolder and
more efficient. Fury at America, in Iraq and the rest of the Muslim world, is
intensifying. The cost in blood and money is rising rapidly.
Unless the military and political trends in Iraq change in a big
way, America's situation there will just worsen with time, not improve, while
the consequences of pulling out will not become any less dreadful.
THIS HAS always been the biggest hole in Bush's war plan - the
lack of an exit strategy. His generals could come up with a military plan to get
rid of Saddam, and a military plan to pacify the country afterward, but nobody
could come up with a political plan to prevent Iraq from reverting to form - or
even worse - once American troops left.
For the US to go to war in Iraq, only for Iraq to fall back into
the hands of the Ba'athists, or Islamic revolutionaries, or to explode in a
civil war that could destabilize the Mideast, and in any event to be gored by
the vengeance and savagery that an American withdrawal would unleash - this was
not an option.
On the other hand, for the US to try to keep a lid on Iraq by
occupying the country forever with masses of troops - this was not an option,
either.
With all the worst, America-hating political forces vying for
power in Iraq - as in the Arab world at large - how could Iraq be made to stand
on its own two feet, more or less, as a peaceful country where Saddamists, al-Qaida
and the rest of America's enemies were shut down?
Given the reality of the Middle East, it seemed impossible. But
George W. Bush and his people don't take no for an answer, so with can-do spirit
they envisioned a Middle East as they'd like it to be, and found their answer:
Democracy.
Once Iraq became a democracy, it would naturally ally itself with
America in the war against terror. Once Iraq became a democracy, it would be
possible to declare mission accomplished and mean it, and bring the boys home.
But between Bush's natural cynicism about nation-building and his
traumatic encounter with the Middle East on 9/11, not to mention his utter
frustration with the Palestinians and the loathing he can't help but notice
coming at him from the Arab and Muslim world, where does he suddenly come to
believe that Iraq can be transformed into a stable democracy?
He doesn't believe it. Bush only talked himself into believing it
because he had no choice - his war plan was short an exit strategy, so he took
neoconservative advice and adopted democracy as his desperate excuse for one.
In truth, though, there is no exit strategy. America has no way
to get out of Iraq without all hell breaking loose. So America digs in, and all
hell is breaking loose. Like I said - a tragedy.
?
Nov. 9, 2003
Don't give up on 'hasbara'
By
OVADIA SOFER
There is
no shortage of explanations for the recent EU survey which found that Europeans
believe Israel is a greater threat to world peace than North Korea. Factors that
might explain Europe's attitudes which are bandied about include anti-Semitism,
entrenched interests in the Arab world and the possibly tendentious way the
study itself was conducted.
These
explanations are not completely satisfactory. For in fact, Israel is failing to
explain itself to Europe. A mere lack of funds or the failure to employ public
relations experts cannot fully explain the difficulty Israel has in getting its
message across to Europe.
At the
same time, anyone systematically following the European press cannot fail to
note the deep shock 9/11 caused Europe's establishment. It suddenly realized the
danger it faces from a massive and uncontrolled presence of millions of Muslim
immigrants, most of them North African but some from Asia and black Africa.
These
immigrants are not successfully integrated into European society. And some of
them are a possible source of subversion or recruitment into the ranks of
Islamic terror groups.
We must
remember that the initial organization of the 9/11 attacks began on European
soil, where the organizers found a vast pool of Muslim zealots.
At the
same time, this very presence of Muslims has forced European decision makers to
lower their voices. They have essentially tried to buy peace by granting vocal
support to the Palestinian cause and to various peace programs, even when the
reality on the ground did not justify them.
Resolving
the Palestinian problem is presented by European governments as the mother of
all solutions. This approach has introduced into European public opinion the
notion that only peace with the Palestinians can save the enlightened world from
the scourge of terrorism.
A VOCAL
Palestinian presence has taken root in the Western European media. And it is
this presence that helps explain the EU poll results better than all the other
possible explanations.
The
Palestinian presence has led to a situation in which shocking attacks against
Israeli civilians draw less and less coverage. When they do, respected
television broadcasters refer to the suicide murderers as "militants" or
"activists."
The
attitude of governments - and the intimate relations between diplomatic
representatives and government leaders - has a direct impact on the behavior of
the media in European states, especially when it comes to Israel and the
Palestinians.
The
Palestinians have learned the media lesson and have placed supremely articulate
people who excel at public relations at the top of their European delegations.
This pool
of Palestinian talent has no equal, even if Israel had a larger and better
public relations budget.
The
transparency of Israeli society and the country's internal divisions are
exploited to condemn Israeli policies.
Palestinian penetration of Europe, sometimes using professional propagandists,
into universities and campuses has yielded impressive gains. These are reflected
today in growing support for the Palestinian cause even among Jewish
intellectuals who are willing to sign petitions to boycott Israeli personalities
and scientific institutions.
Ignorance
also plays a role. A recent survey of a European campuses found that a sizable
majority of young people believe there once was an independent Palestinian state
on Palestinian land that was conquered by European immigrants and Holocaust
survivors - who expelled hundreds of thousands of unfortunate Palestinians.
An
understanding of the connection between the Jewish people and its land is
nonexistent in some student circles.
Moreover,
Israeli achievements in many areas - science, technology, medicine, art and
culture - do not always receive appropriate exposure in the enlightened world.
Again, it
is not just a budgetary issue. Even today external resources can be raised from
foundations, corporations, and sometimes even from the budgets of host
governments to organize exhibits about Israeli cultural values.
For
instance, a major exhibit, "From the Bible to Today," was held in Paris in 1985
and drew an audience of hundreds of thousands of people who learned about the
strong link between the Israeli nation and its country.
It is
true that the reality on the ground is difficult and maybe even discouraging to
Israeli representatives overseas.
But just
as the security establishment has to deal with a new and complex situation, so
too it behooves us to recruit foreign service staffers and unify available
resources to better deal with the challenges facing Israel's image.
The
writer is a former ambassador to France.
?
HSBC: Exports leading economic recovery
By
ZEV STUB
Israel is
experiencing an economic recovery, led primarily by exports, and with the
balance of payments in "extremely good shape," the stage is set for the Bank of
Israel to lower the key interest rate to 4.5% by March 2004, HSBC investment
bank economist David Lubin said in a report this week.
The
recovery of exports is taking place in two stages, Lubin wrote. "Lower-tech"
sectors - such as food, machinery, and equipment - have benefited from the
depreciating exchange rate and seen the greatest export growth until now.
"Higher-tech" exports, on the other hand, are primarily dependent on external
demand conditions, not the price of the shekel. These sectors have continued to
decline, but should begin to grow more rapidly, especially if the Nasdaq
continues to perform well.
Stronger
exports have buoyed Israel's balance of payments, and Israel's current account
is almost certain to be in surplus for the first time since 1990. This is
important for two reasons, Lubin said. First, as a "net creditor" to the rest of
the world, Israel's risk of default on external debt is reduced, alleviating
some of the concerns of the ratings agencies. Second, it removes obstacles to
cuts in interest rates, since it has less need to attract capital inflows.
Foreign direct investment is already high, with $1.7 billion coming in during
the first half of the year.
The
strong balance of payments is also a primary cause of the shekel's current
strength, which has put excessive downward pressure on inflation and
inflationary expectations. This fall "has created a situation in which real
interest rates are still exceptionally high for an economy growing as slowly as
Israel's," Lubin wrote. Although rates have come down from 9.1% to 5.6% in the
last 12 months, he said there is still room for further easing, to 4.5% by
March. Bond yields could also be eased, allowing 2012 bonds to fall below 7%. As
rates come down, the main driver of growth would shift from exports to private
domestic spending, Lubin said.
?
Why build the fence?
?
"If a fence could save your children,
??????? you'd build one too"
?
"Israel has a right to protect its citizens"
?
?
?
?
Communique: 11 November 2003
AP OMITS TERROR IN ISRAEL
Dear HonestReporting
Subscriber,??
?
On Nov. 8, the
Associated Press released a list of "Recent Terror Attacks Around the World"
to accompany reports on Saturday's deadly bombing in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia. The list notes
Islamic terrorism all over the world since 1998, but completely ignores all
Palestinian terrorist attacks that occurred in Israel.
This is becoming a disturbing pattern in media chronicles of Islamic terror ‾ if
it happened in Israel, it just doesn't count:
AP published a similar list of "Recent World Terror Attacks" on May 19,
which also omitted attacks in Israel, and
The New York Times Online devotes a special section to world terror that
leaves Israel conspicuously absent. [In response to HonestReporting
subscribers' complaints, the Times adjusted not the content of the section,
but rather its title, eliminating the word "terror."]
Curiously, AP does note the bombing of the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Kenya
(11/2002). Certainly Kenya isn't the first place that springs to mind when
recalling recent Palestinian terror. Are we to conclude that AP considers terror
attacks against Israeli civilians in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem somehow less
objectionable than those conducted offshore?
For a list of "major" Palestinian terror attacks in Israeli in the past years
‾ none of which is
included in the AP list ‾
click here.
Comments to:
feedback@ap.org
Thank you for your ongoing involvement in the battle against media bias.
HonestReporting.com
--- MEDIA WAKE UP ---
Two media reports detailing Palestinian Authority corruption and funding of
terror were recently released:
‾ On Sunday (Nov. 9),
CBS' 60 Minutes aired an investigative report entitled "Arafat's Billions"
that confirms Yassir Arafat's secret portfolio worth more than $1 billion.
Arafat's personal fortune, the report reveals, has been almost entirely
accumulated though embezzlement of tax revenues and handouts from the likes of
Saddam Hussein, the KGB, and the Saudis. This, while the Palestinian population
suffers from extreme poverty and lack of civilian infrastructure. 60 Minutes
also reported that "Arafat transfers $100,000 a month from funds directed to the
Palestinian Authority to his wife Suha," who lives the good life in
Paris.
‾
BBC (yes, the BBC) published a report that the PA, under Arafat's direction,
is paying members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades up to $50,000 a month. The
al-Aksa Martyrs' Brigade, which has admitted to at least 13 suicide bombings
against Israeli citizens in the past three years, is almost always referred to
in
media reports as "loosely tied to Arafat's Fatah faction"
‾
a description that exonerates Arafat from his active enabling of Palestinian
terror.
HonestReporting encourages subscribers to commend CBS and BBC for their
investigative work, and to encourage your local media to note Arafat's
corruption and active support for the al-Aksa Martyrs' Brigade in forthcoming
reports.
Comments to 60 Minutes:
click here
Comments to BBC:
newsonline@bbc.co.uk
Another encouraging
sign from the BBC: The
Daily Telegraph reported today that the BBC has appointed a "senior
editorial advisor" to oversee BBC coverage of the Mideast, due to ongoing
criticism of BBC's anti-Israeli bias.? A real victory for HonestReporting media
monitors!?
?
?
========== ABOUT HONESTREPORTING
==========
The HonestReporting
documentary film "Relentless: The Struggle For Peace in Israel"
has now been seen by thousands of people at over 100 public screenings across
the globe. For info on a screening in your area, or to order your personal copy,
visit
Relentless online.
HonestReporting
welcomes you to
submit media critiques for possible inclusion in future communiques. Be sure
to include a URL of the article you are critiquing, and send to:
action@honestreporting.com.
Encourage your friends
to join HonestReporting. Send a friendly
info message.
HONESTREPORTING INFO SHEET to print out, post on bulletin boards, photocopy
and distribute. Get the word out to schools, places of worship, community
centers.
?
And follow up:
Attacks Against Jews Don't Count
The Associated Press has a compilation of Recent (Islamic) Terror Attacks Around
the World. And not one attack in Israel is mentioned.
Here's what the AP had to say (from LGF again):
A local AP reporter, who had nothing to do with the story, but was somewhat
helpful (and mildly concerned) said the story was filed as a sidebar to the
story about the recent attack in Saudi Arabia. The story was filed in Riyadh.
Shocking (not). She sent me to their NY/Intl office. The Int'l desk would not
elaborate, and first sent me into a general comment voice mail box. A followup
phone call to the same
Int'l desk (via main no.: (212) 621-1720) gave little additional info. He first
suggested I write to AP at 550 Rockefeller Plaza, NY NY 10020. I told him a wire
service couldn't possibly expect a complaint requiring a correction should go
through the mail, he suggested I contact corporate communications (!) during
business hours at 212/621-1670. I asked him for the name of the International
Editor. He wouldn't give it to me. I asked him for his editor's email address.
He wouldn't give it to me. I told him that it is a disgrace that the AP could
run a story listing an account of recent terror attacks in places such as Yemen,
Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Phillipines, Morocco etc but couldn't bring itself to
include mention of any attacks in Israel, in which hundreds of men, women and
children have been killed and thousands of others maimed.
The reporter then hung up on me.
?
Then here's a list for you -
Date Location Casualities Responsibilty Notes
October 4, 2003 Haifa 19 killed, 60 wounded Islamic Jihad Suicide bombing in
restaurant owned by Jews and Arabs
August 19, 2003 Jerusalem 22 killed, 135 wounded Hamas Suicide bombing on a bus.
January 5, 2003 Tel Aviv 23 killed, 108 injured Fatah al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Two suicide bombers in an immigrant neighborhood
June 5, 2002 Megiddo 17 killed, 38 injured Islamic Jihad Car bomb next to bus
May 27, 2002 Petah Tikvah 2 killed, 37 injured Fatah al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Suicide bomb in shopping mall
May 22, 2002 Rishon Lezion 2 killed, 40 wounded Suicide bomb on pedestrian mall
May 19, 2002 Netanya 3 killed, 59 injured Hamas and the PFLP Suicide bomb in
market
May 7, 2002 Rishon Lezion 16 killed, 55 injured Hamas Suicide bomb in pool hall
Apr 12, 2002 Jerusalem 6 killed, 104 injured Fatah al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Suicide bomb in Mahane Yehuda market
Apr 10, 2002 Kibbutz Yagur 8 killed, 22 injured Hamas Suicide bombing on bus
March 31, 2002 Haifa 14 Killed, 40 Wounded Hamas Suicide bombing at restaurant
March 29, 2002 Jerusalem 2 killed, 28 Wounded Fatah al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Suicide bombing at supermarket in Kiryat Yovel
March 27, 2002 Netanya 22 killed, 140 Wounded Hamas Suicide bombing at Passover
seder at Park Hotel
March 21, 2002 Jerusalem 3 killed, 86 Wounded Fatah al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Suicide bombing downtown
March 20, 2002 Afula 7 killed, 30 wounded Fatah al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade Suicide
bombing on bus
March 14, 2002 Karni-Netzarim road 3 Killed, 2 Wounded Fatah al-Aksa Martyrs
Brigade Remote Control Mine
March 12, 2002 near Kibbutz Matzuva 6 Killed, 7 Wounded Fatah al-Aksa Martyrs
Brigade Gunmen Ambush Vehicles
March 12, 2002 Kiryat Sefer checkpoint 1 Killed, 1 Wounded Shooting Attack
March 11, 2002 Ashdod 1 Wounded Gunman Opens Fire at Bar Mitzvah
March 10, 2002 Netzarim 1 Killed Fatah al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade Shooting Attack
March 9, 2002 Jerusalem 11 Killed, 54 Wounded Hamas Suicide Bomber at Cafe
March 9, 2002 Netanya 2 Killed, 50 Wounded Fatah al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade 2
Gunmen Open Fire on a Promenade
March 7, 2002 Atzmona 5 Killed, 23 Wounded Terrorist Opens Fire and Throws
Grenades
March 7, 2002 Ariel >6 Wounded Suicide Bomber in Hotel Lobby
March 5, 2002 Sderot 1 Baby Wounded Kassam Rocket
March 5, 2002 Afula 1 Killed, 10 Wounded Suicide Bomber on Bus
March 5, 2002 Tel Aviv 3 Killed, >35 Wounded Gunman Opens Fire at Restaurants
March 5, 2002 outside Bethlehem 1 Killed, 1 Wounded Gunman Ambushes Vehicle
March 2, 2002 Jerusalem 10 Killed, >50 Wounded Fatah Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Suicide Bomber outside Synagogue
February 27, 2002 West Bank 3 Wounded Fatah Female Suicide Bomber
February 25, 2002 Jerusalem 1 Killed, 8 Wounded Fatah Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Gunman Opens Fire at a Bus
Stop
February 25, 2002 Gush Etzion 1 Killed, 1 Pregnant Woman Wounded Fatah Al-Aksa
Martyrs Brigade Gunmen Open Fire on a Car
February 22, 2002 Efrat 1 Wounded Suicide Bomber in Supermarket
February 22, 2002 North of Jerusalem 1 Killed Fatah Drive-by Shooting
February 19, 2002 En Arik 6 Killed, 1 Wounded Fatah Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Gunmen Open Fire at Soldiers
February 18, 2002 Gush Katif 3 Killed, 4 Wounded Fatah Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Gunfire and Bombs at Cars
February 18, 2002 near Jerusalem 1 Killed, 1 Injured Fatah Al-Aksa Martyrs
Brigade Car Bomb
February 16, 2002 Karnei Shomron 2 Killed, 27 Wounded Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine Suicide Bomber at Crowded Shopping Mall
February 14, 2002 Gaza 3 Killed, 4 Wounded Mine Placed Under Tank
February 10, 2002 Be'er Sheva 2 Killed, 4 Wounded Hamas Drive-by Shooting
February 8, 2002 Jerusalem 1 Killed 4 Teenagers with Knives
February 6, 2002 Moshav Hamra 2 Killed, 5 Wounded Hamas Gunmen Infiltrates
Moshav
January 30, 2002 Taiba 2 Wounded Fatah Suicide Bomber
January 27, 2002 Jerusalem 1 Killed, >150 Wounded Fatah Female Suicide Bomber
January 25, 2002 Tel Aviv 24 Wounded Islamic Jihad Suicide Bomber at Crowded
Pedestrian Shopping Mall
January 22, 2002 Jerusalem 2 Killed, 40 Wounded Fatah Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Guman Opens Fire on Crowd
January 17, 2002 Hadera 6 Killed, 35 Wounded Fatah Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
Gunman Opens Fire at Bat Mitzvah Celebration
January 15, 2002 Beit Jala 1 Killed Fatah Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade American
Kidnapped and Murdered
January 9, 2002 Kerem Shalom 4 Killed, 2 Wounded Hamas Gunfire and Expolsives
It seems that AP legitimizes attacks on Israeli civilians, as long as they're
inside Israel (or the territories). It also legitimizes attacks on Russian
civilians, Indian civilians, and Iraqi civilians.
?
Another of Arafat's lunatic remarks:
?
RAMALLAH, November 10,2003 (IPC + WAFA)[Official PA website]--
?
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat asserted that Israel used depleted uranium against the Palestinian people, which was evidently verified by American and European assertions as well as the cancer rate among Palestinians has risen similar to that caused in "Hiroshima".?
?
?
?
Arafat's Billions
Nov. 9,
2003
(CBS)?Yasser
Arafat diverted nearly $1 billion in public funds to insure his political
survival, but a lot more is unaccounted for.
Jim Prince and a team of American accountants - hired by Arafat's own finance
ministry - are combing through Arafat's books. Given what they've already
uncovered, Arafat may be rethinking the decision. Lesley Stahl reports.
"What is Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority worth today?" asks accountant
Jim Prince. "Who is controlling that money? Where is that money? How do we get
it back?"
So far, Prince's team has determined that part of the Palestinian leader's
wealth was in a secret portfolio worth close to $1 billion -- with investments
in companies like a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Ramallah, a Tunisian cell phone
company and venture capital funds in the U.S. and the Cayman Islands.
Although the money for the portfolio came from public funds like Palestinian
taxes, virtually none of it was used for the Palestinian people; it was all
controlled by Arafat. And, Prince says, none of these dealings were made public.
"Our whole point is to bring it out of control of any one person," Prince says.
That's what happened with the portfolio money, which is now under the control of
Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank official who Arafat was forced to appoint
finance minister last year after crowds began protesting his corrupt regime.
According to Fayyad, "There is corruption out there. There is abuse. There is
impropriety, and that's what had to be fixed."
Statements like that have earned Fayyad, a bookish technocrat who spent 20 years
in the U.S., a reputation for courage - which was enhanced when he immediately
posted the details of Arafat's secret portfolio on the Internet.
Fayyad's investigators are treading softly, well aware that their probe may
become too embarrassing for Arafat.
Has he tried to stop them? "We run into obstacles in a number of places,
particularly among the old PLO types," Prince says, adding one might draw their
own conclusions as to whether his statement includes Arafat himself.
Martin Indyk, a top adviser on the Middle East in the Clinton administration and
now head of the Saban Center, a Washington think-tank, says Arafat was always
traveling the world, looking for handouts. Money, he says, is "essential" to
Arafat's survival.
"Arafat for years would cry poor, saying, 'I can't pay the salaries, we're gonna
have a disaster here, the Palestinian economy is going to collapse,'" says Indyk.
"And we would all mouth those words: 'The Palestinian economy is going to
collapse if we don't do something about this.' But at the same time, he's
accumulating hundreds of millions of dollars."
The stockpile went well beyond the portfolio. Arafat accumulated another $1
billion with the help of -- of all people -- the Israelis. Under the Oslo
Accords, it was agreed that Israel would collect sales taxes on goods purchased
by Palestinians and transfer those funds to the Palestinian treasury. But
instead, Indyk says, "that money is transferred to Yasser Arafat to, amongst
other places, bank accounts which he maintains off-line in Israel."
Until three years ago, Israel put the tax revenues into Arafat's account at Bank
Leumi in downtown Tel Aviv, no questions asked. But why?
According to Indyk, "The Israelis came to us and said, basically, 'Arafat's job
is to clean up Gaza. It's going to be a difficult job. He needs walking-around
money,' because the assumption was that he would use it to get control of all of
these terrorists who'd been operating in these areas for decades."
Obviously, that hasn't happened. No one knows this better than Dennis Ross, who
was Middle East negotiator for the first President Bush and President Clinton,
and now heads the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He says Arafat's
"walking-around money" financed a vast patronage system.
"I used to see that people came in, you know, with their requests," Ross says.
"'I need a phone. I need an operation. I need a job.' Arafat had money to
dispense."
Like a Chicago ward boss, he still doles out oodles of money; Fayyad says he
pays his security forces alone $20 million a month, all of it in cash.
All told, U.S. officials estimate Arafat's personal nest egg at between $1
billion and $3 billion.
Arafat may have $1 billion, but he sure isn't spending it to live well. He's
holed up in his Ramallah compound, which the Israelis all but reduced to rubble
a year-and-a-half ago. Arafat has always lived modestly, which you can't say
about his wife, Suha. According to Israeli officials, she gets $100,000 a month
from Arafat out of the Palestinian budget, and lives lavishly in Paris on this
allowance.
He also uses the money to bolster his own standing. Both Israeli and U.S.
sources say those recent outpourings of support at Arafat's compound were
"rent-a-rallies," and that Arafat has spent millions to support terrorists and
purchase weapons.
Did he steal from his own people?
"He defines himself as being the embodiment of the Palestinian people," Ross
answers. "So what's good for him is good for them. Did they benefit? The answer
is no. Did they lose? The answer is yes."
Palestinians certainly paid dearly for something else Fayyad uncovered: a system
of monopolies in commodities -- like flour and cement -- that Arafat handed out
to his cronies, who then turned around and fleeced the public.
Fayyad says it could accurately be seen as gouging his own people. "And
especially in Gaza which is poorer, which is something that is totally
unacceptable and immoral, actually."
Of all the monopolies, none was as lucrative or as corrupt as the General
Petroleum Corporation, the one for gasoline. The corporation took the fuel it
purchased from an Israeli company and watered it down with kerosene, not only
defrauding the Palestinian drivers, but wrecking their car engines.
Fayyad says the Petroleum Corporation charged exorbitant prices, and Arafat got
a hefty kickback. "To the president, I can tell you, if there was not money in
the treasury, he went to the Petroleum Corporation."
When Fayyad dismantled the corporation, the man who had run it fled to
California. Ever since, with the monopoly broken up, Palestinian drivers have
paid 20 percent less for gas and 80 percent less for diesel fuel. Gas stations
now advertise 100 percent pure products.
Fayyad became a hero, like the Robin Hood of the Palestinians. Millions of
people were affected by this one move.
He says he was just doing his job. "A lot of this is about, you know,
distinguishing between right and wrong. And that's a straightforward
proposition."
Mohammed Rachid, Arafat's economic adviser who set up his tangled web of
investments and monopolies, says he's cooperating with Fayyad's investigators.
Rachid left the Palestinian territories about a year ago under a cloud. He asked CBS News not to reveal where we met him for his first television
interview.
"I'm proud of what I did till now," Rachid says. "I think I showed a good
performance."
He's referring to the investment portfolio he managed for Arafat. He also opened
that account at the Leumi Bank in Tel Aviv. According to a recent report by the
International Monetary Fund, that secret account was: "Under the control of
President Arafat and his financial adviser Mohammed Rachid" -- and no one else.
"If we are having a secret account, we should have it in Israel? You think this
is logical?" Rachid asks.
But that's what the Israelis, and the people working for Fayyad, say it was.
Rachid says that "transfers to Leumi Bank account never stayed. It was receiving
the revenues and transferring the revenues to the Palestinian Authority's
account in the Arab bank in Gaza."
He's saying the Leumi money was sent to the Palestinian Authority. But, in fact,
much of it was sent to Switzerland, to the prestigious Lombard Odier Bank, for
yet another secret investment account that held over $300 million. In a letter
obtained by CBS News, Rachid tells the bank that the funds will come from
Palestinian "taxes" and "customs revenues."
"It was all under the name of the Palestinian authorities," Rachid says. Doesn't
he mean Arafat? "No, Palestinian Authorities, Palestinian Authorities."
Actually, it was under a code name, "Ledbury" -- not the Palestinian Authority
-- and Minister Fayyad says that this pot of money, too, was available only to
Arafat. The Swiss account was closed out in 2001. No one really knows where that
money is today.
Does Rachid think that it should have gone, in some way, back to help the
Palestinian people?
"Of course," he says. But, "I don't, I don't decide what we do with the money."
Those who want to know why Arafat didn't bring the money back, he says, should
ask him. But Arafat didn't want to talk.
There's yet another stash of money Arafat might be asked about: the funds he
collected when he was chairman of the PLO in exile. The PLO's former treasurer
told us he saw Saddam Hussein hand Arafat a $50 million check for supporting him
during the first Gulf War. And there were other large gifts from the KGB and the
Saudis.
Ross says, "Arafat used to say to me, 'Where's my money? You need to go to the
Saudis and get my money.' It was never the Palestinians' money."
Fayyad is trying to make sure it's the people's money, but many say his one-man
reform effort is having only limited success. Arafat recently sent armed men to
prevent Fayyad from replacing the head of the civil service, who runs Arafat's
patronage apparatus. That has lead some to think Fayyad himself could be in
danger.
"He cannot know, and we cannot know at what point he crosses the red line," says
Indyk.
Other people who have dared to call for transparency of all these finances have
been beaten up, shot, and silenced. Why is Fayyad surviving? Indyk says, "We
should not take it for granted."
He has upset so many powerful people, and his offices have already been
ransacked more than once. But Fayyad says he does not feel threatened.
"It's a dangerous neighborhood," he admits. "But you know this is about, you
know, doing the right thing for the people."
?
Nov 11
??
SYRIA COMPLETES CHEMICAL WARHEADS
?
DAMASCUS [MENL] -- Syria has completed chemical warheads for its arsenal of Scud-based missiles.
?
U.S. officials said Syria, with help from North Korea, has succeeded in
designing and installing CW warheads for the Scud B, Scud C and Scud D
missiles. This provides Syria with warheads that can reach distances from 250 to nearly 700 kilometers.
?
The chemical agent deployed in the CW warheads is sarin, regarded as the most toxic of material. Syria has also been developing more toxic agents such as VX.
?
"Since the 1970s, Syria has pursued what is now one of the most advanced Arab state chemical weapons capabilities," Undersecretary of State John Bolton said on Oct. 30. "It has a stockpile of the nerve agent sarin that can be delivered by aircraft or ballistic missiles, and has engaged in the research and development of more toxic and? persistent nerve agents such as VX."
?
The Dems' Savior?
Attempting to explain why liberating Kosovo was a good idea but liberating Iraq
was not, Wesley Clark, in an interview with The New Yorker, reaches new heights
of incoherence:
In a
speech at the University of Iowa College of Law, on September 19th, Clark had
declared that chief among America's mistakes was that it had gone to war in Iraq
without "the mantle of authority" bestowed by United Nations approval. But
hadn't the Kosovo war also been conducted without the endorsement of the U.N.
Security Council? Yes, Clark allowed, and in that regard the Kosovo war was
"technically illegal." He went on, "The Russians and the Chinese said they would
both veto it. There was never a chance that it would be authorized."
That
situation did not seem entirely dissimilar from the prewar maneuverings
regarding Iraq, when France and Germany said that they would oppose any Security
Council resolution authorizing an immediate war; Bush bypassed the U.N. and
resorted to an alliance with Prime Minister Tony Blair's Britain and sundry
lesser members of the "coalition of the willing." But there was one more
important difference, Clark said: the war against Serbia was waged to stop the
imminent threat of ethnic cleansing in the disputed province of Kosovo; the war
in Iraq, he said, was waged under false pretenses.
Got that?
It was OK to wage an "illegal" war in Kosovo because of an "imminent threat" not
to America or its allies but to the civilian population there--as if Saddam
Hussein didn't pose an imminent threat to Iraqis.
?
ISRAELI ARAB WHO DROVE SUICIDE TERRORIST TO
??? MAXIM RESTAURANT ON 4.10.2003, ARRESTED
(Communicated by the GPO)
Monday, November 10, 2003
?
The ISA and the Israel Police, in a joint operation, on 4.10.2003, in the
wake of the suicide bombing of the Maxim Restaurant in Haifa earlier in the
day, in which 23 people (including three children and a baby girl) were
murdered and over 60 people were wounded
http://www.israel-mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0nuf0 , arrested Um al Fahm
resident Jamal Mahajaneh, who has since admitted to driving Palestinian
suicide terrorist Hanadi Jaradat from the Barta'a area to the restaurant.
?
Mahajaneh had been known to the security authorities as a driver who was
engaged in smuggling Palestinian residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza to
inside Israeli territory.? In September 2003, he had been warned not to
engage in such illegal activities.
?
[IMRA: Israel Radio reported that after the attack Mahajaneh erased all
records of his telephone calls from his cellular telephone, removed
coverings from his car and burned his clothing.? His attorney claims
Mahajaneh simply did not want to have bloody clothing
in his home.
?
892 killed,? 5,984 injured, 19,392 attacks 29 September 2000 through 9
November 2003
IDF Spokesperson 10 November 2003
?
Killed: 629 Civilians + 263 Security Forces = 892 Total Israeli Killed
Injured: 4,247 Civilians + 1,737 Security Forces = 5,984 Total Israeli
Injured
Total Attacks*:? 8,060 West Bank + 10,561 Gaza Strip + 771 Home Front
=19,392 Total
?
* Does not include attacks with rocks or firebombs.
** "Israeli" includes tourists and foreign workers.
?
?
Sep. 25, 2003
At UN, Shalom calls for 'infrastructure of peace'
By
MELISSA RADLER
NEW YORK
Holding a 175-page thick sheaf of anti-Israel resolutions adopted by the United
Nations General Assembly last year, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom urged the
international body to "rise above the tired politics of yesterday and adopt a
new, courageous agenda for tomorrow."
Shalom, who addressed the General Assembly's 58th annual debate yesterday,
called on member states to "move away from the partisan hostility that has taken
over the Middle East agenda."
"No country has suffered such unjustified attack and consistent discrimination
within the UN system. The time has come to end this campaign of diplomatic
incitement," he said. He called for an end to the yearly passage of dozens of
anti-Israel resolutions, most of them adopted annually by a majority of the UN's
191 members since the 1970s.
Shalom's 20-minute address was followed by loud applause from the audience, and
he was greeted by a receiving line of foreign dignitaries upon his exit from the
assembly chamber.
Despite being pilloried regularly at the General Assembly, Shalom held meetings,
described in positive terms by aides, with some 30 heads of state and foreign
ministers during his three-day stay in New York. Among those he discussed Middle
East peace with was the King of Morocco and foreign ministers from Jordan,
Qatar, Oman and Tunisia, where Shalom was born. In a half-hour meeting with US
Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday morning, Shalom argued that the
security fence will enable peace talks to go forward by halting terrorism, and
Powell urged Israel not to take "irreversible measures" with regard to
Palestinian Authority Yasser Arafat, according to a participant. Powell also
noted that the US considers the road map alive and well.
On Wednesday, US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice discussed the fence
with Shalom, and she called Arafat "an obstacle to peace," according to a
participant.
Two years after the Israeli government declared Arafat "irrelevant," Shalom
devoted a section of his remarks yesterday to denouncing Arafat, calling him
"one of the world's icons of terror," and "the greatest obstacle to people
between our peoples," Israelis and Palestinians. He urged the international
community to enable the emergence of moderate Palestinian leaders by isolating
Arafat, and he condemned last week's General Assembly vote denouncing an Israeli
cabinet decision to "remove" Arafat as a vote against the Palestinians.
"To vote for Arafat is to vote against the Palestinian people. When Arafat wins,
terrorism wins, and we all lose," he said.
Shalom also called on member nations to fight a unified battle against terror
and penalize member states, specifically Syria and Iran, and organizations that
sponsor attacks.
In addition to dismantling the terrorist infrastructure, states should be
encouraged to build an "infrastructure of peace," which includes the promotion
of tolerance in the press, government, education, science and business.
"It is up to political and moral leaders everywhere to foster an environment
which rejects extremism and empowers the peacemakers," he said.
?
Sep. 25, 2003
Text of Silvan Shalom's address to UN General Assembly
Following is the text of Foreign Minister Silvan
Shalom's speech to the United Nations 58th General Assembly on Thursday, 25
September 2003, as released by the Government Press Office.
Mr. Secretary General,
Mr. President,
Distinguished Delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I
would like to congratulate His Excellency, the Foreign Minister of St. Lucia,
upon his assumption of the presidency of the General Assembly, and wish him much
success.
Mr. President,
Until just one month ago, every person in this hall and every member of this
organization joined us in the hope that the Middle East peace process might
finally be back on track, and that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict might be on the horizon.
The establishment of a new Palestinian government promised an end to terror and
a new beginning.
This glimmer of hope was darkened on August 19th by the extremists who blew up a
bus full of Jewish families on their way home from prayers at the Western Wall,
the holiest site in the Jewish religion. Twenty three people, young and old,
mothers and babies in their cradles, were slaughtered in this attack. This
attack was carried out by Hamas, a terrorist organization, which under the
Roadmap should have been dismantled by the Palestinian Authority.
Failure to dismantle Hamas has brought our diplomatic efforts to a standstill.
Rather than acting to fulfill its obligation, the Palestinian Authority has
chosen the route of inaction, and complicity in terror.
We cannot allow this to continue. We must bring back the hope that we can build
a better future for our children. The infrastructure of terror must be
dismantled so that we can put our peace efforts back on track. There is no other
time. There is no other way.
Mr. President,
For many years it was thought that terrorism in the Middle East was Israel's
problem, not the world's. Today, the world knows otherwise.
Today, it is not only Israel which mourns the loss of its loved ones, women and
children and babies, at the hands of the terrorists. We have sadly been joined
by peoples from across the globe - from Mombassa to Casablanca, Moscow to Bali.
Even the United Nations, that for so many is a symbol of peace and goodwill, is
not immune.
Standing here today in New York, just two short years after September 11th, the
community of nations knows - that those who seek to advance their political
agendas through killing innocents, are ready to strike at anyone or anything
that represents the values of freedom and human life.
Terrorism has declared war on us all.
Israel has often stood alone in this battle. A country which has suffered more
than any other from terrorism, we have always understood the danger it poses to
democracy and freedom everywhere, even when others refused to see, and condemned
us for our actions. We have always understood that terrorism - no matter what
cause it claims to serve - seeks only to destroy, not to build.
There can be no neutrality in the war against terrorism and there can be no
immunity for those who engage in it. Abstaining is not an option.
This is not a war of choice. Terrorism will not be eliminated until the world
unites against it. Our only choice is to win. Every member of the international
community must take concrete and proactive measures to cut off all channels of
financial, moral and political support to this common enemy.
States - members of this institution - that sponsor terrorists and give them
shelter, are accomplices in the acts of terror themselves. They must be held
accountable for their crimes. It is no coincidence that states that sponsor
terrorism like Iran and Syria, are also striving to acquire Weapons of Mass
Destruction. Their hostility to freedom and the rule of law puts the very future
of humanity in jeopardy.
Mr. President,
I
know that for many in this place Yasser Arafat is seen as the symbol of the
Palestinian struggle. Tragically - for his people and for ours - he is one of
the world's icons of terror.
In the ten years since Arafat declared his commitment to Israel - and the world
- that he would no longer use terror, 1,126 Israelis have been killed and
thousands wounded in 19,000 separate Palestinian terrorist attacks.
In relative numbers, this would be the same as 11,000 French or 56,000 Americans
dying from terrorism in the same period of time.
This carnage must stop. Its impact on both societies is devastating.
Yasser Arafat bears direct responsibility for this terrible suffering. He has
led his people on the path of terror - from hijackings to suicide bombings - for
more than thirty years. Always preferring Israeli pain over Palestinian gain.
He has been - and he remains - the greatest obstacle to peace between our
peoples. For as long as he controls the levers of power - no moderate leadership
can emerge.
To vote for Arafat - like we saw in this Assembly just last week - is to vote
against the Palestinian people. When Arafat wins - terrorism wins, and we all
lose.
Instead of rallying around Arafat, the international community must rally around
the genuine interests of the Palestinian people.
They must do so now, before he leads them even further down the path of terror
and destruction.
Mr. President,
When a responsible and empowered Palestinian leadership finally emerges - a
leadership ready to join the war on terror - it will find us a willing partner
for peace.
Israel is committed to the vision for Middle East peace laid out by US President
George Bush on June 24th, 2002.
Israel will not compromise on the safety of its citizens. But we will go the
extra mile - as we have proven before - to bring peace and security to both our
peoples.
We are ready to work with the Palestinians and the international community to
make this vision a reality. For this to happen, the Palestinian leadership must
take the moral and strategic decision to abandon terrorism once and for all, and
make peacemaking possible.
They must guide their people to build their own society, rather than seeking to
destroy ours. They, too, must understand that it is not poverty that breeds
terror but terror that breeds poverty.
Dear Colleagues,
We cannot stop only at dismantling the infrastructure of terror. We must also
build an infrastructure of peace. It is up to political and moral leaders,
everywhere, to foster an environment which rejects extremism and empowers the
peacemakers.
This is particularly so in the Arab and Muslim world, where incitement against
Israel closes hearts and minds to the possibility of peace.
Leaders must guide their people away from the culture of hate, and replace it
with a culture of tolerance. Concrete expressions of cooperation and exchange
must be built - in media and government, education, science and business - to
reinforce the message of tolerance and acceptance.
For the sake of our collective future, voices of moderation must be heard.
Mr. President,
This culture of peace must permeate not only the borders of the Middle East. It
must permeate the walls of the United Nations as well.
In the past, the United Nations has shown that it can play a positive role. This
Assembly was key in the founding of the State of Israel, fifty-five years ago.
Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 are our guideposts, to negotiations and
peace.
To play such a constructive role in the future, the UN must reform. It must move
away from the partisan hostility that has taken over its Middle East agenda.
For more than three decades, this Assembly has passed every year a litany of
resolutions designed to discredit Israel, challenge its interests, and promote
the will of its greatest enemies.
In my hand, I am holding a collection of the decisions of the 57th General
Assembly on the Middle East. One hundred and seventy five pages filled not with
hope, but with the negative agendas of the past.
No other country has suffered such unjustified attack and consistent
discrimination within the UN system. The time has come to end this campaign of
diplomatic incitement.
For the sake of Israelis and Palestinians - for the sake of the UN and peace
itself - I call on this body to rise above the tired politics of yesterday, and
adopt a new, courageous agenda for tomorrow.
I
call on the General Assembly to abandon the automatic adoption of anti-Israel
resolutions, and to find ways of making itself relevant once again, to the
interests of the people it claims to serve. I call on this Assembly to fulfill
its historic mission and help promote what unites us, not what divides us.
Mr. President,
On the morning of February 1st of this year, Israel lost its first astronaut in
the Columbia-space-shuttle disaster - a skilled and courageous pilot whom I knew
personally, a child of Holocaust survivors, a national hero.
Colonel Ilan Ramon embodied the spirit of our nation. A man of courage and
action, dedicated to the well-being of his people, just as he sought to
contribute to the advancement of his fellow man.
He met his death together with colleagues from the United States and India, on a
scientific mission in the name of humanity as a whole.
Israel's place in such endeavors of international cooperation and accomplishment
is no coincidence. In the fifty-five years since the State of Israel was
established, recognized, and welcomed into the family of nations - our
achievements in the fields of science and technology, the arts and literature,
agriculture and medicine, have come to rank with the best in the world.
Our international cooperation program is celebrated in over a hundred countries
around the globe - sharing skills, experience and knowledge to the benefit of
millions of people.
We extend this hand of friendship to all the nations of the world. We welcome
our improving relations with Europe, just as we remain committed to promoting
closer ties with the nations of Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Mr. President,
The Zionist vision of Israel's founders was to bring into the world a state in
our ancient homeland to serve as a haven for our people from persecution. A
place where the Jewish people could fulfill its right to self-determination in
the modern era. A bastion of democracy and opportunity for all its citizens.
Our founders also made a promise not just to the people of Israel, but to the
people of the Middle East as a whole - to pursue peace and to work for the
common advancement of our region.
I
know personally the profound meaning of this historic undertaking. I came to
Israel as a young refugee from Tunisia. I serve as one of hundreds of thousands
of immigrants to whom Israel has granted promise and protection, freedom and
opportunity, through the values and institutions of democracy.
I
stand here today to reaffirm, before the nations of the world, the commitment of
my country to peace.
Peace for the people of Israel is both a moral and historic imperative. "Shalom"
- the word for peace in Hebrew - is central to our language and our heritage. It
is how we say Hallo and it is how we say Goodbye. It is a name we give to our
children. It is my own family name.
It was our prophet Isaiah, who brought this message of peace to the world
already centuries ago, when he said: "And they shall beat their swords into
ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword
against nation, neither shall they learn war any more".
Israel's historic record is clear. Whenever a true partner for peace emerged, he
was met with Israel's extended hand.
This was true when President Anwar Sadat of Egypt came to Jerusalem in 1977 and
it was true when King Hussein of Jordan signed the Peace Treaty with us in 1994.
The same is true today.
Israel stands ready to complete the circle of peace with all its neighbors. Real
peace. Not just peace for the headlines, but peace which brings an end to
violence and hostility, and positive change for the citizens of our region.
From this great podium - a podium shared by all humanity - I call on the leaders
of Syria and Lebanon, of Iran and of the Palestinian people - to abandon once
and for all their hostility towards us, and join us in building a better future
for our children.
Mr. President,
This evening I shall return to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Jewish
people, to join with them in celebrating Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
According to our tradition, this is a time when G-d determines the fate of each
and every individual for the coming year.
These are days of reflection and prayer.
May all our prayers for peace and for life be answered.
And may the actions and deeds of all the states and peoples represented here in
this hall, bring to mankind - peace and security, and all the blessings that
life can offer.
?
?
Sep. 28, 2003
IDF: Palestinian terrorists manipulating children
By
ARIEH O'SULLIVAN
On Friday evening, an IDF patrol captured two Palestinian youths who had tried
to slip through the security fence surrounding the Gaza Strip north of the Sufa
Crossing.
When they got near the fence they spotted the patrol, became frightened, crossed
over and were captured by the soldiers. The patrol took them in for questioning
and it turned out the two, one aged 16 and the other 15, said they had been
dispatched by an adult to fetch weapons and illegal materiel.
They told their questioners that the man had offered them money if they would
sneak past the heavily patrolled fence and bring back bags that had been placed
near the fence. Inside the bags were supposed to be a cellular telephone,
weapons, and other items, the army said.
Searches over the weekend did not turn up the bags, but did discover two large
bombs planted on the patrol road used by IDF forces, military sources said. The
bombs were between 40-50 kilograms each set to go off when an armored vehicle
passed over a detonator. Soldiers had earlier spotted Palestinians digging in
the area. They fired warning shots at them and the men fired back and fled.
Military sources noted that the first incident was yet another in a string of
"cynical" uses of children by the Palestinian terror organizations for hostile
activities. Just two weeks ago on September 14 two Palestinian children aged
eight and 10 were caught near the security fence near the Kissufim Crossing.
They said a man with a dog had dispatched them to the fence to test the reaction
of the IDF.
In January, two Palestinian youths armed with knives infiltrated the Netzarim
settlement. Israeli soldiers captured the pair, lightly wounding one of them.
They turned out to be brothers, Ismail al-Khnajra, 17 and Ahmed, 14.
A
week before that, three Palestinian teenagers attempted to sneak into the
settlement of Alei Sinai. Soldiers spotted the three figures and opened fire on
them. It turned out they were aged 15 and 16 and armed only with knives. The
Popular Rejectionist Committees had sent them on the mission.
"These incidences are proof of the cynical use of innocent children and youth by
the various terrorist organizations to carryout hostile actions against Israeli
targets," a military source said.
Sources noted that there was an increasing number of incidents involving
children and youth in hostile attacks and these even included attempts to become
suicide bombers or stage suicide attacks.
"This is the result of being injected with hate and incitement toward
Israel and its citizen," a military
source said.
Palestinian youth have also been killed in protests and rioting. Just two weeks
ago, IDF troops shot dead a 15-year-old youth, apparently trying to rip down the
security fence surrounding the Atarot airport in northern Jerusalem.
?
?
Sep. 29, 2003
Is there hope for Europe?
By
BARRY RUBIN
Europe is
engaged in a great enterprise: the construction of a structure in which most of
the continent will be politically and economically united. Every issue,
including the Middle East, is seen in this context. But because all the emphasis
is placed on cooperation and avoiding friction, the great struggle for Europe's
direction is being largely swept under the rug.
Why is
Europe seeing so much anti-Americanism, anti-Israelism, and anti-Semitism? There
are many reasons, but the debate over the continent's nature and world view is a
key factor. If being European means taking a stance distinctive from the US,
then European policy is going to criticize America and oppose its stance in the
Middle East.
There are
those who would define support for US goals and perceptions as unpatriotic, just
as real peace with Israel has been made a test of loyalty in the Arab world. The
Jews, despite history - or maybe because of it - are also being defined out of
Europe by this school of thought, which sees the future orientation as a
European-Third World alliance against the US to achieve world leadership.
The Arab
world plus Iran are important elements in the coalition of Western democracies
and Middle East dictatorships, of secular liberals or leftists and radical
Islamists or Arab nationalists.
Of
course, there are many other reasons for this orientation. They include a desire
for trade and investment with the oil-rich; the belief that appeasing terrorism
will spare the appeasers its depredations; a conviction that siding with the
region's troublemakers will avoid crisis; the worry that disorder will bring
more unwanted Muslim immigrants to Europe's shores and the calculation that
supporting the Arabs will conciliate those who have already arrived.
This is
all terribly ironic. For the European policies that have striven to maintain
peace and order have actually intensified crisis and conflict. If European
states had been tougher over sanctions toward Iraq, Saddam Hussein might not
have thought he could keep his weapons of mass destruction and wear down the
sanctions over time. The US would not have felt compelled to attack Iraq.
Europe's policies in fact brought about a result Europe didn't want.
There are
many other such examples, notably European aid and comfort provided to Iran's
hard-line regime rather than to the democratic opposition forces.
Patriotism, goes the saying, is the last refuge of scoundrels.
TODAY,
FRENCH President Jacques Chirac is the last refuge of dictators. It is European,
not US, positions that have made the region more turbulent, dangerous,
conflict-ridden.
Yet
despite all the talk to the contrary, there is no such thing as European policy.
Chirac behaves as if he were king of Europe, insulting any leaders who do not
follow his dictates, which are presented as the policy of all Europe. Behind him
he has the Germans (though perhaps only as long as the current Social Democratic
government holds office) and Belgium.
Powerful
dissenters also exist, notably Britain, Italy, and Spain. These countries favor
a stance friendlier to the US on Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and other
issues. Soon they will receive reinforcements from central European states
joining the European Union. When these latter countries issued a statement
supporting the Anglo-American war on Iraq, Chirac jeered at them; when Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi refused to meet with Yasser Arafat, Chirac
ridiculed him.
Is it
inevitable that Europe will continue on its current course? No. Perhaps the
decision to declare Hamas a terrorist organization, against open French dissent,
might be the first step in a long-term change of course. If Europe, encouraged
by an agreement through the UN, takes a role in the management of Iraq, that,
too, could indicate a shift.
One key
element here is the Middle East radicals' sheer refusal to change their ways.
Arafat is
not going to make peace. Saddam, from his underground hiding place, is not going
to go quietly. Osama bin Laden and his colleagues are not about to turn to
peaceful ways. The Iranian regime, so unpopular with its own people, will keep
sponsoring terrorism, and defiant Syria is now directly sponsoring terror
against US and European troops in Iraq.
These
people might be Europe's teachers about the nature of the Middle East, just as
past dictators, by their intransigence and aggression, forced many of the
continent's countries to abandon appeasement and turn to defending themselves.
In Europe
people are fond of insisting that there is still hope of an Israel-Palestinian
peace. Perhaps we should be insisting that there is still hope for Europe.
The
writer is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA)
Center of the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya (IDC).
?
Oct. 1, 2003
On the Oslo anniversary, NPR as usual
By
ANDREA LEVIN
National
Public Radio can't seem to help itself - whatever the Middle East subject,
whatever the day, anti-Israel bias percolates. The week marking Oslo's 10th
anniversary was typical.
There
were no reviews of the failed peace effort hailed so enthusiastically for years
by the network, no look at Yasser Arafat's central role in the violence that
shadows the lives of millions of Israelis and Palestinians. (Nor had there ever
been in the preceding decade any serious scrutiny by NPR of the disastrous
Palestinian flouting of Oslo's imperatives to promote reconciliation with Israel
and reject terror.) Multiple NPR reports on September 8 about Ahmed Qurei,
recently dubbed Prime Minister by Arafat to replace Mahmoud Abbas, recently
ousted by Arafat, were of a piece with the rest. In segments without any Israeli
speakers, NPR interviewers directed softball queries about Queri to Palestinian
commentators, in one case to a journalist and in another to a Palestinian-Aamerican
academic.
An NPR
reporter asked the first if Qurei were, as reputed, "a pragmatist" and
"charismatic." The guest agreed he was popular, but cautioned that Qurei faces a
"rough and hard-line Israeli government." The academic explained to another NPR
host that Qurei is "very moderate" and "popular," but will only succeed if -
again - Sharon cooperates on the road map.
Not a
question was posed as to Qurei's longstanding insistence on the so-called
Palestinian "right of return" - a recipe for the destruction of Israel. Nor was
anyone interested in exploring the new PM's striking comments about the Aqaba
Summit. According to MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), Qurei told
the Lebanese daily An Nahar in June: "The words of President Bush [at
Aqaba], that Israel is a Jewish state, aroused great concern among us. These
words should not have been said."
Interesting from an "architect of Oslo." But not to NPR.
Elected
Israeli leaders like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, however, get no similar cozy
treatment. NPR has alotted whole programs to Arab speakers blasting Sharon as
"hated," "hard-line," "right-wing" and a "war criminal" - without a single
Israeli voice permitted in reply.
NPR
reporters themselves stoke the criticism, as when network favorite Columbia
professor Rashid Khalidi was asked about Sharon's apartment in Jerusalem's Old
City.
"That
site is offensive to Palestinians," prompted the reporter. "Like a bone in the
throat," agreed Khalidi.
Not that
Israeli speakers aren't heard at all. Even mainstream experts and officials
representing the views of the majority of the public are interviewed at times,
if often in lopsided segments tilted toward Arab or marginal Israeli
perspectives.
But most
smiled upon among Israelis are those who can be relied on to slam their
government - people like Akiva Eldar, a journalist from the Left fringe of that
the nation's political spectrum. He was interviewed on September 13 on the
question of expelling Arafat.
So
extreme is Eldar that his liberal colleague, Nahum Barnea, from Yediot
Aharonot, memorably denounced him for failing the "lynch test" - for
excoriating Israel incessantly and refusing to fault the Palestinians even when
they had brutally lynched and mutilated two Israelis in Ramallah. Nor had he
ever, according to his critic, rebuked the Palestinians as they systematically
violated Oslo.
Eldar
proceeded to tell NPR listeners the "problem is not really Arafat." In a coarse
parroting of the rhetoric of Israel's detractors, he charged that Ariel Sharon
wants "a kind of Bantustein, which is, you know, the Palestinian version of
Bantustan, the South African Bantustan." The NPR guest also had a crude comment
about President George Bush. He complained that "Big Daddy" is "not willing to
take the two wild kids into a closed room and make sure they make peace." There
was no other speaker in the segment.
This is
"balanced" coverage in an ordinary week on NPR. Now the network faces a dilemma
- actually a quagmire. It continuously produces distortions inimical to Israel
while at the same time both NPR itself and nearly 700 public radio outlets
broadcasting NPR programs across America seek financial support from Jewish
contributors.
It's
getting tougher to persuade those concerned about Israel's existential battle,
Jews and non-Jews alike, to shell out for a tax-supported, listener-funded
institution that seriously misrepresents the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Andrea
Levin is Executive Director of CAMERA, Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
Reporting in America
?
BRET STEPHENS:
---------------------------------------------------------
Man of the Year
|
Leading the way, but
how many Iraqis are following? US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz at the mass gravesite of Mahawil, about 45km outside Baghdad
in July. (AP) |
? |
NO question: This was Paul Wolfowitz's year. On September 15,
2001, at a meeting in Camp David, he advised President George W. Bush to skip
Kabul and train American guns on Baghdad. In March 2003, he got his wish. In the
process, Wolfowitz became the most influential US deputy defense secretary ever
- can you so much as name anyone else who held the post? And he's on the
shortlist to succeed Colin Powell as secretary of state.
Not that this alone qualifies Wolfowitz as the Jerusalem Post's
Man of the Year. The war in Iraq had many authors: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney,
Tony Blair, George Bush. Wolfowitz may have been an early and vocal advocate,
but he was cheering from the second row.
What's not in dispute is that Wolfowitz is the principal author
of the doctrine of preemption, which framed the war in Iraq and which, when it
comes to it, will underpin US action against other rogue states.
This is more remarkable than you might at first think. Following
September 11, many people grasped intuitively that it was useless to contain or
deter foes for whom suicide was an acceptable option. The difference with
Wolfowitz is that he's been talking about this since at least 1992. (The
prescience is of a piece with his warning - in 1979 - that Saddam Hussein might
someday invade Kuwait.)
The difference with Wolfowitz, too, is that his hawkish leanings
on defense (the Economist once called him the administration's "velociraptor")
combine with a remarkable optimism about the prospects for Mideast democracy.
When President Bush says, "America will not permit the world's most dangerous
regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons" - that's
Wolfowitz talking. When the president calls for "a new Arab charter that
champions internal reform, greater political participation, economic openness
and free trade" - that's Wolfowitz's talking, too.
But perhaps the greatest measure of Wolfowitz's influence is that
Colin Powell now waxes rhapsodic about an Iraq "on the road to democratic
self-government." This from the man who, after the first Gulf War, mocked:
"Where's Iraq's Thomas Jefferson?"
To our ears, the sudden stress on Mideast democratization is
"transformative," to use the Pentagon jargon. Israel has long waited for an
administration that understands that the principal problem in the Middle East is
not the unsettled status of our borders. It is the unsettling nature of Arab
regimes - and of the bellicosity, fanaticism, and resentments to which they give
rise. Israel has also long waited for an administration that understands that
the regimes that threaten Tel Aviv also threaten New York.
There's a downside. Earlier in the year, the notion took hold
that the president was taking the country to war at the urgings of his Jewish
advisers, themselves shills for Israel. "Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill
Kristol [are]... the clique of conservatives who are driving this war," wrote
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. She may as well have written "the clique
of Jews," some felt. Other critics of the war were more explicit. "If it were
not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war in Iraq," said
Democratic Congressman Jim Moran, "we would not be doing this."
In this year when anti-Semitism is once again a fact of life, the
name "Wolfowitz" has become its lightning rod.
Surely this is one distinction he does not relish. Yet it remains
a part of what makes this, uniquely, Wolfowitz's year.
?
Oct. 1, 2003
Invasive treatment
By
JANINE ZACHARIA
In 1979
he warned that Iraq would invade Kuwait. In 2001, he told the president to train
his sights on Baghdad, not Kabul. Now Paul Wolfowitz is getting his way. Will he
be proven right?
On a
brilliant September evening at Phillips Flagship Restaurant, an eatery known for
its seafood buffets down on the Washington waterfront, a few dozen former and
current Pentagon personnel and academics wait eagerly for their dinner speaker,
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, to arrive.
The topic
of their two-day conference has been celebrating 30 years of an all-volunteer
military force. An earlier panel, "From the Home Front to the Front Lines - US
Reserve Forces Answering the Call," could not be more timely, given the recent
Pentagon decision to extend tours of duty for reservists and national guardsmen
for months, or perhaps even years, in Iraq.
Wolfowitz
slips out of his dark-green four-wheel drive vehicle - he doesn't travel with a
motorcade - and makes a quiet entrance. Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel
and Readiness David Chu opens his introduction with a well-known Washington
anecdote about the keynote speaker - how as a young Pentagon analyst in the
1970s Wolfowitz fired off repeated memos to then secretary of defense Harold
Brown, warning of Iraq's potential plans to invade Kuwait. Brown, after a while,
"gave orders not to receive any more Wolfowitz memos."
Wolfowitz
was of course prescient by over a decade. And his predictions, Chu said, showed
his talent "to look beyond the horizon and "to take risks in terms of thought."
It is that thinking out-of-the-box post-September 11 that has made Wolfowitz one
of the most influential men of the past year. His fans and foes alike credit him
with almost single-handedly persuading his bosses, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and ultimately US President George W. Bush
- who he advised during the 2000 campaign - of the need to mobilize a massive US
force to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and ensure Iraq becomes a stable,
democratic Middle Eastern ally.
It was
Wolfowitz who led a small group of neo-conservative thinkers in developing a
rationale for the war, at the core of which was the intolerable possibility that
Saddam Hussein could develop weapons of mass destruction and share them with
terrorists, and that regime change in Iraq could help pave the way for Middle
East peace.
AND IT is
now Wolfowitz who is facing some of the most intense questioning about the war
and these very rationales - the depth of Saddam's alleged connections to al-Qaida
(President Bush himself said recently there was no evidence Saddam was involved
in September 11) and his weapons programs, described chillingly by Wolfowitz and
others pre-war, but for which evidence has yet to be found.
Wolfowitz
personally, has been accused - both in the press and by legislators - of
ipso-facto altering the rationales for the war, focusing now more on Iraq as a
fresh battlefront in the war on terrorism and ignoring the weapons of mass
destruction conundrum.
And
perhaps most significantly, Wolfowitz, like the rest of the administration, has
found himself under fire for what critics say was inadequate planning for the
day after, including predictions about the costs, the expected casualties, and
the ease with which order, reconstruction-funding, and oil-production could be
restored.
"In your
almost hour-long testimony there this morning only once did you mention weapons
of mass destruction and that was an ad lib... we're seeing shifting
justifications, I think, for what we're doing there," Republican Senator Lincoln
Chafee of Rhode Island told Wolfowitz at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee
hearing in July.
At a
September 9 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, Democratic Senator Carl
Levin of Michigan said, "And Mr. Wolfowitz you told Congress in March that,
quote, 'We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own
reconstruction, and relatively soon," close quote. Talk about rosy scenarios!"
All this
criticism and questioning led one Democratic aide in the Senate to say of
Wolfowitz that "his stock has plummeted." Perhaps on Capitol Hill. But with
rumors swarming that Wolfowitz could be tapped as secretary of state if Bush
wins a second term, it's hardly evident that that is the case in the White
House.
WOLFOWITZ
HAS not flinched under the criticisms.
At the
Phillips Flagship Restaurant, he became most animated when he deviated from his
speech on military transformation and spoke extemporaneously about his recent
five-day visit to Iraq.
"I think
it's still the superficial impression of most newspaper readers in American that
the bombing reflects great instability," Wolfowitz said, referring to the
car-bombing of the holy Imam Ali mosque and the killing of an influential
American Shia partner, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr al-Hakim along with scores of
others who gathered for prayer.
Rather,
he said, the fact that the Shia have remained calm shows the "extreme calm and
maturity" of the community. He then rattled off a list of calamities that
"should" have taken place with a US invasion but never did and enumerated the
positives, including the training of 55,000 Iraqis to take over for security.
Since the
end of the first Gulf War, during which, as undersecretary of defense for
policy, he was instrumental in persuading Israel not to respond to the firing of
Iraqi Scud missiles at Tel Aviv, Wolfowitz has been a lead proponent of regime
change in Iraq. He deeply disapproved of president George H. W. Bush's decision
to wrap up the war early and to abandon its assistance to Iraqi insurgents bent
on ousting Saddam. After the war, he threw his intellectual support behind the
idea of arming Iraqis to oust Saddam on their own.
It was
only after September 11 that he began to think that America, for its own
national security, would have to do it itself.
Despite
that deep conviction, his friends say, this soft-spoken, intellectual and former
dean and professor of International Relations at the Paul A. Nitze School of
Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, was a surprising
trailblazer.
"The
irony of Paul's fame - or notoriety - is that he was an admirable public servant
and government official for almost two decades, but I'd say quite a cautious
one," says William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and co-author with
Lawrence Kaplan of The War Over Iraq, Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission.
"He had
strong ideas, but he worked them within the system. He was effective at doing
so. And it's a little ironic to see him way out on the parapets, allegedly at
least the architect of an entire world view and the primary defender of a very
controversial foreign policy initiative. He's a very good friend of mine and I
admire him very much but he wouldn't have been my first pick to be in that role.
I wouldn't have expected it," Kristol says.
THAT ROLE
emerged at the Camp David presidential retreat, when President Bush assembled
his war cabinet the Saturday after September 11. As Washington Post
investigative reporter Bob Woodward recounted in a December 2001 series and
later in his book Bush at War, it was Wolfowitz who pushed the idea of attacking
Iraq - an idea, met by "eye-rolling" by Secretary of State Colin Powell and
General Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
At one
point in Woodward's account, Wolfowitz interrupts Rumsfeld to expand on a point
about Iraq. After the meeting, Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, rebukes the
two, saying only one person should speak for the Department of Defense.
Wolfowitz has since denied in interviews that the rebuke took place.
What's
notable about all of this now, says Kristol, is that at the time, "it was
generally agreed that Wolfowitz was going to lose this fight. People forget how
much of a surprise the 'axis of evil' speech was."
By the
January 2002 State of the Union speech, Bush had grouped Iraq, Iran and North
Korea in an "axis of evil." It was the first step in a campaign to build support
for a war against Iraq. The theoretical idea of pursuing regime change in Iraq
as a response to September 11 had started to become policy.
"Paul
showed real courage in advancing this agenda that he thought was so important
for the country," says Kristol. "The truth is there weren't many of us. You
know, this 'great powerful neo-conservative conspiracy.' There were about eight
people. Half of them were not well-liked by the Bush administration, like me.
It's a very impressive thing that he did."
Opponents
of the administration's Iraq policy, who know Wolfowitz, are reluctant to
criticize him personally.
"One
cannot accuse Wolfowitz of any bad intentions or malice. He is an extremely nice
person, and very decent, and open," says Judith Kipper, director of the Middle
East forum at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. While Kipper
believes that the neo-conservative advocates of war with Iraq were "misguided,"
she has "high regard" for Wolfowitz.
"I
disagree with him," she says, "but he's somebody you can engage."
DENNIS
ROSS, the former Middle East envoy, who worked under Wolfowitz twice, once at
the Pentagon and again at the State Department, says that contrary to some
accounts that have tried to portray him as dogmatic, Wolfowitz is open to
debating ideas.
"Paul is
one of the most thoughtful people you will ever be around. He is an
intellectual. He has strong views. But he is an ideas person. He is interested
in having people around him who are ideas people. The notion that he is this
kind of an ideologue, who is dogmatic, who excludes other points of view,
doesn't reflect the Paul Wolfowitz that I know," says Ross.
"If you
want to understand Paul, you understand that he is very smart, he's very
thoughtful, and he cares very deeply about... what he's doing. He's someone who
believes you can change things for the better. Someone always open to those who
can make a credible case," he adds.
Michael
Ledeen, a Middle East analyst at the neo-conservative American Enterprise
Institute, believes Wolfowitz has been "stereotyped as a very hawkish kind of
person." He says his hawkish views are specifically directed "against tyrants.
They're not hawkish in terms of wanting to expand American power just for its
own sake."
In a
chapter he wrote for Present Dangers, a 2000 bible of sorts of neo-conservative
thought on foreign policy and security issues, Wolfowitz reflected on the
challenges faced by the US in the post-Cold War era. He warned against
isolationism, given the US has "so great a capacity to influence events" and
argued that most people now generally support Pax Americana. His belief that
building democracies can help strengthen US national security is clear.
"Democratic change is not only a way to weaken our enemies, it is also a way to
strengthen our friends." His ideas emulate in many ways those of the late
Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, who believed in using American force to bolster
democracies.
Given the
current US unilateral efforts to create a democracy in Iraq, it is interesting
to note something else Wolfowitz wrote about the limitations of US power in this
arena.
"Both
because of what the United States is, and because of what is possible, we cannot
engage either in promoting democracy or in nation-building as an exercise of
will. We must proceed by interaction and interdiction, not imposition."
How that
thought will influence the US-led democratic reconstruction of Iraq remains to
be seen.
WHEN IT
comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Wolfowitz is often erroneously
grouped with peace process critics in his neo-conservative bunch including
Richard Perle, a former informal Pentagon adviser, and Douglas Feith, the
undersecretary of defense for policy. While he is certainly devoutly pro-Israel,
his politics on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are decidedly centrist.
Wolfowitz,
a non-observant Jew who has a sister living in Jerusalem, is "a
two-state-solution guy who believes that the US-Israeli relationship is in both
our interests and also believes that peace is in Israel's interest," says Ross.
At the
April 15, 2002, Israel solidarity rally on the National Mall in Washington,
Wolfowitz was heckled and booed for saying: "Israelis are not the only victims
of violence in the Middle East. Innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying in
great numbers as well." Wolfowitz was interrupted by shouts and jeers when he
tried to talk about a future "independent Palestine."
One
former student at SAIS remembers Wolfowitz criticizing, during an informal
forum, Israel's settlement policy and lauding Yossi Beilin, the former Labor
Party peace negotiator.
In his
writings, Wolfowitz has argued that American power should not be taken for
granted. Perhaps this belief originated in his home in upstate New York. His
father, a mathematics professor at Cornell University, was a Polish Jew who
emigrated from Warsaw in 1920. He reportedly regularly reminded his children
that they were lucky to have escaped totalitarianism in Europe.
At
Cornell, Wolfowitz studied math and chemistry. And under the influence of the
political philosopher Allan Bloom, went on to earn a doctorate in political
science at the University of Chicago. There he studied under Albert Wohlstetter
who preached against d tente during the Cold War.
Wolfowitz
taught political science for three years at Yale before moving to Washington to
take up a series of jobs, beginning in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency,
where he worked on the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks. At the end of the Ford
administration, Wolfowitz was part of "Team B," a group that questioned CIA
reports on the Soviet Union's intentions. He held numerous high-ranking jobs at
Pentagon and Defense. During the Reagan administration, he served for three
years as US ambassador to Indonesia. For seven years before being named deputy
secretary of defense by President Bush, Wolfowitz was dean of SAIS.
Now,
Wolfowitz, who is divorced, seems to spend most of his time working on the
post-Saddam era, and perhaps, some Washington insiders say, angling for that job
of secretary of state.
That, of
course, could depend a lot on the state of the Iraqi arena a year from now, on
the eve of the next election. For now, despite declining American support for
President Bush's handling of Iraq, Wolfowitz remains optimistic.
"Terrorists," Wolfowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal, September 2,
"recognize that Iraq is on a course towards self-government that is irreversible
and, once achieved, will be an example to all in the Muslim world who desire
freedom, pointing a way out of hopelessness that the extremists feed on."
?
Sep. 30, 2003
Pentagon jihadis
By
DANIEL PIPES
The
recent arrest of two Muslim military personnel, James Yee and Ahmad al-Halabi,
on suspicion of aiding al-Qaida prisoners at Guantanamo Bay (with another three
Muslim servicemen under watch) seemed to prompt much surprise. It should not
have.
It has
been obvious for months that Islamists who despise the US have penetrated
American prisons, law enforcement, and armed forces.
A
milestone Wall Street Journal article in February 2003 established that imams
who consider Osama bin Laden "a hero of Allah" dominate the Islamic chaplaincy
in the New York State prison system.
I
documented in March 2003 the case of FBI Special Agent Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, an
immigrant whose pattern of pro-Islamist behavior was overlooked and instead he
was promoted. At least six prior cases of Islamist servicemen have come to
light:
Ali
Mohamed: an Egyptian immigrant who after his discharge from the US army went to
work for Osama bin Laden. Mohamed pleaded guilty to helping plan the 1998
bombing surveillance of the US Embassy in Nairobi and now sits in prison serving
his sentence.
Semi
Osman: An ethnic Lebanese immigrant and non-US citizen who served in both the
army and the naval reserves, Osman was arrested in 2002 and accused of "material
support for terrorists." He pleaded guilty to a weapons violation and served his
sentence.
Abdul
Raheem Al Arshad Ali: an African-American convert to Islam and former Marine, he
awaits trial in prison for supplying a semiautomatic handgun to Semi Osman.
Jeffrey
Leon Battle. an African-American convert and army reservist, Battle awaits trial
in prison on charges of "enlisting in the reserves to receive military training
to use against America."
John
Allen Muhammad: An African-American convert and army veteran, Muhammad is
suspected of having thrown a grenade at a fellow soldier in 1991. He awaits
trial in prison on charges of leading a 21-day shooting spree in the Washington,
DC area in 2002 that killed 10 and wounded three.
Hasan
Akbar: Another African-American convert, Akbar awaits trial in prison for two
counts of premeditated murder and three charges of attempted murder following a
March 2003 fragging incident against his fellow soldiers.
The AKBAR
incident prompted Deanne Stillman of Slate magazine to conclude that Islamists
"may be infiltrating the military in order to undermine it." That infiltration
also has a mundane quality, as shown by the example of Nabil Elibiary. He's an
Islamist who protests the "defaming" of bin Laden and defends polygamy and who
also led the holiday prayer service at an air force base in early 2003.
The
executive branch's insistence on "terrorism" being the enemy, rather than
militant Islam, permits this Islamist penetration.
AND IT
continues. The Defense Department responded last week to the chaplain's arrest
by defending its hiring practices. Only under external pressure, notably from
senators Chuck Schumer and John Kyl, did it agree to reassess them. Even then,
the Pentagon insisted on reviewing the appointments of all 2,800 military
chaplains rather than the 17 Muslims among them.
Political
correctness run amok! Which Christian or Jewish chaplains would be accused, as
was their Muslim colleague last week, of "sedition, aiding the enemy, spying,
espionage and failure to obey a general order"?
The US
government needs to use common sense and focus on militant Islam. It should
consider such steps as:
Breaking
off contact with organizations (like the Graduate School of Islamic and Social
Sciences and the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Council) that place
Islamists in government employment.
Suspending presently employed Muslim personnel who got their jobs through those
institutions until their loyalty can be confirmed.
Finding
anti-Islamist organizations to work with, such as the Islamic Supreme Council of
America for Sunni Muslims and the American Muslim Congress for Shi'ites.
Confirming that government-employed Muslims do, as many of them swore under
oath, "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all
enemies, foreign and domestic." A mechanism is needed to identify employees with
an Islamist outlook and expel them from government service.
Ironically, the Defense Department finds it easier to kill Islamists in
Afghanistan than to exclude them from its own ranks. But only if the latter is
carried out can Americans be confident their government is fully protecting
them.
The
writer is director of the Middle East Forum.
?
Sep. 29, 2003
In praise of Chamberlain
By Sarah Honig
Imagine, if you will, Neville Chamberlain maintaining unwavering
faith in Hitler's intentions even after the invasion of Poland and the bombing
of London. Imagine him sticking to his guns and obstinately insisting that
appeasement wasn't wrongheaded, there just wasn't enough of it.
Imagine Chamberlain, no longer in power, blasting Churchill's
pugnacity and crossing the battle lines for photo-ops with the Fuehrer. Imagine
him rushing to Berlin after the downturn in Axis fortunes to parley with the man
in charge because he was the democratically elected leader and symbol of the
renascent German nation.
Imagine Chamberlain again making it to Hitler's bunker on the eve
of Nazi collapse in a last-ditch effort to save his beleaguered peace partner,
proclaiming he'd personally volunteer to serve as his human shield.
Preposterous? Not in our bailiwick. Our appeasers keep appeasing.
No sooner did Israel's government put Yasser Arafat on removal
notice than Uri Avnery rushed to Ramallah to be at his side. He vowed to protect
the ra'is with his very body, and not for the first time either. On July 3,
1982, Avnery sneaked into Beirut mid-war to hobnob with the imperiled Arafat.
After Oslo imported the PLO chieftain to Gaza he expressed his gratitude during
his triumphant first public appearance there by seating Avnery right next to him
on the podium.
Not that the comparison is fully valid. Arafat is only a poor
Arab's wannabe Hitler, though his heart is in the same place, and he too
exploits the inherent decency of the democracy he confronts. Moreover, Avnery,
like other homegrown Chamberlain clones, advocates ceding stretches of our own
homeland, vital for our own security. Chamberlain never contemplated
surrendering an inch of Britain nor even in some forlorn corner of its
then-extant vast empire.
Chamberlain also didn't badger or malign his successor, or
upbraid him for denying Hitler another opportunity. But Avnery does everything
Chamberlain would have been ashamed of.
If he were alone, it'd be bad enough. But Avnery isn't. As if
compulsively afflicted by collective sadomasochism, more and more Israelis keep
coming back for more, hot on the heels of the latest humiliation and beating,
even before the blood has dried up.
We're plainly pathetic. No sooner has one sham hudna literally
exploded in our faces than some of us are clamoring for another, recalling how
blissful the few weeks of self-deception were. Their message, repeated often
enough, becomes normative, tolerable, even respectable and deserving of due
consideration.
A FEW bloodless days sufficed to wipe our cognitive slate clean
and lull us back into the illusory calm that preceded recent suicide bombings.
That Arafat and his itinerant understudies had the colossal gall to suggest more
of the same in itself merits a treatise on hypocrisy. But that the hutzpa of the
mobster from the Mukata strikes responsive chords amongst Israelis is no less
than mind-blowing.
We can dismiss Avnery because he has crossed the lines not only
physically but also intellectually, spiritually and emotionally, identifying
with the enemy and subscribing to his perspective.
But Peace Now protesters are another matter. So is Yossi Sarid,
whose sanctimonious rhetoric leads us to trust that he still respects Israel's
most basic existential interests. Yet he too lashes out at the government for
"spurning" Ramallah's repeat overtures.
His Meretz sidekick, Ran Cohen, takes hudna hankerings a step
further, recommending that Israel itself construct the trap into which it would
then jump.
Like Sarid, Cohen berates "the impudent Sharon government the
first ever to reject a cease-fire. This is amoral, un-Jewish rejectionism." To
make us more moral and Jewish, Cohen proposes we unilaterally declare a
cease-fire with the terrorists, and also hold ourselves to ransom by
volunteering to pay them protection if they obligingly let us alone.
"For each month without suicide bombings," Cohen suggests,
"Israel would free a given number of Palestinian prisoners. This would
constitute an incentive for the Palestinians not to resort to force."
Get it? The shopkeeper who forks over money to Mafia hoods merely
provides them with incentives not to break his arms and legs, or harm his wife
and kids.
Have no fear, though, even if we were demented enough to follow
Cohen's counsel (which, given Israel's recent track record, mustn't be ruled
out). Cohen will never admit he erred should anything go awry (and it will). The
so-called Peace Camp has never atoned for anything, including its Oslo disaster.
If the new hudna doesn't deliver peace, Cohen will undoubtedly
advise us to overlook insignificant low body counts. If more sizable atrocities
are perpetrated, he'll surely find fault with the tribute we paid, how and when.
Leftist domination of the media makes the hudna nostalgia message
insidiously effective. It gains resonance and wins converts, and not only on the
far Left. Laborites have begun chanting the same mantra and Shinui's Yosef
Paritzky wants "serious cabinet deliberations" of Arafat's new time-out offer.
More worrying yet are equivocations from the Likud direction,
where, after some righteous hemming and hawing, we begin to discern a marked
hesitation to be unpopular or politically incorrect. Hence a hudna rerun isn't
dismissed as such, provided it's hedged around with certain mitigating
conditions.
So far opposition from the Prime Minister's Office has been relatively resolute,
but for how long?
Eventually opinion polls will indicate that the public is for
peace and against suffering and disease. Polls, after all, kick-started many
Sharon policy turnarounds. Polls were what converted him to the security fence
cause, about which he was once justifiably unenthusiastic.
BUT NOW the mythical cure-all has become a fixed feature of our
ritual discourse. Each terrorist onslaught is inevitably followed by intensive
speculation about whether a fence could have prevented the outrage. The answer
is always the same: Labor's failed erstwhile headliner Amram Mitzna encapsulated
it when he charged that "Sharon is personally responsible for the bloodshed.
It's on his hands."
Anger isn't directed at terror's masterminds but at those who
haven't yet managed to accentuate the Green Line with the ultimate
fortification, which would certainly constitute a hurdle but wouldn't foil
determined mass murderers and wouldn't turn them into tame truce proponents.
Incessant brainwashing, however, works. Even ardent hawks no
longer waste much breath giving the lie to the protective wall mythology. It's
no use butting one's head against a popular, hope-inspiring wall. Herein lies
the danger.
Hudna longings too could become politically attractive. If that happens, even
the Arabs couldn't save us from ourselves. No matter how often they betray us
some misguided though vociferous Israelis will plead their case and demand
another chance for them. Old attitudes die hard, especially when sacred
reputations are staked on them.
In praise of Chamberlain, it should be noted that he admitted
Nazi belligerence wasn't quite cricket. He even drew the appropriate
conclusions.
On May 9, 1940, he survived a no-confidence motion (submitted
despite the wartime state of emergency). But because his majority declined, he
felt honor-bound to resign. Being a gentleman, he also thereafter kept his mouth
shut.
But our pseudo-Chamberlains, who possess nothing remotely
approaching his political majority, will never admit error, cease sabotaging the
government charged with picking up the pieces after them, or keep their mouths
shut.
But then again, they aren't honorable gentlemen.
Posted by trafael
at 2:19 AM EST
Updated: Thursday, 13 November 2003 2:44 AM EST
'It's
a black day in history' 
Youngsters
from Arafat's Fatah movement tagged onto a rally in Gaza for the Islamic
group Hamas, holding up posters of Saddam.
Papa
Bush with them boys!
