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Why did I start this blog?
It was during the Iraq War that I became interested in politics, and I found myself on the conservative / republican side of the map. I have a hard time reading /watching most media due to it's left leaning tendencies. I avoid reading the NY Slimes (NYtimes) I don't watch Communist News Network (CNN) nor even come near the hated Baathist/Bolshevic Broadcast Corp (BBC) or National Palestinian Radio (NPR).

There are however many publications on the net which I read religiously (almost) daily (despite me being an atheist ;). You will find my kind of reports in NYpost.com,Jerusalempost.com, (I've always been an ardent supporter of Israel and it's current slightly right leaning government.) NationalPost.com, Nationalreview.com, OpinionJournal.com(Wall Street Journal's ed page), NewsMax.com,FreeRepublic.comFrontPageMag.com,Instapundit.com,Israpundit.com ...

You are invited to take a look at my Op Iraqi Freedom page and my Weasels page which were created during the war.
I should soon (time allowing) make a separate Israeli focused page and dip my pen into writing some essays / commentaries. I am revolted with most media's reporting on the Mideast conflict and it's gullible at best but in fact intentionally malicious rendering of Arab propaganda. Very similarly , the "righteous", leftist, underdog-rooting, revolution-monger reporting was felt during the Iraq war when the media almost hoped for some defeat of the coalition forces, more casualties and a prolonged war. (link to follow)

Following are articles which I recently read or my own commentaries. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do...

The following is a LANDMARK ARTICLE. MUST READ despite it's length!

GRAFFITI ON HISTORY'S WALL
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
USnews.com



All the isms," an English wag once said, "are wasms." Well, not quite. In the 20th century, fascism came and went. Communism came and went. Socialism came and waned. But today several virulent "isms" inhabit the world still. Among the most pernicious are an atavistic anti-Semitism and its 20th-century version, anti-Zionism. These "isms" are graffiti on the wall of history, emblems of a poison still potent and raw, evidenced, most recently, by the remarks of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who said, "Today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."

Mahathir's words were widely condemned. But such comments obscure a deeper truth about this new strain of anti-Semitism, which is not that it is directed at individual Jews or even at Judaism itself. It is directed, rather, against the Jewish collective, the modern State of Israel.
Just as historic anti-Semitism has denied individual Jews the right to live as equal members of society, anti-Zionism would deny the collective expression of the Jewish people, the State of Israel, the right to live as an equal member of the family of nations. Israel's policies are thus subjected to criticism that causes it to be singled out when others in similar circumstances escape any criticism at all. Surely if any other country were bleeding from terrorism as Israel is today, there would be no question of its right to defend itself. But Israel's efforts merely to protect its own citizens are routinely portrayed as aggression.
To complain that such portrayals are unfair and illogical is not to dismiss all criticism of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic. A democracy must welcome critics, and Israel surely has its critics in spades--just look at the spirited Israeli press. "Jews," as one commentator put it, "are gold medalists in the art of self-criticism." But for many, recent criticism of Israel has become so perverse, so persistent, so divorced from reality that it can be seen only as emotional anti-Semitism hiding behind the insidious political mask of anti-Zionism.
The new anti-Semitism transcends boundaries, nationalities, politics, and social systems. Israel has become the object of envy and resentment in much the same way that the individual Jew was once the object of envy and resentment. Israel, in effect, is emerging as the collective Jew among nations. After more than half a century of Holocaust education, hundreds of courses in high schools and colleges, and thousands of books dedicated to exposing its evils, traditional anti-Semitism as a domestic issue had all but disappeared in much of the world. "The Jewish problem" was no longer defined by what happened to the Jews of Germany or France or Poland or Russia. Instead, in Europe and the Muslim world--even in Asia--traditional anti-Semitism has lately re-emerged as anti-Zionism, focused on the Jews of Israel, the role of Israel, and, for some, on Jews in the United States who support Israel.
This phenomenon has its origins in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Since then, the image of the Jew has been transformed. Shylock, suddenly, has been replaced by a new Jew, cartooned as an aggressive, all-powerful collective called Israel. "Rambo Jew," as the writer Daniel Goldhagen put it, "has largely supplanted Shylock in the anti-Semitic imagination." With the territories seized at the end of the war, the "plucky little Jewish state" was no more. In the years since, as it responded again and again to Arab attacks, sympathy for Israel eroded further still as the world's TVs broadcast images not of terrorists but of armed Israelis responding to terrorism. Only somehow the word "responding" too often got lost in the chaos. The TV pictures seemed to imply that the Israelis were guilty of a disproportionate use of force, for they were rarely accompanied by an understanding that a country with just 6 million in a sea of over 120 million Arabs could never fight a war of equal attrition.
But no matter. It is as if the world somehow believes Israel must win the "moral man of the year" award in defending itself--as if responding to those who seek its destruction is morally wrong. Is there really no difference, then, between the violence of murderers who target innocents and the indispensable violence of lawful authorities? Are the arsonist and the firefighter truly moral equivalents? Is Israel's approach, which seeks to minimize civilian casualties, the same as that of the terrorists, who seek to maximize it?


Such questions are prompted by an unprecedented reversal of history: Arab terrorists, incredibly, have managed to inspire more sympathy than their victims. The Jews, having experienced the genocide of Europe, today stand accused of perpetrating genocide on the hard ground of the West Bank and Gaza. The vocabulary of the accusations presents the Jews as Nazis and their Arab enemies as helpless Jews. The worst crimes of anti-Semites in the past--racist and ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide, crimes against humanity--are now increasingly ascribed to Jews and to the Jewish state. The argument has become, if you are against Nazism, you must oppose Israel. Thus has Israeli self-defense been transmogrified as aggression. As a consequence, the era of reconciliation that obtained between Israel and the world after the Holocaust is, tragically, no more. In much of the world's news media and in its elite communities, as a result, there is a pattern of delegitimization of Israel.


AMERICANS, WHO HAVE COME to take for granted the scurrilous anti-Semitism that routinely appears in the Arab press, might be amazed by what now appears in the sophisticated European press. In England, the guardian wrote that "Israel has no right to exist." The observer described Israeli settlements in the West Bank as "an affront to civilization." The New Statesman ran a story titled "A Kosher Conspiracy," illustrated by a cover showing the gold Star of David piercing the Union Jack. The story implies that a Zionist-Jewish cabal is attempting to sway the British press to the cause of Israel. In France, the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur published an extraordinary libel alleging that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinian women so that their relatives would kill them to preserve family honor. In Italy, the Vatican's L'Osservatore Romano spoke of Israel's "aggression that's turning into extermination," while the daily La Stampa ran a Page 1 cartoon of a tank emblazoned with the Jewish star pointing its big gun at the infant Jesus, who cries out, "Surely they don't want to kill me again."
Across Europe, the result has been not just verbal violence but physical. A report issued last year by the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, titled "Fire and Broken Glass," describes the assaults on Jews and people presumed to be Jewish across Europe. Attackers, shouting racist slogans, throw stones at schoolchildren, at worshipers attending religious services, at rabbis. Jewish homes, schools, and synagogues are firebombed. Windows are smashed, Jewish cemeteries desecrated with anti-Jewish slogans. In just a few weeks in the spring of last year, French synagogues and Jewish schools, students, and homes were attacked and firebombed. A synagogue in Marseilles was burned to the ground. In Paris, Jews were attacked by groups of hooded men. According to police, metropolitan Paris saw something like a dozen anti-Jewish incidents a day in the first several months after Easter.


AND THE VIOLENCE CONTINUES. In Ukraine, skinheads attacked Jewish workers and assaulted the director of a Jewish school. In Holland, demonstrators carrying swastikas and photos of Israel chanted "Sieg heil!" and "Jews into the sea!" In Salonika, the Holocaust Memorial was defaced with pro-Palestinian graffiti. In Slovakia, Jewish cemeteries were firebombed. In Berlin, Jews were assaulted, swastikas daubed on Jewish memorials, and a synagogue spray-painted with the words "six million is not enough."


In the Muslim world, a culture of hatred of Jews
permeates all forms of public communications --newspapers ,
videocassettes ,sermons , books, the Internet,television and radio. The intensity of the anti-Jewish invective equals or surpasses that of Nazi Germany in its heyday. The public rhetoric combines the blood libel of medieval Christian Europe with cockeyed Nazi conspiracy theories that echo the famous forgery, the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," and the fanciful notion of a Jewish drive for world dominion. Throughout the Islamic world, one finds slanderous quotations about Jews as the sons of apes and donkeys. A leading Saudi newspaper has Jews using the blood of Christian and Muslim children to make their hamantaschen pastry for Purim and their matzo, the unleavened bread of Passover. In this fundamentalist religious culture, America and Israel are seen as twin Satanic forces, "The Great Satan" and "The Little Satan," as Iran's religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini used to refer to them.
The linkage of the two Satans has been emphasized even more intently since the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, in September 2000, and the attacks of September 11. Ever hear the story of the 4,000 Jews who worked at the World Trade Center being told to not show up for work on the morning of September 11? The story was planted on the Internet by Hezbollah under the cover of a Lebanese TV station. This urban legend has now taken root among Muslims the world over, calling to mind the words of W. B. Yeats: "We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart's grown brutal from the fare."
Islamists see the fingerprints of their enemy everywhere--the fantasy that a secret and all-powerful Zionist lobby drains the lifeblood of Arabs and Muslims and incites Washington to war against Iraq, all the while carrying out its sinister plans for global control. In Egypt, a 41-part TV series was broadcast across the Arab world during Ramadan entitled Horseman Without a Horse. The theme of the series was that the Zionists have controlled the world of politics since the dawn of history and seek to control the Middle East-- a fantasy, as Prof. Robert Wistrich of Hebrew University pointed out, imported from the Germany of the 1930s.
It is difficult for westerners, unmarked by the searing memories of Jewish history, to realize the extent to which the survival of Israel remains an issue for Jews, who cannot dismiss the overheated Arab rhetoric that seeks to justify terrorism against innocent civilians by describing Israel's existence as illegitimate. That rhetoric is the product of a careful calculation by Arab political leaders who recognized the popular appeal of scapegoating Israel for their failure to provide for their own people while legitimizing their regimes.
Not all Arab politicians, happily, indulge in such cynical calculations. Back in February, I participated in a remarkable meeting convened by President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan. The group, which met in the city of Almaty, included the presidents from the central Asian republics of Kirgizstan and Tajikistan, the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Afghanistan, and the deputy foreign minister of Turkey. The meeting was titled the Conference on Order and Tolerance. As we exchanged views, I found myself listening raptly to statesmen who spoke with feeling of their support for a dialogue between Muslims and Jews in an atmosphere of religious tolerance and understanding while denouncing in explicit terms extremism and terrorism. If one takes the number of Muslims among the countries represented in Almaty and adds the number of Muslims in moderate countries like India, the result is a huge swath of the Muslim world that rejects the extremism of the Arab leadership among Israel's neighbors.

	Ties That Really Bind
	America is a notable exception to the new anti-Semitism. How has it escaped? Well, for one thing, ours is a pluralistic society, the product of the Enlightenment, with a tradition of separation of church and state. Because there was no official state religion, Jews could emerge as first-class citizens unburdened by the stigma of not belonging to the "right" church. A nation of immigrants, America accepted all comers. Jews may have arrived as the eternal strangers, but they found a home in a place where all came as strangers. Finally, we have no ferocious obsession with religion. Here, if you want to hate people, there are plenty of reasons to do so, but religion certainly isn't at the top of the list. In America, race, not religion, is far more likely to be the cause of animus. Then, of course, there's the fact that America is a meritocracy. With achievement judged far more important than almost anything else, Jewish success was not nearly so much resented here as it has been elsewhere. Indeed, Jews became a model of what an ethnic group could accomplish in conditions of freedom. Thus it is that Jews here became a core element of American society, not so much a minority seeking rights but a part of the community conferring them. Which is not to say that anti-Jewish sentiment can't be found here. It is simply that when it does manifest itself, anti-Semitism is less often directed from the top of society down than it has been, say, in Europe, from government, employers, or other powerful institutions. When it occurs here, anti-Semitism typically comes from below, from marginal elements of society. Similarities. America is a place where many ethnic groups identify with the country from which they emigrated. It's no accident that we refer to such communities in hyphenated terms: Italian-American, Irish-American, Mexican-American. It is largely because of this habit of identification that concern within the Jewish community for the welfare of Israel seems to provoke no more anxiety over dual loyalties than that of, say, Greek-Americans for Greece. All these factors coalesce in terms of the support America extends to Israel. It was, after all, Harry Truman who first recognized the Jewish state. Americans easily identify with a country and a people who fled oppression, for, after all, that's also a part of America's story. America identified with a country that was itself an extension of the Judeo-Christian tradition, in terms of its recognition of religion. America, most remarkably, identified with a country that boasts a vibrant democracy. And America, most of all, identified with a country that, like America, was a pickup nation, founded on ideals and built by hard-working immigrants confident of their aims and abilities. Most recently, of course, Americans have had to grapple with the effect of terrorism on the nation's civil life. As a result, in part, we have come to understand better Israel's dilemma in dealing with a terrorism that has at its root a religious fanaticism not at all unlike that of the adherents of Osama bin Laden. But that's just the most recent chapter. Why America has avoided the poisonous mind-set of the new anti-Semitism is better explained by the shared traditions of these two up-by-the-bootstraps democracies than by terrorists so threatened by the values both nations hold most dear. Mortimer B. Zuckerman Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

Such tolerance, sadly, is not to be found in the world body created to foster universal values and human ideals--the United Nations. Tragically, the growth of international hostility to Israel has found its most prominent expression in the operations of the U.N. It has, in fact, come a long way from the legitimization and legalization of the existence of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to have their own state on their own land through its 1947 resolution proposing and approving a two-state solution. Since then, the U.N. has adopted an almost reflexively anti-Israeli stance canted to the anti-Israeli majority of its membership. The U.N. today is a regular forum for vicious anti-Israel attacks, conferring on the spurious and the hateful the false cloak of reason and legitimacy, and thus has become an organization for the conservation, not the reduction, of the Middle East conflict. Some U.N. actions simply defy belief. At the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, Israel--the only democracy in the Middle East committed to civil rights, the rule of law, and Arab participation in democratic government--was attacked by Arab and Third World nations and accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Then there is the Fourth Geneva Convention, drafted originally in response to the atrocities of the Nazi regime, to protect people like diplomats and visitors subjected to a military occupation. Last year, U.N. conferees met and, for the first time in the 52 years since its adoption, excoriated one country--Israel--for alleged violations. Not Cambodia and Rwanda, with their well-documented records of genocide. Not Zimbabwe, with its racist economic policies. Not the Balkan states, with their ethnic cleansing. Not even China, with its dismal record on Tibet. Only Israel was singled out. Similarly, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, chaired on occasions by such notably enlightened states as Libya, has followed this same pattern, devoting much of its time, energy, and efforts to attacking Israel. The commission went so far as to affirm, last April 15, the legitimacy of suicide bombing against Israelis, or in judgment-free U.N.-speak, "all available means, including armed struggle."


IN THE ARAB WORLD, Zionism is portrayed not as the Jewish response to a history of anti-Semitism in a world that culminated in the Holocaust but as a hyperaggressive variant of colonialism. But since this new anti-Semitism manifests itself so clearly now as political rejection of the Jewish state, it is worth examining the historical record for a moment. Fact: The majority of Jews came to Israel in the late 19th century and early 20th century not as conquering Europeans backed by a national army and treasury but as the wretched of the earth in search of respite from ceaseless persecution. They were not wealthy; they were young, poor, and desperate. The notion that the traditional position of the Arabs in Palestine was jeopardized by Jewish settlements is belied by another fact: that when the Jews arrived, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and wildly neglected land of sandy deserts and malarial marshes. Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, described it as a "desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds--a silent, mournful expanse. . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country."


Even people unsympathetic to the Zionist cause believed that Jewish immigrants had improved the condition of Palestinian Arabs. Consider the words of Sharif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic holy places in Arabia, in 1918: "One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1,000 years. At the same time, we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine. . . . They knew that the country was for its original sons. The return of these exiles to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually [to be] an experimental school for their brethren." Hussein understood then, as so many refuse to see now, that the regeneration of Palestine and the growth of its population came only after the Jews returned in significant numbers. As Winston Churchill, then the British colonial secretary, pointed out: "The land was not being taken away from the Arabs. The Arabs sold land to Jews only if they chose to do so."
The hope was that the Arabs would accept Israelis as their neighbors and, finally, recognize them as such. That hope died aborning. Even war, that grim final arbiter of international relations, has made no difference. The Arabs resisted from the outset a Jewish presence in the region. They expanded their war against Israel into an attack on the very idea of Israel. Zionism, the Jewish claim to a land of their own, was declared racist because the Arabs said it deprived them of their land. They substituted the homeless Palestinian for the homeless Jew. The Arabs, having rendered the Palestinians homeless by refusing to accept partition in 1948 and having kept many of the Palestinians who fled the battle homeless in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan by refusing to resettle them in their lands, now blame this homelessness on the Jews. They have consistently charged that it was the Jews who had driven the Arabs out of Palestine. But as the eminent Arabist Bernard Lewis has written, "the great majority, like countless millions of refugees elsewhere, left their homes amid the confusion of and panic of invasion and war--one more unhappy part of the vast movement of population which occurred in the aftermath of World War II."
Even the foreign press, in regular contact with all sides during the conflict of 1948, wrote nothing to suggest that the flight of the Palestinians was not voluntary. Nor did Arab spokesmen, such as the Palestinian representative to the U.N., Jamal Husseini, or the secretary general of the Arab League, blame the Jews contemporaneously with the 1948 war for the flight of Arabs and Palestinians. In fact, those who fled were urged to do so by other Arabs. As then Prime Minister of Iraq Nuri Said put it, "the Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down." One Arab who fled encapsulated this thinking in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Difaa: "The Arab governments told us, `Get out so that we can get in.' So we got out, but they did not get in." And a bad situation, impossibly, was allowed to get worse. Arabs and Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war were resettled in camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the only such agency established for any refugee group since the massive dislocations of World War II. The partition of India occurred at the same time as the conflict in Palestine, and millions of Hindus and Muslims were uprooted, but virtually nothing was done for them. Nothing was done in response to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, where a long-standing religious, social, and political culture was virtually destroyed.


Yet 55 years after they were first established, the Arab refugee camps still exist. With the exception of Jordan, the Arab governments home to these camps have refused to grant citizenship to the refugees and opposed their resettlement. In Lebanon, 400,000 stateless Palestinians are not allowed to attend public school, own property, or even improve their housing stock. Three generations later, they continue to serve as political pawns of the Arab states, still hopeful of reversing the events of 1948. "The return of the refugees," as President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt said years later, "will mean the end of Israel."
The U.N., through its administration of the camps, has made a complicated problem infinitely more so. How? U.N. officials define refugees in the Middle East to include the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. In other parts of the world, descendants of refugees are not defined as refugees. The result of this unique treatment has been to increase the numbers of Arab refugees from roughly 700,000 to over 4 million, by including children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren. As a former prime minister of Syria, Khaled al Azm, wrote in his memoirs, "It is we who demanded the return of the refugees while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon them. [We] exploited them in executing crimes of murder and throwing bombs. All this in the service of political purposes." And so it goes, to this very day. At the time of the founding of the State of Israel, 900,000 Jewish refugees were forced out of neighboring Arab states in a coordinated effort. These refugees were absorbed into the new Israel. Yet the world was, and still is, untroubled by the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands.


TO SINGLE OUT ISRAEL as the only state that must restore a refugee population is to hold the Jewish state to a different standard. Or, perhaps, the more accurate term is double standard. Against such a backdrop, with a history so cynically manipulated by its enemies, the distortions and outright untruths that characterize more recent relations between Israel and the Palestinians should probably come as no surprise. There are virtually countless examples from which to choose, but last year's "massacre" by Israeli forces at the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin is particularly illustrative.


A Palestinian suicide bomber, on Passover eve, killed 29 people and injured 140 in the Israeli city of Netanya. It was the sixth terrorist bombing that week. The Israelis responded by sending troops into the West Bank, including the refugee camp at Jenin, the principal home of the bomb makers. A 10-day battle ensued. The Palestinians, with support from U.N. representatives, alleged that the Israelis had massacred hundreds of innocents, carried out summary executions, refrigerated the corpses, and removed them. Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian spokesman, reiterated the claim of many hundreds killed . The media accepted his version. But subsequent news reports, and even Palestinian testimony and writings recently collated, established the fact that groups like Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad
used women and children as shields during the fighting . The reports showed, conclusively, that there was no massacre of Palestinian civilians and documented that the Israelis exercised great restraint during the battle to minimize civilian casualties while suffering an inordinately high number of their own as a result.
Distortions and untruths, unsurprisingly, characterize the Palestinians' political dealings with Israel, as well. A critical moment in the relationship was the Oslo agreement of 1993. There, the negotiating principle was land for peace. What Israel received was no peace in return for its offer of land. The most generous Israeli offer of land for peace came at Camp David three years ago. Then Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, including the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The Camp David offer was not only rejected by Arafat but used as a provocation to launch a campaign of violence and terrorism that continues to this day.
The notion of land for peace bears exploring. If it is taken to mean that Israel must turn over more land until peace is achieved and Arab belligerence ended, the incurious may be left with the conclusion that the lack of peace must be the result of Israel's failure to yield sufficient land. Nothing could be further from the truth. There have been thousands of terrorist attacks since the second intifada began, three years ago. The only way Israel has been able to reduce the number of suicide bombers is eliminating their sanctuary by controlling the West Bank through occupation and sealing off Gaza.
But the story is not one of occupation of the West Bank by Israel. If the term "occupation" had any relevance at all, it was lost three years ago with Arafat's rejection of Barak's proposal for a Palestinian state. The issue is Palestinian refusal to grant Israel the right to exist as a Jewish state. Israel's battle is not the battle of Jew against Muslim. It is a battle against the hatred of the Jews and their connection to the land of Israel. How else to comprehend the Palestinian rejection of Jerusalem as the sacred city of the Jews and the Western Wall as the Second Temple, except as a rejection of the Jewish presence there? "There was no temple in Jerusalem," Arafat said at Camp David. "It was only an obelisk." To question the core of the Jewish faith is hardly an indication of readiness to resolve the conflict.
Quite the contrary, the spiraling Palestinian violence evidences a single-minded determination to continue the conflict. The insight of Amos Oz, the liberal Israeli writer, is pertinent. He is haunted, he said, by the observation that before the Holocaust, European graffiti read, "Jews to Palestine," while today it has been changed, to "Jews out of Palestine." The message to Jews, Oz says, is simple: "Don't be here, and don't be there. That is, don't be."



Excerpts from A muslim telling it like it is
by Dr Farrukh Saleem, an Islamabad-basedfreelance columnist (farrukh15@hotmail.com)

Conclusions
At least 70 percent of Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC) members are Authoritarian Regimes, Totalitarian Regimes or Restricted Democratic Practices.

At least 93 percent of OIC members are either `Not Free' or `Partially Free'.

Here are some other rather depressing facts: OIC has in it more than 1.3 billion people, one-fifth of humanity. Within the OIC are Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, UAE and Kuwait that among them possess 700 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. All the 1.3 billion put together have an annual GDP of less than $1.5 trillion. There are only 290 million Americans and their annual GDP is $10.4 trillion. France is at $1.54 trillion, Germany $2 trillion, UK $1.52 trillion and Italy, long the sick man of Europe, $1.4 trillion.

Kuwait, UAE and Brunei are the only OIC members where per capita income exceeds $10,000 a year. At least fifty OIC members have per capita incomes of under $5,000 a year. Forty-five OIC members have per capita incomes of under $1,000 a year.

Of the 1.3 billion OIC Muslims more than 800 million continue to be absolutely illiterate. Of the 290 million Americans 227 are Nobel Laureates (India has 4).

Of the 1.3 billion Muslims less than 300,000 qualify as `scientists'. That converts to a ratio of 230 scientists per one million Muslims. The United States of America has 1.1 million scientists; Japan has 700,000.

Among them, fifty-six OIC countries have an average of ten universities each for a total of less than 600 universities for 1.3 billion people. India has 8,407 universities, the US has 5,758.

The planet's poorest countries include Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Somalia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Mozambique. At least six of the poorest of the poor are OIC members.

Is the Ummah listening? We are trapped in a vicious cycle of illiteracy, poverty and violence. We continue to blame non-Muslims for all our failures. Salman Rushdie is convinced that America's `war on terrorism' is all about Islam. Rushdie says what we have is a "paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, `infidels' for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity.... this is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world." Rushdie goes to add that "if Islam is to be reconciled with modernity ... the restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticisation, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern. The only aspect of modernity interesting to the terrorists is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned on its makers. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream."



Your Taxes for PLO Propaganda
By David Bedein
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 29, 2003

Excerpts:



The discussion involves the Tendentious "education" booklet "Media and Communication Skills." put out by the Palestine Academic Society For the Study of Academic Affairs (PASSIA) with taxpayer money funding from the U.S. Aid For International Development (USAID).

"In order to influence the general policy in one way or another, all CSOs should know how to influence the media. The best known way to do this is to come up with a hidden agenda (italics mine), and deciding on the most suitable time to release information to the media in order to direct the media towards a predetermined slogan, a defined demand. The best method for exerting pressure, is to transform a problem into a public opinion issue, using the media."

Readers are told by Eric Weiner, of National Public Radio (NPR) that, "being balanced, according to their mandate, can be frustrating" and urges the audience/reader "to present your stories on a human level and not rely on the facts." Present tear-jerkers in which Israelis "have to justify their existence, which makes it easier to get through to us."

Ms. Lyse Doucete of the BBC, who refers to homicide bombers as "honor" killers, believes "her job is to translate" rather than simply report the news, because "Israel is led by a Prime Minister who believes that it is not Israel's policy that is wrong, just that they have to explain it better." And so she admonishes the Palestinians, "if you want to beat the Israelis, you have to beat them at their own game." Thereupon follows eight pages of clear instruction on how the Palestinians can manipulate the press to their own advantage.

Weiner again: "The fact that you have 1,000,000 pounds from the British government is not particularly interesting. But, if you explain why it is going to make such a difference by saying, `Did you know that since the closure was imposed we haven't been able to get paper through to Bethlehem?' . . . we are far more likely to be interested."

And still more from Doucet: "You should also know how to pick your target. Always be smart about where you pitch your story, and pitch it at the right time . . . It is true that Israel is treated with kid gloves and not held to the same standards as Iraq when it comes to UN resolutions."

Crossposted @ Israpundit.com There I encourage readers to write protest letters and I enclosed my own letter addressed to NPR. Enjoy!



Editorial: Skewed Question
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 29, 2003


People complain about the leftwing media. People deny there's a leftwing media. Here's an example from yesterday's presidential press conference of how the White House press snipes at the President's efforts to fight the terrorist enemy. Just imagine the press corps asking a parallel question say about why the United States continues to compel Israel to negotiate with the terrorist Palestine Authority whose suicide bombing methods are now being used against Americans in Iraq, and judge for yourself whether there is a balanced press in Washington looking out for American interests:
Mr. President, your policies on the Middle East seem so far to have produced pretty meager results, as the violence between Israelis and Palestinians continues. And as you heard last week from Muslim leaders in Indonesia, your policies are seen as biased toward Israel and I'd like to ask you about that. The government of Israel continues to build settlements in occupied territories and it continues to build the security fence which Palestinians see as stealing their land. You've criticized these moves mildly a couple of times, but you've never taken any concrete action to back up your words on that. Will you?

Let's dissect the question step by step:

Mr. President, your policies on the Middle East seem so far to have produced pretty meager results, as the violence between Israelis and Palestinians continues.

Two false assumptions:

[1] That Bush's Mid-East policy is somehow to blame for failing to stop the Palestinians from terrorizing Israel with suicide bombings. The people who must be blamed for the horrifying violence that is being perpetrated against Israeli citizens are, well, aside from how politically incorrect it is to say this in today's political climate: the people who are perpetrating the violence - the suicide bombers and the terrorists who organize and arm them , and tell them they're going to heaven if they blow up innocents, and make them national heroes.

[2] That there is some kind of equivalent "violence" going on "between" Israelis and Palestinians. The language of relativism here infers that there are two sides who refuse to stop hurting each other, and who are engaged in similar kinds of warfare. This is what other appeasers said about Hitler during the Blitz. This war began in 1948 when 100 million Arabs declared war on 1 million Jews. Since 1948, the Israelis have been offering to live in peace with their neighbours. If Arabs never attacked Israel in an effort to extinguish it, as happened in the wars of 1948, 1967 and 1973, Israel would have never raised a martial finger against anyone. If there were no suicide bombings or other forms of terrorism directed at Israelis, there would be no Israeli "violence", since there would be no need of it.

In 2000 at Camp David, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians 95% of their negotiating demands. He offered them their own sovereign state in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, more than 90 percent of the West Bank, and a capital in Jerusalem. But Arafat rejected the stunningly generous proposal. His counter proposal was to set the terrorists loose, initiate the suicide-bombing intifada and ignite a full-scale terror war against Jews.

And as you heard last week from Muslim leaders in Indonesia, your policies are seen as biased toward Israel and I'd like to ask you about that.

False assumption: Were these Muslim leaders among those from 57 countries who applauded the statement made by the Malaysian Prime Minister the previoius week that Jews controlled the world? Does what nameless Muslim leaders think about American policies toward Israel represent reality and should it serve as a basis for American foreign policy -- particularly if those Muslim leaders like 40% of the Muslim world think Osama Bin Laden is a hero?.

The government of Israel continues to build settlements in occupied territories. . . .

False assumption: The territories were occupied by Israel in the course of repelling an armed aggression by Arab states whose expressed purpose was to obliterate Israel, erase it from the map. The "occupation" is necessary because the Arab aggressors have refused to sign a peace treaty with Israel for 55 years and are still intent on "liberating Palestine from the [Jordan] river to the sea." By all rights of international law, Israel could have annexed the entire West Bank and made it part of Israel. That is what Poland did to Prussia after the Second World War as punishment for the Nazi aggression. What do the settlements have to do with peace -- except in the eye of the aggressor? Why shouldn't Jews live in the West Bank? There are more than a million Arabs living in Israel? The answer is that the Arabs are Jew-haters who refuse to live alongside of Jews. Why isn't the White House reporter asking about this little problem?

. . . .and it continues to build the security fence which Palestinians see as stealing their land.

False assumption: How touching. Throughout the "Road Map To Peace," Palestinians keep straying over the border into Israel to blow up Jewish families and do so with the encouragement and support of the Palestine Authority. In desperation the Jews start building a fence to protect themsleves. The Palestinians call this "stealing their land." And a White House correspondent lends credibility to the claim. As a matter of fact, the fence that already surrounds the Gaza strip has resulted in the fact that not a single suicide bomber has carried out his mission from Gaza.

How come no one at the press conference asked this question:

Mr. President, how can we expect any kind of realistic peace talks to emerge in this conflict if the Palestinian Authority refuses to first dismantle its own terrorist infrastructure, and to shut down the terrorist groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, that operate so freely, with such bloody consequences, under its wing? Mr. President, how come America gets the right to go into Afghanistan and Iraq to root out the terrorists and Israel is denied the same right of self-defense?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev's Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.

Talibans take this! (drooling) mmmmmm....lol




I see that I am in a humorous mood today:

Why Muslim terrorists are so quick to commit suicide:


"No Jesus, No Christmas.
No television, No cheerleaders, No baseball, No football, No basketball, No hockey, No golf, No tailgate parties, No Wal-Mart, No Home Depot, No pork BBQ, No hot dogs, No burgers, No chocolate chip cookies.
No lobster, No shellfish, or even frozen fish sticks, No gumbo, No jambalaya.

Rags for clothes and towels for hats.

Constant wailing from the guy next-door because he's sick and there are no doctors.

Constant wailing from the guy in the tower (lol).

More than one wife.

You can't shave.

Your wives can't shave.

You can't shower to wash off the smell of donkey cooked over burning camel dung.

The women have to wear baggy dresses and veils at all times.

Your bride is picked by someone else. She smells just like your donkey. But your donkey has a better disposition.

Then they tell you that when you die it all gets better!

I mean, really, is there a mystery here?"


Yo! Yasser, Ariel -- Let's Do Lunch - Great Humor!

Great humor at the expense of the Hollywood actors' peace-making trip to the Mideast.
Warmly recommended.... laugh the whole thing off :)


Where presidents and prime ministers have failed, Hollywood hunk Brad Pitt and wife Jennifer Anniston hope their star power will work wonders in new roles as Middle East peace envoys. They will team up with other actors such as Edward Norton, Jason Alexander and Danny DeVito on a private mission to help resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict.
The problem with Hollywood stars is that they don't understand that their popularity comes from speaking words written by other people while being filmed by other people on projects that are financed by other people. Playing a doctor on television does not qualify one to perform brain surgery, even if you can say, "I need that Fleeber retracter stat!" Even DeVito, who produces and directs and therefore understands a bit more about the illusory nature of the entertainment industry (and thus should really know better) gets into the act. And when I say "gets into the act," I mean that quite literally.

And how will these constellations beam their little rays of sunshine into the drab and dreary lives of Israelis and Palestinians and achieve peace?

London's Sunday Telegraph said it was not clear how the stars intended to stop the escalating violence but their strategy was to appeal to the man in the street. Pitt and Aniston believe the region's war-weary inhabitants want a negotiated settlement and they think direct appeals to 'ordinary folk' can bring the warring parties together, the paper said.
One problem Aniston & Co may encounter is that 75% of 'ordinary' Palestinians like seeing 'ordinary' Israelis blown up in restaurants and on buses. Aniston's smile might melt hearts in America, but they've likely never heard of her:

For some, the prospect of DeVito talking peace with Hamas militants over a cup of tea, or Pitt breaking bread at a Sabbath dinner with hardline Jewish settlers, is ridiculous, the Telegraph said.
Israeli sociologist Oz Almog told the paper: 'Many Palestinians do not even have television sets. What's more, for the past three years here, no one has listened to anyone. So what makes these people think they will listen to Danny DeVito?'


Well, Oz, come on ... I mean, this is Danny DeVito. Dude. For real.

While organisers admit that none of the actors has any experience of the Middle East or of conflict resolution, they say this may help as they will be considered non-partisan.
Or it may indicate that they're really unqualified to speak on the subject. I don't know a damned thing about directing a movie, but I'd like DeVito to let me helm his next $80 million film. How do you think that'll work out?

Mr Mohammed Darawse, the Palestinian regional coordinator of the project, is convinced they can make a difference. He told the Telegraph: 'They asked intelligent questions when we met and they clearly know the big picture.'
Uh, let's see. Israel exists on territory that the Palestinians think belongs to them, and they want to push the Israelis into the Mediterranean, sans lifejackets. The Israelis don't want that, and would like to be able to eat pizza or ride buses without teenagers wearing bomb bras blowing them up. How's that for the big picture? Or, from Mr Darawse's point of view, the Palestinians' land was stolen by the evil Zionists who are descended from apes and pigs, and since these yahoods refuse to go away, the Palestinians have the right to attack them until they leave. Any better? No?

How about this, then: the Palestinians, who had possession of half of the territory known collectively as Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip in 1948, refused to recognize Israel's right to exist and allowed five Arab armies to pass through their territory to annihilate the Israelis. The Israelis won. The Palestinians did the same thing in 1967, and the Israelis won again, and this time decided that they were tired of Palestinians attacking them from the east, and took over the territories. The Palestinians are pissed off because they've had the world's worst leadership; this was confirmed after Oslo, when after being offered 95% of what they claim to want, decided instead to launch the intifada instead of accepting. Better? No?

Okay, I give up -- apparently, it takes someone with the genius of Jason Alexander to solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict. I suppose he could force both sides to watch "Bob Patterson" episodes until they crack. Oh, the horror! (via Strange Women Lying in Ponds)


The PA's anti-US message

Excerpts:
" America will fall, may it be Allah's will, just as Rome fell."

Ibrahim Madiras recently called the US "the foremost enemy of the Muslim nation," comparable to the evil Pharaoh of the Bible (PA TV February 21, 2003)

Iraq's land will be a graveyard for the American soldiers..." (Al-Hayat al-Jadida, Dec. 19, 2002).

During the war, the PA actively endorsed killing Americans and even produced a music video celebrating the deaths of US soldiers, which was broadcast repeatedly on its TV.

See video and cartoons here - pmw.org.il(the original article)

I crossposted the entire article on Israpundit.com



Quote of the day:

The left believes in words, the right believes in actions. The left judges Islamists by their words, the right by their actions.

best left/right characterization in a while:)

When did YOU visit Israel last?

I have just returned at the beginning of the month from my annual visit to Israel.
Wrote a pictorial essay: Eilat 2003 ( https://trafael.tripod.com/eilat.html ). Most pics are not mine but they show the beauty of the country.

On the last page I comment on the changing face of Israel.

Enjoy!

Crossposted @ Israpundit.com



Anti-Israeli picture bias in the media


Disgustingly lowly, Israeli leaders and particularly Sharon are shown in the media frowning, somber or grim- faced.

On the other hand Arafat and his clan largely have a grandfatherly grin plastered on their faces.

Pervasively subliminal.

Crossposted @ NYTimesProtest.com



Facts vs. Arab confabulations

This is video shot from a drone (1 MB) during IDF's Gaza strike which disproves the usual arab lies about a massacre.
From IDF's website.

Crossposted @ Mideasttruth.com



Subject: Landmark Survey of Israelis, Israeli-Arabs & Palestinians:
Profound Palestinian Distrust of and Dislike for America

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FOR MORE INFORMATION:
October 22, 2003 Ben Clarke 703-358-0080

Landmark Survey of Israelis, Israeli-Arabs & Palestinians: Profound
Palestinian Distrust of and Dislike for America

An overwhelming 95% of Jews in Israel support the United States in the
War on Iraq; 74% of Palestinians support Saddam Hussein


In perhaps the most comprehensive comparative study of Israelis,
Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians to date, it is distinctly clear that they
have vastly divergent views on issues ranging from 9/11 to the War on Iraq
to the current Roadmap for Peace.

Consider the following key findings:

- 96% of Jews in Israel believe that the people who flew planes into New
York's World Trade Center were terrorists; a mere 37% of Palestinians share
that view; in addition, 26% of Palestinians believe Israelis planned the
9/11 attacks.

- 42% of Palestinians and 61% of Israeli-Arabs stated that they 'support'
the people who are attacking American troops in Iraq right now. Zero
percent of Israeli Jews hold that view.

- 36% of Palestinians believe that the United States poses the greatest
threat to world peace; 51% stated that Israel poses the greatest threat to
world peace.

The survey was released today by Itamar Marcus, founder of Palestinian Media
Watch (www.pmw.org.il), written by pollster Frank Luntz and conducted by
PORI (The Public Opinion Research of Israel) and The Palestinian Center for
Public Opinion. The survey consisted of interviews with 600 Israeli Jews,
400 Israeli Arabs and 607 Palestinians and was fielded between the dates of
September 21st and September 27th. Israel has approximately six million
Jewish citizens and more than one million citizens who are Arabs.

"There are those in America who urge Washington to take what they call 'a
balanced approach' to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict," said pollster Frank
Luntz. "The problem is, there is absolutely no balance between Palestinians
and Israelis when it comes to their views of the United States. The
American people are not going to be happy, and will certainly not want a
balanced approach, when they learn that more than 40% of Palestinians
support the people attacking and killing American soldiers in Iraq."

"These results are a product of the Palestinians being taught for years by
their leaders to see the US as an archenemy to be loathed and fought," says
Itamar Marcus, of Palestinian Media Watch who sponsored the poll. "While PA
officials are accepted in Washington as colleagues and even allies, the PA's
message in Arabic is to hate and kill Americans. The Americans were murdered
in Gaza by Palestinians fulfilling their role to wage war against Americans,
as they have openly been taught by their leaders."

Although Israelis, Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians live side-by-side, their
attitudes, opinions and most basic beliefs are often diametrically opposed.

For example:

- 75% of Israeli Jews and 71% of Israeli-Arabs, but only 41% of Palestinians
"strongly agree" that "men and women are equal and society should treat mean
and women exactly the same."

- 83% of Israelis "strongly agree" that "terrorism is NEVER justified under
any circumstances." By comparison, only 58% of Israeli-Arabs and 34% of
Palestinians hold a similar view.

- Fully 90% of Jews in Israel strongly agree that Hamas is "a terrorist
group," compared to only 16% of Israeli-Arabs and 5% of Palestinians.

"Palestinian support for terrorism is a direct result of their government
teaching that violence and terror are valid tools to achieve political
goals," explains Marcus. "Even the so-called moderates of PA leaders, Hanan
Ashrawi and Sari Nusseibeh, hold this view, as they explicitly stated a year
ago. In the PA, all agree that the killing of Israelis civilians is valid
if it would further their political goals. The debate between the
"moderates" and the masses has only been about whether it has been
productive."

The survey also cast grave doubts on the prospects for a lasting peace in
the region. Although an equal 40% of Jews in Israel and 40% of Palestinians
see a possibility for peace, the two sides are still quite divided in their
priorities. For example:

- 99% of Israelis consider bombings of Israeli buses and restaurants to be
acts of terrorism, while only 10% of Palestinians would agree.

- 47% of Jewish Israelis rank "peace" as their highest value. By
comparison, only 23% of Palestinians choose peace first.

- 46% of Palestinians characterize Israelis as the 'enemy' and 31% believe
that Allah wants Muslims to fight Jews. Moreover, 59% of Palestinians feel
Hamas and Islamic Jihad should NOT give up their armed struggle against
Israel even if Israel were to leave all territories, including East
Jerusalem, and grant statehood to the Palestinians.

"This poll shows that the United States needs to continue - in fact, greatly
expand - its public diplomacy efforts in the Middle East, including among
Palestinian Arabs," said Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA). "The prospects
for peace in the region will greatly improve if attitudes change."

"We need to strip away the public fictions about the Palestinian
government," former Ambassador Richard Carlson went on to say. "These
polling figures reflect the years of political incitement and indoctrination
of the Palestinian people, not just the hateful drumbeat against Israel but
against America, equally." Carlson currently serves as Vice Chairman for
the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Palestinians, Israeli-Arabs and Jewish Israelis all overwhelmingly believe
that democracy is the best form of government. However, each group defines
"democracy" differently. Nearly 8 in 10 Jews in Israel believe that their
political system should be a 'democratic regime in which all the political
ideas are represented.' When asked exactly the same question, only 33% of
Palestinians agreed. In fact, one in five Palestinians support the
establishment of an Islamic single-party government.

"What's truly unique about this survey is that it asks either identical or
parallel questions of the three populations," said Luntz. "This offers
observers of the Middle East a perfect opportunity to analyze beliefs and
opinions across the full spectrum of participants."

"In reading the results," Luntz added, "it is clear that for peace to
happen, the culture of hate that causes Palestinians to accept terrorism
will have to be replaced by educating for peace. I am pessimistic about the
prospects for peace. The divide between the populations is just too great,
even in the definition of the words used. A terrorist that kills 20 Israeli
women and children is a 'freedom fighter' to half of the Palestinian
population. How can you have peace under these circumstances?" Luntz
concluded.

SURVEY QUESTIONNAIRE SUMMARY FOLLOWS

PORI Public Opinion & marketing Research of Israel, 2000 Ltd.
Middle East Survey (Media Summary)

N = 600 Israeli Jews - 400 Israeli Arabs - 607 Palestinians
Margin of Error (600 Sample +/- 4%) (400 Sample +/- 4.9%)
September 2003

1. First, in your opinion, which nation or people is the single greatest
threat to WORLD peace? I need you to pick only one nation or people you
think is the single greatest threat to WORLD peace.
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
IRAN 52%/ 3%/ 1%/
PALESTINIANS 8%/ 5%/ 1%
IRAQ 7%/ 1%/ 1%
MOSLEMS IN GENERAL 6%/ ------/ ------
UNITED STATES 4%/ 40%/ 36%
SYRIA 3%/ ------/ ------
SAUDI ARABIA 3%/ ------/ 1%
NORTH KOREA 2%/ 1%/ 1%
ISRAEL 2%/ 26%/ 51%
ALL ARAB COUNTRIES 2%/ ------/ ------
CHINA 1%/ 1%/ 1%
OTHER 4%/ 4%/ 2%
DON'T KNOW/REFUSED 9%/ 22%/ 7%

2. In the war between the United States and Saddam
Hussein, whom did you support?
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

STRONGLY HUSSEIN ------/ 21%/ 50%
MOSTLY HUSSEIN ------/ 17%/ 24%
MOSTLY UNITED STATES 22%/ 10%/ 6%
STRONGLY UNITED STATES 73%/ 9%/ 4%
DON'T KNOW 5%/ 44%/ 16%

3. And in general, do you . the people who are attacking
American troops in Iraq right now.
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

STRONGLY SUPPORT ------/ 40%/ 26%
SOMEWHAT SUPPORT ------/ 21%/ 16%
SOMEWHAT OPPOSE 25%/ 12%/ 21%
STRONGLY OPPOSE 71%/ 15%/ 23%
DON'T KNOW 5%/ 12%/ 14%

4. In your opinion, were the people who flew planes
into New York's World Trade Center . ?
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
TERRORISTS 96%/ 41%/ 37%
MARTYRS 3%/ 8%/ 22%
FREEDOM FIGHTERS ------/ 25%/ 14%
DON'T KNOW 1%/ 27%/ 27%

5. And who do you believe planned the 9/11 attacks
against the United States?
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
OSAMA BIN LADEN 91%/ 34%/ 46%
SADDAM HUSSEIN 2%/ 1%/ 4%
THE UNITED STATES 1%/ 13%/ 6%
ISRAEL ------/ 11%/ 26%
SOMEONE ELSE 2%/ 2%/ 1%
DON'T KNOW 5%/ 39%/ 18%

6. Terrorism is NEVER justified under any
circumstances.
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

STRONGLY AGREE 83%/ 58%/ 34%
SOMEWHAT AGREE 10%/ 11%/ 32%
SOMEWHAT DISAGREE 4%/ 6%/ 18%
STRONGLY DISAGREE 4%/ 22%/ 9%
DON'T KNOW 1%/ 4%/ 7%

7. Hamas is a terrorist group.
Israeli Jews/Israeli
Arabs/Palestinians

STRONGLY AGREE 90%/ 16%/ 5%
SOMEWHAT AGREE 8%/ 11%/ 8%
SOMEWHAT DISAGREE 1%/ 14%/ 14%
STRONGLY DISAGREE ------/ 45%/ 67%/
DON'T KNOW 1%/ 15%/ 6%

[Hamas are freedom fighters.]

STRONGLY AGREE ------/ 33%/ 51%/
SOMEWHAT AGREE ------/ 26%/ 31%
SOMEWHAT DISAGREE ------/ 10%/ 10%
STRONGLY DISAGREE ------/ 20%/ 5%
DON'T KNOW ------/ 12%/ 4%

8. [Last year the Tulkarm Shahids Memorial
Soccer Championship For Children was named
After Abd Al-Al Baset Odeh, who killed 30 Israelis
in a suicide bombing. Is this a good thing or a bad
thing?]
Israeli Jews/Israeli
Arabs/Palestinians

A GOOD THING ------/ [15%] [71%]
A BAD THING ------/ [70%] [13%]
DON'T KNOW ------/ [15%] [17%]

9. If the Ministry of Education wanted to name a
youth soccer tournament after Baruch Goldstein,
who killed unarmed Palestinians in an attack,
would that be a good ting or bad thing?
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians
GOOD THING 11%/ 4%/ ------
BAD THING 83%/ 91%/ ------
DON'T KNOW 7%/ 5%/ ------

10. Do you consider Palestinian bombings of Israeli
buses and restaurants to be acts of terrorism?
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

YES 99%/ 57%/ 10%
NO 1%/ 31%/ 79%
DON'T KNOW ------/ 12%/ 11%

11. When Palestinian leaders refer to "occupied territories," do
you think they mean .
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

ALL OF THE WEST BANK AND 17%/ 64%/ 48%
GAZA STRIP

ALL OF THE WEST BANK, GAZA 78%/ 25%/ 37%
STRIP AND ISRAEL

SOMETHING ELSE 5% 11%/ 15%

12. Do you believe God wants Jews to fight Muslims?
[Do you believe Allah wants Muslims to fight Jews?]

Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

YES 12%/ [31%] / [31%]
NO 64%/ [52%] / [47%]
DON'T KNOW 18%/ [15%] / [22%]
DON'T BELIVE IN GOD / [ALLAH] 7%/ [2%] / [------]

13. If the Palestinians were to stop the terrorist attacks
and give up the right of return, should Israel withdraw
from all the territories, including East Jerusalem,
and grant them statehood?
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

YES 38%/ ------/ ------/
NO 57%/ ------/ ------
DON'T KNOW 4%/ ------/ ------

14. [If Israel were to leave all the territories, including
East Jerusalem, and grant statehood to the
Palestinians, should Palestinians give up the
right of return?]
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

YES ------/ [26%]/ [11%]
NO ------/ [65%]/ [80%]
DON'T KNOW ------/ [10%]/ [9%]

15. [And if Israel were to leave all territories, including
East Jerusalem, and grant statehood to the
Palestinians, should Hamas and Islamic Jihad give
up their armed struggle against Israel?]
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

YES ------/ [83%]/ [26%]
NO ------/ [13%]/ [59%]
DON'T KNOW ------/ [5%]/ [16%]

16. How would you feel if a future Palestinian state were to
be governed by Sha'riah law?

Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

VERY FAVORABLE 2%/ 32%/ 33%
SOMEWHAT FAVORABLE 5%/ 25%/ 36%
SOMEWHAT UNFAVORABLE 16%/ 10%/ 22%
VERY UNFAVORABLE 66%/ 27%/ 3%
DON'T KNOW/REFUSED 11%/ 7%/ 7%

17. Which of the following is most important to you?
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

PEACE 47%/ 53%/ 23%
FREEDOM 20%/ 21%/ 29%
*DEATH THROUGH KIDUSH 4%/ [5%]/ [23%]
HASHEM / **[SHAHADA]
YOUR HOMELAND 25%/ 21%/ 24%
DON'T KNOW 4%/ 1%/ 3%

*Martyrdom, dying defending one's religion or people
**Death For Allah

18. Democracy is the best form of government.
Israeli Jews/Israeli Arabs/Palestinians

STRONGLY AGREE 53%/ 55%/ 55%
SOMEWHAT AGREE 34%/ 31%/ 25%
SOMEWHAT DISAGREE 8%/ 4%/ 9%
STRONGLY DISAGREE 5%/ 9%/ 8%
DON'T KNOW ------/ 1%/ 3%


METHODOLOGY

All three surveys were written and coordinated by Frank Luntz. Interviews
were conducted by PORI among the three populations:

Israeli Jews:

PORI - Public Opinion Research of Israel conducted this survey by telephone
(CATI) among a sample of 600 Adults (18+) Israeli Jews. The survey was in
the field September 23rd and 24th . The margin of error is +/- 4%.

Israeli Arabs:

PORI - Public Opinion Research of Israel conducted this survey by telephone
(CATI) among a sample of 400 Adults (18+) Israeli Arabs. The survey was in
the field September 24th and 25th . The margin of error is +/- 4.9%.

Palestinians:

PORI - Public Opinion Research of Israel coordinated this survey of
face-to-face interviews among a sample of 607 Palestinians. The interviews
were conducted by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion. The survey was
in the field between the dates of September 21st and September 27th and has
a margin of error of +/- 4%.

PORI, founded in 1966, is one of the senior research institutes in Israel.
The firm has conducted numerous research projects for overseas governments
including the U.S. Department of State,
media and academic clients that include The Pew Research Center and the
BBC, as well as
international corporate work for companies that include Boeing and IBM.

Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, founded in 1994, has overseas
clients including U.S. Department of State, Gallup International and the UN
Development Program.

Crossposted @ Israpundit.com

Tour of U.S. Schools Reveals Why Zionism Is Flunking on Campus


By Natan Sharansky
Forward Magazine
October 24, 2003

When I got to Rutgers University in New Jersey last month, I almost forgot I was on a college campus. The atmosphere was far from the cool, button-down academic reserve typical of such institutions. It was more reminiscent of a battlefield.

My arrival was greeted by a noisy demonstration of Palestinian and Jewish students holding signs reading "Racist Israel" and "War Criminals," together with black-coated Neturei Karta members calling for the destruction of the blasphemous Zionist entity. Faculty members, predictably led by a former Israeli professor, had sent out e-mails protesting the granting of a platform to a representative of the "Nazi, war-criminal" state. Of course, there was the famous pie incident in which a member of a campus Jewish anti-occupation group made his way past my security guards and plastered me in the face with a cream pie while shouting "End the Occupation."

Opposed to them were hundreds of no less rowdy Jewish students, full of motivation to defend Israel and give the protesters back as good as they got. After the pie incident, when I returned to the hall and mounted the stage, the atmosphere was so electric, so full of adrenalin, that the Palestinians and their supporters who had come to disrupt the event had no choice but to abandon their plans for provocation.

Things were not much calmer at Boston University: An anonymous bomb threat brought swarms of police to the lecture hall and almost forced a cancellation of my appearance. But here, too, some good resulted when the bomb threat caused the lecture to be moved to a larger hall, which was quickly filled with some 600 listeners who were unwilling to accept the violent silencing of pro-Israel views.

These moments -- the pie throwing, the bomb threat, the demonstration -- as raucous, threatening and contentious as they were, are among the more pleasant memories from my 13-campus tour of the United States. Perhaps it is because at these moments I felt that there was some point to my trip, perhaps because the violent hostility had stirred the students and motivated them to want to fight and win -- which I, of course, was delighted to see.

There were other moments during my tour, difficult moments when I felt fear, sadness and worry. During a frank and friendly conversation with a group of Jewish students at Harvard University, one student admitted to me that she was afraid -- afraid to express support for Israel, afraid to take part in pro-Israel organizations, afraid to be identified. The mood on campus had turned so anti-Israel that she was afraid that her open identification could cost her, damaging her grades and her academic future. That her professors, who control her final grades, were likely to view such activism unkindly, and that the risk was too great.

Having grown up in the communist Soviet Union, I am very familiar with this fear to express one's opinions, with the need to hold the "correct opinions" in order to get ahead, with the reality that expressing support for Israel is a blot on one's resume. But to find all these things at Harvard Business School? In a place that was supposed to be open, liberal, professional? At first I thought this must be an individual case, particular to this student. I thought her fears were exaggerated. But my conversations with other students at various universities made it clear that her feelings are widespread, that the situation on campuses in the United States and Canada is more serious than we think. And this is truly frightening.

To most Israelis, what happens on the world's campuses hardly seems a life-and-death concern. The world is against us in any case. And as for Jewish students, why should we care? They've got troubles? Let them move to Israel. In my own view, however, this is a fateful issue for the State of Israel and the Jewish people.

Israel has few strategic assets as critical as American Jewry. The fact that the world's leading superpower is a steadfast ally of Israel is due in large measure to this proud and activist community. But nobody can guarantee that the current state of affairs will continue indefinitely. I have been in close contact with the American Jewish community for more than 30 years, and its leadership is largely unchanged. I entered a Russian prison, I got out, I moved to Israel, I became a Cabinet minister and the people I work with are mostly the same people. The leadership is getting old, and the younger generation is not stepping forward.

The continuing support of American Jewry depends on this younger generation. If it chooses to affiliate actively with the Jewish people, if it supports Israel and acts on its behalf, then we will continue to have a strong backbone of support in a world that is turning more and more hostile. But if this younger generation were to disappear -- whether through assimilation or an unwillingness to be identified -- Israel would find within a very few years that it faces an entirely different United States.

This younger generation is growing up on the university campus. That is where the core of future administrations is taking shape. The students I met at Princeton, Columbia and Harvard will be the decision-makers of the coming decades. Will they be as pro-Israel as today's decision-makers? Will they stand up fearlessly for Israel? Given the level of anti-Israel sentiment on today's campuses, where being "in" means being hostile or at least apathetic toward Israel, I have grave doubts.

The transformation of campuses into hothouses of anti-Israel opinion did not happen by itself, nor did it occur overnight. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the mood on campus was completely different. Jewish students then were at the center of student activism, leading movements for human rights, including the Soviet Jewry freedom movement. Demonstrations, hunger strikes, mass rallies -- all this combined to form a massive army that was largely made up, as the Soviet secret police used to put it sneeringly, of "students and housewives." These struggles were an inseparable part of the Jewish identities of those young people. They were certain of themselves, certain of the justice of their cause and certain that they were on the side of the angels. The goal was clear, the enemy was defined and their pride in themselves, their Jewishness and Israel was boundless.

When I sat for Sabbath dinner with 300 Jewish students at Columbia University in New York -- together with Glenn Richter, who in 1964 at the university launched the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry -- and I told them about those days, the events seemed to them all but unimaginable. Today, when Jewish activity on campus is directed almost entirely inward, when Jewish student organizations feel like walled fortresses in enemy territory, when pro-Israel students hardly dream of taking leadership positions in campus struggles for human rights, those days seem like a distant dream.

Years of massive investments of money and effort by Arab states and the Palestinians have changed the picture. One after the other, departments of Middle Eastern studies have been set up on university campuses, with generous Saudi funding -- departments that worked to establish pseudo-scientific theories, presenting Israel as the last colonial state, a state whose very existence is immoral regardless of borders, a state that should not exist. Differing views are as a matter of course not tolerated. When Jewish community leaders decided in the last few years to begin investing funds to create chairs in Israel studies, they discovered there is no one to teach them. There are no experts, no writers. The field has been abandoned.

Not only in the intellectual arena have we abandoned the field. In the public relations field, too, the Palestinians have learned, unlike the Israelis, to appreciate the importance of the university as the shaper of the next generation, and to concentrate their efforts there. Articulate, effective speakers have been dispatched to campuses to mobilize the idealistic students for their own political interests.

They have been sent to explain that despite the fact that in the Arab nations, as in the autonomous areas of the Palestinian Authority, there are no rights for women, minorities, gays or nearly anyone else, that despite all this they are the true bearers of the banner of human rights; that all true seekers of justice should act on their behalf, and against Israel's.

The absurdity cries out to the heavens, but no one seems to notice. The banner of human rights, once identified to a great degree with Jews, has become a weapon against them. Liberal and democratic discourse on human rights serves mainly as a vehicle for attacks against Israel, and increasingly against Jews.

In the last three years the process has greatly intensified. Students, young, idealistic and naturally tending to see the world in black and white, have been greatly influenced by daily media reports about "human rights violations" carried out by Israel, by pictures of Palestinian children, by unbalanced reportage. Lacking a serious "other side," lacking any real information about the roots of the conflict, lacking any serious Israeli public relations effort, the campuses have become more and more hostile.

When I assumed my current position as minister for Jerusalem and Diaspora affairs, it was clear to me that this issue of campuses as centers of anti-Israelism and their influence on the young Jews of the world must be at the center of my agenda. It is a matter of critical importance for the State of Israel and the Jewish people. And so I decided to travel, to learn the facts first-hand and to try to begin a process of change.

Before I left Israel my daughter said to me, "Dad, if they throw eggs at you, duck." My other daughter countered: "Why duck? Catch them and throw them back." You may laugh, but that is how I felt. After ducking for so long, while Israel was under constant attack for supposedly being a "war criminal," a "Nazi state" and the "embodiment of evil," I felt the time had come to throw back a few eggs. Especially on campuses, especially on the topic of human rights. Not to apologize, but to try to show the true picture -- who is the only democracy in the Middle East and who are the dictatorships, where are human rights honored and where are they trampled.

I wanted to show that even during a cruel war against terrorism, Israel was showing great sensitivity to human rights -- certainly in comparison to other democracies at war: the United States in Afghanistan, NATO in Yugoslavia, Russia in Chechnya. I talked about the battle of Jenin, when we decided not to use airplanes that could hurt the Palestinian civilian population, and instead sent our soldiers hunting house to house for weapons and terrorists.

I wanted, as someone who had spent a considerable part of his life struggling for human rights, to bring the human rights struggle back to its proper context. To return it to its true owners. To explain that support for terrorists and dictators like Yasser Arafat and his gang cannot be considered support for human rights.

For six days I traveled across the United States. I did not meet with administration officials or do any politicking. Just campuses. Meeting students, instructors, Jewish and non-Jewish activists. A marathon of 13 campuses in six days. I discovered an enormous thirst for knowledge, for straight answers about these supposed "human rights violations" and "war crimes." I learned that combining human rights, a popular, burning issue among students, and Israel, a very unpopular issue, works to Israel's advantage, because even the most pro-Palestinian students, including Arab students, had to back down when the discussion centered squarely and honestly on human rights and democracy.

But I also learned that every such victory was a limited one, like capturing a single hill in enemy territory. The overall picture is deeply worrying. On every campus I visited, Jewish students make up between 10% and 20% of the population, but no more than a tenth of them, by my estimate, take part in Jewish or pro-Israel activity. Another tiny but outspoken fraction serves as the spearhead of anti-Israel activity, for there is no better cover for hiding the racist nature of causes like an anti-Israel boycott than a Jewish professor or student eager to prove that he is holier than the pope. And the rest? The rest are simply silent. They are not identified, not active, not risk-takers. Nearly 90% of our students are Jews of silence.

To the credit of the activists, it must be said that they do impressive work. But they are few, and many are tired and discouraged. One student who was active in pro-Israel organizations told us that at a certain point he could no longer stand the peer pressure of those around him who viewed him as a pro-Israel obsessive. He now pours his idealistic energies into an organic farm he started. Now that he is involved in environmental activism everyone is happy with him. Having myself grown up in a place where those around me barely tolerated my Jewish involvements, I know that this sort of peer pressure will drive most people to flee, just as we -- most of us -- in Russia tried to run away from our Jewishness to the ivory towers of science or the arts. We thought that scientific excellence would save us from the mark of Cain on our foreheads.

Can the trends be reversed? Can we recapture the campus? I believe we can. But it will require a concentrated effort and a genuine change of consciousness and direction in Israel's informational efforts. We in Israel and in Jewish communities around the world must combine our efforts and work together. In the United States things have begun to stir, and various organizations are active on campus. Now it is time for Israel to do its share.


This article first appeared in Ma'ariv and is reprinted with permission. Translated by J.J. Goldberg.

* Find this article at:
http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.10.24/oped1.html

Crossposted @ Israpundit.com



4 following articles from Opinionjournal.com


Good News Watch


"One of the chief arguments against coalition intervention in Iraq was that military action there would 'destabilize the region,' " notes Jerry Bowyer on TechCentralStation.com. Bowyer applies a market test to this argument and finds it wanting:

Looking at the countries with readily available [stock] market indices--Israel TA-100, Turkish ISE National-100, Pakistani Karachi 100, Egyptian CMA--we find that every one of those indices has risen over the time period, from George Bush's ultimatum on March 17th to now. Egypt is up 19.3%; Israel is up 29.3%; Turkey is up 45.1%; and the-powder-keg-known-as-Pakistan is up an astonishing 67.5%!

"The U.S. command said Thursday crime rates in Iraq dropped significantly in the past two weeks as Iraqi police tightened their control on security," United Press International reports from Baghdad:

U.S. Gen. Mike Hazelink, who is in charge of security in the Iraqi capital, said car thefts dropped by 50 percent, homicide by 65 percent and armed robberies by 30 percent, according to the latest statistics tabulated by coalition forces.

And the BBC reports that "Afghanistan is to compete in a beauty contest for the first time in more than 30 years and almost two years after the fall of the oppressive Taleban regime":

Vida Samadzai, 25, who has lived in the United States since 1996, will compete alongside 60 other women from across the world for the Miss Earth title in Manila, the Philippines, contest organisers said.

Ms Samadzai, or Miss Afghanistan as she will be known in the competition, will take part in all sections of the contest, including the swimsuit section.

The Hindustan Times has a nice collection of photos of the Afghan beauty.


Weasel Watch

"A top Iraqi official attending an international conference on raising funds to rebuild Iraq warned Thursday that France and Germany's limited donations would not be forgotten," CNN reports from Madrid:

Ayad Allawi, the current head of Iraq's U.S.-appointed governing council, said he hoped German and French officials would reconsider their decision not to boost their contributions beyond funds already pledged through the European Union.

"As far as Germany and France are concerned, really, this was a regrettable position they had," Allawi said. "I don't think the Iraqis are going to forget easily that in the hour of need, those countries wanted to neglect Iraq."

Chris Patten, external affairs commissioner for the European Union, tells the Washington Post: "You can't expect European taxpayers who felt particularly hostile to military intervention to feel hugely enthusiastic about spending a large amount of money in Iraq." Maybe, but you can expect European leaders to show a little leadership for a change.

The Post adds that Arab countries, with the exception of Kuwait, also are refusing to pony up:

"Yes, they are balking," one U.S. official said of the Arab states, as the American side continued to press hard for a breakthrough. Without Saudi participation, he said, it would be difficult to create a "snowball effect" among Arab donors. The Saudis are the " 'big brother' of the Gulf, [but] they have not helped in a constructive fashion," the official said.

This is hardly surprising, since a stable Iraq moving toward democracy would be an enormous threat to nearby Arab dictators' hold on power.

Not everyone is trying to stiff Iraq, though: "Poor yet sympathetic to Iraq's postwar plight, the ex-communist countries of the 'New Europe' that deployed small contingents of peacekeeping troops are now sending food, medicine and other goods in lieu of cash," reports the Associated Press.


Arab Apartheid

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a branch of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization, "distributed leaflets in Jerusalem on Wednesday threatening to execute Palestinians who sell their property to Jews or act as intermediaries in such deals," the Jerusalem Post reports:

"The Aksa Martyrs Brigades warn those thieves and traitors who are selling [Arab-owned] lands through Israeli real estate agents," said the leaflets, some of which were distributed on the Temple Mount.

This refutes the anti-Semitic lie that Israel is an "apartheid state." Whereas Israel has perhaps a million Arab citizens, Palestinian Arabs are willing to murder fellow Arabs in an attempt to ensure that the disputed territories are Judenrein.


And some FUN! : 'I Hate Moderates'

Cheers to blogger "Frank J." for this delightful bon mot (ellipsis in original):

There is now a Centrist Coalition blog. I hate moderates . . . much more than even liberals. I bet Satan is a moderate; the best way to get evil accepted is to package it with some good. That's what moderates do; they're always like, "Oh! I'm so special because I don't take a firm stance on issues, and I see value in everyone's viewpoints." I bet right now a moderate is reading this and partially agreeing with it. Damn you!


Fair and Balanced?
PBS sees only the left-wing side of "complex topics."

Friday, October 24, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

In polite company, it is now well known that the Fox slogan "fair and balanced" is not to be uttered unless accompanied by a knowing roll of the eyes or some ironic inflection of the voice. But judging from an education initiative offered by WNET New York, public television has fairness issues of its own. And they make Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes look positively mainstream.

The exhibit here is "Human Rights 101." A "multimedia human rights initiative" aimed at students, it was launched earlier this month by WNET's Educational Resources Center. The package offers kids "insight into such complex topics such as tolerance, racism, women's rights, refugees, and religious freedom," with the goal of leaving them "equipped for life with knowledge that will help them effect change."

On one thing we agree: These are indeed "complex topics." But a review of the listed human-rights organizations yields little hint of complexity. To the contrary, with the exception of Freedom House, the resources students will find here are pretty much those you might expect to be given by, well, the Democratic National Committee. That might not be surprising: WNET is the same station that a few years back was embarrassed when it was found swapping mailing lists with the DNC and a host of other, mainly Democratic groups.

Human Rights 101 evinces similar ideological predilections. A student who clicks onto Environmental Defense will find out how to oppose drilling in the Arctic. The American Friends Service Committee lists a "press availability" for explaining how "Bush's Arm-twisting Victories in Congress and U.N. Will Deepen Quagmire in Iraq, Budget Crisis at Home." Equality Now, dedicated to women's rights, cites a "global campaign against sexual exploitation of women by US military forces in South Korea and around the world." Madre, another women's group, is today hosting "the Patriot Act Un-birthday Bash." And so it goes down the line, on everything from abortion to globalization.



If you believe that there may be other sides to these issues, you certainly won't learn where to find them from this list. On religious freedom, for example, where is the Acton Institute for Religious Liberty or the Becket Fund or even the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom? On trade and globalization, wouldn't students benefit hearing from, say, the Cato Institute, or seeing a reference to The Wall Street Journal/Heritage Foundation annual Index of Economic Freedom, which underscores the critical role of free markets and property rights for poor people in developing nations?
The same gaping hole runs through almost every issue. On the environment, where's PERC, the Montana-based green group dedicated to private stewardship? And what about Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship, which has done yeoman's work on behalf of prisoner rights and rehabilitation? Come to think of it, though the Web site for Human Rights 101 includes virtually every United Nations rights declaration, what about steering American students to something really radical: say, a discourse about James Madison and the Bill of Rights?

Remember, the people who think this WNET list provides an objective overview of the subject are the same people who can't keep their brie down when the subject turns to the conservative domination of Fox News or talk radio. But whatever the direction private broadcasters may take, they at least do it on their own dime. With the General Accounting Office now in the midst of the first review of funding for public broadcasting in nearly two decades, that's something Congress might want to consider before cutting its next check.


This article hits it right on the spot. I feel the same regarding NPR [National Palestinian(!) radio] as follows from the following email which i wrote the day before:

Dear Sir,

It is truly revolting to read the headlines of your station's reports, let alone listen to your anti-Israeli bias.
A simple glance at your headlines in the past days and weeks, shows Israel to constantly be the aggressor while the PAlestinians are the victims. Your coverage of the Israeli opinion is not only laconic but in that short time you tend to interview Israelis from the far left or human rights activists. Daily terror attacks against Israelis go uncovered, while you give ample time to Palestinian voices of grief. It is such a recurring pattern that I won't even bother proving it. Just take a close look at the transcript of ANY of your reports.

I think that National PAlestinian radio (NPR) is a more fitting name to your station.
Shame on you for using public dollars for such biased reports.


Another Holocaust?
from: Pakistan Today!!!! wow!

By: Daniel Pipes

The prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, informed the world last week, among other things, that "Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them." In reaction, Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. national security adviser, described Mahathir's comments as "hateful, they are outrageous." She then added, "I don't think they are emblematic of the Muslim world." If only she were right about that.

In fact, Mahathir's views are precisely emblematic of Muslim discourse about Jews - symbolized by the standing ovation his speech received from an all-Muslim audience of leaders representing 57 states. Then, a Saudi newspaper reports, when Western leaders criticized Mahathir, "Muslim leaders closed ranks" around him with words of praise ("very correct," "a very, very wise assessment").

Although anti-Jewish sentiments among Muslims go back centuries, today's hostility results from two main developments: Jewish success in modern times and the establishment of Israel. Until about 1970, however, Muslim resentment and fear of Jewish power, remained relatively quiet.

This changed in the 1970s, when a further political radicalization combined with an oil boom gave states like Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Libya the will and the means to sponsor anti-Jewish ideas worldwide. With barely a Muslim voice to counter ever-more outlandish theories, these multiplied and deepened. For the first time, the Muslim world became the main locus of anti-Jewish theories.

By now, notes Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, "Hatred of Jews is widespread throughout the Muslim world. It is taught in the schools and preached in the mosques. Cartoons in Muslim newspapers routinely portray Jews in blatantly anti-Semitic terms."

Indeed, Mahathir is hardly the only Muslim ruler to make anti-Jewish statements. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria said in 2001 that Israelis try "to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ." The Iranian ayatollahs and Saudi princes have a rich history of anti-Jewish venom, as of course do Egyptian television programs and Palestinian textbooks.

Of the many examples, one stands out for me: a June 2002 interview with a 3-year-old girl named Basmallah on Saudi television, made available by the Middle East Media and Research Institute:

Anchor: Basmallah, are you familiar with the Jews?
Basmallah: Yes.
Anchor: Do you like them?
Basmallah: No.
Anchor: Why don't you like them?
Basmallah: Because...
Anchor: Because they are what?
Basmallah: They're apes and pigs.
Anchor: Because they are apes and pigs. Who said they are so?
Basmallah: Our God.
Anchor: Where did he say this?
Basmallah: In the Koran.

The little girl is wrong, but her words show that, contrary to Condoleezza Rice's analysis. Muslim antisemitism extends even to the youngest children. That Mahathir himself is no Islamist but (in the words of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman) "about as forward-looking a Muslim leader as we're likely to find" also points to the pervasiveness of anti-Jewish bias.

In its attitudes toward Jews, the Muslim world today resembles Germany of the 1930s - a time when insults, caricatures, conspiracy theories, and sporadic violence prepared Germans for the mass murder that followed.

The same might be happening today. Wild accusatory comments like Mahathir's have become banal. Against Israelis, violence has already reached a rate approaching one death per day over the past three years. Outside Israel, violence against Jews is also persistent: a Jewish building blown up in Argentina, Daniel Pearl's murder in Pakistan, stabbings in France, the Brooklyn Bridge and LAX killings in the United States.

These episodes, plus calling Jews "apes and pigs" could serve as the psychological preparation that one day leads to assaulting Israel with weapons of mass destruction. Armaments chemical, biological, and nuclear would be the successors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. Millions of Jews would perish in another Holocaust.

As in the 1930s, the world at large - including the U.S. government - again seems not to note the deadliness of processes now underway. Anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence are decried, to be sure, but with little sense of urgency and even less of their cumulative impact.

Condoleezza Rice and other top-ranking officials need to recognize the power and reach of the anti-Jewish ideology among Muslims, then develop active ways to combat it. This evil has already taken innocent lives; unless combated it could take many more.

(Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Militant Islam Reaches America (W.W. Norton).)

THE DANIEL PEARL VIDEO WHICH YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN!

First you might want to read about it:

"Pearl video brings the horror home" - from the Boston Globe
THE DANIEL PEARL VIDEO - WHY YOU HAVE NEVER SEEN IT! By Joel Leyden

The video is here (2 MB, Real Audio) but beware it is NOT for the faint at heart!
Gruesome piece of Islamist propaganda...
Watch and never forget!

Crossposted @ Israpundit

QUOTE OF THE DAY


Dear Ol' Rumsfeld (August 2003):

"My feeling about the so-called occupied territories are that there was a war, Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved in it once it started, they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in various parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won."

So Rummy-like! HA!

A blogger:
The Soviet Union, when there was one, spent some 80 years oppressing - and often quite brutally - up to 50 million Muslims - and you've NEVER heard a single peep from Muslim leaders or Muslim countries, in fact, many of them were happy to be Soviet client-states.

America, with all it's faults and all the atrocities it has committed around the world, doesn't stop sending wheat and other foodstuff to Muslim countries (not to mention 95% of the rest of the world who would be executed for saying a single word about their own leaders, but are happy to march down the streets burning American flags having had a good breakfast made up of American-grown food) - as well as contributing to their economies with all the oil we buy from them.

They feel miserable? Sure they do, so would I with the leaders they have."

An article in Life Magazine six months after the end of World War II decried:

"We have swept away Hitlerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease."

"We've lost the peace".

"Never has American prestige in Europe been lower."

"Wherever the people have endured either the American armies or the Russian armies both hopes have been bitterly disappointed."

"The taste of victory had gone sour in the mouth of every thoughtful American I met."

Sounds so eerily familiar.....


The failure brigade
Mona Charen Oct. 17, 2003 http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |

There is a marked tendency among those on the left to believe the worst about the United States. This is particularly true when it comes to military action.


Before the war in Afghanistan, the failure chorus warned that Afghan fighters had withstood the mighty British and Soviet empires, that the winter weather would paralyze our troops and that the Taliban could count of the aid of Islamists worldwide. Before the Iraq War, the negativity brigade warned darkly that our troops would be subject to poison gas or chemical attack (yes, the same people who are now loudly proclaiming that Iraq never possessed those weapons); that the Israelis would be drawn into the conflict thus igniting a larger regional war; that Muslims worldwide would unite against us; that the price of oil would skyrocket; that Iraq's oil fields would burn out of control creating an environmental catastrophe; and that patriotic feeling would cause the Iraqis to fight to the death against us just as the Russians had fought the Nazis at Stalingrad.


Once the war had begun, many in the press declared that we had become bogged down in a quagmire after only a few days of fighting. When the Iraqi armed forces capitulated in the south, we were told that this was a clever way to draw us into a sustained "house by house" battle in Baghdad that would take months or years to win, if we won at all.


When Baghdad fell just three weeks after the war had begun, we were told that not since Nebuchadnezzar's time had Baghdad experienced such a terrible spate of looting and crime. The United States and Britain had just demonstrated that an enlightened coalition could liberate a nation enslaved by a tyrant in three weeks with very few civilian casualties, very little damage to the nation's infrastructure and extremely low casualties for the coalition itself. But the news media in Britain and the United States were singing lamentations.


Where oh where were the precious antiquities from the Iraqi Museum? (They were all fine, it turns out.) Why is the electricity still not functioning properly? Why are there shortages of water? What about the street crime?


Once each problem is solved, a new lament is discovered. I must say I predicted this back in February. It was just after Baghdad fell, and there was rejoicing in the streets. I was giving a talk at the local Barnes and Noble bookstore (it was on C-SPAN) and was asked, "What will the liberals say now?" I responded, "Well, in about a month they'll be complaining that Iraq is not yet a functioning democracy."


Does this drumbeat of negativity have any effects? I think it does. The first baleful effect is that the press is failing in its duty to provide the news straight. Yes, there are ambushes on our soldiers and bombings of embassies, and these must be covered. And there is a certain amount of lawlessness, and that, too, should be reported. But there are a great many aspects of the rebuilding of Iraq that the press is failing to convey.


More than 45 countries have offered military assistance in rebuilding Iraq, and that number now rises with this week's Security Council resolution pledging more aid. Thirty thousand Iraqis have traveled to Hungary for military and police training. The United States is training thousands of Iraqi police, with 34,000 already on the job. It isn't quick or easy to find suitable police in a country where, for 30 years, eligibility was determined by family or political connections -- to say nothing of a willingness to commit any human rights abuse in the name of the regime.


U.S. and international efforts are also rebuilding sports stadiums, schools, hospitals and power grids. They are doing so in the face of sabotage and murder. A little appreciation from home could go a long way.


Moreover, the Saddamists and Islamists who have gathered in Iraq to defeat us are not acting irrationally. They have historical reasons to believe that if they can inflict enough casualties on the United States, we will run. They cite Somalia, Lebanon and Vietnam.


What we are doing in Iraq is right morally and strategically. And it is succeeding on the ground. But the press has the power to distort reality. By presenting an overly bleak picture of the challenges we face, they can demoralize us.


MORE ON IRAQ AND THE MEDIA
by Glenn Reynold Oct 17


Writing in the National Journal, Jonathan Rauch joins those noticing the discrepancy between media accounts of what's going on in Iraq and what people who have been there say:

Consistently, however, observers -- including some I know personally and trust -- return from Iraq reporting that the picture up close is better than the images in the media. Michael O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution military analyst who is no pushover for the Bush administration, recently came back saying that the quality of the work being done in Iraq by American forces is "stunning."

Another federal judge has weighed in on Iraq, too. Judge Gilbert Merritt, a Carter appointee on the U.S. Court of Appeals whom I clerked for after law school, visited Iraq on the same judicial-assistance mission as Judge Donald Walter, whose report I mentioned earlier, and offers a similar take:

Still, Merritt is optimistic. From his time in Iraq, he has come to believe that the overwhelming majority of people there support the reconstruction. . . .
An early opponent of the U.S. invasion, Merritt now says he saw a different dimension of Iraq while there and believes the United States was right to lead the coalition's campaign to oust Saddam.

Reports on Iraq contradicted by military analysts, federal judges, touring musicians, Democratic congressmen, and returning troops. Now that we know they're not telling us the whole story at home, or abroad, don't you think it's time for folks in the news business to rethink their priorities and performance? If any other industry were performing this poorly, the press would be running one expose after another.

Still, there's progress. An episode of Sixty Minutes II last week on Iraq got high marks for evenhandedness, though I didn't see it. So I guess they're educable, with time and effort. So don't be shy about emailing `em if you think they get it wrong!


Sept. 30, 2003 / 4:16 PM ET

IRAQ AND THE MEDIA, CONTINUED

Since my original post on the one-sided and negative media reporting on Iraq, other people have gotten into the act.

Columnist John Leo has noticed that the media are starting to respond, and writes:

Letters home from Iraq are now regularly put up on the Internet. One last week from Senior Chief Petty Officer Art Messer of the Navy Seabees said: "The countryside is getting more safe by the day despite all the attacks you are hearing about. Imagine if every shooting incident or robbery committed in Los Angeles was blown out of proportion." A few military personnel have their own blogs. One, who calls himself Chief Wiggles, is quite good.
The Internet campaign is another example of the new media going around the old media, in this case to counter stories by quagmire-oriented reporters.

That's absolutely right, and some bloggers are taking it a step farther with Front Line Voices, a new Weblog set up to let the troops report on what's going on.

But that bypass may become a bit less necessary, as Big Media types are showing signs of improvement. As Deborah Orin notes, Tom Brokaw did some actual reporting: and brought back an actual story:

One result is the surging growth of an Internet universe . . . focused on spreading good news from Iraq and lambasting "Big Media," especially the anti-American BBC, for ignoring it.
But this week's Time magazine is typical of a press corps that has - mostly - raced to highlight every bit of bad news from Iraq, and virtually none of the good news.
When NBC anchor Tom Brokaw went to Iraq, it was as if he was visiting a different country than any other TV journalist had reported from, because he left Baghdad and many of his reports actually had an optimistic tone.
Why? Perhaps because Brokaw has chronicled the Greatest Generation and World War II, a time of patience instead of attention deficit disorder and a demand for overnight success. Nowadays, one can imagine critics instantly howling for Dwight D. Eisenhower's head over the deaths on D-Day.

Imagine what we might hear if more reporters were willing to venture out in search of a story. And even within Baghdad, there are important stories that are being ignored in favor of the latest pinprick attacks by leftover Baathists. Saddam's holdings are being privatized. How that's done is vitally important -- but you can barely find a story about it in the Big Media. There are plans to turn Iraq's oil revenues into a "trust fund" for the benefit of Iraqis in general. How that's done is vitally important, too, but we're not hearing about it, either.

There are a lot of stories we're missing (Jay Rosen, chair of NYU's Journalism School, has some suggestions). Worse yet, we can't make good decisions without information, and the "police-blotter" reporting from Iraq means that Americans aren't getting that.



Sept. 23, 2003 / 5:28 PM ET

IRAQ MEDIA BACKLASH?

When I posted here on the relentless negativity of the media coverage of Iraq last week, I was ahead of the curve. But just barely. Now even Dan Rather is apologizing. John Leo has a column on the subject, and USA Todayhas a story quoting MSNBC's Dr. Bob Arnot as saying that he doesn't recognize the Iraq he's seen from the media reports:

"I contrast some of the infectious enthusiasm I see here with what I see on TV, and I say, `Oh, my God, am I in the same country?' "

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, a bunch of Democratic Congressmen just returned from Iraq and complained about the inaccurate negativity of the coverage:

Comparisons with Vietnam were farfetched, members said.
Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the committee's ranking member, said, "The media stresses the wounds, the injuries, and the deaths, as they should, but for instance in Northern Iraq, Gen. [Dave] Petraeus has 3,100 projects -- from soccer fields to schools to refineries -- all good stuff and that isn't being reported."
Skelton and other Democrats on the trip said they plan to reach out to all members of their caucus and explain what they observed.

I want to be clear here: There's nothing unpatriotic or evil about reporting bad news. But what the Big Media presence in Iraq is doing is manufacturing a storyline by engaging in what one of the congressmen on that trip called a "police-blotter" approach -- reporting every shooting in a country the size of California, while ignoring everything good that happens.

If you want to read a more balanced first-person report from Iraq, mixing good news and bad news and trying to provide some actual perspective, try this one. And then wonder why the Internet is beating the pants off the Old Media, yet again.


Sept. 22, 2003 / 11:58 AM ET

MORE ON IRAQ AND THE MEDIA


Following up on last week's post about Big Media coverage of Iraq, it seems that a few Big Media folks are catching on. Michael Barone's U.S. News column this week notes that critics of the goings-on in Iraq seem unfamiliar with history, and offers some examples of difficult transitions from war to peace after World Wars I and II that seem to have been forgotten. Barone also notes the one-sided character of the reporting:

The media also have the wrong standard for what is news. It is news when there is a fatal accident at Disneyland and not news when there is not. But Iraq is not Disneyland. In a country that is occupied after decades of a brutal dictatorship, good news is news. Yet with only a few exceptions -- see Michael Gordon's story in the New York Times on the 101st Airborne in northern Iraq -- the good news is not being told. More than 6,000 Iraqi civil affairs units -- local governments -- have been set up. Hospitals have been reopened. A court system has been set up. Mistakes, inevitable in a chaotic world, are being corrected: A Baathist leader put in charge in Najaf was soon removed.
Reports from soldiers on the ground, circulating widely on the Internet but seldom if ever appearing in old media, indicate that the large majority of Iraqis are friendly and helpful and glad that American troops are there.

Meanwhile, Canadian columnist David Warren writes:

And as for those media, everyone with a vote should read the courageous item by John Burns of the New York Times in the last issue of the trade magazine, Editor & Publisher. It is a breathtaking, first-hand account of the corruption among Western journalists in Baghdad before the fall of Saddam. Not minor, but total corruption; and not by a few but by almost all. Now the "embedded" reporters have come and gone, who gave us fresh and untutored eyewitness reporting that completely contradicted the sordid Baghdad media gaggle. So we are back to being fed "quagmire" stories by reporters with big axes to grind, and no credibility.

But the best example of Big Media recognition that there's more going on than the standard reporting has made clear can be found in a C-SPAN interview with UPI correspondent Pamela Hess, who has just returned from Iraq. (You can stream the video from C-SPAN's Webpage -- just select the one marked "Pamela Hess, Defense Correspondent, United Press International").

Hess is no cheerleader -- in fact, at about 34 minutes into the interview she provides a pointed and cogent critique of what the administration, and in particular the civilian occupation authorities, are doing wrong in Iraq that's more detailed and clearer than anything I've read in the hundreds of cut-and-paste faux-Vietnam reports -- but she also says this, at about 2:42 into the interview:

"Outside of Baghdad, things really aren't as bad as they look on the news. Now, naturally on the news, we're gonna focus on where the troubles are, because that's what makes news. But there are places in Iraq where things are going pretty well. You can't say `just fine' because the power is down, there's no phone service, but things are pretty peaceful. People are patient and are slowly rebuilding things back together."

She also observes later, at about 8:20, "Statistically, the numbers are kind of low in terms of Americans who are getting killed over there."

This is actual reporting, rather than cherry-picking stories to fit a preconceived notion. And that's my complaint about most of the Big Media reporting on Iraq. It may be, as Daniel Drezner has written, that there really isn't a single coherent story on Iraq. But the Big Media reporting has tried to construct just such a story, not because it's true, but because, for a variety of reasons explored in my previous post, it's the story that they want to tell. (They also spend a fair amount of time, as Bill Hobbs points out, accusing the administration of justifying the war on grounds it explicitly avoided, so as to make things look worse.) I hope that I'm managing to let a little air into their hermetically sealed world, and I hope that they'll be forced by the facts on the ground -- and viewers' growing tendency to tune out -- to do a better job.

We can hope, anyway.

UPDATE: After I wrote the above, but before it appeared online, a reader sent me a link to this piece by Democratic Congressman Jim Marshall, who recently visited Iraq. Marshall says that the relentlessly negative media coverage is encouraging pro-Saddam holdouts and is thus "killing our troops."

Harsh, but I'd say it's true. The good news is that, with Democratic congressmen starting to say it, maybe the media will listen. Marshall also notes:

I'm afraid the news media are hurting our chances. They are dwelling upon the mistakes, the ambushes, the soldiers killed, the wounded, the Blumbergs. Fair enough. But it is not balancing this bad news with "the rest of the story," the progress made daily, the good news.
The falsely bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy.

Read the whole thing -- and e-mail a copy to any members of the press you think should read it!


Sept. 19, 2003 / 11:52 AM ET

MEDIA LIES, AND THE LYING MEDIA LIARS WHO TELL THEM


Things just get worse for the British Broadcasting Corp., as the initial claim that Tony Blair's government "sexed up" an intelligence dossier about Iraq has exploded, and revealed a miserable tissue of lies and shoddiness at the BBC. The BBC correspondent, Andrew Gilligan, has been left out in the cold by the BBC, which initially defended him. Oxford blogger Joshua Chafetz is gloating that events have proved him right in his conjecture that the BBC had let its anti-war bias lure it into self-destruction.

Sadly, it's not just the BBC. New York Times Iraq correspondent John Burns reports that many journalists in Iraq were deliberately slanting their stories to curry favor with Saddam's regime

Interestingly, non-Big Media reports from Iraq are a lot more positive than the steady rain of negativity that we get from the media. Here's what federal judge Don Walter wrote after visiting Iraq as part of a judicial assistance team:

Despite my initial opposition to the war, I am now convinced, whether we find any weapons of mass destruction or prove Saddam sheltered and financed terrorists, absolutely, we should have overthrown the Baathists, indeed, we should have done it sooner.
What changed my mind?
When we left mid June, 57 mass graves had been found, one with the bodies of 1200 children. There have been credible reports of murder, brutality and torture of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iraqi citizens. There is poverty on a monumental scale and fear on a larger one. That fear is still palpable.
I have seen the machines and places of torture. I will tell you one story told to me by the Chief of Pediatrics at the Medical College in Basra. It was one of the most shocking to me, but I heard worse. One of Saddam's security agents was sent to question a Shiite in his home. The interrogation took place in the living room in the presence of the man's wife, who held their three month old child. A question was asked and the thug did not like the answer; he asked it again, same answer. He grabbed the baby from its mother and plucked its eye out. And then repeated his question. Worse things happened with the knowledge, indeed with the participation, of Saddam, his family and the Baathist regime.
Thousands suffered while we were messing about with France and Russia and Germany and the UN. Every one of them knew what was going on there, but France and the UN were making millions administering the food for oil program. We cannot, I know, remake the world, nor do I believe we should. We cannot stamp out evil, I know. But this time we were morally right and our economic and strategic interests were involved. I submit that just because we can't do everything doesn't mean that we should do nothing. . . .
We must have the moral courage to see this through, to do whatever it takes to secure responsible government for the Iraqi people. Having decided to topple Saddam, we cannot abandon those who trust us. I fear we will quit as the horrors of war come into our living rooms. Look at the stories you are getting from the media today. The steady drip, drip, drip of bad news may destroy our will to fulfill the obligations we have assumed. WE ARE NOT GETTING THE WHOLE TRUTH FROM THE NEWS MEDIA. The news you watch, listen to and read is highly selective. Good news doesn't sell.


Nor is Judge Walter the only one to tell a different tale than the Big Media are reporting. The Blogcritics site publishes a first-hand report from a musician touring in the Middle East, who says:

ALL the Iraqis are done with the idea of Arab Unity. They hate all the other states except for Syria. They believe Saddam gave so much money to these other states, and none of them offered any support. They are particularly hateful now to the Palestinians; ordinary Iraqis were sometimes moved out of their own homes to house them, and they got jobs and pensions-- and she said that the new Arabic graffiti on the walls of Baghdad University is "Palestinians go home. The free ride is over."
In any case, this tour was a lovefest compared to the last one, so god only knows what the reporters are all going on about. Another thing I heard is that 90% of all the attacks have happened in the Sunni Triangle, which if you look on a map represents all of about 1/8 of Iraq maybe (Ramadi, Fallujah, Baghdad-- I don't have a good map to do the math with), so you have a country 7/8 calm. This guy's Iraqi mom (from Mosul) also said that the power is now on regularly in Baghdad but no one is reporting that.
If CNN hasn't gotten it, it appears that Assad in Syria has. The cabinet change was a big thing even though many hoped/expected that Assad would choose a non-Baathist over Otri. Still, they think a few of the new guys will be non-Baathists which would have been unthinkable before.
They sure need it-- the country is a beautiful basket case full of intelligent, kind people who could do something good if given a chance. On a more superficial, but probably important level as well, the kids military uniforms we saw last year are all gone, and a lot of the militarization you used to see in posters and monuments, etc. seems to have been toned down. The Lebanese paper, The Star, attributes this directly albeit grudgingly to the US being right next door.

Similarly, here's a report from returning servicemen:

Both men said they are glad to be home visiting their families -- and feel honored and grateful for all the support they received from the community while they were in the Middle East. Both of them also said things are going well for the U.S. troops in Iraq.
"Ninety-nine percent of what is going on over there is a good story," said Callanan.
"There were a lot of reporters over there who overlooked the good stories, which may have been the only frustrating part of being there," he said. "From media reports, it may not seem as though things are going well there but they are. There are a lot of changes taking place which will eventually pay big dividends."
Cheung agreed that the media reports he read while in Iraq seemed so much different from what he was seeing for himself. One of the things he read that goaded him the most was that the Iraqis did not want the troops over there.
"I talked to so many Iraqis -- adults and children -- and they thanked me, invited me to their house, asked if they can cook a meal for me and offered me everything they have," he said. "Because we were there, they have the freedom we enjoy in this country every day. They waved to us and a lot of times they worked with us."

You'd never know this from listening to the whining of CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, who has been complaining that CNN's coverage isn't negative enough and blaming it on "intimidation." This produced the following list of the top 10 ways CNN was intimidated. It also led blogger Roger Simon to compare Amanpour -- unfavorably -- with John Burns, and led another blogger to write: "I once respected her as a reporter, but that has all drained away in the last year." And Professor Daniel Drezner has more comments on Amanpour's credibility. She is, however, merely emblematic of a larger problem.

This mismatch between what we're hearing from non-journalists in Iraq, and the unending lugubrious flow from Big Media, is shaping up to be the next blow to the credibility of Big Journalism. Why are the reports we're getting so lousy? You might argue that the situation is complex, and that these positive stories are only part of what's going on. But that doesn't explain why the coverage is so unrelentingly negative, and why stories like these get so little attention. I think it's a combination of factors:

Bias: Everybody knows -- because it's true -- that a lot of people in the media don't like Bush, and would like to see him lose in 2004. That naturally produces a negative tone. Plus, the press has been generally anti-military since Vietnam. That's fading now, as out-of-date baby boomers are replaced, but it hasn't faded entirely by any means. James Lileks compares the favorable press treatment of Clinton's abortive 1998 Iraq invasion ("Operation Desert Fox") and nails it with this:

I've read enough editorials from various papers from this period to reinforce something I've long suspected: the reason many editorialists hate this war is because they don't feel it's theirs.
If Clinton had risen to the occasion, wiped out al-Qaida, sent Marines to kick down the statues and put bullets in those filthy sons' brainpans, this would be the most noble effort of our time. We would hear clear echoes of JFK's call to bear any burden. FDR, Truman, Marshall Plan, forbearance, patience -- the editorial pages of the land would absolutely brim with encouragement and optimism every damn day, because the good fight was being waged, and the right people were waging it.
Read the whole Lileks piece if you have time. It's devastating.

Butt-covering: As CNN's Eason Jordan admitted after the war, CNN slanted its coverage to make Saddam look good for years. That's how they maintained "access." (What good is "access" when all it produces are lies? Well, no good -- except to the journalists whose careers it enhances. We've seen journalists develop something akin to the "ticket punching" mentality that the U.S. Army had in Vietnam, where being able to say you were there is more important than the quality of work you did.)

More butt-covering: Many media people predicted disaster before the war, based on their alleged expertise in the area. They were proved wrong again and again, and would like to turn the tables.

Laziness: A lot of Big Media types don't get out of Baghdad much to see the rest of the country where things are better. Plus, they're often still hanging around with their former "minders" from the Old Regime, who may know where to get cheap booze but who can't be expected to offer a fair picture of the regime that overthrew them.

Hysteria: The same thing that led them to overhype Hurricane Isabel -- bad but not terrible -- or for that matter shark attacks at the beach. They love bad news, because they think it sells. Funny that their viewership is shrinking, for the most part.

Euro-envy: Too many American journalists still think that their European counterparts know more. I don't know why -- it was European nations that made a mess of the Middle East to start with, and that have kept the pot boiling with their destructive support of tyrants. The BBC's anti-American bias is quite plain by now (see above). And as Tom Friedman notes in The New York Times, the French are essentially at war with us, trying to regain influence in the region. And as Sylvain Galineau observes, "France wants to get back to business as usual. For TotalFinaElf, Alcatel and the scores of French companies who coined money working for the Hussein regime for decades. As long as Paul Bremer is in charge, it won't happen. France needs someone it can bribe and sign dodgy deals with. The UN can deliver that. The US won't." Journalists are supposed to pride themselves in noticing the self-interest behind what people tell them. Why have they missed this? Because they're biased, butt-covering, lazy, hysterical, and Euro-envying. That's my guess, anyway.

All of these things reflect badly on the press. If the Jayson Blair affair was journalism's Enron, the kind of misconduct that John Burns reports is journalism's Nuremberg. With that in mind, I guess an after-the-fact cover-and-spin operation is no surprise. But they're crazy to think that people aren't noticing.


Reporters ignored atrocities to get access in Saddam's Iraq
John Leo (archive)


September 22, 2003

John Burns, the great New York Times reporter, offers us a brutally blunt assessment of how badly Western correspondents covered Saddam Hussein's regime. His report, excerpted by The Wall Street Journal and Editor & Publisher, is spreading rapidly on the Internet and is bound to have an impact on the public's already low respect for most journalists.

The compulsively candid Burns, until recently the New York Times bureau chief in Iraq, wrote his comments for the new book "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq" (The Lyons Press), a collection of first-person accounts by journalists in Iraq.

Burns, who has covered China, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan and Bosnia, says the terror of Saddam Hussein's Iraq was unmatched anywhere in the world, except perhaps by North Korea today. Iraq was a vast slaughterhouse, he says, but most Western reporters worked hard to keep the news from getting out because they were afraid of losing access or getting expelled from Iraq. The monstrous savagery of life under Saddam -- the vast tortures and up to a million dead -- was "the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents," he writes.

Burns laid some of this out earlier in the Times -- the bribes and gifts from journalists to Saddam's henchmen, with reporters turning over copies of their stories to show how friendly they were to the regime. "A rigorous system for controlling and monitoring Western journalists has been in place in Iraq for decades, based on a wafer-thin facade of civility," he wrote in the Times last April 20.

In his "Embedded" article, Burns is more caustic about the payoffs by journalists. He says big shots at the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from TV reporters, "who then behaved as if they were in Belgium." Will these unnamed TV reporters be called to account?

As an example of evasive noncoverage, Burns cites the reluctance of most reporters to say anything about Abu Ghraib prison, the heart of Saddam's reign of terror. Burns says he couldn't find a single colleague in journalism who had read the human rights reports about butchery at the prison. Last October, when President Bush's pressure caused Saddam to announce a limited amnesty at Abu Ghraib, the BBC didn't think it was worth sending anyone to the prison. Burns writes: "You had the BBC thinking it was inappropriate to go there because it means that it causes trouble." Of the reporters who did go to the prison, he says, "Ninety-eight percent of them had never heard of Abu Ghraib. Had no idea what it was."

After the amnesty turned into a mob scene and a near-riot and unofficial jail break, some groups marched to the intelligence ministry. Burns says this was a phenomenal story, an actual protest in a terrorized land, but "some of my colleagues chose not to cover that." No use reporting real news if it's going to cause any inconvenience.

"There is corruption in our business," Burns writes. "In the run-up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility." The usual rationalization by wayward correspondents is that Saddam's horrors couldn't be reported without jeopardizing the lives of sources and reporters. CNN's chief news executive, Eason Jordan, offered that lame excuse in a notorious New York Times op-ed piece on April 11. It was a devil's handshake: CNN got to stay in Iraq; Saddam Hussein got good press.

Eason said he knew all about the beatings and electroshock torture. One woman who talked to CNN was beaten daily for months in front of her father, then torn limb from limb. Her body parts were left in a bag on her family's doorstep. But CNN's viewers hadn't been told.

Burns has no patience with excuses like Eason's. He is a reporter who was jailed for six days for his reporting in China and who risked being killed by Saddam's regime in its dying days. At one point, he wondered whether he would wind up in Abu Ghraib himself.

He says of Iraq: "We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. They (reporters) rationalized it away."

Though President Bush chose to make weapons of mass destruction his principal argument against Saddam, Burns writes, "this war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights alone. This was a grotesque charnel house, and also a genuine threat to us. We had the power to end it and we did end it."

Even if as many as 5,000 Iraqis died in the war, Burns writes, that's fewer than would have died if Saddam's killing machine had gone on as usual during the six-week period of battle. The war should have been justified on this basis, he says, "but you'd never have known it by reading most of the coverage of the war by those correspondents."

Criticisms like this are often shrugged off as sour outbursts by conservatives who don't understand the press. What happens now that the outburst is coming from the best reporter to serve in Iraq?

Media Muzzled- An Absolutely Disgraceful Performance
The News We Kept to Ourselves
Russia Hid Saddam's WMDs - (by fellow compatriot) Ion Mihai Pacepa
For its intellectuals, France falters

Media Muzzled- An Absolutely Disgraceful Performance
By Notra Trulock

CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan, admitted earlier this year that his network had been withholding the truth about the Iraqi regime for years. In the New York Times, he confessed that his network didn't report all the "awful things" it learned about life under Saddam Hussein. His reason: CNN feared that by doing so it would jeopardize the lives of Iraqis working for the network's Baghdad bureau. But he also admitted that CNN was afraid that Iraq's information ministry would shut down that bureau and cut off CNN's access to Iraqi "newsmakers."

Confirmation that the media have been distorting the news out of Iraq has now come from some surprising sources. John Burns, the Times' Baghdad bureau chief and a veteran foreign correspondent, had denounced the media's "absolutely disgraceful performance" in coverage of Iraq. Burns' critique was published as an excerpt from an oral history chapter in a new book on the media and Iraq at Editor & Publisher.com. He is blunt in his criticism of colleagues for their failure to report "awful things" about Saddam Hussein's regime. Burns' words have been widely circulated on the Internet and appeared, in an abbreviated form, in the Wall Street Journal.

He recounts the bribes paid to Iraqi information ministry officials in exchange for favorable treatment. He tells of $600 cell phones given to family members of the director of the ministry as well as bribes to other officials totaling "hundreds of thousands of dollars" from television correspondents "who then behaved as if they were in Belgium." NPR correspondent Ann Garrels confirmed Burns' account of the bribes in her new book on the war. Book reviews in the Denver Post and USA Today cite her references to the bribes paid to Iraqi officials in return for visas, access and information. USA Today has her citing one mid-level bureaucrat who made at least $200,000 off his share of the bribes. In addition to access and information, Garrels charges that some of her colleagues had "unspoken agreements" with the Iraqis not to report the awful truths about human rights abuses. The USA Today review says she singled out CNN for its efforts to "curry favor" in order to maintain its presence in Baghdad.

One anecdote from Burns, repeated endlessly on the Internet, involves a correspondent "from a major American newspaper." This correspondent took the trouble to print both his own and his competitors' stories off the Internet. He then provided these to Iraqi officials in an effort to demonstrate that he was "a good boy" in comparison to the regime's detractors, like Burns. Burns doesn't name names, but many continue to wonder about the identity of that "reporter."

Burns' main criticism focuses on the Western media's refusal to portray the human rights abuses and reign of terror in Iraq. He thinks that with the possible exception of North Korea, Iraq as a terror state was in a category by itself. "Absolute evil," he said. In fact, he thinks that the war could have been justified on human rights grounds alone. But many journalists, according to Burns, simply refused to report this fundamental truth about the Saddam Hussein regime.

With regard to CNN's Jordan, Burns says that he "missed the point completely." Jordan had defended CNN by claiming that the network withheld stories about Iraqi brutality because it was trying to defend its own Iraqi employees. But Burns charges that this group was only "one thousandth of one per cent of the people of Iraq." Why didn't the media tell the story of "murder on a mass scale" he wonders.

Not surprisingly, the mainstream media have generally ignored Burns' allegations. Fox News' Brit Hume made a brief reference to Burns and the Wall Street Journal editorial page printed a brief excerpt from his chapter. The Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz, did likewise. His only comment was to wonder about the identity of the newspaper correspondent mentioned above. The excerpt originally appeared in Editor and Publisher, a journal about the media. It generated "tons of email" both praising and criticizing Burns.

Among the emails was one from CBS News' Dan Rather. Rather praised Burns' article as "a brilliant, important contribution to American journalism." But Rather has come in for some criticism himself, this time from National Public Radio correspondent Ann Garrels. In her new book, Garrels characterized Rather's pre-war interview with Saddam Hussein as "obsequious tripe." She quotes a colleague as accusing Rather of lobbing "softball questions" at Hussein and saying that he "might just as well have been interviewing the prime minister of Belgium."

Another Times' star, columnist Thomas L. Friedman, seconded Burns' critique. Appearing on the Charlie Rose show, Friedman reportedly said that the last ten years of media coverage of Iraq was hardly "a shining example of American journalism." Friedman agreed that the media failed to cover Iraqi atrocities in order to get and keep visas and access. He thinks, "the press has something to answer for" on this story.

Burns concluded, "there is corruption in our business," and he urged his colleagues to "get back to basics." But the real censors in the Iraq case seem to have been the network executives and newspaper editors who cared more about maintaining a "presence" in Baghdad than truth or accuracy in their reporting. What does that say about the reporting from the capitals of other regimes, like Cuba, Syria, Iran or Saudi Arabia?

Notra Trulock is Associate Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at aimeditor@yahoo.com.


The News We Kept to Ourselves
by EASON JORDAN Friday April 11, 2003 at 01:18 PM


ATLANTA -- Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard -- awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.


For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief. CNN had been in Baghdad long enough to know that telling the world about the torture of one of its employees would almost certainly have gotten him killed and put his family and co-workers at grave risk.

Working for a foreign news organization provided Iraqi citizens no protection. The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.

We also had to worry that our reporting might endanger Iraqis not on our payroll. I knew that CNN could not report that Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, told me in 1995 that he intended to assassinate two of his brothers-in-law who had defected and also the man giving them asylum, King Hussein of Jordan. If we had gone with the story, I was sure he would have responded by killing the Iraqi translator who was the only other participant in the meeting. After all, secret police thugs brutalized even senior officials of the Information Ministry, just to keep them in line (one such official has long been missing all his fingernails).

Still, I felt I had a moral obligation to warn Jordan's monarch, and I did so the next day. King Hussein dismissed the threat as a madman's rant. A few months later Uday lured the brothers-in-law back to Baghdad; they were soon killed.

I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.

Last December, when I told Information Minister Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf that we intended to send reporters to Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, he warned me they would "suffer the severest possible consequences." CNN went ahead, and in March, Kurdish officials presented us with evidence that they had thwarted an armed attack on our quarters in Erbil. This included videotaped confessions of two men identifying themselves as Iraqi intelligence agents who said their bosses in Baghdad told them the hotel actually housed C.I.A. and Israeli agents. The Kurds offered to let us interview the suspects on camera, but we refused, for fear of endangering our staff in Baghdad.

Then there were the events that were not unreported but that nonetheless still haunt me. A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.

I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.

Eason Jordan is chief news executive at CNN.



Russia Hid Saddam's WMDs
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
Washington Times | October 2, 2003


On March 20, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the U.S.-led "aggression" against Iraq as "unwarranted" and "unjustifiable." Three days later, Pravda said that an anonymous Russian "military expert" was predicting that the United States would fabricate finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov immediately started plying the idea abroad, and it has taken hold around the world ever since.

As a former Romanian spy chief who used to take orders from the Soviet KGB, it is perfectly obvious to me that Russia is behind the evanescence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. After all, Russia helped Saddam get his hands on them in the first place. The Soviet Union and all its bloc states always had a standard operating procedure for deep sixing weapons of mass destruction -- in Romanian it was codenamed "Sarindar, meaning "emergency exit." I implemented it in Libya. It was for ridding Third World despots of all trace of their chemical weapons if the Western imperialists ever got near them. We wanted to make sure they would never be traced back to us, and we also wanted to frustrate the West by not giving them anything they could make propaganda with.

All chemical weapons were to be immediately burned or buried deep at sea. Technological documentation, however, would be preserved in microfiche buried in waterproof containers for future reconstruction. Chemical weapons, especially those produced in Third World countries, which lack sophisticated production facilities, often do not retain lethal properties after a few months on the shelf and are routinely dumped anyway. And all chemical weapons plants had a civilian cover making detection difficult, regardless of the circumstances.

The plan included an elaborate propaganda routine. Anyone accusing Moammar Gadhafi of possessing chemical weapons would be ridiculed. Lies, all lies! Come to Libya and see! Our Western left-wing organizations, like the World Peace Council, existed for sole purpose of spreading the propaganda we gave them. These very same groups bray the exact same themes to this day. We always relied on their expertise at organizing large street demonstrations in Western Europe over America's "war-mongering" whenever we wanted to distract world attention from the crimes of the vicious regimes we sponsored.

Iraq, in my view, had its own "Sarindar" plan in effect direct from Moscow. It certainly had one in the past. Nicolae Ceausescu told me so, and he heard it from Leonid Brezhnev. KGB chairman Yury Andropov, and later, Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, told me so, too. In the late 1970s, Gen. Primakov ran Saddam's weapons programs. After that, as you may recall, he was promoted to head of the Soviet foreign intelligence service in 1990, to Russia's minister of foreign affairs in 1996, and in 1998, to prime minister. What you may not know is that Primakov hates Israel and has always championed Arab radicalism. He was a personal friend of Saddam's and has repeatedly visited Baghdad after 1991, quietly helping Saddam play his game of hide-and-seek.

The Soviet bloc not only sold Saddam its WMDs, but it showed them how to make them "disappear." Russia is still at it. Primakov was in Baghdad from December until a couple of days before the war, along with a team of Russian military experts led by two of Russia's topnotch "retired"generals: Vladislav Achalov, a former deputy defense minister, and Igor Maltsev, a former air defense chief of staff. They were all there receiving honorary medals from the Iraqi defense minister. They clearly were not there to give Saddam military advice for the upcoming war--Saddam's Katyusha launchers were of World War II vintage, and his T-72 tanks, BMP-1 fighting vehicles and MiG fighter planes were all obviously useless against America. "I did not fly to Baghdad to drink coffee," was what Gen. Achalov told the media afterward. They were there orchestrating Iraq's "Sarindar" plan.

The U.S. military in fact, has already found the only thing that would have been allowed to survive under the classic Soviet "Sarindar" plan to liquidate weapons arsenals in the event of defeat in war -- the technological documents showing how to reproduce weapons stocks in just a few weeks.

Such a plan has undoubtedly been in place since August 1995 -- when Saddam's son-in-law, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who ran Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological programs for 10 years, defected to Jordan. That August, UNSCOM and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors searched a chicken farm owned by Kamel's family and found more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes containing documentation dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear. Caught red-handed, Iraq at last admitted to its "extensive biological warfare program, including weaponization," issued a "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure Report" and turned over documents about the nerve agent VX and nuclear weapons.

Saddam then lured Gen. Kamel back, pretending to pardon his defection. Three days later, Kamel and over 40 relatives, including women and children, were murdered, in what the official Iraqi press described as a "spontaneous administration of tribal justice." After sending that message to his cowed, miserable people, Saddam then made a show of cooperation with UN inspection, since Kamel had just compromised all his programs, anyway. In November 1995, he issued a second "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure" as to his supposedly non-existent missile programs. That very same month, Jordan intercepted a large shipment of high-grade missile components destined for Iraq. UNSCOM soon fished similar missile components out of the Tigris River, again refuting Saddam's spluttering denials. In June 1996, Saddam slammed the door shut to UNSCOM's inspection of any "concealment mechanisms." On Aug. 5, 1998, halted cooperation with UNSCOM and the IAEA completely, and they withdrew on Dec. 16, 1998. Saddam had another four years to develop and hide his weapons of mass destruction without any annoying, prying eyes. U.N. Security Council resolutions 1115, (June 21, 1997), 1137 (Nov. 12, 1997), and 1194 (Sept. 9, 1998) were issued condemning Iraq--ineffectual words that had no effect. In 2002, under the pressure of a huge U.S. military buildup by a new U.S. administration, Saddam made yet another "Full, Final and Complete Disclosure," which was found to contain "false statements" and to constitute another "material breach" of U.N. and IAEA inspection and of paragraphs eight to 13 of resolution 687 (1991).

It was just a few days after this last "Disclosure," after a decade of intervening with the U.N. and the rest of the world on Iraq's behalf, that Gen. Primakov and his team of military experts landed in Baghdad -- even though, with 200,000 U.S. troops at the border, war was imminent, and Moscow could no longer save Saddam Hussein. Gen. Primakov was undoubtedly cleaning up the loose ends of the "Sarindar" plan and assuring Saddam that Moscow would rebuild his weapons of mass destruction after the storm subsided for a good price.

Mr. Putin likes to take shots at America and wants to reassert Russia in world affairs. Why would he not take advantage of this opportunity? As minister of foreign affairs and prime minister, Gen. Primakov has authored the "multipolarity" strategy of counterbalancing American leadership by elevating Russia to great-power status in Eurasia. Between Feb. 9-12, Mr. Putin visited Germany and France to propose a three-power tactical alignment against the United States to advocate further inspections rather than war. On Feb. 21, the Russian Duma appealed to the German and French parliaments to join them on March 4-7 in Baghdad, for "preventing U.S. military aggression against Iraq." Crowds of European leftists, steeped for generations in left-wing propaganda straight out of Moscow, continue to find the line appealing.

Mr. Putin's tactics have worked. The United States won a brilliant military victory, demolishing a dictatorship without destroying the country, but it has begun losing the peace. While American troops unveiled the mass graves of Saddam's victims, anti-American forces in Western Europe and elsewhere, spewed out vitriolic attacks, accusing Washington of greed for oil and not of really caring about weapons of mass destruction, or exaggerating their risks, as if weapons of mass destruction were really nothing very much to worry about after all.

It is worth remembering that Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, chose to live in a Soviet gulag instead of continuing to develop the power of death. "I wanted to alert the world," Sakharov explained in 1968, "to the grave perils threatening the human race thermonuclear extinction, ecological catastrophe, famine." Even Igor Kurchatov, the KGB academician who headed the Soviet nuclear program from 1943 until his death in 1960, expressed deep qualms of conscience about helping to create weapons of mass destruction. "The rate of growth of atomic explosives is such," he warned in an article written together with several other Soviet nuclear scientists not long before he died, "that in just a few years the stockpile will be large enough to create conditions under which the existence of life on earth will be impossible."

The Cold War was fought over the reluctance to use weapons of mass destruction, yet now this logic is something only senior citizens seem to recall. Today, even lunatic regimes like that in North Korea not only possess weapons of mass destruction, but openly offer to sell them to anyone with cash, including terrorists and their state sponsors. Is anyone paying any attention? Being inured to proliferation, however, does not reduce its danger. On the contrary, it increases it.


General Ion Mihai Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. He is currently finishing a new book, Red Roots: The Origins of Today's Anti-Americanism.


For its intellectuals, France falters
John Vinocur/IHT
Thursday, October 2, 2003



PARIS A growing sense of France's decline as a force in Europe has developed here.

The idea's novelty is not the issue itself. Rather it is that for the first time in a half century that the notion of a rapid descent in France's influence is receiving wide acknowledgment within the French establishment.

At its most hurtful and remarkable, and yet perhaps its most honest, there is the start of acceptance by segments of the French intellectual community that French leadership, as it is constituted now, is not something Europe wants - or France merits.

Several current books, three on the bestseller lists, have focused discussion on the country's incapacities, rigidities and its role, they say, in the context of the Iraq war, in dividing the Western community and fracturing notions of Europe's potential unity.

The books, with titles that translate to phrases like "France in Free Fall" or "French Arrogance," are merciless in their accusations of the fantasy-driven ineffectualness of French foreign policy and the extent of the country's economic breakdown. Or they more specifically target what one of books, "Le Pouvoir du Monde," by Bernard Poulet, regards as the implosion of the newspaper Le Monde, mirror of the French establishment, from one-time symbol of rectitude to self-appointed "universal mentor and Great Inquisitor"; or what another, essentially a short essay, called "Au Nom de l'Autre" by Alain Finkielkraut, contends is the rise in France of a new kind of anti-Semitism in proportions greater than anywhere else in Europe.

Together, they project the image of a decadent France, adrift from its brilliant past, incapable of inspiring allegiance or emulation and without a constructive, humanist plan for the future.

Of all the books, the current No. 2 on the bestseller list of L'Express, "La France Qui Tombe," by Nicolas Baverez, has been the focus of unusual attention.

Baverez, a practicing attorney and economist who has a strong place in the Paris establishment, argues that France's leadership hates change. Rather, it "cultivates the status quo and rigidity" because it is run through the connivance of politicians, civil servants and union officials, bringing together both the left- and right-wing elites. They are described as mainly concerned with preserving the failed statist system that protects their jobs and status.

Although he has little patience with the American role in the world (it is branded unilateral, imperial and unpredictable, yet flexible and open to change) Baverez charges that the failure of French policy on Iraq and Europe - resisting the United States with nothing to offer in exchange, and attempting to force the rest of Europe to follow its lead - "crowns the process of the nation's decline" and leaves France in growing diplomatic isolation everywhere.

Over the past year, said Bavarez, "French diplomacy has undertaken to broaden the fracture within the West, and duplicate American unilateralism on the European scale by its arrogant dressing down of Europe's new democracies. It has sustained a systematically critical attitude that flees concrete propositions in favor of theoretical slogans exalting a multipolar world or multilateralism."

As for Europe, Bavarez maintains that France has been discredited by its reticence to transfer any kind of meaningful sovereignty to the central organization, its resistance to giving up its advantages in the area of agricultural policy and its disregard for the directives and rules of the European Union executive commission.

He does not stop there. Of a united Europe, Bavarez said, France has "ruined what might have remained of a common foreign and security policy, deeply dividing the community and placing France in the minority." His country was at the edge of marginalization in Europe and the world, he claimed, because of its "verbal pretense of having real power" that is "completely cut off from its capacity for influence or action."

In a real sense, none of this is new. But this time, the provenance is a respected establishment figure talking, so to speak, from the belly of the beast. The echo has been striking within in national debate.

Over the years, foreign journalists, free of establishment pressures, have made Bavarez's points one by one without denting French public discourse. Talk circulated during the presidential election campaign last year about French decline, coming largely from Jacques Chirac, but it was basically dismissed as political taunts aimed at the Socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

Now, in response to the Bavarez book, there is public rage from the Chirac camp, which the Bavarez book charges with having neither the courage nor the competence to confront the basic problems.

But the density of Bavarez's factual argumentation, bolstered by the presence of the other books, all treating France's pride-of-rank and French conceits with brutal disrespect, have given the notion of French decline a legitimacy, reality and currency that it lacked before in public debate.

Alain Duhamel, perhaps the most consensual of France's mainstream political commentators, has praised Bavarez for launching "a legitimate debate on a subject that merits one: French decline." He said it touched "a sensitive point in the national subconscious that set off an intellectual hullabaloo."

An ardent advocate of limited surrender of French sovereignty so that the EU can become the vector of French worldwide ambitions - he too has written a new book whose title translates to France in Disarray - Duhamel acknowledges that France no longer pulls Europe along behind it, although he insists Europe will not advance without France.

Indeed, Le Monde, which normally makes French ambitions, or distress about their failures, synonymous with Europe's, made some rare admissions this week about the French descent in Europe's eyes.

Daniel Vernet, a former senior editor of the newspaper, wrote, "We often irritate our partners because too frequently we have the tendency to want to impose our views, or only to consider as truly European those positions that conform to a French vision, however much in the EU minority it may be."

That resulted in a dilemma without an obvious exit, Vernet said. "The European partners don't want to hear about European policy independent from the United States," he wrote. "So, either France acts alone, and, regardless of what's claimed, its influence remains limited. Or it seeks a common denominator with its partners and it has to give up its ambitions."

Even Chirac may have given a sign that he understands the changing vision of France's real possibilities. In two major speeches on world affairs since the end of the summer, he dropped any references to multipolarity, the French notion of a world of competing poles with Europe set up as a rival pole to the United States.

In the sense that they project the picture of a country that has lost its way, the other books complemented the Bavarez thesis and set the tone of discussion.

In "Ouest contre Ouest," by Andre Glucksmann, one of the few leading French intellectuals to challenge the country's position on the Iraq war, France is described as a nation, with others in Europe, that fled the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, on the United States in panic and attempted to set up a sterile biosphere away from the world's realities.

The book, also a bestseller, maintains that this flight from confronting trouble carried with it an attempt to create two opposing notions of the West: a serene Europe, sheltered from terrorist kamikazes, and a warlike, imperialist, autistic United States.

Glucksmann wrote that the central question of the future was not hegemony or multipolarity, the key French terms illustrating the Chirac government's seeming obsession about the United States and its desire to counter the Americans, but civilization versus nihilism, and whether the West together could make a fight to protect civilization.

Glucksmann believes that France's leadership has wanted to bring Russia into its project to counter the United States, with France promising in the bargain a return of Russia's lost rank and prestige.

"What does France gain?" he asked. "The possibility to continue its siesta. It would be up to Russia to counterbalance America, and keep the Islamist and Eastern hordes away. It would be the United States' job to chase down all the worldwide risks that we want to avoid. Paris, in all this, gives itself the role of directing the world by proxy. Once the Euro-Asiatic bloc is cemented through the inspiration of the Elys?e Palace, Washington, put in its just place and counterbalanced, will conform."

These messages converge with that of "L'Arrogance Fran?aise," by Romain Gubert and Emmanuel Saint-Martin, whose chapter and section headings - How France Lost Europe or Narcissistic Blindness - well sum up a book that holds that French foreign and European policy is guided by "obsessive concern with its standing, and terror in the face of its decline."

France's essential arrogance, the authors suggest, is in continuing to act as if the world community and its European partners do not comprehend that for the French leadership, the "EU serves as the means for France to recover its influence and to reconquer its lost power."

In this light, although the writers of "L'Arrogance Fran?aise" do not say so specifically, it is possible to see French policy in relationship to Iraq as a temporary instrumentalization of Germany in an effort to recapture European primacy - an attempt understood and foiled by the vast number of its NATO and EU partners.

Months later, the fact is, after Sweden's rejection of the euro (in part because of France's refusal to conform to the economic performance standards it set up itself for the currency's credibility), and the likely splintering of the EU into groups of several speeds without any semblance of a unified foreign or defense policy, France has come up empty.

The sum of the messages of the books, in French to the French, is that this vision of the country's current circumstances is not a French-bashing invention from afar, but a home truth.

For Bavarez, France is threatened with becoming a museum diplomatically and a transit center economically. To do anything about it, it must revive itself internally first, getting away from what he calls its "social statist model." To advance, it must end the dominant role of a "public sector placed outside of any constraint requiring productivity or competitiveness."

The reform of the rest of French policy, based on genuine integration into Europe, should follow, he argues.

He recommends what he calls shock therapy, a forced march toward modernity that involves the risk of a clash among French interest groups and an end to the "sinister continuity" that unites the presidencies of Fran?ois Mitterrand and Chirac in a kind of angry immobility.

But for Bavarez, and most of the other writers now gaining the nation's attention, the present reality is harsh for France.

"Overtaken by the democratic vitality and technological advance of the United State," Bavarez concludes, "downgraded industrially and challenged commercially by China and Asia, the decline of France is accelerating at the same rhythm as the vast changes in the world."

International Herald Tribune

How martyrs are made
Baghdad Residents Don't Want U.S. Troops to Go Soon, Poll Says
Iraqis: Ousting Saddam worth hardships
Why is the State Department so cozy with the Saudis? - shocking exposure

How martyrs are made- Toronto's Globe & Mail


By MARGARET WENTE
Saturday, October 11, 2003

Early last Saturday morning, 27-year-old Hanadi Jaradat waved goodbye to her parents and hurried off down the street. She had business to do -- something about a land transaction. An apprentice lawyer, she was only a few days away from finishing her internship and opening her own office. "She was happy," her father later said.

But Ms. Jaradat's true business lay elsewhere. She changed from her traditional Arab robe and scarf into blue jeans, and put her hair up into a ponytail. She slipped across a lightly guarded part of the security fence that now separates large parts of the West Bank from Israel, and made her way to a busy Arab-Israeli restaurant in Haifa called Maxim. It was full of families on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Somehow, she dodged the security check that all restaurants in Israel have these days. Inside, she detonated her body-belt full of explosives. She blew up 19 people, including herself and three generations of two different Israeli families, and injured dozens more. Five of the dead were Israeli-Arab Christians, and three were Jewish children.

The Maxim was co-owned by an Arab family and a Jewish family, and was almost 40 years old. It served both Arab and Jewish customers, and was a symbol of peaceful co-existence. No one knows if that irony occurred to Hanadi Jaradat, who is now the newest role model for Palestinian girls -- the most-successful female suicide bomber ever.

"Everyone was happy and proud of her," said a neighbour in Jenin, the explosive refugee camp where she lived. "We are receiving congratulations from people," said her 15-year-old brother, Thaher. "Why should we cry? It is like her wedding today, the happiest day for her."

The usual explanation for what motivates people like Ms. Jaradat is despair and revenge. There was plenty of that. A few months ago, Israeli soldiers killed her older brother and a male cousin. The family says they have no idea why, but the Israelis say they were Islamic Jihad terrorists. It was Islamic Jihad that claimed credit for Ms. Jaradat's murder mission.

I've heard this story before. I heard it from another family last January, who told me how their bright and beautiful 17-year-old daughter left home one day to detonate herself in a Jewish supermarket. I also learned then that young Palestinians are urged by a relentless stream of propaganda to choose violent death. This poison is manufactured not by Islamic Jihad or Hamas, but by the Palestinian Authority itself. It includes TV news shows and newspaper articles that glorify murderers (interviews with proud mothers of the dead are a standard feature), and sermons from extremist imams. It also includes a unique invention of Palestinian culture -- music videos celebrating suicide, starring attractive boys and girls in Western fashions and set to catchy music. These music videos have two themes. One is the wickedness and depravity of the Israelis. The other is the beauty of Shahada -- dying for Allah -- which is depicted as the supreme act of patriotism.

In these videos, Israelis are depicted as monsters -- cruel, sadistic people who murder mothers, children, and helpless old men in cold blood. One that ran on TV all summer (after the PA had agreed to engage in the "peace process") shows a mother who is targeted and murdered by soldiers. Her daughter mourns her death and sings sadly over her grave. In another, shot in a similarly gauzy, impressionistic style, soldiers shoot down Palestinian schoolchildren at a checkpoint in successive waves, until they're all dead. The last scene shows a graveyard, where the ghostly children rise again, presumably to ascend to the sweet afterlife. In another, a handsome young man sees his sweetheart shot dead. She ascends to Heaven, where she appears robed in white among the other maidens of Paradise. Then he becomes a martyr, too, and is reunited with her in Paradise, where they once again embrace.

Other music videos show children riding off on their bicycles to throw stones at enemy soldiers and falling happily to their death. "Don't cry for me," they write in notes left for their parents. In one, a mother mourns her fallen son and then hands a gun to the younger one (who looks to be about 12). You can see this infinitely depressing material for yourself at the Web site of Palestinian Media Watch http://www.pmw.org.il, an independent Israeli organization which has done the world a service by documenting it.

These messages, which have been broadcast for years, are part of mainstream culture. And although most Palestinians are desperately poor, almost every family has a TV. The messages run on official Palestinian Authority TV. (Since the summer, the amount of airtime has been substantially reduced, but they're still shown every day.) They are produced with money supplied by the European Union and other nations that subsidize the PA.

What political goal are they designed to achieve? There isn't one. In fact, the only goal seems to be to get rid of the Jews. The message is that all of Israel, not just the territories, belongs to the Palestinians. Palestinian textbooks don't even show the state of Israel. The entire region is depicted as greater Palestine.

One music video that aired a couple of weeks ago did show a map of Israel. There was a heart over it, dripping blood. Then, arms with stones sprouted from the ground, and in the final shot, the Palestinian flag covered the whole map.

Many outsiders believe that these extreme beliefs are confined to a small minority of people. This is not true. Yasser Arafat periodically repeats his enthusiasm for child martyrs (but only in Arabic). Soccer teams and UN-sponsored summer camps are named after suicide bombers. Last May, the director of the Palestinian children's aid association gave a television interview in which she explained that part of education policy is to teach children to aspire to death for Allah. "The concept of Shahada for him [the child] means belonging to the homeland, from a religious point of view. Sacrifice for his homeland. Achieving Shahada in order to reach Paradise and to meet his God. This is the best."

It has worked. One of the most-chilling television moments I have ever seen features two 11-year-old girls being interviewed on a news set around a year ago. They are talking about wanting to die, in the same way that girls here talk about wanting to be teachers, or doctors, or brides. "Do you think it is beautiful?" asks the adult male host. "Shahada is very, very beautiful," answers one of the girls. "Everyone yearns for Shahada. What could be better than going to Paradise?"

"Every Palestinian child aged, say 12, says 'O Lord, I would like to become a Shahid,' " says the other girl.

The story of the Yom Kippur massacre was quickly overtaken by fresh news this week. Israel bombed an empty terrorist training camp in Syria in retaliation. Governments and newspapers around the world condemned Israel for it. People criticized George W. Bush for not being tough enough on Sharon. The latest Arafat government fell apart. Wise people opined once again that Israeli will never be able to achieve a political solution through military action.

This is true. It's also true that peace will never come until Palestinians renounce their death cult. So far, there's no sign of it.

mwente@globeandmail.ca

WASHINGTON -- More than two-thirds of Baghdad (search) residents would like to see U.S. troops stay longer than a few more months, but many of those Iraqis still have sharply mixed feelings about the troops, a poll says.



Baghdad Residents Don't Want U.S. Troops to Go Soon, Poll Says

AP Oct 13, 2003

The Gallup poll found that 71 percent of the capital city's residents felt U.S. troops should not leave in the next few months. Just 26 percent felt the troops should leave that soon.

However, a sizable minority felt there were circumstances in which attacks against those troops could be justified. Almost one in five, 19 percent, said attacks could be justified, and an additional 17 percent said they could be in some situations.

These mixed feelings from Baghdad residents come at a time when many in the United States are calling for the troops to be brought home soon.

When Gallup set out recently to poll residents of Baghdad on their feelings about the war, U.S. troops and the future of their country, the biggest surprise may have been public reaction to the questioners. The response rate was close to 97 percent, with some people following questioners around the streets begging for a chance to give their opinions, said Richard Burkholder, director of international polling for the organization.

Almost six in 10 in the poll, 58 percent, said that U.S. troops in Baghdad have behaved fairly well or very well, with one in 10 saying "very well." Twenty 20 percent said the troops have behaved fairly badly and 9 percent said very badly.


REBUILDING IN THE GULF
Iraqis: Ousting Saddam worth hardships
Posted: September 24, 2003

A new Gallup poll of Baghdad residents released today shows 62 percent think ousting Saddam Hussein was worth any hardships they have personally endured since the invasion of Iraq by coalition forces.

The poll was the first scientific survey "assessing the postwar social and political climate of Baghdad's 6.4 million citizens," the Gallup Organization said in a statement. The group says it has committed to a multi-year task of reporting Iraqis' opinions.

The poll was conducted in homes across Baghdad. Galllup says 1,178 hour-long interviews were conducted.

Among the poll's findings:


*Nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of Baghdad's citizens think ousting Saddam Hussein was worth any hardships they have personally endured since the invasion.

*Nearly half (47 percent) thinks the country as a whole is currently worse off than it was before the invasion - 33 percent thinks it is already in better shape.

*Two-thirds (67 percent) believe Iraq will be in better condition five years from now than it was before the U.S. and British-led invasion; just 8 percent think it will be worse off.

*61 percent take a favorable view of the new Iraqi Governing Council, but see its policies and decisions "still mostly determined by the coalition's own authorities" (75 percent).

*Fully half (50 percent) think that the Coalition Provisional Authority is doing a better job now than was the case two months ago, while just 14 percent think it is doing a worse job.



DANGEROUS DIPLOMACY

Foggy Bottom's Friends
Why is the State Department so cozy with the Saudis?

BY JOEL MOWBRAY
Monday, October 13, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

(Wall street journal's editor's note ): This is adapted from , "Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens American Security," which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore.)

The date was April 24, 2002. Standing on the runway at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, the cadre of FBI, Secret Service and Customs agents had just been informed by law-enforcement officials that there was a "snag" with Crown Prince Abdullah's oversized entourage, which was arriving with the prince for a visit to George W. Bush's Western White House in Crawford, Texas. The flight manifest of the eight-plane delegation accompanying the Saudi would-be king had a problem. Three problems, to be exact: One person on the list was wanted by U.S. law enforcement authorities, and two others were on a terrorist watch list.

This had the potential to be what folks in Washington like to refer to as an "international incident." But the State Department was not about to let an "international incident" happen. Which is why this story has never been written--until now.

Upon hearing that there was someone who was wanted and two suspected terrorists in Abdullah's entourage, the FBI was ready to "storm the plane and pull those guys off," explains an informed source. But given the "international" component, State was informed of the FBI's intentions before any action could be taken. When word reached the Near Eastern Affairs bureau, its reaction was classic State Department: "What are we going to do about those poor people trapped on the plane?" To which at least one law-enforcement official on the ground responded, "Shoot them"--not exactly the answer State was looking for.

State, Secret Service and the FBI then began what bureaucrats refer to as an "interagency process." In other words, they started fighting. The FBI believed that felons, even Saudi felons, were to be arrested. State had other ideas. The Secret Service didn't really have any, other than to make sure that the three Saudis in question didn't get anywhere near the president or the vice president. State went to the mat in part because it was responsible for giving visas to the three in the first place. Since this was a government delegation--for which all applications are generally handled at one time--the names were probably not run through the normal watch lists before the visas were issued.

Details about what happened to the three men in the end are not entirely clear, and no one at State was willing to provide any facts about the incident. What is clear, though, is that the three didn't get anywhere near Crawford, but were also spared the "embarrassment" of arrest. And the House of Saud was spared an "international incident." That normally staid bureaucrats engaged in incredible acrobatics to bail out three guys who never should have been in the United States in the first place says a great deal about State's "special relationship" with the Saudis.

The State-Saudi alliance really does boil down to one thing: oil. At least that's what former secretary of state George Shultz seems to think: "They're an important country," he told me. "They have lots of oil. You do pay a lot of attention to that." Foggy Bottom agrees, and has been conditioned to do so by the 1970s oil shocks. When the infamous oil crisis of 1973 was ballooning, America was confident that its tight relationship with the Saudis would ensure an uninterrupted flow of cheap oil. This confidence was shattered--and world oil prices more than tripled--when the Saudis pursued their own economic interests. Saudi power inside Washington skyrocketed, with bureaucrats realizing that the House of Saud could not be taken for granted.

When the next oil crisis struck in 1979, prices shot up by more than 150%--but that was mostly driven by other countries: a substantial drop in Iraqi production and the sudden halt in Iranian production. Consumer panic, hoarding by nervous companies and individuals, and price gouging also contributed. Saudi Arabia did little to deepen the crisis--Saudi-controlled OPEC implemented two comparably modest price increases in 1979--and actually was seen by many as an invaluable ally. The balance of power managed to shift even further in the Saudi direction in following years--and State became ever more willing to accede to Saudi demands.




The bond between Washington and Riyadh may have deepened because of the oil crises, but it began decades earlier. FDR initiated the oil-for-protection relationship in 1945. President Eisenhower enshrined this arrangement as a strategic goal with his Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957, where he declared the protection of the Arab world--with particular focus on Saudi Arabia--to be a national-security priority.
While official policy was coziness with the House of Saud and Foggy Bottom was dominated by Arabists, there was some degree of tension, with many officials uncomfortable with the radical Wahhabi clerics who dominate everyday life in Saudi Arabia. In 1962, President Kennedy became increasingly concerned that the civil war in Yemen--in which Egypt backed the pan-Arab revolutionaries, and Saudi Arabia backed the royalists--posed a tremendous threat to the stability of the region. According to Hermann Eilts, a former ambassador to both Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Kennedy pushed the House of Saud to engage "in internal economic and political reform and end all aid to the Yemeni royalists." Such pressure, though, turned out to be short-lived. Mr. Eilts, in a review of a book by a fellow Arabist, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia Parker Hart, noted that promotion of reform--something Mr. Eilts himself found unpleasant and unhelpful--was abandoned entirely just a few years after it started.

Not until Lyndon Johnson's administration did then-secretary of state Dean Rusk wisely discontinue all such exhortations for reform, which by then had become almost rote and counterproductive. The Saudi leadership, Rusk believed, was best qualified to judge its own best interests.

But in the intervening years, the State Department's refusal to press for reform in Saudi Arabia turned into humiliating obsequiousness. Wahhabi Islam--the militant strain endorsed by the ruling family--is the only permitted religion in the kingdom. Christians are not allowed to worship on Saudi soil--and Jews are not even allowed in the country. Even Shiites, the majority population in the oil-rich Eastern Province, are not free to practice their denomination of Islam. Not only does State not push to change this flagrant violation of religious liberty, it behaves like the House of Saud when asked to do so. In 1997, the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah banned the offering of Catholic Mass on the premises--Protestant services had already been relegated to the British Consulate--because of the Saudi government's "displeasure."



Perhaps former assistant secretary (the lead position of a bureau) for Near Eastern Affairs Ned Walker said it best when he told the Washington Post, "Let's face it, we got a lot of money out of Saudi Arabia." Mr. Walker meant "we" as in the U.S. government, but he easily could have used it to refer to former Foggy Bottom officials who benefit financially after retirement. Some do it directly--and in public view, because of stringent reporting requirements--while most, including Mr. Walker, choose a less noticeable trough.
The gravy train dates back more than 25 years. In that time, it has created a circle of sympathizers and both direct and indirect lobbyists. But the most important--and most indirect--byproduct of lining the pockets of former State officials is that the Saudi royal family finds itself with passionate supporters inside Foggy Bottom. Which is precisely the intended effect. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, was quoted in the Washington Post: "If the reputation then builds that the Saudis take care of friends when they leave office, you'd be surprised how much better friends you have who are just coming into office." This is not to say that State officials make decisions with visions of dollars dancing in their heads, but at the very least, they probably take a more benign view of the royal family that "takes care of" their friends and former colleagues.

Among the first former Foggy Bottom officials to work directly for the House of Saud was former assistant secretary for congressional affairs Frederick Dutton, starting in 1975. According to a 1995 public filing (mandated for all paid foreign agents), Mr. Dutton earns some $200,000 a year. Providing mostly legal services, Mr. Dutton also flacks for the House of Saud and even lobbies on the royal family's behalf from time to time. One of his successors as head of congressional affairs, Linwood Holton, also went to work for the Saudis, starting in 1977. Rounding out the current team of retired State officials now directly employed by the Saudis is Peter Thomas Madigan, deputy assistant secretary for legislative affairs in the first Bush administration.

Most of the Saudi money, though, goes indirectly to former State officials, most commonly by means of think tanks. This approach pays dividends in many ways: Foggy Bottom retirees get to have their cake--without the public realizing they're eating it--and the Saudis get to have "indirect" lobbyists, who promote the Saudi agenda under the cover of the think-tank label. Three organizations in particular are the primary beneficiaries of Saudi petrodollars, and all are populated with former State officials: the Meridian International Center, the Middle East Policy Council and the Middle East Institute.

After a long and "distinguished" career in the Foreign Service, Walter Cutler took the reins at the Meridian International Center. He had served as ambassador to Zaire and Tunisia, and twice in Saudi Arabia, and he stayed close to the Saudis after leaving State. Mr. Cutler told the Washington Post that the Saudis had been "very supportive of the center." Meridian is not alone. The Middle East Policy Council, which also receives significant Saudi funding, counts among its ranks former ambassadors--career Foreign Service members all--Charles Freeman, Frank Carlucci, and Hermann Eilts.

The Middle East Institute, officially on the Saudi payroll, receives some $200,000 of its annual $1.5 million budget from the Saudi government, and an unknown amount from Saudi individuals--often a meaningless distinction since most of the "individuals" with money to donate are members of the royal family, which constitutes the government. MEI's chairman is Wyche Fowler, who was ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1996-2001, and its president is Ned Walker, who has served as the deputy chief of Mission in Riyadh and ambassador to Egypt.

Also at MEI: David Mack, former ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs; Richard Parker, former ambassador to Algeria, Lebanon, and Morocco; William Eagleton, former ambassador to Syria; Joseph C. Wilson, career foreign-service office and former deputy chief of mission in Baghdad; David Ransom, former ambassador to Bahrain and former deputy chief of Mission in Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and Syria; and Michael Sterner, former ambassador to the UAE and deputy assistant secretary of Near Eastern affairs.

For Meridian and MEI, at least, the House of Saud is not the only government entity lining up to fund them; Foggy Bottom is as well. Meridian does significant amounts of work with State, particularly in coordinating the International Visitors Program, which determines the individuals and groups invited--and not invited--to Washington for a chance to curry favor with State officials in person. MEI last year was slated to handle a conference of Iraqi dissidents--which was going to exclude the umbrella organization of pro-democracy groups, the Iraqi National Congress--in London. (The conference was cancelled after public outcry over MEI's role.) The grant for holding the conference was a staggering $5 million--more than three times MEI's annual budget.

The money, the favors, and State's affinity for Saudi elites over the decades have all helped contribute to the "special relationship" between State and the House of Saud. Notes Hudson Institute senior fellow Laurent Murawiec, "This is a relationship that has been cemented by 40 years of money, power, and political favors that goes much deeper than most people realize."





State has by no means been acting as a rogue department in dealing with Saudi Arabia, somehow coddling a nation that various White Houses considered hostile. But the lengths to which State goes to pamper the Saudis is something largely carried out of its own volition. There is no better example of this than Visa Express, the program that required all Saudis (including noncitizens) to turn in their visa applications at private Saudi travel agencies, which then sent them in bundles to the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh or the Consulate in Jeddah. Visa Express was entirely of State's own making; it was conceived of and planned for while Bill Clinton was president, and was officially launched when President Bush was in the White House. And in the three months it was operational before the September 11 attacks, Visa Express let in three of the hijackers. But State did not shut it down. It took 10 months--and tremendous public pressure--before that happened.
From the moment in early 1993 that Mary Ryan became head of Consular Affairs, the division that oversees visa issuance, consulates and embassies, traditional requirements for visa applicants started getting pared down. Partial versions of Visa Express--though not by that name--were implemented in various countries in the mid- to late 1990s. But nowhere in the world had State launched a program whereby all residents, citizens and noncitizens alike, would be expected to submit visa applications to local, private travel agencies. It was a bold--and untested--plan. Yet State chose to try out this ambitious project in a nation that was a known hotbed of al Qaeda extremists.

To be fair, most Americans were not thinking about national security in late 2000 and early 2001, but State should have been. That's its job. Khobar Towers, the U.S. military dormitory, had been attacked by Hezbollah terrorists in 1996, killing 19 U.S. soldiers and wounding 372. And State had ample information that al Qaeda was fully operational inside Saudi Arabia. Yet State went ahead with plans to launch its first nationwide Visa Express program.

Although State vociferously defended Visa Express when it came under intense scrutiny--claiming that it was almost irrelevant that travel agencies had been deputized to collect visa applications (and more, as it turned out)--the truth is that Visa Express was an incredible threat to U.S. border security. State's official line was that travel agencies did no more than, say, FedEx would in collecting and passing on applications. This was simply not true.

According to internal State documents, travel agencies were expected to conduct preinterviews and ensure compliance. In other words, people with financial incentive to obtain visas for others were helping them fill out the forms. At first blush, this might not sound significant. But the average visa application is approved or refused in two to three minutes, meaning that there are key indicators a consular officer looks for in making his decisions. With a two-page form--one page of which has questions like "Are you a member of a terrorist organization? (Answering 'yes' will not necessarily trigger a refusal)"--a travel agent who handles dozens or hundreds of applications daily could easily figure out the red flags that are to be avoided. Armed with that information, it would be relatively easy to help an applicant beat the system. Visa Express also arranged it so that the overwhelming majority of Saudi applicants never came into contact with a U.S. citizen until stepping off the airplane onto American soil.

Apparently oblivious to the glaring security loopholes created by Visa Express, State proudly implemented the program in June 2001. In an e-mail that, in hindsight, is shocking for its gleeful tone, the deputy chief of mission in Riyadh, Thomas P. Furey, wrote to Mary Ryan about Visa Express being a "win-win-win-win"--with nary a mention of security concerns. In the e-mail, Mr. Furey notes that the program started with Saudi nationals--whom he amazingly refers to as "clearly approvable"--and then says that Visa Express had been expanded to include non-Saudi citizens one day earlier, on June 25, 2001. Visa Express also resulted in the overwhelming majority of Saudi applicants never coming into contact with visa applicants. "The number of people on the street and coming through the gates should only be fifteen percent of what it was last summer," Mr. Furey wrote.

The four wins Mr. Furey boasts about? From his e-mail:


The RSO [regional security officer, an American responsible for coordinating embassy security with local police] is happy, the guard force [Saudi residents who provide embassy and consulate security] is happy, the public loves the service (no more long lines and they can go to the travel agencies in the evening and not take time off from work), we love it (no more crowd control stress and reduced work for the FSNs [Foreign Service Nationals, Saudi residents]) and now this afternoon Chuck Brayshaw and I were at the Foreign Ministry and discovered the most amazing thing--the Saudi Government loves it!
It would be easier to defend State's creation of Visa Express if it had abandoned it on Sept. 12, 2001--or at least had done so after it realized that 15 of the hijackers were Saudis, including three who got in through the program. But in the month after September 11, out of 102 applicants whose forms were processed at the Jeddah consulate, only two were interviewed, and none were refused. When word leaked to the Washington Post that 15 of the 19 terrorists were Saudis, the embassy in Riyadh assured the Saudis that the U.S. had "not changed its procedures or policies in determining visa eligibility as a result of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."
After my investigative story on Visa Express came out in mid-June 2002, State's initial change was cosmetic--literally. It dropped the name "Visa Express," but changed nothing about the program itself. Only after a month of a full-court press defending the suddenly nameless program did State shutter it. And even then, it was not because it had realized the error of its ways, but because it needed to offer some proof to Congress--set to vote near the end of July to strip State of the visa authority altogether--that it was indeed fit to handle such a vital function of U.S. border security. (The gambit worked--Congress sided with State.)

After the program was sacked, officials at State "openly worried that Saudi relations would worsen with the stricter requirements," according to an official there. If only they had expressed such "worry" about the wisdom of fast-tracking visas in a nation teeming with Islamic extremists.

Saudi Arabia, after all, is the home of Wahhabi Islam, and Wahhabi true believers' favorite catch phrase is "Death to America"--well, maybe the second favorite, after "Death to Israel." But look again at Mr. Furey's e-mail. He was clearly--frighteningly--blind to this reality. He referred to Saudi nationals as "clearly approvable." What he saw was a nation filled with people he believed belonged in the United States. Mr. Furey, in his e-mail, summed up his idealized vision of Saudi Arabia quite succinctly: "This place really is a wonderland."




State's obliviousness to reality--and security--had an even more incredible result: One of the 10 travel-agency companies contracted as a Visa Express vendor is a subsidiary of a suspected financier of terrorism. Fursan Travel & Tourism is owned by the Al-Rajhi Banking & Investment Corporation, or RBIC, which is one of the alleged financiers of al Qaeda listed in the "Golden Chain" documents seized in Bosnia in March 2002 (detailing the early supporters of al Qaeda back in the late 1980s, after the Soviets left Afghanistan). RBIC was also the primary bank for a number of charities raided in the United States after Sept. 11 for suspected ties to terrorist organizations. RBIC maintained accounts for the International Islamic Relief Organization, the Saudi Red Crescent Society, the Muslim World League and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth. RBIC also was used to wire money to the Global Relief Foundation in Belgium, which the United States has designated as a terrorist organization.
Records recovered by Spanish authorities show that several members of an al Qaeda affiliate there held accounts at RBIC, and the terror cell's chief financier told a business partner to use RBIC for their transactions in a fax recovered by Spanish police. And they were not the only al Qaeda terrorists who did business there. Abdulaziz Alomari, who helped Mohamed Atta crash American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center and was one of the three terrorists who received a visa through Visa Express, held an account at RBIC as well. Because his visa application form--which I obtained--does not indicate which travel agency he used, it is not known whether Alomari submitted his application to the agency owned by RBIC.

The founder and namesake of RBIC, Suleiman Abdul Aziz al-Rajhi, also started the SAAR Foundation, whose successor, Safa Trust (SAAR liquidated, but most of the same people and operations carried over to Safa) was at the center of the FBI's investigation into the extensive financial network of mostly Saudi-financed terrorist activities in the U.S. Operation Greenquest, as it was called, resulted in the raiding of 23 different Muslim organizations' offices, including Safa Trust and several charities that had bank accounts with RBIC. Although the raids occurred after September 11, the FBI had been investigating the elaborate financial arrangements--which regularly included SAAR--for years before the September 11 attacks.

Yet the State Department was so careless in choosing its Visa Express vendors that one owned by a suspected financier of terrorism became deputized to handle the collection and initial processing of U.S. visas.




When driving from Jeddah to Mecca, one encounters two road signs. The first tells Muslims that Mecca is straight ahead. The other tells non-Muslims to proceed no further and take the last available exit. Welcome to Saudi Arabia, where some Muslims can practice their religion freely, and no one else can. Shiite Muslims, the majority population of the oil-rich Eastern Province, are not only not free to practice their version of Islam, but they can be imprisoned and tortured for doing so. History helps explain some of this disdain and contempt for non-Wahhabists. Mohammed ibn Saud, ancestor to the current king, struck a pact with Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab some 250 years ago, whereby Wahhab's fundamentalist clerics and followers would support the Saud family, in exchange for the royal family's generous financial support of Wahhabism, Wahhab's militant version of Sunni Islam. Modern-day Wahhabists hate nothing more--aside from Christians, Jews, and other infidels--than Muslims practicing non-Wahhabist Islam.
In a June 28, 2000, letter to then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which was established by Congress in 1998 to advise Foggy Bottom, wrote:


In Saudi Arabia, the government brazenly denies religious freedom and vigorously enforces its prohibition against all forms of public religious expression other than that of Wahabi Muslims. Numerous Christians and Shi'a Muslims continue to be detained, imprisoned and deported. As the Department's 1999 Annual Report bluntly summarized: "Freedom of religion does not exist."
Even worshipping or praying in the dark of night can be a dangerous activity in Saudi Arabia, for Saudi police regularly storm into homes if they have reason to believe Christians are attempting to worship. Punishment can be severe. In 1998, a Christian Ethiopian got 1,000 lashes--carried out over several months--after merely being accused of distributing religious materials.
The worst punishments are reserved, though, for those who leave Islam. The punishment for people who commit apostasy--the "crime" of converting from Islam to another religion--is beheading. The House of Saud, however, promotes conversions of a different kind--bringing people into Islam, particularly those who work in embassies. Paid on a sliding scale, those who cajole others into converting to Islam are rewarded with bounties of up to $20,000. The highest payment is for converting an American diplomat; lower payments of a few hundred dollars are given for converting a foreign national from one of the non-Western embassies.

Based on overwhelming evidence of religious persecution and overall denial of any form of religious liberty, the Commission on International Religious Freedom recommended--for the fourth year in a row--that State designate Saudi Arabia as one of the handful of nations considered a "country of particular concern (CPC)." According to the commission, Saudi Arabia qualified under every criterion--and was actually seen as the worst offender in the world.

But for the fourth year in a row, State didn't comply. The CPC designation is despised by listed countries, because it automatically triggers sanctions, though those sanctions can be easily waived for reasons of U.S. national interest. Under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998, which both created the commission and mandated that State provide annual reports on international religious freedom, State has no leeway on whether or not to report a country that meets certain standards of religious persecution or denial of religious liberty.

There is a simple explanation for the Saudi exclusion: higher-ups at State put their collective foot down. According to an administration official familiar with the internal squabbling surrounding the Saudi-CPC question, "It was Armitage's decision. He made the call." That would be Richard Armitage, Foggy Bottom's No. 2 official, Secretary Colin Powell's right-hand man, and a trusted friend of the Saudis. In the Powell State Department, Mr. Armitage is the filter through which all major policy changes must go. And Mr. Armitage made it quite clear, according to another official, that Saudi Arabia was not to be given the CPC designation. A different administration official, however, says that although politics played a part, Mr. Armitage's role in the process was a bit more nuanced, meaning those writing the report were made to "know" early on how things operate and what wouldn't be tolerated. "Let's put it this way: the decision [on Saudi Arabia] was made a long time before it was actually 'made,' " explains the official. Either way, the House of Saud received another free pass.





Prince Bandar is often considered the most politically savvy of all the foreign ambassadors living in Washington. That may or may not be true--but he certainly is the best-protected. According to a Diplomatic Security official, Prince Bandar has a security detail that includes full-time participation of six highly trained and skilled DS officers. (DS officers are federal government employees charged with securing American diplomatic missions.) The DS officers and a contingent of private security officers guard him at his northern Virginia residence and travel with him to places like Florida or his ski resort in Aspen, Colo.
A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, claimed that State was reimbursed by the Saudi government for the use of the DS officers, though he refused to provide any specifics or evidence to that effect. Even if the salaries are reimbursed, though, six skilled DS agents are diverted from meaningful work, such as investigating visa fraud, in order to protect one person.

To show his appreciation for their presence, Prince Bandar provides the DS agents with catered meals every day, and with fresh-brewed coffee and gourmet pastries to start out the mornings. The agents enjoy these delicacies from the comfort of an extra house on the premises reserved for the security staff. When the DS agents join Prince Bandar in Aspen--where they have their own ski chalet--he typically buys them full ski outfits and other gifts.

But each agent who works for Bandar is cycled off-rotation very quickly: on average about 30 days after arriving. There doesn't seem to be any real reason for this, other than that Bandar might hope that the more agents he serves catered meals and buys fancy gifts for, the more friends he is likely to have. But with the number of "friends" he--and the rest of the Saudi royal family--already have at Foggy Bottom, one wonders why he would need more.

Mr. Mowbray is author of "Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens American Security" (Regnery, 2003), from which this article is adapted. You can buy it from the OpinionJournal bookstore.