FULL ARTICLES

IRAN: HOLOCAUST CONFERENCE SOON IN TEHRAN

Iran: Holocaust conference soon in Tehran
AKI (Italian news agency)
January 5, 2006

www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.246551760&par=0

Iran has decided to rewrite and revise the history of the Holocaust. Following the repeated declarations by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other senior government officials on the need to re-examine the history of the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War, the association of Islamic Journalists of Iran has been tasked with quickly putting together an international conference on the Holocaust.

“President Ahmadinejad has placed at the centre of international attention, a very important question on the truthfulness of the version that Europe and the Zionists have imposed on the world on the murder of Jews during the years of the great war, and therefore we are of the opinion that it is useful and necessary to organise an international conference on that theme, where all the historians and researchers, even those that do not believe in the official version, will be able to express themselves freely,” Mehdi Afzali, spokesperson of the Association of Islamic Journalists told Adnkronos International (AKI).

“We want to offer a free and democratic platform to the historians to examine in-depth this myth, seeing that in different European countries there exist laws against democracy and freedom that to do not allow intellectuals who believe in a version distinct from that which is officially pronounced on the Holocaust,” added Afzali.

“We will invite those who believe in the imposed version as well as all those who have spent years of their lives in the study of documents related to the Holocaust and have come to the conclusion that the history books in schools and universities do not correspond to the truth,” said Afzali, who however refused to supply the names of the revisionist historians who have been contacted to appear in the conference in Tehran. Revisionists are those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened.

In Iran, books by the English historian, David Irving, currently in custody in an Austrian jail after having been accused of denying the Holocaust, are very popular.

Among the names of possible guests at the conference are the Israeli journalist lsrael Shamir, a convert to Christianity, and Horst Mahler from Germany, a former member of the terrorist group, the Red Army Faction. Other revisionist scholars, such as the French Robert Faurisson and the American Arthur Butz, are also some of the other possible participants of the conference in Tehran.

 

“NEW YEAR’S ORGY” AT BERLIN HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

‘New Year’s orgy’ at Holocaust memorial

New Year’s Eve celebrations held last Saturday at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate pour into nearby Holocaust memorial. Wine bottles, empty packs of condoms left on some stones
By Ronen Bergman
Ynetnews
January 3, 2006

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3194377,00.html

New Year’s Eve celebrations held last Saturday at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate poured into the nearby Holocaust memorial, Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

“The riled up masses drank, ate and sent massive amounts of fireworks into the air from in between the graves,” an Israel Air Force pilot who is currently visiting Germany said.

Following the celebrations, wine bottles, decorations and even empty packs of condoms were left on some of the stones.

Cleaning service employees were summoned to the scene, but it seems that clearing the memorial of the filth left behind may take a while.

4 slabs defaced with swastikas

Last November the same memorial was partly defaced with yellow Stars of David. A Berlin police spokesman said at the time that a star had been painted by unknown vandals onto each of six of the 2,711 concrete slabs of varying height that make up the memorial.

Under the Nazis, Jews had to wear yellow stars of David to distinguish themselves from so-called “Aryan” Germans.

A Berlin Police spokesman said that the stars, which were removed, may have been linked to a number of others found sprayed or painted onto buildings and monuments in central Berlin.

The memorial, which was officially unveiled in May in the heart of the German capital, is constantly under surveillance. It covers almost 20,000 square meters, allowing visitors to wander around its tight grid pattern.

Four of the slabs were defaced with swastikas shortly before a visit to Germany by President Moshe Katsav in June.

 

HAMAS TV

Hamas launches TV station in Gaza
The Associated Press
(AP version as edited and published by the Jerusalem Post)
January 9, 2006

The Hamas terror group has launched a TV station in the Gaza Strip, a first step toward setting up a satellite station like the one Hizbullah runs in Lebanon, Hamas officials said Monday.

The Al-Aksa Television station is being set up just weeks before the Palestinians’ Jan. 25 parliamentary election, and if up and running in time, could help Hamas in its campaign, analysts said. Hamas presents a serious challenge to the ruling Fatah party, which has led the Palestinian Authority since its establishment in 1994.

The station broadcast a half-hour of readings from the Islamic holy book, the Quran, on Sunday, but nothing else due to technical difficulties, said a Hamas official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the issue.

During down times, a picture of the Al-Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, one of Islam’s holiest shrines, fills the screen.

Once officially launched, Al-Aksa Television will be the first private station in Gaza. Hamas says it wants the station to be high-tech and modern, not like the stodgy, state-run Arab stations.

Hizbullah’s Al-Manar TV has reporters throughout the Middle East, including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, who cover events on location. When Hezbollah attacks Israeli targets, Al-Manar often broadcasts images of the strike.

Hamas’ Al Aqsa Television will seek to do similar things. The Hamas official said the station aims to carry the group’s message to the Palestinian people and to the world.

“Politically and from a freedom of expression point of view, every party is entitled to have whichever medium it sees fit to present its political programs and promote them,” said Moheib Nawati, a political analyst in Gaza.

Until recently, Hamas’ only real message was resistance, so the radio station it runs was sufficient to get out its word, Nawati said. Now, with the Islamic group expanding into politics, it wants a TV station to effectively spread its new ideas, he added.

“The timing, I think, serves the election campaign and is in a way a form of early preparation for Hamas’ attempt to control matters more, including presenting its political programs after the elections,” Nawati said.

 

MEET CANDIDATE “MARTYR MOM”

Meet Candidate “Martyr Mom”
By Andrew G. Bostom
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 5, 2006

www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20776

Umm Nidal Farhat mothered three Hamas terrorist sons all of whom were killed while participating in so-called martyrdom operations aimed at slaughtering Israelis, indiscriminately, whether military personnel, or civilians. She relished the most notorious of these actions, the murderous rampage by her son Muhammad:

“I prayed from the depths of my heart that Allah would cause the success of his operation. I asked Allah to give me 10 [Israelis] for Muhammad, and Allah granted my request and Muhammad made his dream come true, killing 10 Israeli settlers and soldiers. Our God honored him even more, in that there were many Israelis wounded.”

In recognition, Umm Nidal was bestowed the honorific appellation Khansaa Filastin after the poetess Al-Khansaa, a convert to Islam and contemporary of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. Al-Khansaa is deemed “the mother of the Shahids” because she did not mourn when her four sons died in the battle of Al-Qadasiyya (637), instead thanking Allah who had “honored her with their deaths.”

Propelled by this notoriety, which the larger Palestinian Muslim society clearly extolled, including “moderate” Professor Sari Nusseibah (who stated on Al-Jazeera television [Qatar], June 29, 2002, “When I hear the words of Umm Nidal, I recall the [hadith] stating that ‘Paradise lies under the feet of mothers’. All respect is due to this mother, it is due to every Palestinian mother and every female Palestinian who is a Jihad fighter on this land”), Umm Nidal is now a proud candidate for the Palestinian Legislative Council in the forthcoming late January elections. During a recent interview, Umm Nidal made clear the normative Islamic context of her willingness to sacrifice three sons as “martyrs”:

“I protect my sons from defying Allah, or from choosing a path that would not please Allah. This is what I fear, when it comes to my sons. But as for sacrifice, Jihad for the sake of Allah, or performing the duty they were charged with - this makes me happy… I prepared all my sons for Jihad for the sake of Allah, whether by carrying out an attack, or by any other form of Jihad. I prepared myself for this. He who chooses a difficult road must be ready to bear the consequences.”

Umm Nidals’ religious views are supported by both the contemporary pronouncements of acclaimed Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, and the research of Professor Franz Rosenthal. At the July 2003 meeting (in Stockholm) of the European Council for Fatwa and Research, which he heads, Sheikh Al-Qaradawi stated,

“Those who oppose martyrdom operations and claim that they are suicide are making a great mistake. The goals of the one who carries out a martyrdom operation and of the one who commits suicide are completely different. Anyone who analyzes the soul of [these two] will discover the huge difference between them. The [person who commits] suicide kills himself for himself, because he failed in business, love, an examination, or the like. He was too weak to cope with the situation and chose to flee life for death…In contrast, the one who carries out a martyrdom operation does not think of himself. He sacrifices himself for the sake of a higher goal, for which all sacrifices become meaningless. He sells himself to Allah in order to buy Paradise in exchange. Allah said: ‘Allah has bought from the believers their souls and their properties for they shall inherit Paradise…While the [person who commits] suicide dies in escape and retreat, the one who carries out a martyrdom operation dies in advance and attack. Unlike the [person who commits] suicide, who has no goal except escape from confrontation, the one who carries out a martyrdom operation has a clear goal, and that is to please Allah.”

In his seminal 1946 essay, “On Suicide in Islam.” (Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 66, pp. 243, 256), Rosenthal observed, consistent with Qaradawi’s statements:

“While the Qur’anic attitude toward suicide remains uncertain, the great authorities of the hadith leave no doubt as to the official attitude of Islam. In their opinion suicide is an unlawful act....On the other hand, death as the result of ‘suicidal’ missions and of the desire of martyrdom occurs not infrequently, since death is considered highly commendable according to Muslim religious concepts. However, such cases are no[t] suicides in the proper sense of the term.”

Moreover, in this exchange with her interviewer on December 21, 2005, Umm Nidal recapitulates another normative Islamic doctrine, the concept of Dar al Harb, where the lives (and possessions) of all the non-Muslim “harbis” (in this case, all Israelis) are muba’a, or licit for the Muslims:

Interviewer: Can’t you distinguish between operations against civilians and against soldiers, even from a psychological point of view?

Umm Nidal: There is no difference. This is Islamic religious law. I don’t invent anything. I follow Islamic religious law in this. A Muslim is very careful not to kill an innocent person, because he knows he would be destined to eternal Hell. So the issue is not at all simple. We rely on Islamic religious law when we say there is no prohibition on killing these people.

Once again, Umm Nidal’s understandings are substantiated by both Sheikh Qaradawi’s contemporary statements, and the writings of the mid-20th century Belgian scholar Armand Abel, a noted expert on the concept of Dar al Harb. Qaradawi stated the following in July 2003:

“It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb [the Domain of Disbelief where the battle for the domination of Islam should be waged] is not protected. Because they fight against and are hostile towards the Muslims, they annulled the protection of his blood and his property… in modern war, all of society, with all its classes and ethnic groups, is mobilized to participate in the war, to aid its continuation, and to provide it with the material and human fuel required for it to assure the victory of the state fighting its enemies. Every citizen in society must take upon himself a role in the effort to provide for the battle. The entire domestic front, including professionals, laborers, and industrialists, stands behind the fighting army, even if it does not bear arms. Therefore the experts say that the Zionist entity, in truth, is one army.”

Nearly a half century earlier (in 1958), Armand Abel observed,

“Together with the duty of the ‘war in the way of God’ (or jihad), this universalistic aspiration would lead the Moslems to see the world as being divided fundamentally into two parts. On the one hand there was that part of the world where Islam prevailed, where salvation had been announced, where the religion that ought to reign was practiced; this was the Dar ul Islam. On the other hand, there was the part which still awaited the establishment of the saving religion and which constituted, by definition, the object of the holy war. This was the Dar ul Harb. The latter, in the view of the Moslem jurists, was not populated by people who had a natural right not to practice Islam, but rather by people destined to become Moslems who, through impiousness and rebellion, refused to accept this great benefit. Since they were destined sooner or later to be converted at the approach of the victorious armies of the Prophet’s successor, or else killed for their rebelliousness, they were the rebel subjects of the Caliph. Their kings were nothing but odious tyrants who, by opposing the progress of the saving religion together with their armies, were following a Satanic inspiration and rising up against the designs of Providence. And so no respite should be granted them, no truce: perpetual war should be their lot, waged in the course of the winter and summer ghazu. [razzias] If the sovereign of the country thus attacked desired peace, it was possible for him, just like for any other tributary or community, to pay the tribute for himself and for his subjects…indeed, anything within the reach of the Moslem armies as they advanced, being property of impious men and rebels, was legitimately considered their booty; their men, seized by armed soldiers, were mercilessly consigned to the lot specified in the Koranic verse about the sword, and their women and children were treated like things.”

When will our policymaking and media elites finally learn and acknowledge the daily impact of barbaric, yet normative Muslim doctrines – rooted in jihad – such as “martyrdom” and “Dar al Harb”? And how moribund is our world that the mother of three murderous jihad terrorists – a triumphal “Martyr Mom” – can run for elective office in the Palestinian Legislative Council, and this harrowing spectacle is regarded with the same banality by these elites as if she were a “Soccer Mom”?

 

SUDAN SUSPECTED OF CLANDESTINE NUCLEAR DEALS

Clandestine nuclear deals traced to Sudan
By Ian Traynor and Ian Cobain
The Guardian
January 5, 2006

International investigators and western intelligence have for the first time named Sudan as a major conduit for sophisticated engineering equipment that could be used in nuclear weapons programmes.

Hundreds of millions of pounds of equipment was imported into the African country over a three-year period before the 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 and has since disappeared, according to Guardian sources.

Western governments, UN detectives and international analysts trying to stem the illicit trade in weapons of mass destruction technology are alarmed by the black market trade.

A European intelligence assessment obtained by the Guardian says Sudan has been using front companies and third countries to import machine tools, gauges and hi-tech processing equipment from western Europe for its military industries in recent years.

But it says that Sudan is also being used as a conduit, as much of the equipment is too sophisticated for use in the country itself.

“The suspicion arises that at least some of the machinery was not destined for or not only destined for Sudan,” the assessment says. “Among the equipment purchased by Sudan there are dual-use goods whose use in Sudan appears implausible because of their high technological standard.”

Western analysts and intelligence agencies suspect the equipment has been or is being traded by the nuclear proliferation racket headed by the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, who admitted nuclear trading two years ago and is under house arrest in Islamabad.

Khan is known to have visited Sudan at least once between 1998 and 2002, and the suspicion is he may have used the country as a warehouse for the hi-tech engineering equipment he was selling to Libya, Iran and North Korea for the assembly of centrifuges for enriching uranium, the most common way of building a nuclear bomb.

Sudan has been ravaged by internal conflicts for decades, and has until recently been governed by an Islamist regime.

Analysts point out that a “failing state” such as Sudan is an ideal candidate for the illicit trading. David Albright, who is investigating the various players in the Khan network and tracks nuclear proliferation for the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said about £320m worth of dual-use engineering equipment was imported by Sudan between 1999 and 2001.

The purchases were denominated in German marks (before the introduction of the euro), suggesting that at least some of the equipment came from Germany.

Investigators say the machinery has not been found in Sudan. Nor has it been found in Libya, since Tripoli gave up its secret nuclear bomb project in December 2003. Given Osama bin Laden’s long relationship with Sudan, where he lived before moving to Afghanistan, there had been suspicions of al-Qaida involvement. But the goods have not been found in Afghanistan either.

“A huge amount of dual-use equipment was bought by Sudan and people don’t know where it went to,” Mr. Albright said. “It’s a big mystery. The equipment has not been found anywhere.”

A senior international investigator confirmed that Sudan had been importing the material and that the transports had ceased in 2001. “No one now seems to be buying to that extent,” he said. “Perhaps the activity stopped because they got all that they needed.”

While the Khan operation is a main suspect, Iran is also suspected of being behind the Sudanese dealings. “There is the Khan network and then there is a much bigger network in this, and that is the Iranian network,” the investigator said.

Yesterday, the Guardian reported that the same European intelligence assessment - which draws on material gathered by British, French, German and Belgian agencies - concluded that the Iranian government had been successfully scouring Europe for the sophisticated equipment needed to build a nuclear bomb.

Western intelligence and Mr. Albright identified a state-owned firm in Khartoum as a “pivotal organization” in Sudan’s procurement of weapons and dual-use technology in eastern and western Europe and Russia.

The named company has offices in Tehran, Moscow, Sofia, Istanbul and Beijing. According to the European intelligence assessment, the company “is cooperating intensively with Iran”.

“It is striking,” says the document, “that [the company’s] partners are enterprises subordinate to Iran’s Defense Industries Organization. Technology transfer between these two states and links between their programmes cannot be ruled out.”

While the machinery was dual-use, meaning that it could be used in civil or military applications, Mr. Albright said he understood the equipment was “nuclear-related”. “For the people following this, the interest is whether it’s nuclear. The assumption is it is.”

The likelihood that the machinery was for Sudan is slim, say experts and investigators.

“The idea that Sudan could buy and make use of extremely sophisticated nuclear technology is obviously a question mark,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear proliferation expert at Washington’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Sudan is known to have a small civilian nuclear programme, researching nuclear medicine, radiological safety and food irradiation techniques.

Never before has it been suspected of involvement in nuclear weapons research, however. It signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty in 2004.