I attach three items relating to the finances of the Palestinian Authority.

-- Tom Gross

An anti-Israel Freudian slip in London
By Sharon Sadeh
Ha'aretz
July 30, 2002

Dr. Lewis Aron, a psychoanalyst and senior researcher at New York University, could not believe his eyes when he surfed to the London Freud Museum website. The site – and Freud's own words – he says, are being used "to ridicule, denigrate, and maliciously slander Israel."

Aron said, "as a psychoanalyst, I'm always on the Internet for information, and when I saw the website, I was shocked." Aaron, together with colleagues Bob Prince and Dodi Goldman, composed an online petition that, within one week, was signed by 400 people.

One section of the criticized website – called Freud Today – is a bulletin board for current affairs, and several articles there are dedicated to "Freudian aspects" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Aron say the website "misuses Freud's name to promote a biased and particular political point of view. The material is a massive distortion of both the facts and Freud's own vision.

In particular, Aron points out one article, "The Arab-Israeli Conflict," and takes exception to two phrases that appear in the article: "Israeli child killers" and "dispossessed people throwing stones."

"[The] reference to a 'dispossessed people throwing stones' dramatically trivializes Palestinian terror, and [the] reference to Israel's murdering children – and the accompanying highly biased selection of photos – similarly blames Israel. It one-sidedly, neglects completely its right to self-defense."

In another article about the Holocaust that appeared on the website, the writers notes, "The Holocaust was different. It happened in the most advanced and cultured society in Europe, it required the participation of millions of people in an organized bureaucratic machine, it was pursued vigorously when it made no economic, political or military sense," and then moves, quite naturally as if the connection were obvious, to a discussion about the phenomenon of refuseniks in the IDF, whom he praises to the skies.

"What better memorial to the Holocaust could there be than the actions of these Israeli soldiers? By refusing to shoot [Palestinians] on command they sound the death knell to the casual excuse for moral bankruptcy which has been used to justify barbarity and bureaucracy in equal measure. The seductive lie: 'I was only following orders.'" Aron said this equated the IDF with Nazis and was outrageous.

But the author of the articles, Ivan Ward, said he was shocked by the furor and utterly rejected the accusation of comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. On the contrary, he believes that by highlighting the IDF's refuseniks, he was portraying Israel in a positive light and was showing that Israeli society is much stronger and more morally upright than Germany was under the Nazis.

However the Freud Museum has made several changes on the site in the last few days. Some of the problematic texts have been removed, while other have been updated and reedited. Ward, who is the museum's education director, added his signature to the articles he wrote and pointed out that the views expressed were his alone.

Nonetheless, the connection between a museum perpetuating Freud's legacy and the Middle East conflict seemed odd to say the least. The museum, located in London's prestigious Hampstead suburb, was home to the Freud family after they escaped to the United Kingdom in 1938, following the Nazi annexation of Austria.

The house, in which Freud lived for the last two years of his life, was renovated after the death of his daughter Anna in 1982, and turned into a cultural and research center for conferences and public gatherings. Freud's study, library and rare collection of antiques are meticulously preserved, as is the famous couch on which his patients would lie.

Like Wrad, the museum management could not understand why there was an outcry. Museum director Erica Davies rejected the criticism, saying that posting the articles was legitimate. "The views are not necessarily those of the museum, but [Ward's] attempt to interpret how Freud might have thought about things. One of the main concerns of the museum had been the contemporary relevance of Freud today, and the person responsible is Ivan Ward."

Ward said he did not intend to put forward a one-sided political view. "It is just a question of being able to use things in the real world in order to speak about or show the legacy of Freud. Every piece has a Freud quotation or relates directly to Freud's work."

Ward says that he concentrated on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since several different elements of the conflict connect to Freud. "I write about things in which I can find a Freudian connection. It is not like I've got some ulterior anti-Israeli motive. I did try to write about other conflicts, but I couldn't make the Freudian link. It is as simple as that."

That said, Ward agreed, after rereading his own texts, that he feels some of the sentiments he expresses about Israel – which he has never visited – were either too strong or no longer relevant. Even if they accurately reflected his political stand-point, which leans clearly to the left, he decided to remove some parts of the articles in question.

Few subjects have been falsified so thoroughly as the recent history of the West Bank and Gaza, argues Karsh. After Israel took control of these territories following the harsh British, Egyptian, and Jordanian occupations, they flourished.

Israel allowed free education, freedom of speech and freedom to trade, and consequently Palestinian per-capita income shot ahead of that in neighboring Arab states. During the 1970's, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world-ahead of such "wonders" as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself.

Per-capita GNP expanded by more than tenfold between 1968 and 1996, when Israel handed over the territories to Yasser Arafat's corrupt Palestinian Authority.

Karsh points out that by the time Israel had finished its redeployment from most of Hebron in January 1997 (an act of compromise by the "right-wing" government of Benjamin Netanyahu, with Ariel Sharon as his foreign minister), 99 percent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip no longer lived under Israeli occupation. "By no conceivable stretching of words can the anti-Israel violence emanating from the territories [since then] be made to qualify as resistance to foreign occupation. In these years there has been no such occupation," says Karsh.

The Arab world's definition of occupation, says Karsh, continues to be the existence of Israel itself.

WHAT DID THE GOVERNMENT KNOW AND WHEN DID IT KNOW IT?

What did the government know and when did it know it?
Teheran Times
July 8, 2002

www.tehrantimes.com

There is now tons of evidence that the US/Israel governments were involved in the WTC/911 events. Here are some facts:

The task was simple, deny the evidence, cover-up the embarrassing arrest of two Israelis with an explosives-tainted truck, and give the media a reason to return to the mantra of "all terror is caused by Muslims" But what started as a simply attempt to spin the news away from the Israelis arrested in Washington State has backfired on the Bush administration in a big way. In conducting the classic "limited hangout" of admitting to foreknowledge of the attacks of 9-11 in order to reassert the link to Osama bin Laden, Bush has handed opponents of his administration and opponents of World War the most damning proof yet that the reality of 9-11 is not what the US Government and media have been telling the American people it is.

The arrested Israelis posed a problem. History records in the Lavon Affair that Israelis willingly use bombs and lay false trails to Arabs for political gain.

And it wasn't too long ago that JDL Chairman Irv Rubin was arrested for plotting to blow up a US Congressman who refused to toe the Israel party line. Then there were the two Mossad agents arrested inside the Mexican Congress with guns and explosives shortly after 9-11.

As the battered World Trade Towers collapsed, the very first suspects arrested, caught cheering as the towers fell, were Israelis, later identified as Mossad agents. The arrested spies worked for Urban Moving Systems, whose Israeli owner promptly fled the nation.

Still other espionage suspects posed as art students trying to get into federal buildings, while others held cover jobs in mall kiosks selling "Zoom Copters", kiosks that sat empty when their entire staffs were thrown into jail on suspicion of espionage. All told, the Israeli spy ring, which had been partly uncovered prior to 9-11, was the largest spy ring ever uncovered in the United States. In California, the ADL was convicted of running a massive spy operation on American citizens.

Coupled with the spies themselves was the discovery of a massive phone tapping operation carried out by yet another Israeli company contracted to place phone tapping equipment on the US phone system to aid US law enforcement authorities. However, those same authorities began to suspect that Israelis were using that very same system to listen in on the phone calls of Americans when high profile drug investigations into Ecstasy rings (run by the Israeli organized crime) were derailed using information only obtainable from police phone calls.

In the Kenneth Starr report, it is reported that Bill Clinton was aware that an unnamed foreign power had made recordings of his phone sex sessions with Monica Lewinsky. In the end, three Israeli companies with deep penetration of the American communications infrastructure were implicated in the phone and internet tapping scandal. One of these companies, Odigo, had an office near the World Trade Towers, and received a two hour advance warning of the impending attack. Two hours means the warning was sent before the planes that eventually crashed into the World Trade Towers had even left the ground on their final flights! Someone knew of the plan, someone who decided they needed to warn Israelis working for a company linked to Israel's spying operation.

Taken together, there is probable cause to investigate just what connection the Israeli spying operation had with 9-11. Such an investigation should have happened, but instead, something very odd took place in the investigation! According to a government official quoted in Carl Cameron's story on the spy ring, the US Government classified the evidence that links the arrested Israeli spies to 9-11. Rather than treat the arrested spies as Jonathan Pollard had been treated, the US Government hurried to get the arrested Israelis out of the country as quickly as possible, in one case releasing and deporting one Israeli even though he failed his polygraph examination! Pollard had been just one spy. Here was the largest spy ring ever uncovered in the United States and the United States itself was trying to cover it all up! The media went along by downplaying the Rubin story, ignoring the Mexican incident and actually spiking Carl Cameron's four part story on the spy ring.

As quiet as the media was about the evidence pointing towards Israeli involvement in 9-11, the media was quite the opposite when it came to claims of proof linking ex CIA agent Osama bin Laden with the crimes.

The reason was obvious. Long before the attacks on the World Trade Towers the United States had been planning for a war in Afghanistan to create a climate more favorable for American oil companies. John Marcesca, as part of a UNOCAL working group on the Afghanistan pipeline project, had gone before Congress and stressed the necessity of replacing the Afghanistan government before a pipeline from the Caspian sea to the gulf of India could be built. The Bush White House admits that a plan to attack Afghanistan existed BEFORE 9-11. Following 9-11, the US did replace the government of Afghanistan, and the pipeline is under construction. One member of the UNOCAL working group, Hamid Karzai, is the President of the new government in Afghanistan. Another UNOCAL group member, Zalmay Khalilzad, is the US special envoy to Afghanistan.

A cozy relationship to be sure! But there was a problem with the "Osama did it" story.

As much evidence as existed suggesting Israeli involvement in 9-11 (certainly enough to justify being classified by the US Government), there was none at all to support the official story.

The 19 names of suspected hijackers released by the FBI don't point to Afghanistan. They come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates; all across the middle east without a focus in any one region.

Indeed, even as the FBI was admitting that its list of 19 names was based solely on identifications thought to have been forged, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saudi Al-Faisal insisted that an investigation in Saudi Arabia showed that the 5 Saudi men were not aboard the four jet liners that crashed in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania on September 11. "It was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened," Al-Faisal told the Arabic Press in Washington after meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush at the White House. A sixth identified hijacker is also reported to still be alive in Tunisia, while a 7th named man died two years ago! The 19 names of suspected hijackers released by the FBI don't even appear on the passenger lists of the hijacked planes.

The FBI list of alleged hijackers Crew and Passenger lists for the hijacked planes. None of the Hijacker names appear on them.

CNN reported that the men who hijacked those aircraft were using phony IDs, using the names of Arabs. A total of 7 of the men named by the FBI as suspected 9-11 hijackers are still alive! And the FBI Admits it has no actual evidence linking the 19 Arab suspects to 9-11 In another development, the BBC reported that the transcript of a phone call made by Flight Attendant Madeline Amy Sweeney to Boston air traffic controls shows that the flight attendant gave the seat numbers occupied by the hijackers, seat numbers which were NOT the seats of the men the FBI claimed were responsible for the hijacking! FBI Chief Robert Mueller admitted on September 20 and on September 27 that the FBI has no way to prove the true identities of the hijackers. Yet in the haste to move forward on the already planned war in Afghanistan, our government and the FBI (which does not have the best record for honesty in investigations to begin with, having been caught rigging lab tests, manufacturing testimony in the Vincent Foster affair, and illegally withholding/destroying evidence in the Oklahoma Bombing case) are not taking too close a look at evidence that points away from the designated suspect, the people living over the oil fields.

Yet another problem lies with the described actions of the hijackers themselves. We are being told on the one hand that these men were such fanatical devotees of their faith that they willingly crashed the jets they were flying into buildings. Yet on the other hand, we are being told that these same men spent the night before their planned visit to Allah drinking in strip bars, committing not just one, but two mortal sins which would keep them out of Paradise no matter what else they did. Truly devout Muslims would spend the day before a suicide attack fasting and praying.

Not only does the drinking in strip bars not fit the profile of a fanatically religious Muslim willing to die for his cause, but the witness reports of the men in the bars are of men going out of their way to be noticed and remembered, while waving around phony identifications.

Because of the facts of the phony identifications, we don't really know who was on those planes. What we do know is that the men on those planes went to a great deal of trouble to steal the identities of Muslims, and to make sure those identities were seen and remembered, then to leave a plethora of planted clues around, such as crop dusting manuals, and letters in checked baggage (why does a terrorist about to die need to check baggage?) that "somehow" didn't get on the final, fatal, flight. This abundance of dubious evidence pointing to Arabs is the pattern previously established in the Lavon Affair.

"IN TODAY'S MUSLIM AND ARAB WORLD, HITLER AND THE HOLOCAUST ARE LABELS BANDIED ABOUT WITHOUT REGARD TO HISTORICAL TRUTH"

Their Kampf
Hitler's book in Arab hands.
By David Pryce-Jones
National Review
July 29, 2002

Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf is as vile as any book ever published. Written in 1923 while he was in prison as a revolutionary agitator and at that point unlikely ever to be anything else, Hitler built on the connected emotions of hatred and self-pity. It is the work of a failure, what is more of a man who knows himself to be a failure. The failure is everyone's fault except his own. And all these people are against him because they belong to different races: That is the key. In the book he invents a "racial ladder" with Germans naturally at the top of it and Jews down at the bottom. If only they had been properly German, all those other people would have recognized his greatness. But by definition they couldn't be German, and they stood in his way, and so he had to kill them, stamp them out. On the one hand, thwarted ambition; on the other hand, a hatred of humanity. The combination still has the power to send a shiver down the spine.

Hitler's fate, and the mass-murder he inspired, did not put an end to the malignant appeal of his book. There are plenty of people who know themselves to be failures and blame everyone for it except themselves. They too fantasize that they have enemies who can never be anything else because they belong to another race, and the only solution is to massacre the lot. Almost 80 years after its first appearance, Mein Kampf remains an international hit. The Bavarian state owns the copyright but whether it collects royalties is unclear. The book is banned in Germany, but for some years Random House has been marketing an English translation, defending itself with the argument that it is a historic text which has to be studied.

Communism was perhaps the most spectacular political failure in history, killing tens of millions, and wasting the lives of hundreds of millions more. These victims mostly came from societies that were still traditional, usually agricultural. How were they to explain to themselves the calamity which Communism visited upon them? The arrival of democracy in Russia and its former satellites has brought into these countries fresh editions of Mein Kampf in half a dozen languages. In Poland the initial print-run was 20,000 copies (a significant quantity there). A minority evidently believes that Communism was all a Jewish plot, and Hitler had got things right. The authorities crack down half-heartedly.

Muslim and Arab society is today a failure much as Communism used to be. Muslims and Arabs live under absolute and despotic government which prevents them from enjoying anything like the freedom and prosperity that they see in the West and wish for themselves. On the whole they realize that they have long ago taken their history and destiny into their own hands, and so are responsible for themselves. But so dire are the injustices and the poverty, and so threatening is the tyranny over their heads, that many are lost in pity for themselves, and hatred of everyone else. A slew of racists, radicals, and Islamists share a frame of mind that the West is selfishly conspiring against them, with the Jews once again secretly in charge. Catering to such people since the early '60s, editions of Mein Kampf have been put out in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, and it is reported to be a bestseller in the Palestinian Authority area. It is available in London stores selling Arabic books. As its Arabic translator Luis al-Haj expresses it in his preface, "National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald. Rather, its seeds multiplied under each star."

In traditional society in the Middle East, Arabs were the masters and Jews were second-class subjects, protected though under rather demeaning conditions. European-style anti-Semitism, usually spread by missionaries and diplomats, came in during the 19th century. Zionism, another import from Europe, redefined Jews according to nationality rather than religion, and the accompanying improvement in their lowly status abruptly challenged Arab assumptions of superiority. These second-class people could surely never have done it on their own; they could only be obtaining their new power from outside it had to be a plot. Hitler says so too in his book. He believed Zionism was "nothing but a comedy," and he could see through "this sly trick of the Jews." He wrote in Mein Kampf:

They have no thought of building up a Jewish state in Palestine, so that they might inhabit it, but they only want a central organization of their international world cheating, endowed with prerogatives, withdrawn from the seizure of others: a refuge for convicted rascals and a high school for future rogues.

The Third Reich and the Arab East, by Lukasz Hirszowicz, a Polish-born scholar, was published almost 40 years ago but remains a definitive work. It examines in careful detail how Hitler's Germany sought to woo Arabs through anti-British and anti-Jewish policies. Nazi personalities like Josef Goebbels and Baldur von Schirach of the Hitler Youth carried out goodwill tours. Various German agents financed and armed clandestine Arab fascist groups. The first Arabic translation of Mein Kampf appeared in 1938, and Hitler himself tactfully proposed to omit from it his "racial ladder" theory.

Of all the Arabs convinced of Hitler's coming triumph, none was so eager as Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian Arabs in the Hitler years. Vincent Sheean, the Thomas L. Friedman of the day, thought that Haj Amin had "great gifts." Along the lines that "my enemy's enemy is my friend," Haj Amin converted the Palestinian cause into a local branch of Hitler's worldwide anti-Jewish persecution. Fleeing from the British, he spent the war in Berlin. A friend and admirer of Himmler's, he raised a division of Bosnian Muslims for the SS. Hitler made grandiose promises to him, but was cautious enough to add that they could be met only after victory.

Fanaticism had led Haj Amin into utter delusion. Hitler, the expected savior, had in reality the settled conviction that Arabs were Untermenschen and he had no intention of doing them any favors. On that racial ladder of his, Arabs occupied a servile place, held in much the same contempt as the Jews. All sorts of Arab leaders were to follow Haj Amin's example and fall into the racist trap Hitler set for them, including Gamal Abdul Nasser and Anwar Sadat, the Syrian and Iraqi Baathists, and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia.

It cannot be proved, but I suspect that many probably most Arabs accept Israel as a fact of life, created by the millions of individual choices which make up history, and over which nobody has any control. But the leadership, the intellectuals particularly, have internalized and perpetuated Hitler's fantasies about Jews and a Jewish state. In one Muslim country after another, leaders who may describe themselves either as Islamist or secular call for the State of Israel to disappear from the map, and its people to be annihilated. It does not seem in the least shocking to them to be proposing mass-murder.

On the contrary: It is only natural in an absolute ruler to seek to kill off his enemies. Ahmad Ragab, a columnist for the Egyptian government paper Al-Akhbar, is only one example among many opinion-makers to "give thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory," and regretting only that Hitler had not extracted revenge for Palestine by murdering every last Jew. Arab propagandists contradictorily go in for versions of Holocaust denial. The present mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, said quite typically before his recent meeting with Pope John Paul II that the numbers of Holocaust victims had been exaggerated. "The Jews are using this issue, in many ways, [including] to blackmail the Germans financially." That has become a standard notion and it chimes perfectly with Mein Kampf and its lies about "rogues" endowed with "prerogatives."

But if really Hitler and his henchmen are role models to be imitated, then it is confused and confusing that Arab media regularly publish articles and cartoons caricaturing Israelis as Nazis, twisting the Star of David into a swastika, and so on. In today's Muslim and Arab world, Hitler and the Holocaust are labels bandied about without regard to historical truth, in order to promote hatred on the one hand, and self-pity on the other twin signals of intellectual and moral failure.

The Middle East war nobody knows
By Lawrence Henry
The American Prowler
July 16, 2002

There is a great unreported story in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what amounts to an unreported war: the war of the Palestinian resistance. No, not that Palestinian resistance, not the Palestinian Authority's, or Hamas's, or Hezbollah's, or the Al Aqsa Martyr Brigade's, resistance to Israel. The resistance within Palestine to all those terrorist entities. The resistance that constitutes an Israeli fifth column within the West Bank and Gaza.

This resistance gets reported only under one rubric – "suspected collaborators" – and only under one circumstance – the execution of those "suspected collaborators." Sometimes these executions take place under a thin cloak of criminal procedure, as sentences carried out by the Palestinian Authority after trial. More often lately, they are simply slaughters in the street, often accompanied by mobs baying for blood and mutilation – and getting it.

The collaborators are not Jewish spies, though certainly the Mossad must provide them some support, and must debrief them when it can. When they are identified at all, it is evident they are Arabic and Muslim.

What they do is not pretty. They identify leaders and technical experts among the terrorist groups, guide the Israeli Defense Force to those terrorists, and help in getting them arrested or killed. People naively and wonderingly look back at the Nazi scourge in World War II and wonder why no "good Germans" arose to bump off Nazi party leaders and SS generals.

This is why:

"GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) January 13, 2001 – Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority put two men before firing squads Saturday for collaborating with Israel in killings of Palestinian militiamen, executing them before weeping family members and crowds of hundreds amid cries of 'God is Great!'

"Palestinian courts in Gaza City and the West Bank town of Nablus on Friday convicted Majdi Makawi, 28, and Alam Bani Odeh, 25, of involvement in separate attacks that killed Jamal Abdel Razek, a leader of Arafat's Fatah movement, and Palestinian bomb-maker Ibrahim Bani Odeh. Arafat upheld the courts' execution orders.

"In Nablus, the 3-year-old daughter of Bani Odeh clung to his hand as he waited for execution, his mother and wife crying beside him."

So is this:

"The Independent, By Robert Fisk in Ramallah, August 9, 2001 – Preferring to avoid the controversial trials that have condemned nine alleged collaborators to death, Yasser Arafat's intelligence operatives are now murdering Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel, killing at least 20 men in the past nine months, at least six of whom were more than 50 years old.

"Palestinian police no longer investigate the 'mysterious' killings of men believed to have worked for Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service, who in some cases helped the Israelis to murder Palestinian militants; many of the Palestinian killers have been masked, at least one victim has been gunned down by men wearing Palestinian police uniforms while another was killed by fellow prisoners in a Majido prison in Nablus – under the full control of Arafat's Palestinian Authority."

And this:

"The Telegraph (U.K.), By Alan Philps April 24, 2002 – Gunmen pumped dozens of bullets into three suspected Palestinian informers and strung one up yesterday in a gruesome ceremony at the site of a burnt-out vehicle where the Israeli air force had killed two leading militants."

And most recently, these paragraphs, buried at the bottom of a July 14 story by AP's Ibrahim Barzak:

"More than a dozen Palestinians are now on death row after being convicted of collaborating with Israel in the targeted killings of militants.

"Two convicted informers were executed in January 2001. But Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who gives the final authorization for an execution, came under international pressure to stop the executions and has not permitted any more since then.

"However, Palestinian militias have taken the law into their hands, rounding up and executing suspected collaborators. Dozens have been killed."

If, as Ibrahim Barzak reports, "dozens have been killed," there must be hundreds of such "collaborators."

Heroes are dying here, heroes who have braved the insanity gripping their people to fight for real freedom – freedom from the thuggish tyranny of the terrorist gangs, freedom from ignorance and hatred. Mostly we do not know their names, and we never will. We are almost never told that they are winning. As Uri Dan wrote in the New York Post on July 13:

"Three weeks ago in Israel, in a single day, there were 58 terror alerts – some 'very hot' – of planned Palestinian attacks. But none was carried out – thanks to an enormous security blanket thrown over the West Bank that has given Israelis a long stretch without the deadly bombings that have claimed hundreds of lives."

A key element in that "security blanket," as Dan reported, is "greater collaboration from Palestinians who either oppose homicide bombers or are paid informers."

Perhaps some historian of the future will tell the story of these heroes. Except in passing, no reporter today is doing it.

Please note that contrary to what the BBC, CNN and others are saying (all of which rely on the skewered information put out by AP and Reuters) not all the dead and injured in yesterday's terror attack were "settlers." At least one of the dead, for example, lived in the Tel Aviv suburb of Givataim.

Two more Israelis died today – a second baby as a result of yesterday's attack, and a soldier (Lieutenant Elad Grenadir, 21, from Haifa) was killed while trying to apprehend the gunman responsible for yesterday's attack.

Among the organizations rushing to claim responsibility was the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades, which is under the control of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO. The dead include two babies, a 16-year-old boy and a 20-year-old girl.

Marking a change of policy that began earlier this month, Amnesty International issued a press statement condemning the attack. "The fact that Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories are illegal under international humanitarian law does not mean that settlers may be attacked," announced Amnesty. (The full statement is copied below.)

-- Tom Gross

“THIS WAS NO ‘ISOLATED INCIDENT’”

No 'isolated incident'
The Jerusalem Post
July 6, 2002

CNN's coverage of Thursday night's attack on the El Al counter at Los Angeles Airport must have puzzled local viewers.

The obvious first assumption, given the timing and location of the incident, would surely be that it was a terror strike as was indeed stated immediately by Israeli officials. Yet CNN's broadcaster seemed at pains to stress that no such evidence was yet available (as if it could be) to draw such a conclusion. Instead, several other theories were floated. Perhaps it was a "work dispute," since early eyewitness accounts supposedly had the attacker shouting out "They cost me my job!" Others apparently described it as an "altercation that got out of hand," and CNN's newscaster even helpfully reminded viewers that "California is a place where a lot of people walk about carrying around guns."

This wasn't just a media line. US law enforcement officials also seemed to reluctant to label the incident a terrorist attack, instead saying that at first glance it appeared to be an "isolated incident." One American security expert appeared on the air confidently declaring that it was unlikely to be the forewarned al-Qaida strike on July 4, because that group prefers committing "large-scale terror attacks" as if al-Qaida operated only according to some kind of strictly followed playbook.

Even after the assailant was identified as Hesham Muhammad Ali Hadayet, an Egyptian national who has spent the past 12 years in the US, local law enforcement officials continued to resist drawing the obvious conclusion. Because Hadayet had no prior known links with terrorist groups, Richard Garcia, the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, told The New York Times it just as well could have been a "hate crime," or perhaps Hadayet "might simply have been despondent for some as yet unknown reason, perhaps a financial problem or a family dispute, and that despair drove him to violence."

It may well be that Hadayet had personal problems. It is also clear that he was capable of hate. "He had hate for Israel, for sure," the Times quoted one former employee in Hadayet's limousine service, who added "He [Hadayet] told me that the Israelis tried to destroy the Egyptian nation and the Egyptian population by sending prostitutes with AIDS to Egypt."

The Israel/AIDS conspiracy is a fantastic anti-Semitic canard widely circulated in Arab circles during the past decade. Perhaps Hadayet read about it in Egyptian newspapers sent from home, or saw it on anti-Israeli Internet sites, or heard it discussed in the local mosques near his home in the Los Angeles suburb of Irvine, described by an Israeli official in one report as "a problematic center of anti-Israel rhetoric recently."

The notion that an individual like Hadayet necessarily needed a direct personal order from the likes of Osama bin Laden to carry out his nefarious deed for it to be characterized as a "terror attack" rather than "isolated incident," "hate crime," or "despondent act" is a dangerously misguided one. It is misguided about the nature of terrorism in general, and about the nature of the enemy America is facing in specific. Haven't bin Laden and other Islamic terrorist leaders publicly called on individual Muslims like Hadayet to commit such acts? And when they do, isn't that terrorism, pure and simple?

Why the reluctance on the part of some in the US to acknowledge that this was clearly a terrorist attack on American soil? Because to do so would grant a victory to al-Qaida? Or because it would mean admitting that letting such a heavily armed man inside an airport terminal on a day when the nation was at the highest state of alert was a clear lapse of security? (Had Hadayet attacked any counter other then El Al, one wonders if he would have been stopped so quickly and prevented from killing many others).

Or is this a sign that even after 9/11, many Americans are still grappling with the mind shift needed to wage an extended war on terrorism both at home and abroad?

Even the early characterizations of the victims as Israelis Victoria Hen and Ya'acov Aminov were Israeli-Americans seemed intended to somehow shift the definition of the crime away from an act of terrorism against the US, to some kind of transplanted offshoot of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

No wonder that Hen's family felt compelled to issue a statement flatly declaring: "We the family believe that this was a murder, an act carried out by a terrorist against Israelis and American Israelis on American soil. We wish that the American government will once and for all take a clear and present stand on the issue of terror and will act on it."

The intention here is not to criticize the US war on terrorism from an Israeli perspective. Israel has its own problems, both in psychological and practical terms, in dealing with terrorism. The US, with its rich tradition of civil liberties and proudly multi-ethnic society must find its own, very different path, to fighting and defeating this scourge.

But echoing the Hen family, one thing needs to be stated loud and clear about last week's attack at LA airport. This was no "isolated incident." The enemies of America vowed to commit a terror strike on American soil on July 4 and they succeeded. America needs to clearly acknowledge this fact, draw the necessary conclusions, and then act on them as swiftly as possible.

“IN 1976, NO MEDIA OUTLET HAD ANY PROBLEM DESCRIBING AN ARMED ARAB ATTACK ON JEWISH PASSANGERS AS AN ACT OF TERROR”

By David Bedein
Israel Resource News Agency
July 5, 2002

The news of an Arab terrorist shooting two people to death at the El Al Counter in the Los Angeles International Airport broke in Israel just as the Israel Broadcasting Authority's TV Channel One was telecasting previously unseen footage of the IDF rescue operation at the Entebbe, Uganda airport exactly 26 years ago to the day, where Arab terrorists had been holding 109 Israeli Jewish passengers from an Air France flight that had taken off from Tel Aviv a few days before.

As we flipped through internet radio news channels to hear more about what happened in LA, news announcers around the world praised the efficient and professional response of the Israel's two El Al security guards, one of whom wrestled the Arab terrorist and while the other one him into Moslem never-never land with appropriate shots to appropriate parts of the anatomy. No other airline retains trained armed security personnel

As we followed breaking news in LA, we watched the footage of how the IDF executed the PLO hijackers and rescued more than one hundred Jewish hostages from the hands of the PLO, at a price of the commander of that operation, Yonatan Netanyahu and the lives of three of the hostages.

Headlines around the world that coincided with America's two hundredth birthday were filled with adulation and pride for the unprecedented swift and professional IDF response to the hijacking of Jewish passengers to a remote part of the world where they were separated by the PLO from the other passengers in way that Joseph Mengele would have been proud of.

In 1976, no media outlet had any problem describing an armed Arab attack on Jewish passengers as an act of terror.

Yet the FBI official on the spot was quick to tell CNN that this would only fall into the "Israeli definition of a terror attack, because "a man of Islamic descent killed Jews". The FBI official would not comment on the Koranic verses of Jihad that the Arab killer had tacked to his apartment door.

The FBI, in its pretense to be fair and balanced, questions the "terrorism part" of the attack.

To lift the FBI's intellectual standing and understanding of what terrorism is, the time has come for the US government to appreciate the definition of "terror" and "terrorism",

According to the authoritative source, "The Oxford Dictionary." "terror" is defined as... "extreme fear: the use of such fear to intimidate people, especially for political reasons: a person or thing that causes extreme fear."

"Terrorism" is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as "the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims."

FBI officials might want to interview relatives and friends of the victims, to ascertain as to whether their sentiment could be called terror-stricken after the violent death of their loved ones, as well as to debrief the passengers who witnessed the attack

For 1900 years, there had been no Jewish army where Jews could bear arms to defend themselves.

And what is the Israelis connection to the spirit of July 4th? Look to the Second Amendment of the American Bill of Rights; "The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not be Infringed".

The concept of "turning the other cheek" to a killer may have been coined in Israel.

When the Jewish state was established, "turning the other cheek" was immediately annulled. From the IDF rescue at the Entebbe airport on July 4, 1976 to the rapid response of the EL AL security personnel on July 4, 2002, the message is clear: Israel will not take the risk of not defending itself.

HADAYAT BELONGED TO AL QAEDA OPERATIONAL ARM

Hadayat Belonged to Egyptian Jihad, al Qaeda's Operational Arm
DebkaFile
July 5, 2002

Hashem Mohamed Hadayat, 41, who gunned down Yakov Aminov, 46, and Vicky Hen, 25 - both from Los Angeles - on the 4th of July at the El Al terminal of Los Angeles, and wounded 7 others, is revealed by DEBKAfile's intelligence and counter-terror sources as a Muslim extremist. During his ten years in the United States, he was a secret operative of the Egyptian Jihad who maintained undercover links to the same Jihad cell in Brooklyn, New York, as the "blind sheikh" Abdul Rahim Rahman and Ramzi Yousef. Both are doing time for perpetrating the first attack on the New York World Trade Center in 1993.

Hadayat is also believed to have abetted a previous, contrived airline disaster: On October 31, 1999, an Egyptair Boeing 767 Flight 990, which also took off from Los Angeles airport, never reached its destination of Kennedy, New York. The plane plunged into the Atlantic off the Nantucket Island, Mass. coast, killing all 217 passengers and crew. In a special probe, the US National Transportation Safety Board found that the copilot Gameel el-Batouty was at the controls when the plane went into its dive. His voice was recorded shouting, "I put my faith in Allah!"

The report held back from referring more directly to the Egyptian copilot's responsibility for the crash.

Our sources affirm that Hadayat, who lived in Irvine, California, 70 km south of Los Angeles, knew Batouty well. There are also indications that, in the years 1998 and 1999, Hadayat was in touch with a group of high Egyptian air force officers and helicopter pilots posted at the time at Edwards Base north of Los Angeles. They were there to learn how to install command and control centers in Egypt's air defense systems, operate anti-air missile batteries and fly Apache gunships. Most of those officers were on the doomed Egyptian airliner after completing their courses.

Although the long-delayed US Transportation Board report never referred to the presence of this high-ranking Egyptian air force delegation on the flight, DEBKAfile's Washington sources reported at the time that most of the investigators were satisfied that Batouty could not have seized control of the Boeing 767 without the aid – certainly the compliance – of those officers.

Two years ago, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak exerted all his influence on President Clinton to keep the federal board's findings out of its published report and, above all, the fact that a group of Egyptian air force officers was on the plane. He warned that citing the Egyptian copilot as deliberately causing the crash would have a negative effect on Egyptian-US relations.

The report therefore fell short of clear conclusions.

Hadayat's murderous attack on El Al flight 106 passengers points back to the Egyptair 990 disaster of 1999, reviving the many questions left open by that earlier, half stifled inquiry, which carefully stepped round any suggestion of terrorism. It also raises the question of how many sleeper cells the Egyptian Jihad, al Qaeda's primary operational arm, maintains in American cities.

Hadayat struck the El Al ticket line on his 42nd birthday. The initial FBI inquiry found through records of his fingerprints at the Department of Motor Vehicles, which issued him with a limousine license, that he was married with at least one child, and had lived in Irvine for the last two years, working on a green card.

Since the attack, the possibility that he arrived in America as a sleeper terrorist must be seriously addressed. US investigators realize he was not a lone operative and are seeking his accomplices in such matters as setting up the hit, providing the guns he carried and intelligence on the security situation at the Tom Brady terminal.

DEBKAfile's Middle East intelligence sources report that early Friday, Egyptian intelligence officers picked up Hadayat's relatives and associates in Cairo, to try and trace the identities of his fellows in the American Jihad cell.

The anti-Semitic lies that threaten all of us
By Harold Evans
The Times (of London)
June 28, 2002

Rampant anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, from schools to press, TV and internet, not only makes Middle East peace impossible, but makes us all targets now.

Just before he was given the boot by President Bush, Yassir Arafat made an extraordinary offer – extraordinary because it was not one of the specific demands Bush was about to make, extraordinary because Arafat acknowledged a hidden horror: the indoctrination of the delusional young people who carry out suicide bombings. In a six-page private memorandum he sent to President Bush and Arab capitals outlining his 100-day plan for reform, Arafat said he would "renounce fanaticism in the educational curricula and spread the spirit of democracy and enlightenment and openness".

There is a lot under the stone Arafat has lifted. Fanaticism has been bred into the suicide murderers and millions of young people throughout the Arab nations with scant attention by media, governments, academia and churches in the civilised world. The Palestinian schools, financed by Europe, are open sewers in terms of the hatred they seed – hatred not just of Israel, but of all Jews and all their friends. Dr Ahmad Abu Halabiya, former acting rector of the Islamic University in Gaza, speaks the message: "Wherever you are, kill the Jews, the Americans who are like them and those who stand by them."

Arab leaders come to Washington and London and Geneva with formulas for peace, while at home they feed their populations with similar incitements. It means that even if by some miracle there is agreement on the shape of a Palestinian state, there will be no peace in the Middle East for a generation. The Israelis may forget or forgive the suicide assassins; the Palestinians may put behind them the humiliations of occupation. But the political conflict over Palestine is only one aspect of the fanaticism that has been fomented. It adds up to the dehumanisation of all Jews and it has been manufactured and propagated throughout the Middle East and south Asia on a scale and intensity that is utterly unprecedented. This is something relatively new in the Islamic world. There was more tolerance for Jews in the Islamic empire than ever there was in Christian Europe.

I was aware, as we all are, that the Palestinians hate the state of Israel. What has surprised me is the virulence of this new anti-Semitism throughout all the Muslim countries. It is frenzied, vociferous, paranoid, vicious and prolific, and is only incidentally connected to the Palestinian conflict. Hope, the familiar bromide, seems to have little to do with it. The moment of high hope following Camp David saw a surge, not a diminution, in the tide. It is a singular phenomenon; there is nothing comparable to it in relation to Arabs or Muslims.

Everyone talking about Palestine or terrorism is talking in a vacuum, for nothing can be understood without a proper appreciation of the way minds have been poisoned. A single skinhead assault on a synagogue in Europe is news, but not the unremitting daily assault on Jews waged from Morocco to Cairo to Damascus, from Baghdad to Teheran, the Gaza Strip to Karachi.

The paradox is that the world is connected as never before in terms of the flow of current, but many of the wires are lethally bare. The religious fanaticism that has spawned and condoned terrorism and drives the new anti-Semitism is insensible to reason. Jonathan Swift recognised our dilemma more than 200 years ago: "You cannot reason a person out of something he did not reason himself into."

What we are up against is best illustrated by what the Jews did to the World Trade Centre. Everyone in the Muslim world knows that September 11 was a Jewish plot to pave the way for a joint Israeli-US military operation against not just Osama bin Laden and the Taleban but also Islamic militants in Palestine. On the day of the bombing, 4,000 Jews were absent from the World Trade Centre; they had been tipped off.

I thought this canard had long ago vanished up its own orifice, but it was being retailed with all sincerity by a Pakistani taxi driver last week in New York of all places – which proves nothing except that he is an accurate representation of a now unshakeable Muslim conviction. Millions and millions and millions believe this rubbish, as a Gallup Poll has found after questioning people in nine predominantly Islamic countries – Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia – representing about half the world's Muslim population.

Some 67 per cent found the attacks morally unjustified, which is something – why not 100 per cent? – but they were also asked if they believed reports that groups of Arabs carried out the bombings. Only in West-aligned Turkey was the answer Yes, but it was close; 46 per cent to 43 per cent. In all the other eight Islamic countries, the populations rejected the idea that Arabs or al-Qaeda were responsible. Repeat, that is a poll just a couple of months ago, after millions of words from reporters and exultant videos from the Osama bin Laden show. The majorities are overwhelming in Pakistan, Kuwait, Iran and Indonesia – in Pakistan only 4 per cent accept that the killers were Arabs. Thomas Friedman, of The New York Times, reported last month from Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim state, that nobody has any doubt about the Mossad conspiracy.

Who could be naive/crazy/malign/misguided enough to disseminate such fabrications? The effluent is from official sources, newspapers and television in Arab states, from schools and government-funded mosques, from Arab columnists and editorial writers, cartoonists, clerics and intellectuals, from websites that trail into an infinity of iniquity. The appearance of modernity in the Arab media is illusory. More important than the presence of the hardware is the absence of the software, the notion of a ruggedly independent self-critical free press. CNN will film American bomb damage in Afghanistan; al-Jazeera and the Middle East stations would never dream of talking to the orphans and widows whose loved ones were blown apart by a suicide bomber. An Arab critic of America and the coalition is always given the last word. How could people be so susceptible to misinformation? Well, conspiracy theories simplify a complex world. The absence of evidence is itself proof of plot: missing records at Pearl Harbor, missing bullets in Dallas, missing bodies in Jenin. Preconceptions are outfitted in fantasy.

Contradiction by authority is mere affirmation of the vastness of the plot: so he's in it, too. Conspiracy and rumour bloom, especially where the flow of news and opinion is restricted and illiteracy is high.

But there is another explanation for the potency of lies today. It is the aura of authenticity provided by technology, by the internet. John Daniszewski, of the Los Angeles Times, asked an editor of The Nation in Islamabad, Ayesha Haroon, why they blamed Israel. "It is quite possible that there was deliberate malice in printing it," she admitted. "I also think it has to do with the internet. When you see something on a computer, you tend to believe it is true." Here in our new magic is a source of much misery. An Indonesian visiting the Islamic stronghold of Yogyakarta, according to Friedman, was alarmed by the tide running for jihad against Christians and Jews. Internet users are only 5 per cent of the population, but these 5 per cent spread rumours about Jews to everyone else. "They say, 'He got it from the internet'. They think it's the Bible."

The smear that defiles the Jews who died in the World Trade Centre, that millions perceive as reality, owes its original currency in September 2001 to a website called InformationTimes.com, "an independent news and information service" whose address was given as the Press Building in Washington. I thought it worth asking the editor in chief, Syed Adeeb, for the evidence. He told me his source was the TV station Al Manar in the Lebanon. When I asked if he had any qualms about relying on Al Manar because it was a mouthpiece for the terrorist group Hezbollah, which exists "to stage an effective psychological warfare with the Zionist enemy", Adeeb's reply was: "Well, it is a very popular station." Adeeb clearly believed his story; when I mentioned that there were Jews who died in the towers, he conceded that one or two might have died, but he found it sinister that nobody could tell him just how many.

He volunteered that he was an American citizen and that some of his best friends were Jews. Adeeb's approach to the world speaks for itself in his headlines: "Israelis with bomb material arrested in Washington"; "Israeli mafia controls US Congress"; "Crazy Hindu terrorists threaten America"; "FBI and CIA should investigate the Israeli lobby"; "Barbarous Israeli soldiers rape and torture 86 women in Nablus, Palestine".

I asked for the source of that rape story and was referred to the Labour MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, Lynne Jones. I checked. Dr Jones did indeed put the atrocity in circulation, quoting an e-mail from an Anthony Razook in Nablus, but she was careful to say that "this report has not been authenticated". Such qualifications evaporate in the endless laundering of information.

Once upon a time stories such as this would circulate only on smudged cyclostyled sheets that would never see the light of day. But now Wizards of Oz such as Adeeb have a megaphone to a gullible world, with this spurious authenticity of electronic delivery. In the thirties, Cordell Hull complained of print and radio that a lie went half way round the world before truth had time to put its trousers on; nowadays it has been to Mars and back before anyone is half awake. At the end of the line of incendiary headlines and the careless propagation of e-mail there is Danny Pearl, tortured and butchered because he was a Jew and a reporter.

Unfortunately, reporting and comment in the West all too often, with the best of motives, ingenuously reinforce the anti-Semitic mindset. Israel is supported, in Lenin's phrase, like a rope supports a hanging man. Equal weight is given to information from corrupt police states and proven liars as to information from a vigorous, self-critical democracy. The pious but fatuous posture is that this is somehow fair, as if truth existed in a moral vacuum, something to be measured by the yard, like calico. Five million Jews in Israel are a vulnerable minority surrounded by 300 million Muslims governed for the most part by authoritarian regimes, quasi-police states that in more than 50 years have never ceased trying to wipe it out by war and terrorism. They muzzle dissent and critical reporting, they run vengeful penal systems and toxic schools, they have failed in almost every measure of social and political justice, they deflect the frustrations of their streets to the scapegoat of Zionism and they breed and finance international terrorism. Yet it is Israel that is regarded with scepticism and sometimes hostility.

Take the battle of Jenin. The presumption in the feeding frenzy in the best newspapers in Europe and in hours and hours of television was that the Palestinian stories of 3,000 killed and buried in secret mass graves must be true, though the main propagator of this story, Saeb Erekat, has been accused of being a liar. The Guardian was even moved to write the editorial opinion that Israel's attacks on Jenin were "every bit as repellent" as Osama bin Laden's attack on New York on September 11.

Every bit as repellent? Did we miss something? Some American provocation of Osama comparable to the continuous murder of Israeli women, children, the old and the sick? Was something going on in the World Trade Centre as menacing as the making of bombs in Jenin, known proudly to Palestinians as Suicide Capital? In fact, there was no massacre, no mass graves. Human Rights Watch has since put the death toll at 54, including, on their count, 22 civilians - the Israelis say 3. Some Palestinian militants in fact claim Jenin as a victory in the killing of 23 Israeli soldiers.

Of course, the press had a duty to report the Palestinians' allegations of massacre; it was entitled to raise questions and express alarm in the editorial columns. But truth did not lie in the balance between competing statements, and it was ill served by hysteria. Big stories such as this demand special rigour in the reporting, restraint in the language, scrupulous care in the headlining, proper attribution of sources and above all a sense of responsibility: "genocide" is too agonising when real for it to be devalued by its use as small change. To describe suicide bombers as "martyrs", as a recent British headline did, is to endorse a barbarity; Palestinians can call bombers martyrs if they like but it is a defamation of historic martyrs who gave their lives to save others, not to kill randomly and for financial reward for their families. Words, said Churchill, are the only things that last for ever. We should all have as much care with the explosive power of words as we expect airports to have with our luggage.

Let me reject the sophistry that to question such matters is to excuse everything done under the guise of protesting anti-Semitism. It is not anti-Semitic to raise questions about Jenin, no more than it is anti-press to raise questions about the reporting. It is not anti-Semitic to report and protest at ill treatment of Palestinians. It is not anti-Semitic to consider whether Sharon's past belies his promises for the future. It is not anti-Semitic to deplore the long occupation, though originally brought about by the Arab leaders who instigated and lost three wars.

It IS anti-Semitic to vilify the state of Israel as a diabolical abstraction, reserving tolerance for the individual Jew but not the collective Jew; it IS anti-Semitic to invent malignant outrages; it is anti-Semitic consistently to condemn in Israel what you ignore or condone elsewhere; it is, above all, anti-Semitic to de-humanise Judaism and the Jewish people such as to incite and justify their extermination. That is what we have seen thousands and thousands of times over on a preposterous scale.

The European Community recently voted more millions to the Palestinian Authority. Corrupt as it is, one sympathises with its need for the relief of suffering and poverty, but should it not have been made a condition that the PA must cease using European money for racist propaganda through its schools, its mosques, on television and radio, in political rallies and summer camps? The fanaticism Arafat offers to renounce – as a bargaining chip, not a moral principle – is the fanaticism stimulated by his Palestinian Authority which, among other enlightenments, makes educational films of little girls singing their dedication to martyrdom. The degree of infection was manifest at Al-Najah University in the city of Nablus, where the students put on a display entitled "The Sbarro Café Exhibition".

The Sbarro Café is the pizza parlour where a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered 15 people taking a meal. The display, according to the Associated Press and Israeli media, included an exhibit with pizza slices and body parts strewn across the room. The walls were painted red to represent scattered blood.

It is hard looking for sanity to put in the picture – especially in the Department of Psychiatry at Ein Shams University in Cairo. Here is Dr Adel Sadeq, who is also chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists' Association, on suicide bombings: "As a professional psychiatrist, I say that the height of bliss comes with the end of the countdown: ten, nine, eight, seven six, five, four three, two, one. When the martyr reaches 'one' and he explodes, he has a sense of himself flying, because he knows for certain that he is not dead. It is a transition to another, more beautiful, world. None in the Western world sacrifices his life for his homeland. If his homeland is drowning, he is the first to jump ship. In our culture it is different... this is the only Arab weapon there is and anyone who says otherwise is a conspirator."

Next patient, please! The Muslim world's relentless caricatures of the Jew are boringly on the same one note; Jews are always dirty, hook-nosed, money-grubbing, vindictive and scheming parasites. They are barbarians who deliberately spread vice, drugs and prostitution, and poison water. Among the fabrications: Israeli authorities infected by injection 300 Palestinian children with HIV during the years of the intifada; Israel poisoned Palestinians with uranium and nerve gas; Israel is giving out drug-laced chewing gum and chocolate intended to make women sexually corrupt; Jews use the blood of gentiles to make matzos for Passover Al-Ahram, Cairo). This past April, state-funded San Francisco students put out a poster of a baby "slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American licence".

Incredibly, the Arab and Muslim media, and behind them their states, have resurrected that notorious Bolshevik forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This supposedly occult document, which reads like something discarded as too ridiculous for the script of Mel Brooks's The Producers, is the secret Zionist plan by which satanic Jews will gain world domination. It has had more scholarly stakes through its heart than the umpteen re-enactments of Dracula, but this bizarre counterfeit is common currency in the Muslim world. A multi-million dollar 30-part series was produced in Egypt by Arab Radio and Television. With a cast of 400! And not as satire.

It is the Protocols that inspire Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, to teach their children that the Jews control the world's wealth and mass media. According to Hamas – and who will be there in the classroom or on the street to raise a question? - Jews deliberately instigated the French and Russian revolutions, and World War I, so that they could wipe out the Islamic caliphate, and establish the League of Nations "in order to rule the world by their intermediary".

When I checked on the website Palestine Watch, by the way, to report on what they were telling the world about Israeli propaganda, I drew a blank, but there it described Hamas as seeking nothing other than peace with dignity, forbearing to mention the small matter that Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel.

Apart from the volume and intensity of the multi-media global campaign, there has been an ominous change in political direction. Arab frustration with the recognition of the state of Israel after the Second World War has for decades been expressed as "why should the Arabs have to compensate the Jews for the Holocaust that was perpetrated by Europeans". Today the theme is that the Holocaust is a Zionist invention. It is expressed with a vehemence as astounding as the contempt for scholarship.

A typical columnist in Al-Akhbar, the Egyptian Government daily, on April 29: "The entire matter (the Holocaust), as many French and British scientists have proven, is nothing more than a huge Israeli plot aimed at extorting the German Government in particular and the European countries. I personally and in the light of this imaginary tale complain to Hitler, even saying to him, 'If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that that the world could sigh in relief (without) their evil and sin'." Hiri Manzour in the official Palestinian newspaper: "The figure of six million Jews cremated in the Nazi Auschwitz camps is a lie," a hoax promoted by Jews as part of their international "marketing operation".

Seif al-Jarawn in the Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda: "They concocted horrible stories of gas chambers which Hitler, they claimed, used to burn them alive. The press overflowed with pictures of Jews being gunned down... or being pushed into gas chambers. The truth is that such malicious persecution was a malicious fabrication by the Jews."

Clearly here is a consistent attempt to undermine the moral foundations of the state of Israel and it is espoused by a number of supposedly moderate people. The former President of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, had this to say on Tehran Radio: "One atomic bomb would wipe out Israel without trace while the Islamic world would only be damaged rather than destroyed by Israeli nuclear retaliation."

The brilliance of the whole campaign of anti-Semitism is its stupefying perversity: the Arab and Muslim media and mosques depict Israelis as Nazis – even the conciliatory Barak and the hawkish Sharon are alike dressed up in swastikas with fangs dripping with blood – but media and mosque peddle the same Judeophobia that paved the way to Auschwitz. How can you talk to someone who conducts all discourse standing on his head screaming? People in the West who adopt the same murderous metaphor for Israel, and I heard it often on my recent visit to Europe, may be regarded as a joke in their own country, but that is not where the action is. They are moral idiots but they lend credibility to malevolent liars in the Middle East.

By comparison with the phantasmagoria I have described, it seems a small matter that without exception Palestinian school textbooks supplied by the PA Authority, and funded by Europe, have no space in the maps for the sovereign state of Israel, no mention of its five million people, no recognition of the Jews' historic links to Jerusalem.

The Palestinian claim to statehood is unanswerable, and with wiser leadership it would have been flourishing for years. It is tragic that the cause is now being so ruthlessly exploited with Jew as a code word for extremist incitement of hatred of America and the West. This is jihad. It is aimed at us all, at Europeans who "look like" Americans because they believe in liberal democracy and are infected by American culture. But its first victims are the Palestinians and the frustrated masses of the Muslim world. Their leaders have led them into ignominy in three wars. They have failed to reform their corrupt and incompetent societies. It is convenient to deflect the despair and anger of the street to Israel and the Jews who supposedly control the West, but terror and hate have a way of poisoning every society that encourages or tolerates them.

When Bernard Lewis observed 16 years ago that anti-Semitism was becoming part of Arab intellectual life "almost as much as happened in Nazi Germany", he added the comforting thought that it lacked the visceral quality of Central and East European anti-Semitism, being "still largely political and ideological, intellectual and literary", lacking any deep personal animosity or popular resonance, something cynically exploited by Arab rulers and elites, a polemical weapon to be discarded when no longer required.

But that was before the current electronic efflorescence of hate, before the brainwashing I have sketched, before September 11. Habits of mind tending to approve terror are becoming ingrained in the Muslim world, sanctioned by the lethargy and prejudice in Europe: those Palestinians who danced for joy on September 11 and those students who staged the grisly exhibition of pizza parlour murders were not al-Qaeda, but their acceptance of terror as a substitute for politics does not augur well for the future of their country or the possibilities of peaceful political dialogue in any of the Arab states.

APPEAL BY BRITISH JEWS

Appeal by British Jews

Dr Lynne Jones, MP – Birmingham, Selly Oak
The House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA
13th June, 2002

Dear Dr Jones,

We read with astonishment & disbelief at your decision to publish an uncorroborated letter about mass rape during the 'massacre that never was' in Jenin. As has been amply documented, 1, the Palestinian Arab reports of "atrocities" in Jenin were fabricated. Even the widely reported "thousands killed" was directly contradicted by the Director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement himself, who stated that Jenin has been the PA's greatest victory because they "only lost 56 men whilst successfully killing 33 Israelis"!

Whilst you have now posted a disclaimer as to the contents of the letter, it is unacceptable that you still have it printed in full on your MP's website. The potential consequences of publicising these unfounded accusations are very serious in terms of Muslim, Christian & Jewish relations within Britain.

We believe that you act with extreme irresponsibility by continuing to publish a letter which specifically accuses Israeli soldiers of a most horrendous and appalling crime. Such behaviour is simply unimaginable in the mindset of the Jewish people. Also, these allegations have been categorically denied by the Israeli Embassy. Further, there have been no other reports of rape having occurred, despite the prevalence of many foreign journalists and Human Rights Organisations in the region who have visited Jenin. Indeed, to post such an uncorroborated letter is, we believe, an abuse of your Parliamentary privilege.

Given the damaging effect that your behaviour could have on the serious and dedicated interfaith work currently being carried out by many organisations in the country, we lend our support to the Board's claim that this letter be removed forthwith.

To spend the public money you receive by posting inciteful material on your web site is a most serious misuse of tax-payers revenue. Your dishonourable conduct not only brings the House into disrepute; but your actions are in direct contradiction with the government's policy on interfaith understanding & tolerance, which is the only road towards peace.

Taking into account the above, we are copying this letter to the Chief Whip for consideration of commencing disciplinary proceedings against you &, as you would expect from a matter of such gravity, we shall likewise copy this letter to the other key Parliamentary figures listed below.

We urge you to reconsider the inclusion of this material on your MP's website as a matter of extreme urgency.

Yours sincerely,

Rosalynne Baron
Israel Solidarity Campaign

LIST OF RELEVANT ADDRESSES

1 – Dr Lynne Jones, MP – Birmingham, Selly Oak
House of Commons
London, SW1A 0AA
jonesl@parliament.uk
www.poptel.org.uk/lynne.jones/iraqme.htm
Tel: 0207 219 4190 / 0121-486 2808
Fax: 0207 219 3870 / 0121-486 2808

2 – The Rt. Hon Hilary Armstrong, MP, North West Durham
Government Chief Whip
Email: armstrongh@parliament.uk

3 – Rt. Hon Tony Blair, MP
Prime Minister
Fax: 0207 925 0918
10 Downing Street, London, SW1A 2AA

4 – Prime Minister's Parliamentary Private Secretary
David Hanson MP
10 Downing Street, London, SW1A 2AA
Tel: 0207 219 5064 Fax: 0207 219 2671
hansond@parliament.uk

5 – Rt. Hon Jack Straw MP
Foreign Secretary
jack.straw@fco.gov.uk

6 – Rt. Hon Charles Clarke
Labour Party Chairman
pscclarke@cabinet-office.x.gsi.gov.uk

Lynne Jones has also been instrumental in motions in the House of Commons
for:
1. Suspension of the EU-Israel Agreement (1157)18-4-02
2. To halt arms export to Israel.(1140) 17-4-02
3. Prevention of Humanitarian Assistance to the West Bank (1272) 9.5.02

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach some Arab, European, and American media reaction to President Bush's speech offering to support the creation of a new Palestinian state in return for their choosing a "leadership not compromised by terror." (The summaries below are mine.)

ARAB MEDIA

In contrast to some western media that criticized George Bush for "having joined the Likud," several Arab newspapers cautiously welcomed the speech. The pan-Arab (Saudi-owned) daily Asharq al-Awsat devoted its main editorial (June 27) to urging Arab critics not to be "over-hasty in reacting negatively" to the "vision" Bush unveiled of the Mideast's future. There were "many positive points" that "constitute a foundation which can be built on" to achieve peace in the region, it says.

In Egypt, the government-run daily Al-Ahram (June 27) echoed President Hosni Mubarak's verdict that Bush's speech was "balanced" and included "positive ideas."

EUROPEAN MEDIA

Some in the European media, on the other hand, had nothing but criticism for Bush, using the opportunity not to welcome his calling for greater freedoms for Arabs, but to attack Israel and American Jews.

Writing in the (London) Independent under the headline, "The President's proposals make peace in the Middle East impossible," columnist David Aaronovitch says (June 26, 2002):

"The speech itself was not so much White House as Little House on the Prairie ... It is not even a matter of democracy. After all, was not Arafat himself elected back in 1996, in a process overseen by, amongst others, ex-President Carter?"

"Colin Powell's original plan was to recognise a provisional Palestinian state, and to move gradually on from there. Then someone in the White House got to mess with it. Someone stupid."

Also in the Independent (June 26, 2002), the paper's chief Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, under the headline "I wonder why Bush doesn't let Sharon run his press office," writes:

"Put your flak jackets on, President George Bush has spoken. He wants a regime change in Palestine, just as he wants a regime change in Iraq... 'Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership so a Palestinian state can be born,' Bush told the fearful American people... There were no Bush conditions for Israel. He did not secure ... a halt to continuing Israeli military 'incursions' how I love that word 'incursions'. Why, I wonder, doesn't Mr Bush let Ariel Sharon run the White House press bureau? Not only would it be more honest we would at least be hearing the voice of Israel at first hand but it would spare the American President the ignominy of parroting everything he is told by the Israelis."

Fisk does offer criticism of Arafat alongside that of Bush and Sharon: "Yet never before has an occupied people been led by so pathetic a person as Yasser Arafat. Nineteen years ago, this same Yasser Arafat swore to me on a hilltop above the Lebanese city of Tripoli that his 'Palestine' would be 'a democracy among the guns'. His Palestine, he told me, would be unlike any other Arab state. There would be no secret policemen, no 'regime', no cronyism, no corruption. Fast forward to the spring of 1998. I am listening to a French diplomat who has returned from Gaza. He and his delegation carried a personal letter to Arafat from President Chirac. Again and again, Arafat disregarded the letter, only interested in when the new French school in Gaza will open. The diplomats understand. One of Arafat's relatives will be the headmistress of this school. Family before nation. The Chirac letter stays unopened."

Jonathan Freedland, columnist for the (London) Guardian, writes (June 26): "This new plan of Bush's is a flight of errant, irresponsible fancy that can only fail, bringing more bloodshed and ruin to the peoples of the Middle East who are desperate for something better. But it will reverberate far beyond. It will damage the international standing of the US president and America along with it. Muslim and Arab nations will be antagonised by this plan of inaction, while chancelleries from London to Moscow will realise they are dealing with a leader who pays no lip-service to them – or to basic reality. This is a foreign policy failure for George Bush... there is a leadership problem in the US – and his name is George Bush."

The mass circulation British newspaper, the Sun, takes a different view. The paper's editorial (June 26) writes: "Yasser Arafat: Your time is up. Is it not now crystal clear that Arafat has failed his own people? He has fostered terrorism instead of choosing the way of peace. He has led many young people to their deaths - by encouraging them to become so-called "suicide bombers" (we prefer the term "homicide bombers"). Arafat has not improved the lot of his people; he has worsened it ... Yesterday the initial signals from Downing Street were that Tony Blair doesn't totally back Bush. Why? Blair is WRONG if he thinks peace with Israel is possible so long as Arafat remains in power. Bush is correct in making HIS demand. If it takes years to oust Arafat many lives will be lost before peace is achieved. If Arafat were to go quickly, less blood might be shed. Blair's apparent resistance to Arafat's removal suggests his grasp of the realities in Israel is less than perfect. Then again, he has to rely on the British Foreign Office for advice. He may as well just ring Arafat direct."

THE ECONOMIST

Some, such as the influential news weekly, the Economist, cannot fathom that the Bush administration may have decided it is in America's (and Europe's) strategic interests to try and encourage liberal democracy in the Middle East, and instead see the hand of Jews behind Bush's speech.

In an editorial, The Economist considered the speech a "one-sided peace vision" and writes "Most of Mr. Bush's critics will be tempted to explain this week's sharp pro-Israeli turn by reference to America's domestic politics. There is something in this. America has a well-organised Jewish lobby."

Echoing this, Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory (Washington Post, June 27) writes "the hawks [in the Republican party] are counting the Jewish votes that may fall their way in the wake of the ferocious advocacy of the Israeli cause."

While McGrory expressed her dissatisfaction over Bush's policy, she fails to condemn Arafat's terrorism that brought the Middle East to its current state. McGrory's objection to terrorism appears to be only because "the hideous and odious tactic of sending young men and women out to die and take innocents with them costs the [Palestinians] world sympathy."

AMERICA

However, a number of other U.S. commentators welcome Bush's speech. Writing in the New York Post (June 25), John Podhoretz says: "Bush yesterday proved that he is not only the best friend Israel has ever had, but the best friend the Palestinian people have ever had as well. The speech Dubya delivered outside the Oval Office was a turning point for truth-telling in the Middle East."

Optimistically, Michael Kelly (Washington Post, June 27, 2002, "Predictions for the Middle East") writes that he believes Yasser Arafat will be gone within a year – in the best possible manner: not made a heroic 'martyr' by an Israeli bomb or bullet, nor sent into yet another forced exile to wreak more destruction as a heroic leader-in-exile. No, this time the tired, old, failed, disgraced little tyrant without a country will leave as the loser he is; he will be forced into retirement by his own long-suffering people."

Kelly believes that the "Palestinians will elect leaders who at least credibly promise a representative government of laws, who at least credibly promise to reject terror and murder and war as the means toward statehood."

"In a matter of only a few years, Palestine will be one of two new Arab democratic states. The other neonatal Arab democracy will be Iraq. These unthinkable developments will revolutionize the power dynamic in the Middle East, to force Arab and Islamic regimes to increasingly allow democratic reforms."

Kelly adds: "The administrations of Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin knew of course that Arafat was wholly duplicitous, wholly incompetent and a delusional murderous schemer. They knew his people knew this. They knew he was lying when he pretended to want a workable peace. They knew his people knew this too. Yet, they treated him as an honest man upon whom could be built a decent peace and a decent state.

"To the Palestinians, this said that the Americans were stupid and weak. It also said that they were corrupt. As they had in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, the freedom-trumpeting Americans were happy to support tyrannies whenever it suited Washington's interests. And so they were doubly worthy of contempt."

The JINSA Report (Washington) (in a dispatch titled "The Price of Our Education") argues that the Clinton administration and supporters of a peace process based on the goodwill of Yasser Arafat have been on a very slow learning curve, but are finally getting it. JINSA writes he [Ross] "now says Arafat was never a proper partner. He has been educated. The price was nearly 2,000 lives lost and thousands more scarred; the imposition of a cruel dictatorship on the Palestinian people; the inculcation of the cult of martyrdom into Palestinian society; and a rising belief among impressionable Palestinians that they will get their state from the Jordan to the Med."

I attach six articles below.

-- Tom Gross

PUTIN AWARDS WOMAN INJURED BY ANTI-SEMITIC BOMB

Putin awards woman injured by anti-Semitic bomb
Russiajournal.com
June 27, 2002

President Vladimir Putin on Friday awarded the Russian Order of Courage to a woman who was badly injured when she tried to remove a booby-trapped anti-Semitic sign, the presidential press service said.

Tatyana Sapunova, 28, suffered burns and eye injuries last month when she tried to pull down a sign reading "Death to Jews" that was placed alongside a highway outside Moscow. The sign was rigged with explosives.

Sapunova, who is being treated for her wounds in Israel, was given the award "for courage and selflessness in fulfilling her civic duty," according to the award decree.

Since the May 27 incident, several copycat signs with dummy packages resembling explosives have been found on Russian roads.

FALLACI’S FRENCH FIGHT

Fallaci's fight
France, where speech can be criminal
By Rachel Zabarkes
National Review Online
June 26, 2002

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-zabarkes062602.asp

Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci made a name for herself with her fierce, uncompromising interviews of some of the world's leading newsmakers. Fallaci retreated from public life after September 11, but has recently returned to the spotlight with a new book and a brilliant, Zola-esque diatribe against European and Arab anti-Semitism. The essay, which appeared on April 12 in Italy's Corriere della Sera, paints a picture of a supposedly liberal Europe caught in contradiction. Fallaci's is a sharp, impassioned critique of the hypocrisy and recklessness of Palestinian leadership, of the pro-terror apologetics of the European intelligentsia, and to some extent of herself, for once falling into their traps.

How unfortunate, then, that the French human-rights group Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Between People (MRAP) – whose website lists Zola as one of its intellectual founders – seek to block the distribution of Fallaci's new book in France. MRAP claims that the book, Anger and Pride, incites racial hatred against Muslims, and has begun legal proceedings against its author. In the offending passages, Fallaci remarks that the children of Allah "multiply like rats" and "spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day."

Even more unfortunate, though, is that the group could succeed. "Racism," including so-called "hate speech," is a criminal offense in France, and according to current sensitivity standards, Fallaci's remarks may make the grade.

Under a 1972 law, individuals may be fined and imprisoned for up to a year for inciting racial hatred. Though the law also covers discrimination in employment practices and group-membership selection, most of the roughly 100 people convicted of racist offenses each year are found guilty of racial slurs or defamation.

MRAP has lobbied for such legislation since its founding in 1949, and in recent years the group has been behind some prominent racism cases. In 1996 and again in 1997, MRAP filed charges against actress and animal-rights activist Brigitte Bardot, who twice criticized Muslim ritual slaughter in France's daily Le Figaro. Bardot was ultimately convicted of the offense and fined 10,000 francs for her transgression. MRAP also filed charges against Yahoo! in 2000, for auctioning Third Reich memorabilia over the Internet.

That same year, in a vain but representative allegation, the group branded 40 French mayors racists for protesting a gathering of tens of thousands of gypsies in northeastern France. The mayors maintained that they merely wanted to protect their cities from the vandalism and theft that had accompanied the gathering in previous years. MRAP claimed their protest was racist because they would not have greeted "an influx of tourists" with so little hospitality.

Yet while MRAP spends its time protecting the sensibilities of France's Muslim and "traveling" minorities, real-life violence against another French minority, the Jews, has been a serious problem for some time. The Anti-Defamation League reports over 400 anti-Semitic incidents in France in recent months, including the burning and vandalism of synagogues and Jewish schools, and physical assaults on individual Jews. So what has MRAP been doing about this?

The group has of course issued the occasional and requisite condemnation of anti-Semitism. Yet for every such statement made since January 2002, MRAP has issued almost double the number of press releases condemning Israel's "provocations" and "war crimes" in "Palestine."

This is precisely the kind of disproportion Fallaci's essay assails. It appears MRAP is more concerned with a few derisive remarks about Islam than with on-going violence against French and Israeli Jews. Fallaci's comments, though earning her the title of "Islamophobe" among French, are almost complimentary compared to the anti-Semitic venom spreading throughout the Arab world. And it is the latter, not the former, that is the stuff of true incitement. Demonstrators at pro-Palestinian rallies in France chant slogans like "Hitler was right," and "In Paris as in Gaza -Intifada!" Most of the attacks against France's Jews have been perpetrated by Muslim immigrants.

Fallaci's essay also points a finger at the French government, for its unabashed hostility towards Israel and sympathy for Palestinian terrorists. After Sept. 11, French ambassador to Israel Jacques Huntzinger made a point of saying that, unlike their al Qaeda colleagues, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists carry out their murderous acts for an understandable reason. Just a few days earlier, French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine had compared U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East to that of Pontius Pilate vis – vis Christ: Americans were attempting to crucify Palestinians under Jewish pressure. Vedrine was hardly troubled in December of last year when his colleague Daniel Bernard, France's Ambassador to England, called Israel a "sh***y little country" and accused the Jews of endangering world peace. It's tough to take the notion of "hate speech" seriously when remarks like Fallaci's generate criminal proceedings yet statements like these are simply allowed to slide by.

The tragedy of all of this, of course, is that Fallaci's book could be just what France needs. It may not be a feel-good ode to friendship, but if it is written with anything close to the sincerity and courage of her essay, it could do more good than all of France's hate-speech laws and MRAP's combined. That is, if the French are allowed to read it.

ARTICLES

DR. RUTH IN ISRAEL FOR A SOLIDARITY VISIT

Dr. Ruth in Israel for a solidarity visit
The Jerusalem Post
June 29, 2002

US-based sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer is in Israel apparently on a solidarity visit, sources said.

Dr. Ruth, as she is fondly known, arrived in the country over the last few days and is staying at a hotel in Tel Aviv, a hotel employee confirmed today.

Her visit comes at a time when few foreign celebrities are traveling to the Jewish state due to terror attacks and ongoing violence with the Palestinians. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld was also expected to show up this summer, however his publicists said several days ago that his visit has been postponed for as long as eight weeks.

Westheimer, a Holocaust survivor in her 70s, is also a grandmother of three and an author.

She makes her home in New York City, and contrary to other foreign personalities, continues to make regular visits to Israel, where she lived for a period after World War II.

In June 1948, during Israel's Independence War, Westheimer was wounded in a bombing while she was on her way to an underground shelter. Three other people were killed in that blast.

“STAR WARS” ACTRESS HELPS DEFEND ISRAEL

'Star Wars' actress helps defend Israel
By Naomi Pfefferman
The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
June 14, 2002

A month before the release of her new film "Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones," Natalie Portman immersed herself in a more terrestrial conflict: defending Israel.

The Jerusalem-born actress – who plays Darth Vader's squeeze Queen Padme Amidala – objected in her Ivy League college newspaper to a law student's essay condemning Israel. Faisal Chaudhry's essay decried a "racist colonial occupation ... (in which) white Israeli soldiers destroy refugee camps of the brown people they have dispossessed."

Says Portman, who emigrated to the United States at age 3: "It just angered me that someone who is obviously intelligent enough to attend law school could be so misinformed."

So the porcelain-skinned actress dashed off an April 12 letter to the editor dismissing the essay as "a distortion of the fact that most Israelis and Palestinians are indistinguishable physically. The Israeli government itself is comprised of a great number of Sephardic Jews, may of whom originate from Arab countries. ... Until we accept the fact that we are constituents of the same family, we will blunder in believing that a loss for one 'side'- or as Chaudhry names it, a 'color' – is not a loss for all human kind."

The vivacious, effusive Portman says her letter gleaned "positive response on campus from both Arabs and Jews." But she was less pleased with an April 29 Time magazine story comparing Amidala to the United Nations Secretary-General. The piece suggests "Padme, in a scene cut from the film, sounds like Kofi Annan pleading for Palestinians when she tells the Senate, 'If you offer the separatists violence, they can only show violence in return!'"

Portman, her bubbly voice suddenly hushed, says "I'd hate to think I'm ever portraying Kofi Annan as a benevolent queen." She pauses, then adds with feeling, "But I agree violence is not an answer."

Long before Portman was proving the pen is mightier than the lightsaber, she grew up in a "Star Wars"-less household on Long Island. The daughter of an Israeli fertility doctor and an American-born artist, she didn't see George Lucas' original "Star Wars" films, which were released in the late 1970s and 1980s. "I do remember a couple cousins running around on the Jewish holidays, imitating Chewbacca," confides Portman, who visited Israel twice yearly and has dual citizenship.

Back in her American suburb, Portman says she attended a Conservative Jewish day school through seventh grade "to preserve my Hebrew and my sense of Israel more than anything religious." Like most Israelis, her parents were proud but secular Jews, so young Natalie did not become bat mitzvah.

The young actress was dismayed when her budding career caused classmates to spurn her. "In seventh grade, I cried every day when I came back from shooting 'The Professional,'" she says of her debut film.

Portman switched schools and went on to portray gritty characters light-years away from her nice Jewish-girl self. She was a beguiling pre-teen in "Beautiful Girls," a pregnant Okie in "Where the Heart Is," and Susan Sarandon's beleaguered daughter in "Anywhere But Here." One critic described her as a "ravishing little gamine," though her protective parents wouldn't let her do sex scenes (or use her real surname – "Portman" is her grand-mother's maiden name).

Portman's most personal role was the lead in "The Diary of Anne Frank" on Broadway in 1998, for which she received rave reviews while maintaining straight As. "I grew up with the Holocaust, because my grandparents lost their entire families," says the actress, who noted an eerie similarity between a relative's story and Anne's. "My grandfather's 14-year-old brother was also hidden, but one day he couldn't take it anymore and he ran outside and was shot." No wonder Portman frequently found herself crying offstage: "It's a stunning realization when you come to see how much historical memory affects you," she says.

After director George Lucas cast her in his three "Star Wars" prequels, Portman couldn't help but compare the saga's Clone warriors to Nazi troops. "The clones actualize the sort of deindividuation necessary to give rise to something like the Holocaust," Portman says.

The actress also feels "Star Wars" – with its desert landscapes, warlords and shadowy villains – has particular resonance since the Afghanistan war. The saga explores how Anakin (Hayden Christiansen in "Episode II") turns to the Dark Side and becomes Darth Vader; a question one could ask of American-born Taliban soldier John Walker Lindh. "Why there is evil in the world, and what purpose it serves, will keep imitative mythologies like 'Star Wars' alive," Portman says.

She found herself pondering the same question during a visit to Israel three months ago. While sitting on a Tel Aviv beach, her reverie was interrupted by explosions. "Then we heard the ambulances coming," Portman says.

"When we got back to the hotel we heard that 20 girls my age had been killed in a suicide bombing at the Dolphinarium, just a block away from where we had been."

Portman, nevertheless, is determined to keep on visiting Israel. But she's unsure "Star Wars Episode III" will commence shooting in Tunisia next year. "I have a feeling we'll have to figure something else out," says the psychology major, who takes advanced Hebrew, attends Hillel and reads the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. "It would be great if we could end up shooting in Israel."