Tom Gross Mideast Media Analysis

Israelis operating in Iraq

September 30, 2002

JUST 38 JEWS LEFT IN BAGHDAD

I attach three articles – one relating to today's Jewish community of Iraq, and two relating to the alleged activities of Israel in Iraq.

1. "Israelis operating in Iraq." This report, from the "Bahrain Tribune" (September 28, 2002) relies on information from "Jane's Foreign Report". It states that Israel's elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit has been ordered into Iraq to find and identify places likely to be used by Iraqi Scud missile launchers against Israeli population centers. Jane's is usually a reliable source of intelligence information, but may not be so in this case.

2. (Israel's recently launched) "Ofek 5 has mapped out Iraqi Scud zone" (Israel Radio, September 29, 2002).

3. "Iraq's Jews, once numerous, dwindle to 38 in Baghdad" (by Michael Freund, Jerusalem Post, September 29, 2002).

There are just 38 Jews left in Baghdad, and a handful in the Kurdish-controlled northern areas of Iraq. 52 of Baghdad's 53 synagogues have been closed. More than one million Muslims are allowed to live and pray freely in Israel, yet it is Israel not Iraq that is accused of "apartheid."

-- Tom Gross



FULL ARTICLES

“ISRAEL SPECIAL FORCES ARE OPERATING INSIDE WESTERN IRAQ”

Israelis operating in Iraq
The Bahrain Tribune
September 28, 2002

Israel special forces are operating inside western Iraq, pinpointing locations where Iraqi missile launchers might be positioned, the Jane's Foreign Report newsletter said in its latest issue, received yesterday.

The newsletter said the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit was ordered into Iraq to find and identify places used by, or likely to be used by, Iraqi Scud missile launchers.

Our information is that neither Israel nor the US have a clue about what, if anything, Saddam Hussein is hiding, the newsletter said. It was this ignorance that persuaded the (Israeli) prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to assign the Sayeret Matkal to a job that is sensitive and dangerous, it said.

Jane's Foreign Report said there were only certain locations from where Iraq's remaining Scud missiles could be launched at Israeli targets, given their limited range. Matkal's mission is to detect early preparations, it said.

 

OFEK 5 HAS MAPPED OUT IRAQI SCUD ZONE

Ofek 5 has mapped out Iraqi Scud zone
Israel Radio
September 29, 2002

Israel Radio Defense Correspondent Carmela Menashe reported this morning that defense sources say Israel's recently launched Ofek 5 spy satellite has already mapped out the area within Iraq that could be used for launching missiles against Israel.

 

"IN A DECADE FROM NOW, I DON'T BELEIVE THERE WILL BE ANY JEWS LEFT IN IRAQ"

Iraq's Jews, once numerous, dwindle to 38 in Baghdad
By Michael Freund
The Jerusalem Post
September 29, 2002

Only a few dozen Jews remain in Iraq, and most of them are elderly, Mordechai Ben-Porat, chairman of the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Or Yehuda, told The Jerusalem Post Thursday.

According to Ben-Porat, some 150 Iraqi Jews have managed to leave the country in the past five years, leaving just 38 Jews in Baghdad, and a handful in the Kurdish-controlled northern areas of the country.

The average age of the community is about 50 years old, with just two or three young people left, he said. The last two Jews who lived in the southern city of Basra left for Baghdad two years ago, he added.

Iraqi Jewry was once one of the largest and most prominent Jewish communities in the Middle East. But after the establishment of the State of Israel, more than 120,000 Iraqi Jews made aliya in the 1950s in a clandestine operation dubbed "Operation Ezra and Nehemiah."

Whereas Baghdad once had 53 active synagogues, only one remains open, where the Jewish community gathers every Saturday night for evening prayers and the havdala service to mark the end of Shabbat, Ben-Porat said.

He said although the late 1960s and early 1970s were not easy for the Jews of Iraq, Saddam Hussein's regime in recent years has "shown fairness toward the Jewish community." In the past decade, the Iraqi government has refurbished the tombs of Ezekiel the Prophet and Ezra the Scribe, which are also considered sacred by Muslims, he said.

"Saddam ordered that guards be placed at the holy sites, and upon his instructions, the tomb of Jonah the Prophet was also renovated in the North of the country," Ben-Porat said.

He said the Jewish community "has a lot of buildings and assets, and earns rental income from them, which it uses to assist members of the remaining community."

"In a decade from now, I don't believe there will be any Jews left in Iraq," Ben-Porat said.


Professor: Israel is the “mirror image of Nazism”

CONTENTS

1. "A real Zionist conspiracy"
2. The text of the email from Prof. Sinnott of Manchester, to Prof. Greenblatt of Harvard
3. The text of the original email in June from Prof. Greenblatt of Harvard, to Prof. Baker of Manchester (to which Prof. Sinnott was replying)
4. "Professor's anti-Israeli tirade revives sacked academics row" (Sunday Telegraph, London, Sept. 29, 2002)
5. "Anti-Israel row recurs at college" (Guardian, Sept. 30, 2002)



“A REAL ZIONIST CONSPIRACY”

[Note by Tom Gross]

This is a follow-up to a dispatch I sent in June involving the sacking of two academics from the University of Manchester's Institute of Science and Technology because they were born Israeli.

Another professor at the University of Manchester, Michael Sinnott, is now under investigation for calling Israel the "mirror image of Nazism," stating that "uniformed Israeli troops murder and mutilate Palestinian children," claiming that there was "a real Zionist conspiracy" worldwide, and other alleged anti-Semitic remarks. He made these comments in an email to Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt, who is a leading authority on Shakespeare, and president of the Modern Language Association of America.

Prof. Sinniott also wrote: "With the atrocities in Jenin, Israel is about where Germany was around the time of Kristallnacht" and "when the Anti-Defamation League has spent decades harrumphing mendaciously in support of the enantio-Nazis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, what can it say against the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and be believed? The chickens are all set to come home to roost."

The University of Manchester has announced it will launch an investigation into Prof. Sinnott's remarks.

None of these items have yet to be reported in the American or Israeli media.

-- Tom Gross



FULL ARTICLES

“THE MIRROR-IMAGE OF NAZISM”

Text of email from Professor Michael L. Sinnott

(This email has been authenticated for accuracy. It is reproduced here with permission. I have removed the email addresses of both the sender and recipient to protect their privacy. Sinnott addresses Greenblat as Dr, even though he is a professor – Tom Gross)

Dear Dr. Greenblatt,

I am writing to let you know my disgust and anger at your orchestration of a campaign of press vilification of one of my colleagues, and of this institution.

From the sanctimonious claptrap of your "open letter" to Mona Baker, and the three-quarters of a page given to it in the "Sunday Telegraph" of July 7, one would imagine Israel to be an inoffensive Mediterranean Sweden, rather than a v(oe)lkisch polity whose atrocities surpass those of Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Uniformed Israeli troops murder and mutilate Palestinian children, destroy homes and orchards, steal land and water, and do their best to root out Palestinian culture and the Palestinians themselves.

I have been there, and seen the sly, creeping dispossession of the country's rightful owners; Bethlehem was particularly affecting. With the recent crop of atrocities, the Zionist state is now fully living down to Zionism's historical and cultural origins as the mirror-image of Nazism.

Both ideologies arose in the same city, within thirty years of each other, and are both based on ideas of a superior/chosen people whose desires override the rights of the rest of us, and who have a mystical rights over a particular piece of territory. Their founders even had the same taste in music – Herzl is said to have had his Big Idea after a performance of Tannh(ae)user.

Zionist atrociousness has been slower to develop, but victims learn from their victimisers, and with the atrocities in Jenin, Israel is about where Germany was around the time of Kristallnacht.

The Academic Boycott seems an inadequate response, and the press coverage you engineered made it seem not just inadequate, but trivial – a bog-standard, posturing spat between literary intellectuals of no consequence. Not so. The boycott was originally proposed by a group of greatly-admired scientists, with the aim of excluding Israel from the EU Framework VI programme of scientific and technological support, worth billions. That minor portion of the Israeli economy dependent neither on Palestinian indentured labour nor on handouts from the US taxpayer is heavily technology-based, and breaking the links with the nearest source of collaboration will do real damage.

I am pleased to tell you that of the 400-odd partners in potential Europe Networks whose names I have seen recently, not a single one was Israeli. I would imagine that Network coordinators, who had to work informally and in a rush to put the Networks together, would simply not contact Israelis for fear of losing some of the European partners they had already recruited. The boycott is working.

There quite a few murderous, ethnocentric and priest-ridden little countries in the world; what makes Israel such a menace is the breathtaking power of the American Jewish lobby, which allows Israel to do what it likes, and makes the US act immorally, and against its own national interest.

In my seven years on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago, I was always amazed that the Israeli atrocities for which my tax dollars were paying were never reported in the American news media, which were either controlled by Jews, or browbeaten by them in the way you have just exemplified. The ability to dictate the terms in which news is reported was paralleled by an ability to control academic discourse; it is a foolish or brave American academic who dissents from the contention that Jews Are Special.

However, as the 97% Gentile majority in the US starts to enquire, in the aftermath of September 11, why the US is so hated in the Arab world, there are hopeful signs that the lies of the Jewish lobby will be laid bare.

When the bulk of the American population finds it has been duped by a real Zionist conspiracy (or at least a consort of unscrupulous ethnic exceptionalists, acting against the American national interest), all the traditional, and supposedly long-discredited, Jewish conspiracy-theories will gain a new lease of life.

When the Anti-Defamation League has spent decades harrumphing mendaciously in support of the enantio-Nazis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, what can it say against the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and be believed? The chickens are all set to come home to roost.

Yours, etc.,

Professor Michael L. Sinnott,
Department of Paper Science, UMIST,
POB 88, Sackville Street,
Manchester M60 1QD,
United Kingdom

 

“A RECKLESS ASSAULT ON OPEN INQUIRY AND SCHOLARLY COLLABORATION”

From: Stephen Greenblatt <@>
President, Modern Language Association of America
June 26, 2002

An Open Letter to Mona Baker, Director of the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester Institute for Science and Technology

Dear Professor Baker:

As the President of the Modern Language Association of America, I am writing to deplore your action, reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, to dismiss two scholars, Miriam Shlesinger and Gideon Toury, from the boards of The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication and Translation Studies Abstracts, for the sole reason that they are Israelis. In my view and in the view of the executive committee of the MLA board, you have committed a reckless assault on open inquiry and scholarly collaboration.

Scholarship depends upon the free and open exchange of evidence and argument. The pursuit of knowledge does not suddenly come to a halt at national borders. This does not mean that serious scholars must be indifferent to the world's murderous struggles, but it does mean that they are committed to an ongoing, frank conversation. The conversation often includes serious, passionate disagreement: "the history of scholarship," as Charles Evans Hughes remarked many years ago, "is a record of disagreement." But truth-seeking depends upon dialogue. The advancement of knowledge depends upon more people around the table, not fewer. Excluding scholars because of the passports that they carry or because of their skin color, religion, or political party corrupts the integrity of intellectual work.

It is particularly grotesque, of course, that the journals you run concern translation and intercultural communication. By discriminating against scholars simply because of their nationality, you have, in our view, done a lasting disservice to this work and harmed your journals, perhaps irreparably. But the chilling shadow that the dismissals cast extends well beyond the issue of translation. An attack on cultural cooperation, with a particular group singled out for collective punishment, violates the essential spirit of scholarly freedom and the pursuit of truth. Such an act is intellectually and morally bankrupt.

Fortunately, the whole scholarly world does not share your notion of how to foster intercultural communication. Earlier this month in Istanbul, a group of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians and literary scholars, sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, sat down together to discuss the nature of textual interpretation. Their quiet action holds infinitely more hope for the future – the future of scholarship and the future of peace – than a crude and embittering policy of exclusion.

 

“A BIT LATE IN THE DAY TO INVOKE 19TH-CENTURY JEWISH STEREOTYPES”

Professor's anti-Israeli tirade revives sacked academics row
By David Harrison
The Sunday Telegraph
September 29, 2002

A second academic at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (Umist) is being investigated for alleged anti-semitism.

Umist acted after The Telegraph passed it an e-mail from Michael Sinnott, a professor of paper science, in which he described Israel as "the mirror image of Nazism".

University officials said they were "angered" by the anti-Israeli tirade, which claimed that there was "a real Zionist conspiracy" worldwide.

Two months ago The Telegraph revealed that Prof Mona Baker, the director of Umist's centre for translation and intercultural studies, had sacked two scholars for being Israeli. An internal inquiry into her actions is continuing.

The latest anti-Israeli comments were made in an e-mail to Prof Stephen Greenblatt, a Harvard scholar who had highlighted Prof Baker's decision to dismiss the Israelis from two of her journals.

Prof Baker said that her decision to sack Dr Miriam Shlesinger and Prof Gideon Toury on the ground of nationality was part of an academics' international boycott of Israel.

The firings provoked an international outcry. Prof Greenblatt, a world authority on Shakespeare, described them as "repellent", "dangerous" and "morally bankrupt".

Prof Sinnott, who is described as head of paper science research and whose recent work concerns the "binding of linked cellulose binding domains to transformer papers", was infuriated by Prof Greenblatt's comments.

He sent Prof Greenblatt an e-mail expressing "my disgust and anger at your orchestration of a campaign of press vilification of one of my colleagues, and of this institution".

He said: "[Israel's] atrocities surpass those of Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Uniformed Israeli troops murder and mutilate Palestinian children, destroy homes and orchards, steal land and water and do their best to root out Palestinian culture and the Palestinians themselves."

Prof Sinnott went on: "With the recent crop of atrocities the Zionist state is now fully living down to Zionism's historical and cultural origins as the mirror image of Nazism.

"Both ideologies arose in the same city, within 30 years of each other, and are both based on ideas of a superior/chosen people whose desires override the rights of the rest of us.

"Zionist atrociousness has been slower to develop, but victims learn from their victimisers, and, with the atrocities in Jenin, Israel is about where Germany was around the time of Kristallnacht."

Prof Sinnott condemned "the power of the American Jewish lobby" and added that in seven years he spent working at the University of Illinois at Chicago, "I was always amazed that the Israeli atrocities for which my tax dollars were paying were never reported in the American news media which were either controlled by Jews or browbeaten by them in the way you have just exemplified".

He concludes: "When the bulk of the American population finds it has been duped by a real Zionist conspiracy ... all the traditional and supposedly long-discredited Jewish conspiracy theories will gain a new lease of life."

Last night Prof Greenblatt, the president of the Modern Language Association of America, said he had received "scores of letters on this subject, mostly supportive" but was "surprised by the vehemence and extremism" of Prof Sinnott's e-mail. "It was over the top and not the sort of letter I would expect from a university professor. Clearly he has a problem with Jews."

Prof Greenblatt, who has never met or corresponded with Prof Sinnott, added: "I would have thought that it was a bit late in the day to invoke 19th-century Jewish stereotypes and talk of an international conspiracy.

"I have tried hard not to make this an issue about Jews or Israel. The question I asked originally was whether an academic boycott made any sense. Academics should not be fighting because somebody is Israeli or Iraqi or any nationality or colour or creed."

A Umist spokesman denied that the university was a hotbed of anti-Israel extremism. "Umist does not have a view on the Middle East situation," he said. "The e-mail has left us very angry and we have launched an investigation."

After consulting university officials, Prof Sinnott attempted to distance himself from the views he had expressed. He said: "The e-mail was a mistake. It was written in the heat of the moment after reading what I considered to be an unfair article about the sackings in The Telegraph. I deeply regret sending it and regret any offence it has caused."

Prof Baker declined to comment pending the results of the investigation into her actions.

 

ANTI-ISRAEL ROW RECURS AT UMIST

Anti-Israel row recurs at college
By Peter Hetherington
The Guardian
September 30, 2002

Another professor at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology is under investigation for alleged anti-Israeli views after sending an email to a US-academic critical of Zionism.

The university, Umist, has said it is angry over reports that Michael Sinnott, a professor of paper science, described Israel as the "mirror image of Nazism" in an email to a Harvard scholar.

The latest row follows a move two months ago by Mona Baker, director of translation and intercultural studies at Umist, to dismiss two Israelis from two of her journals in response to calls for academics to boycott Israel. Her action provoked an outcry.

At Harvard, Stephen Greenblatt, a leading authority on Shakespeare, described them as repellent and dangerous. Professor Sinnott sent him an email expressing anger at Professor Greenblatt's orchestrating a "campaign of press vilification" of one of his colleagues and of Umist.

Prof Greenblatt said he was surprised by the "vehemence and extremism" of Prof Sinnott's email.

Umist said it would launch an investigation.

Prof Sinnott said the email was written in the heat of the moment. He regretted any offence it had caused.


An Essay by Jack Schwartz: Why does Israel stir such passions?

September 26, 2002

OUT OF ALL PROPORTION

Below is a lengthy and informative essay by Jack Schwartz, a senior New York newspaper editor, examining why criticism of Israel assumes a scale and intensity quite different from criticism of other states. Schwartz puts this into an interesting historical perspective.

“The totalitarian states of post-Holocaust Eastern Europe managed to pursue anti-Semitism without Jews,” writes Schwartz. “But the post-colonial Left has done them one better: It practices anti-Semitism without anti-Semites. Since colonialists – that is, Zionists – must by definition be racists, the Left, in opposing them, can make common cause with the most retrograde regimes in the name of anti-racism.”

-- Tom Gross



WHY IS CRITICISM OF ISRAEL SO OBSESSIONAL?

Why is criticism of Israel so obsessional?
By Jack Schwartz
September 2002

What is it about the Jewish state that stirs such passions not only among Palestinians or their Arab compatriots or Muslim co-religionists, but European journalists, French diplomats, Belgian jurists and U.N. bureaucrats? What is the case against Israel and, inferentially, the Jews? In what measure is it a secular critique of two competing nationalist movements or, to what degree, if any, does it spring from traditional anti-Semitism?

The brief against the Jewish state, put most simply, by Arab spokesmen is that Jewish colonizers stole the land from the indigenous Arab people, that the Israelis have no claim to it whatsoever and that the Arabs were justified to oppose them at every step. This argument is best represented by the Arab metaphor, “if a guest in your house decides to keep a third of it, you have every right to prevent him doing so; he may have improved it, but you never asked him to, and his work gives him no claim to what is, essentially, your house.”

The reasoning behind this is that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine, descendants of the ancient Canaanites, who were happily working the land on their bucolic farms and villages when the Jews, colonialist interlopers, took advantage of their hospitality, first slipping in, buying more land, then seizing it in cahoots with their European sponsors who had wrested it from the Ottoman Empire in the Great War, but who had no writ to deed it to the Jews in the first place. When the imperialist powers decided to withdraw and partition Palestine, the Arabs fought this injustice but were overwhelmed by the weight of their enemy and so lost not only their state but their land. Understandably, they’ve sought to rectify this loss, using whatever means come to hand.

ARAB APOLOGISTS JUGGLE NOT ONLY THEIR OWN HISTORY, BUT ALSO REWRITE JEWISH HISTORY

The metaphor is evocative, but like so many poetic tropes, it dissolves under serious historical examination. First, it assumes that Palestine is the house of the Arabs – and solely their house; that only the Arabs have a claim to the land and that the Jews do not have an equal stake or, for that matter, any claim at all. Ishmael lived there but Isaac did not. To justify this, Arab apologists must juggle not only their own history, but also rewrite Jewish history. In effect, they have appropriated the past of the Jews – a bit of cultural imperialism that such champions as Edward Said would no doubt appreciate.

At the heart of their apologetics is that the Jewish temple – the core of the ancient Jewish commonwealth – never existed in Jerusalem and that the Jews therefore have no claim to the city which has been a Muslim holy site since the seventh century. As Yasser Arafat insists, the Jewish temple was in Nablus (which might justify Jewish claims on the West Bank, but no matter).

In fact, the existence of the Jewish commonwealth with the centrality of its worship at the Temple in Jerusalem has been overwhelmingly documented by the disciplines of archeology, anthropology and history. There are whole areas of study on the management of the tithes sent by the extensive Jewish Diaspora in the Greek and Roman world to the temple – not in Nablus or Hebron – but in Jerusalem. It might also be worth noting that if the Temple is not in Jerusalem then Jesus never entered there, never preached there, was not crucified there and was not resurrected there. In effect, the Muslim argument negates Christianity.

FOR ISLAM, THE CLOCK IN PALESTINE BEGINS IN 638 A.D.

For Islam, the historical clock in Palestine begins ticking in the year 638 A.D. when Arab armies under the command of caliph Omar conquered Jerusalem. If the clock starts any time in the 500 years before that, the inhabitants of this region cannot be Arab Muslims but must be Jews, Christians or Pagans ruled by the Romans, Byzantines and Persians from 70 A.D. to the Arab conquest. If it starts even 400 years earlier in the 3rd Century B.C., the inhabitants are Jews living under Greek and later Roman suzerainty who have dwelled there continuously for centuries. If the clock starts 500 years later, in 1138 A.D., the inhabitants are Christians in the Crusader states.

For the Palestinians to claim that they are descendants of the Philistines makes them the heirs of sea-faring invaders – not a good idea; to claim that they descend from the Arab colonizers who imposed Islam by military might and coercive taxation gives them a claim, but far from an exclusive and unsullied one. And what is left of the original Canaanite culture? Do the Arabs pray to Baal on the hilltops? The fact is that in the last 2,000 years – an eye-blink in history – Arabs have been in control of the Holy Land for less than half the time.

Jerusalem and its environs were ruled by Rome and Byzantium for almost 600 years, by the Crusaders for almost 100 years, by the Turks for 400 years and by the Jews for 100 years at the beginning and end of this two-millennium period. In the interim, as a military and commercial conduit, the land from the Jordan to the sea, was crossed and re-crossed, peopled, depopulated and re-peopled by countless conquerors, cultures, wayfarers, adventurers: Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Franks, Mamelukes, Kurds, Persians, Turks, Jews.

To say that one culture – in this case Arab Muslims – has an exclusive claim to this territory; that history began in 638 with the Muslim conquest and ended in 1517 (Arab rule) or 1918 (Ottoman rule) is specious reasoning and bad history. It belies a sense of privilege based on cultural arrogance, ethnic entitlement and sectarian triumphalism. Like many irredentist projects, it ignores the complexities of history in order to project a mythical past in order to justify its claim on the future.

That Muhammad alighted on the Rock, enshrined by the Dome, during the Prophet’s night journey to heaven is a wonderful source of inspiration for the Muslim faithful which entitles them to a share in Jerusalem as a city holy to three faiths – but it does not make a plausible historical case for exclusive political hegemony over this peace of land and its surroundings – which was the premise that prompted the Arabs to fight the newly declared Jewish state – and consequently lose their own. The tragedy for the Palestinians was that instead of being satisfied with their own state, which they were allotted in 1948, they were more obsessed with negating the Jewish one, to their own undoing.

“THEIR DESCENDANTS NEVER FASTED, NEVER MOURNED FOR HER”

And what of the Jews? When the Temple fell to the Roman general Titus in 70 A.D., The Jews were forcibly expelled from their land, thus beginning their 1,800 year journey of travail and persecution during which they never forget their bond as a people, their link to the land, their longing to return. As Abraham Joshua Heschel famously and eloquently observed: “Jerusalem is the city of David, of the prophets of Israel – not of Titus, the Roman Emperor; or Godfrey of Bouillon, the Crusader; or of Saladin. Their descendants never fasted, never mourned for her; Jerusalem was not part of their soul, their grief, an answer to their suffering... The Jewish people has never ceased to assert its right to the land of Israel. This continuous, uninterrupted insistence, an intimate ingredient of Jewish consciousness, is at the core of Jewish history.”

It is not for Arab adherents and their European choir – whose forbears’ hands are soaked with Jewish blood – to assert that Judaism is merely a religion, that Jews are not a people, that Jews do not deserve their own state, their own land. When the Continent turned Fascist in the years leading up to World War II, many zealous Europeans cried “Jews to Palestine.”

Today, in the throes of post-colonialism many zealous Europeans cry “Jews out of Palestine.” Exactly where would they like the Jews to go? The answer is obvious. They would like the Jews to disappear. But it is not for Arab polemicists to decide the nature of Jewish peoplehood. It is for the Jews to determine their own destiny. The Jewish people – like the Palestinians – have an inalienable right to self-determination. Their national rights can be exercised only in Israel and their claims to a state of their own in this land were recognized by international agreement authorized by a United Nations resolution. The attempt by the Arabs to deny those rights through violence – first by raids and riots, then via war, then by terror, and ultimately through a campaign to sufficiently weaken Israel so that it will be overwhelmed – disregards the legitimate claims of Jews to the land, doing so in the name of a blind and ugly revanchism. It is duplicitous, it is vengeful. It is base.

Heedless of life, it thrives on destructive energy, celebrating negation. It has sacrificed three generations to a chimera. In this, it is not unlike the totalitarian dystopias of the Left that promised a blissful future at the price of sacrificing the present. Only the present takes ever-longer and the future never comes. The Palestinian people have had the misfortune to be misled and manipulated by a cabal of Arab dictators, to be instigated by a pack of emigre zealots and to be led by an inept, corrupt, mendacious, tyrannical thug who was better at stirring the pot than serving the meal. What the Palestinians needed was a Nelson Mandela, what they got was Yasser Arafat and his traveling circus of unreconstructed cronies. It was worse than anything the Israelis could have done to them.

“THESE FIGURES ARE PRODUCED NOT BY ZIONISTS BUT BY MUSLIM RULERS”

The Arabs would like to categorize Jews as foreign imperialists who colonized a pristine land, first exploiting and then expelling the innocent natives, an argument which has won them support in post-colonial Europe, itself the beneficiary of a rapacious colonial past that is unmatchable. How does this charge stand up to scrutiny? First, in the 19th century, the Arabs’ holy Jerusalem that Arafat has sworn to retake, had languished for centuries under Turkish rule before it was even made a provincial capital. The Palestinian notables preferred to take their pleasures in Damascus from whence the province till then had been ruled. When the first Ottoman census was taken in the mid-19th century the Jews already formed a plurality, well before the birth of Zionism. Simply put, more than 100 years ago, the Jews were the largest community in a Jerusalem under Turkish suzerainty – and subsequently, their quorum only grew greater. By 1910, Jerusalem had a population of 68,000, of whom 50,000 were Jews. The figures are produced not by Zionists but by Muslim rulers. Before the outbreak of the 1948 war, of the city’s 165,000 residents, 100,000 were Jews.

At the time of the First Aliyah in 1882, the overwhelming majority of Arabs were landless tenant farmers working on the estates of absentee landlords who resided in Lebanon and Damascus. They owned little except the debts to their overlords. They were constantly plagued by attacks from Bedouin raiders in a province that was, by most travelers’ accounts, insecure, forgotten, underdeveloped, fallow, a backwater governed by indifferent and corrupt Ottoman rulers. The land was not seized by the Jews, but sold by Arab notables who knew they could get exorbitant prices from Jewish settlers.

This practice continued well into the unrest of the 1920’s to the point where some of the very Palestinian leaders who were protesting Jewish immigration were at the same time quietly selling their land to Jewish buyers at a tidy profit. Rather than being despoiled by the Jews, many Arab families made their fortunes through them. Nor is it Zionist myth that what the Jews often found was land that was desolate, arid, swampy and malarial.

Moreover, since Jewish immigration after the Great War was driven by the socialist ethos of physical work, by insisting on doing their own field labor, the new immigrants deprived the Arabs of the plantation work that was a traditional source of income for landless laborers. Thus, the Zionist failure to exploit the natives – as the Belgians had done in the Congo, the Dutch in the East Indies, the French in West Africa and the British everywhere – became a source of friction, one of the many ironies in the Arab-Jewish struggle. The landless Arab tenants were at the mercy of village mukhtars who led clans and served as straw bosses, distributing jobs to friends and withholding them from foes.

ARABS ARRIVING AFTER THE JEWS FOR ECONOMIC BENEFIT

Prosperity, which raised the level of all boats, did not come until the great wave of Jewish immigration in the 1920’s with the creation of a Jewish homeland by the League of Nations after the Great War. While there are many reasons for this, the urbanization and modernization that came with the Jewish influx cannot be ignored. Incomes are greater and infant mortality is lower among Arabs – the birth rate increases from 3 to 4 percent – in the Palestinian mandate than in neighboring British-ruled territory in the Middle East.

The result, not surprisingly, is an influx of Arab immigrants from the other British principalities. The Israelis assert that it was as much as 38 percent of the Arab population during this inter-war period; critics insist that it was only 7 percent. Even the lower figure – which, over time, compounds, is not insignificant.

It shows that some of the Arabs who today claim an ancestral link to Palestine from time immemorial are the descendants of people who, quite understandably, arrived for economic betterment subsequent to the forbears of many Israelis and indeed, were drawn to Palestine, in part, by the very economic conditions the Jews had helped create. To assert exclusive communal right to the entire land given the flux of population, the realities of absentee landlordism and tenant penury and the significant alterations to the region in the inter-war years, is fantasy.

STIRRED UP BY NATIONALIST LEADERS

During this period, stirred up by nationalist leaders, encouraged by local British commanders who opposed London’s commitment to a Jewish homeland, the Arabs of Palestine were led to believe that, through violence, they could seize the entire region. It was an illusion that led them down a primrose path to disaster. Those Arab leaders who sought an accommodation with the Jews were shunted aside, silenced or assassinated.

The Palestinians national movement, which needed statesmen steering a steady course, instead fell to the hands of fanatics. It got Al-Hajj Amin-Huysani who, with British approval, maneuvered himself into the role of Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 and proceeded to preach a bellicose doctrine of hatred and intransigence for the next 40 years.

The ideology offered was little more than an opposition to Zionism. Arab riots in 1929 killed more than 100 Jews and wounded over 300. Actually, rioting worked, resulting in a British White Paper in 1930 that recommended a moratorium on Jewish land purchases to quell the unrest. It was the first time the Arabs learned that violence could bring international results, a lesson that they have repeated to greater effect till this very day.

Palestinian violence in the 30’s led to strict quota limitations by the British on Jewish immigration. The result was that from the late 30’s in places like Germany and Austria, to the early 40’s in countries like Hungary and Romania, hundreds of thousands of Jews were caught in a death trap.

This was no accident on the part of the Palestinian leadership. Al-Hajj Amin, who spent the war years in Berlin raising SS troops for the Nazis among Bosnian Muslims, actively encouraged Hitler’s final solution for the Jewish problem, which would help alleviate his own Jewish problem. It was the Bosnian Muslim Handzar SS division that massacred Jewish and Serb communities during the German occupation of Yugoslavia and rounded up Jews for transport to Auschwitz.

Al-Hajj Amin also pledged Arab support for the Nazis and a willing Fifth Column should Rommel’s armies approach Jerusalem. From Berlin he broadcast to the Arabs urging them to: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them, for the love of God, history and religion.” One of the many current calumnies against the Israelis – that they are Nazis and that they are committing genocide – is the exact opposite of historical reality. It was the Palestinian leadership that collaborated with the real Nazis – they had everything to gain from a German victory and a British defeat – and who contributed to a real genocide.

THE JEWS ACCEPTED LESS THAN THAY HAD HOPED FOR

With the end of World War II came the end of the British mandate. Unable to resolve the differences between the two competing nationalisms, the British withdrew. A U.N. Special Committee on Palestine – which excluded the Great Powers, and the majority of whose members represented Third World or Socialist bloc countries – recommended partition, for which the U.N. voted in November 1947.

Although the Jews got less than they’d hoped for, they accepted, reasoning that a circumscribed state was better than no state at all. The Arabs, who also had been voted a state which would have given them a significant swath of the pre-1967 borders of Israel, were not content with this. Blinded by their eliminationist policy and whipped to a frenzy by the Mufti and other leaders who convinced them that the Jews could not withstand them, they launched a war of extermination against the Jewish nation.

The Palestinians were anything but innocent bystanders in this battle. They were active combatants in a war that they started and they came up on the losing side. As the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer, not himself Jewish, once observed: “The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem... But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in the world.” Such exceptionalism, whereby Jews are judged by a standard. different than that applied to others, is a tenet of anti-Semitism.

Israel’s war of Independence was actually two different wars over a period of a little more than a year. The first, from late November 1947 till April 1948 was a conflict between a fledgling Jewish force and an army of 9,000 Palestinian irregulars who, at the outset, had the upper hand but by the spring had been defeated by the Israelis. During this period, about 70,000 Palestinians left their homes voluntarily, the overwhelming majority of them upper and middle-class families who left to sit out the war in Beirut, Damascus and Cairo for the same reason that the well-to-do always leave combat areas – because they wanted to avoid the violence in safety and see which way the wind blew.

The imagery of hapless civilians being driven from their homes at this point is a myth. During the initial stages of the fighting, when the Arabs met with early success, where Jewish enclaves were overrun, the survivors were massacred. What stopped them from going further was not moral scruples but military failure.

DECLARING INDEPENDENCE

The first phase of the ’48 war ended in April with the Jews controlling more territory than had been ceded in the original partition. Israel’s leader, David Ben Gurion, declared that since the Palestinians had attacked the Jews with the intent of destroying them, the Jews were no longer bound by the terms of partition, which they had originally been willing to respect. In May, Israel declared its independence and the creation of the first Jewish state in the Holy Land since the fall of the Second Commonwealth almost 2,000 years earlier.

At that point, the war changed to become an international conflict. Four Arab nations – Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq sent their armies to invade the new Jewish state. They were aided by the Palestinians whose irregulars fought alongside the Arab invaders. Their goal was to obliterate Israel, and they had every confidence they could do so. As the Secretary-General of the Arab League made clear at the time: “This will be a war of extermination. It will be a momentous massacre to be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”

The result, however, was the opposite. After three rounds of fighting, the Arab armies – along with their Palestinian military allies – were routed by January 1949. Had they won, it is doubtful that any quarter would have been given to the Jews as is evidenced by the massacre of 77 members of a Jewish medical convoy traveling to Hadassah hospital under a Red Cross banner, or the subsequent slaughter of Jewish prisoners at Kfar Etzion. The Palestinians, for their part, cite the Deir Yassin massacre of 254 Arabs, an act of brutality that cannot be excused. Executed by fringe elements which were subsequently curbed (as distinct from the free reign given to Hamas today by the Palestinian Authority), it proved to be the exception rather than the rule.

By contrast, it was the Arabs who routinely practiced atrocity whenever they could and only a Jewish victory prevented a second Holocaust from occurring within three years of the first one. It is only in retrospect that the Israeli triumph seems assured. At the time, it was no such thing. Had the victory gone to the Arabs, no one would be talking today about a state for the Jews. It was during this second phase of the war that the Israelis seized additional territory which had been allocated to the Palestinians. When the Palestinians refer to the injustice of 1948, they are complaining that not only should the Jewish state never have come into existence but, having done so and defended itself against a deadly onslaught, Israel should then be obligated to give back the territory of the very people who attacked it. This may be the only instance in history where the losers in a war of aggression insist on dictating the terms of peace.

MASS EXODUS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT

It was also during this second period of warfare that a mass exodus of Arabs took place. The reasons are mixed. In some places, local Israeli commanders, concerned about Fifth Column action in their rear from a hostile Arab populace, and facing the threat of fighting several Arab armies before them on different fronts, may have indeed driven people from their villages. In other sectors, they urged them to stay. In Haifa, the Jewish mayor made a vain appeal to the city’s considerable Arab population – probably the most sizable concentration of Arabs in the region – to remain in their homes and be assured safety. And Arab radio itself, with repeated descriptions of false Jewish atrocities designed to stir the population to combat the Jews, merely terrified them and prompted a considerable number to flee.

While the causes were many in the swirl of war, there was no plan by the Jewish leadership to drive the Arabs from their land. Quite to the contrary, the Israeli General Staff ordered all units to avoid destruction of Arab villages and expulsion of Arab communities. Israel’s Declaration of Independence itself urges Arabs to remain in the country. Compare this with the Palestinian national charter which to this day calls for the destruction of Israel.

From the outset, the Zionist leaders had urged cooperation with the Arabs, and even as it was being invaded, Israel pledged to respect the rights of its Arab citizens. The Arab dispersion came about piecemeal, through the ebb and flow of war. In some places people fled, in others, people relocated from one area of Israel to another, and in still other places, such as the Galilee, most stayed and were unharmed.

Indeed, they became citizens with voting rights and their own members in the Israeli Parliament, which is more than their brethren had in any of the surrounding Arab states. Nor can we gainsay the possibility that many others hoped to march back in the trail of victorious Arab armies with the opportunity not only to return to their own homes but to plunder those of their slain or fleeing Jewish neighbors.

U.N. Resolution 194, voted subsequent to the fighting and oft-cited by Palestinians to justify their “right of return,” (a phrase which it never uses) stipulates that those who fled who were willing “to live in peace with their neighbors” should be permitted to come back. Given the climate of hatred and revanchism fostered among the refugees by their leaders from the outset, this is a moot point.

THE PRICE ISRAEL MUST PAY FOR EUROPE’S GUILT OVER ITS OWN COLONIAL PAST

When the fighting stopped, the war didn’t end but an armistice was declared. No Arab leader was willing to make peace with Israel except for King Abdullah of Transjordan who was assassinated for his pains (at Al Aqsa Mosque reportedly at the behest of the Mufti). Faced by an array of intransigent Arab nations, it would have been suicidal for the burgeoning Jewish state to accept the return of a hostile and revanchist populace.

The Arab countries, for their part, refused to absorb the Palestinians, allowing the sore of their displacement to fester in a cluster of camps administered by the United Nations. The U.N. set up a special Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinians – the only one ever established for any refugee group following the massive dislocations of World War II. Nothing like this was set up for Hindus or Muslims, millions of whom had been displaced in the mutual group massacre of a million dead during the partition of India that occurred at the very same time as the conflict in Palestine.

Seven million Germans were expelled from their homes in Czechoslovakia and neighboring states after the war, ten times the number of 500,000-700,000 Arabs that had left Palestine. They were left to fend for themselves with no talk of repatriation or compensation, then or ever.

The Kurds, numbering 20 million, whose national aspirations seem to have been overlooked by the settlements that followed both World Wars, were left to the mercies of their enemies, not least among them the Iraqis who went on to attempt an actual genocide against them.

Ostensibly, the reason for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency – whose exclusive client is the Palestinians – was that the Palestinians, unlike other refugees, had nowhere else to go. But this is nonsense, since by culture, language, affinity and ethnicity, the Palestinians fit in perfectly with the Arabs of the surrounding Muslim states. It was a lot easier for an Arabic-speaking Palestinian to assimilate into the culture of Beirut than for a Muslim refugee from Gujarat to fit into the culture of Lahore in Pakistan.

Moreover, in subsequent turmoil, such as the Chinese occupation of Tibet where a long-standing religious, social and political culture was destroyed, the U.N. did nothing to create special camps for Tibetan refugees. It was only the Palestinians who were allowed to languish at the behest of the U.N. in camps that became political pawns of the Arab states in their long-term strategy to reverse the events of 1948. If restitution to refugees must be granted, it should be applied across the board.

To single out Israel as the only state that has to restore a refugee population fits into a hoary anti-Semitic pattern of holding the Jewish community culpable for behavior tolerated by the rest of society. It projects a medieval custom onto a global stage. Critics charge that Israel is the price that the Arabs have been forced to pay for Europe’s guilt over the Holocaust. More accurately – and more immediately – the refugee camps are the price Israel must pay for Europe’s guilt over its own colonial past.

“THE JEWS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SUBMISSIVE”

And what of the Jews of Arab lands? Why has the U.N. never sought restitution for their losses in fleeing Arab oppression? In the years before and after the creation of Israel, riots, lynchings, threats, a menacing atmosphere leading to pogroms, assaults and murder, put the long-standing Jewish communities of these countries at risk. Many of them traced their ancestry to ancient times, longer than the Arab presence in Jerusalem. The result was that more than 600,000 Jews fled their homes in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Maghreb – the Muslim lands of western North Africa – with little more than what they could carry on their backs.

The conventional wisdom that Jews found sanctuary under Muslim rule over the centuries is only partially true. While they were treated as dhimmi – protected people of the book – the protection waxed and waned as it did in Europe. The toleration shown to the Jews by Muslim rulers was based on the presumption that they maintain their subjection. The faithful were admonished by their leaders to hold the Jews in their humbled status in keeping with Sura 9:29 of the Koran which tells Muslims to subdue nonbelievers and make them pay tribute.

For the Jews – whose role was supposed to be submissive – to turn the tables and rule in a land that had once been governed by Islam must be insupportable to a culture that had dismissed them as craven. For the Arabs the creation of Israel was not merely a political disaster, it was a cosmic rupture. It went in the face of everything they knew and understood. Their moral universe was in disorder and it had to be righted however long it took.

This explains the ferocity of the maledictions brought down on the Jewish people and America by fanatic Muslim clergyman, and the receptivity to it among those who know little better. It explains the stream of anti-Semitic and anti-American vituperation emanating from pulpits which has now become normative throughout the Muslim world.

It explains the animus of such voices as that of Sheikh Ibrahim Madhi on Palestinian TV who excoriated the Jews as “the enemies of Allah, the nation that was cursed in Allah’s book.”

It explains the exhortations of the columnist in the Egyptian Government-controlled daily Al-Akhbar who wrote of the Jews: “Allah also cursed them with a thousand curses... They are doomed to a life of humiliation and wretchedness until Judgment Day.”

It explains the popularity of the anti-Semitic czarist forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in Cairo book stores – recently a multi-part series beamed out of Riyadh to celebrate Ramadan. It explains the anti-Semitic aspect of fundamentalist Wahhabism with the admonition to “harbor enmity and hatred for the infidels.”

NOT WAITING TO BE SLAUGHTERED

It is fundamentalism which now challenges the secular arm of the Palestinian movement and has altered the terms of engagement from nationalist irredentism to jihad, the re-conquest of holy Jerusalem and Arafat’s call for thousands of martyrs. But whether secular or sectarian, the goal has always been the same – Israel’s destruction. The attempts to obliterate the Jewish state – after failing to smother its birth – go back to its earliest years. Abetted by their sponsors in Damascus and Cairo, Arab raiders infiltrated Israel throughout its early decades in a trail of murder and terror that took hundreds of lives. Arab polemicists condemn Israeli reprisals but fail to mention the endless assaults that provoked them.

More to the point, the Israeli counter-raids worked. By 1956, the sponsor states got the message and curtailed the infiltrators. But by 1967, swept up in the frenzy of pan-Arabism, through an alliance of Egypt and Syria, they tried again. Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, brushed aside U.N. observers and marched his armies to the Israeli border threatening to destroy it. Nasser’s intentions were made very clear. As he mobilized his forces Cairo Radio announced that “the Arab people is firmly resolved to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and to restore the honor of the Arabs of Palestine.”

Nasser himself said at the time: “We will not accept any possibility of coexistence with Israel” and he subsequently made his oft-quoted speech professing his resolve “to restore the situation to what it was in 1948,” that is before the creation of the Jewish state. The Israelis, inconveniently, did not wait to be slaughtered but struck a pre-emptive blow. The result was the Arab debacle of the Six-Day War with Israel in command of the Sinai desert, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip which had been administered by Egypt and the West Bank which had been annexed by Jordan.

LITTLE TALK OF FOREIGN OCCUPATION OR PALESTINIAN SELF-DETERMINATION

It should be noted that under Jordanian rule – which was intended to be permanent – there was little talk of foreign occupation or Palestinian self-determination, and certainly hardly any international support for this. It was only when control shifted from Arab to Israeli hands that the issue of human rights and occupation came to the fore as if anyone had rights under Arab rule. As for Israel’s putative designs on the West Bank, we should remember that before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, Israel urged Jordan not to join Egypt and Syria in their aggression. Had King Hussein listened, the West Bank would have remained under Arab rule. That he chose to ignore Israel’s entreaties may have been poor judgment, but the consequences cannot be blamed on an Israeli “master plan”.

Prior to the 1967 war, the Arab goal was more naked and direct – an end of the Jewish “occupation” of Israel. This was already affected by the establishment of the PLO – a creation of the Arab League in its strategy of weakening its Israeli foe. In the competition between Cairo and Damascus for control of this undertaking, Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement became an important client of the Syrians in their efforts to destabilize Israel from within.

His first terrorist act – celebrated by his followers today – occurred in 1964, almost three years before the Six-Day War and prior to any occupation. The only thing he was trying to “liberate” was the Jewish state. The occupation was always a secondary issue used by the Arab countries – who cared little about an occupied West Bank under Jordan – to advance their own agenda of destroying Israel. And indeed, when the Jews tried to negotiate a comprehensive peace after the 1967 war, they were met with the rebuff of the Arab League at the Khartoum Conference: “No Peace, No Recognition, No Negotiations.” Sadly, for both Palestinians and Jews, Israel never had a serious negotiating partner. Instead, it got intransigence, dissimulation and terror.

ARAFAT’S CONTEMPT FOR HUMAN LIFE

The terror resumed almost immediately but it took wings. While the Arab states were refusing to negotiate with the Israelis – thereby losing a critical opportunity for a settlement early on and condemning their Palestinian brethren once again to more years of frustration – airline hijacking began in 1968 under the aegis of Yasser Arafat and the P.L.O. with support from their Arab patrons. The attack on innocent civilians, the contempt for human life, the use of commercial airliners as weapons of retribution which Al Qaeda used to such devastating affect at the World Trade Center, can all be traced to the model established and perfected by Arafat and his cohorts more than 30 years ago, a brand of terror, then as now, cheered by the Arab street. It is no accident that Palestinians celebrated the terror attack on the World Trade Center before an embarrassed Arafat attempted to quash their enthusiasm.

The Arab response to Israeli overtures has been consistent throughout. Refuse to negotiate with Israel and then complain that they have no choice but armed resistance, ignoring the fact that they do have another alternative, but the result – recognition of a secure, viable Israeli state with defensible borders – is so repugnant to them that they cannot bring themselves to accept it. Consequently, the premise of the Palestinian strategy is to replace serious discussions with a global propaganda assault to convince the world that they have no viable option on the path to independence other than violence.

ARAFAT’S WAR

Most recently, the Palestinians were offered a chance to have their own state in the final days of the Clinton administration, as attested to by former U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross, where the Camp David offer of August was expanded so that the Palestinians had 97 percent of their land with contiguous borders, a capital in Arab East Jerusalem, control of the Muslim holy sites and a plan for compensation of refugees and a return to the new Palestinian state – an offer far better than the one the Israelis accepted in 1947. This would have ended the occupation, dispensed with most of the settlements, created a Palestinian state and brought peace.

Arafat, some of whose own advisers were urging him to accept this last chance for a final settlement under Clinton’s aegis, demurred. The result is the disaster he has brought upon both his own people and the Israelis, all of whom are victims of his vacillation and intransigence. That Arafat failed to seize the moment – in the grand tradition of the Palestinians never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity – is tragic.

TERROR WAS NOT A LAST RECOURSE; IT WAS A PREFERRED CHOICE

But to insist that the Arabs had no option other than violence is a falsehood. Of the many lies that the Arab propaganda machine have disseminated, this is the most egregious. It flies in the face of the historical record. Terror was not a last recourse; it was a preferred choice. But as the Mufti and his successors learned through his Nazi model, Dr. Goebbels, lie often enough and brazenly enough and people will believe you. Abetted by historically challenged journalists, home-grown media crew on the West Bank in thrall to the Palestinian Authority, an intellectual Left brought up on a diet of post-colonialism and the retroactive anti-Semitism of a craven Europe, Arab partisans have had a wide berth to say whatever they please about Israel and the Jewish people, too often with impunity.

To charge that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is worse than anything that the Nazis wreaked in occupied Europe, as did the Saudi ambassador to London recently, is historically shameful. It is a comment – whose likeness is now a commonplace in Arab rhetoric – of someone who knows better and outrageously fabricates for cynical, political purposes. It is of a piece with the Arabs’ denial of the Holocaust – since, for them, not only is the destruction of European Jewry a Zionist invention but, if the Nazis are innocent then whatever the Israelis do on the West Bank and Gaza is indeed worse than what Hitler wrought.

Of all the Arab calumnies against Israel, this is the most odious and painful – intended as such – because it makes a mockery of perhaps the greatest misfortune ever to befall the Jewish people and turns their own calamity against them by first denying it and then likening the survivors and their descendents to their tormenters.

If Islam is the true religion, having superceded the inauthentic Judaism (and inept Christianity), then why not appropriate Jewish suffering as well? To compare the Israeli security measures in Palestine during the intifada to the German occupation of Europe is knowingly, willfully, obscene. (If there is an analogy, it is with the British security measures against terrorism in Northern Ireland – checkpoints, roadblocks, curfews, house searches, raids, roundups and death, including that of innocents – and no one was accusing England of genocide. Moreover, the very British media that now blanches at calling Palestinian homicide bombers terrorists had no compunction about applying the term to IRA terrorists who blew up shopping centers in Great Britain.)

In the two years, since the outbreak of the intifada approximately 1,500 Palestinians have been killed, more than half involved in violence against Israel. At the same time, more than 500 Israelis were killed, the great majority noncombatants. During the two years between 1942 and 1944 most of the six million Jews killed in occupied Europe were wiped out along with most of the seven million gentiles killed by the Nazis. Millions of Europeans were consigned to slave labor, concentration camps, deportation and horrible medical experiments. To make an analogy between the Nazis, who planned to enslave Europe under a racially pure Reich, and the struggle of the Jewish remnant for a small place among nations against a sea of 280 million Arabs, is reprehensible.

MANIPULATING AND MANEUVERING WORLD BODIES

And it is numbers – the 280 million Arabs and the rest of the Muslim faithful – a total of 1.2 billion people – that is their ultimate weapon, not bombs or guns or missiles. It is with these overwhelming numbers that they have stacked the deck on countless U.N. committees – and created a few of their own – to undermine, isolate and revile Zionism. They have infiltrated world bodies, manipulated and maneuvered them to their own end, to wear away the legitimacy of the Jewish state and ultimately to weaken it sufficiently so that it collapses.

Whether these are Non-Government Organizations, labor associations, welfare or relief agencies, all are exposed to the overwhelming numbers of the Arab world which, together with oil blackmail and the attraction of Arab markets make their incessant drumbeat of condemnation an irresistible force in world politics.

Under such circumstances it is easy to see how the Arabs pushed through the U.N. their infamous equation of Zionism with racism – a calumny that has gained renewed vigor since last year’s Jew-baiting Durban conference on racism that gave global imprimatur to anti-Semitism. This slur comes from a culture that still practices human bondage against people of color and has enslaved thousands of black victims from Sudan to the Maghreb. (Not a murmur about this from the Arabs’ South African supporters at Durban.)

THE HYPOCRISY OF SINGLING OUT JEWS

Their sheer critical mass allows them to project a sanitized Arafat as the defender of his people while vilifying Ariel Sharon as the perpetrator of Sabra and Shatila during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. There has been a willful obfuscation of the fact that the massacres were committed by Phalangists commanded by the late Elie Hobeika who subsequently thrived under the protection of the Syrians. And the fact that Hobeika led a vengeful force of Arab Maronite Christians, 400 of whose number had been massacred by Palestinians at Damour during a fratricidal Lebanese conflict, also is conveniently ignored. Nor does it impress the Arabs’ European advocates in Brussels who seek to put Sharon on trial for the Phalangist onslaught.

An estimated 700-800 people were killed at Sabra and Shatila. But 150,000 people were slaughtered over 15 years in Lebanon in a brutal civil war among Arab Christian and Muslim factions during which the Palestinians had created a corrupt rump state under the aegis of Yasser Arafat that was up to its neck in blood. But no one in Belgium is calling for Arafat to stand in the dock for this – much less for the massacres of Israeli athletes at Munich and Jewish children at Ma’alot that he orchestrated. To judge both sides equally is pursuing ethics. To judge only one side is pursuing interests. The hypocrisy of singling out Jews while ignoring greater crimes committed by others is a signal manifestation of anti-Semitism.

ANTI-SEMITISM HAS VAULTED FROM THE GHETTO TO THE GLOBE

In the dark night of the Jews long exile, their enemies’ goal was to confine them to European ghettoes and Muslim mellahs, to isolate them as a means of humiliation, control and worse. Such action was justified by the “moral inferiority” of their creed. Those who reviled the Jews were self-righteous in their indictments. Today, a new version of this virus manifests itself in the movement to condemn Israel as a pariah state. Anti-Semitism has vaulted from the ghetto to the globe. The assault on Israel is an attack on Jewish existence. Should this succeed it would result in the decimation of the state’s five million souls. The remnant in the Diaspora would be left vulnerable to the mercies of their host states and the triumphalism of a renascent Islam.

Such a scenario may appear far-fetched, but so would the death camps have seemed in enlightened 19th-century Europe. Given the chasms of Jewish history it is not beyond the realm of possibility. The Israeli Army is currently a powerful defense force, but military advantage – particularly under political pressure – can swiftly melt away. Israel is arrayed against 1.2-billion Muslims among whom are leaders such as former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani who boasts that Muslim losses in a nuclear face-off would be an acceptable price to pay for Israel’s destruction. Since Iran is working intensely to achieve long-range nuclear capability, this is no idle threat. Israel’s support in the West – where one out of three people in a recent poll of Europeans were reported to have anti-Semitic attitudes – has faded, and the Arabs smell blood.

But their case for the Palestinians is not about human rights. How can the Arab League, all of whose 22 member nations have systematically deprived their citizens of human rights for more than half-a-century, possibly be interested in human rights? The Europeans, so obsessed with Palestinian rights, seem less concerned with the far greater number of victims whose rights are trampled upon by their Arab rulers. Rather, the “rights” campaign is about advancing the cause of the one national movement in the world whose obstacle to fulfillment is the existence of an independent Jewish state. The West, as well as other democracies, must see that it is in its own self-interest to support democratic Israel – not necessarily all of its policies, but its security – against the violent, irredentist cleptocracy that Arafat has perpetrated.

It is shameful, though not surprising, that the very people who hounded the Jews from their own realms for two millennia have now pursued them to Israel, joining a new pack that is in full cry for their blood. Behind their liberationist masks and post-colonialist posturing is the face of anti-Semitism. Its goal is the obliteration of the Jewish state which cannot be achieved without a second Holocaust.

The assumption that the current Israeli population would blend comfortably into a binational Palestine where they would be made welcome by the Arab majority is absurd. The only issue for opponents of the Jewish State is whether the grim fate that awaits a defeated Israel is deserved or unfortunate.

Israel has now replaced Capitalism as something that will just wither away in the catechism of Left-wing ideologues who refuse to face the end game of their advocacy. In their moral universe, anti-colonialism – and its twin rubric, anti-racism – trump all other principles. This permits them to support a corrupt Palestinian tyranny against an embattled Jewish democracy. And if they are against racism, genocide and oppression, how could they be anti-Semitic?

PRACTICING ANTI-SEMITISM WITHOUT ANTI-SEMITES

The totalitarian states of post-Holocaust Eastern Europe managed to pursue anti-Semitism without Jews but the post-colonial Left has done them one better: It practices anti-Semitism without anti-Semites. Since colonialists – that is, Zionists – must by definition be racists, the Left, in opposing them, can make common cause with the most retrograde regimes in the name of anti-racism.

This alliance of craven intelligentsia in the West and a witches brew of mullahs, despots and murderers in the Middle East threatens not only the Jewish state but the Jewish people who happen to live there. It is very much in keeping with the impulse to delegitimize and demonize the Jew, the sina qua non of anti-Semitism from its origins.

Until this is acknowledged and addressed Israel will remain in a national ghetto and peace will never come to the Holy Land. It is critical to affect a sea-change in the moral climate which can lead to a spirit of compromise and a mutual respect for the humanity of both Arab and Jew that may resolve their tragic struggle. It would be a victory for both Israelis and Palestinians and, most important, a triumph for decency.


In the U.S. & Canada too, “Hating Israel is part of campus culture”

CONTENTS

1. Summers: "Anti-Israel activists at Harvard: Anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent"
2. "Hating Israel is part of campus culture" (By Jonathan Kay, National Post, Canada, Sept. 25, 2002)
3. "Summers's truth-telling" (By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, Sept. 26, 2002)
4. "Anti-Semitism in Harvard Yard" (By Suzanne Fields, Washington Times, Sept. 26, 2002)


SUMMERS: “ANTI-ISRAEL ACTIVISTS AT HARVARD: ANTI-SEMITIC IN THEIR EFFECT, IF NOT THEIR INTENT”

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach three editorial pieces relating to Harvard University President Lawrence Summers' characterization of the actions of some anti-Israel activists at Harvard as "anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent."

1. "Hating Israel is part of campus culture" (By Jonathan Kay, National Post, Canada, Sept. 25, 2002). The author notes that only last week Canadian philosopher and London University professor Ted Honderich told an audience in Toronto that Palestinians have a "moral right" to blow up Jews – and that it was not only "permissible" to do so, but "obligatory". The author says "Honderich is a symptom of a poisonous, unapologetic hatred of Israel that is now part of mainstream campus culture."

2. "Summers's truth-telling" (By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, Sept. 26, 2002). The writer notes that at San Francisco State University pro-Palestinians demonstrators recently confronted supporters of Israel with chants of "Hitler should have finished the job".

3. "Anti-Semitism in Harvard Yard" (By Suzanne Fields, The Washington Times, Sept. 26, 2002). The writer says that Summers' "bold" speech (which is posted on the Harvard Web site) should be "assigned reading".



FULL ARTICLES

HATING ISRAEL IS PART OF CAMPUS CULTURE

Hating Israel is part of campus culture
By Jonathan Kay
The National Post (Canada)
September 25, 2002

Last week, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up on a Tel Aviv bus, propelling pounds of densely packed metal shrapnel into the vehicle's passengers. Five people were killed instantly, and 60 others wounded.

The event presumably failed to darken the day of Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosopher who teaches at University College London. Last week, he told an audience in Toronto that Palestinians have a "moral right" to blow up Jews. And he encourages them to exercise it: "To claim a moral right on behalf of the Palestinians to their terrorism is to say that they are right to engage in it, that it is permissible if not obligatory."

In Britain, where Honderich now lives, his theories have generated controversy. A disgusted Daily Telegraph reviewer called his new book, After the Terror, "one of the worst books I have ever read." But on his Canadian tour, Honderich was greeted warmly. Following his lecture at the University of Toronto, audience members lined up to respectfully parse the fine points of his philosophical theories. And since Honderich blames the West and Israel for what happened on Sept. 11, the CBC naturally regards him as star material. On Sept. 8, Michael Enright interviewed Honderich on national radio – an opportunity Honderich used to repeat his claim that suicide bombings are a proper response to Israel's "rape" of Palestine.

Honderich is a symptom of a poisonous, unapologetic hatred of Israel that is now part of mainstream campus culture. In the United States and Europe, academics have tried to boycott Israeli scholars – but not those from, say, Syria or Iraq, whose violent "rape" of dissenting minorities makes Ariel Sharon look like the world's most tender lover. Here in Canada, Sherene Razack, director of the Centre for Integrative Anti-Racism Studies at the University of Toronto, has distributed hysterical mass electronic mailings accusing Israel of "atrocities beyond belief," and calls on Canadian academics to demonstrate "solidarity" with the Palestinians.

Do all of these pronouncements rise to a sort of soft anti-Semitism – as Harvard University President Lawrence Summers argued last week? It's an attractive theory. While anti-Israel academics claim they are merely standing up for the world's "oppressed," they have a remarkable habit of ignoring anyone who doesn't happen to be oppressed by Jews. In Chechnya, many times more Muslims have died at the hands of Russians than Palestinians at the hands of Israelis. In Sudan, more than a million Christians and animists have been killed by a genocidal government in Khartoum. But last time I checked, Europe's profs weren't targeting Russian chess players or Sudanese mullahs. All their wrath and attention is reserved for Israel and the United States. Following Honderich's lecture last week, I asked him whether the people of Lebanon would be justified in using terror to fight back against the "rape" committed daily by 35,000 Syrian troops. He had no opinion. "I'd have to look at the situation," he told me. "I don't know much about it."

But anti-Semitism – even the indirect variety Summers talks about – can't be the only culprit. Like most of the academics who bash Israel, Honderich does not come across as a bigot: In fact, he suggested in his speech that early Zionists too had a "moral right" to terrorism. The real problem is more generic, and has to do with the lingering instinct among academics to romanticize terrorism as an expression of righteous class struggle. Honderich and his European colleagues still see Yasser Arafat as Che Guevara in a kaffiyeh.

Indeed, Honderich spent a good deal of his speech talking about poverty in Africa and the evils of capitalism (which he calls a "vicious economic system"), and suggested both had something to do with the assault on the World Trade Center. "Is it possible to suppose that the Sept. 11 attacks had nothing at all to do with ... Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Sierra Leone?" he asks in After The Terror. "In thinking about it, remember that the attacks on the towers were indeed attacks on the principal symbols of world capitalism."

Never mind that the first major al-Qaeda supported attack against Americans came nine years ago in Somalia, where the United States sacrificed the lives of 18 soldiers in an attempt to distribute food to famine-stricken Muslims. Never mind that the words "Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Sierra Leone" appear in al-Qaeda exhortations rather less frequently than, say, "exterminate the infidels wherever you find them." Never mind the West's campaign to liberate two million Muslims in Kosovo. Never mind that the majority of al-Qaeda murderers are middle-class doctors, engineers and civil servants from Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich sheikhdoms. By the deluded lights of warmed- over Marxists, it all comes down to class struggle. Apocalyptic Islam and anti-Semitism are just clever cover stories for liberating the masses.

William F. Buckley once said that he'd be better off living in a country governed by the first 100 names in the Boston phone book than by tenured members of the Harvard faculty. He's still right. A five-year-old child has the sense to know that slaughtering innocent civilians is wrong. To convince yourself otherwise, you have to spend years hanging around a university.

 

“SERIOUS AND THOUGHTFUL PEOPLE ARE ADVOCATING AND TAKING ACTIONS THAT ARE ANTI-SEMITIC IN THEIR EFFECT IF NOT THEIR INTENT”

Summers's truth-telling
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
September 26, 2002

When Lawrence Summers became the president of Harvard last year, not even his greatest admirers predicted how resolutely he would make the university's motto – "Veritas" – his own. Almost from the day he was inaugurated, Summers has insisted on speaking unpopular truths: about the disrespect shown to Americans in uniform, about the rot of grade inflation in Harvard's classrooms, about the absence of "mainstream values" among "coastal elites" – even about the failure of a celebrity professor like Cornel West to do serious academic work.

Last week, voicing another unpopular truth, Summers spoke out against the spread of Jew-bashing – not only in Europe and at UN conferences but at American universities.

"There is disturbing evidence of an upturn in anti-Semitism globally, and also ... closer to home," he said on Sept. 17. "Profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."

Actually, even anti-Semitic intent can be found on American campuses these days. At San Francisco State University, for example, pro-Palestinians demonstrators recently confronted supporters of Israel with signs reading "Jews = Nazis" and chants of "Hitler should have finished the job." Earlier this month, anti-Israel rioters at Concordia University in Montreal smashed windows and hurled furniture to protest a scheduled speech by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Fortunately, such naked Jew-hatred is still rare in academia. What Summers had in mind was something less blatant but no less disgraceful.

"Some here at Harvard and at universities across the country," he said, "have called for the university to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested. I hasten to say the university has categorically rejected this suggestion."

The divestment campaign Summers was referring to demands that Israel be treated as a pariah, a country so toxic that American universities shouldn't even own stock in companies that do business there. It is modeled on the anti-apartheid movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and its planted axiom is that there is no important moral difference between Israel – a free and tolerant democracy at war with dictatorial enemies bent on genocide – and the former white-ruled South Africa. That is a position only a moral idiot could endorse.

Supporters of the divestment effort at Harvard and elsewhere were quick to condemn Summers for his "McCarthyesque" attack. "This is the ugliest statement imaginable," fumed John Assad, a neurobiology professor at Harvard Medical School, "to paint critics as anti-Semitic."

In fact, Summers didn't "paint critics" as anti-Semitic or anything else; he characterized their actions as "anti-Semitic in their effect." He was not ascribing base motives to those who support the divestment campaign. He didn't presume to read their hearts. Rather, he was pointing out the impact of their behavior. One who supports a campaign that singles out Israel for demonization and obloquy is taking an anti-Semitic action, whether he intended to or not.

Of course Israeli policies are fair game for criticism. But it is not "criticism" to falsely smear Israel as racist – not when the Arab world seethes with a hatred of Jews more rabid than even the Nazis' was.

It is not "criticism" to portray Israel's lawful presence in Gaza and the West Bank as an illegal occupation yet never murmur a word of objection to China's occupation of Tibet, Syria's of Lebanon, Turkey's of Northern Cyprus, or Russia's of Chechnya.

It is not "criticism" to lay the blame for the violence of the Middle East at Israel's doorstep while ignoring the immense risks that Israel has taken, and the sacrifices it has made, in pursuit of peace with the Palestinians.

It is not "criticism" to accuse Israel of apartheid when it is the Arab world that preaches "Kill the Jews!" and dances in the street when terrorists do so.

This is not criticism – it is calumny. It butchers the truth and subjects Israel to a cruel double standard. It abets the cause of the world's foremost Jew-haters – people whose explicit goal is the liquidation of the Jewish state. A professor who signs his name to something so grotesque is committing an anti-Semitic act.

"In our own day," Norman Podhoretz has written, "Israel has become the touchstone of attitudes toward the Jewish people, and anti-Zionism has become the main and most relevant form of anti-Semitism." Anti-Semitism used to express itself in demanding that good Aryans boycott Jewish shops. Today it demands that good universities boycott the Jewish state. It may look different on the outside, but it's the same old poison underneath.

 

ANTI-SEMITISM IN HARVARD YARD

Anti-Semitism in Harvard Yard
By Suzanne Fields
The Washington Times
September 26, 2002

Let's give a round of applause to Larry Summers, president of Harvard, for standing up to the anti-Semites in Harvard Yard. He delivered a bold speech admonishing all those whose actions are "anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent."

Petitions have been circulating on campus demanding that Harvard divest its endowment of any investments in Israel. Harvard is not alone. The divestment movement has been gathering momentum on many college campuses where the elite and privileged heap scorn on Israel for "human rights abuses," but never find an offense in China, Rwanda or any Arab countries that support suicide bombers and other terrorists.

Mr. Summers' speech was not academic. The Harvard president put his mouth where his policy is. He rejected a petition signed by 69 Harvard professors calling for divestiture in Israel. But when so many college presidents and faculty drop their eyes when confronting an anti-Semite on campus, he must be counted among the brave for using his bully pulpit to criticize men and women who consider themselves to be "serious and thoughtful people."

He carefully examines the image of "the new bigot." No longer is the anti-Semite one of the uneducated rabble-rousers of the politically uncouth in brogans and white hoods. The new bigot carries petitions in Harvard Yard in the heart of the Ivy League decked out in running shoes with politically correct labels. "Where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israel have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists," says Mr. Summers, "profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities."

The usual suspects on the campus left accuse him of misunderstanding the difference between being anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. But Mr. Summers doesn't buy that argument, nor does he limit his concerns to issues of divestment. He criticizes student fund-raising events for groups that support terrorism, which enjoy "at least modest success and very little criticism." He observes that many university students who condemn global capitalism lash out specifically at Israel, comparing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with Hitler. He reminds the campus that only Israel was singled out with human-rights violations at the U.N. Conference on Racism, with no mention of abysmal human-rights violations by the governments of China, Rwanda, and most of the Islamic countries.

Mr. Summers describes himself as a secular Jew who grew up in an America where his religion was hardly noticed by others in school, college or work. He had not been born in 1922, when A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, sought quotas for Jews. The freshman class that year was 21 percent Jewish, three times higher than in 1900 and Lowell observed that anti-Semitism among students grows "in proportion to the number of Jews." It was mere coincidence, of course, that Jews ranked high in intellectual competitions, winning scholarships and academic prizes. After much sturm and drang, the quota idea was dropped, but merit qualifications were diluted and geographical requirements altered. Jewish enrollment fell to 15 percent, rising again in the 1930s when merit qualifications were restored. Anti-Semitism has many faces, and some faces wear sinister smiles. Legitimate criticism of Israel, of course, is not anti-Semitic. But protesters at Harvard who single out the Jewish homeland sound suspiciously anti-Semitic.

For Jews in 2002 (as in 1922) there are no distinctions at Harvard between actions that are anti-Semitic in their "effect" if not in their "intent." The Jewish stereotype subtly emerges and corrupts even those with "good intentions." A good college education depends on disciplined thinking and debate.

The phenomenon cited by the president of Harvard infects academics abroad too, where hundreds of European intellectuals demanded that Israeli researchers be removed from their ranks; Israeli scholars were ousted from the board of an international literature journal.

In this country, Jews who are aware of increasing attitudes of anti-Semitism arising from the conflict in the Middle East have found substantial support from Christian evangelicals who share their fears. The president of Harvard wants to broaden Christian support. He delivered his speech at the morning prayer service of the Memorial Church of Harvard, a nondenominational Protestant congregation. The daily morning-prayer service has been a tradition at Harvard since its founding in 1636. The service, meant to bring teachers and students together before classes start, opens with a brief speech by a member or friend of the university.

Mr. Summers said he was speaking out against anti-Semitism "not as president of the university but as a concerned member of our community." He posted the speech on his Summers' Page on the Harvard Web site. It should be assigned reading.

(Suzanne Fields is a columnist for The Washington Times.)


Hamas: Barghouti is a traitor. Al-Aqsa: Amar is a traitor

HAMAS JEALOUS OF THE AL-AQSA MARTYRS BRIGADES

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach two items:

1. In recent months, Hamas has grown increasingly jealous of the mounting operational "successes" (in terms of killing Israelis in suicide and other attacks) of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the terrorist militia founded by Yasser Arafat and Marwan Barghouti after they launched their intifada.

The tensions and rivalries between Hamas and Arafat's Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigades have become more public of late. According to the briefing (attached below, and translated by the IDF from Palestinian internet sites), Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi earlier this month criticized Palestinian and international media for "trying to glorify Marwan Barghouti's image."

Hamas denounced Barghouti, who is due to go on trial in Israel for murder, for "recruiting Nelson Mandela and a battery of French lawyers to defend him, despite the fact that [Israel] is detaining [suspected Palestinian terrorists] who are much more important and serving in much more active roles than he is."

The Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades website has responded by denouncing Hamas for "disgracing one of our noble warriors, Marwan Barghouti."

2. Following the IDF translation, I attach a separate statement by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from September 23, 2002, denouncing Nabil Amar as a "traitor". Nabil Amar recently called for reform of the Palestinian Authority and criticized Yasser Arafat. The statement by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades implies that Amar will be "punished" for his criticism of Arafat.



FULL ARTICLES

TOP HAMAS OFFICIAL BRANDS MARWAN BARGHOUTI A “TRAITOR”

Top Hamas official brands Marwan Barghouti a "traitor"

Over the past several days, tensions have been rising between Fatah and Hamas. The two Palestinian terror organizations are exchanging public accusations as they vie for leadership in the armed struggle against Israel.

According to IDF statistics, Palestinian terrorists have carried out more than 13,700 terror attacks since September 2000. These attacks have resulted in the slaying of 612 civilians, soldiers and visitors.

The current uproar was sparked by blatant criticisms, voiced by top Hamas official Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, against Marwan Barghouti, commander of the terrorist wing of the Fatah, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades. Barghouti is currently standing trial in Israel for the murder of dozens of Israeli civilians and soldiers.

HAMAS STATEMENTS

Statement by Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi:

On 8 September 2002, responding to remarks by a participant in the Internet forum, 'Paltalk', Rantisi stated:

"Palestinian and international media are trying to glorify Marwan Barghouti's image. In addition, campaigns are being organized to defend him [legally and publicly], despite the fact that he [Barghouti] was among the Copenhagen Group [a political dialog that took place between Israel and the Palestinians in Copenhagen several years ago] and pursued peace with Israel [in peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in the late 90s]."

"It seems that steps are being taken to turn him [Barghouti] into the 'Karadi of Palestine' [Karadi: the U.S.-appointed Afghan leader after the overthrow of the Taliban regime]. This is manifested by the world-wide interest in him [Barghouti] and the recruiting of Nelson Mandela and a battery of French lawyers to defend him, this despite the fact that Israel is detaining [suspected Palestinian terrorists] who are much more important and serving in much more active roles than he is. Most important among these is 'jihad warrior' Hassan Yusuf [a Ramallah-based Hamas official being held in Israel for his direct involvement in terror attacks]."

"Is this act of turning Barghouti into the new Palestinian Karadi going to continue? Are you going to allow this?"

Statement by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin:

These accusations reinforce recent angry remarks directed at Fatah by Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. In a special interview with the Islamic newspaper Nidaa Alislam in July 2002, Yassin declared that Hamas "is working to deepen the roots of Islam in Palestine?. The Islamic movement has scored a great victory over the secular movements [primarily Fatah] that have been overshadowed by the spreading wave of Islam after having held the reins of government [in the past]."

Below are some relevant excerpts from Yassin's interview:

Rantisi's claims provoked much disfavor among members of Fatah, headed by Yassir Arafat. In a formal statement published by members of the Fatah Forum on the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades website, Barghouti is called 'warrior, symbol of the struggle, and flag of the Intifada who lit the torch [of struggle] that will never be extinguished.' These descriptions of Barghouti as 'warrior of the Intifada' [the war of terror against Israel initiated by the Palestinian Authority in September 2000] contradict the claims of Palestinian organizations acting on behalf of Barghouti that allege that he is merely a political figure.

FATAH RESPONDS

The following is a translation of a statement published on the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades website:

"In the name of the merciful compassionate Allah
A statement by the members of the Fatah Forum
[The symbol of the Fatah movement]

A dangerous precedent – a Hamas leader has disgraced one of our noble warriors, Marwan Barghouti!

Oh, brothers of the Palestinian people, standing tall,

Marwan Barghouti is a symbol of the struggle, a flag of the Intifada who lit the torch [of struggle] that will never be extinguished.

We, sons of Palestine, sons of Fatah, members of the Fatah Forum, stress that our people – no matter which groups or divisions we represent – cannot accept the vile words of Dr. Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi, prominent Hamas leader, who brags about his dedication to "national unity" while he points his finger at others saying that they are deliberately undermining it."

Rantisi stated in an Internet interview he gave on 8 September 2002: 'Everything connected with the trial of our brother warrior Marwan Barghouti is but a show to allow him to be transformed into a 'Palestinian Karadi.'

We consider these words of Rantisi, as well as his agreement with and support of the question directed to him during that interview, a dangerous precedent and expressive only of his narrow political outlook. This characterization of the warrior Barghouti constitutes a serious deviation from the basic principles of our Palestinian people, offensive in light of his sacrifices and an insult to the blood of the fallen and wounded and the sacrifice of the imprisoned.

We take this opportunity to send greetings to our warriors detained in Zionist penitentiaries, first and foremost these brothers:

Nasser Abu Hamid
[Ramallah-based Fatah operative convicted of murdering Israelis]

Nasser Awis
[Nablus-based Fatah operative responsible for dispatching suicide terrorists]

Abed Alrahim Maluch
[Senior official of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, responsible for the PFLP's policy of terror]

Marwan Barghouti
[Head of the Fatah terrorist wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades]

Hassan Yusuf
[Senior Hamas leader in Ramallah, involved in terror attacks]

Louis Abdu
[Senior Fatah operative, linked to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades]

Abu Haza
[Kalkilya-based Fatah operative involved in terror attacks]

Yasser Abu Bachar
[Samaria-based Fatah operative involved in terror attacks]

We call for their immediate release

We, members of the Fatah Movement in the Fatah Forum call upon all [active] forces among our [Palestinian] people and the [Arab] nation to condemn and denounce the slander and allegations directed at the standing of one of our brave warriors. It seems that he who uttered these words strives to draw attention to himself at the expense of our warriors, the [Palestinian] problem and the interests of our [Palestinian] people while destroying what our people have achieved through blood and sacrifice.

We call upon Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi to apologize, immediately and publicly, for his statements. We call upon our brothers in Hamas to bear the burden of national responsibility and declare their position vis these statements, positive or negative.

We call upon our brother Ahmed Yassin to intervene immediately, to publicly denounce the current situation, as he, more than anyone else, is aware of its sensitivity and to take care to distance himself from these statements.

Should he [Rantisi] fail to do so, we will pursue him using every legal, informational, legislative and other legal means at our disposal to pay him back for his despicable behavior. We emphasize that these actions will not deter us, the sons of Fatah, from continuing the struggle to be the first in line among the guardians of national unity and in the struggle for the liberation of our country – which was stolen from us – and the captive holy sites, until the establishment of our Palestinian state with its capital, Jerusalem, headed by the warrior leader, the symbol, Abu Amar [Yassir Arafat].

This revolution will end only in victory.
Fatah Forum

 

NABIL AMAR IS A TRAITOR

Nabil Amar is a traitor
Statement by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades
September 23, 2002

This is a translation of the declaration published by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades on 23 September 2002:

"Our brave people At this moment of truth, while our people, and all the groups it consists of, stand united by the leader [Arafat]'s side, there is one group of middlemen and agents that is watching us and trying to force an alternative leadership upon us. They do this in order to solve the Palestinian problem, by advance planning with the Americans and the Israelis, who gave legitimacy to the continuation of the occupation [of the Palestinian land]. They cooperated with the occupation and made plans to wipe out the brave and noble fighters who are protecting our independent decision-making. Those who are called 'an alternative' have became 'a third side' and do not play any part in the Palestinian battle. On this point, we wish to emphasize that we have no other leader apart from the leaders who are currently dealing with our problems and with the current events concerning our people in this highly decisive period.

"We have no other leadership apart from the warrior leadership, from the point of view of real and true belief in the battle, we wish to say to all the conspirators, such as Nabil Amar and his group of traitors who are seeking to create an alternative leadership, that their schemes will not be realised. We want to emphasize at this point, our right to armed battle in every way possible and to strike at the Zionist targets and the Zionist territory [the State of Israel]. Our people have no other choice but the way of legitimate battle and gathering around the leadership and the symbol, which is Yaser Arafat.

"The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades warns all those who have chosen to scorn the achievements of the Palestinian people, led by the national and historic leadership.

"The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades take it upon themselves to fulfill the mission of resistance, and to make dubious the opposition within the Palestinian Authority and within the Fatah [to Arafat] which has been denounced by the entire Palestinian People.

"The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades – Say and do. Promise and fulfill.


Yom Kippur update: TV boss attacks his own station

September 20, 2002

CONTENTS

1. "Totally unrealistic and factually incorrect"
2. "TV chief attacks 'one-sided' Palestinian documentary" (Guardian, Sept. 20, 2002)
3. "Carlton chairman criticises its own documentary on Israel" (Independent, Sept. 20, 2002)



“TOTALLY UNREALISTIC AND FACTUALLY INCORRECT”

[Note by Tom Gross]

This is a follow-up to Tuesday's dispatch On Yom Kippur, British TV screens a particularly harsh attack on Israel.

The head of Britain's biggest television company, Carlton Communications, today took the extraordinary step of disowning the programming of his own station. (Carlton had made the program for ITV.) Michael Green said of the documentary "Palestine Is Still the Issue," broadcast on the day of Yom Kippur: "It was totally unrealistic, it was factually incorrect, and historically incorrect."

Below are articles from the "religion" section of today's (UK) Guardian and the "media" section of the Independent. While a number of television executives and newspaper owners have admitted in private in recent months that their journalists are unfair to Israel, it is extremely rare for them to do so in public.

-- Tom Gross



FULL ARTICLES

“ONE-SIDED AND HISTORICALLY INCORRECT”

TV chief attacks 'one-sided' Palestinian documentary
Is Green right to criticise his programme makers?
By Stephen Bates
The Guardian
September 20, 2002

Michael Green, chairman of Carlton Communications, has disowned a John Pilger documentary on the Palestinians, made and transmitted by his own company and condemned as one-sided by the Israeli embassy, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and Conservative Friends of Israel.

The late-night documentary by one of journalism's best-known polemicists, broadcast on Monday, was seen by about 1 million viewers. The company said yesterday it had attracted viewers' complaints and praise in equal measure.

But Mr Green, who is Jewish, told the Jewish Chronicle he had been "extremely unhappy" with the programme and was actively seeking to balance it with another documentary putting the Israeli point of view. "I entirely agree with what is being said. It was one-sided, it was totally unrealistic, but it was John Pilger ... it was factually incorrect, historically incorrect.

"There's no doubt in my mind that this programme is a tragedy for Israel so far as accuracy is concerned. What I am doing right now is to make sure there is a programme that shows the Israeli point of view.

"I agree with the board of deputies that what is terribly important is to try to get balance and redress."

The documentary Palestine Is Still the Issue, broadcast on the day of Yom Kippur, the holiest in the Jewish calendar, condemned Israeli injustices towards the Palestinians and argued that they were at the root of the Middle East conflict. It interviewed Palestinians, Israelis and an Israeli government spokesman.

The embassy claimed that the programme was a wilful distortion and offered a "dehumanised portrayal of the Jewish people, exemplified by regular insinuation and comparison to the holocaust (which) was wholly offensive". The board of deputies said it made no effort to provide context or provide any kind of Israeli perspective.

A spokeswoman for Carlton said there was no confirmation that another film would be made. She added: "Notwithstanding the chairman's views the documentary was not prevented from being shown."

John Pilger was not available for comment.

 

A “TRAGEDY FOR ISRAEL SO FAR AS ACCURACY IS CONCERNED”

Carlton chairman criticises its own documentary on Israel
By Paul Peachey
The Independent
September 20, 2002

The chairman of Carlton Television, Michael Green, has strongly criticised one of his company's documentaries on the Middle East made by the award-winning journalist John Pilger.

Mr Green said the programme, Palestine Is Still The Issue, was one-sided, totally unrealistic and a "tragedy for Israel so far as accuracy is concerned". He told the Jewish Chronicle that he had seen the programme before it was broadcast on Monday and was "extremely unhappy" with it. He said he was "focused" on getting the network to make a programme from the Israeli point of view.

"I fully accept that we are a public-service broadcaster and that it is the opinion of John Pilger," he told the newspaper. "That is the nature of our remit. We do present programmes that give differing points of view. It was factually incorrect, historically incorrect. Unfortunately, you can't always agree with him. He [Mr Pilger] has a huge reputation but consistently my views are very much opposed to his views."

Last night Mr Pilger told The Independent: "What this fuss is about is that a mainstream documentary has described accurately and fairly the great injustice done to the Palestinian people and it has done so by using both Palestinian and Israeli witnesses.

"To the pro-Israeli lobby, the broadcast of this basic truth is unacceptable." The programme, which followed up a documentary on Palestine Mr Pilger made 25 years ago, has stirred strong passions and Carlton was inundated with complaints and praise in equal measure, according to a spokeswoman. About one million people watched the programme.

A spokesman from Carlton factual programmes, said the views expressed by Mr Green were his own and that he was in no way involved in the programme or its transmission.

He added: "John Pilger's programme and its accuracy went through normal procedures of editorial scrutiny prior to completion and senior executives both at Carlton and the ITV network approved its transmission. The film dealt with a sensitive subject and was bound to be controversial."

The Israeli embassy said it would be demanding ITV schedule a programme that "presents an objective and honest version of this complex and multifaceted conflict". The Board of Deputies of British Jews has also complained to the Independent Television Commission.

Carlton said it could not confirm another documentary would be made. Mr Green had no say on scheduling.


On Yom Kippur, British TV screens a particularly harsh attack on Israel

September 18, 2002

CONTENTS

1. "Ferocious anti-Israel propaganda packed with lies"
2. Even Yasser Arafat doesn't go so far as Pilger
3. The Gloria Hunniford chat show
4. "Best not to clog up the airwaves with a lot of whining Jews"
5. "No newspaper in the UK mentioned it"
6. Fisk: why are Palestinian dead not part of 9/11 commemorations?
7. "Israel's Routine Terrorism" (By John Pilger, Mirror, September 16, 2002)
8. "America's case for war is built on blindness, hypocrisy and lies" (By Robert Fisk, Independent, September 15, 2002)


“FEROCIOUS ANTI-ISRAEL PROPAGANDA PACKED WITH LIES”

[Note by Tom Gross]

Britain's most popular television channel, ITV1, is being criticized for airing a program which has been described as "ferociously anti-Israel propaganda packed with lies." British Jews were angry not only with the content of the program but with its timing, falling on Yom Kippur. In a reference to Iraq, the program was titled "Palestine is still the Issue".

The concluding comments of Pilger's program, made by Carlton Television for ITV, were: The world stood silent when the Holocaust was committed against the Jews – will they stay silent again?'

EVEN YASSER ARAFAT DOESN’T GO SO FAR AS PILGER

To accompany the documentary, its maker, John Pilger, published an article in The Mirror, one of Europe's highest selling dailies, which has several million readers. I attach that article below.

Typical of many European media pieces on the Middle East, Pilger's commentary (headlined: "Israel's routine terrorism" and attached below) is riddled with the most basic factual errors. There is barely a statistic or fact given in his article which is correct. And even Yasser Arafat doesn't go so far in some of Pilger's claims, such as "For much of their resistance, the Palestinians have fought back courageously with slingshots". (In the period 1951 – 1955 alone, for example, there were more 3000 armed terror attacks against Israeli civilians, resulting in the deaths of 922 Israelis and foreign tourists.)

Before that, to indicate that there is a diversity of opinion on the Middle East in the British media, I attach an extract from the U.S.-based Canadian writer Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph, and a surprisingly self critical paragraph from The Guardian.

THE GLORIA HUNNIFORD CHAT SHOW

Pilger's discussion of the program, on the Gloria Hunniford chat show (which is carried on another British television station, Channel 5) was aired earlier during Yom Kippur when few Jews were available to participate.

According to TV reviewers, Israel and Israelis in the programme were dehumanized from start to finish. No effort was made to provide context, Israeli perspective or even explanation. The program also accuses the Jewish world of carrying out a conspiracy to manipulate the non-Jewish world into believing that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic.

“BEST NOT TO CLOG UP THE AIRWAVES WITH A LOT OF WHINING JEWS”

Mark Steyn (The Daily Telegraph, September 14, 2002): "Still, I for one never tire of seeing headscarved women in Midwestern towns giving interviews about how in the past year they can tell people are looking at them "differently". I expect the French, German and Belgian television shows are full of features about how European Jews have spent the past year coping with savage assaults, synagogue torchings, schoolbus burnings, etc. They're not? My, you do surprise me. It's probably just as well. Best not to clog up the airwaves with a lot of whining Jews moaning about being attacked by Muslim gangs, lest it provoke another anti-Muslim "backlash", eh?"

“NO NEWSPAPER IN THE UK MENTIONED IT”

Ian Mayes (The Guardian, September 16, 2002): "Why, I was asked last week by a reader in Israel, had the paper not reported a rally of about 2,000 Arabs in support of Saddam Hussein in Gaza City on September 10? A piece of unidentified copy, quoting Associated Press, followed the question: "Did this story appear in today's Guardian?" The answer is no. The Guardian's correspondent that day was, in any case, busy on the West Bank. The question was really intended as a statement – that the Guardian's coverage was so slanted against the Israelis and in favour of the Palestinians that a report such as this, judged by the reader to reflect unfavourably on the Palestinians, stood no chance of appearing in the Guardian. In fact, an electronic search failed to find any mention of it in any national newspaper in the United Kingdom."

FISK: WHY ARE PALESTINIAN DEAD NOT PART OF 9/11 COMMEMORATIONS?

Incidentally, Robert Fisk, the chief Middle East correspondent of the liberal British daily The Independent, spent September 11 addressing an American university on why "the massacre of Palestinians in Beirut 20 years ago, with its death toll well over half that of 11 September" was not being commemorated in the US as part of the September 11 anniversary.

-- Tom Gross



FULL ARTICLES

ISRAEL’S ROUTINE TERRORISM

Israel's Routine Terrorism
John Pilger on the hypocrisy of an occupying force
The Mirror
September 16, 2002

Tonight ITV1 screens John Pilger's powerful documentary, "Palestine is still the Issue." In this special report, Pilger reveals the tragedy of an epic injustice that is at the root of Bush's and Blair's threats of war.

Last October, in the early hours of the morning, a young expectant mother called Fatima Abed-Rabo awoke with intense labour pains; and she and her husband Nasser set out in a friend's car for the hospital in Bethlehem, in Israeli occupied Palestine.

The couple had been trying for a second child for three years and had undergone fertility treatment. "The news of the pregnancy had made us so happy," said Nasser, "that we celebrated by replacing the tin sheeting on our home with a concrete roof."

The couple were stopped at the Israeli military roadblock just outside their village. The soldiers turned them back, even though Fatima was now haemorrhaging. They got a taxi, hoping that would be allowed through. Again, they were turned back. No explanation was given; one soldier mimicked Fatima's moans.

Fatima gave birth to her baby in the taxi. She remembers the soldiers hurling her husband's ID into the blood on the floor.

"We cut the umbilical cord with a razor blade," she said. "My husband wrapped the tiny boy in his jacket, and eventually one of his relatives found a back route."

Barely three pounds in weight, blue and in a critical condition, the baby was dead by the time they arrived at the hospital.

We don't know why they did this to us," she told me in my film on ITV tonight. "It wasn't personal. This is how they treat all Palestinians. I'm sorry to say this, but they would rather help an animal than an Arab."

Stories like Fatima's are rarely news in Britain, yet they are typical of the everyday treatment of the Palestinians. Human rights groups run by Israelis have recorded hundreds of instances of pregnant and seriously ill Palestinians being turned back at Israeli checkpoints, including ambulances.

"We don't know how many have died like this," said a spokeswoman for the Israeli Physicians for Human Rights, "because many people don't even bother to set out for hospital, knowing the soldiers will stop them. "These people offer no threat to Israel. Those who do, like the suicide bombers, of course never go through roadblocks, which exist only to control, subjugate and humiliate ordinary people. It is like a routine terrorism."

Fatima's remark about being treated worse than an animal is apposite. It is always easier to harm or kill people who, in the eyes of the powerful, do not matter: be it in Afghanistan or occupied Palestine.

Israeli soldiers enforcing the illegal occupation of Palestinian land can cause the death of babies and other innocents, or kill them outright, and words such as murder and terrorism are almost never used. The same immunity has been enjoyed by those politicians who design and permit this "routine terrorism," which is the product of a form of colonialism.

Indeed, to understand both the roots and the double standards of Bush's "war on terror," whose propaganda the Israeli regime of Ariel Sharon has adopted almost word for word, you need to come to Palestine, where one of the longest military occupations in modern times is now in its 36th year.

When I was passing through Israeli checkpoints last May, there were several of these routine murders. A nurse was one of them. Nine-tenths of Palestinians killed by the Israelis are civilians; 45 per cent are teenagers and children. In Gaza, five years ago, an amusement park opened beside the sea. It was the only one in a deeply impoverished place populated mainly by refugees whose families were forced off their land or out of their villages by the Israelis.

"At first, it was very successful," said Walid Al Dirawi, who looks after the deserted ruin of rusting rides and dodgem cars. "Then the shooting started from across the road. The Israeli settlers and soldiers shot it up every weekend, and of course people stayed away." Behind the dodgems is a wall pock-marked with bullet holes, like a shooting gallery.

The "settlers" are mostly religious Israelis or immigrants from Russia, America and elsewhere, who are subsidised by the government to live in what are colonial fortresses in the midst of Palestinian communities, guarded by the Israeli army. They have no right to be there under international law, and the United Nations says they should get out. Their justification is usually Biblical.

For the Israeli state, they serve a practical purpose; they occupy and encroach upon more and more Palestinian land, while allowing the military to control the Palestinians with more and more roadblocks and restrictions. Many Palestinian villages are surrounded by barbed wire, and people require a special permit even to travel to the next one. Gaza, where 800,000 are trapped, is surrounded by an electrified fence.

When Archbishop Desmond Tutu came here recently, he said: "The way the Palestinians are treated is the way we were treated in apartheid South Africa."

Trapped by checkpoints and arbitrary curfews the Palestinian economy is in ruins. According to a US government survey, more than half of all Palestinian children suffer from malnutrition, including chronic malnutrition defined as stunted growth.

People struggle to live on less than £1 a day. One of the most moving sights I have seen are the kites that reach for the sky every dusk, displaying the colours of the Palestinian flag, flown by terribly thin children from their open prison in refugee camps.

Cutting a swathe through this poverty and despair are the Israeli "settlements": surreal, middle class suburbs that are armed fortresses with watchtowers. From here, the "settlers" shot up the amusement park. I visited one of these fortresses. What struck me was the lushness: the constant sound of running water: sprinklers nourishing hothouse crops and manicured gardens. On the other side of what looks like the Berlin Wall, in impoverished Gaza, standpipes trickle and often run dry.

These illegal, provocative enclaves, and their surrounding security areas, control almost 42 per cent of occupied Palestine – a fact that, on its own, makes mockery of the popular myth that two years ago the Israelis made a "generous" offer to return 90 per cent of the occupied territories, which the Palestinian Authority rejected.

The truth is very different. Following peace negotiations in America in 2000, President Clinton's National Security Adviser Robert Malley, who was there with Clinton, revealed that, although the Palestinians rejected certain Israeli proposals, "it could also be said that Israel rejected the unprecedented two-state solution put to them by the Palestinians, including the following provisions: a state of Israel incorporating some land captured in 1967 and including a very large majority of its settlers; the largest Jewish Jerusalem in the city's history (and) security guaranteed by a US-led international presence."

Shortly after it was founded in 1948, Israel controlled, mostly as a result of a United Nations partition and partly by force, a total of 78 per cent of historic Palestine. The Palestinians, who were the majority, fled in an orchestrated campaign of fear and terror, or they were expelled. These days, this would be known as "ethnic cleansing".

When he retired, General Moshe Dayan, Israel's military hero, said: "Jewish places were built in the place of Arab villages. There is not one single place in the country that did not have a former Arab population."

During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israelis occupied the remaining 22 per cent of Palestine. Today, the Palestinians, seeking to form their own independent state, want only that 22 per cent back.

Little of this background is known or understood widely in Britain, even though the region is constantly in the news. Last May, the Glasgow University Media Group, famous for its pioneering media analysis, published a study that found TV viewers in particular were rarely told that Palestinians were the victims of an illegal and brutal military occupation. Only nine per cent of those interviewed were aware that the Israelis were the occupiers. For years, representing the Israelis as oppressors has been a taboo with always the threat of slurs of anti-Semitism (a bleak irony, as Palestinians are Semites, too).

This has been manipulated by the Israeli government and its foreign lobbies, especially in the United States where the lobby commands most of the Congress and the White House.

Many Israelis, like many Jews in Britain and other counties, condemn this intimidation, just as they condemn the occupation and are fearful of its deeply corrupting effect on Israeli society. Recently, the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Jonathan Sacks, said he had long believed that Israel should give back the Occupied Territories. When I was in Israel in May, some 50,000 Israelis crowded central Tel Aviv, demanding that the government of Ariel Sharon made peace.

They are still a minority. The Palestinian suicide bombers and their mass murder of innocents have hardened Israeli public opinion, but what is seldom reported is that they are a relatively recent phenomenon.

For much of their resistance, the Palestinians have fought back courageously with slingshots – against a modern army, equipped with tanks, fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships.

Britain has a historic responsibility towards the Palestinians. The 1917 "Balfour Declaration" promised Jews a homeland provided it would not prejudice the rights of the non-Jewish communities. The British famously reneged on this. Britain administered the League of Nations" Mandate for Palestine until the partition that created Israel in 1948, which the Palestinians call al-Nakba, "the catastrophe."

As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, successive British governments have pledged to support the resolutions that have called upon Israel to end its occupation.

In the General Assembly, there have been an estimated 450 resolutions calling, in one form or another, for justice for the Palestinians. This is a world record. No country has incurred the opprobrium of the world community as often as Israel and no country has been excused its "rogue" behaviour so consistently, thanks to its backer, America.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it was ordered to withdraw by the United Nations Security Council. When the Iraqis failed to comply, they were attacked with such force that tens of thousands were slaughtered. When Israel seized the West Bank of the Jordan and Gaza, it was ordered to withdraw by the same UN Security council. That was 35 years ago, and the occupation goes on.

On the contrary, Israel has since been rewarded with billions of dollars worth of aid and armaments, principally by the United States, which has helped it develop nuclear weapons and other so-called weapons of mass destruction.

Britain has nurtured the hypocrisy that reached its apogee in the United Nations General Assembly last week when George Bush, speaking and postulating like a Mafia don, and with the full support of Tony Blair, threatened the very existence of the UN unless it provided him with a figleaf from behind which he could attack Iraq.

But it was Israel's flouting of UN resolutions on Palestine that was the spectre in the General Assembly. Every delegate knew it, especially the British who are fully aware of the enduring destabilising effect of the illegal occupation.

They also know that it is being intensified by Ariel Sharon, a man whom a commission of his own parliament found indirectly but "personally responsible" for the massacre of more than 800 Palestinians in 1982 and who once boasted: "They (the Arabs) have the numbers. We have the matches."

With Bush and Blair about to ignite another war in the Middle East, justice for the Palestinians remains key to peace.

• John Pilger's documentary, "Palestine is still the Issue" is on ITV1 tonight at 11.05 p.m.

 

IN EXPOSING THE BRUTALITIES OF IRAQI TORTURE, FISK THROWS IN PILGER, ASHRAWI AND RELIES ON AMIRA HAAS AS DEFENSE

Robert Fisk: America's case for war is built on blindness, hypocrisy and lies
George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are wilfully ignoring the realities of the Middle East. The result can only be catastrophic
The Independent
September 15, 2002

Years ago, in a snug underground restaurant in downtown Tehran, drinking duq – an Iranian beverage of mint and yoghurt – Saddam Hussein's former head of nuclear research told me what happened when he made a personal appeal for the release of a friend from prison. "I was taken directly from my Baghdad office to the director of state security," he said. "I was thrown down the stairs to an underground cell and then stripped and trussed up on a wheel attached to the ceiling. Then the director came to see me.

"'You will tell us all about your friends – everything,' he said. 'In your field of research, you are an expert, the best. In my field of research, I am the best man.' That's when the whipping and the electrodes began."

All this happened, of course, when Saddam Hussein was still our friend, when we were encouraging him to go on killing Iranians in his 1980-88 war against Tehran, when the US government – under President Bush Snr – was giving Iraq preferential agricultural assistance funding. Not long before, Saddam's pilots had fired a missile into an American warship called the Stark and almost sunk it. Pilot error, claimed Saddam – the American vessel had been mistaken for an Iranian oil tanker – and the US government cheerfully forgave the Iraqi dictator.

Those were the days. But sitting in the United Nations General Assembly last week, watching President Bush Jr tell us with all his Texan passion about the beatings and the whippings and the rapes in Iraq, you would have thought they'd just been discovered. For sheer brazen historical hypocrisy, it would have been difficult to beat that part of the President's speech. Saddam, it appears, turned into a bad guy when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Before that, he was just a loyal ally of the United States, a "strong man" – as the news agency boys like to call our dictators – rather than a tyrant.

But the real lie in the President's speech – that which has dominated American political discourse since the crimes against humanity on 11 September last year – was the virtual absence of any attempt to explain the real reasons why the United States has found itself under attack.

In his mendacious article in this newspaper last week, President Bush's Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, also attempted to mask this reality. The 11 September assault, he announced, was an attack on people "who believe in freedom, who practise tolerance and who defend the inalienable rights of man". He made, as usual, absolutely no reference to the Middle East, to America's woeful, biased policies in that region, to its ruthless support for Arab dictators who do its bidding – for Saddam Hussein, for example, at a time when the head of Iraqi nuclear research was undergoing his Calvary – nor to America's military presence in the holiest of Muslim lands, nor to its unconditional support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian land in the West Bank and Gaza.

Oddly, a very faint ghost of this reality did creep into the start of the President's UN address last week. It was contained in two sentences whose importance was totally ignored by the American press – and whose true meaning might have been lost on Mr Bush himself, given that he did not write his speech – but it was revealing nonetheless. "Our common security," he said, "is challenged by regional conflicts – ethnic and religious strife that is ancient but not inevitable. In the Middle East, there can be no peace for either side without freedom for both sides." Then he repeated his old line about the need for "an independent and democratic Palestine".

This was perhaps as close as we've got, so far, to an official admission that this whole terrible crisis is about the Middle East. If this is a simple war for civilisation against "evil" – the line that Mr Bush was so cruelly peddling again to the survivors of 11 September and the victims' relatives last week – then what are these "regional challenges"? Why did Palestine insinuate its way into the text of President Bush's UN speech? Needless to say, this strange, uncomfortable little truth was of no interest to the New York and Washington media, whose wilful refusal to investigate the real political causes of this whole catastrophe has led to a news coverage that is as bizarre as it is schizophrenic.

Before dawn on 11 September last week, I watched six American television channels and saw the twin towers fall to the ground 18 times. The few references to the suicide killers who committed the crime made not a single mention of the fact that they were Arabs. Last week, The Washington Post and The New York Times went to agonising lengths to separate their Middle East coverage from the 11 September commemorations, as if they might be committing some form of sacrilege or be acting in bad taste if they did not. "The challenge for the administration is to offer a coherent and persuasive explanation of how the Iraq danger is connected to the 9/11 attacks" is about as far as The Washington Post got in smelling a rat, and that only dropped into the seventh paragraph of an eight-paragraph editorial.

All references to Palestine or illegal Jewish settlements or Israeli occupation of Arab land were simply erased from the public conscience last week. When Hannan Ashrawi, that most humane of Palestinian women, tried to speak at Colorado university on 11 September, Jewish groups organised a massive demonstration against her. US television simply did not acknowledge the Palestinian tragedy. It is a tribute to our own reporting that at least John Pilger's trenchant programme – Palestine is Still the Issue – is being shown on ITV tomorrow night, although at the disgracefully late time of 11.05pm.

But maybe all this no longer matters. When Mr Rumsfeld can claim so outrageously – as he did when asked for proof of Iraq's nuclear potential – that the "absence of evidence doesn't mean the evidence of absence", we might as well end all moral debate. When Mr Rumsfeld refers to the "so-called occupied West Bank", he reveals himself to be a very disreputable man. When he advances the policy of a pre-emptive "act" of war – as he did in The Independent on Sunday last week – he forgets Israel's "pre-emptive" 1982 invasion of Lebanon which cost 17,500 Arab lives and 22 years of occupation, and ended in retreat and military defeat for Israel.

Strange things are going on in the Middle East right now. Arab military intelligence reports the shifting of massive US arms shipments around the region – not just to Qatar and Kuwait, but to the Arabian Sea, the Red Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. American and Israeli military planners and intelligence analysts are said to have met twice in Tel Aviv to discuss the potential outcome of the next Middle East war. The destruction of Saddam and the break-up of Saudi Arabia – a likely scenario if Iraq crumbles – have long been two Israeli dreams. As the United States discovered during its fruitful period of neutrality between 1939 and 1941, war primes the pumps of the economy. Is that what is going on today – the preparation of a war to refloat the US economy?

My Israeli colleague Amira Haas once defined to me our job as journalists: "to monitor the centres of power". Never has it been so important for us to do just that. For if we fail, we will become the mouthpiece of power. So a few thoughts for the coming weeks: remember the days when Saddam was America's friend; remember that Arabs committed the crimes against humanity of 11 September last year and that they came from a place called the Middle East, a place of injustice and occupation and torture; remember "Palestine"; remember that, a year ago, no one spoke of Iraq, only of al-Qa'ida and Osama bin Laden. And, I suppose, remember that "evil" is a good crowd-puller but a mighty hard enemy to shoot down with a missile.


The Guardian’s views on U.S. think tanks

WHITAKER SOUNDS DANGEROUSLY LIKE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST

[Note by Tom Gross]

Following his recent trashing of MEMRI, Brian Whitaker, the Middle East editor of the (London) Guardian, turns his attention to other U.S. research institutes whose politics he dislikes. In a 2000 word "expose" (copied below, and published in The Guardian under the banner "world dispatch"), Whitaker examines the influence these organizations supposedly have on U.S. mideast policy. He suggests that they – rather than the increasingly murderous and dictatorial policies of Yasser Arafat – are behind what he calls "an increasingly bizarre set of policies on the Middle East coming from Washington".

Whitaker insists on putting the word "expert" in inverted commas when referring to such Middle East scholars as Michael Rubin. He also sounds dangerously like a conspiracy theorist when he refers to the independent groups he chooses to highlight as "a cosy and cleverly-constructed network."

He says that these "privately-funded organizations promote views from only one end of the political spectrum". Whitaker fails to mention the host of other think tanks and research institutes in the US that espouse views closer to his own, and that are also privately funded, whether by American Jews or Saudi princes.

And, as in previous attacks on other people's not-for-profit organizations, Whitaker fails to tell readers that he runs one of his own: al-Bab, or Arab Gateway, whose website has pages about non-Arab minorities in the Middle East, such as Berbers and Kurds, but no page on Jews, and which has a "Palestine" section but no "Israel" section.

-- Tom Gross



“A COSY AND CLEVERLY-CONSTRUCTED NETWORK OF MIDDLE EAST ‘EXPERTS’”

US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy
Brian Whitaker reports on the network of research institutes whose views and TV appearances are supplanting all other experts on Middle Eastern issues
The Guardian
August 19, 2002

http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,777100,00.html

A little-known fact about Richard Perle, the leading advocate of hardline policies at the Pentagon, is that he once wrote a political thriller. The book, appropriately called Hard Line, is set in the days of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Its hero is a male senior official at the Pentagon, working late into the night and battling almost single-handedly to rescue the US from liberal wimps at the state department who want to sign away America's nuclear deterrent in a disarmament deal with the Russians.

Ten years on Mr Perle finds himself cast in the real-life role of his fictional hero – except that the Russians are no longer a threat, so he has to make do with the Iraqis, the Saudis and terrorism in general.

In real life too, Mr Perle is not fighting his battle single-handed. Around him there is a cosy and cleverly-constructed network of Middle East "experts" who share his neo-conservative outlook and who pop up as talking heads on US television, in newspapers, books, testimonies to congressional committees, and at lunchtime gatherings in Washington.

The network centres on research institutes – thinktanks that attempt to influence government policy and are funded by tax-deductible gifts from unidentified donors.

When he is not too busy at the Pentagon, or too busy running Hollinger Digital – part of the group that publishes the Daily Telegraph in Britain – or at board meetings of the Jerusalem Post, Mr Perle is "resident fellow" at one of the thinktanks – the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Mr Perle's close friend and political ally at AEI is David Wurmser, head of its Middle East studies department. Mr Perle helpfully wrote the introduction to Mr Wurmser's book, Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein.

Mr Wurmser's wife, Meyrav, is co-founder, along with Colonel Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence – of the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri), which specialises in translating and distributing articles that show Arabs in a bad light.

She also holds strong views on leftwing Israeli intellectuals, whom she regards as a threat to Israel (see "Selective Memri", Guardian Unlimited, August 12, 2002).

Ms Wurmser currently runs the Middle East section at another thinktank – the Hudson Institute, where Mr Perle recently joined the board of trustees. In addition, Ms Wurmser belongs to an organisation called the Middle East Forum.

Michael Rubin, a specialist on Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, who recently arrived from yet another thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, assists Mr Perle and Mr Wurmser at AEI. Mr Rubin also belongs to the Middle East Forum.

Another Middle East scholar at AEI is Laurie Mylroie, author of Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, which expounds a rather daft theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing.

When the book was published by the AEI, Mr Perle hailed it as "splendid and wholly convincing".

An earlier book on Iraq Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf which Ms Mylroie co-authored with Judith Miller, a New York Times journalist, became the New York Times's No 1 bestseller.

Ms Mylroie and Ms Miller both have connections with the Middle East Forum. Mr Perle, Mr Rubin, Ms Wurmser, Ms Mylroie and Ms Miller are all clients of Eleana Benador, a Peruvian-born linguist who acts as a sort of theatrical agent for experts on the Middle East and terrorism, organising their TV appearances and speaking engagements.

Of the 28 clients on Ms Benador's books, at least nine are connected with the AEI, the Washington Institute and the Middle East Forum.

Although these three privately-funded organisations promote views from only one end of the political spectrum, the amount of exposure that they get with their books, articles and TV appearances is extraordinary.

The Washington Institute, for example, takes the credit for placing up to 90 articles written by its members – mainly "op-ed" pieces – in newspapers during the last year.

Fourteen of those appeared in the Los Angeles Times, nine in New Republic, eight in the Wall Street Journal, eight in the Jerusalem Post, seven in the National Review Online, six in the Daily Telegraph, six in the Washington Post, four in the New York Times and four in the Baltimore Sun. Of the total, 50 were written by Michael Rubin.

Anyone who has tried offering op-ed articles to a major newspaper will appreciate the scale of this achievement.

The media attention bestowed on these thinktanks is not for want of other experts in the field. American universities have about 1,400 full-time faculty members specialising in the Middle East.

Of those, an estimated 400-500 are experts on some aspect of contemporary politics in the region, but their views are rarely sought or heard, either by the media or government.

"I see a parade of people from these institutes coming through as talking heads [on cable TV]. I very seldom see a professor from a university on those shows," says Juan Cole, professor of history at Michigan University, who is a critic of the private institutes.

"Academics [at universities] are involved in analysing what's going on but they're not advocates, so they don't have the same impetus," he said.

"The expertise on the Middle East that exists in the universities is not being utilised, even for basic information."

Of course, very few academics have agents like Eleana Benador to promote their work and very few are based in Washington – which can make arranging TV appearances , or rubbing shoulders with state department officials a bit difficult.

Those who work for US thinktanks are often given university-style titles such as "senior fellow", or "adjunct scholar", but their research is very different from that of universities – it is entirely directed towards shaping government policy.

What nobody outside the thinktanks knows, however, is who pays for this policy-shaping research.

Under US law, large donations given to non-profit, "non-partisan" organisations such as thinktanks must be itemised in their annual "form 990" returns to the tax authorities. But the identity of donors does not need to be made public.

The AEI, which deals with many other issues besides the Middle East, had assets of $35.8m (£23.2m) and an income of $24.5m in 2000, according to its most recent tax return.

It received seven donations of $1m or above in cash or shares, the highest being $3.35m.

The Washington Institute, which deals only with Middle East policy, had assets of $11.2m and an income of $4.1m in 2000. The institute says its donors are identifiable because they are also its trustees, but the list of trustees contains 239 names which makes it impossible to distinguish large benefactors from small ones.

The smaller Middle East Forum had an income of less than $1.5m in 2000, with the largest single donation amounting to $355,000.

In terms of their ability to influence policy, thinktanks have several advantages over universities. To begin with they can hire staff without committee procedures, which allows them to build up teams of researchers that share a similar political orientation.

They can also publish books themselves without going through the academic refereeing processes required by university publishers. And they usually site themselves in Washington, close to government and the media.

Apart from influencing policy on the Middle East, the Washington Institute and the Middle East Forum recently launched a campaign to discredit university departments that specialise in the region.

After September 11, when various government agencies realised there was a shortage of Americans who could speak Arabic, there were moves to beef up the relevant university departments.

But Martin Kramer, of the Washington Institute, Middle East Forum and former director of the Moshe Dayan Centre at Tel Aviv university, had other ideas.

He produced a vitriolic book Ivory Towers on Sand, which criticised Middle East departments of universities in the US.

His book was published by the Washington Institute and warmly reviewed in the Weekly Standard, whose editor, William Kristol, was a member of the Middle East Forum along with Mr Kramer.

"Kramer has performed a crucial service by exposing intellectual rot in a scholarly field of capital importance to national wellbeing," the review said.

The Washington Institute is considered the most influential of the Middle East thinktanks, and the one that the state department takes most seriously. Its director is the former US diplomat, Dennis Ross.

Besides publishing books and placing newspaper articles, the institute has a number of other activities that for legal purposes do not constitute lobbying, since this would change its tax status.

It holds lunches and seminars, typically about three times a week, where ideas are exchanged and political networking takes place. It has also given testimony to congressional committees nine times in the last five years.

Every four years, it convenes a "bipartisan blue-ribbon commission" known as the Presidential study group, which presents a blueprint for Middle East policy to the newly-elected president.

The institute makes no secret of its extensive links with Israel, which currently include the presence of two scholars from the Israeli armed forces.

Israel is an ally and the connection is so well known that officials and politicians take it into account when dealing with the institute. But it would surely be a different matter if the ally concerned were a country such as Egypt, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

Apart from occasional lapses, such as the publication of Mr Kramer's book, the Washington Institute typically represents the considered, sober voice of American-Israeli conservatism.

The Middle East Forum is its strident voice – two different tones, but mostly the same people.

Three prominent figures from the Washington Institute – Robert Satloff (director of policy), Patrick Clawson (director of research) and Mr Rubin (prolific writer, currently at AEI) – also belong to the forum.

Daniel Pipes, the bearded $100,000-a-year head of the forum is listed as an "associate" at the institute, while Mr Kramer, editor of the forum's journal, is a "visiting fellow".

Mr Pipes became the bete noire of US Muslim organisations after writing an article for the National Review in 1990 that referred to "massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene".

Since he usually complains vigorously when the words are quoted outside their original context, readers are invited to view the full article at www.danielpipes.org. He is also noted for his combative performances on the Fox News channel, where he has an interesting business relationship. Search for his name on the Fox News website and, along with transcripts of his TV interviews, an advert appears saying "Daniel Pipes is available thru Barber & Associates, America's leading resource for business, international and technology speakers since 1977".

The Middle East Forum issues two regular publications, the Middle East Quarterly and the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, the latter published jointly with the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon.

The Middle East Quarterly describes itself as "a bold, insightful, and controversial publication".

Among the insights in its latest issue is an article on weapons of mass destruction that says Syria "has more destructive capabilities" than Iraq, or Iran.

The Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, which is sent out by email free of charge – but can never-the-less afford to pay its contributors – specialises in covering the seamy side of Lebanese and Syrian politics. The ever-active Mr Rubin is on its editorial board.

The Middle East Forum also targets universities through its campus speakers Bureau – that in adopting the line of Mr Kramer's book, seeks to correct "inaccurate Middle Eastern curricula in American education", by addressing "biases" and "basic errors" and providing "better information" than students can get from the many "irresponsible" professors that it believes lurk in US universities.

At a time when much of the world is confused by what it sees as an increasingly bizarre set of policies on the Middle East coming from Washington, to understand the neat little network outlined above may make such policies a little more explicable.

Of course these people and organisations are not the only ones trying to influence US policy on the Middle East. There are others who try to influence it too – in different directions.

However, this particular network is operating in a political climate that is currently especially receptive to its ideas.

It is also well funded by its anonymous benefactors and is well organised. Ideas sown by one element are watered and nurtured by the others.

Whatever outsiders may think about this, worldly-wise Americans see no cause for disquiet. It's just a coterie of like-minded chums going about their normal business, and an everyday story of political life in Washington.


The killing of Israelis, harassment of journalists by Arafat resumes

CONTENTS

1. Harassment of journalists barely reported in western media
2. "Members of Palestinian security services abduct three Italians in Gaza Strip" (Jerusalem Post, Sept. 18, 2002)
3. "Al Aksa brigades claim responsibility for Mevo Dotan shooting" (AP, Sept. 18, 2002)
4. "Israeli victim identified as 67-year-old man from Ma'aleh Adumim" (Jerusalem Post, Sept. 18, 2002)
5. "French court orders release of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon" (AP, Sept. 18, 2002)



HARASSMENT OF JOURNALISTS BARELY REPORTED IN WESTERN MEDIA

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach five items:

1. "Members of Palestinian security services abduct three Italians in Gaza Strip" (Jerusalem Post, September 18, 2002). This is an example of the kind of threats and harassment of western journalists (usually those who do not toe the Palestinian line) by Yasser Arafat's security forces. It occurs often but is rarely reported on in western media, nor criticized by western human rights groups.

2. "One dead, two hurt in suicide bomb attack in northern Israel" (AP/Jerusalem Post, September 18, 2002). This is the first "successful" suicide attack since August 4. The dead man is in addition to the suicide bomber. According to Israel's Channel 2 TV, the victim was a policeman who approached the bomber (who then detonated the device) thus stopping him from blowing himself up next to a crowd of civilians.

In addition to the suicide bomb, at least two other Israeli civilians have been murdered at random today.

3. "Al Aksa brigades claim responsibility for Mevo Dotan shooting" (AP, September 18, 2002). In a phone call to the Associated press, the al Aksa terrorist group, formed by Yasser Arafat since the start of the Intifada, boasts about its latest murder of an Israeli civilian this morning.

4. "Israeli victim identified as 67-year-old man from Ma'aleh Adumim" (Jerusalem Post, September 18, 2002). A murdered Israeli man was left in a Palestinian garbage dump.

[Some media are also reporting on the deaths of two Palestinians today, coupling them with the two murdered Israelis. Some western and Arab media fail to note that one of the dead Palestinians was shot by Israeli troops in his car after he attempted to attack Israelis with an AK-47 assault rifle, and the other dead Palestinian, 28-year-old Ashraf Alawneh, was severely beaten and then shot in the chest by Palestinians who suspected him of collaborating with Israel.]

5. "French court orders release of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon" (AP, September 18, 2002). Maurice Papon, responsible for deporting Jews to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, was freed today only three years into his sentence for crimes against humanity. Last year, Papon wrote in a letter to France's justice minister that he felt neither "regrets or remorse" for his acts.

-- Tom Gross




FULL ARTICLES

THREE ITALIAN CITIZENS AND FORMER PA OFFICER ABDUCTED IN GAZA

Members of Palestinian security services abduct three Italians, former PA officer in Gaza Strip
The Jerusalem Post
September 18, 2002

Three Italian citizens and a former Palestinian security officer were abducted at the Tufah checkpoint in the Gaza Strip last night, according to a statement by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser.

Two Italian journalists, an Italian student, and a former PA officer were abducted by members of various Palestinian security services, including a militant with the Palestinian Authority Military Intelligence and the Abu Rish wing of Fatah, the press release stated.

 

“PALESTINIAN TERRORISTS HAVE ONCE AGAIN SET OUT ON A BLOODLETTING OF THE ISRAELI PUBLIC”

One dead, three hurt in suicide bomb attack in northern Israel
The Associated Press and Jerusalem Post
September 18, 2002

A suicide bomber blew himself up Wednesday afternoon at a busy intersection outside the Israeli-Arab city of Umm el Fahm, killing one person and wounding three, police and media reports said.

It was the first suicide attack in Israel in six weeks.

The blast went off during afternoon rush hour on the Wadi Ara Highway, outside Umm el-Fahm, which is several kilometers from Afula.

According to Channel 2, the bomber detonated his explosives while standing on the highway, after police approached him because he was suspiciously weaving between trucks on foot.

The explosion killed the bomber, one other person, and wounded two people, an official with Magen David Adom said.

Witness Mohammed Akbariyeh said he was sitting in a restaurant near the bus stop when the blast went off.

"Suddenly, we heard a huge explosion. The ground just flew upward. We ran to the spot. We saw a police car which had been damaged from the rear. One policeman wounded and another man also wounded. The body of the terrorist was simply cut in two," Akbariyeh told Israel Radio.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

David Baker, an official in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office, said that "Palestinian terrorists have once again set out on a bloodletting of the Israeli public."

It was the first suicide attack since Aug. 4 when a bomber blew himself up on a bus at the Meron junction outside Safed in northern Israel, killing himself and nine Israelis, and wounding 50 people.

 

AL AKSA MARTYRS BRIGADE CLAIM RESPONSIBILITY FOR ROADSIDE SHOOTING

Al Aksa brigades claim responsibility for Mevo Dotan shooting
The Associated Press
September 18, 2002

The Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade claimed responsibility Wednesday for a roadside shooting attack in northern Samaria that killed one Israeli and wounded another.

The Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigade, a militia linked to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, claimed responsibility in a telephone call to The Associated Press.

 

BODY FOUND IN GARBAGE DUMP OF 67-YEAR-OLD MAN

Israeli victim identified as 67-year-old man from Ma'aleh Adumim
The Jerusalem Post
September 18, 2002

The victim whose body was found this morning in a garbage dump in east Jerusalem is identified by Israel Radio as 67-year-old Ma'aleh Adumim resident David Buhbut. The body was found in the Palestinian village of el-Azariya.

 

FRENCH COURT ORDERS RELEASE OF NAZI COLLABORATOR MAURICE PAPON

French court orders release of Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon
The Associated Press
September 18, 2002

A French appeals court ordered the release Wednesday of Maurice Papon, a former police chief imprisoned for his role in deporting Jews to Nazi death camps, his lawyer said.

Papon, 92, has been serving a 10-year prison sentence since 1999 for complicity in crimes against humanity. Papon was the highest ranking French official sentenced for collaboration with the Nazis. His six-month trial, the nation's longest, reopened painful memories about France's wartime collaboration.

His lawyers have repeatedly asked that Papon be released from La Sante prison in Paris because of his age and ill health, and his case has sparked an ongoing debate in France about jailing the elderly.

The former Vichy official had triple coronary bypass surgery several years ago and had a pacemaker implanted in January 1999.

Lawyer Jean-Marc Varaut, who announced the court's decision, said his client "will be freed by the end of the day." Lawyers for the former Vichy official filed a new request for his release over the summer, based on a new provision in French law that allows prisoners to be freed if two independent doctors agree they are suffering from a fatal illness, or their long-term health is endangered by remaining behind bars.

A French judge rejected the request July 24, which Papon's lawyers then appealed.

Another of Papon's lawyers, Francis Vuillemin, said: "It is a crucial moment in his life." "It is a great victory. He is totally free to come and go," the lawyer said.

Jewish groups have vehemently opposed Papon's liberation. Before the ruling, French President Jacques Chirac had turned down three requests to pardon Papon.

Papon, who led the Bordeaux area police during the Nazi occupation of France, was convicted in 1998 of complicity in crimes against humanity and sentenced to 10 years in prison for signing orders that led to the deportation of 1,690 Jews from Bordeaux from 1942-44.

Most of those deported went on to Auschwitz, and all but a handful died.

Papon fled to Switzerland after his conviction, but was arrested and began serving his sentence in October 1999. Last year, he wrote in a letter to France's justice minister that he felt neither "regrets or remorse" for his acts.


Barenboim would play for Arafat, Assad, not Sharon

September 09, 2002

“WITH FRIENDS LIKE BARENBOIM WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?”

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach six pieces concerning the Israeli-Argentinean pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim:

1. "Controversial conductor Barenboim set to play Ramallah concert" (Ha'aretz, Sept. 10, 2002).

2. "Spain honors Palestinian, Israeli with Peace Prize" (Voice of America news, Sept. 4, 2002). Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said have been awarded the Spanish-speaking world's equivalent of the Nobel Prize for their strong criticism of Israel's government.

3. "A maestro crudely off key" (By Martin Sherman, Israel Insider, Sept. 4, 2002). In an interview with the Hebrew daily Yediot Ahronot last weekend, the internationally renowned conductor Daniel Barenboim said he would not allow Ariel Sharon to attend his concerts, but that he would like to play in Damascus, where Syrian President Bashir Assad could attend. "With friends like Barenboim who needs enemies?" asks the writer.

4. "Wake up, Israel." The Guardian reprints extracts from Daniel Barenboim's new autobiography (Guardian, Sept. 6, 2002).

5. "Spain peace prize for Jewish, Palestinian artists" (Reuters, Sept. 4, 2002). The Prince of Asturias "concord" prize was awarded to Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said for their "generous and laudable work for peace and harmonious living".

6. The Guardian also ran another article by Barenboim in the same edition (Sept. 6, 2002) entitled "Those who want to leave, do so" concerning Barenboim's impromptu playing of Wagner at last year's Israel festival in Jerusalem. Barenboim suddenly played Wagner as an encore at the end of another concert even after he had promised the concert organizers and Holocaust survivors that he would not do so.



FULL ARTICLES

BARENBOIM TO PLAY SPECIAL CONCERT IN RAMALLAH

Controversial conductor Barenboim set to play Ramallah concert
Ha'aretz
September 10, 2002

Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim announced Monday that he will conduct a special concert in Ramallah on Tuesday. This is the second time that the well-known Jewish dove has announced plans to visit Ramallah, but the first visit, planned for March, was cancelled on the advice of Israeli security forces, who said they could not guarantee Barenboim's safety. At the time, Barenboim said that although he trusted his Palestinian escorts, he would not set out for Ramallah because he knew he would be turned back at the checkpoint.

Barenboim has made several statements condemning the Israel Defense Force's operations in the West Bank in recent weeks, and some three weeks ago held a concert at Beir Zeit University, where he has close friendships with several Palestinian musicians. "It is important for Palestinians to have positive feelings about someone from the other side," said Barenboim, explaining his desire to visit the territories. "I told them that I am not a politician, that I have no solutions and that I have come solely to open hearts."

Barenboim arrived in Israel last week to participate in the Fifth International Chamber Music Festival in Jerusalem. On Sunday, Jerusalem police boosted its presence at the YMCA building in the city, after Barenboim received death threats. Sources close to the conductor reported the threats to the police, which they said came from ultra-Orthodox quarters

 

SPAIN HONORS PALESTINIAN, ISRAELIS WITH PEACE PRIZE

Spain honors Palestinian, Israeli with Peace Prize
Voice of America news
VOA Arts & Culture
September 4, 2002

Spain has awarded its highest peace prize to Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim and U.S.-based Palestinian writer Edward Said for their efforts toward peace in the Middle East.

Officials say they honored the two artists with the Prince of Asturias Concord prize for their efforts in setting up a youth orchestra for Arab and Israeli musicians as they sought to promote dialogue and an end to historical antagonism.

The Associated Press says the two men became friends in the early 1990s. They later started a summer workshop called "West Eastern Divan" that brought young musicians from Israel and Arab countries together in Germany, the United States and earlier this year in Spain.

The 59-year-old Mr. Berenboim was born in Argentina. He is a concert pianist and conductor currently heading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Berlin's Staatsoper. 67-year-old Mr. Said is a writer and essayist as well as a professor at New York's Colombia University.

The Prince of Asturias prizes are awarded annually as the Spanish-speaking world's answer to the Nobel Prize.

 

A MAESTRO CRUDELY OFF KEY

A maestro crudely off key
By Martin Sherman
Israel Insider
September 4, 2002

In an interview with the Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot last weekend, the internationally renowned conductor Daniel Barenboim flatly rejected the possibility of inviting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an ardent music lover, to any of his concerts during his upcoming visit to Israel.

"I have nothing to say to 'that man,' in spite of his love of music," snapped Barenboim, an allegedly loyal Israeli, about his democratically elected prime minister. "I think that 'that man' is inflicting great harm not only on the Palestinians but on the Israelis as well," he said, explaining the reasons for ostracizing Sharon, who was swept into power by an unprecedented landslide by Barenboim's fellow Israelis, apparently unendowed with the conductor's superior political acumen.

It should, of course, be noted that Barenboim's political "insight" and professed concern for Israel have led him into close collaboration with none other than Edward Said.

Said, an intellectual of Palestinian origin and of doubtful integrity, who was embarrassingly caught by the camera hurling stones at IDF soldiers on the Lebanese border after the Israeli withdrawal, has over the years made a name for himself as one of Zionism's most vitriolic critics, and a fervent advocate of the elimination of the Jewish state.

One can only surmise, therefore, that, for Sharon to redeem himself in Barenboim's eyes, he would have to revert to the failed policy of concession and withdrawal of his predecessors, whom Barenboim would not have hesitated to invite to his performances.

Never mind that these policies have wrought untold disaster on Israel; never mind that they resulted in the killing and maiming of thousands of Israelis; never mind that they were utterly rejected at the polls. What matters, apparently, is that they have the overriding merit of being approved by the fashionable, liberal Left.

Much of the remainder of the interview is a disturbing mixture of self-contradictory platitudes and blatant non-sequiturs. Thus, for example, Barenboim spoke in glowing terms of the accomplishments of a joint Israeli-Palestinian-Arab orchestra which he formed (together with Said) in order to promote dialogue between protagonists in the Middle East conflict.

So it appears that according to Barenboimian logic, dialogue with citizens of Israel's adversaries is perfectly acceptable, even desirable; but unthinkable when it comes to the Israeli prime minister with whom he refuses to converse.

Not that Barenboim has any illusions about the nature of the heads of state in Arab countries. For when asked about the possibility of his peace-promoting orchestra performing in Jerusalem, his reaction was sharp: "Are you crazy?" he retorted, "There are members in the orchestra who come from Egypt [sic], Lebanon, Jordan [sic] and even five from Syria. I cannot possibly divulge their names. If I did, they may not be allowed home. They could even find themselves in more serious danger."

Strange how complacent and uncritical Barenboim is about the behavior of the Arab regimes – especially Egypt and Jordan – who in spite of their signature on peace agreements with Israel, still often penalize their citizens who dare to maintain overt cultural ties with the despised "Zionist entity."

But perhaps the peak of absurdity in the interview was reached when Barenboim expressed the hope of his joint orchestra performing in the near future in Damascus. It is inconceivable that he believes he could hold such an event without inviting Syrian President Bashir Assad to attend. So one must conclude that while the Israeli premier is a persona non grata at his concerts, the president of one of the most tyrannical and non democratic states in the world is not.

Yet, in spite of his severe censure of his own country and countrymen, in spite of unquestioning acceptance of the undemocratic abuses of his country's adversaries, in spite of his liaisons with his country's fiercest critics, Barenboim still professes allegiance to Israel. "I come to this country because it is important to me," he declares. "This is who I am. This is my people."

With friends like Barenboim, one might well ponder, who needs enemies?

(The writer is a senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya.)

 

“IT’S TERRIBLE FOR EVERYBODY”

Wake up, Israel
Can music stop a war? The great Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim thinks so. As his 60th birthday nears, he tells Emma Brockes why he is now directing his fierce energies at the Middle East crisis – and why he thinks Sharon is a danger to his homeland. In an exclusive extract from his autobiography, he explains why he broke his country's Wagner ban
The Guardian
September 6, 2002

In the town of Pilas, near Seville in southern Spain, there is not much incentive to move. During the summer months the people of Pilas resign themselves to lassitude and so, this morning, an unusual atmosphere hangs in the air: something smacking of industry stirs, a quiver of music comes from the direction of the conference centre. It is of an intensity so alien to Pilas that even the armed guard, slouched at the gate and keeping a despondent lookout for terrorists, summons the energy to turn his head.

Pilas would not normally regard itself as a target for terrorists, but this week it is taking no chances. In the Complejo Residencial Lantana, something both energetic and politically sensitive is in session: rehearsals for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a group of young Arab and Israeli musicians tutored for two weeks by a man once described by the former mayor of Jerusalem as "arrogant and uncivilised", as a "phenomenon" by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, and as "cultish", "despotic" and most frequently "a genius" by European newspapers. At 11 years old, Daniel Barenboim performed Prokofiev's second piano sonata for Arthur Rubinstein and established himself as a prodigy. In the 48 years since, his reputation has snowballed through careers as a pianist and conductor, engagement in the Middle East debate (he was the first conductor to take Wagner to Israel) and marriage to Jacqueline du Pre. Barenboim, 59, has become a figure of Romantic depth and proportion: a man who hates mediocrity, repetition and rushing at meal times. "Arrogant?" he says, with a loaded smile. "I hope not. An artist can only be great if he is uncompromising."

Half an hour before rehearsals, the Complejo seethes with the competitive energy of a performing-arts school: three thick-necked brass players jam in the shady colonnade while girls with long hair attack their stringed instruments in the dining-room foyer. Sprinklers click and the bald sky glowers, a burnt-out blue straight from the Old Testament. "You are here to audition for the maestro?" asks the receptionist, and she pats me reassuringly on the shoulder. When Barenboim enters the auditorium he is mopping his brow, his head several journey stages in front of his body. The air is dense with concentration. "How many bars after B1 is the next allegro?" he raps (21). "Can you hear the difference between the 5th and the 7th? Listen to the strings. You can smell the difference, yes?" The musicians stare at him with huge eyes. One pimply cellist recoils after sneaking a gulp of water from his bottle. "Non!" thunders Barenboim. "There is no drinking! OK, bar 18, tutti!"

Afterwards, he enters a whitewashed room and reclines on a sofa, drinking an energy drink and talking, talking – he loves to talk. Contrary to his reputation, he says, he is very lethargic, hates getting up in the morning. "You won't believe it, but I'll tell you anyway: I'm actually a very lazy person. I'm not a morning person. On days when there is a rehearsal at 10am, I get up at nine. In Berlin, unfortunately, I live too far from the opera house to have an afternoon nap."

Barenboim is in the odd position of speaking five languages, each with a slight accent. Spanish is his first language; his first nine years were spent in Argentina before his parents, both Russian, moved to Israel then to France and finally to Germany, where he now lives with his second wife, a pianist, and his two teenage sons. He also spent 15 years in London. "It is strange," his Spanish assistant tells me later. "He speaks flawless Spanish, but it is not Argentinian, not from Madrid, not from the north or the south – it is impossible to tell where he comes from."

This suits Barenboim. One of the few advantages that the 21st century has over the early 20th and 19th is, he believes, the pluralism of its societies. "Human beings have not only the possibility but almost the duty – yes, the duty! – to acquire multiple identities." He paddles his arms in a short, expressive backstroke. "That's what globalisation means at its most positive. That you can feel French when you play Debussy, that you feel German when you play Wagner. You do not have to be one thing." He slumps contentedly back on to the sofa as if proud of this idea.

Barenboim has constructed an identity for himself in which he is rooted culturally as a Jew, geographically as an Israeli and temperamentally as a Latino. "It's complicated, but definable. But I have worries about my children. They have a Russian mother and this mixture of a father; they were born in France, but they are not French. They are not Russian. They are not Argentinian. They are not Israeli. They live in Berlin and the language at home is mostly English, but they go to a French school. They say it isn't a problem, but I worry for them."

They are like him, but more so, and he envies them just a little. Barenboim looks longingly back to the 19th century when intellectuals could not only speak five languages but read philosophy in them too. "People like Rubinstein – their culture was frightening by its breadth. Rubinstein knew his Dostoevsky in Russian, and he knew his Goethe in German and his Baudelaire in French." He sucks up his energy drink. "When he played the piano, you sensed all of that. Now, most of the intellectuals – the writers and the painters – behave as if music has nothing to do with them. The musicians live in their own ivory towers and don't associate music with the other arts or even with their emotional lives. What is missing today is the juxtaposition of ideas. This is the problem with contemporary music and with culture in general."

What do his children listen to? He winces. "'Ip-'op," he says and roars with laughter.

This year, the youngest player at the East West summer school is 13, a Palestinian pianist called Kalim, whom Barenboim tutors with parental tenderness. Of the four years the summer school has been running, Barenboim found last year the most tense. The intifada was a year old, and the students were brittle and suspicious of each other. This year, by contrast, things are so terrible in the Middle East that the young musicians are practically clinging to each other in sympathy. "I give them a little speech when they get here," he says. "I say, 'We have a common goal, to create a concert.' I say, 'You must remember that this last year has been dreadful, for everybody. And there's no point saying it was more terrible for us than for them. It's terrible for everybody.' I say to them, 'A wound when it heals, it closes. But the doors, it is only we who can keep them open.' This is not a political thing, it is a human conviction."

Barenboim makes sense of the politics by relating them to music. Yitzhak Rabin, he says, had a very "linear" way of thinking, could handle the horizontal melody of fighting Israel's external enemies, but could not handle the harmony, that is the "vertical pressure" of terrorism from the inside. How would he characterise Ariel Sharon, musically? He laughs unhappily. "Well, I think he is rather unmusical." He allows a fierce little pause. "In Israel, the people with experience have no vision, and the people with vision have no experience. And this is a terrible thing. But the most terrible thing is that there is no alternative – I mean, the alternative to Sharon is Sharon plus.

"I think Sharon is leading the country along a path that is, long-term, against the interests of Israel and the Jewish people. Time is not on Israel's side, nor are demographics. To put it musically, it is as if Sharon thinks, 'I will play a fast movement slow, because by playing it slow it will have more expression.' Whereas the expression is linked to a certain speed and the meaning is lost if you play it too slow. It's time that somebody in Israel wakes up and sees that the Jewish people are on a path which, for the first time since the creation of the state, makes one doubt that there will always be a Jewish state in Israel. That would not have been possible 10 years ago."

Barenboim has pitched his life against what he calls "mechanical repetition". He hates it to the extent of subverting perfectly good rehearsal techniques to avoid growing bored – a trick that infuriates his colleagues. His time as musical director of the Deutsche Staatsoper, the opera house of the former East Berlin, has taught him to value the mentality of eastern European players over that of musicians from the west. "I find that the people who have lived under a totalitarian regime have a better understanding of democracy and freedom than many people who have only lived in open society. I find, for instance, that they know how to work together so wonderfully and quickly: a vote is taken, it's decided in a wonderfully democratic way. In western orchestras there are clashes and fears of influence of certain groups. I suppose the former east still looks on the bright side of democracy, whereas people in the west have seen the dark side too."

The most talented player he has ever encountered is still, by a long way, Jacqueline du Pre. "Absolutely, absolutely, what she had is rare." The pair were married in 1967, she converted to Judaism and, until she died of multiple sclerosis in 1987, they were Israel's darlings. In the film Hilary and Jackie, she is portrayed as endearing but loopy. Did her talent make her strange? Barenboim sighs. "Well, in a way, there was a part of her that was so childlike. Not childish. Childlike, naive. When she finished playing a highly complex composition, she was perfectly the girl next door. When you were with her, you didn't see a hint of this complexity of her playing." She played, he says, as if she were composing the music as she went along. Did they compete with each other? "Non." He smiles. "We were of different sexes, you know that?"

When he is conducting, Barenboim says, he achieves the perfect state of physical, rational and emotional grace. At the end of a concert, all he wants to hear is silence. "You measure your success not with the volume of the applause, but with the silence with which they listen."

Good days, bad days – the only thing that gets him down is fatigue. Everything else is enlightenment. The interview has overrun and he is woefully late for afternoon rehearsal. He shrugs and blinks his currant-black eyes. "There are no rules," he says. "I live my life as I make my music, fighting against routine."

 

SPAIN PEACE PRIZE FOR SAID AND BARENBOIM

Spain peace prize for Jewish, Palestinian artists
Reuters
September 4, 2002

Spain on Wednesday awarded its highest peace prize to Jewish musical conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian-U.S. writer and academic Edward Said for their efforts toward peace in the Middle East.

The jury of the Prince of Asturias "concord" prize said a youth orchestra set up by the two men for young Arab and Israeli musicians had influenced their decision.

The jury took into account the men's "generous and laudable work for peace and harmonious living, symbolised by a group of young musicians working together, getting over historical antagonism and adding to dialogue and reflection," said jury chairman Vicente Alvaro Areces.

Barenboim, born in Buenos Aires in 1942, is a concert pianist and conductor who currently heads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Staatsoper Berlin. Writer and essayist Said is a professor at New York's Columbia University.

The annual Prince of Asturias prizes – Spain's answer to the Nobels – give out eight honours for performance in the arts, sciences, diplomacy and sports. The concord prize awards "exemplary and important works for brotherhood, the fight against poverty, sickness or ignorance, the defence of freedom and the protection of heritage," the foundation said.

 

BARENBOIM ON PLAYING WAGNER

'Those who want to leave, do so'
The debate over Wagner resurfaces in Israel at regular intervals. No consensus can yet be expected on this topic
By Daniel Barenboim
The Guardian
September 6, 2002

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,786392,00.html

Quite understandably, the debate over Wagner resurfaces in Israel at regular intervals. No consensus can yet be expected on this topic.

Bronislaw Huberman founded the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936, at a time when no taboo existed against Wagner's works. A few years before, conductor Arturo Toscanini, a well-known anti-fascist, had decided to stop performing at Bayreuth because of Hitler's purging of Jews from public life. The same conductor directed the inaugural concerts of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Israel Philharmonic was independently managed and did not decide, until after Kristallnacht in 1938, to stop performing Wagner. The associations connected to Wagner's music because of its misuse by the Nazis were deemed to be too strong.

During the Israel tour of the Berlin Staatskapelle in July 2001, I was invited to conduct a concert by the Israel festival. The programme included, among other works, music by Wagner. I have the greatest understanding and compassion for all Holocaust survivors and the terrible associations with which Wagner's music is linked. Therefore, I do not believe Wagner's works should be played during concerts for regular season-ticket holders, when faithful subscribers would be confronted with music that raises painful memories.

However, the question must be asked: does anyone have the right to deprive other people, who do not have these same associations, of hearing Wagner's music? This would indirectly serve the misuse of Wagner's music by the Nazis. After all, the Israel Philharmonic's decision to cease performing Wagner's music was not based on Wagner's anti-semitism – which had been well established since the 19th century – but on the anti-semitism of the Nazis.

Certain decisions are absolutely correct and understandable at the time of their making. However, new developments sometimes make a revision of past decisions necessary. An example of this is the position taken by the Israel Philharmonic, after the second world war and the Holocaust, not to engage soloists and conductors such as Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, who had converted from Judaism before or during the war. Given the circumstances, this decision was understandable. However, over time this policy was cancelled, as conversion was no longer considered to be a sign of weakness or an attempt to improve one's personal fate through assimilation. Nowadays, there would be no problem in inviting a converted Jew to perform music with the orchestra.

The present debate about Wagner is very similar. In 1938, the decision against his music was understandable, as its terrible associations were too strong. I also understand that some people cannot forget these associations, and one should not ever force them to listen to Wagner's music in concert. However, Israel should also act as a democratic state. This entails not preventing people who are free of these associations from listening to Wagner's music. It is not my intention to wage a missionary's war in favour of Wagner in Israel. I do feel, however, that this is a case where Israel can, and should, define itself as a democracy.

My concert with the Staatskapelle took place in Jerusalem on July 7 2001, with a programme of music by Schumann and Stravinsky and an encore by Tchaikovsky. Afterwards, I turned to the audience and proposed the Prelude and Liebstod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde as a further encore. Of course I did not want to play Wagner for an audience that was unprepared for it, and therefore I engaged in a long dialogue with the audience that lasted some 40 minutes, indicating that those who wanted to leave should do so, but that if others wanted to hear it, we were ready to play. Some 20 or 30 people left. And the rest stayed and gave us a standing ovation at the end, which gave me the feeling that we had done something positive.

It was only the next day that the scandal really erupted, which means that it was organised by people who were not there but who had some political agenda, which greatly saddens me. In a democratic society like Israel there should be no room for taboos. The boycott of Wagner is very capricious: the Israel Philharmonic is not allowed to play Wagner, but you can buy Wagner records in Israel, you can hear Wagner on Israeli radio, you can see Wagner videos on Israeli television, and you can have a mobile phone that plays The Ride of the Valkyries. I do not believe that someone who sits at home in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem suffers because he knows that in another city someone is playing Wagner.

Unfortunately, the debate about Wagner is linked to the fact that we have not yet made the transition into being Israeli Jews, and that we cling to all sorts of associations with the past which of course were valid and understandable at the time, as a way of reminding ourselves of our own Judaism. Saying that Wagner will not be played in Israel gives us a further link to the Judaism of the 1930s and 1940s.

We need to have a sense of history, but we also need to know who we are today as Israeli Jews. And until we are able to do that, we will not be able to establish a fruitful dialogue with non-Jews. This is why there is a connection between the Wagner issue and the relationship with the Palestinians.

* This is an edited extract from A Life in Music by Daniel Barenboim.


Sara and Benjamin Netanyahu in the news

“ANGRY CROWDS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO OBSTRUCT FREE EXPRESSION”

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach:

1 "Police clash with protesters canceling Netanyahu speech" (AP, Sept. 9, 2002). Canadian riot police fired tear gas at rioting pro-Palestinian students who prevented Benjamin Netanyahu from speaking.

2 "CJC denounces mob rule in Montreal" (Press release from the Canadian Jewish Congress, Sept.9, 2002).

3 "Netanyahu's wife says Israel 'can burn,' later apologizes" (AP, Sept. 5, 2002).



FULL ARTICLES

CHANTING PROTESTORS FORCE CANCELLATION OF NETANYAHU SPEECH AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY

Police clash with protesters disrupting Netanyahu speech
The Associated Press
September 9, 2002

A crowd of chanting protesters waving Palestinian flags forced the cancellation of a speech Monday by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and clashed with police.

Scores of demonstrators, some wearing keffiyehs, stormed the Concordia University building in downtown Montreal where Netanyahu was scheduled to speak.

They threw chairs and smashed windows when police tried to make them leave, and police responded with tear gas. There were no immediate reports of injuries, and at least one demonstrator was seen being taken into police custody.

Netanyahu had yet to arrive when the clash took place, and university security officials later announced the speech was called off. Some of the several hundred people who gathered to protest Netanyahu's visit accused him of being a terrorist and said he had no right to propagate anti-Palestinian views.

 

A “HECKLER’S VETO”

CJC denounces mob rule in Montreal
September 9, 2002

Canadian Jewish Congress deplores the violent pro-Palestinian riot that blocked former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from delivering his scheduled address at Concordia University in Montreal today. Mr. Netanyahu's speaking engagement in Montreal was organized by the university's student Hillel organization.

"This violent form of censorship has no place in a free and democratic Canada," says Keith Landy, CJC national president. "In this country we don't tolerate mob rule. Angry crowds should not be allowed to obstruct free expression if they don't happen to agree with or like the message. It's shameful."

Mr. Landy stresses that the demonstrators have a right to make their voices heard by lawfully protesting. "But denying a foreign dignitary a platform to give a speech, especially at a university where free speech is supposedly sacred, is completely unacceptable. This amounts to a 'heckler's veto,'" the CJC leader contends.

 

NETANYAHU’S WIFE SAYS ISRAEL “CAN BURN,” THEN APOLOGIZES

Netanyahu's wife says Israel 'can burn,' later apologizes
The Associated Press
September 5, 2002

In audio taped remarks played on Israel TV Thursday the wife of former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said "this country can burn" and that she and her husband would leave Israel because he is not appreciated.

Sara Netanyahu later apologized in a letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. She made the comments Monday during a telephone conversation with Shimshon Deri, an activist in Netanyahu and Sharon's Likud party.

In the phone call, she said, "There are sometimes issues of revenge and personal conflicts and they don't understand one thing: when the country is in flames, when there are terror attacks… there is one person who can save this country," referring to her husband, who is vying with Sharon for party leadership.

Using Netanyahu's nickname, she said, "Bibi is a leader who is greater than this entire country, he really is a leader on a national scale. We'll move abroad. This country can burn. This country can't survive without Bibi. People here will be slaughtered."

Israel and the Palestinians are locked in nearly two years of fighting, during which Palestinian suicide bombers have killed more than 250 Israelis. Netanyahu has repeatedly criticized Sharon for failing to bring an end to the attacks, demanding harsher military measures.

Netanyahu served as Israel's prime minister from 1996-1999, pursuing a hard-line policy toward the Palestinians. He was defeated in an election by Ehud Barak, a moderate, whose peace efforts failed. Barak lost an election in February 2001 to Sharon, a veteran hawk.

Following his defeat, Netanyahu left politics briefly. He returned before the 2001 election, seeking special permission to run for prime minister, though he was not a member of parliament. The parliament turned him down, and he embarked on a campaign to unseat Sharon as Likud party leader.

According to Israeli media, Deri used to be a strong Netanyahu backer but the two had a disagreement. The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reported that Deri's lawyer later demanded she publicly apologize to the Likud party and the citizens of Israel, the newspaper reported, printing a copy of the letter she sent to Sharon.

"I am sorry for the things I said. I love our country... This is my home and like everyone else I have no other home," the newspaper quoted the letter as saying.


Danny Levin: September 11’s “first victim”

KILLED WHILE TRYING TO PROTECT AN AIR STEWARDESS

[Note by Tom Gross]

According to the article below, from the magazine section of this weekend's Yediot Ahronot (Israel's highest circulation daily newspaper), the first victim of the September 11 attacks was Danny Levin, a former member of Israel's elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal.

Levin, who was sitting in the business section of Flight 11 from Boston, was killed while trying to protect one of the air stewardesses who was being attacked. Afterwards two additional flight attendants and the captain were murdered, leaving the hijackers free to crash the plane into the World Trade Center.

Levin was married with two children. His wife, Ann, still lives in Boston.

-- Tom Gross



THE ISRAELI HERO OF FLIGHT 11

Excerpt from "Year to the Twin Towers disaster"
Seven days magazine
Yediot Ahronot
September 6, 2002

(The translation of this article is courtesy of IMRA.)

Danny Levin was the first victim of the biggest attack in history that morning, in which almost 3,000 people died. An internal memorandum of the US Federal Aviation Administration sets that in the course of a struggle that took place between Levin, a graduate of Israel's elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, and the four hijackers who were assaulting that cockpit, Levin was murdered by Satam Al Suqami, a 25 year old Saudi.

Some time after the attack the Levin family in Jerusalem received a telephone call from the FBI offices in New York. On the line was the agent responsible for the investigation of the attack on Flight 11. He told Peggy and Charles Levin that there is a high degree of certainty that their son Danny tried to prevent the hijacking. The FBI relied, among other things, on the testimony of the stewardess Amy Sweeney.

Sweeney called Michael Woodward, the flight services supervisor in Boston, from the rear of the plane: "a hijacker slit the throat of a passenger in business class and the passenger appears to me to be dead." To this day the American investigators are not convinced that Danny Levin was murdered on the spot. An additional stewardess, Betty Ong, who succeeded in calling from a telephone by one of the passenger seats, said that the passenger who was attacked from business class seat 10B was seriously wounded.

The Levin family, Danny' parents and brothers, have no doubt that Danny battled the hijackers. And it is for them a tremendous consolation. "I wasn't surprised to hear from the FBI that Danny fought. I was sure that this is what he would do," Yonatan, his younger brother, said. "Danny didn't sit quietly. From what we heard from the Americans, the hijackers attacked one of the stewardesses and Danny rose to protect her and prevent them from entering the cockpit. It is a consolation to us that Danny fought. We see it as an act of heroism that a person sacrifices his life in order to save others. An act of heroism that everyone should do at such an instance and particularly suitable for Danny."

That battle in the business section ended quickly. Levin was overcome and bled to death on the floor. Two additional flight attendants were knifed and the captain was murdered. The hijackers were already inside the cockpit. They announced to the passengers to remain quiet in their seats.


London to host “celebration of September 11”

CONTENTS

1. "Celebration" of 9/11 in London
2. "London to host Islamic 'celebration' of Sept. 11" (Daily Telegraph, Sept. 9, 2002)
3. "US 'was partly to blame' for terror attacks'" (Financial Times, Sept. 4, 2002)
4. "Al-Qaeda 'plotted nuclear attacks'" (BBC News, Sept. 8, 2002)
5. "Al-Jazeera interviews Sept. 11 planners" (Associated Press, Sept. 8, 2002)
6. "Official media response from Al-Muhajiroun" (Sept. 10, 2002)
7. "U.K. Islamic group holds conference on effects of Sept. 11" (Press Release, Sept. 10, 2002)


“CELEBRATION” OF 9/11 IN LONDON

I attach six items related to the September 11 attacks:

1. "London to host Islamic 'celebration' of Sept. 11" (The Daily Telegraph). Extremist Muslim clerics will meet in London on September 11 to celebrate the anniversary of al-Qaeda's attacks on America and to launch a new organization for Islamic militants. The "celebration" is being funded by Saudi-based businessmen, according to the report.

2. "US 'was partly to blame' for terror attacks'" (The Financial Times). A majority of Europeans think that U.S. foreign policy is partially to blame for the September 11 attacks, according to a new poll.

3. "Al-Qaeda 'plotted nuclear attacks'" (BBC news). Al-Qaeda initially planned to fly hijacked jets into nuclear installations – rather than the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – according to an Arab journalist who says he interviewed two of the group's masterminds. Bin Laden was only told on 6 September that the attacks would be carried out on what the perpetrators referred to as "Holy Tuesday".

Related to the BBC story, I also attach: "Al-Jazeera interviews Sept. 11 planners," an AP dispatch from Dubai and finally the "Official media response from Al-Muhajiroun" and a press release issued by Hizb ut-Tahrir regarding the London Islamic Conference.

-- Tom Gross



FULL ARTICLES

LONDON TO HOST ISLAMIC “CELEBRATION” OF SEPTEMBER 11

London to host Islamic 'celebration' of Sept. 11
By Thair Shaikh
The Daily Telegraph
September 9, 2002

Extremist Muslim clerics will meet in London on September 11 to celebrate the anniversary of al-Qaeda's attacks on America and to launch an organisation for Islamic militants.

The conference, which will be attended by the most radical mullahs in Britain, will argue that the atrocities were justified because Muslims must defend themselves against armed aggression.

It will launch the Islamic Council of Britain (ICB), which will aim to implement sharia law in Britain and will welcome al-Qa'eda sympathisers as members.

The conference, to be held at Finsbury Park mosque, north London, will be attended by followers of militant groups and chaired by their Muslim leaders, including Omar Bakri Mohammed, whose al-Muhajiroun group wants to establish a worldwide Islamic state.

Mr Mohammed, 44, who was born in Syria and lives in London, has been investigated by Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad for anti-Semitic statements.

He said: "The people at this conference look at September 11 like a battle, as a great achievement by the mujahideen against the evil superpower. "I never praised September 11 after it happened but now I can see why they did it."

Mr Mohammed, who is entitled to stay in Britain although his 1980s claim for asylum failed, said that he would not stop al-Qa'eda members from joining the ICB. He said: "We don't perceive them as the US perceives them; we see them as a sincere devoted people who stood firm against the invasion of a Muslim country."

The clerics claim that the ICB is funded by Saudi-based businessmen, which, if true, will embarrass Saudi Arabia. The Riyadh government expelled Mr Mohammed in 1986 and recently launched a multi-million-dollar public relations campaign to persuade America that it is rooting out Islamic militants.

Al-Muhajiroun claims to have secured a six-figure sum for funding the ICB and said it would build a dozen Islamic centres, launch a website and hold seminars and classes for Muslims.

Mr Mohammed said: "I believe the Muslim Council of Britain has sold out to the British Government. Many Muslims in Britain feel like this. We have been working on getting the funding for six months: it is from a group of Saudi businessmen. Please don't write about this. I am against the killing of innocent people; we are not at war with anybody in this country."

Abu Hamza al-Masri, a cleric at the Finsbury Park mosque, will be co-chairing the conference. Several suspected al-Qa'eda members have been linked to his group, Supporters of Sharia, and the FBI is seeking his extradition for allegedly trying to set up a terrorist training camp in America.

Mr al-Masri, an Egyptian who lost both hands and an eye while fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation, is also wanted in Yemen on terrorist charges.

Radical Muslims speaking at the conference include Yasser al-Siri, 40, an Egyptian-born dissident who arrived in Britain in 1993 and claimed political asylum. He was released from custody in July after extradition proceedings by America were dropped because of insufficient evidence. Mr al-Siri has been sentenced to death in Egypt for a bombing that killed a 12-year-old girl.

Imran Waheed, the British representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir (Islamic Liberation Party), a group banned in a number of Muslim countries, and Anjem Choudary, a British-born solicitor who is chairman of the Society of Muslim Lawyers and a leader of al-Muhajiroun, will also attend.

 

MAJORITY OF EUROPEANS BELIEVE U.S. “WAS PARTLY TO BLAME FOR TERROR ATTACKS”

US 'was partly to blame' for terror attacks'
By Stacy Humes-Schulz
The Financial Times
September 4, 2002

A majority of Europeans think that US foreign policy is partially to blame for the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

A survey of American and European attitudes towards foreign relations found that 55 per cent of respondents from six European countries agreed that US policy had contributed to the attacks.

The poll also found widespread public support within the US for an invasion of Iraq, with 75 per cent of American respondents in favour of using military force to overthrow Saddam Hussein and incite regime change.

A mere 10 per cent of Europeans would support US military action in Iraq without backing from the UN and allies.

The survey of 9,000 Europeans and Americans was jointly undertaken by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF).

The findings also showed that terrorism is a concern for more Americans than Europeans, with 91 per cent of those polled in the US citing international terrorism as a critical threat and only 65 per cent of Europeans identifying it as extremely important.

"The tragedy of September 11 has created a seismic shift in US public attitudes about the world and America's place in it," said Marshall M. Bouton, president of CCFR.

But a majority of Americans, 52 per cent, think that the US should remain the only world superpower, while 65 per cent of Europeans said that the European Union should become a superpower similar to the US. Only 33 per cent of Americans agreed.

 

AL-QAEDA PLANNED TO FLY JETS INTO NUCLEAR INSTALLATIONS

Al-Qaeda 'plotted nuclear attacks'
BBC News online
September 8, 2002

Al-Qaeda initially planned to fly hijacked jets into nuclear installations – rather than the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – according to an Arab journalist who says he interviewed two of the group's masterminds.

The Arabic television station al-Jazeera says it will broadcast on Thursday the interview in which Osama Bin Laden's aides describe in detail how they planned the 11 September attacks. In an article published in several European newspapers, documentary-maker Yosri Fouda said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh told him they had decided against the attack on nuclear power plants "for the moment" because of fears it could "get out of control". Both men are on the FBI's most wanted list and have a $25m bounty on their heads.

The FBI says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is one of Bin Laden's key lieutenants, while Ramzi Binalshibh is said to have shared an apartment in Hamburg with Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the hijackers.

Yosri Fouda said he was taken to a hideout in Pakistan. He was told by a man there that Bin Laden was alive and well, but was not shown any proof of this. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told him he was head of the al-Qaeda military committee and Ramzi Binalshibh the co-ordinator of what they refer to as "Holy Tuesday".

Over the course of two days, Mr Fouda says, the men gave him an insight into how the terror group operates and how the 11 September attacks were planned.

Mohammed and Binalshibh alleged that:
• The decision to launch a "martyrdom operation inside America" was made by network's military committee in early 1999
• Atta was summoned to a meeting with key hijackers in Afghanistan that same year
• Hijackers were recruited from al-Qaeda's Department of Martyrs, which is still active
• Mr Binalshibh wanted to be one of the hijackers, but was refused a US visa
• A number of reconnaissance teams travelled to the US ahead of the hijackers
• Ramzi Binalshibh posed in e-mails as Atta's girlfriend in Germany when the two communicated through the internet
• The fourth hijacked plane was heading for Congress, not the White House, when passengers overpowered the attackers
• The codenames for the targets were university faculties: "town planning" for the WTC, "law" for Congress, "fine arts" for the Pentagon
• On 29 August, Atta gave the date for the attacks to Mr Binalshibh, who ordered active cells in Europe and the US to evacuate
• Bin Laden was told on 6 September

At the end of his two-day interview, Mr Fouda writes, he was instructed to leave the videotapes behind so the faces of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh could be blanked out.

Despite promises that they would be returned, the videos never turned up. But, the journalist says, he did eventually receive voice tapes of the interviews.

 

AL-JAZEERA INTERVIEWS TWO PLANNERS OF 9/11

Al-Jazeera interviews Sept. 11 planners
The Associated Press
September 8, 2002

The Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera says it has conducted interviews with two wanted al-Qaida members who disclose how the terror network planned and carried out the September 11 attacks.

The Qatar-based pan-Arab station, which became known for carrying interviews with al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants, said Thursday the interviews would be aired next Thursday in the second part of a documentary to mark the September 11 terror attacks anniversary. The first part aired Thursday.

Al-Jazeera said Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and Ramzi Binalshibh were interviewed recently at a secret location. They reportedly detail how the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people were planned and conducted.

Binalshibh, a Yemeni believed to be in his late 20s or early 30s, was a member of a Hamburg-based cell led by Muhammad Atta, the Egyptian-born suspected lead September 11 hijacker. Binalshibh remains at large.

Muhammad, 36, is one of the FBI's most-wanted terrorists and is believed to be at large in Afghanistan or nearby, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press in June. US investigators believe Muhammad, working under bin Laden's leadership, planned many aspects of the September 11 attacks.

US officials regard him as one of the highest-ranking al-Qaida leaders still at large and believe he is still planning attacks against US interests. Although he was born in Kuwait, officials there say he is a Pakistani national and note that people born in Kuwait do not automatically qualify for citizenship.

Muhammad is accused of working with Ramzi Yousef in the first World Trade Center bombing, which left six dead in 1993. He and Yousef, who is now in prison, also were accused of plotting in 1995 to bomb several tran-Pacific airliners heading for the United States.

Federal prosecutors in New York charged Muhammad in 1996 in connection with the alleged 1995 plot. The State Department is offering a reward of up to $25 million for information leading to his capture.

Other bin Laden lieutenants are also believed to have helped put together the September 11 attacks, US officials have said. Evidence is mounting that Muhammad was at the center of the operational planning.

Al-Jazeera chief editor Ibrahim Helal told The Associated Press earlier Thursday that the station will mark the September 11 anniversary by running "human reports on how the attacks and the war affected the lives of the American and Afghan peoples, and investigative reports on the attacks themselves."

The channel caught the world's attention, especially the United States, after it began airing statements from bin Laden, the suspected ringleader of the September 11 attacks that killed more than 3,000 people and sparked the US led war on terror.

The Bush administration has criticized Al-Jazeera for giving bin Laden and his aides a forum to address the Arab public. Al-Jazeera, a popular, independent-minded pan-Arab station, insists that it would broadcast any items it sees as newsworthy.

American television networks have been carefully considering which approach to take in covering the anniversary, giving it the importance it deserves without exploiting it, and showing concern that rerunning footage of planes slamming into the twin towers would frighten children who might not understand that it was archive footage.

 

Note by TG: The day after the above dispatch was sent, I received the following:

RESPONSE FROM AL-MUHAJIROUN

Official media response from Al-Muhajiroun
September 10, 2002

Following intense media interest in the Islamic Conference due to be held this Wednesday the 11th of September 2002 at Finsbury Park Mosque, the organisers, Al-Muhajiroun, would like to make it clear that:

The participants, which include leaders from the Muslim community (but no one from Hizb ut-Tahrir) will not be celebrating the events of the 11th of September, but rather will be analysing and highlighting the lessons which can be derived from the incident and what has subsequently followed regarding the nature of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims around the world and the new format of the relationship between countries in the international arena.

The event will discuss the positive outcomes from the 11th September not least of which is the clear crystallisation of the two camps of Islam and Kufr (non-Islam), of believers and hypocrites and of those who follow the Messenger Muhammad (saw) and his companions (the salafis) and those deviant from this path.

Muslim leaders will be announcing the launch of the Islamic Council of Britain (ICB), to represent the true Islamic stance on issues affecting Muslims both in Britain and abroad, without compromise, without fear of anyone apart from Allah and purely to please Allah (SWT). Moreover the ICB will not be funded by any government (contrary to reports in Sundays Telegraph) and have not '…secured a six-figure sum for funding the ICB…' from Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic Council of Britain (ICB) is in contrast to the Muslim Council of Britain (MBC) who, as we all know, have sold the Muslims out to the British government, in return for being recognised as the 'official voice of the Muslims' and who believe that Muslims must apostatise themselves by taking an oath of allegiance to the Queen and in their actions obey man made law as opposed to God's law. The ICB are therefore a different sect (firqah) from the MCB, the ICB belonging to the minority Salafiyyah sect (also known as Firqah Naajiyyah or the 'saved sect'), whereas the MCB belong to the majority Ilmaaniyyah sect (i.e. secularists).

Claims by secular 'moderate' so-called Muslims that we 'feed on people with little knowledge of Islam' that we want to spread 'hate and destruction' or that 'Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad is widely despised by Muslims' are made by non-practising Secularists about their own sect of people, whose only excuse for remaining Muslims as opposed to Murtadeen (apostates) is their obvious ignorance about the reality of Islam and the Shari'ah as practised by the Messenger Muhammad (saw) and his companions.

Sadly secular Muslims make up the majority of Muslims in a world which lacks Islam implemented as a law and order (i.e. Al-Khilafah) and whose idea of Islam is that based upon their own desires and that which Tony Blair or George Bush dictate as opposed to that which Allah (SWT) has revealed to the Messenger Muhammad (saw). Indeed the challenge is there for anyone to state otherwise basing his or her argument on the Qur'an and Sunnah (tradition of the Messenger Muhammad (saw)) as understood by his companions (ra).

We pray that Allah (SWT) guides us all to the truth.

 

LONDON ISLAMIC CONFERENCE: BEYOND SEPTEMBER 11TH

U.K. Islamic group holds conference on effects of Sept. 11
Press Release
September 10, 2002

(The following is a reformatted version of a press release issued by Hizb ut-Tahrir and received via electronic mail. The release was not confirmed by the sender.)

Thousands of Muslims from the West, men and women, young and old, and of diverse ethnic backgrounds are set to attend a conference in London this Sunday, 15th September 2002, that is billed as the largest gathering of Muslims in Britain post-September 11th. The organisers of the conference are Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain and it is entitled "Beyond September 11th: The Role of Muslims in the West".

Following the events of September 11th and the unleashing of the American war machine, better known as the "War Against Terror", Muslims have been asked to make a choice – either they accept Capitalism and its colonialist worldview or be labelled the 'terrorist'.

The conference will present a distinct, positive and intellectual agenda for Muslims in the West – a new approach, which leads to Muslims actively engaging in an intellectual debate with the wider society on the flaws of Capitalism and what Muslims believe to be the only alternative ideological system: Islam.

Speakers at the conference will include Issam Amireh, a well-known Imam from Palestine who was imprisoned by the Palestinian Authority and Dr Abu Muhammad, an Iraqi dissident. Topics for discussion include the inevitability of the clash of civilisations, the recent military escalation towards Iraq and the challenge of living by Islam in the West.

Dr Imran Waheed, a UK based doctor and an organizer of this Sunday's conference, said, "In the wake of September 11th we will be delineating a clear, distinct and definitive path for Muslims in the West to follow. Islam can fill the spiritual and political voids that riddle the West and offers the world liberation from the shackles of an ideology that enslaves the masses to feed the few".

The venue for the conference is London Arena, Limeharbour, London. The conference begins at 11.00 hrs BST and ends at 20.00 hrs BST.

Notes to Editors:

1) Hizb ut-Tahrir is an independent political party whose ideology is Islam. The party works throughout the Islamic world to resume the Islamic way of life by re- establishing the Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate). The party adheres to the Islamic Shari'ah in all aspects of its work. It considers violence or armed struggle against the regime, as a method to re-establish the Islamic State, a violation of the Islamic Shari'ah.

CONTACT:

Dr Imran Waheed
Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain
Suite 298
56 Gloucester Road
London, SW7 4UB, United Kingdom