Mideast Dispatch Archive: December 2002 Archives

Mamet, Fonda, Ensler, Spielberg, Streisand: Hollywood and the Middle East

December 29, 2002

* This dispatch concerns film and theatre personalities and the Middle East conflict

CONTENTS

1. Where is the outcry from Jewish Hollywood?
2. "Weeping at 'Sophie's Choice,' while sniffing at the State of Israel"
3. Oliver Stone came to offer Yasser Arafat his "moral and emotional support"
4. But there weren’t any Palestinian women demonstrating against terror
5. "The silence of the Hollywood lambs" (By Jack Engelhard, Dec. 21, 2002)
6. "Loudmouth stars are remaining surprisingly quiet about Israel" (By Dennis Prager, Oct. 2, 2002)
7. "If I forget thee, Jerusalem" (By David Mamet, Forward, Dec. 27, 2002)
8. "Jane Fonda's mideast mission" (AP, Dec. 19, 2002)
9. "Jane Fonda visits refugee camp, Ramallah hospital" (AP, Dec. 22, 2002)
10. "Friends like these" (Jerusalem Post editorial, April 1, 2002)

WHERE IS THE OUTCRY FROM JEWISH HOLLYWOOD?

[Notes by Tom Gross]

I attach several articles relating to film and theatre personalities and the Middle East conflict, with a brief summary first. Some of these pieces are not particularly well written, but nevertheless interesting. May I wish everyone on this list all the best for 2003.

1. "The silence of the Hollywood lambs" (By Jack Engelhard, Dec. 21, 2002). Engelhard (who is the author of Indecent Proposal, the best-selling book on which the movie of the same name is based) asks: "Where is the outcry from Jewish Hollywood about the murdering and maiming of Jewish children? The silence is deafening, as it was in Ben Hecht's day when that legendary journalist tried to raise awareness for the plight of those trapped in Nazi Europe [and the Jews of Hollywood turned a blind eye]."

2. "Loudmouth stars are remaining surprisingly quiet about Israel" (By Dennis Prager, Oct. 2, 2002). Prager asks "Is there an issue that some Hollywood star – director, producer, actor, actress – has not publicly commented on? It's hard to name one [from smoking to fur to Iraq] ... There is one issue, however, about which one hears nothing from Hollywood: the terror against Israeli citizens... As one Hollywood insider, screenwriter Dan Gordon ('The Hurricane,' 'Murder in the First'), told the Los Angeles Times: 'There's been a puzzling silence. We're in an industry that takes stands on everything. People can't shut us up! I'd love to see the indignation about homicide bombers that is reserved for smokers.'"

“WEEPING AT “SOPHIE’S CHOICE,’ WHILE SNIFFING AT THE STATE OF ISRAEL”

3. "If I forget thee, Jerusalem" (By David Mamet, Forward, Dec. 27, 2002). The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and filmmaker, who visited Israel last summer as a guest of the Jerusalem Film Festival, published this essay on December 27, 2002 in The Forward, the old Socialist Yiddish-language newspaper of New York, which is now published in both Yiddish and English as a weekly. It may be too long for many of you to read, but I recommend reading the end where his strongest points are made. Mamet criticizes "assimilated Western Jews" and others for the dichotomy they have created "between the Real and the Imaginary. Imaginary Jews are the delight of the world. They include Anne Frank, Janusz Korszak, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and the movie stars in 'Exodus.' These Jews delight the world in their willingness to die heroically as a form of entertainment. The plight of actual Jews, however, has traditionally been more problematic, and paradoxically, those same folk who weep at 'Sophie's Choice,' sniff at the State of Israel..."

"Here, in Israel, are actual Jews, fighting for their country, against both terror and misthought public opinion, as well as disgracefully biased and, indeed, fraudulent reporting. Here are people courageously going about their lives, in that which, sad to say, were it not a Jewish state, would, in its steadfastness, in its reserve, in its courage, rightly be the pride of the Western world," writes Mamet.

OLIVER STONE CAME TO OFFER YASSER ARAFAT HIS “MORAL AND EMOTIONAL SUPPORT”

4. "Jane Fonda's mideast mission" (AP, Dec. 19, 2002).

5. "Jane Fonda visits refugee camp, Ramallah hospital" (AP, Dec. 22, 2002). The two-times Oscar winner Jane Fonda accompanied by Eve Ensler (the writer behind the off-Broadway hit The Vagina Monologues) last week made a three day visit to Israel and the West Bank aimed at promoting peace. During their visit Fonda and Ensler spoke to Jewish and Arab doctors and patients at Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital. Fonda appeared emotionally moved when she met 23-year-old Sharon Maman, who suffered brain damage after two suicide bombers blew up simultaneously in downtown Jerusalem on Dec. 1, 2001. Sharon only began speaking again three months ago.

Many Israelis were furious, however, when Fonda went on to visit Yasser Arafat and the mothers of two Palestinians who had died while carrying out acts of violence against Israeli civilians. This latter point was omitted from the AP stories I attach, but received widespread coverage in the Israeli press.

There were also a number of articles from right-wing Israelis attacking Fonda, who went to communist North Vietnam in 1972, at the height of the Vietnam War, and posed on an anti-aircraft gun, and thirty years later, despite her apologies, is still widely known as "Hanoi Jane." I do not attach these rather vicious attacks on Fonda here, but instead include:

BUT THERE WEREN’T ANY PALESTINIAN WOMEN DEMONSTRATING AGAINST TERROR

6. Extracts of an editorial from Yediot Ahronot (December 24, 2002). Israel's best-selling newspaper says: "It would be natural to expect that Fonda and Ensler [after accompanying extreme left-wing Israelis in anti-Israeli demonstrations] would also take part in a demonstration by Palestinian women against terror. But this is impossible. There haven't been any... Fonda and Ensler could have called on Palestinian women to take a stand against the suicide bombs and the continuation of violence. Instead they chose to ignore this and to focus on condemning Israel. And really – why should they get caught up in taking a stand on very unpopular and politically incorrect issues in their society? For this, a lot of courage is needed – courage which Jane Fonda and Eve Ensler lack."

7. "Friends like these" (Jerusalem Post editorial, April 1, 2002). I originally sent this article out on April 1, and do so again now as many of you have joined this list since then. The paper asks "where are Steven Spielberg, Barbara Streisand, Philip Roth, Daniel Libeskind. Some are prominent memorializers of the Holocaust. Yet in the face of the present assault, they are lending neither their bodies, nor their voices, nor their pens. It's as if Israel has been erased from their Jewish consciousness. In fairness, this failure of responsibility is not theirs alone. It has been abetted by the Western press, so wondrously evenhanded over the years regarding events in Israel that it has created the intellectual underpinnings on which Palestinian terrorism flourishes. And it has been abetted by Israel's uniquely incompetent public relations machine." One Jewish Hollywood celebrity that did come, Oliver Stone, came to visit Yasser Arafat and offered him his "moral and emotional support". "We can only hope that events in Israel will not someday make Diaspora Jews bitterly regret their present silence," the paper adds.

-- Tom Gross

FULL ARTICLES

THE SILENCE OF THE HOLLYWOOD LAMBS

The silence of the Hollywood lambs
By Jack Engelhard
December 21, 2002

This week Sean Penn, the famous Hollywood actor, is touring Iraq, mostly hospitals. I wonder – are there any famous Hollywood actors visiting hospitals in Israel?

Let others quarrel about Penn's wisdom and patriotism – though I do admire him for saying that he would not speak out against America while overseas.

In fact I have no quarrel at all with mainly liberal performers, except to ask... where is the outcry from Jewish Hollywood about the murdering and maiming of Jewish children?

The silence – if you'll pardon the cliche – is deafening, as it was in Ben Hecht's day when that legendary journalist tried to raise awareness for the plight of those trapped in Nazi Europe.

Strangely, most of his early support came from gentile performers. Jews were afraid to speak up. Either they didn't care or were afraid to spur on (more) anti-Semitism.

Today there is so much anti-Semitism around there's not much chance of making it worse. (Okay, that is debatable.) This leaves us to conclude that Hollywood – so quick to defend the widow and the orphan – does not care.

This is something I do not believe. I believe Hollywood does care. So if that's the case, why the silence? Why is Penn not in Israel? My guess, as to this Silence of the Hollywood Lambs, is that Israel has lost the public-relations war and has allowed itself to be portrayed as Goliath when in fact Israel is David.

Israel is not a fashionable cause. Israel is not a liberal cause. Some of this is Israel's fault for its failure to get the message out.

Much of it, though, is the fault of what I dare refer to as a "media pogrom." This media pogrom extends from Australia, throughout Europe up to and into our own doorsteps.

Just the other day the Philadelphia Inquirer (carrying AP) referred to the Palestinian terrorist group Fatah as "activists." So as this is being written, as Penn visits Baghdad hospitals to bring a smile to Arab children, Israel weeps alone.

You would think that Hollywood would embrace Israel since Hollywood was founded by Jews. Hollywood is Jewish glory. The studios were founded by Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Samuel Goldwyn and the like, onto today's Katzenberg, Geffen, Spielberg. Our cast, past and present, includes such luminaries as John Garfield, Jeff Chandler, June Allison, Natalie Wood, Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, Paul Newman, Lee Grant, Harrison Ford, Winona Ryder, Billy Crystal, Ellen Barkin, Alan Arkin, Goldie Hawn, Michael Caine – and yes, I know, some of these are but partly Jewish and there are questions about Cary Grant.

But that is a game we all play in Jewish homes.

This, however, is no game, what's going on in Israel. Jewish blood is flowing, once again, only this time there is no Ben Hecht to energize an outcry.

For all I know there may be a Sean Penn equivalent in Israel right now bringing comfort to thousands of Israeli children who managed to survive suicide attacks. If such a performer is out there, I have not heard his name. I have not heard the names of any Hollywood stars – Jewish or gentile – who have bothered to visit Rambam Hospital or Hadassah Hospital to bring a smile to the face of a Jewish child who has lost arms and legs. There are so many of them, children and grown-ups. All victims of these "activists." I may not agree with Penn's politics, but I like the fact that he is not afraid, not silent, and that he cares about people other than himself.

THIS SILENCE WILL BE A LONG-LASTING STAIN ON HOLLYWOOD’S MORAL RECORD

Loudmouth "stars" are remaining surprisingly quiet about Israel
By Dennis Prager
Jewish World Review
October 2, 2002

Is there an issue that some Hollywood star – director, producer, actor, actress – has not publicly commented on? It's hard to name one.

Producer, director Rob Reiner has devoted years to imposing onerous taxes on poor people who smoke and to putting perhaps half of California's cigar and pipe stores out of business. Barbra Streisand has devoted yeoman efforts to promoting leftist causes (sometimes with malice, as in her recent letter to House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt in which she writes that "... industries, run by big Republican donors and insiders, clearly have much to gain if we go to war against Iraq"). Ed Asner has devoted much of his life to defending leftist tyrannies.

Almost everyone in Hollywood has signed on to anything promoting gun control, higher taxes, saving whales and undoing global warming, while various actresses have posed nude to protest the wearing of fur. The list of stars and causes is almost endless.

There is one issue, however, about which one hears nothing from Hollywood: the terror against Israeli citizens. Far more has been said by Hollywood against potential threats to endangered insect or bird species than against actual attempts to render Israeli Jews an endangered species.

As one Hollywood insider, screenwriter Dan Gordon ("The Hurricane," "Murder in the First"), told the Los Angeles Times: "There's been a puzzling silence. We're in an industry that takes stands on everything. People can't shut us up! I'd love to see the indignation about homicide bombers that is reserved for smokers. You smoke in this town, and you're dead. Rob Reiner will come after you."

Let it be said loudly and clearly that this silence will be a long-lasting stain on Hollywood's moral record. The Palestinian/Islamic/Arab war to destroy Israel is the moral test of our time. If you are silent on this issue, you are either morally confused, immoral or lack courage.

In the case of Hollywood's silence, the first and third are the more likely reasons.

First, the confusion. In an article on the silence of the Jews in Hollywood, the Los Angeles Times quotes writer-director Michael Tolkin, author of "The Player" and "Changing Lanes": "Liberals are on the side of the underdog. The people who've had their cities turned into rubble look like the underdog."

This is a very revealing statement. Many of us have long argued that leftists do not ask, "Who is right and who is wrong?" but rather, "Who is strong and who is weak?" in determining their positions on world and national issues. The substitution of power criteria for moral criteria is one of the reasons the left so often takes immoral positions. It is, therefore, helpful to hear such a candid acknowledgment of Hollywood liberals' moral confusion. Not to mention ignorance – no Palestinian city has been "turned into rubble."

The other reason for Hollywood's silence on the moral litmus test of our time is lack of courage. Absence of moral courage is in no way distinctive to Hollywood; indeed, it is the rarest of humanity's good traits. But one suspects that many in Hollywood pride themselves on having moral courage, so it is important to set the record straight.

It is sadly illuminating that it takes courage for a Hollywood insider to publicly support Israel. The Jewish state is, after all, one of the most enlightened and liberal democracies in the world, and it is fighting against one of the most morally backward cultures in the world.

With all the prominent Jews in Hollywood, this silence is even more remarkable, but not surprising. Most of Hollywood's Jews have little or nothing to do with Jewish causes, Jewish communal life or Judaism. Their causes are those of the left, their community is largely like-minded Hollywood folks, and their values come from liberalism, not Judaism. Moreover, the silence on Israel of Hollywood's most prominent Jews enables the non-Jewish stars to remain silent. If the Jews don't care about Israel, why should they?

Ever since I learned that Richard Wagner – whose music is among the greatest ever written – was a racist anti-Semite, I learned that I had to disassociate artists from their art. So, I never expected anything morally significant from artists, in Hollywood or anywhere else, and am therefore not surprised at Hollywood's silence about Israel's suffering. But it remains a moral failure.

“WHY HAS THE WESTERN PRESS EMBRACED ANTI-SEMITISM AS THE NEW BLACK?”

"If I forget thee, Jerusalem" The power of blunt nostalgia
By David Mamet
The Forward
December 27, 2002

(David Mamet, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, visited Israel recently as a guest of the Jerusalem Film Festival. His experience gave rise to the following essay.)

I am reading in Jerusalem. I read, in Azure, a scholarly Israeli publication, an article by historian Michael Oren that Israeli opinion is split on Orde Wingate. Wingate was a Brit philosemite (the exception that, et cetera), creator of the doctrine of desert guerrilla warfare and godfather of the Israeli military. I read that the jury was still out on him, as he ate raw onions, strained his tea through his socks and greeted guests in the nude. Now, as to particulars one and three, I have been guilty myself (though never in conjunction). As to particular two, I must ask, did he, in the absence of a strainer, improvise brilliantly with a pair of clean socks, or, did he (disons le mot) utilize the very socks in which he trod that desert land he was to aid in Making Free? But, perhaps, there are some doors History was never meant to open.

My accommodations in the Mount Zion Hotel are superb – two large picture windows overlook the Old City. To its left, modern Jerusalem, to the right, the Mount of Olives, East Jerusalem and the descent to the Dead Sea. Looking east, before actual dawn, and just before sunset, the light is extraordinary. The Old City is the height of land – it rises from the sea to the Temple Mount and falls away to the Dead Sea and the desert.

A tour guide, a committed amateur archaeologist, gives me a tour of the south and east walls.

"Look up," he says, "what do you see?"

"The land rises and then falls away," I say.

He nods. "The clouds come in from the sea and deposit the rain at the highest point: the Old City. To its west, the land is tillable. To its east is desert. This is the division," he says. "This is the spot where..."

"Two cultures," I suggest.

"Not two cultures," he says, "but two mentalities, two spiritualities meet: the people in the land toward the sea, in biblical Canaan, were concerned with commerce, with trade, with agriculture. The people to the east, the people in the desert, were concerned with spirit, with visions. The two have always met in Jerusalem."

We walk toward the cemetery at the Mount of Olives. Below he shows me the City of David, that is, Jerusalem, as it existed at the turn of the common era. In those days, he says, it had more than 100,000 inhabitants. The July heat is killing me. It is not hard to imagine the relief of the desert traveler, coming to the high, watered ground. The cleansing, insistent influence of the desert to the Westerner does not need to be imagined; one feels it.

The Old City is fairly empty. It is usually, of course, steeved, if I may, with tourists and pilgrims. The current intifada has discouraged them. We stop for lunch in a Palestinian falafel place my friends recommend as the best around. We eat under a large poster showing the growth of Medina from the desert crossroads into the modern shrine. "Excuse me," I say, "but is it dangerous to be eating in a Palestinian restaurant?" I am assured that the proprietors, like most of their co-religionists in the Old City, are Israeli citizens and that they would not think of committing antisocial acts. I am puzzled to find this suggested suspension of human nature, and not gratified when, several weeks later, I find my friends' opinions proved too sanguine.

I am invited to Sabbath lunch in South Jerusalem, in a house one block from one of the latest bus bombings. My hosts are the Horensteins, close friends from Newton, Mass. I get out of the cab, and they greet me warmly. There is a group standing outside the front door, among them a nice-looking, obviously Christian gent, around my age. How like the Horensteins, I think, to extend their hospitality, to share their Jewish home with a non-Jewish friend.

The ringer is, of course, not him, but me. He is Michael Oren, the Horensteins' cousin, author of the piece on Wingate and, incidentally, of "Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East." He is a scholar and saw the eponymous war (1967), and several others, as a paratrooper in the IDF. With him is his son, Yoram, an 18-year-old on half-day leave from his unit, an ultra-elite helicopter rescue squad in the IDF. The young man leaves, and Michael says, "When he came home last night, he was short one of his uniform shirts, so I lent him one of mine." This offhanded statement is the greatest expression of parental pride I have ever heard.

I am overcome by a sense of grief. We sit there, at the ritual meal, talking about Jerusalem, about the war (Michael's sister-in-law was killed in one of the recent bombings) about being Jewish.

To me, a Diaspora Jew, the question is constant, insistent and poignant while in Israel at this meal it is more than poignant, it is painful. How, I wonder, can I not be here; and how is it possible that I did not come here (as did Michael Oren) in my youth, and "grow up with the country," instead of wasting my time in show business? I am full of grief, as at a middle-aged meeting with the girl I did not marry.

Now, this blunt trauma of nostalgia is a dead giveaway, signaling not an inability to relive the past, but to face the present. The present, to me, consists in this: that I am an aging Diaspora Jew on a junket, and that my cheap feelings of personal loss could better be expressed as respect and homage.

Israel is at war and has been at war since its inception. Much contemporary opinion in the West is antisemitic. Before my trip, I was strolling through Newton. There, before me, was a broken-down Volvo of old, the vehicle of my brethren, the congenitally liberal. It was festooned, as are its kind, with every sort of correct exhortation: "Save James Bay," "Honor Diversity" and so on. A most interesting bumper sticker read: "Israel Out of the Settlements." Now this is a legitimate expression of free speech. Israel has been involved, as we know, in a rather protracted real estate dispute with several hundred million of its neighbors. This legitimate political expression, however, had all its "S"s transformed into dollar signs. Here we have, one would have supposed, a civilized person – one would assume that one could reason with the owner of a Volvo – sporting a slogan which could best be translated as "Hook-nosed Jews Die." My very airplane book, my refuge on the endless flight to Israel, is Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears," in which I find the major plot point, the misplacement, by Israel, of an atom bomb. As per Mr. Clancy, in this otherwise ripping yarn, the world is going to end because these lazy or distracted Mockies have committed a blunder no civilized folk would make.

It is – I cannot say "refreshing" – a relief to trade a low-level umbrage at anti-Israeli tripe for the reality of a country at war. Israel, at war, looks very much like Israel at peace. Life, as the phrase has it, goes on. Six thousand people have bought tickets to the opening night of the Jerusalem Film Festival. Nine thousand show up and are seated. We are in The Sultan's Pool, a natural open-air amphitheater, just under the walls of the Old City. Lia Van Leer, the festival's founder and complete enchilada, asks me to accompany her to the podium to open the ball officially. I do so, in English, and add "Shalom, chaverim" ("Hello, companions"), thus, exhausting my conversational Hebrew. And we watch Pedro Almodovar's "Talk to Her," with 9,000 mainly young Israelis. They laugh at the film, cordially boo the mayor and, during the speeches afterward, smoke cigarettes, sitting under the open sky. Such beautiful young people. Even the old people here look young to me. But, then, I am in love.

I tour the sites of bombings on the Jaffa Road, accompanying Mayor Ehud Olmert. The tour ends at the house of Boris Schatz, the founder of the Bezalel School, the Jewish state's first school of art. Jimmy and Micah Lewensohn, his great-nephews, are my hosts. It is crammed with workbooks, plaques, sculptures, paintings, ceramics, weavings. Schatz, once court sculptor to the King of Bulgaria, had an unfortunate marital experience, around 1904, and it drove him back to his Judaism. Theodor Herzl enlisted him as the "First Artist of the Yishuv" (the pre-statehood settlement). Schatz came out to create a new Jewish art. Micah tells me that Shatz's wife, once a lover of Gorky, ended up screwing half the men in the Yishuv. It was, he said, like the Wild West. They went up to the Galilee on retreat, got whacked out on the native weeds, and it was one big orgy. These were disaffected youth, he said; they were, in effect, hippies, the early Zionists. Schatz dressed in a white djellaba, kept a pet peacock and held court in the Galilee. Herzl comes up to see him, there he is: the peacock, half-naked girls, Shabbos dinner and somebody's playing the flute. "And you know," Micah says, "the flute is prohibited on Shabbos."

So I am nostalgic for the days of '48, and Schatz's great-nephew is nostalgic for the 1910 Wild West, as he puts it, of the Galilee. "He was insane," Micah lovingly says of his great-uncle. "Here is the burial plaque he designed for Ben Yehuda. You will see he dated it 'In the Year Seven.'" He shrugs. Ben Yehuda died in '24, and Schatz reinvented the calendar to reflect "seven years since the Balfour Declaration."

In my study, in the U.S., are two World War I posters. The images are identical, but the text of each is in a different language. They show a gallant squad of British soldiers in khaki, charging off. In the foreground, another soldier uses his bayonet to free a bound man. This man is a heavily bearded, tubercular, bowed endomorph in shirt sleeves. He has a hooked nose, essentially, a cartoon tailor of 1917. He gazes at the soldiers, whose ranks he will now join, and says, "You have cut my bonds and set me free. Now let me set others free." The superscription says, in the one poster in English, and in the other in Yiddish: "Jews the World Over Love Liberty, Have Fought, And Will Fight for It." And, below the pictured scene: "Britain Expects Every Son of Israel To Do His Duty: Enlist with the Infantry Reinforcements." Well, it is a various world.

Assimilated Western Jews say, "I don't like this Sharon," as if to refer to the prime minister simply as "Sharon" were to over-commit themselves. They are like the office assistant raised to executive status who immediately forgets how to use the fax machine. "This Sharon" indeed. Well, there are all sorts of Jews. One dichotomy is between the Real and the Imaginary. Imaginary Jews are the delight of the world. They include Anne Frank, Janusz Korszak, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and the movie stars in "Exodus." These Jews delight the world in their willingness to die heroically as a form of entertainment. The plight of actual Jews, however, has traditionally been more problematic, and paradoxically, those same folk who weep at "Sophie's Choice," sniff at the State of Israel.

Here, in Israel, are actual Jews, fighting for their country, against both terror and misthought public opinion, as well as disgracefully biased and, indeed, fraudulent reporting. Here are people courageously going about their lives, in that which, sad to say, were it not a Jewish state, would, in its steadfastness, in its reserve, in its courage, rightly be the pride of the Western world. This Western world is, I think, deeply confused between the real and the imaginary. All of us moviegoers, who awarded ourselves the mantle of humanity for our tears at "The Diary of Anne Frank" – we owe a debt to the Jews. We do not owe this debt out of any "Unwritten Ordinance of Humanitarianism" but from a personal accountability. Having eaten the dessert, cheap sentiment, it is time to eat the broccoli. If you love the Jews as victims, but detest our right to statehood, might you not ask yourself "why?" That is your debt to the Jews. Here is your debt to the Jewish state. Had Israel not in 1981 bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor, some scant weeks away from production of nuclear bomb material, all New York (God forbid) might have been Ground Zero.

I had two Tom Clancy books to while away the eons on the plane. One, as I say, was "The Sum of All Fears," which I discarded on the trip out. Alone, in my Jerusalem hotel room, I turn to my second Clancy novel, "The Bear and the Dragon." A subplot deals with the Chinese custom (reported by Clancy) of female infanticide. An American operative falls in love with a Chinese young woman and is informed of this crime and is, rightfully, horrified, as is Clancy. How can these little children be murdered? He writes, "If it were the Jews, the world would be Up in Arms." What can he mean? As the world was in 1941, when they rushed to the defense of 6 million innocents? Or as the world is today, in its staunch support of Israel's right to existence, and in opposition to the murder of its children? What can Clancy mean? Is there no beach novel to rest my overburdened sensibilities? Where do I belong? What will bring peace to the Middle East? Why has the Western press embraced antisemitism as the new black? Well, Jerusalem has been notorious, since antiquity, for inculcating in the visitor a sense not only of the immediacy but of the solubility of the large questions. I recommend it.

JANE FONDA’S MIDEAST MISSION

Jane Fonda's mideast mission
The Associated Press
December 19, 2002

Jane Fonda visited Israelis wounded in suicide bomb attacks and met with Israeli peace activists Thursday.

The 64-year-old actress and activist is on a weeklong trip to the region and plans to attend meetings of Israeli and Palestinian women organized by a global movement to stop violence against women.

The movement, called V-Day, was inspired by the off-Broadway hit "The Vagina Monologues" and its playwright, Eve Ensler, who is also in Israel.

Fonda and Ensler spoke Thursday to Jewish and Arab doctors and patients at Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital after a performance of selected passages from "Monologues" put on by a group of Israeli women.

Earlier, Fonda, a two-time Oscar winner and fitness guru, visited Israelis recovering from chronic injuries at the hospital's rehabilitation center.

She appeared emotionally moved when she met 23-year-old Sharon Maman, who suffered brain damage after two suicide bombers blew up simultaneously in downtown Jerusalem on Dec. 1, 2001. The young man, who lay flat on his stomach on a hospital bed, only began speaking again three months ago.

On Saturday, Fonda is to visit the West Bank town of Ramallah to see a physical rehabilitation center, a Palestinian refugee camp and Yasser Arafat's headquarters complex, most of which Israeli troops have destroyed.

JANE FONDA VISITS REFUGEE CAMP, RAMALLAH HOSPITAL

Jane Fonda visits refugee camp, Ramallah hospital
The Associated Press
December 23, 2002

Actress Jane Fonda visited a refugee camp and a hospital in the West Bank on Saturday, capping a three-day visit to the region aimed at promoting peace.

Fonda, who was celebrating her 65th birthday, traveled through the Kalkilya crossing, trudging through mud and clutching a bouquet of red roses given to her by a Palestinian women's group.

She toured West Bank villages and was led through a Palestinian refugee camp near Ramallah in a daylong tour hosted by the Jerusalem Center for Women.

It was the final leg of a trip organized by a global movement to stop violence against women.

The movement, called V-Day, was inspired by the off-Broadway hit "The Vagina Monologues" and its playwright, Eve Ensler.

Ensler accompanied Fonda and led discussions with Palestinian women.

"This is the focal point of so many conflicts," Fonda said. "Both sides aren't hearing each other's narratives, and maybe that's our role as artists."

In an emotional moment, Fonda and Ensler met with Fatima al-Kasba, 37, who lost two teenage sons in the conflict. Fonda embraced Kasba, both women in tears, as the mother of five described the pain of losing her children and her hopes for peace.

Later, Fonda and Ensler toured the Abu Raya Rehabilitation Center, where victims of violence and spinal cord injuries are treated and provided with physiotherapy.

Fonda, a two-time Oscar winner and fitness guru, said she had been to Israel and the West Bank in 1980, but what she saw today was dramatically different.

She said she was most surprised by the number and proximity of Jewish communities to the Palestinian population.

NOT STEVEN SPIELBERG. NOT BARBARA STREISAND. NOT PHILIP ROTH.

Friends like these
Editorial
The Jerusalem Post
April 1, 2002

Yasser Arafat may be holed up in dimly lit quarters, but it's not as if he lacks for photo-op flash. Last month we watched as a claque of literary and Hollywood heavies – Nobelist Jose Saramago and mega-director Oliver Stone among them – tramped through Arafat's offices, lending moral and emotional support. Now the Palestinian leader has been joined by French antiglobalization leader Jose Bove, several members of the European Parliament, and about 600 Italian and French "peace activists," who have volunteered their services as human shields. Arafat, an expert in putting innocent people in harm's way, has been happy to oblige.

Meanwhile, here in Israel, we have... Not Steven Spielberg. Not Barbara Streisand. Not Philip Roth. Not Daniel Libeskind. Not the March of the Living. We do have Karrin Wheeler, an American Jew who's here "to tell the Israeli government... that the source of terror and violence is the Israeli government and racism." But that's not exactly the kind of support Israelis were hoping to get from their American cousins.

As we write, the bloodiest month in the 18-month-long intifada has just ended. Arab anti-Semitism is at fury pitch, Hitlerian in its rhetoric and medieval in its deeds. Newsweek's cover story wonders whether Israel has any future to speak of. Yet notable exceptions aside, the reaction of the Diaspora has to a depressing extent amounted to little more than diffident handwringing. When the history of this phase of the Arab-Israeli conflict is written, this diffidence will surely count among its more lamentable chapters.

This is not to say that the average Diaspora Jew is to be blamed for shying away from Israel, though surely it doesn't take an extraordinary measure of courage to pay a week's visit. But people like Spielberg, Streisand, Roth, and Libeskind have a different level of responsibility. Each has "spoken" for the Jewish people. Some are prominent memorializers of the Holocaust. Yet in the face of the present assault, they are lending neither their bodies, nor their voices, nor their pens to the defense of an embattled Jewish homeland. It's as if Israel has been erased from their Jewish consciousness.

In fairness, this failure of responsibility is not theirs alone. It has been abetted by the Western press, so wondrously evenhanded over the years regarding events in Israel that it has created the intellectual underpinnings on which Palestinian terrorism flourishes. And it has been abetted by Israel's uniquely incompetent public relations machine.

Still, given the train of events from Camp David onward, it cannot be too much to ask of Diaspora Jews to figure it out for themselves. Put simply: Their correligionists and ethnic kin are being killed, a dozen at a time, in their homes, cafes, cars, and grocery stores, because they are Jews. Not Israelis, mind, but Jews. So if Diaspora Jewry will not speak out for Israel – because they object to Sharon, or to the settlements, or to this or that aspect of Israeli domestic policy – will they at least speak out for themselves?

It bears notice that the people who have recently paid court in Ramallah are among the worst the West has to offer. As an editor at the Diario de Noticias, the Portuguese Saramago put his newspaper behind the abortive 1975 Communist putsch by sacking every reporter who would not report the party line. Stone is notorious for films that bend truth and invent facts in the service of his message. Bove is the man who led the violent Seattle WTO protests that inspired an explosion of anarchist and neo-Nazi violence throughout Europe. Thus do the unrepentant, the mendacious, the violent, and the radical come together in common cause with the Palestinian Authority.

That said, the inability or unwillingness of their more moderate peers – Jewish ones especially – to offer some kind of riposte marks the gravest sort of failure. Saramago, Stone, and Bove may be an execrable bunch, but they have opinions aplenty, and the courage to express them. We can only hope that events in Israel will not someday make Diaspora Jews bitterly regret their present silence.

Not much joy at a Saudi Christmas

December 24, 2002

FULL ARTICLES

CHRISTMAS IS MOSTLY HIDDEN IN THIS DESERT KINGDOM

A Saudi Christmas is a secret affair
By Susan Sevareid
The Associated Press
December 22, 2002

Past the stuffed animals and congratulatory baby baskets, sprigs of plastic evergreens are tucked in among the silk flowers. The rows of ribbon include a few spools of reds, golds and greens, and two half-empty boxes of blown-glass Christmas tree ornaments sit partly obscured on a nearby shelf.

As evinced by the atmosphere in this Riyadh gift shop, Christmas is mostly hidden in this desert kingdom, where Islam is the only accepted religion.

Expatriate workers hold discrete holiday parties within walled compounds, out of sight of the government's religious police, who guard against offenses to the faith. For many other foreigners, the anniversary of Christ's birth is a private day of reflection.

"I only pray in my room," said a Roman Catholic laborer from Sri Lanka, noting there is little else to do to celebrate Christmas.

Some embassies, he said, organize gatherings for their citizens during the holiday season, but generally not on Christmas Day to avoid offending Saudi sensibilities.

Saudi Arabia, as the birthplace of Islam, is charged with protecting the faith's holiest shrines at Mecca and Medina, and differing beliefs, like new ideas, are carefully guarded against as threats to the culture, traditions and official religion.

Churches are not permitted – "freedom of religion does not exist," a recent State Department report said about Saudi Arabia – though some expatriates gather privately throughout the year for religious services.

It is not that way everywhere in the Middle East. In the neighboring Persian Gulf state of Bahrain, luxury hotels are decorated with brightly lit trees and poinsettias, and signs advertise Christmas meals. At the Holiday Inn, strains of "Silver Bells" and "White Christmas" waft through the lobby.

Christmas trees are sold in the Yemeni capital of San'a and in expatriate neighborhoods of Cairo. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak declared last week that Jan. 7 – when the country's minority Orthodox Coptic Christians celebrate Christmas – was a holiday for all Egyptians.

But in Riyadh, the mere mention of Christmas leads many expatriates to lower their voices and fidget, fearful of unwanted attention or risking their jobs. Just buying a Christmas card requires a whispered journey into a greeting card underworld.

At the Riyadh gift shop where a few festive decorations were tucked in among other goods, a Filipino employee shakes his head when asked about Christmas cards. But he gives directions to another shop, advising an inquirer to look for the Filipino manager.

"He'll give you one in secret ... secret because it's 'haram' here, you know," he says, using the Arabic word for "forbidden" known to anyone who has run afoul of conservative Islamic social norms.

At another card shop, an Indian employee reaches beneath the counter to pull out a half-dozen religious and secular Christmas cards, his eyes darting around his empty shop and out the window.

There would be trouble if caught: "They ask where you got them," he says. The ever-vigilant religious police have confiscated cards in the past, he said, and have even been known to haul shopkeepers away to be questioned about where they got such materials.

Clearly relieved once he is able to tuck the purchases into a paper bag and staple it shut, he points to a less offensive "Seasons Greetings" card, discreetly visible beside the cash register.

At $1.35, they're half the price of the Christmas cards, and half the risk.

“WE KNOW THE JEWS HAVE MANIPULATED THE SEPT. 11 ATTACKS”

Saudi interior minister says Jews were behind Sept. 11 attacks
By Alaa Shahine
The Associated Press
December 5, 2002

The Saudi Interior minister has claimed Jews were behind the Sept. 11 attacks because they have benefited from subsequent criticism of Islam and Arabs, according to media reports.

Interior Minister Prince Nayef made the remarks in the Arabic-language Kuwaiti daily Assyasah last month. The latest edition of Ain al-Yaqeen, a weekly Internet magazine devoted to Saudi issues, posted the Assyasah interview and its own English translation.

"We know that the Jews have manipulated the Sept. 11 incidents and turned American public opinion against Arabs and Muslims," Prince Nayef was quoted as saying in the Arabic text, while Ain al Yaqeen's English version referred to "Zionists" instead of "Jews."

"We still ask ourselves: Who has benefited from Sept. 11 attacks? I think they (the Jews) were the protagonists of such attacks," Nayef was quoted as saying. Nayef's spokesman, Saud al-Musaibeeh, did not respond to repeated requests for confirmation the minister had been quoted accurately.

The Internet magazine's English translation of the comments began to attract attention in the United States just as the Saudis launched a new public relations campaign to address accusations the kingdom is soft on terrorism and inculcates extremist thought among its citizens.

"The Saudis are telling us that they are an ally in the war on terror while their top government officials are still blaming ... the Jews and denying that 15 Saudis took part in the attacks on New York and the Pentagon," Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat, said in Washington earlier this week.

"The Bush administration continually defends Saudi Arabia as a friend of the United States and a committed partner in the war on terror," Engel said. "Does this Saudi minister sound like a partner in the war on terror?"

Sen. Charles Schumer, also a New York Democrat, wrote this week in a letter to the Saudi ambassador to the United States that "the interior minister's comments only serve to confirm American suspicions about the Saudi government's commitment to the war on terror."

Nayef's remarks echoed rumors that have been heard in the Arab world since the attacks – but this time they are attributed to the man in charge of Saudi investigations into the attacks.

The Saudi minister was quoted in the interview as saying his kingdom is currently detaining some 100 terror suspects for interrogation. He added that the suspects "will either apologize for their mistakes and change their course or will be referred to trial."

The United States has blamed the Sept. 11 attacks on al-Qaida terror network, whose chief, Osama bin Laden, was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994. It took Saudi Arabia five months after the attacks to acknowledge that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. The Gulf kingdom, a close U.S. ally, has never officially held al-Qaida responsible for the attacks and usually refers to the hijackers as people "enticed and deluded" into committing their crimes.

Several statements attributed to bin Laden aired by the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television claimed responsibility for the attacks. A statement attributed to al-Qaida's "political bureau" that appeared Monday on an Islamic web site listed the Sept. 11 attacks as among the successful operations carried out by the terrorist group against the United States.

In the interview, Nayef said he could not believe that bin Laden and his network, including Saudi participants, worked alone.

He was quoted as saying he believed terrorist networks have links to "foreign intelligence agencies that work against Arab and Muslim interests, chief among them is the Israeli Mossad."

THE SAUDIS AID TERRORISM BOTH DIRECTLY AND INDIRECTLY

Time to face Mecca
By Tom Gross
The National Review
February 8, 2002

www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross020802.shtml

In his State of the Union address last week, President Bush indicated where his war on terror is heading. Iraq, Iran and North Korea "and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil," he declared. Bush received considerable praise from the pundits. Charles Krauthammer, for example, congratulated him on an "astonishingly bold address" which was "about preventing the next Sept. 11." The prime target, it was generally agreed, would be Iraq.

Yet, it has been clear since Sept. 11 – and actually since well before then – that if America wants to prevent a major terrorist onslaught there is one government above all others that must be reformed or replaced. And it is not that of Saddam, but the House of Saud.

The Saudi regime – not merely its exiled son, Osama Bin laden – bears a major share of the responsibility for international terrorism. Further acts of terror against Americans of the kind seen in Africa, Yemen, New York and Washington, will likely follow unless some serious pressure is placed on Riyadh, both to stop sponsoring Islamic extremists, and to allow moderates some significant role in government.

The Saudis aid terrorism both directly and indirectly. On the direct level, they fund (at government and at private levels) Islamic terrorist groups throughout the world. For example, evidence uncovered in Afghanistan by British and American intelligence officers clearly implicates a number of leading Saudis, some of them members of the royal family, in the funding of al-Qaeda.

The Saudi government is also the chief financial backer of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. It was members of Hamas who taught shoe bomber Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up an American Airlines jet, how to dry the explosive triacetone triperoxide, and mold it into shoes and belts. He received this instruction when he visited Gaza last June.

In addition to providing support for terrorist groups, the Saudis have helped to shape those groups' ideology by exporting an extreme form of Islamist philosophy.

The Saudis are also responsible for terror on an indirect level. By refusing to permit any opposition to the regime other than that of the extremist imams, who support Bin Ladenism, they have virtually forced young Saudis who want to express their opposition to the ruling family's brutal, corrupt ways into the arms of those imams. The result – al Qaeda – merely mirrors their own lack of respect for life and humanity.

These extremists will eventually overthrow the regime if it doesn’t reform. Signs of dissent are growing. Just before Christmas, for example, 1,000 young men were reported to have rioted in Jeddah.

The Saudi regime regularly dishonors the moderate Islamic tradition with its beheadings, amputations and floggings. Its appalling treatment of women (the religious police patrol the streets with electric camel prods looking for women exposing a little too much under their chadors), the vile anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial that permeate the state-controlled media, and the general lack of tolerance for Christians and Jews – in all these respects, the Saudis are worse than Iran and Iraq.

When it comes to inciting Islamic extremism, too, the Saudi record is in many respects worse than Iraq or Iran. It is no accident that the Saudis enjoyed warm relations with the Taliban long after Teheran broke ties. As Abdullah Al Refaie, editor-in-chief, of the Saudi paper Al Muslimoon, put it: "The Iranian claim that the Taliban have discredited Islam is simply not true. The Taliban, in fact, have a good record of behaving as faithful and moderate Muslims."

The Saudi regime's brutal record of torture is ignored by the West – even when Britons, Belgians, and Canadians are the victims, as was the case last year. As the British media revealed last month, during a 67-day period of torture, Saudi police hung from the ceiling a middle-aged British man who was being held on trumped-up charges, beat him with a pickaxe handle, and threatened to have his wife repeatedly gang-raped until he confessed.

And yet the Saudi government is often described by American media and politicians as "moderate" and "our partners," and is subject to much flattery from American and British halls of government. As is the case with the Palestinian Authority, reports about the true extent of the awfulness of the Saudi regime are largely ignored in the western media, creating a dangerously misleading impression. Last week, for example, the New York Times sub-headlined its news interview with Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, "Dispensing wisdom, receiving praise."

Western governments have spent far too long propping up the regime in Riyadh, as they have the one in Gaza, on the principle that the alternative would be worse. But in fact there are plenty of moderate voices, among both the Saudis and the Palestinians, who are desperate to find Western support but are too terrified to speak out against their native regimes.

To say that the Saudis have been less than fully cooperative in the war on terrorism would be an understatement. The lack of meaningful criticism or rebuke from the US to Riyadh for the fact that 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers were Saudis (and at least one entered the US on a Saudi diplomatic passport) – a fact that the Saudis only acknowledged this week – that over 100 of the 158 detainees being held in US custody at Guantanamo Bay are Saudis, that 240 of the 250 al-Qaeda prisoners Pakistan is holding are Saudis – this is surely one of the main reasons why the Saudi ruling class are continuing to fund al Qaeda and other Islamic terror groups.

Citing Western intelligence sources, Turkish, German and British newspapers all last month reported that Saudi intelligence is currently financing the relocation of thousands of Al Qaeda insurgents to Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. The German daily Die Welt reported last Wednesday that Saudi officials have helped place many of them in the Ein Hilwe Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, and plan to finance their relocation to territory controlled by Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. (Not unrelated, Die Welt also reported that it was Saudi intelligence that paid Iran $10 million to buy the weapons for the Palestinian Authority that were captured by Israel in the Red Sea on January 3.)

Indeed it is the Saudis, not the Iraqis, who one way or another leave their fingerprints on virtually every major development among Muslim terrorists. Take, for example, the recent use of women suicide bombers against Israeli civilians. The Islamic authorities in Gaza have so far ordered only men, not women, to blow up Israeli teenagers. The Palestinians behind these recent female attacks (only one of which was "successful") cite as their inspiration last August's fatwa issued by the Saudi High Islamic Council exhorting women to become suicide bombers.

Even with the Taliban's collapse, the ideological justification for the September 11 attacks (and of similar future acts) continues among Saudis. For example, Saudi Sheikh Safar Abd Al-Rahman Al-Hawali, as quoted in Al-Hayat, a London-based Arabic daily, on January 13, 2002, said: "Since when is the Pentagon 'innocent'? The famous American intellectual Gore Vidal himself called it 'Hell and a nest of Satans'... [It is] a den of spies and a Mafia nest." He went on to describe the World Trade Center as "the center of usury and money laundering."

And here is Sheikh Ali bin Khdheir (a Yemenite who is funded from Saudi sources), again speaking after Sept. 11: "It is permissible to kill the combatants among them, as well as those who are non-combatants, for example the aged man, the blind man, and the dhimmi, as the clerics agree."

Former CIA Director James Woolsey is virtually alone among American officials in stating what should be obvious to everybody: Saudi Arabia, he said last month, "deserves a very large part of the blame for Sept. 11."

It is constantly argued that if the Saudi monarchy were to fall, the successor regime would merely be more extreme and anti-Western. Such thinking also led Bush Sr. to try and keep the Soviet regime in power in the dying days of communism. Yet there are moderate Saudis. Some come from within the regime, such as King Fahd's half-brother, Prince Talal, now 73, who spent many years in exile for trying to persuade his fellow royals to shed their despotic ways, and only last week renewed his call for the modernization of Saudi institutions.

Others are from the middle classes, such as Dr. Sahr Muhammad Hatem of Riyadh. Unable to voice her criticism inside the country, she wrote a letter to a London-based Arabic newspaper on December 12, 2001. Under the title "Our Culture of Demagogy Has Engendered bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, and Their Ilk," she wrote: "The mentality of each one of us was programmed upon entering school as a child, [to believe] that ... anyone who is not a Muslim is our enemy, and that the West means enfeeblement, licentiousness, lack of values, and even Jahiliya [a term used to describe the backward pre-Islamic era] itself. Anyone who escapes this programming in school encounters it at the mosque, or through the media or from the preachers lurking in every corner."

Dr Hatem has received much praise from other Saudis. In the future, is the US going to support those who agree with her, or is it going to continue to prop up the unsavory regime that continues to govern Riyadh? The regime can be pressured. It needs to sell oil more than the US needs to buy it. Nor is it just oil that they send abroad. They also export hate – the hatred of America.

SAUDI DAILY PRAISES PASSOVER & JERUSALEM SUICIDE BOMBERS

Saudi government-controlled daily praises Passover and Jerusalem supermarket suicide bombers
Al-Jazirah (Saudi Arabia)
Memri
April 1, 2002

In an article for the Saudi government-controlled daily Al-Jazirah, columnist Dr. Khalil Ibrahim Al-Sa'adat applauded the actions of 'Abd Al-Baset 'Oudeh, the Palestinian who detonated himself at a Passover 'Seder' in a Netanya hotel, and Ayat Al-Akhras, who carried out a suicide attack in a Jerusalem supermarket. Following are excerpts from the article:

PRAISING THE PASSOVER BOMBER

"May Allah have mercy upon you, oh 'Abd Al-Baset 'Oudeh, mujaheed and martyr, the quiet hero who infiltrated so elegantly and spoke so gaily. You defended your religion, your homeland, and your people. You attached no importance to [any] Arab summit; you did not wait for international agreements; you did not follow television interviews; you did not pause because of dead Arab and international reactions that neither help nor hinder."

"Courageously, full of willingness to [wage] Jihad, and with faith filling your heart, you executed your assignment and sacrificed your pure soul for your religion and your homeland. The Israeli tanks did not strike you with dread; the Israeli military, armed to the teeth with all types of modern weaponry, did not move a hair on your head; the prime minister of this aggressive state that occupies your land and your homeland did not frighten you; Israeli intelligence, experts in terrorist espionage and treacherous collaboration, did not expose you."

"You could not stand the killing, the destruction, and the exile carried out by the Zionist army...You knew that the Zionists do not honor treaties, promises, and agreements, and understand only the language of resistance and Jihad."

"You rose up like the rest of your mujahideen brothers, took matters into your own hands, and did not wait for Arab or international help that might never arrive, and if it did would be no more than words of condemnation and demand."

"May Allah have mercy on you, oh beloved of the Arab nation, oh 'Abd Al-Baset. You evoked hope that had begun to dissipate; you restored life that had begun to expire; you revived the Arab pride, valor, chivalry, and sacrifice that had begun to die, and you caused pain to [the people] who had begun to celebrate and sing atop the bodies of the children, youths, and mothers of your people."

"You entered silently, with the faith and confidence with which Allah inspired you. Despite all the obstacles, fortifications, and security measures, you reached [the appointed place], sat down at one of the tables, talked, told a few jokes, and laughed with them, and then Allah decreed for you a martyr's death. What heroism, courage, and strength – almost unmatched on the face of the earth!"

PRAISING THE SUPERMARKET BOMBER

"May Allah have mercy on you, oh Ayat Al-Akhras. You left your home for the path of martyrdom and Paradise. Your family knew not where you were headed, and knew not that you had chosen the way of martyrdom. There was nothing to stop you ... You proceeded with a determination, will, and strength rarely found, even impossible to find, in a 16-year-old girl..."

"You sought not the counsel of the American, French, or Russian governments; you sought not a green or red light from them; rather, you knew that the hand of Allah is supreme, that soul-sacrifice is the highest form of Jihad, and that he who sacrifices reaches the highest level of Paradise. You were not tempted by and did not rejoice in the life of this world, oh beloved of the Arab nations of 16 springs [i.e. 16 years]. Marriage was before you; you were a girl engaged and looking forward to finishing your studies in order to wed – except you chose Allah, Paradise, and martyrdom. You taught the Arab nation a lesson almost never taught in the schools and universities, and you breathed your last [breath] and evoked [in us] sensations that had begun to disappear..."

"You raised our heads high and told the oppressing world, biased towards Zionism, that a young girl had infiltrated [into] Israeli society despite the tight security closure, and had profoundly shaken it without tank, missile, or rifle – [merely] with her small, pure soul. You say to us, 'Despair not; it is simpler than you think. Be filled with faith in Allah, with a quest for Jihad and martyrdom.'"

"May Allah have mercy on you, oh 'Abd Al-Baset, Ayat, and all the male and female mujahideen. We ask Allah that the angels welcome you as righteous martyrs, and beseech Allah to give you the highest level of Paradise."

Not all children are equal: UN ignores Jewish Israeli child victims

December 23, 2002

FULL ARTICLES

WHEN IT COMES TO THE JEWISH STATE, UN EQUALITY GOES OUT THE DOOR

Gentleman's agreement at the UN
When it comes to Jews or the Jewish state, UN Charter equality goes out the door, says lawyer Anne Bayefsky
Globe and Mail (Canada)
December 23, 2002

This year's General Assembly, which ended on Friday, marked a new low in United Nations bias against Jews and the Jewish state. The three resolutions passed in its final days are a disturbing commentary.

On Wednesday, the General Assembly adopted a resolution on Palestinian children. This brings the number of resolutions on the human rights of children to three: one on the rights of the child, one on the "girl child," and one on Palestinian children – the only children in the world subject to the specific concern of a General Assembly resolution.

With its automatic majority on the Palestinian side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the General Assembly is able to generate large numbers of resolutions critical only of Israel. The resolution focusing only on Palestinian children, however, is a historic first, and it increases the number of General Assembly resolutions directed annually at Israel to 20. Human-rights situations in the rest of the world drew only six country-specific resolutions this year. There were no resolutions on human rights in such countries as Syria, Saudi Arabia or China.

The draft version of the resolution on Palestinian children was adopted on Nov. 15 by the General Assembly's Third Committee (which deals with social, cultural and humanitarian affairs), in the same week that a Palestinian gunman broke into a home on an Israeli kibbutz and shot to death two children – Noam, 4, and Matan, 5 – while their mother, Revital Ohayon, tried to hide them under her body. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, claimed responsibility.

In the past two years, Palestinian terrorists have repeatedly targeted Israeli children. On April 27, gunmen broke into a home west of Hebron, found five-year-old Danielle Shefi hiding under her parents' bed and shot her in the head. On May 9, 2001, Israeli students Kobi Mandell, 13, and Yossi Ish-Ran, 14, were stoned to death and their bodies mutilated in a cave south of Jerusalem. Palestinian suicide bombers have directed attacks at places where children gather, such as buses, discos and pizza parlours.

More than 100 Israeli children have been murdered and 900 wounded or maimed in the past two years alone. The General Assembly resolution, however, neither expressed concern nor made any mention of Israeli children.

Speaking on behalf of the European Union, Ellen Margrethe Loj, the Danish ambassador to the UN, apologized to the General Assembly for abstaining instead of voting in favour, saying EU states preferred resolutions on country-specific situations to be dealt with under a different agenda item. Only Israel, the United States, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau voted against the resolution. Canada abstained.

Also missing from the resolution billed to help Palestinian children:

Any reference to the Palestinian Authority's practice of encouraging Palestinian children to participate in the armed conflict, and the Palestinian media's appeal to children to glorify and emulate suicide bombers;

The endemic anti-Semitism in Palestinian children's textbooks used in schools run by the UN Relief and Works Agency;

The use of Palestinian children as human shields by terrorists operating from densely populated civilian areas.

Also on Wednesday, the General Assembly adopted a resolution on racism, capping a two-month negotiation over the inclusion of the word "anti-Semitism." For the past four years, a racism resolution has included "anti-Semitism" as a specific subject of study of the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. This year, the reference to anti-Semitism as part of the rapporteur's mandate was deleted. Only the United States, Israel and Palau voted against the resolution. Canada abstained.

Ironically, the deletion was due not only to the 130 developing nations that removed "anti-Semitism" from this year's draft to begin with, but also to the EU. Behind closed doors, Arab states indicated they might accept the word's retention as a matter of specific study of the UN special rapporteur, so long as "anti-Arab" discrimination was also included. The United States and Israel had no objection, but the EU refused – the same EU that claims to be protecting Arab interests against U.S. hegemony.

On Dec. 13, the Security Council passed a resolution on the Nov. 28 terrorist attacks in Kenya directed at Israelis. Those attacks involved a suicide bombing at a hotel operated by, and catering to, Israelis, and a missile attack on an Israeli civilian airplane. In the case of October's hostage-taking crisis in Moscow, the Security Council adopted a resolution condemning the terrorist attack within 24 hours. In the case of the bombing in Bali, also in October, the Security Council adopted a resolution within 48 hours. But it took the council two weeks of intensive negotiation to adopt the resolution concerning the attacks in Kenya.

The struggle behind the scenes during those two weeks occurred over references to Israel and Israeli victims. The original draft circulated by the United States, for example, read: "Condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist bomb attack against Kenyan and Israeli civilians." The final version omits the reference to "Israeli civilians" and reads, "Condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist bomb attack at the Paradise Hotel in Kikambala, Kenya, and the attempted missile attack on Arkia Israeli Airlines Flight 582."

In addition, while the Security Council resolutions on the Bali and Russian attacks urge co-operation with the Indonesian and Russian authorities in their efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice, the reference to co-operation with "Israeli authorities" was left out of the Kenya resolution.

In theory, the UN Charter proclaims the equality of all persons, and of all nations large and small. When the victims are Jews or the Jewish state, UN practice is quite different.

(Anne Bayefsky is an international lawyer and professor of political science at York University.)

GAS MASK LESSONS FOR ISRAELI CHILDREN TO START WITHIN A WEEK

Children of Israel to learn the lessons of war
By Stephen Farrell
The Times of London
December 23, 2002

Israel has escalated domestic preparations for a US-led war against Iraq, with gas mask lessons for children due to start within a week.

Fearing retaliatory missile strikes by President Saddam Hussein, the Jewish state is to go on high alert from January 15, two weeks in advance of the January 27 deadline for a United Nations inspectors' report to the Security Council.

Israeli soldiers are also getting ready for joint exercises with 1,000 US troops scheduled to arrive in Israel this week to conduct joint anti-missile tests.

Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, said that the gas mask exercise was being held "in preparation of any possibility of war".

For months, Israeli families have been collecting new gas masks at exchange points throughout the country, where they hand in old masks issued during the Gulf War.

Amid fears that Baghdad will launch biological or chemical weapons, Ronit Tirosh, director-general of the Education Ministry, said that teachers had received training from the Israeli military on how to deal with an attack and how to help panicky children.

"The next stage, which will start in about a week, will be to train the youth and children on how to use gas masks and to instruct them what should be done at each stage," she said.

More than 15,000 medical workers have already received smallpox vaccinations, and officials confirmed yesterday that 6,000 more Israelis would receive them in the coming weeks.

Iraq launched 39 Scud missiles against Israel in 1991, but despite Israel's usual policy of retaliation, it refrained from reprisal attacks at the behest of the US, to avoid inflaming the Arab world and damaging the anti-Baghdad coalition.

Mr Sharon's Government has made it clear that there would be no such restraint this time if Saddam unleashes unconventional warheads delivered either by missile, aircraft or pilotless drones.

But Israel has also updated its missile defences from the – largely ineffective – Patriot missile batteries that were used a decade ago. Israeli sources have confirmed that the military's Home Front Command, air force and other branches have been given until mid-January to finish preparations and raise levels of readiness.

The Patriot system – originally designed to shoot down aircraft not missiles – has now been upgraded and will work alongside two batteries of the $2billion Arrow anti-missile system, developed jointly by Israel and the US.

This is designed to intercept Scuds at a higher altitude during the estimated six-minute flying time to Israel from launchers in western Iraq, shooting them down before they even reach Israeli airspace.

One Israeli drill last week simulated the landing of missiles carrying chemical or biological materials at various sites in the country, gauging the effectiveness of nationwide watchposts to detect and report sites where missiles fell.

Brigadier-General Ruth Yaron, a military spokeswoman, said that Israel would have only three minutes' warning of a missile attack, but that would be "enough time".

“THE VOICE THAT COMES FROM THE STADIUM TONIGHT IS A VOICE OF COEXISTENCE”

Jewish, Arab children use soccer to promote peace, coexistence
The Associated Press
December 7, 2002

Love of soccer was a common bond for some 7,000 Jewish and Arab Israeli children who came from throughout Israel and send a message of peaceful coexistence to Israelis watching on TV.

As an added bonus: their favorite Tel Aviv team won.

The Jewish and Arab children from 200 towns and villages – all players in Hapoel Tel Aviv's junior soccer league – dressed in uniform red and white to make a rare show of solidarity amid two years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting that has claimed more than 2,000 lives.

"We brought the 7,000 children here tonight to march against racism, against intolerance and against violence," said Moti Orenstein, the team's chairman. "The voice that comes from the stadium tonight is a voice of coexistence."

After circling the field, the children took their seats in the stadium among some 20,000 spectators who came to watch the No. 2 ranked team, Hapoel Tel Aviv, play suburban rival Hapoel Peth Tikva.

Forty minutes into the game, Salim Towama, Hapoel Tel Aviv's only Arab player, scored the first of the team's two goals – sending the crowd, especially the children, into pandemonium. Tel Aviv won the game 2-1.

"Soccer is the best thing because it allows coexistence between Jews and Arabs," said Sultan Nabari, 25, an Israeli Arab from Kfar Hura, who is an umpire in the junior league. "Sport is against violence and if you bring the Jews and Arabs together and on the same team it fosters coexistence because they have nothing to fight about."

After the game, Towama said he felt soccer brings peoplestogether. "I hope that it will happen outside of soccer and that there will be quiet here," he added.

"I play with Jews and Arabs – it's not a problem," said Aboudi Karsoun, a 15-year-old Israeli Arab from Kfar Kassem.

ISRAEL'S “HOME” SOCCER GAMES MOVED TO BRITAIN

Israel's 'home' soccer games moved to Britain because of security concerns
The Associated Press
December 2002

Israel's soccer team will play at least two "home" matches in the Euro 2004 qualifying round in Britain due to security concerns at home.

Israeli Soccer Federation chief Gavri Levy said Israel's April 2 match against France and an April 30 contest against Cyprus would be played at Watford's Vicarage Road ground.

Levy said an agreement was reached after a meeting Tuesday with Watford officials.

Watford's official web site confirmed Wednesday that discussions had been held, but denied that a final deal had been struck. Confirmation of the move is also subject to approval of local authorities.

Israeli teams at both at national and club level have been playing international matches outside Israel in recent months due to security concerns and a reluctance for visiting teams to come to Israel.

The coach of the Israeli soccer team, Avraham Grant, said Wednesday that the team was warned a day before an Oct. 12 game against Malta that a suspected al-Qaida member had just been arrested on suspicion he was planning to carry out an attack during the game. The match was played without incident.

Boycott of world-class Israeli scientists “could cost lives” elsewhere

December 17, 2002

FULL ARTICLES

“WE REFUSE TO LOOK AT THESE”

British academic boycott of Israel gathers pace
By Andy Beckett and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian
December 12, 2002

Evidence is growing that a British boycott of Israeli academics is gathering pace.

British academics have delivered a series of snubs to their Israeli counterparts since the idea of a boycott first gained ground in the spring.

In interviews with the Guardian, British and Israeli academics listed various incidents in which visits, research projects and publication of articles have been blocked.

Colin Blakemore, an Oxford University professor of physiology, who supports a boycott, said: "I do not know of any British academic who has been to a conference in Israel in the last six months."

Dr Oren Yiftachel, a left-wing Israeli academic at Ben Gurion University, complained that an article he had co-authored with a Palestinian was initially rejected by the respected British journal Political Geography. He said it was returned to him unopened with a note stating that Political Geography could not accept a submission from Israel.

Mr Yiftachel said that, after months of negotiation, the article is to be published but only after he agreed to make substantial revisions, including making a comparison between his homeland and apartheid South Africa.

The issue of a boycott was highlighted in the spring when two British academics, Steven and Hilary Rose, had a letter published in the Guardian supporting the idea. It was signed by 123 other academics.

Professor Paul Zinger, outgoing head of the Israeli Science Foundation, said: "Every year we send most of our research papers abroad for reference. We send out about 7,000 papers a year. This year, for the first time, we had people writing back, about 25 of them, saying 'We refuse to look at these'."

“ACADEMIC AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE SHOULD NOT BE USED AS A POLITICAL WEAPON”

No rush to sign up for the boycott
Letters
The Guardian
December 13, 2002

The case of Israeli academic Oren Yiftachel (It's water on stone – in the end the stone wears out, G2, December 12) is a good example of how the British left not only attacks the Sharon government, but actually aids it in victimising Israeli peace campaigners – many of whom are academics. The leadership of the Peace Now movement comes from Israeli academia, as did the initiators of the Oslo Accords in 1993. If it hadn't been for Israeli academics, Arafat and Rabin would not have shaken hands and the peace process would never have got off the ground.

The confused tactics of the boycott advocates are symptomatic of a wider malaise within the British left of refusing support for the Israeli peace movement, which wishes to end the occupation and secure a two-state solution. It is far easier to see the situation in black and white – and give a blank ideological cheque to the Palestinian cause.

Arafat's Fatah is currently trying to convince Hamas and the Islamists in Cairo that suicide bombing is counter-productive and that any atrocities during the Israeli election period will undermine Amram Mitzna, the dovish Labour candidate. The bombers serve as the Israeli right's willing allies in increasing the number of seats for Sharon and re-electing him. If the Palestinians understand that the only group in Israel which can help to deliver a Palestinian state is the peace camp, why hasn't this self-evident truth peculated into the blind righteousness of the boycott organisers?

Dr Colin Shindler
SOAS, University of London

• Now that an academic boycott is an acceptable way for UK academics to support struggles against oppression, will the principle be extended beyond contacts with Israeli academics? Will we, for example, refuse contacts with students and academics from all the countries in the Middle and Far East with doubtful records on human rights and free speech? And will we UK academics refrain from submitting our research papers to US academic journals and conferences because of Bush's dangerous policies on Iraq? No, of course not! Our careers in UK universities are built on publishing in US journals and developing the lucrative overseas student market.

Prof. Margaret Harris
Aston University, Birmingham

• If it is true that some academic journals are refusing to print first-class research from Israel, how then do they fill their pages? With less good work that would not otherwise have been published. For all who care about freedom of expression and the integrity of science, this political censorship can be nipped in the bud by sending all manuscripts via Israeli universities.

Prof. Joan Freeman
Middlesex University
joan7@mdx.ac.uk

• The Israeli government's actions towards the Palestinians should be condemned. However an academic boycott of Israel is both short-sighted and wrong on principle. Academic and intellectual life should not be used as a political weapon. It is particularly disturbing if editors of academic journals are making judgments based on nationality or politics, rather than scholarly content. It is essential that we safeguard the internationalism and openness of intellectual community.

Dr Charles Thorpe
Cardiff

• Contrary to the impression created by your article the AUT has a very clear policy on the Middle East, which was agreed at our annual council in May. In summary, we called for a moratorium on EU and European Science Foundation (ESF) funding of Israeli cultural and research institutions, until Israel abides by UN resolutions and opens serious peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Consequently, we wrote to the ESF calling on all such funding to be suspended forthwith. However, it should be pointed out that the AUT has never supported an academic boycott of Israeli universities and recognises that the conflict is damaging to everyone in the Middle East.

Sally Hunt
General secretary, Association of University Teachers

• Palestinian voices are strangely absent in your article. It is as if once again the Palestinians do not exist, the argument is exclusively between Israelis and westerners.

The repeated demands from Palestinians for boycotts and sanctions are nowhere mentioned. Supporters of the Palestinians in the west should, like opponents of South African apartheid in the past, take their lead from the Palestinians themselves. As long as the Palestinians call for boycotts and sanctions we should support them.

Dr Nur Masalha
Dr Stephanie Cronin
London

• I will refuse to referee any research paper or book from Steven Rose or Colin Blackmore, or anyone else who boycotts academics, or their work, on the basis of any of the following: race, religion, political beliefs or country of origin. Hopefully other academics will help defend academic freedom by doing likewise.

Dr Milton Wainwright
Department of molecular biology and biotechnology, University of Sheffield
M.Wainwright@sheffield.ac.uk

ACADEMIC LIBERTY AND BOYCOTTS

Academic liberty and boycotts
Letters
The Guardian
December 16, 2002

We write as linguists in support of our colleague, Professor Mona Baker, who is under investigation by Umist for removing two Israeli members of the editorial board of a journal she privately owns and publishes (It's water on stone, G2, December 12).

Although we write as individuals, we may speak for a large body of opinion in our field because we are the past presidents of the Linguistics Association since 1980.

We believe Umist's treatment of Prof. Baker and the publicity this case is attracting are disproportionate to her actions. Though we have been assured by Umist there is no question of dismissal, Prof. Baker has already been publicly reprimanded on the Umist website and a committee has been set up to scrutinise her activities and consider the issues that are taken to arise from them.

Like the rest of the academic community, we are divided over whether or not the academic boycott of Israeli institutions is justified, and even more so over whether Prof. Baker was right to extend it to individual Israeli scholars. However, we all agree that the discrimination by Israel against the Palestinians raises issues which are far more serious, by any standards, than the academic boycott and we regret the way in which this issue is serving to divert attention from the scene in the Middle East.

We are also very concerned at the potential infringement of Prof. Baker's liberty by Umist and at the precedent this would set. Whether or not an individual academic wishes to engage outside the university in a political action is an issue for their own individual judgment and should not be taken up by the employing organisation.

Prof. Keith Brown
Cambridge University
Prof. Richard Hudson
University College London
and three other past presidents of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain

• Andy Beckett's article on the campaign to boycott Israeli academics illustrates the totalitarian nature of those proposing the boycott: academics are fired purely because of their country of origin and scholarly journals insist on political statements being added to articles before acceptance. No wonder over 14,000 scientists and scholars from more than 60 countries have now signed a counter-petition condemning this malign initiative.

Walter Bodmer
Principal of Hertford College, Oxford
Ruth Deech
Principal of St Anne's College, Oxford
Prof. Leslie Wagner
Vice-chancellor, Leeds Metropolitan University
Prof. Jeremy Myerson
Royal College of Art
and 73 other UK academics

• Andy Beckett mentions the "leftwing, anti-Zionist Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe" and the claims his "career has been regularly threatened by rightwingers who disapprove of his pro-Palestinian views".

In fact, Dr Pappe is and continues to be employed at the University of Haifa, which has promoted him and given him tenure, in the face of what many consider the repugnance of his views and the slandering of his native country. It is true he was taken to task recently – and briefly – after being accused of waging a smear campaign against colleagues with whom he disagrees politically, but the university took no punitive action against him.

The university prides itself on scrupulously preserving an atmosphere of pluralism and freedom on campus, even under the severe and emotionally charged conditions that surround us here.

Nechama Wintman
Spokesperson, Haifa University

• If academics want to make a difference to what happens in Israel what they should be doing is lending strong vocal and other support to those in Israel who, on a daily basis, often with their Palestinian friends, labour against the appalling effects of the occupation. Their activities range from organising replantings of uprooted olive trees and of food convoys to villages under siege, to large-scale resistances to army activities (see info@gush-shalom.org and www.ariga.com).

I can't see how it can ever be right to boycott academics. But, right apart, it is surely exactly the kind of distraction the rightwing Jewish lobby relishes and needs; and yet again, the Palestinians and those who are really suffering get forgotten.

Naomi Eilan
University of Warwick

• As organisers of the speaking tour of two Israeli military refuseniks, we would like to respond to the concerns at the apparent rise in anti-Israeli meetings on UK campuses. Our meetings were well supported not only by the left, but also by many student and some Jewish groups. In Leicester and Nottingham, where we tried to work with local Union of Jewish Students groups, we were cold-shouldered on the grounds that such meetings would send out the wrong kind of message. In London and Leeds, UJS members suggested the tour was promoting anti-semitism and should be stopped – some chutzpah, complaining about a virtually non-existent boycott, while seeking to silence any critics of Israeli policies through cries of anti-semitism. Individual UJS members did contribute to several of the 30 meetings. We look forward to a time when the UJS feels able to participate more openly in such debates.

Irene Bruegel
Jews for Justice for Palestinians
Tirza Waisel
Just Peace UK

“IN MEDICAL RESEARCH, LIVES ARE POTENTIALLY AT RISK”

Boycott of work by Israeli scientists 'could cost lives'
By Daniel Foggo and Josie Clarke
Sunday Telegraph (London)
December 15, 2002

The development of life-saving new medical treatments could be under threat because of the British boycott of Israeli academics, leading scientists and research organisations are warning.

Baroness Greenfield, the eminent neurobiologist and the director of the Royal Institution, the oldest independent research body in the country, said that she was becoming increasingly "distressed" by the boycott.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is part of the World Health Organisation, also said that it would become concerned if the shunning of work by Israeli academics, which began in April, continued.

The protests followed evidence that the boycott is gathering pace, with an increasing amount of Israeli research being ignored.

The coterie of Left-wing British intellectuals organising the boycott, which aims to deny Israeli academics an international platform until their country engages in peace talks with the Palestinians, insist that the action is morally justified.

Lady Greenfield, who is also a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University and a council member of the foundation which regulates the Weizmann Institute, a prestigious cancer research centre, issued a warning last night, however, that it could put the well-being of the British public at risk.

She said: "The obvious implication of the boycott is that if this is stopping medical research from being propagated, then the development of treatments and people's lives could be affected.

"If it continues it will harm people in every sphere but in medical research lives are potentially at risk. What are they trying to achieve by doing this? It is a situation where everyone loses.

The Israelis will suffer, the academics who do it are disapproved of by their colleagues, and it sends a very sad signal out to the general public because it is so illogical.

"If Britain goes to war with Iraq, does that mean that British academics should be boycotted by everyone else?"

The IARC, which co-ordinates and conducts research on cancer, also criticised the boycott. A spokesman confirmed that the agency collaborated with Israeli researchers, even though Israel had not been a member since 1967, and gave a warning that vital research could be held up "if this boycott were to expand in reach".

The boycott was begun by two British academics, Steven Rose, a professor of biology at the Open University, and his wife Hilary, a professor of social policy at Bradford University.

Last April they sent a letter with the signatures of 123 other experts in their fields to a newspaper stating their intention to impose a moratorium on support for Israeli academics.

In July, The Telegraph reported how two Israeli professors were removed from their positions on two journals produced by Mona Baker, a professor of translation studies at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. The university is still considering what action, if any, should be taken over the matter.

Last week it emerged that other Israelis are having their work ignored by British academics. Prof. Paul Singer, of the Israel Science Foundation, said: "We send out about 7,000 papers a year. This year, for the first time, we had about 25 people writing back saying: 'We refuse to look at these'."

Colin Blakemore, a professor of physiology at Oxford University, who supports the boycott, said: "I do not know of any British academic who has been to a conference in Israel in the last six months."

Tony Blair has reportedly told the Chief Rabbi in Britain that he was "appalled" by the boycott and that he "would do anything to stop it", but no action has been taken. Downing Street declined to comment last night.

BLAIR “APPALLED” BY EVIDENCE OF DISCRIMINATION ON BRITISH CAMPUSES

Blair vows to end dons' boycott of Israeli scholars
By Francis Elliott and Catherine Milner
Daily Telegraph
November 17, 2002

Tony Blair has told Britain's Chief Rabbi that he will "do anything necessary" to stop the academic boycott of Israeli scholars at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (Umist).

The Prime Minister told Jonathan Sacks during a private meeting in Downing Street that he was "appalled" by evidence of discrimination on British university campuses, according to his aides.

His comments – his first on the issue – follow worldwide protests sparked by a British academic's sacking of two Israeli scholars from her highly respected international journals.

The dismissal by Mona Baker, a professor at Umist, of Dr Miriam Shlesinger and Prof. Gideon Toury because of their nationality initially raised no public opposition from within British universities.

But when The Telegraph revealed her actions it led to a fierce debate in this country and abroad about attitudes to Israel in British academia.

An inquiry by Umist into her actions has been in progress since then. When Rabbi Sacks raised the case, Mr Blair said its findings had to "send a clear signal" that so-called academic boycotts will not be tolerated.

Umist launched its inquiry into Prof. Baker's actions in July. A spokesman for the university this week insisted that the investigation was nearing completion. Mr Blair's intervention will increase pressure on the university to remove the academic from her post.

"The Prime Minister is appalled by discrimination against academics on the grounds of their race or nationality. He believes that universities must send a clear signal that this will not be tolerated," said a Downing Street aide.

A spokesman for the Prime Minister confirmed that he had met Rabbi Sacks in Number 10 on October 28 and that the issue had been raised.

Mr Blair is said to have told the Chief Rabbi that he took the matter "very seriously indeed". A senior Labour Party figure said that the Prime Minister had also offered to "do anything necessary" to stop academic boycotts.

Officials declined to spell out exactly what the Government might do to put pressure on Umist. However, the university, which received £36.9 million in public funds last year, will be acutely aware of the approaching review of higher education funding, due to be published in January.

It will also need official approval for plans to merge with the University of Manchester to create Britain's first super-university.

The timing of Mr Blair's intervention is therefore clearly designed to exert maximum leverage over the institution which initially refused to take action over the affair.

Umist at first claimed that because the journals from which Prof. Baker had dismissed the scholars – The Translator and Translation Studies Abstracts – did not belong to the university it could not act.

Prof. Baker justified her action by saying: "I deplore the Israeli state. Miriam knew that was how I felt and that they would have to go because of the current situation."

Umist was forced to back down, however, after protests by academics from around the world and Estelle Morris, the then education secretary, who said that such discrimination was "completely unacceptable".

A spokesman for the university said last week: "There have been reports that the case has been dropped but that is not true. The committee will return its verdict about whether Mona Baker will be able to remain in her post – or not – before Christmas."

Mr Blair's intervention will also be taken as an implicit criticism of Oxford University. The university last week refused to make public the results of its internal investigation into allegations that Tom Paulin, a poet and academic, told an Egyptian newspaper that American-born Israeli settlers should be shot dead.

Mr Paulin, who lectures in English at Hertford College, remains in his post. Harvard University this week cancelled a lecture by him because the invitation had caused "divisiveness and consternation" in the prestigious American institution.

Lord Janner, of the Holocaust Educational Trust, welcomed Mr Blair's intervention and said that it would be "very well received". He added: "Academics should ask themselves who is next to be boycotted."

About 700 academics worldwide have signalled their support for an academic boycott of Israel. In Britain, the calls for action have been led by Steven Rose, an Open University professor.

Calls for such a boycott have been supported by NATFHE, the lecturers' union, while demands for a moratorium on the European funding of Israeli institutions have been backed by the Association of University Teachers.

“THE LONGEST HATRED”

Israel on campus
By Ruth R. Wisse
The Wall Street Journal
December 13, 2002

Anti-Semitism thrives because slandering Israel is the only aggression against a minority that is encouraged by the rules of political correctness.

The claim of universities to be fostering diversity and preventing discrimination against vulnerable minorities is oddly compromised by a surge of anti-Semitism. With the recent addition of Columbia and Yale, over 50 campuses are currently circulating faculty petitions to divest from Israel and from American firms selling arms to Israel. Faculty at Georgetown, Michigan and Harvard have gone out of their way to invite speakers best known for their defamation of Israel and the Jews.

To be sure, hundreds of university presidents have either spoken out publicly or signed a statement deploring the presence of anti-Semitism on campus. But none has tried to explain the phenomenon, much less undertaken to do anything about it. So questions abound. How does one know, for example, that the divestment petition is anti-Semitic? Why should Jews have become a target in a campus atmosphere of such advertised sensitivity? And what can universities do to remedy the situation without stifling healthy debate?

PETITION CAMPAIGN

Like many such initiatives since the 1960s, the petition campaign against Israel is promoted by relatively small numbers of faculty with interlocking interests. Its driving force are Arabs, Arabists, and their sympathizers who help prosecute the war against Israel as a way of diverting attention away from Arab regimes. They are joined by Leftists – including Jews – who see in Jewish particularism the chief hindrance to their internationalist faith; by radicals who consider Israel and America to be colonial powers and who promote their reactionary or revolutionary alternatives; and by antiwar enthusiasts who blame Israel for inviting Arab aggression against it.

The call for divestment sets up an implicit comparison between Israel and South Africa, whose apartheid policy once inspired a campaign of divestment aimed at forcing democratic change. In South Africa, a minority of whites had established a government based on racial criteria. But not only is Israel a vigorous democracy, it is, with Turkey, the only democracy in the Middle East. Arab autocrats and despots attack the Jewish state precisely because it embodies the democracy they are determined to resist. Arab rulers see in Israel's free and open society a threat to Muslim hegemony and to autocratic rule.

Most university professors and students who support divestment do so in the misguided belief that it will force Israel to improve its human-rights record in the West Bank and Gaza. What they fail to recognize is that, far from championing human rights, the divestment petition is a springboard for the spread of anti-Semitic hostility to American campuses. The economic boycott has been part of the Arab arsenal in the war against Israel for the past 50 years. Last month, the Arab League formally reactivated its boycott at a meeting in Damascus. Saudi Arabia recently blacklisted about 200 European, American, and other companies for importing Israeli products or product parts under other labels; and its Chamber of Commerce and Industry called on citizens to report the presence of any Israeli product exported through a third country. The divestment petitioners are asking their universities to join the Arab boycott that has the destruction of Israel as its larger goal.

The divestment campaign did not just happen, and speakers assaulting Israel do not appear of themselves. This antipathy to Israel grows from a campus culture that is selectively repressive. All the while that students, in the spirit of diversity, are actively discouraged from making pejorative comments about other vulnerable minorities, some Arab and Muslim students have been actively fomenting hatred of Israel as an expression of their "identity." On campuses with a large Arab presence, such as Wayne State in Detroit, this has resulted in a palpable threat to Jewish students, and outbreaks of physical violence have actually occurred at San Francisco State and Concordia University in Montreal. Since Arab and Muslim students are currently the only ones who exuberantly defame another group, and who blame that group rather than Arab and Muslim governments for the failings of their own anti-democratic societies, it is hardly surprising that they should be joined by others looking for a villain or scapegoat. Anti-Semitism thrives because slandering Israel is the only aggression against a minority that is encouraged by the rules of political correctness.

Along similar lines, universities have allowed Middle East departments to disseminate anti-Israel propaganda to an extent unimaginable a generation ago, representing violations of intellectual honesty and academic impartiality that may be unique in our academic life. Martin Kramer's book on Middle East Studies in America, "Ivory Towers on Sand," points out the conditions that encourage this abuse. Instead of scrutinizing the obsession with Israel that has retarded the development of Arab societies, many professors of Arab and Muslim civilization have themselves become obsessed with the obsession. Here the damage to America is at least as great as to Israel, for had these scholars been submitting Arab regimes to honest scrutiny, they would have long since have been investigating the connections between anti-Semitism, opposition to democracy, and hostility to the U.S. Why has it been left to private think tanks to inform us about the rise and nature of terrorism in the Middle East?

SPEECH CODES

The last thing university authorities ought to do in addressing this latest outbreak of what has been called "the longest hatred" is to enforce the kind of speech codes that have been invoked to protect other sensitive minorities. What is wanted is more honest debate, not less, but honest debate on both sides of the issue. Anti-Semitism works by making Jews the defendants of a political charge. Its hostile agenda invites counter-scrutiny. The more the Arab world and its defenders try to blame Israel, the more critically we should be studying the Arab world to see how it uses anti-Semitism to divert attention from its problems, and where the responsibility for those problems really lies.

Anti-Semitism perverts the ideal of a mutually tolerant campus. The Faculty and administration, and students who wish to uphold that ideal, will have to exercise their free speech to address the function and the roots of this virulent phenomenon.

(Ms. Wisse, a professor of Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard, is the author of "If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews" (Free Press, 2001).)

Mr. Assad takes tea with the Queen

December 16, 2002

FULL ARTICLES

“WHY ON EARTH IS HE HONOURING THIS MAN IN THIS WAY?”

Hubris and naivety in the war against terror
By Melanie Phillips
The Daily Mail
December 16, 2002

When President George W Bush declared his 'war on terror', he effectively announced that the practice of cosying up to state sponsors of terrorism was now at an end.

Tony Blair is supposed to be America's ally in this struggle. Yet today, he is rolling out the red carpet for a man who sits at the very epicentre of terror, the Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Terror is absolutely central to Syria's policy. It sponsors Hezbollah in Lebanon, which not only carries out terror attacks against Israel but before September 11 had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group.

At a rally in Lebanon last month, Hezbollah's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, called on Palestinians to 'take suicide bombings worldwide'. Yet the man being feted in London this week has forged a far closer relationship with Hezbollah even than his father, the late President Hafiz al-Assad.

Syria also hosts the headquarters of Islamic Jihad and numerous other terrorist organisations. As Damascus radio said earlier this year, 'Syria has turned its land into a training camp, a safe haven and an arms depot for the Palestinian revolutionaries'.

Last week in an interview with the Times, President Assad declared that he actually supported Palestinian 'suicide' bombers. Yet this is the man who will dine with the Prime Minister in Downing Street today, meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace tomorrow and attend the Lord Mayor's dinner.

As a Jew who believes that Israel is a principal victim of the terror sponsored by Syria and others, I am appalled by this honouring of a man with so much blood on his hands. But many others must also be wondering just what is going on.

The answer is that President Assad is New Labour's kind of guy. He and his wife have great PR because hey, they don't even look or sound like Arabs. The President is an ophthalmologist who studied medicine in England, no less. Mrs Assad is actually an Englishwoman who started life as plain Emma from west London.

The Times reported that he didn't look like a ruthless dictator – no doubt because he didn't sport military fatigues, or goose-step across the room.

But of course, far from being a New Labour dream the Assads are the first family of a backward country with extensive poverty, absence of human rights and second-class status for women.

Yet this charmer with the bedside manner has apparently beguiled the Prime Minister into believing that here is a man who is going to lead Syria out of the dark ages and with whom Britain can therefore do business. Just how gullible can you get?

This state visit is presumably intended as a reward for President Assad's support for the UN resolution on Iraq. But this was clearly a tactical manoeuvre. In November, Syria's Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shar revealed that it had voted for the resolution to divide President Bush's administration and prevent war against Iraq.

In other words, this was a spoiling exercise. And indeed, in last week's interview President Assad warned that the campaign to topple Saddam would have 'catastrophic consequences' for the region.

Now, intelligence sources are claiming that Syria is actually surreptitiously arming Iraq. It is reported that more than 52 crates containing new air-defence systems and spare parts have been smuggled from Syria into Iraq since last December, enabling the Iraqis to upgrade their air defence capabilities. And Syria is also said to have allowed Saddam to open an oil smuggling route through the port of Latakia.

Well, what a surprise. But do many in Britain actually care? For a disturbing number of people still can't see the point of taking military action against Saddam Hussein. They think there is no link between the Iraqi dictator and al Q'aeda, and so he poses no terror threat to the west.

I happen to believe such a link does exist. But even if it did not, the threat from Saddam is still plain. He repeatedly declares his intention to become leader of the Arab world. Weapons of mass destruction would help him achieve this ambition.

This would mean that despite his secularism he would become leader of the Islamic jihad. The people who brought us September 11 would then be equipped with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

Mr Blair has grasped that we cannot sit by and wait for this to happen. Hence his support for President Bush. But this obscures significant differences between the two. For Mr Blair appears to believe that Islamic fascism is susceptible to reason, and in particular to the force of his own personality.

This hubris has already led him into humiliation. Last year, shortly after the murder of Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Ze'evi by the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Mr Blair went to Syria to tell President Assad to renounce violence. He got his reply at a press conference when he was forced to listen to the Syrian leader defend Palestinian terror attacks on Israel.

So why on earth is he honouring this man in this way? The main reason is that he is desperate to demonstrate that Britain has no quarrel with Islam or the Arab world as such. But this spectacularly misses the point. The west has indeed no quarrel with Islam, one of the world's great religions and civilisations.

It is rather that certain Islamist groups and their state backers have declared war in the name of Islam against the west in general and the Jews in particular – and not just those in Israel.

President Assad himself makes no distinction between hatred of Israel and hatred of the Jews. In a disgusting remark when he visited the Pope last year, he said: 'The Israelis are trying to kill all monotheistic religious principles on the basis of the same mentality that led to the betrayal and torture of Jesus, and the same mentality through which they tried to kill the Prophet Mohammad'.

His defence minister Mustafa Tlass is the author of 'The Matzah of Zion', a grotesque anti-semitic libel which claims that the Jews drink the blood of children. This obscene publication, now in its eighth reprint, is doing a roaring trade in the Arab world. Earlier this year, President Assad extended Mr Tlass's term for another two years in appreciation of his services.

Mr Blair's refusal to acknowledge all this in public is more than shameful. It serves to perpetuate terrorism. His failure to take a principled, public stand against the sponsors of terror and the anti-semitism that fuels it is taken as a sign of weakness, to be exploited by terrorism's many godfathers.

Such grovelling appeasement also perpetuates ignorance and confusion among the British people, with the resulting lack of support for action against a terror network whose nature and reach are simply not understood. It has led too many to believe that Israel is the cause of world terror, rather than recognise that Israel is the principal target of a genocidal onslaught against the Jews and a wider war against the west.

Realpolitik is the art of the possible. Naivety and hubris merely make leaders look ridiculous or compromised – and leave their countries dangerously exposed.

“GOD SAVE THE QUEEN FROM TERRORISM”

Syrian leader flies in to anti-terror protest
By Richard Beeston, Diplomatic Editor and Stephen Farrell in Jerusalem
The Times of London
December 16, 2002

Bashar Assad, the Syrian President, arrived in London last night at the start of an historic but controversial visit that is seen as a big political gamble by Tony Blair. Even before the Syrian leader, the first to visit Britain, and his London-born wife stepped off the plane, Israeli politicians had condemned his trip and Jewish groups were planning demonstrations against his support for militant groups that use suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

Mr Assad told The Times last week that Palestinian suicide bombings were "a reaction to the terrorism practised by (the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon against the civilian Palestinian population". Hundreds of British Jews are planning to protest against his arrival at Downing Street today with placards reading "A Sad Day for Britain" and "God Save the Queen from Terrorism", a reference to his audience tomorrow with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

Downing Street and the Foreign Office had expected an uproar. Senior British officials said that the Syrian leader would be challenged over his support of militant groups, but that the visit itself was a risk the Prime Minister thought was worth taking.

With a war looming in Iraq and new peace efforts on the horizon in the Middle East, Syria's influential role in the Arab world could be pivotal to the success or failure of both. Nevertheless, Mr Assad's official visit could backfire badly on his hosts.

The "nightmare scenario" at the Foreign Office is the threat that militant groups in the Middle East, with strong links to Damascus, could launch new terrorist attacks in the region while the Syrian head of state is being feted in London.

Syria allows the militant Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad to run offices in Damascus and has close military ties in Lebanon with the Shia Muslim group Hezbollah, which pioneered the use of suicide bombers, kidnapped Western hostages and has large forces massed on Israel's northern border.

Dan Meridor, an Israeli Cabinet member, accused Syria of channelling arms and funding to the three groups, which are listed in Britain and America as terrorist organisations.

"I would be interested to know if he (Assad) is asked while he is there 'why do you allow these terror organisations to continue to operate and have their offices in Damascus, why do you continue the occupation of southern Lebanon and why do you supply Hezbollah with weapons capable of striking more than 50 kilometres into Israel when we have withdrawn from every inch of Lebanon?'" he asked. "Syria had to make up its mind to join or fight terror, and its decision was to continue with terror."

The Israelis were furious when Syria was the only country on the United Nations Security Council to vote against a resolution condemning the suicide attack on an Israeli hotel in Mombasa. A senior advisor to Mr Sharon is due in London today to make Israel's case as well as raise that of Ori Tenenboim, the son of an Israeli businessman kidnapped by Hezbollah.

The Syrians are one of Iraq's closest trading partners, helping the regime in Baghdad to smuggle hundreds of millions of pounds of oil out of the country. Syria also allows other goods to be exported to Iraq by plane and train, avoiding the United Nations embargo. Damascus has also spoken out consistently against any war.

British diplomats, however, are hopeful that behind Syria's tough public stand on Iraq and its illicit business contacts with Baghdad, the Syrian regime will be more flexible in private. The Syrians unexpectedly voted in favour of the tough UN Security Council resolution 1441, which Washington and London will use as the justification for any war with Iraq.

Since September 11 the Syrian intelligence has also been actively co-operating with Western intelligence agencies to share information on Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network. That relationship is credited with having saved lives in the West and will be strengthened during the London visit.

There are also distinct signals that Damascus is distancing itself from Iraq as war looms.

SYRIAN PIPELINE HELPS IRAQ EVADE UN OIL SANCTIONS

Syrian pipeline helps Iraq evade UN oil sanctions
By Michael Evans
The Times of London
December 16, 2002

Syria has expanded its oil-smuggling operation with Iraq by opening a second pipeline between the two countries, according to intelligence based on recent satellite photographs.

Iraqi crude oil is reported to be flowing at the rate of 60,000 barrels a day through the new pipeline, which connects two oilfields close to the Iraqi-Syrian border – Ain Zalah in northern Iraq and Suwaydiyah in northeast Syria.

Imports of Iraqi oil are illegal unless approved by the United Nations' oil-for-food programme agreed after the 1991 Gulf War. The increase in oil imports from Iraq to Syria provides further evidence of closer ties between Damascus and Baghdad, after years of strained relations.

President Assad of Syria admitted last week that a pipeline, reopened in November 2000, had been used for sending oil from Iraq to Syria. But he insisted in an interview with The Times that the oil-flow had been agreed in order to test the pipeline, which had been closed for many years.

However, the flow of oil from Iraq to Syria through the two pipelines – amounting to an estimated total of more than 200,000 barrels a day – has enabled Damascus to increase its own oil exports by around 50 per cent.

Oil industry sources said that Syrian oil exports this year had suddenly risen from about 300,000 to 450,000 barrels a day. Syria has its own oilfields, which produce about 520,000 barrels a day.

The issue of illegal oil sales from Iraq to Syria is expected to be raised by Tony Blair when he meets the Syrian leader today, although a Foreign Office official said that Mr Assad was well aware of the Government's disapproval of the pipeline deals.

The sales are helping to boost funds for the Iraqi regime as it prepares for a possible war with an American-led coalition next year. Sixty thousand barrels a day over a period of 12 months is estimated to be worth about $500 million (£330 million). Iraq has 112 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. Its oil resources are the world's second-largest, after Saudi Arabia.

The main oil-smuggling route is through the pipeline that runs from Kirkuk in northern Iraq to Banias in Syria. This was reactivated two years ago, in spite of the UN sanctions. The 150,000 barrels of oil exported through the Kirkuk-Banias pipeline are sold at much less than the international price. The new pipeline began operating two months ago, according to Middle Eastern reports. It eventually feeds into the Syrian domestic pipeline grid. Oil industry sources said that Syria tended to use the Iraqi oil for domestic purposes. This freed Syria's own crude oil for export. The 50 per cent rise in Syrian oil exports has occurred despite there being no significant increase in Syria's own oil production.

Ian Brodie, from the journal Oil and Energy Trends, said that it was difficult to be precise about Syria's oil exports. But it was clear that in the middle of this year there was a significant rise, due to Iraqi oil imports.

A report in The Sunday Telegraph yesterday said that crates of air defence equipment and spare parts had been smuggled into Iraq from Syria in the past few weeks. Defence experts were quoted as saying that the parts would help the Iraqis to improve the range and effectiveness of their Sam-6 anti-aircraft missiles.

TERRORISM LINKS

Although Syria has not been directly implicated in acts of terrorism since 1986, it supports terrorist groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and allows them to maintain offices in Damascus.

The US State Department says that Damascus is the primary transit point for Iranian-supplied weapons to Hezbollah.

The Israelis claim that President Assad has met Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.

“ONE OF THE WORST STATE-SPONSORS OF INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM”

The Assad visit to London: Background and implications
By Mark Ami-El
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Institute for Contemporary Affairs
December 15, 2002

• Syria remains one of the worst state-sponsors of international terrorism, providing a haven for leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.

• Syria sponsors Hizballah in Lebanon, an international terrorist organization with a global reach that, before 9/11, had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group.

• Syria refuses to recognize UN resolutions confirming Israel's full withdrawal to the Lebanese-Israeli border.

• Syria helps Saddam Hussein smuggle oil out and smuggle weapons into Iraq.

President Bashar Assad becomes the first Syrian head of state to visit Britain when he arrives on December 15 for an unprecedented state visit. He will have a working lunch with Prime Minister Tony Blair and an audience with the Queen.

SYRIA HARBORS TERRORIST GROUPS

Yet Syria remains one of the worst state-sponsors of international terrorism. It sponsors ten international terrorist groups on its own soil, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas. The latter two groups are responsible for some of the worst homicide bombings against the Israeli civilian population.

As a result of its harboring terrorist groups, Syria has been designated by the United States as a state supporting terrorism, and has been on the terrorism list of the U.S. Department of State since it was first prepared in 1979. Today, Syria is in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1373, which insists that all states refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts.

HIZBULLAH’S PATRON

Syria is also a sponsor of terrorism through its position in Lebanon, where it has stationed a large occupation army since 1975. The Syrian military is primarily located in eastern Lebanon in the Bekaa Valley. The Hizballah (pro-Iranian Shi ite) organization has its training bases in this area in the vicinity of Syrian military camps. Moreover, Hizballah s chief supply route goes through Syria. On a regular basis, Iranian cargo aircraft land at Damascus International Airport, carrying weapons for Hizballah.

Hizballah is an international terrorist organization with a global reach. It is responsible for the murder of 241 U.S. Marines in a Beirut suicide bombing in 1983. It seized the CIA station chief in Beirut, tortured, and executed him. It murdered another U.S. officer, Col. Higgins, serving in a peacekeeping capacity. In 2001, U.S. courts identified Saudi Hizballah as responsible for the 1996 bombing of al-Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. Air Force servicemen. Prior to September 11, 2001, Hizballah had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group.

Hizballah has been openly expressing its global ambitions, with its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, calling recently for a widespread suicide bombing campaign. Speaking at a rally in Lebanon s Bekaa Valley in November, he said, Martyrdom operations suicide bombings should be exported outside Palestine....I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide. Don t be shy about it.

After banning Hizballah s military wing in late 2001, Canada finally slapped a total ban on Hizballah on December 11, 2002, after the group urged Palestinians to carry out more suicide attacks in Israel. However, Britain still recognizes Hizballah s political wing.

In addition, most EU delegations in Beirut maintain contact with Hizballah, despite the fact that in three different incidents, Hizballah sent recruits holding European passports to conduct terrorist missions in Israel. The continuously forgiving European approach is likely to encourage Hizballah to expand its operations in Europe and become more involved in international terrorism.

SYRIA UNDERMINES UN RESOLUTIONS

In 2000, Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in accordance with UN Security Council Resolution 425 from 1978. Israel s line of withdrawal (the blue line) was recognized by the UN Security Council as a full withdrawal, as enshrined in UN Security Council Resolutions 1310 and 1337. Nonetheless, Syria fully supports Hizballah s effort to wage war for further withdrawals, particularly in the Shebaa farms area, which technically is part of the Golan Heights. During Prime Minister Blair s last visit to Damascus, Assad had the audacity to compare Hizballah s struggle for this area to the French resistance to the Nazis.

Furthermore, on December 14, Syria voted in the UN Security Council against a U.S. – sponsored resolution, approved 14-1, condemning the suicide bomb attack on an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya. The Syrian ambassador, Mikhail Wehbe, said he could not accept the repeated mention of Israel in the text.

SYRIA HELPS SADDAM HUSSEIN

Syria has also undermined UN resolutions on Iraq. Presently, all Iraqi oil production is under sanctions, meaning that any sales of Iraq oil must be conducted through the UN oil-for-food program. Syria has permitted Saddam to export oil in a pipeline crossing Syrian territory, allowing Iraq to circumvent the oil-for-food arrangements.

Furthermore, according to the Telegraph, Syria has been secretly helping Saddam Hussein by smuggling vital arms supplies to Baghdad. According to Western intelligence officials, at least 52 crates containing new Russian-made air-defense systems and spare parts have been smuggled into Iraq from Syria since the start of December. The intelligence officials believe Syria has helped Saddam smuggle substantial quantities of arms and spare parts through its territory, for which the Syrians receive an estimated 20 percent commission on the purchase price.

IMPLICATIONS OF ASSADS VISIT

Assads visit to London clearly undermines the coherence of the war on terrorism. How can the U.S. attack the Taliban as a state sponsor of terrorism and ignore Syria's backing of terrorism.

Because of the exceptionally high number of American fatalities from Hizballah attacks, Britains ignoring Syrian sponsorship of Hizballah can only alienate many Americans.

Had Syrian behavior improved, then the invitation to London would have made sense. Now, Assad understands that he can ignore his responsibilities regarding UN Security Council resolutions, threaten international peace and security, and be rewarded. He has lost any incentive to change his behavior. Because of his glaring violations of UN resolutions, any act that rewards Assad now will only undermines the UN in the longer term.

SYRIA ADOPTING STRATEGY OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION AND RELATIONS

Syrian information minister's briefing on al-Assad's visit to london
Arabic News
December 16, 2002

Syria's Minister of Information, Adnan Omran, has underlined that President Bashar Al-Assad's visit to Britain comes within Syria's adopted strategy of international cooperation and relations.

In a meeting with the Lebanese Broadcasting Cooperation (LBC) TV, Minister Omran pointed out that such strategy aims at establishing best relations with all the world states on the mutual respect basis by which Syria occupied an important position on the international arena.

Omran cited President Bashar Al-Assad was able to deepen that policy of Syria and develop it by means of visiting a number of major European countries including France, Germany, Italy and Spain as well as his reception of a large number of senior European and World officials.

The information minister talked about the British role which is close to the US expressing hope that such close relation would be used for the interest of peace and the implementation of the international resolutions.

Meanwhile, Omran underlined that Syria is committed to her principled stances.

In an interview with the Egyptian newspaper on Sunday, Omran stressed the necessity of unifying Arab positions in the face of hostile policies targeting the Arab nation and her interests.

Omran called on the Arab states to build self-capabilities in the frame of an Arab security, economic and political integration and in different fields.

Omran pointed out that Syria voted for the Security Council resolution 1441 with the aim of protecting Iraqi people from an aggression.

Omran cited that the US Middle Eastern agenda is drawn by Israel referring to the US intentional disregard of the more than 200 Israeli nuclear warheads at a time it (the US) is preparing for a war against Iraq under the pretext of the possibility of her possession elements that may help Iraq to manufacture a nuclear weapon in the future.

Columbia University “may offer Tom Paulin a permanent position”

December 09, 2002

FULL ARTICLES

“A RACIST HOODLUM”

Columbia Alumni letter re Tom Paulin
Columbia Spectator
December 9, 2002

Dear President Bollinger,

One might have thought Columbia's perpetually troubled English Department had already brought enough shame upon the university. First came the Edward Said saga: membership in an international terror organization; fabrication of the facts of his life to fit the myth of Palestinian dispossession; throwing stones at Israelis from the border of Lebanon. Then followed the Gayatri Spivak performance in Leeds in June of this year, celebrating both the suicide hijackings of 9/11 and the daily suicide bombings in Israel as (in her inimitable prose) "purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself, the extreme end of autoeroticism..."

But now the English Department may be on the verge of offering a permanent appointment to a racist hoodlum (in a line descending from Ezra Pound to Leroi Jones-Amiri Baraka) who makes Said and Spivak look morally sensitive and intellectually tactful. This, of course, is the notorious Tom Paulin, the Irish poet apparently seeking to relocate from England to NY.

Mr. Paulin, long known as a stalwart of the IRA school of poetics, has more recently turned his attention to Israel. According to the London Daily Telegraph ("Oxford poet 'wants US Jews shot'", 13 April 2002), Mr. Paulin told an interviewer for Al-Ahram that he abhorred "Brooklyn-born" Jewish "settlers" and believed "they should be shot dead." He added, for good measure, that he had quit the Labor Party because Tony Blair presides over "a Zionist government" and that he for his part "never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all." Columbia's James Shapiro, English professor and one of Paulin's ardent defenders, has told the Columbia Spectator (20 November 2002)) that these remarks "did not step over the line." Apparently Professor Shapiro's moral dividing line is like the receding horizon: he walks towards it, but can never reach it.

Has incitement to murder now become one of the qualifications for appointment in a department that once employed John Erskine, Mark Van Doren, F.W. Dupee, and Lionel Trilling? As alumni of Columbia, we hope not. Do we, as Orwell famously asked, have the right to expect common decency even of a (minor) poet? We hope yes.

Sincerely yours,

Edward Alexander (BA, '57)
Jerold S. Auerbach (PhD, '65)
Stephen M. Rittenberg (BA,'57, MD, '63)
Sol Z. Rosen (LLB, 1960)
Albert Silbowitz (BA, '62)

“PAULIN COMMITTED TO CENSORSHIP OF POLITICAL OPINIONS WITH WHICH HE DOES NOT AGREE”

New York Times Letters
To the Editor:

On the basic principle of freedom of speech, Harvard University was right to reinstate its invitation to the poet Tom Paulin (news article, Nov. 21). It should be noted, however, that Mr. Paulin is himself committed to the censorship of political opinions with which he does not agree.

Last year Mr. Paulin wrote to The Guardian, in London, asking why it permitted "Zionists" like me and the author and critic Ian Buruma to write for and express our views in the paper. He is also a supporter of the boycott of Israeli academics, denying those who (like me) deplore the policies of the current Israeli government the right to speak in international forums, solely on the basis of their nationality.

Linda Grant
Seattle, Nov. 23, 2002

PAULIN “SPEAKS NAZI LANGUAGE WHEN HE ADDRESSES THE PROBLEMS OF THE MIDEAST”

Harvard at Bay
What to do with Tom Paulin?
By William F Buckley
The National Review
December 3, 2002

The back and forth at Harvard is much-noticed news almost everywhere. In Israel, to be sure, as also in the Arab press. But also in Great Britain and France, where anti-Semitism is a way of life, however well-mannered. The issue is a poet, Tom Paulin, an Oxford don who teaches this season at Columbia and was invited to give the Morris Gray lecture at Harvard.

Well, when this happened, some spoilsport publicized a remark the poet had made to an Egyptian weekly, to wit, that "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." That stretch of prosody is without discernible poetry, but this of course was not considered in ensuing events. The English department at Harvard, on second thought, rescinded the invitation. President Lawrence Summers applauded this decision. But what then happened was a firestorm of free-speech protest, in which three Harvard Law School luminaries figured, Laurence Tribe, Alan Dershowitz, and Charles Fried. The English department, on third thought, re-invited the poet to speak, and now it was news all over the country and indeed the world. We are asked to consider what are the bounds, if any, on utterances of a particular nature if inconsistent with civil comity in a university. We are asked what hate speech should the colleges hate, and how exactly to give voice to that hate. And, inevitably, whether academic freedom is exercised, or is flouted, by speech of a particular character.

What then to do? The New York Observer, which usually flutters if there is the faintest liberal breeze in the air, is stentorian on the subject. In its editorial, it says, "Columbia should fire Mr. Paulin immediately, on the principle that having an anti-Semite on the payroll does a disservice to Columbia professors, students, and alumni who don't subscribe to the view that calling for the murder of Jews is something an Ivy League professor should be doing in his off hours."

The other view, that of the law professors cited above, is that freedom of speech is absolute, and nowhere more ideally protected than in universities.

Well, what concretely to do about the poet's forthcoming lecture? There will of course be some picketers outside, but doesn't something a little more resourceful come to mind?

In the spring of 1962, Commander George Lincoln Rockwell was invited by a student committee at Hunter College in New York to be the speaker at one of its monthly events.

Rockwell was the "Commander" of the American Nazi Party. He dressed in a Nazi commander's uniform, with swastikas here and there, and preached the faith of Hitler. He had a cadre of a dozen or two subordinate Nazis, and took such opportunities as he could to display the Nazi faith in Washington, where he was based, and elsewhere.

Hunter College's undergraduates were predominantly Jewish, and when news of the scheduled event was brought to Hunter president John Meng, a Roman Catholic, he made a decision which lives in Solomonic heraldry. It took the form of a letter to the faculty.

Today's students (he wrote) know of Nazism and what it did only by cursory reading. You and I know of it from direct experience in a world war. I will not overrule the invitation because I am committed to giving the student association plenary authority in the matter.

But, as a symbol of the gravity of the invitation to Mr. Rockwell, I call on members of the faculty to join me in attending the Passover Assembly at Park Avenue at 7 P.M. That is when the meeting with Commander Rockwell is scheduled. I feel sure that many members of the student body will wish to join us in that memorial meeting. That was a truly eloquent means of handling an aberrational invitation.

Granted that Mr. Paulin is a poet, and not a Nazi. His problem is that he speaks Nazi language when he addresses the problems of the Mideast. That he is a poet is not, in the circumstances, what anybody is interested in, any more than it would have distracted the Hunter College community if George Lincoln Rockwell was also a rock star. There are salient considerations that have been raised at Harvard, and it is these that President Summers of Harvard needs now to act on.

“ARE THERE NO RESPONSIBLE SCHOLARS LEFT IN THE IVY LEAGUE?”

Harvard and Columbia promote Anti-Semitic poet
The New York Observer
November 26, 2002

It's disappointing when a school like Harvard University takes a step toward endorsing anti-Semitic hate speech. But that's just what's happening up in Cambridge, where bigotry and hatred have gained a foothold under a false cloak of freedom of speech.

Last week, Harvard's English Department renewed an invitation to poet Tom Paulin to deliver its annual Morris Gray Lecture, one week after the department had wisely decided to cancel Mr. Paulin's lecture because of public statements he recently made calling for the murder of Jewish people. Harvard had rescinded its initial invitation to Mr. Paulin when the university learned that, earlier this year, he had told Al-Ahram Weekly, a Cairo-based newspaper, that "Brooklyn-born" Jewish settlers on the West Bank "should be shot dead." He went on to say, "I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." He added, "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all."

Apprised of these statements, Harvard's English Department disinvited Mr. Paulin, having no wish to offer a prestigious platform to a man who was calling for the murder of innocent people, and who was doing so at a time when scores of people on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are being killed each week. Harvard's president, Lawrence Summers, who recently gave a speech warning that anti-Semitism was "finding support in progressive intellectual communities," issued a statement supporting the decision to revoke Mr. Paulin's invitation.

But it seems that Mr. Summers' concerns about anti-Semitism on college campuses were all too prescient. A group of Harvard students and professors, unable to distinguish between someone expressing his or her views and someone calling for people "to be shot dead," cried "censorship" and demanded that the English department re-invite Mr. Paulin. A Harvard psychology professor named Patrick Cavanagh wrote to the Harvard Crimson in defense of Mr. Paulin and calling Mr. Summers "Ayatollah Summers." Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz – never one to miss a chance to get some publicity – also leapt to the anti-Semitic poet's defense, as did Harvard Law professors Lawrence Tribe and Charles Fried. In an absurd case of twisted logic, the law professors signed a letter to the Crimson in which they tried to argue that disinviting Mr. Paulin would set a "truly dangerous" precedent. Rather than stand up to these juvenile attempts at intimidation, the English Department re-invited Mr. Paulin to deliver the lecture. Emboldened by their cheap victory, professors Cavanagh, Dershowitz, Tribe and Fried are likely planning to invite Louis Farrakhan to deliver Harvard's commencement address.

By the way, Mr. Paulin has not confined his anti-Semitism to one newspaper interview. In 2001, he published a poem in which he referred to the Israeli army as "the Zionist SS" and declared that "we ... dumb goys" would no longer fall for the "lying phrase" and "weasel" language of Zionists.

Harvard is not the only Ivy League school in Mr. Paulin's orbit: He is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University. Columbia should fire Mr. Paulin immediately, on the principle that having an anti-Semite on the payroll does a disservice to Columbia professors, students and alumni who don't subscribe to the view that calling for the murder of Jews is something an Ivy League professor should be doing in his off hours.

America's colleges and universities are allowing anti-Semitism to flourish under the guise of academic freedom. It's time to recognize this disease and to fight it. Are there no responsible scholars left in the Ivy League?

CONFUSED AT HARVARD

Confused at Harvard
By Jay Ambrose
Anchorage Daily News
Scripps Howard News Service
December 2, 2002

I've never been invited to speak at Harvard, and what that means is perfectly clear, at least if you buy the logic employed by faculty members of the famous institution's English department. I have been deprived of free speech.

That is precisely the argument some on the English faculty made after the group invited an Oxford poet to speak, canceled the invitation and then extended it again. The fact that this man had publicly advocated murder – or something very much like that – should not get in the way of his coming, these faculty members concluded, because that would get in the way of free speech.

There are many devises by which you can limit someone's freedom to speak out. You can come up with a speech code for students, which a Harvard Law School committee is considering. You can gather up the writings of a person and burn them or, if you are in government, you can try to outlaw the publication of those writings. If a person is giving a speech somewhere, you can run in and stuff a sock in his mouth.

But by no credible definition of the phrase is it a violation of "free speech" to fail to ask someone to come speak at your institution, and that would hold true even if you have previously invited him and then changed your mind. If a failure of the English department at Harvard to invite people to speak is an infringement on their free speech, then all of us who have not had that honor have thus had our free speech curtailed. Unless my friends are holding the truth from me, I would assume that is most of us.

Now what you could say, of course, is that an institution of learning that crudely establishes criteria of who will be and won't be allowed to talk will be limiting the chances of students to have the face-to-face experience of encountering a wide range of ideas. But what we have here is not an issue of disallowing speech but of proactively soliciting a speaker. And it hardly seems a clumsy, oafish, anti-intellectual stance to say that a good reason to reconsider an invitation are a poet's comments that U.S.-born Jewish settlers in Israel are "Nazis" who "should be shot dead."

So said Tom Paulin, the invited one, in a widely quoted newspaper interview. The poet's words are hard to explain away, especially when so much killing is going on in Israel. Was he engaging in hyperbole? If so, it was astonishingly irresponsible hyperbole. And no matter whether he meant his words literally or as a figurative means of expressing intense disgust, his is not rhetoric suggestive of a keenly analytical mind that has something meaningful to contribute, certainly not if his lecture ventures into a discourse of how Middle East suffering might be alleviated. Inviting him to speak at Harvard in fact confers a kind of legitimacy on someone whose quoted words in combination come down to one word: hate.

Meanwhile, at the same time the English profs are using free speech as an excuse to do something reprehensible, another part of Harvard is meandering its way to an actual infringement of free speech. Mostly because a couple of first-year students at the law school wrote a vile word and some racially offensive thoughts in an online exchange, the school's dean established a Committee on Healthy Diversity. By next spring, it will spout recommendations – and it may do as an association of black students recommends and establish a speech code. Bad thought, strangely named committee. Don't do it.

Speech codes really, truly are means of instructing people on what they can and cannot say; they really, truly do aim to control speech; they really, truly are tyrannical; they really, truly do contravene one of the noblest principles handed down to us through Western civilization. As an alternative, I have a plan for the confused people at Harvard. If some of those law students persist in their stupidities despite other people freely pointing out their mental and moral deficiencies, let the English faculty deal with them. It can refuse to invite them to give speeches.

HARVARD’S DISAPPEARING BACKBONE

Harvard's disappearing backbone
The Weekly Standard "scrapbook"
From the December 2, 2002 issue

Last week, The Scrapbook foolishly ran an item under the headline, "Harvard Grows a Backbone." We won't make that mistake again. Shortly after we applauded the university for disinviting Ulster poet and Oxford lecturer Tom Paulin – who had been scheduled to deliver the annual Morris Gray poetry lecture – Harvard's English department unanimously reinvited him. Professor Peter Sacks was quoted in the Boston Globe on the reinvitation: "Free speech was a principle that needed upholding here. This was a clear reaffirmation that the department stood strongly by the First Amendment."

The "speech" that Harvard's English teachers here pay obeisance to is arguably not protected by the First Amendment. Specifically, it was an incitement to murder American Jews who had become Israeli settlers. Last April, Paulin told the Egyptian paper Al-Ahram Weekly that these "Brooklyn-born" settlers "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." Paulin has complained that this line was wrenched from its context. Okay, here's a little more context from the same interview: "I can understand how [Palestinian] suicide bombers feel," Paulin said. "I think, though, it is better to resort to conventional guerrilla warfare. I think attacks on civilians in fact boost morale."

Not to be pedantic, but the First Amendment also has nothing to do with the decision by a private university to bestow, or not bestow, the honor of delivering the annual Morris Gray poetry lecture. Of course, we don't actually expect the English faculty to understand constitutional law. We suspect that for them the words "First Amendment" serve the purpose of a ritual incantation. Translation: "We wouldn't want anyone to think that we're too spineless to take a stand against someone who declares open season on the Jews. We'll honor whom we damn well please. It's a matter of high principle. Now shut up and leave us alone."

In an apparently unrelated development, the Harvard Law School is simultaneously immersed in a debate over adopting a code restricting offensive speech. It will be interesting to see if the law students carve out an exception for inciting the murder of Jews (perhaps restricted to poets with a BBC pedigree), or if that will remain the franchise of the English department.

One witty correspondent, rightfully making fun of our "backbone" headline, forwarded us the Chronicle of Higher Education's report on Harvard's cave-in with the comment: "file under osteoporosis." This reminded us of the timeless Winston Churchill send-up of Ramsay MacDonald in the House of Commons, January 28, 1931:

I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as "The Boneless Wonder." My parents judged that that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eye, and I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.

Now you can see the same thing at the finest American universities. The passage of an additional 70 years has not made the spectacle any less revolting and demoralizing.

“FREE SPEECH WAS A PRINCIPLE THAT NEEDED UPHOLDING HERE”

Harvard invites banned poet back
BBC news
November 21, 2002

Tom Paulin: Ban caused widespread debate

Poet Tom Paulin has been invited back to speak at Harvard University after his earlier ban linked to comments he made about Jewish settlers in the occupied territories.

Paulin, an Oxford fellow who has been teaching at Columbia University in New York, had his offer cancelled after he made the comments in an interview to an Egyptian newspaper.

In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly in April, Paulin said US-born settlers in the occupied territories were "Nazis, racists" and he had "nothing but hatred" for them.

The university cancelled a lecture he was to give to the English Department after complaints from pro-Israeli groups.

But the English department decided to offer the invitation again – in the interests of free speech – after a two-hour meeting.

"Free speech was a principle that needed upholding here," English professor Peter Sacks said on Wednesday. "This was a clear reaffirmation that the department stood strongly by the First Amendment."

Paulin was supposed to speak on 14 November, but will probably not make the lecture until next spring.

The banning of Paulin caused widespread debate in academic circles.

"We are ultimately stronger as a university if we together maintain our robust commitment to free expression, including the freedom of groups on campus to invite speakers with controversial views," said Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers.

In the interview, Paulin, who was born in Northern Ireland, also said he understood "how suicide bombers feel" but suggested the Palestinians should wage a guerrilla war instead of attacking civilians.

Last year he wrote a poem for the Observer newspaper, labelling Israeli soldiers "Zionist SS".

Suicide bomber game tests the boundaries of taste

December 05, 2002

Madame Tussauds to remove Arafat making “V” for victory sign (& a Spanish MP speaks out for Israel)

December 04, 2002

FULL ARTICLES

MADAME TUSSAUDS TO REMOVE ARAFAT POSTER

Madame Tussauds to remove Arafat poster
By Douglas Davis
The Jerusalem Post
December 3, 2002

A poster depicting Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat making a Churchill-tyle "V" for victory sign is to be removed from display at Madame Tussauds, the famous London waxworks tourist attraction.

The Arafat poster, which will be removed at the end of the month, appears beside posters of Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana.

The decision followed a number of complaints, including one from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which pointed out that Arafat is "a known supporter and instigator of terrorism."

In a letter to Madame Tussauds, the board's public affairs director Fiona Macaualy said she could see little reason why the poster should not be removed immediately.

"I understand that you consider Yasser Arafat to be newsworthy but I doubt that it would be considered socially acceptable to advertise other such terrorists and criminals such as Osama bin Laden or Myra Hindley [a notorious British child murderer who died last month]."

AMONG THE EUROPEANS: LIVING IN TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

Among the Europeans: Living in two different worlds.
By Benny Irdi Nirenstein
The National Review
November 21, 2002

Last week in Florence, 300,000 Europeans – many waving Palestinian flags and sporting t-shirt images of Che Guevara, Stalin, and Mao Tse-Tong – marched to denounce the possibility that the United States will liberate the Iraqi people. In the upside-down world of these European demonstrators, democracies are to be condemned and dictatorships coddled.

Being an Italian who grew up in Israel, I'm increasingly caught in between two very different worlds. Half my friends now serve in the Israeli army, a veritable melting pot of rich and poor, black and white. For my other friends, danger is avoiding a hangover after a late night of partying in Rome.

I returned to Italy recently. What I find is frightening. Europeans no longer take for granted principles I came to understand in Israel. I assumed that anyone growing up in a democracy would understand that democracies are always superior to dictatorships. I never thought Italians who suffered so horribly during war and dictatorship would ever again find terrorism – the deliberate slaughter of civilians for political gain – acceptable. But increasingly they do.

I can no longer speak about the importance of freedom, liberty, and democracy in Italy without attracting the condescending sneers of a generation schooled by Europe's media, statesmen, and left-wing intelligentsia to look beyond such "simplistic" concepts.

To my European classmates, any suggestion that there is a connection between Islam and terror – even as self-identified Islamic groups slaughter schoolchildren in Israel, tourists in Egypt, and revelers at a Bali nightclub – is more racist than Islamists' targeting of civilians because of their religion. European politicians, Jacques Chirac, for example, unabashedly honors Hizbullah's Sheikh Nasrallah, the same man who last month suggested that he would welcome the return of all Jews to Israel "to save the trouble of hunting them down later."

In Italian classrooms, political ethics are reversed. Terrorism is justified, but defense of democracy is not. Military campaigns are roundly condemned, even though it was the military and not political appeasement that freed Western Europe from the worst tyranny. For many Italian students, professors, journalists, and politicians, there can be no justification for war. When the Baath party seized power in a coup, Saddam Hussein purged hundreds of political competitors. But to a new generation of Europeans schooled by Sixties radicals and liberal elites, Saddam is a legitimate nationalist leader and masterful tactician, while President George Bush, leader of the world's strongest democracy, is simply dismissed as stupid.

European arrogance has grown so great that even the most-ignorant student emerging with a failing grade feels justified in mocking the president of the United States. No countervailing arguments are needed to address those who understand the necessity of war, the right of self-defense, or the fragility of liberty in the face of tyranny.

I don't know whether the gap between Europe and America has ever been so great. No one I know identifies himself as pro-American. Despite recent waves of anti-Semitic and racist violence, and Le Pen's strong showing in the French elections, Europeans believe Americans to be racist, while they themselves are culturally tolerant. Europeans believe themselves to be empathetic while Americans are merciless and ruthless. They see no irony in the fact that it is the United States that is standing with Iraqis and Iranians against murderous dictators, while the European Union seeks to expand its business ties to Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They do not see any problem with Mary Robinson's legitimization of suicide bombings, nor the European Union's subsidization of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. For my European teachers, Saddam is more a representative of a different culture than a dictator set on accumulating weapons of mass destruction.

In many ways, the widening ideological gulf between Western European countries like Italy and the United States is due to the deep ideological mark of communism. Eastern Europe suffered under Communism and knows the evil of Leftism gone awry. In Italy, Communism has never fallen out of vogue. Under U.S. military protection, successive generations of young Italians have grown up unable to conceive of what tyranny actually means while taking liberty for granted. They demonize power and believe that the underdog must always be right. Accordingly, in the Middle East, Israel's military prowess makes the Jewish state worthy of contempt, and proponents of the slaughter of Israelis and Jews worthy of honor. More broadly, the power of the United States makes America public-enemy number one. Thus, American efforts to feed Muslims in Somalia, or liberate Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo are ignored. Despite the sacrifice of American lives for freedom in Korea, Grenada, Kuwait, and Haiti, they believe Washington is just cynically seeking control of Iraq's oil.

The inability of Europe to truly separate religion from state compounds the problem. No Italian politician can afford to ignore the Catholic Church. British politicians still look toward the Church of England for their moral guidance. When religion and politics mix, it can breed two extremist outcomes: One of fundamentalism as afflicts the Islamic world, and the other of irresponsible pacifism that now afflicts Europe, with an effect equally dangerous. Europe is now facing a devaluation of the same fundamental values that allowed it for more than 300 years be the world's most-prosperous and powerful region. The cultural relativism that increasingly reigns supreme in Europe serves as a powerful justification for treating as allies and equals the most corrupted and anti-democratic regimes on the globe. Terror becomes as legitimate as the decisions of a democratically elected government. Europe must awake from its sleep if it wants to play a relevant role in the world's future balance, and it does.

The question I ask myself when I am studying in Rome is whether my European friends must see terror with their own eyes before it can stop wondering "why these crazy Americans are going to war?"

– Benny Irdi Nirenstein is completing a political-science degree at Luiss University.

TURKISH PRESIDENT SALUTES HANUKAH

Sezer salutes Hanukah
Ankara – Turkish Daily News
November 30, 2002

President Ahmet Necdet Sezer saluted the Hanukah feast of Turkish Jews. In a written statement Sezer pointed out that Muslim and Jewish holidays take place coincidentally at the same time. "This gives us great happiness. In days we are all focused on purification, making peace with each other and promoting human values, we hope to reach peace in Middle East," he declared.

Sezer wished the holiday to bring peace and order to Turkish citizens and the Jewish world.

Hanukah, the Hebrew word meaning dedication, is celebrated for eight days in the Hebrew month of Kislev, which usually occurs in mid to late December.

KATSAV HOSTS TRADITIONAL RAMADAN FEAST FOR ISRAELI ARAB LEADERS

Katsav hosts traditional Ramadan feast for Israeli Arab leaders
by Greer Fay Cashman
Jerusalem Post

President Moshe Katsav hosted some 70 Israeli Arab leaders, including MKs, mayors, and heads of local councils, at a Id al-Fitr feast on Sunday after sunset, when Muslims break their Ramadan fast.

Katsav did not shy away from using the feast to address the heavy issues, such as the element of Israeli Arab society who actively support Palestinian terrorism.

Jews and Arabs must work together to nip this trend in the bud, he told the gathering. "If you don't stop it now, you will lose the power to do so in the future," he warned.

Katsav said that he did not object to Israel's Arabs advocating a Palestinian state but he strenuously condemned the participation of Israeli Arabs in terrorism.

Katsav was also critical of those Arab states that provide funding for terrorism. "Whoever supports terrorism, doesn't want a Palestinian state," he said. "Whoever supports the ongoing bloodshed is preventing the creation of a Palestinian state."

Shawki Hatif, head of the Arab Coordinating Council, echoed Katsav's plea for an end to bloodshed. "Every day we are burying people on both sides," he said. "We have to raise our voices against this madness." He also lamented that as a direct outcome of the violence, Israeli Arabs have been marked as enemies.

"With the creation of the state, this community decided to throw in its lot in with Israel," he said. "The question is whether Israel accepts us."

MK Abdel Malik Dehamshe commended Katsav's courage for inviting Arabs leaders at this time to come and break their fast.

EU OFFERS TO REMOVE HAMAS FROM TERROR LIST

EU offers to remove Hamas from terror list
Special to World Tribune.com
November 28, 2002

The European Union has offered to remove Hamas from a list of organizations deemed as terrorist if the Islamic group suspends suicide missions against Israel.

Palestinian sources said the EU offer was submitted during negotiations with Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip and Egypt over the last month. The sources said an EU representative held a series of talks with Hamas in an effort to achieve a limited ceasefire over the next few months.

Earlier this month, the EU sponsored talks in Cairo between Hamas and the ruling Fatah movement to discuss a ceasefire in the more than two-year-old war against Israel. The talks included a series of offers from both the EU and Egypt for a suspension of attacks.

An EU negotiator was said to have offered to remove Hamas from the European list of terrorist groups. Hamas's military wing Izzedin Al Kassam was placed on the list earlier this year while the political arm was left out.

Palestinian sources said the Fatah-Hamas dialogue will be renewed next month in Cairo. They said they expect the dialogue to include senior representatives of both movements.

[Canada has placed Hamas and the Islamic Jihad groups on Ottawa's list of terrorist groups. Hamas is already on the list of U.S. State Department terrorist organizations.]

For their part, Hamas leaders have rejected a ceasefire in suicide missions in Israeli cities. They termed such attacks as strategic, saying they would lead to the defeat of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in elections scheduled for Jan. 28.

Palestinian sources said Fatah and Palestinian Authority officials have urged Hamas to halt attacks inside Israel until at least after the Israeli elections. PA officials have expressed support for Labor Party chairman Amram Mitzna as Israel's next prime minister.

The EU effort has drawn protests from European parliamentarians. The parliamentarians have accused the EU and its commissioner for foreign relations Chris Patten of encouraging corruption and violence in the Palestinian Authority.

The EU provides 10 million euros a month to the PA and members of the European Parliament's foreign relations committee called for a panel to investigate PA corruption. Several members expressed concern that EU money could have been diverted to fund what they termed were Palestinian terrorist attacks. Patten rejected the assertion.

BRITISH JEWS URGE INQUIRY TO EXAMINE CHARGES EU FUNDS TERRORISM

British Jews urge inquiry to examine charges EU funds terrorism
By Douglas Davis
The Jerusalem Post
December 2, 2002

Britain's Jewish community is urging European parliamentarians in Brussels to support requests for a committee of inquiry into allegations that European Union aid is being used to fund Palestinian terrorism.

A minimum of 157 signatures are needed to establish such and inquiry. So far, more than 100 parliamentarians have signed the request.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, the community's representative body, said Monday it was "deeply concerned" by allegations that millions of euros sent to the Palestinian Authority are being used to fund Palestinian terrorism. It has written to all British legislators in Brussels urging them to request an inquiry, it said.

"The situation in the Middle East is heartbreaking for both sides and there can be no peaceful resolution of this conflict until all acts of terrorism have ceased," Tony Sacker, the board's vice-president, said in a letter to the legislators.

"Ensuring that EU funds are not used to fund terrorism will be an important contribution to the peace process," he said.

Last month, EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten said he wanted an investigation into allegations of misuse of EU aid to the Palestinians like "a hole in the head." Patten's remark came in response to a question by Charles Tanner, foreign affairs spokesman for the Conservative group in the European Parliament, over charges that European aid to the Palestinians is being diverted to fund terrorist activity.

In a letter to the London Sunday Telegraph, Tanner said, "If there is to be any chance of securing a lasting peace in the Middle East, we must settle beyond all reasonable doubt such serious allegations of fraudulent and violent use of EU taxpayers' money."

Unless there is an inquiry, Tanner said, "aggrieved Israelis will feel entitled to sue the EU. Commissioner Patten should be the first to accept that he has all to gain by clearing the air once and for all."

Tanner said he was surprised "the European Commission [the cabinet of the European parliament] has resisted this initiative. Commissioner Patten's response to my intervention... was that he wanted the issue investigated 'like a hole in the head.'"

NOKDIM WOMEN DEMAND COURT EXTRADITE KNOWN TERRORISTS FROM SPAIN TO ISRAEL

Nokdim women demand court extradite known terrorists from Spain to Israel
Israel radio report
December 3, 2002

Two women from the Jewish community of Nokdim in Samaria, who lost their loved ones in a shooting attack, are demanding the High Court request the extradition of the murderers to Israel, according to Israel Radio.

Tamara Lipschitz, who lost her father, and Miriam Gorov, who lost her husband, when terrorists fired on their vehicle between Nokdim and Tekoa, southeast of Bethlehem shortly after 4 p.m. on February 25, 2002, are making the request.

The victims' family members argue that the terrorists fled to Spain and that Israel has an extradition agreement with the country, according to the radio.

PALESTINIAN LEGISLATOR HANAN ASHRAWI WINS SWEDISH PALME PRIZE

Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi wins Swedish Palme Prize
The Associated Press
November 20, 2002

Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi on Wednesday was named the winner of the US$50,000 Olof Palme Prize for her work for Palestinian independence and openness that "has won respect in all camps," according to the citation.

The annual award is endowed by the family of the slain Swedish prime minister and the governing Social Democratic Party to foster international understanding.

Ashrawi was honored for her "consistent and fearless fight over the years for her people's independence and dignity," the Olof Palme Memorial Fund for International Understanding and Common Security said.

Ashrawi was a spokeswoman for the Palestinian side in peace talks in the early 1990s and served as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's higher education minister between 1996 and 1998. She's served as an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council since 1996.

The awards committee called Ashrawi "a leading force in the struggle for increased openness and democratic structures within her own Palestinian ranks" and said she was "an inspiring symbol of a new, democratic, peaceful Middle East."

A prize ceremony will be held in the Swedish capital on Jan. 30 to mark the birthday of Palme, who was shot to death Feb. 28, 1986, on a Stockholm street as he and his wife walked home unguarded from a downtown movie theater.

The Palme Prize, which includes a diploma, is awarded for an outstanding achievement chosen by the Fund's board. Previous winners include Czech President Vaclav Havel and Amnesty International.

“JUDEOPHOBIA EXPLAINS THE PRO-PALESTINIAN HYSTERIA OF THE EUROPEAN LEFT”

"Judeophobia Explains the Pro-Palestinian Hysteria of the European Left"
Interview with Pilar Rahola, Former Member of Parliament of the Spanish Republican Left
By Marc Tobiass
Proche-orient.info
October 2, 2002

A Catalan from Barcelona, Pilar Rahola is a highly colorful figure on the Spanish scene. She is known for her feminism, as well as for her frank and direct manner. A former parliamentarian, Pilar Rahola sat in the national legislature in Madrid for eight years, first as part of the republican left, then as the founder of the Independence Party. However, she decided to leave political life just over a year ago to devote more time to her other passions. She has just published "The History of Ada," a metaphor for abandoned children, those child-slaves or children-soldiers whom one meets all over the world, that is, when they are not transformed into human bombs.

She has also decided to step forward to denounce the flagrant imbalance in the handling of information from the Middle East. Her most recent piece, "In Favor of Israel," is to be published in a book in which fifteen Spanish intellectuals, including Jon Juaristi, president of the Cervantes Institute, and Gabriel Alviac, a well-known journalist with El Mundo [translator's note: a Spanish daily newspaper], seek to reestablish the facts.

Marc Tobiass (of proche-orient.com) talks with Pilar Rahola.

Marc Tobiass: Why did you feel the need to write "In Favor of Israel," to participate in the publication of this book?

Pilar Rahola: Since the start of the second intifada, the Spanish press, on the right as well as the left, has taken a particularly aggressive approach toward Israel, an approach that leaves out the reasons for Israel's actions and tends to ignore the Israeli victims in this conflict. In this situation, a small minority of intellectuals, public personalities-sensitive to the Jewish question in general and to Israel in particular-felt deeply touched by this problem. Outraged by the return of Judeophobia in Spain, we, each in our own way, began to write some articles, to use the media to condemn this situation. And then Oracia Vasquez Real, an important writer in Spain, suggested that we coordinate our activity, that we collect in one work the vision of the Middle East conflict held by fifteen well-known intellectuals.

Marc Tobiass: For whom did you write this book, and with what objective?

Pilar Rahola: Fundamentally, this book is addressed to the anti-Jewish school of thought in Spain. The goal of our book is to launch a debate about Judeophobia in Spain. We are convinced that the current view of the conflict, so Manichaean-with the good, always the Palestinians, and the evil, always the Israelis-has deep roots. It comes from an ancient anti-Jewish feeling that exists in Spain and that also explains the history of Spain. This feeling softened slightly after the Franco era [translator's note: post-1975], but today there is a virulent resurgence of this savage feeling to the point where one can find genuinely anti-Semitic expressions in the Spanish press. In essence, this is a provocative book in the face of totally pro-Arab thinking in Spain, that is completely uncritical of the mistakes of the Arab world in general and of the Palestinians in particular. We want to counter this flagrant imbalance.

Marc Tobiass: This imbalance is not specifically Spanish, nor, for that matter, is the Judeophobia. You rightly recall in your piece the troubling remark of Hermann Broch [translator's note: Austrian anti-Nazi novelist, 1886-1951] denouncing the indifference of Europe as the worst of the crimes in the bloody madness of the Hitler era.

Pilar Rahola: Yes, I think that Europe was indifferent on the surface because it felt guilty within. I believe that this indifference unquestionably comes from Judeophobia. And in the ultimate paradox, the Jewish soul is part and parcel of Europe. Europe cannot be explained without its Jewish soul, but it is also explained by its hatred of the Jews. Thus, all the repeated attempts of Europe to get rid of its Jewish soul are, in fact, a kind of suicide.

After the Holocaust, after Auschwitz, that is, after the ultimate stage in the destruction of the Jewish soul-a process which lasted for centuries in Europe-Europe is shattered, many of its elements are dead, but it also has a bad conscience; it knows it is guilty. Since then, Europe has looked for and found in the Palestinian cause the expiation for its guilt. It is from this that the uncritical and Manichean attitude toward the Palestinian cause emerges-it is, primarily, the last heroic (European) adventure. Further, the more the Jews are presented as being the evil party, the bad ones, the less difficult it is to carry the responsibility and the guilt. This is a process of collective psychology. From such a perspective, there essentially is no difference between France, for example, and Spain. It is unbelievable how Europe continues to hate its Jewish soul, even after it has expelled it!

Marc Tobiasss: According to you, it is this Judeophobia that explains the "pro-Palestinian hysteria" that exists in Europe.

Pilar Rahola: I am sure of it. There is undeniably of late a very serious effort at disinformation about everything to do with the Middle East. There is a kind of madness that excuses all the crimes, abuses, and errors of the Palestinian side, and, at the same time, there is an historical predisposition that condemns any single error of the Israeli side-and this to the point where the Palestinian victims are given maximum attention and the Israeli (victims) are ignored. It is as if the Jewish victims didn't exist, on the pretext that they were responsible for their own death!

The worst thing is that there is also a problem of terrorism in Spain, but when the crimes of ETA [translator's note: the Basque terrorist group] are mentioned, one speaks of terrorism, while when the crimes of Hamas are mentioned, one speaks of militants, activists, resistance, struggle. When one mentions the Palestinian victims, one speaks of children, civilians, innocents, but when one mentions the Israeli victims, one speaks of people without a name, as if to suggest that they are only soldiers, members of the army. There is a distortion in the presentation of the conflict, a dangerous manipulation that feeds the hatred and the anti-Semitism.

Marc Tobiass: Your remarks add up to an indictment of the European media.

Pilar Rahola: What I want is to launch an appeal to the collective European way of thinking, and especially to the intellectuals and journalists, because, from my point of view, they are in the process of creating a collective reality that is Judeophobic. Today one must prove oneself to be on the left; it is necessary to be anti-Semitic to have credibility. Things have reached the point where, for instance, Sharon is always guilty of being guilty, while Arafat is seen as an honest figure, innocent, a tireless old resistance fighter, a heroic figure, a kind of Gandhi-in brief, a person gussied up in romantic finery, when in reality he is head of an oligarchy that has so much blood on its hands.

Israel is not (just) a country that is trying, for better or worse, to survive for fifty years, but it is reduced to one sole image: a country that occupies the territories and whose vocation is to make life miserable for the poor Palestinians. The history of the Holy Land is being reinvented. Everything takes place as if there were instructions: Never recall the faults and errors of the Palestinians, never recall their alliances with dangerous countries such as Iraq, in order to heap more shame on the United States and Israel. The profound reasons for this war are never made clear, never discussed.

Marc Tobiass: There is a comment in your text that sent shivers down my spine. You say that Judeophobia is, in the final analysis, the common denominator between Europe and the Palestinians.

Pilar Rahola: It's true that there are in Europe non-Jews who are sensitive and respect the Jewish soul, which is also part of the foundation of Europe, but they constitute a minority. The majority, the unconscious European collective, does not understand, does not absorb, nor accept, the Jewish phenomenon. And it is there that the essential meeting point between the European and the Palestinian takes place. Palestinian identity is not just a recent phenomenon, but it is, above all, built on hatred of Israel, hatred of the Jews.

If Europe can be explained by its Jewish component and by its hatred of the Jews, as if they were two sides of the same coin, Palestinian identity can essentially be explained only by its anti-Jewish component. It is for this reason that the Palestinians have such difficulty putting an end to their violence.

If the Palestinians renounced their hatred of the Jews, they would at the same time lose a significant part of their identity. To get beyond this violence, they would have to get beyond the hatred and thus change their identity. In other words, they would have to reinvent themselves. It is on the basis of this hatred that the Palestinian meets and agrees with the European. Often, this takes place with people of the left, which is a veritable calamity for people like myself, as we are of the left. We are Europeans, but we do not accept Judeophobia, just as we do not accept the anti-Zionism that justifies and nourishes the anti-Semitism of the Spanish left today.

Marc Tobiass: Isn't this legitimization of hate the true obstacle to peace?

Pilar Rahola: Without doubt. I believe that Europe is directly responsible, and not only for the conflict. In the final analysis, who, if not Europe, created the Jewish problem in the world? In a certain sense, one can even say that Europe is the actual founder of the State of Israel. Europe expelled its Jews-its Spanish Jews, its Russian Jews, its French Jews, and its German (Jews). It expelled them from its body, even though these Jews felt themselves European to the core.

Marc Tobiass: You describe yourself as being of the left and, for you, being a leftist is above all an existential position toward life, toward society. Yet, you yourself say that when this position turns into ideology, at times it becomes an excuse for channeling uncritical dogma, a simplistic Manichaeanism, indeed a racism. You, who were a parliamentarian of the left, how can you handle this contradiction?

Pilar Rahola: Those on the left in Spain have a real problem. In some respects we are the heirs of the French Revolution; we have been influenced by the great ideologues like [Jean-Paul] Sartre and [Albert] Camus, and also by May 1968. That is to say, the overall thinking of the Spanish left comes from France. Now, France is fundamentally anti-American.from which (comes) our anti-Americanism, that at times borders on the pathological, an anti-Americanism which is also anti-Semitic. This explains why to a certain extent the Spanish left is anti-Semitic. Obviously, people like myself have great difficulty with this state of affairs.

I believe that if the left has failed as a great world ideology, it is because the left did not succeed in breaking with the worst of its dogmatic thinking. The left can be very progressive, but it can also be very dogmatic. Unfortunately, the left became infatuated with such infamous dictators as Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin, and now it is in love with Arafat. The left should be critical, and in the first place, self-critical.

Marc Tobiass: And what is the dogma that worries you the most today?

Pilar Rahola: The most absurd thing is to watch leaders of the left today greet and celebrate Arab leaders, even when they are fundamentalists. For example, in the debates that followed the attacks of September 11, we heard an anti-American discourse here, pooh-poohing the victims, something which is in and of itself terrible! And there were those who tried to downgrade-with that tawdry third-worldism which characterizes some circles of the left-the danger embodied in individuals like Bin Laden, who is, in fact, an authentic fascist. I believe that for the moment the world remains blind to the biggest totalitarianism of the twenty-first century, which is Islamic fundamentalism. Now we must prepare ourselves seriously to face this danger: For me, this totalitarianism is without any shadow of a doubt comparable to Stalinism and Nazism, the biggest scourges of the twentieth century.

Marc Tobiass: To finish this interview, Pilar Rahola, I would like to cite a sentence from your text: You say that to be "in favor of Israel" is the most intelligent, rational, prudent, and honest way to be in favor of Palestine.

Pilar Rahola: First of all, I do not accept the use of defense of the Palestinian cause as a pretext for a new epidemic of anti-Semitism. If Europe had had a critical discussion that did not hesitate to condemn the grave and permanent mistakes of the Palestinian side, if Europe had been more critical of the Palestinians, we would be closer to a solution today. But Arafat enjoys support and legitimacy in Europe which allows him to never miss an opportunity for missing the opportunity of peace. I believe that if Europe had been more critical toward Arafat, toward the different aspects of Palestinian violence, if Europe had been tougher in its statements, the Palestinians would have been compelled to step back from the violence and the suicide attacks.

A sense of justice calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state next to the State of Israel, but not in its place. Yet, at its core, Europe is ill at ease with the existence of Israel, and one can even say that the existence of this state provokes resentment and anger on the European left. Even if this is not acknowledged, many Europeans contend that a Palestinian state must replace the State of Israel.

But for those of us who support Israel, who are in favor of good neighborly relations-for coexistence between the State of Israel and a Palestinian state-our way of saying YES to a Palestinian state is also a way of saying YES to the existence of the State of Israel.

Kenya bomb attacks: “Terror is terror”; & another excuse to slander Israel

December 02, 2002

[Note by Tom Gross]

ANOTHER EXCUSE TO SLANDER ISRAEL

This is a follow-up to the dispatch of November 28 (Mossad to track down those behind triple bomb attacks in Kenya.) I attach a further round-up of articles connected to the Mombassa bomb attacks, with notes and a summary first. (In some cases, to save space, I have attached a summary without the full article.)

Although a few individual correspondents from international TV networks – including one who was quietly removed from Israel earlier this year for her persistent misrepresentation of facts and was posted to Africa – managed to lace anti-Israel comments into their reporting, much of the coverage was sympathetic to Israel.

The correspondent I mention claimed in her reports that the government of Israel should be doing more to help the Kenyan victims (even though it is far from clear why she thought it is Israel's responsibility.) In any case, nothing could be further from the truth. Israeli military aircraft brought the most seriously injured Kenyans back to Israel with the Israeli injured in order to provide them (at Israeli taxpayer expense) with emergency medical treatment of the kind that is not available in Kenya.

There are also a number of print journalists, such as Robert Fisk, yesterday in The Independent on Sunday, who have used the Kenya attacks as an excuse to further slander Israel. However, several papers and writers have taken a more understanding approach.

-- Tom Gross

SUMMARIES

“NOW WE UNDERSTAND”

1. "Kenya: Have we become canon fodder?" (By Magesha Ngwiri, The Nation – Nairobi, Kenya)

[Extract only] "By all means, we sympathise with the Palestinians who have never known peace since 1948. But now we understand why Israel acts the way it does, a country that is surrounded from all sides by enemies and which can never relax for even a single day for to do so would mean its extermination."

“A SINGLE WAR”

2. "A single war" (By Max Boot, New York Post, December 2, 2002)

"There is at least one silver lining in the ghastly carnage in Mombasa, Kenya: The homicidal swine who turned the Paradise Hotel into an inferno blew away the illusion that Israels war on terrorism can be separated from America's. This is a myth treasured by many in the U.S. government, especially at the State Department, who believe that America is right to use overwhelming force against its enemies, but that Israel should show "restraint" no matter the provocation. While America roots out the source of our terrorist problems in Afghanistan, Washington sternly admonishes Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that he must not touch a hair of Yasser Arafat's head – even though Arafat is at least as much responsible for terrorism as Mullah Omar once was."

(Note by TG: This is one of several editorials making this point. I attach one more example below.)

“BOTH FOOLISH AND WRONG”

3. "Terror is terror is terror" (Boston Herald editorial, November 30, 2002)

"We say it. We believe it. And yet when it comes to Israel too often the Bush administration – at least in its public pronouncements – attempts to draw distinctions between global terrorist networks and the Mideast's homegrown varieties. Once upon a time that was merely foolish. Now it is both foolish and wrong."

ALARM SPREADING ACROSS THE JEWISH WORLD

4. "For Israelis – and Jews everywhere – fear is now international" (By Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, November 29, 2002).

Jonathan Freedland, a significant figure in the European left-liberal media (he is tipped as a future editor of the Guardian newspaper), seems to be realizing that Israel and Jews are under attack, and do not solely play the role of aggressor. He writes "Kenya's psychological impact will not be felt by Israelis alone. It will fuel a growing mood of alarm spreading across the Jewish world: the sense that Jews are being hounded in a way unseen for more than half a century... No one expects George Bush to make concessions to Bin Laden, so why should Sharon to Arafat? As of yesterday, that argument will gain ground. Overtly now, the al-Qaida and Palestinian campaigns have been fused."

“MIDEAST MIXED SIGNALS”

5. "Mideast mixed signals" (Toronto Star editorial, December 1, 2002)

Yet another traditionally anti-Israel paper takes a more understanding position, and unlike many editorials notes that the attacks on Israeli civilians last Thursday were directed not just at tourists but at voters ("Gunmen associated with Fatah murdered Israeli voters.") The Star writes: "Who speaks for Palestinians? Yasser Arafat and his moderate-sounding aides, or the terrorists who murdered innocent Israelis this past week in Israel and Kenya? The world needs to know... These attacks on democracy, civil aviation and tourists come as Palestinians court the world's sympathy. This is no way to earn it."

MOSSAD WAKES “SLEEPER” AGENTS IN YEMEN & SAUDI ARABIA

6. "Mossad wakens 'sleeper' agents in Yemen, Saudi Arabia" (The Jerusalem Post, December 1, 2002)

This is based on a report in the London Sunday Times, which may or may not be true.

HUNDREDS ATTEND MOMBASSA TOUR GUIDE’S FUNERAL

7. "Hundreds attend Mombasa tour guide's funeral" (The Jerusalem Post, December 1, 2002)

Albert's oldest daughter, Ilana, recalled how the last contact he had with her was via e-mail. He asked her what he should "bring his beautiful daughter" back from Kenya. She replied: "Just come home safely."

ISRAEL NEVER RECEIVED A WARNING

8. "Western countries didn't share information with Israel" (Israeli press reports, Extract only)

"Though the Australian media are reporting that their government warned its citizens almost three weeks ago that Mombassa was a likely terrorist target, and though the U.S. confirms that it received similar information, Israel says it never received such a warning. British officials refused to comment on whether they were made privy to these warnings. The Americans say that they did not act on the information because it was "general and not trustworthy." Western intelligence agencies generally pass on information of this nature among themselves."

"The three Israelis murdered in Mombassa on Thursday were laid to rest today. The brothers Noi and Dvir Anter, 12 and 13, from Ariel were buried this afternoon at the Yarkon Cemetery near Petach Tikvah. Their mother was seriously wounded in the carbomb attack, and their younger sister was lightly hurt. Ilana Nulman, principal of HaYovel Junior High School in Ariel, where the two boys studied, said that the hallmark of the two boys was their "constant smile that never left their faces. They were true flowers. The pain is tremendously great. We took out paper and all sorts of drawing utensils, and the computer room, and encouraged the students to put their feelings down on paper or on the computer. One of them wrote an apology, and later explained that he had hurt one of the two brothers and didn't get a chance to say he was sorry."

BRITISH TOURISTS SHUN ISRAELIS IN KENYA

9. "British tourists shun Israelis" (London Times, November 29, 2002)

British tourists travelling to Kenya are demanding to know whether Israelis will be sharing their hotels, according to a leading travel firm.

FULL ARTICLES

“ONE SILVER LINING IN THE GHASTLY CARNAGE”

A single war
By Max Boot
The New York Post
December 2, 2002

There is at least one silver lining in the ghastly carnage in Mombasa, Kenya: The homicidal swine who turned the Paradise Hotel into an inferno blew away the illusion that Israels war on terrorism can be separated from America's.

This is a myth treasured by many in the U.S. government, especially at the State Department, who believe that America is right to use overwhelming force against its enemies, but that Israel should show "restraint" no matter the provocation. While America roots out the source of our terrorist problems in Afghanistan, Washington sternly admonishes Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that he must not touch a hair of Yasser Arafat's head – even though Arafat is at least as much responsible for terrorism as Mullah Omar once was.

This attitude reached new heights of absurdity after the targeted killing of six al Qaeda terrorists in Yemen by a CIA-operated Predator unmanned aerial vehicle. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher took pains to argue that there was absolutely no comparison between this action and Israel's targeted killings of terrorists, which the U.S. government continues to condemn.

But what if the people attacking America are also the people attacking Israel? If it turns out that al Qaeda was responsible for the Kenya attack, as now appears likely, this conclusion will be inescapable. Yet the evidence already strongly pointed in that direction long before last week's bombing.

One only has to think back to 9/11: The suicidal attacks on America caused great grief in Israel – and undisguised joy in the Palestinian territories.

Though Arafat took pains to quash coverage of pro-al Qaeda demonstrations, the Palestinian reaction was hardly an aberration. Remember that in the 1991 Gulf War the Palestinians also openly rooted for America's enemy, Saddam Hussein.

It's more than a matter of rooting interest, however; there are also much closer connections between anti-American terrorists and anti-Israeli terrorists.

At the broadest level, both groups represent an extremist Islamist ideology that revels in suicidal attacks and seeks to inflict maximum civilian casualties. The 9/11 hijackers were similar in spirit to those who tried to blow an Israeli airliner out of the sky over Kenya with SA-7 missiles.

Not all Palestinian terrorists, much less all Palestinians, are Islamists – but fanatical groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad are at the forefront of the current Al Aqsa intifida.

Within extremist Islamic circles, hatred of America ("the Great Satan") and Israel ("the Little Satan") go hand in hand. The Islamists even debate which is their greatest enemy: Some argue for America, on the grounds that Israel is merely an outpost of the "Crusader" empire centered in the United States; others suggest that the "Zionist entity" is the greater threat, on the grounds that a Zionist conspiracy secretly controls the U.S. government. But there is no denying that the two are closely linked in the Islamists' minds because both countries stand for everything they detest: religious freedom, women's rights, democracy, pluralism.

Thus Hezbollah (Party of God), the Iranian-sponsored Lebanese terrorist group, has carried out major operations against both Israel and America. Hezbollah is believed to be behind the blowing up of the U.S. embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the kidnapping and killing of numerous Americans in the 1980s, and the bombing of the U.S. Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996. At the same time, Hezbollah has waged a relentless war against Israel from its bases in Southern Lebanon, a war that has not slowed down even after its ostensible provocation (Israel's occupation of part of Lebanon) ended in 2000.

Many observers wrongly focus on the divisions between terrorist groups. Some, such as Hezbollah, are Shiites. Others, like al Qaeda, are led by Sunnis. Still others, such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, have secular leaders. But even rivals cooperate in their common campaign against Israel and the West, much as disparate terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s (the Baader Meinhof Gang, Red Army Faction, Irish Republican Army, etc.) worked together under the tutelage of Communist intelligence services.

The modern Islamist movement began with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s-'60s, but has since spread throughout the Middle East and beyond, from the Palestinian territories to Pakistan. All these groups see themselves as fellow jihadis (holy warriors) for the Dar al Islam (house of Islam) against the Dar al Harb (house of war – or all non-Islamic societies).

If we are ever to defeat them, we must see them as they see themselves. If we do, we'll realize that the Israeli conflict is not a "distraction" from the war on terrorism – it is the war on terrorism.

(Max Boot is the Olin senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.)

TERROR IS TERROR IS TERROR

Terror is terror is terror: A dangerous world got more dangerous
Editorial
The Boston Herald
November 30, 2002

We say it. We believe it. And yet when it comes to Israel too often the Bush administration – at least in its public pronouncements – attempts to draw distinctions between global terrorist networks and the Mideast's homegrown varieties.

Once upon a time that was merely foolish. Now it is both foolish and wrong.

The coordinated attacks Thursday on Israeli citizens in Mombasa, Kenya, are of a different order of magnitude not just for them, but for the United States as well. It is entirely likely that the attacks, one on an Israeli-owned resort hotel and the second on a plane departing from Mombasa airport, were the work of al-Qaeda. The suicide bombing of the hotel killed 12, three of them Israelis and nine Kenyans, most of them members of a youthful dance troupe which had come to welcome the new arrivals.

The attempted strike on the plane from a shoulder-held missile was, of course, a nightmare scenario come to life. That it missed, that it was barely felt by the pilot who thought a bird had hit the plane, and that the lives of 261 passengers were spared, was a result of either a faulty missile, an inexperienced terrorist or simple good luck.

"The world war against terror must become a practical, realistic and uncompromising war against all the terror organizations and those who harbor them – anywhere and at any time," Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said following the attacks.

Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, interviewed on the "Today" show yesterday, focused on the new terrorist weapon of choice, a shoulder-launched missile, noting that the next one could easily be aimed at an American plane.

The older model, used in Kenya, is fairly available on the just barely underground arms market. Even the more advanced Stinger missiles are still floating around Afghanistan to such an extent that the Central Intelligence Agency is offering a bounty for them.

We have known for a rather long time that we live in a dangerous world. This week it just got a little more dangerous, a little scarier.

FEAR IS NOW INTERNATIONAL

For Israelis – and Jews everywhere – fear is now international
By Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian
November 29, 2002

The sick fact is that, by Israeli standards, this was not a particularly big one. Suicide bombings inside the country regularly claim a dozen Israeli lives or more, while the terrorists who attacked the Paradise hotel outside Mombasa yesterday killed as many of themselves as they did Israelis (three each).

If terror were a crude matter of numbers, the African murders would have less significance than, say, yesterday's raid on a Likud party office in Beit Shean, which killed five. But numbers are not always decisive. Location matters too. Which is why yesterday's double assault from Kenya will strike so hard.

First, it will deepen yet further Israelis' state of fear. For more than two years Israelis have lived with the daily possibility of violent and random death within their own borders. Every parent worries that the bus carrying their child could blow to pieces; a trip to the mall could be a deathtrap; a pizzeria could be a minefield. That constant fear has seeped into the marrow of the society. Nothing is normal.

But Israelis always had one way to escape the fear. A holiday outside the country could be the valve that releases the pressure. Home may not have been safe, but abroad could be.

Now Israelis have lost even that comfort. Now they will believe that nowhere is safe. They will be hunted down wherever they are, targeted for the crime of being Israeli. That is the message of yesterday's attack: Israelis cannot live at home, they cannot live in the world.

Some will think that an overreaction. After all, Australians were the target of October's Bali bomb – yet surely few Aussies now feel themselves in a state of siege. That's true, but it misses two important differences. Australians are not under constant attack in their own country. Nor are they a people with a long, collective history of persecution.

Which is why Kenya's psychological impact will not be felt by Israelis alone. It will fuel a growing mood of alarm spreading across the Jewish world: the sense that Jews are being hounded in a way unseen for more than half a century.

Many Jews will see Mombasa as confirmation that Osama bin Laden's words are to be taken at face value. That when he repeatedly declares a "jihad against Jews and crusaders", he means it. And he puts Jews first for a reason: because he regards them – not Israelis or Zionists, but Jews – as enemy number one. Al-Qaida's April attack on an ancient Tunisian synagogue, which left 16 dead, was an early proof. Yesterday was another.

Politically, there are two likely impacts. First, Kenya will, like all terror attacks, prompt Israelis to close ranks. They will unite behind their prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who last night looked set to cruise to re-election as Likud leader. When terror strikes, Israelis accept the Sharon view that the only proper response is crushing force.

So the fledgling campaign of Labour challenger Amram Mitzna – arguing that a peace process, not military might, is the only long-term answer – will now struggle to get a hearing. What is there to talk about with maniacs prepared to blow 261 passengers out of the sky?

Sharon and much of the Israeli consensus will see a second vindication in Mombasa. Ever since September 11, Israeli leaders – and their allies among the US hawks – have argued that Israel's struggle with the Palestinians is merely one front in the wider war on terror. "Arafat is our bin Laden" is the slogan.

The desire to link the two is not hard to fathom. If these are the same fight, then Israel has the same right to hit at the "terror camps" of the West Bank as America had to strike at Afghanistan. And why negotiate with Palestinians if they are merely a local branch of al-Qaida? No one expects George Bush to make concessions to Bin Laden, so why should Sharon to Arafat?

As of yesterday, that argument will gain ground. Overtly now, the al-Qaida and Palestinian campaigns have been fused. As an Israeli government statement declared yesterday: "Whether in New York or Washington, Bali or Moscow, Mombasa or Bet She'an, terrorism is indivisible, and all attempts to understand it will only serve to ensure its continuation."

Kenya adds weight to the hawkish view that Israel faces a murderous enemy with whom there can be no reasoning; there is no point talking peace, because this is not a local, soluble struggle over real estate but a global, metaphysical "clash of civilisations". That is the view of the right, in Jerusalem and Washington and, not for the first time, the terrorists have just served as the hawks' star witness.

“WHO SPEAKS FOR PALESTINIANS?”

"Mideast mixed signals"
Editorial
Toronto Star
December 1, 2002

Who speaks for Palestinians? Yasser Arafat and his moderate-sounding aides, or the terrorists who murdered innocent Israelis this past week in Israel and Kenya? The 56 per cent of Palestinians who shrink from attacks inside Israel or the large minority who still cheer them?

The world needs to know.

Brutal attacks on Israeli voters, holiday-goers and air travellers a few days ago coincided with news reports that Arafat's top deputy Mahmoud Abbas has denounced the two-year Palestinian campaign of violence as a tragic error and a dead end. "We should... ask ourselves where we are headed," he told Fatah party activists at a closed-door meeting. "What happened in these two years... is a complete destruction of everything we built."

Yes it is. Some 2,700 people have died, Arafat's credibility has been shattered, his Palestinian Authority all but destroyed, statehood has been put on hold and tens of thousands have sunk into poverty.

A rethinking of Palestinian strategy is overdue. But Arafat himself, not an aide, should have shouted this message from the rooftops. Then fewer ordinary people might still cling to the contemptible fiction that terror is justified.

If Arafat cannot bring himself to challenge this view, publicly and forcefully, he should bow out. To be credible peace partners Palestinian leaders must make themselves heard for peace above the noise of rockets, bombs and guns. They haven't yet.

No sooner were Abbas' musings on the futility of violence made public, than gunmen from the Al Aqsa Brigades – associated with Fatah – murdered Israeli voters as they re-elected Prime Minister Ariel Sharon head of the ruling Likud party.

And in Kenya, Israeli tourists were blown to pieces by killers thought to be in league with Al Qaeda, and an Israeli passenger jet was nearly brought down by two missiles in a frightening escalation of terror.

These attacks on democracy, civil aviation and tourists come as Palestinians court the world's sympathy. This is no way to earn it.

MOSSAD WAKENS “SLEEPER” AGENTS

Mossad wakens 'sleeper' agents in Yemen, Saudi Arabia
By Douglas Davis
The Jerusalem Post
December 1, 2002

The Mossad has activated "sleeper" agents in Saudi Arabia and Yemen after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered Mossad head Meir Dagan to track down the planners and perpetrators of last Friday's twin attacks in Mombasa.

Quoting one source, the London Sunday Times reported that Sharon summoned Dagan to a meeting following the attacks and told him: "War has been declared on the State of Israel by the global Islamic terror syndicate. Change your priorities and get them, one by one."

Codenamed "Warriors," the highly trained sleeper agents are said to volunteer to live undercover in Arab countries, remaining dormant unless war breaks out. In such circumstances, their mission is to undermine Arab plans for strikes against Israel.

The last time the Mossad received such orders was in 1972 when then-prime minister Golda Meir ordered the assassination of Palestinians who were involved in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. All but one were eliminated in an operation that ranged over several continents and six years.

According to the newspaper, Sharon's order "promises to have momentous consequences for the conduct of the war on terror." It also said the order had met with a mixed reception among Mossad agents.

"If Bin Laden was involved in the Kenya attack, this man is a walking corpse," one agent was quoted as saying. Others, however, described the decision to activate the "Warriors" as "overkill." One source was quoted as saying: "Muslim terrorism is not a critical threat to the state of Israel. We should keep these people for an all-out war."

“JUST COME HOME SAFELY”

Hundreds attend Mombasa tour guide's funeral
By Kelly Hartog
The Jerusalem Post
December 1, 2002

The way in which 60-year-old Albert de Havilla's funeral was conducted was a true reflection of the man himself: calm, muted, and simple. This was not a funeral like those of so many terrorism victims. There were no camera crews, no hysteria, no flailing of arms, wailing or keening, cursing or cries for vengeance.

Several hundred people turned out to pay their respects, including family, friends, co-workers, and the small group of journalists who had accompanied him to Kenya.

All those who spoke at his graveside described a man who "loved life, had a hunger for knowledge, and whose enthusiasm had not waned with the passing years." Albert was born in Morocco and at the age of 16 was heavily involved in a program to help smuggle Jews from his homeland into Israel. He later made aliya with his wife, Estria.

Albert recently took early retirement from his post at the Prime Minister's Office and began a new chapter in life as a tour guide.

A co-worker at the funeral said after working for only a month for Paradise Geographic he received an award for being the most outstanding employee.

Albert is also survived by three grandchildren and his two other daughters, Ruthie and Keren. Keren is an flight attendant with Arkia, the airline he took to Mombasa, and Ruthie flew to Kenya with her father. They shared his final meal together.

I had spoken to Albert, my tour guide, just about every other day on the telephone in the two weeks prior to my departure to Kenya. No minor question was too much of a bother for him. He was incredibly busy at work and happily handed me his home telephone number, telling me to call him in the evening where he could chat to me in peace and quiet.

I first met him at the airport last Wednesday night when he handed me my ticket to Mombasa. Impeccably dressed in slacks, shirt, and jacket, he towered above everyone – a strong, lean man with a shock of white hair.

With his perfect posture, welcoming smile, and gentle tone of voice he had the rare ability to be both a leader who commanded respect and one who was also completely approachable.

Within 12 hours of us meeting and shaking our hands he was dead. I can never forget how he saved the lives of our entire group by making us go into the dining room for breakfast instead of waiting with the others who had just arrived to check in. Finishing up his eggs and juice, he left the dining room to see if the lobby had cleared a little. It was the last time we saw him.

They never knew it, but Albert De Havilla and the Anter family's lives and deaths became forever linked on the morning of Thursday, November 28.

A special bus had been set aside to take our small group of journalists to the Paradise Hotel as we left Mombasa Airport. We had around 10 extra seats on our small bus and several families found themselves stranded as the larger buses were full. They asked if they could accompany us on our bus for the 45-minute journey to the hotel.

De Havilla initially protested. He wanted the journalists to have their "reserved" bus and not share it.

Eventually he acquiesced after asking us if we would mind sharing the bus. Of course we didn't. Two families embarked. One of those was the Anter family. Little Adva, 8, came and sat next to me.

Her brother Noy, sat in front of me alongside his mother, Ora. She put one arm around her son and awkwardly reached her other arm over the back seat and held onto Adva for the entire journey. The little girl kept asking when we would be arriving. Dvir and his father sat at the front of the bus.

As we all listened to Albert's descriptions of every street and village we passed, Dvir kept piping up with questions. Adva could barely keep awake.

When her mother finally said "We're here," Adva was fast asleep. She had to be shaken awake and carried off the bus. The boys ran ahead into the lobby.

We had all arrived on the same bus. I cannot help but wonder what would have happened if Albert had held firm and not allowed the Anter family on our bus. The "what if's" can destroy you if you let them. Dvir, Noy, and Albert have now been laid to rest. Adva and Ora have a long road ahead.

BRITISH TOURISTS ASK IF ISRAELIS WILL BE SHARING THEIR HOTELS

British tourists shun Israelis
By Gabriel Rozenburg
The Times of London
November 29, 2002

British tourists travelling to Kenya are demanding to know whether Israelis will be sharing their hotels, according to a leading travel firm.

Somak Holidays, Britain's leading tour operator to Kenya, said that it received between 80 and 100 calls yesterday from tourists asking whether they would be staying in hotels either owned by Israelis or specifically catering for Israeli tourists.

Ash Sofat, the company's chief executive, said that bookings to Kenya had not been significantly affected by the attacks in Mombasa, but there had been widespread concern among his customers.

The company currently has 349 clients in Mombasa, but Mr Sofat said that none of his hotels worked with Israeli travel companies.

"A group of people are wanting to know if there are many Israeli tourists in their hotels," he said.

"I think it's a fairly healthy line of questioning. But this appears to be an Israel-Palestine problem and not a Kenya problem."

Shuli Davidovich, press secretary to the Israeli Embassy, said that she had never heard of tourists singling out Israelis in such a manner before.

"I would be concerned if it was a lasting phenomenon that Israelis would be asked not to go to certain hotels and tourist centres," she said.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said last night that British tourists would not be urged to avoid travelling to Kenya.