Mideast Dispatch Archive: June 2005 Archives

The New York Times finally covers the Le Monde verdict

June 30, 2005

* “No one denies now that there has been a rise in anti-Semitism tied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” – William Goldnadel, the head of Attorneys Without Borders, the group which filed the French court complaint against Le Monde

This dispatch was prepared on Monday, but I didn’t send it then because I had already sent two dispatches that day.

This is an update to three previous dispatches on this list:

* French court fines Le Monde journalists for “racist defamation” of Israel (May 30, 2005)
* J’Accuse: Anti-Semitism at Le Monde and beyond (June 3, 2005)
* Le Monde ‘J’accuse’ follow-up (June 10, 2005)

ONE MONTH LATE

[Note by Tom Gross]

One month late, the New York Times has finally mentioned the French court ruling which found Le Monde guilty of anti-Semitism for an article pretending to be merely an analysis of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. (I know from sources at the Times that one of the reasons they have finally run this story was due to pressure generated by my article in the Wall Street Journal Europe.)

Unsurprisingly, however, the New York Times seems to be disappointed with the ruling. New York Times correspondent Craig S. Smith says in the opening of his report that it “adds to a deficit of free speech in Europe,” and he despairs that “Europe is struggling to adjust the boundaries of reasonable debate at the worst possible time.”

By relegating the comments of William Goldnadel (the head of Attorneys Without Borders, the group that filed the complaint) to the end of the article and by listing the other cases he has brought against Le Monde, the New York Times appears to seek to downplay his achievement.

COULD THE NY TIMES LEARN A THING OR TWO FROM THE LE MONDE JUDGMENT?

In the National Review two years ago, I wrote a lengthy assessment of the New York Times’s own coverage of Israel. Although there was some improvement in the Times’s coverage after Steven Erlanger became Jerusalem correspondent, many of the points in my piece remain true today. It can read at www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross031403.asp.

The New York Times’s article on Le Monde omits much, and barely mentions the level of attacks Jews have experienced in France in recent years, nor the substantial increase in emigration from France by Jews that has followed these attacks.

The New York Times article also claims that the Le Monde article in question, “Israel-Palestine: The Cancer,” “was nothing remarkable to American readers accustomed to raucous, sometimes racist public debate.”

In my Wall Street Journal article I argued that because the media had so far ignored this case, it had failed to produce a “long overdue reassessment of Europe’s attitude toward Israel.” The New York Times also appears to be failing in that lesson.

I attach the New York Times article (followed by the article from the Wall Street Journal Europe, for subscribers who are new to this list).

-- Tom Gross

FULL ARTICLE

FREE SPEECH AND HATE SPEECH: FRENCH RULING ROILS THE WATERS

Free Speech and Hate Speech: French Ruling Roils the Waters
By Craig S. Smith
New York Times
June 27, 2005

www.nytimes.com/2005/06/27/international/europe/27france.html

According to William Goldnadel, the 4 euros he won in a recent court case here is a windfall for Jews in France. Others only see it adding to a deficit of free speech in Europe.

Three French intellectuals and the publisher of the nation’s premier newspaper, Le Monde, were ordered by a French court in May to pay 1 euro each to Attorneys Without Borders, which Mr. Goldnadel leads, for defaming Jews in an op-ed article three years ago. The article, the court found, equated Jews with the state of Israel, whose policies the authors sharply criticized.

The four men were also told to pay one euro each to an Israeli-French association, and Le Monde was ordered to publish a notice of the court’s decision in its pages in the coming months.

The case is one of many such complaints to land in European courts in recent years as a surge of emotional discourse – regarding Muslims after the Sept. 11 attacks and Israel after the second Palestinian intifada – bumps against post-Nazi laws intended to guard against the fascist hate-mongering of the 1930’s.

The far-right French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen has been taken to court on several occasions, accused of disparaging Muslims and discounting the Nazis’ wartime atrocities. In 2002, the French author Michel Houellebecq was acquitted of inciting racial hatred in a 2001 novel that called Islam “the stupidest religion.”

Most recently, an Italian judge ordered the journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial on charges that she defamed Islam in her 2004 book, “The Force of Reason.” She wrote in the book that Islam “sows hatred in the place of love and slavery in the place of freedom.”

Some here say that Europe is struggling to adjust the boundaries of reasonable debate at the worst possible time.

“The more insecure Europe is about its identity, the more dangerous it is to cross those boundaries,” said Dominique Mosi, an international relations specialist.

“Especially now, those boundaries are even more delicate because there is a danger of Europe falling prey to nationalistic and jingoistic reactions.”

Most European countries have laws restricting hate speech that, even if they predate the mid-20th century rise of Nazism, have been reinforced by the shared history of the Holocaust. Even Britain, which protects freedom of speech in a spirit closer to that of the United States, is considering a law against “incitement of religious hatred” to go with a law against incitement of racial hatred.

Many free-speech cases have been set off since Sept. 11 by criticism of Islam amid concerns about Europe’s growing conservative Muslim population. That does not mean that such laws curb speech uniformly across Europe. Enforcement varies according to the national mood, and penalties for infractions are usually low, leaving the field open to anyone willing to face the resulting opprobrium.

Theo van Gogh, for example, the Dutch filmmaker murdered in Amsterdam last Nov. 2 by an Islamist activist, was well known for his outrageous public comments about Muslims and Jews. One of his favorite epithets for conservative Muslims evoked bestiality with a goat, while in 1991 he wrote that “it smells like caramel today, they must be burning the diabetic Jews.” He was fined the equivalent of a few hundred dollars for that.

The case of the article published in Le Monde arose amid a wave of scorn for Israeli policies that swept Europe after the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000. The mood soon fueled a surge in anti-Semitism in France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe. “Death to Jews!” was shouted in Paris streets. Jewish children were attacked at schools; synagogues were burned. Emotions peaked during the Israeli Defense Force’s reoccupation of Palestinian areas from March to May 2002. Political cartoons across Europe equated Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with Hitler.

The article, published in June 2002, was nothing remarkable to American readers accustomed to raucous, sometimes racist public debate. But public criticism of racial or religious groups is forbidden in France, which is vigilant in policing public speech in pursuit of its vision of a homogenous, secular nation free of sectarian divisions.

The authors – one of whom is Jewish – condemned Mr. Sharon, accusing him of “oppressing and asphyxiating the Palestinian population.”

One of the passages cited by the court read, “One finds it hard to imagine that a nation of fugitives descended from the people which has been persecuted the longest in the history of humanity, having been subjected to the worst humiliations and the deepest contempt, would be capable of transforming itself in two generations into a ‘dominating and self-assured people’ and, with the exception of an admirable minority, a contemptuous people taking satisfaction in humiliating others.”

The phrase “dominating and self-assured people” was taken from a speech by Charles de Gaulle, who used it to describe Israelis in the aftermath of the 1967 war.

Mr. Goldnadel filed a complaint on behalf of his organization and the France-Israel Association, charging the authors with racial defamation.

At the subsequent trial, the judge found that any reasonable reader would understand the attack to be against the Sharon government and its supporters, rather than against all Jews. An appeals court, however, decided that three sentences in the 2,665-word article constituted racial defamation under a 1990 antiracism law.

Catherine Cohen, the lawyer for Le Monde, said the defendants had applied for the case to be heard by France’s highest court of appeals, the Court of Cassation, which could uphold the verdict or annul it. Either way, the defendants must pay their token fines and Le Monde must publish the verdict in its pages.

An open letter in support of the defendants, signed by 100 French intellectuals and published in Le Monde last year, argued that criticizing the Israeli government “and even the majority of Israelis who support it,” is far from a condemnation of all Jews. It warned that the case “shows the serious threat, which often takes the form of intimidation, that is looming over freedom of expression in France.”

But Mr. Goldnadel sees the case as part of a larger shift in what is acceptable in public discourse that began with the start of the second intifada. “Since the intifada, the media has suddenly discovered freedom of expression,” he said. “When speaking of Israel or Zionism they say anything they want to now.”

This is not the first case Mr. Goldnadel has brought against Le Monde: in 1999 he sued the newspaper, accusing it of defaming Serbs by equating them with the policies of Slobodan Milosevic. He lost at trial and won on appeal, but lost in the Court of Cassation.

In June 2001, Mr. Goldnadel’s group brought charges against Daniel Mermet, a journalist at Radio France, for broadcasting comments from listeners who blamed Jews in general for Israeli policies, complaining that they had exploited the sympathy won during World War II. Mr. Goldnadel lost in the trial and in the appeal.

He said he hoped the appeals court decision in the latest case represented an effort to address the sharp rise in anti-Semitism that the government and judiciary have been accused of ignoring.

“No one denies now that there has been a rise in anti-Semitism tied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he said.

J’ACCUSE

J’Accuse.
Anti-Semitism at ‘Le Monde’ and beyond.
By Tom Gross
The Wall Street Journal Europe
June 2, 2005

A French court last week found three writers for Le Monde, as well as the newspaper’s publisher, guilty of “racist defamation” against Israel and the Jewish people. In a groundbreaking decision, the Versailles court of appeal ruled that a comment piece published in Le Monde in 2002, “Israel-Palestine: The Cancer,” had whipped up anti-Semitic opinion.

The writers of the article, Edgar Morin (a well-known sociologist), Daniele Sallenave (a senior lecturer at Nanterre University) and Sami Nair (a member of the European parliament), as well as Le Monde’s publisher, Jean-Marie Colombani, were ordered to pay symbolic damages of one euro to a human-rights group and to the Franco-Israeli association. Le Monde was also ordered to publish a condemnation of the article, which it has yet to do.

It is encouraging to see a French court rule that anti-Semitism should have no place in the media – even when it is masked as an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The ruling also makes it clear that the law in this respect applies to extremist Jews (Mr. Morin is Jewish) as much as to non-Jews.

Press freedom is a value to be cherished, but not exploited and abused. In general, European countries have strict laws against such abuse and Europe’s mainstream media are in any case usually good at exercising self-censorship. Responsible journalists strenuously avoid libelous characterizations of entire ethnic, national or religious groups. They go out of their way, for example, to avoid suggesting that the massacres in Darfur, which are being carried out by Arab militias, in any way represent an Arab trait.

The exception to this seems to be the coverage of Jews, particularly Israeli ones. This is particularly ironic given the fact that Europe’s relatively strict freedom of speech laws (compared to those in the U.S.) were to a large extend drafted as a reaction to the Continent’s Nazi occupation. And yet, from Oslo to Athens, from London to Madrid, it has been virtually open season on them in the last few years, especially in supposedly liberal media.

“Israel-Palestine: The Cancer” was a nasty piece of work, replete with lies, slanders and myths about “the chosen people,” “the Jenin massacre,” describing the Jews as “a contemptuous people taking satisfaction in humiliating others,” “imposing their unmerciful rule,” and so on.

Yet it is was no worse than thousands of other news reports, editorials, commentaries, letters, cartoons and headlines published throughout Europe in recent years, in the guise of legitimate and reasoned discussion of Israeli policies.

The libels and distortions about Israel in some British media are by now fairly well known: the Guardian’s equation of Israel and al Qaeda; the Evening Standard’s equation of Israel and the Taliban; the report by the BBC’s Middle East correspondent, Orla Guerin, on how “the Israelis stole Christmas.” Most notorious of all is the Independent’s Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, who specializes in such observations as his comment that, “If ever a sword was thrust into a military alliance of East and West, the Israelis wielded that dagger,” and who implies that the White House has fallen into the hands of the Jews: “The Perles and the Wolfowitzes and the Cohens ... [the] very sinister people hovering around Bush.”

The invective against Israel elsewhere in Europe is less well known. In Spain, for example, on June 4, 2001 (three days after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 young Israelis at a disco, and wounded over 100 others, all in the midst of a unilateral Israeli ceasefire), the liberal weekly Cambio 16 published a cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (with a hook nose he does not have), wearing a skull cap (which he does not usually wear), sporting a swastika inside a star of David on his chest, and proclaiming: “At least Hitler taught me how to invade a country and destroy every living insect.”

The week before, on May 23, El Pais (the “New York Times of Spain”) published a cartoon of an allegorical figure carrying a small rectangular-shaped black moustache, flying through the air toward Sharon’s upper lip. The caption read: “Clio, the muse of history, puts Hitler’s moustache on Ariel Sharon.”

Two days later, on May 25, the Catalan daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon showing an imposing building, with a sign outside reading “Museo del Holocausto Judio” (Museum of the Jewish Holocaust), and next to it another building under construction, with a large sign reading “Futuro Museo del Holocausto Palestino” (Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust).

Greece's largest newspaper, the leftist daily Eleftherotypia, has run several such cartoons. In April 2002, on its front cover, under the title “Holocaust II,” an Israeli soldier was depicted as a Nazi officer and a Palestinian civilian as a Jewish death camp inmate. In September 2002, another cartoon in Eleftherotypia showed an Israeli soldier with a Jewish star telling a Nazi officer next to him “Arafat is not a person the Reich can talk to anymore.” The Nazi officer responds “Why? Is he a Jew?”

In Italy, in October 2001, the Web site of one of the country’s most respected newspapers, La Repubblica, published the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” in its entirety, without providing any historical explanation. It did suggest, however, that the work would help readers understand why the U.S. had taken military action in Afghanistan.

In April 2002, the Italian liberal daily La Stampa ran a front-page cartoon showing an Israeli tank, emblazoned with a Jewish star, pointing a large gun at the baby Jesus in a manger, while the baby pleads, “Surely they don’t want to kill me again, do they?”

In Corriere Della Sera, another cartoon showed Jesus trapped in his tomb, unable to rise, because Ariel Sharon, rifle in hand, is sitting on the sepulcher.

Sweden’s largest morning paper, Dagens Nyheter, ran a caricature of a Hassidic Jew accusing anyone who criticized Israel of anti-Semitism. Another leading Swedish paper, Aftonbladet, used the headline “The Crucifixion of Arafat.”

If the misreporting and bias were limited to one or two newspapers or television programs in each country, it might be possible to shrug them off. But they are not. Bashing Israel even extends to local papers that don’t usually cover foreign affairs, such as the double-page spread titled “Jews in jackboots” in “Luton on Sunday.” (Luton is an industrial town in southern England.) Or the article in Norway’s leading regional paper, Stavanger Aftenblad, equating Israel’s actions against terrorists in Ramallah with the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Grotesque and utterly false comparisons such as these should have no place in reporting or commenting on the Middle East. Yet although the French court ruling – the first of its kind in Europe – is a major landmark, no one in France seems to care. The country’s most distinguished newspaper, the paper of record, has been found guilty of anti-Semitism. One would have thought that such a verdict would prompt wide-ranging coverage and lead to extensive soul-searching and public debate. Instead, there has been almost complete silence, and virtually no coverage in the French press.

And few elsewhere will have heard about it. Reuters and Agence France Presse (agencies that have demonstrated particularly marked bias against Israel) ran short stories about the judgment in their French-language wires last week, but chose not to run them on their English news services. The Associated Press didn’t run it at all. Instead of triggering the long overdue reassessment of Europe’s attitude toward Israel, the media have chosen to ignore it.

(Mr. Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph and the New York Daily News.)

Jihad Warning: Is there a coming “Eurabian threat to the West”?

June 27, 2005

JIHAD WARNING

Jihad Warning: The coming Eurabia?
June 26, 2005

Book reviewed:
“Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis” by Bat Ye’or
(Fairleigh Dickinson, 384 pp., $23.95)

Review for the New York Post
By Tom Gross

www.nypost.com/postopinion/books/48862.htm

For over three decades, the historian Bat Ye’or has been a voice in the wilderness. Her warning that “jihad” - a movement central to Islamic thinking from India to Nigeria - had in the 1970s emerged as a powerful force in much of Europe, fell on deaf ears. Most Europeans remained in complete denial about what was confronting them. They were equally blind, according to Ye’or, to the fact that many European politicians and diplomats were effectively in collusion with the jihadists, motivated by economic aims and a philosophy of appeasement, or by the shared values of anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism.

There has been greater awareness of the Moslem fundamentalist threat in Europe following the 9/11 attacks on the US (along with the revelation that several of the 9/11 perpetrators had been educated at European mosques and universities), and following the Madrid train bombings which killed 190 people last year. But a great deal of willful ignorance remains.

Indeed militant Islamists have been much better at understanding and exploiting western cultural ideals and weaknesses than European and American intellectuals (preoccupied with attacking the US and Israel) have been in understanding theirs.

Even today, many Western liberals - viewing the world through their own narrow prism - insist that Islamic terrorism is the product of ignorance and poverty, despite overwhelming evidence that most suicide bombers and their handlers have been highly educated and relatively wealthy. Like Nazis, Communists, and others before them who would destroy western civilization, the Jihadists in Europe, Iraq and al-Qaeda, know exactly what they are doing.

Bat Ye’or’s new book Eurabia has already been welcomed as one of the definitive works of this decade, and compared by some to Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations.”

She points out that for over a millennium, the effect of Islamic “jihad” through its political, military, economic and cultural components, has been to subjugate and in some case extinguish once-thriving Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Buddhist civilizations in Asia, Africa and Europe.

She argues that “jihad” has now reappeared in Europe, not by accident but as the result of a grand design by French and other European Union diplomats to forge a new political entity “Eurabia” which would fuse together the European and Arab worlds, dispose of Israel - the irritant in their way - and then challenge America for world hegemony.

The term “Eurabia”, notes Ye’or, was first used in the mid-1970s, as the title of a journal edited by the President of the Association for Franco-Arab Solidarity.

Relying on detailed documents, minutes and directives generated by government bodies, including a little known organization set up by France in the 1970s called the Euro-Arab Dialogue, Ye’or charts the deliberate co-operation that has brought European democracies, Arab dictatorships and Islamic terror groups closer together. (Only last week a Dutch diplomat was caught on film embracing a member of the Palestinian terror group Islamic Jihad in Gaza.) One motivation behind this is appeasement, and the jihadists are adept at exploiting the European desire to avoid trouble. Today the European Union can, as Osama Bin Laden implied in his message last summer, be placed in the category of “lands of temporary truce.”

But as Ye’or notes, what started as a scheme for a greater “Eurabia” controlled by the French (who would in turn welcome the flow of Arab oil and Muslim immigration into Europe), has turned into an attempt by fundamentalist Muslims to take over Europe.

Within a single generation, a significant portion of the population of major cities in a dozen European countries have become Muslim. “The Economist” projects, for instance, that by 2020, the three largest Dutch cities will have an almost 50% Muslim population.

Yet the crisis for Europe isn’t about numbers, but about militancy. Of course most European Muslims wish to integrate, while practicing their religion in a peaceful way. But - given the opinion polls that show an admiration, among other things, for Bin-Laden - it seems clear that an increasing minority do not.

Bat Ye’or is a pseudonym that this brave, pioneering Egyptian-born Jewish writer has been forced to adopt following threats. (The name means “daughter of the Nile” in Hebrew.) She has long been a resident of Geneva, Switzerland, and a close observer of a sweeping historical trend that many of us may have been slow to detect.

Just occasionally what she writes smacks of conspiracy-theory. The processes she describes are probably a little less systematic and more fragmentary than she suggests. But she is broadly right, and the facts she lays bare will have enormous repercussions not just for Europe but for the US as well.

(Tom Gross is a former Jerusalem correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph.)

“My dream was to be a suicide bomber”

[Note by Tom Gross]

ITALIAN VANITY FAIR AND THE HOSPITAL STORY

Throughout last week, the western media continued to extensively cover the Israel-Palestinian conflict. They covered the visit of US Secretary of State Rice, the Sharon-Abbas summit and Israel’s failed air strike against terrorists as they launched rockets on Israeli houses. Hour upon hour were devoted to this failed strike by the BBC alone, most of which was highly critical of Israel. (And today the BBC have extensive coverage extolling the virtues of the “International Solidarity Movement.”)

Yet the media went out of its way to avoid mention of the attempt by Fatah to blow up a hospital last Monday. Throughout the years of suicide bombings in the Middle East it has been extremely rare for a bomber to target a large civilian hospital. Not even Al Qaeda has targeted hospitals. Fatah, the party created and molded by Yasser Arafat and now led by Mohammad Abbas, was responsible for sending Gaza resident Wafa Samir Ibraim Bas, 21, to blow up the hospital. Yet this is not deemed worthy of a mention by most mainstream western journalists covering Abbas in a series of articles and on air reports last week.

Below, I attach advanced extracts of an article from next month’s Italian Vanity Fair (yesterday’s London Sunday Telegraph published extracts of this article) which is one of the few articles in the western press to properly report this story. Wafa Samir Ibraim Bas is interviewed about her potentially catastrophic act. This Fatah member freely admits that she wanted to kill dozens of “Jews” and was not concerned if those killed were babies.

FOX NEWS SHOWS THE DRAMATIC FOOTAGE THAT THE BBC AND CNN AVOID

The dramatic footage of Israel’s arrest of this would-be hospital bomber was shown internationally only on the Fox News channel. No other major television network featured this story. By not covering this story, the BBC and CNN can continue to criticize the checkpoints Palestinians have to go through when entering Israel as if there was no reason for these checkpoints.

Most friends of mine dismiss Fox as “right-wing” and unfair and unbalanced. In truth, and certainly as far as this story goes, Fox seems far more interested in comprehensive reporting than the BBC or CNN.

The video of the bombing attempt by Wafa Samir Ibraim Bas can still be seen at
www1.idf.il/DOVER/site/mainpage.asp?sl=EN&id=7&docid=41434.EN

“HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH” TOO BUSY SERVING REFRESHMENTS TO NOTICE THE HOSPITAL STORY

Only a few days after the attempt on the hospital, Human Rights Watch (HRW) failed to include it in their report titled “Promoting Impunity: The Israeli Military’s Failure to Investigate Wrongdoing”. The report was unveiled by HRW at a press conference at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem late last week. (The hotel is the unofficial base for Palestinian Authority media operations.) Perhaps Human Rights Watch was too busy serving refreshments to journalists to notice this story.

ANOTHER $500 MILLION IN SUPPLIES TO GAZA HOSPITALS

It was also reported last week that medical supplies worth $500 million dollars have been distributed to four hospitals in the Gaza strip. This money comes from USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. Had the Palestinians not squandered billions of dollars in international aid over the last 12 years, purchasing huge stockpiles of arms and depositing much of the money in foreign bank accounts, they would probably not still need to come to Israel for medical treatment. I have covered such corruption in previous dispatches, including European Union funding and the Beersheva massacre (August 31, 2004).

PA OFFICIAL: ISRAEL IS “POISONING PALESTINIAN FOOD”

I also attach (below) an article that quotes Yusuf Abu Safia, the chairman of the Palestinian Environmental Authority who claims that Israel has dumped carcinogens in Palestinian food. In addition he claims that Palestinian children play with Israeli games that beam radioactive rays. Israel struggles to get its story heard by the world’s press even when, in the case of the hospital, it is particularly shocking and the video feed is free and readily available to media from the Israeli government. Yet, utterly ridiculous claims like this one by a Palestinian official are picked up and publicized. I have on many occasions covered some of the more spurious Palestinian claims, for example in the dispatch titled Arafat killed by high tech laser attack (March 21, 2005).

TWO ISRAELI TEENS SHOT BY PALESTINIAN GUNMEN RECEIVE ALMOST NO MEDIA COVERAGE

Palestinian gunmen on Friday randomly shot dead two Israeli teenagers. Avichai Levy (17), died immediately, and Aviad Mansour (16), died of his wounds yesterday. As far as I can tell, there has been no coverage of Aviad Mansour’s death in the Western media today.

-- Tom Gross

SUMMARIES

“MY DREAM WAS TO BE A SUICIDE BOMBER”

“‘My dream was to be a suicide bomber. I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews. Yes, even babies’” (By Manuela Dviri in Tel Aviv, Italian Vanity Fair – advanced extracts published by The Sunday Telegraph (London), June 26, 2005)

It was about midday when a young Palestinian woman from the refugee camp of Jabalya in Gaza approached an Israeli checkpoint clutching a special permit to visit a doctor on the other side of the border...

When a soldier asked her to remove her long, dark cloak, she turned to face him. All her movements were taped by the military surveillance camera at the checkpoint: calmly, deliberately, she took off her clothing, item by item, until she looked like any normal young woman in T-shirt and jeans. It was then that she tried to set off the belt containing 20lb of explosives hidden beneath her trousers. To her horror, she did not succeed. Desperate, she clawed at her face, screaming. She was still alive, she realised. She had failed her martyrdom mission.

That afternoon, on June 21, the 21-year-old, Wafa Samir al-Biss, was brought before the press by Israeli intelligence. Her neck and hands were covered with scars caused by a kitchen gas explosion six months earlier. The ugly scars - which had been treated in a hospital in Israel - had probably helped turn her into the perfect would-be huriia (virgin), the ideal martyr, since they would make it difficult for her to find a suitable husband.

The decision to publicise her case was intended to show that a terrorist threat remains despite a lull in the intifada since the Palestinian-Israeli ceasefire agreement at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit in February...

Wafa had been sent on her mission by the Abu Rish Brigade, the small militant faction with links to Fatah. She did not, she said later, regret it, though she stressed that her decision had had nothing to do with her scarring. “My dream was to be a martyr. I believe in death,” she said. “Today I wanted to blow myself up in a hospital, maybe even in the one in which I was treated. But since lots of Arabs come to be treated there, I decided I would go to another, maybe the Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews”

Asked whether she had considered the consequences of her planned attack, that it might have now precluded access to Israel for Palestinian patients who meant no harm and needed special medical treatment that could be achieved only here, she answered: “So what?” With a flat look in her eyes, she said: “They pay you the cost of the treatment, don’t they?”

And what about babies? Would you have killed babies and children? she was asked. “Yes, even babies and children...

PALESTINIAN OFFICIAL: ISRAEL FLOODS PALESTINIANS WITH CARCINOGENS

“Israel Floods Palestinians With Carcinogens: Official” (By Ola Attallah, Islam Online, June 20, 2005)

A Palestinian official charged today that Israel has dumped the Palestinian market with carcinogenic food and fruit.

“The market is inundated with such killer food and chemicals that cause cancer and other malicious diseases. These goods pose serious threats to the health of the Palestinian people,” Yusuf Abu Safia, the chairman of the Environmental Authority (EA), told IslamOnline.net...

Abu Safia further warned that Palestinian children play with Israeli games that beam radioactive rays.

He said Egyptian border authorities seized two shipments of carcinogenic and radioactive Israeli games last month...

The Palestinian official further said that Israel has declared a “disguised war” aimed at killing the Palestinians slowly...

FULL ARTICLES

“MY DREAM WAS TO BE A SUICIDE BOMBER”

‘My dream was to be a suicide bomber. I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews. Yes, even babies’
By Manuela Dviri in Tel Aviv
Italian Vanity Fair – advanced extracts published by The Sunday Telegraph
(London)
June 26, 2005

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/06/26/wmid26.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/06/26/ixworld.html

This is an edited extract of an article that will be published in Italian Vanity Fair this week

It was about midday when a young Palestinian woman from the refugee camp of Jabalya in Gaza approached an Israeli checkpoint clutching a special permit to visit a doctor on the other side of the border.

The girl had big, brown eyes and her black hair was tied in a ponytail, but it was the strangeness of her gait that attracted the attention of the security officials at the Erez crossing, the main transit point between Israel and the Gaza Strip.

When a soldier asked her to remove her long, dark cloak, she turned to face him. All her movements were taped by the military surveillance camera at the checkpoint: calmly, deliberately, she took off her clothing, item by item, until she looked like any normal young woman in T-shirt and jeans. It was then that she tried to set off the belt containing 20lb of explosives hidden beneath her trousers. To her horror, she did not succeed. Desperate, she clawed at her face, screaming. She was still alive, she realised. She had failed her martyrdom mission.

According to the Israeli doctor who attended Wafa at the Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, she received blood transfusions during her treatment. “I told her, with a laugh, that now she has Jewish blood in her veins,” he said, adding sadly that she had “seemed so nice - we got a lovely thank you letter from her family.”

And what about babies? Would you have killed babies and children? she was asked. “Yes, even babies and children. You, too, kill our babies. Do you remember the Doura child?”

[Middle East commentator David Steinmann, adds, for this list: This was the case in which a Palestinian father and son were apparently caught in the crossfire between attacking Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers. The child was killed. Subsequent investigation by Europeans revealed that the child was almost certainly killed by Palestinian gunfire; but that finding wasn’t publicized amongst the Palestinian population since the death of the child had already been used to brainwash them against the alleged Israeli child killers. No point sowing doubt amongst the population once you’ve got them convinced that the enemy is inhuman and must be slaughtered].

Then she started to cry. “I don’t want my mother to see me like this. After all, I haven’t killed anyone will they have pity on me?” ‘It is unlikely. Wafa has become one of a very special group of females: the women who have tried – and failed - to die while killing for the Palestinian cause. I recently visited the Israeli jail that holds these “suicide women” near the finest Israeli villas, in the heart of the most fertile area of the country, the Plain of Sharon.

They are here, and still alive, because they changed their minds at the last moment, because they were arrested, or because, like Wafa, they did not succeed. They are kept in a kind of labyrinth, behind seven, or perhaps eight, iron doors and gates, at the end of long corridors to which few people are allowed access, and which are reached after climbing and descending one flight of stairs after another.

Their unarmed guard, a young, calm-looking blonde woman, calls them her “girls”. “There are 30 of them, between 17 and 30 years old, some of them are married and others aren’t, some of them have children,” she told me. “Their stories come out of the Thousand and One Nights. Some of them did it to make amends for a relative who was a collaborator, others to escape becoming victims of honour killings, and for the psychologically frail or depressed it was a good way to commit suicide and at the same time become ‘heroines’. Personally, I don’t judge them or hate them, because if I did I wouldn’t be able to look after them any more.”

One of the inmates, Ayat Allah Kamil, 20, from Kabatya, told me why she had wanted to become a martyr: “Because of my religion. I’m very religious. For the holy war [jihad] there’s no difference between men and women shaid [martyrs].”

According to the Koran, male martyrs are welcomed to Paradise by 72 beautiful virgins. Ayat, as with many of the women she is incarcerated with, believes that a woman martyr “will be the chief of the 72 virgins, the fairest of the fair”.

Her fellow prisoner, Kahira Saadi, from Jenin, is one of the jail celebrities. A mother of four, aged 27, she was held responsible for an attack in which three people died and 80 were injured. Zipi Shemesh, five months’ pregnant, and her husband, Gad, were among the dead. They had gone to an ultrasound appointment and had left their two daughters, Shoval, seven, and Shahar, three, with a babysitter. They never came back. Kahira was given three life sentences and another 80 years. She looked pale, sad, anguished. I asked her if the dead tormented her during the night. “No,” she said. “Anyway, the actual attacker would have blown himself up even without me. I didn’t kill anyone myself, physically.”

Who do your children live with? “With my mother-in-law, my husband is in jail, too.”

Aren’t you sorry you ruined their lives as well as your own? “I did it to defend them. I’m not sorry, we’re at war. But perhaps I wouldn’t do it again. It was an impulse,” Kahira answered balefully.

I think the real reason for what you did was different from the official one. “You’re right,” she said, “but I’m not going to tell you what the reason was.”

You’re paying heavily for it. Who comes to see you here? “Nobody came for the first two years, but now my children are beginning to come.”

Have you had the courage to tell them you’re never going to get out of here? “No, and I trust that God will solve my problem somehow. I tell you again that I didn’t physically kill anyone that day.”

What did you do? “I helped the attacker to get into Jerusalem. I gave him some flowers to hold in his hands.”

When? “I don’t remember the exact date, only that it was Mother’s Day. That’s why I prepared him some flowers.”

Then it was February, I told her.

“How can you remember it so well?” she asked.

Because my son was killed on Mother’s Day, I said, and I watched as she grew pale and seemed to stagger.

No, it wasn’t you, I explained. He was killed in 1998, while your attack was in 2002. But we certainly have an anniversary in common.

At this, Kahira gave me a look that I’ll never be able to describe. She didn’t utter another word.

One question has bothered me since my visit to that prison. The parents and the relatives of these failed martyrs, what happens to them afterwards? What do they feel after the tragedy, with that knowledge? I decided that I would ask Wafa’s father, Samir al-Biss. Samir is the owner of a tiny, shabby grocery shop. For many years, before the intifada, he worked as a day labourer in Israel. After the initial shock of his daughter’s martyrdom mission, he disconnected the telephone and now will not speak directly to anyone.

He has, however, allowed Wael, Wafa’s cousin, to answer on his behalf. “Wafa’s father is still in a state of shock,” Wael said. “He wishes to say that he can’t bring himself to believe that his daughter was going to blow herself up. He believes that she was put up to it and exploited by someone and that it’s not fair that the whole Palestinian population should be punished for what she has tried to do. The Palestinians don’t have to pay for her act,” he added sadly.

I tend to agree with him. Neither the Palestinian people nor the Israelis should have to pay for the fanatical acts of their extremists.

(Manuela Dviri is a journalist, playwright, left-wing activist, and writer whose son, Jonathan, was killed by a Hizbollah rocket seven years ago. She received the 2005 Peres Reward for Peace and Reconciliation for her involvement with Saving Children, an Israeli-Palestinian project which refers Palestinian children to Israeli hospitals for free treatment.)

PALESTINIAN OFFICIAL: ISRAEL FLOODS PALESTINIANS WITH CARCINOGENS

Israel Floods Palestinians With Carcinogens: Official
By Ola Attallah, IOL correspondent
Islam Online
June 20, 2005

www.islam-online.net/English/News/2005-06/20/article05.shtml

A Palestinian official charged Monday, June 20, that Israel has dumped the Palestinian market with carcinogenic food and fruit.

Abu Safia further added that the EA has seized several shipments packed with biscuits and juices, adding that lab analysis revealed that the Israeli goods contained high percentage of the carcinogen saccarine.

“This chemical (saccarine) is highly dangerous to public health and has been banned since 1982 around the globe as studies held it as the main culprit behind cancer,” he said.

“Frozen meat, summer vegetables and fruit have been injected with chemicals and exposed to radiation which mutated into double of their size.”

In summer, Palestinians basically consume Israeli-cultivated vegetables and fruit like watermelons, apricots and plums.

Abu Safia further warned that Palestinian children play with Israeli games that beam radioactive rays.

He said Egyptian border authorities seized two shipments of carcinogenic and radioactive Israeli games last month.

“Disguised War”

The Palestinian official further said that Israel has declared a “disguised war” aimed at killing the Palestinians slowly.

Abu Safia highlighted the fact that such stuffs are not marketed for the Israelis, stressing that they were produced especially for the Palestinians at lower price.

He added Israelis are also deliberately flooding Palestinian markets with settler-made, poor-quality and cheap products to undermine Palestinian production.

The official also hit out at some Palestinian tradesmen for buying secondhand Israeli domestic appliances and computers at meager prices, then reselling them on the Palestinian market.

He said his Environmental Authority has seized 2,500 used computer monitors in addition to a shipment of 1954-produced medicine, whose production and expiry dates have been faked, and brought to the Palestinians from Israel.

The official urged all Palestinians, starting from the Palestinian Authority, tradesmen and consumers to join forces to boost the national economy and production by boycotting such suspicious Israeli products to head off also serious health problems.

“We shouldn’t allow Israel to kill our children and us,” he said.

“Lies in the library” and Comic book controversy

June 24, 2005

CREEPING HISTORICAL REVISIONISM

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach two articles. The first charts creeping historical revisionism about Israel in American library books for both adults and children. The second concerns criticism in Germany of comic books on the Holocaust.

LIES IN THE LIBRARY

In her article (below), Andrea Rapp, a librarian in Ohio, outlines how an increasing number of books being bought by and stocked in American libraries contain the same kinds of lies and myths about Israel that have been common in recent years in parts of the mainstream media.

For example in her book on the killings of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics (Rosen books, 2003), author Liz Sonneborn is reluctant to identify Israelis as victims and one of the killers is said to have felt “proud that for the first time his life had meaning.”

Sonneborn “explains” that at the birth of Israel, Israeli soldiers forced hundreds of thousands of Arabs into “camps.”

As I have pointed out before on this list, news organizations such as the BBC, who at the time the Munich Olympic massacre took place correctly called the perpetrators “terrorists” have in recent articles on BBC online, gone out of their way not to refer to them as “terrorists.”

It seems that the distortion by news organizations of current events is now being mirrored by library books that distort history.

I have argued previously, both in published articles and on this email list, that media distortions are not just unpleasant; they set back hopes for a diplomatic solution and for peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. The same can be said in regard to other forms of literature be they books for children or academics.

COMIC BOOKS: FROM DONALD DUCK TO AUSCHWITZ

The second article below, from the Times of London, concerns two comic books that are to be published by the German firm Ehapa, the same comic book company that publishes comics with Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. These two comic books “Auschwitz” and “Yossel” have been criticized for portraying such a serious topic in this light form.

Both the articles below illustrate a worrying trend of historical revisionism that could leave an indelible mark on many generations to come. There are summaries first for those who don’t have time to read them in full.

-- Tom Gross

MARK STEYN ON RACHEL CORRIE (An additional note)

As I mentioned recently (in one of the dispatches on Le Monde), I don’t usually point out the full extent to which notes, commentaries and items on this list are subsequently used by many of the journalists who subscribe to the list.

But because Mark Steyn is such a brilliant writer, I am happy to report his referral to and repetition of parts of what he calls “Tom Gross’s withering internet post” in his new article on the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie.”

Steyn, who is best known as a political commentator (his work regularly appears in north America, the UK, the Middle East and Australia), is also the theatre critic for the distinguished American monthly The New Criterion.

(Because Mark Steyn is often sympathetic to Israel, many of his detractors have assumed he is Jewish. In fact he is a Canadian Baptist, born in the Caribbean and resident in New Hampshire.)

SUMMARIES

LIES IN THE LIBRARY

“Lies in the Library” (By Andrea Rapp, Reform Judaism magazine, Summer 2005)

A few months ago, I ordered a collection of recently published children’s books on Israel for our temple library. Much to my dismay, after reviewing the works I discovered that many books contained flat-out incorrect information reported as fact, demonstrated a blatant anti-Israel bias, or sometimes both. These are the library books on Israel that students across the country will be consulting for reports and class assignments. It’s frightening...

In A Historical Atlas of Israel (Rosen Publishing Group, 2003), Amy Romano does mention the 1947 UN partition resolution but editorializes: “Although the Jews accepted the decree, they had no intention of honoring it.”...

In The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Abdo and Daughters, 2004), Cory Gunderson asserts that “the Israeli military killed hundreds of Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon.” In fact, it was Lebanese Christian militiamen who committed the killings in the camps...

Sometimes a single word was enough for me to consider a book inappropriate for our temple library. In an otherwise lovely book for middle-grade students, Welcome to Israel (Chelsea House Publishers, 2002), Meredith Costain and Paul Collins write: “A group of Jews known as Zionists wanted Palestine to become a state where only Jews could live.” The use of the word “only” presents an entirely false and sinister picture of Israel’s founders...

Aside from factual errors, something else is afoot in books on the Arab-Israeli conflict: the acceptance of creeping historical revisionism promulgated by Palestinian media sources. The most common untruths are the assertions that the Palestinian Arabs are the inheritors of the ancient Canaanites (or the Philistines) and that Jews and Arabs (now reborn as “Canaanites”) have been at war with each other for millennia--both fictions seeking to show that Arab ties to the land are deeper than those of the Jews...

Many books put forth a sinister image of Israel. Israel’s former Prime Minister Menachem Begin is frequently labeled a “terrorist,” while Yassir Arafat is described as “moderate” or “mild-mannered.” Photographs depict Israelis as gun-toting soldiers and Palestinians as hard-working farmers or fearful-looking women and children. The photo caption in “I Remember Palestine” by Anita Ganeri is typical: “Palestinians demonstrate for the right to rule themselves in the Occupied Territories, free from the daily restrictions imposed by Israeli soldiers, barricades, and barbed wire fences.” The caption fails to explain that barricades are measures to protect Israelis from Palestinian terrorist attacks...

Sometimes it happens unintentionally. With rare exceptions, these books are not written by scholars or historians, but by writers who are not necessarily experts in their published area...

COMIC BOOK DEPICTION OF HOLOCAUST UPSETS JEWS

“Comic book depiction of Holocaust upsets Jews” (By Roger Boyes, Times of London, June 21, 2005)

Jewish leaders in Germany are deeply upset by attempts to use comic strips to depict the horrors of Auschwitz. Two new comic books confront young Germans with the most graphic accounts ever of their country’s Nazi past. “You think it’s just going to be another story,” said Andreas Munch, 11, “and then, pow!” German officers are shown screaming at prisoners as they pile up corpses retrieved from the gas chambers. “All this has to be converted into cinders and ashes by the evening!” says the speech bubble in the story Auschwitz by the French artist Pascal Croci.

A second comic book, Yossel, by the American artist Joe Kubert, shows a boy being electrocuted as he tries to escape beneath the wires of a concentration camp fence. No concession is made to the sensibilities of the young readers; the dead bodies are portrayed as graphically as if they were the fictional victims of Batman or some other superhero...

The fear in the Jewish community is that comic books could end up as collectors’ items for far-right activists. Crude anti-Semitic comics already circulate in the neo- Nazi underground in Germany and Italy. Camp commanders depicted as monsters in the comic strips are perversely often attractive to teenagers with ultra-nationalist sympathies...

FULL ARTICLES

LIES IN THE LIBRARY

Lies in the Library

Libraries have become the latest battleground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Israelies are getting bibliographically battered.
By Andrea Rapp
“Reform Judaism” magazine
Summer 2005 edition

www.reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1038&pge_prg_id=5213&pge_id=1001

Here are a few examples of the falsehoods and errors I found:

In The Six-Day War by Matthew Broyles (2004), one of The Rosen Publishing Group’s new series of books on the Middle East wars, Broyles states that the 1917 Balfour Declaration proposed to divide Palestine between Jews and Arabs and make Jerusalem an international city. Actually, these proposals were not in the Balfour Declaration, but in the UN partition resolution of twenty years later; the Balfour Declaration declared that the British government favors “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Broyles goes on to say that the Jews “boldly” declared their state in May of 1948, then “war began.” The author makes no mention of the UN partition resolution; instead, he writes, “the home of the Palestinians was now the home of the Jews,” and so the homeless Palestinians fled. Here, as in many other books, the entire Arab-Israeli conflict is portrayed as one long frustrated Palestinian attempt to achieve statehood, rather than as Arab resistance to the State of Israel.

In Virginia Brackett’s biography, Menachem Begin (Chelsea House, 2003), Brackett relates how the Arab-Israeli conflict came before the UN in 1947, but she omits the fact that the UN passed a partition resolution calling for a Jewish and an Arab state, which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected. By her account, the sequence was as follows: In April of 1948, Jews killed Arabs at Deir Yassin, Arabs fled the land, David Ben Gurion declared the new State of Israel in May, and the British departed immediately. Thus was the State of Israel born.

In Tracey Boraas’ generally accurate book Israel (Capstone Press, 2003), she asserts that the 2000 Camp David talks collapsed because “both Israel and the Palestinian Authority insisted on control of East Jerusalem.” In fact, the Israelis agreed to cede control of Arab East Jerusalem to the Palestinian side. Since the Palestinian delegation walked out of Camp David without presenting a counterproposal, it is impossible to pin the collapse of the talks on any one issue.

Consider these two examples:

In the introduction to I Remember Palestine (Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1995), Anita Ganeri writes that “Palestine is the historical name...A country called Israel is now in this area,” and that “Palestine was taken over by the Babylonians, Greeks, and Romans.” In fact, it was in the 2nd century CE that the Romans, in retribution against the Jews for their revolt against Rome, cynically dubbed the Jewish land “Palestine,” after the Jews’ historic nemesis, the Philistines. The Philistines were an Aegean people, not Arabs. The Babylonians never inhabited “Palestine,” although they did conquer ancient Judah. And “Palestine” did not exist at the time of the Greek conquest in the 4th century BCE.

Donald J. Zeigler’s Israel (Chelsea House, 2003) reports that while modern Israelis trace their roots back to the ancient Israelites, the Palestinians’ “namesakes appeared on the map as residents of Canaan.” Here too we have the Palestinians-as-Philistines. A full-page illustration of David brandishing the severed head of the Philistine Goliath appears to demonstrate the supposed three-thousand-year old conflict between Jews and Arabs.

Many books put forth a sinister image of Israel. Israel’s former Prime Minister Menachem Begin is frequently labeled a “terrorist,” while Yassir Arafat is described as “moderate” or “mild-mannered.” Photographs depict Israelis as gun-toting soldiers and Palestinians as hard-working farmers or fearful-looking women and children. The photo caption in I Remember Palestine by Anita Ganeri is typical: “Palestinians demonstrate for the right to rule themselves in the Occupied Territories, free from the daily restrictions imposed by Israeli soldiers, barricades, and barbed wire fences.” The caption fails to explain that barricades are measures to protect Israelis from Palestinian terrorist attacks.

This reluctance to identify Israelis as victims is evident even in Murder at the 1972 Olympics in Munich by Liz Sonneborn (Rosen, 2003). One of the killers is said to have felt proud that for the first time his life had meaning. Sonneborn “explains” that at the birth of Israel, Israeli soldiers had forced hundreds of thousands of Arabs into camps, living in tin huts that did little to protect them from scorching heat and harsh winds, and this led them to vow to “liberate” Palestine.

How It Happens

How can reputable American publishers routinely release children’s books replete with factual and insidious errors?

Sometimes it happens unintentionally. With rare exceptions, these books are not written by scholars or historians, but by writers who are not necessarily experts in their published area. Publishers commission writers to compose one or more titles for their nonfiction “series,” such as a series on holidays, on zoo animals, or on nations of the world. A single author might be called upon to write one book on Mother’s Day customs for the holiday series, a second book on polar bears for the zoo animals series, and a third on the Arab-Israeli conflict for a world history series. Indeed, in 2002 Boraas wrote books on Australia, Columbia, Sweden, England, Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Sam Houston in addition to her book on Israel. Similarly, in 2003 Sonneborn wrote books on German Americans, the Cherokee, and Miranda v. Arizona.

As some authors are less rigorous than others in their research, publishers sometimes engage academic experts to oversee the content of series books, but this additional step does not guarantee correction of errors and/or bias. Of the twenty-five books on Israel I considered, four cited on their title pages the names of university academic advisers or consultants, yet I rejected three for my library because of major factual errors.

In certain cases, biases in educational materials appear to be intentional. In her examination of high school social studies textbooks for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, New York University professor and Brookings Institution fellow Diane Ravitch found that most of the textbooks she researched were replete with half-truths, distortions, and double standards. When slavery was discussed in a Western context (the enslavement of Africans by the West) it was condemned as evil, but when reported on in the context of non-Western cultures, it was described euphemistically as a path to upward career mobility or as a chance to join a new family. Ravitch also discovered disparities in textbook attitudes towards dictators of fallen and current repressive regimes; authors were quick to criticize Hitler and Stalin, but showed deference to 21st-century tyrannical regimes, such as those in Communist China and present-day Iran. In addition, her review of textbooks reporting on the September 11 attacks yielded not a single account of the history of Islamic fundamentalism or other background information to provide a context for the acts of terror. The forward to her Fordham Institute report notes that textbook readers will scarcely discern that someone had actually organized these attacks. In the textbooks Ravitch examined, as in the books I reviewed, there is a startling lack of exploration as to the causality of current world events. Wars “break out,” peace conferences “fail”--all rather mysteriously, without historical context.

Ravitch concluded that the simplified, sanitized, dumbed-down, poorly written, and often inaccurate material in today’s textbooks reflect a culture that has suffused American textbook publishing. The bias and sensitivity review panels employed by publishers and by state education agencies (i.e. the purchasers of textbooks) issue guidelines for the purpose of ensuring that textbook writers do not inadvertently use “politically unacceptable language” or language that would offend feminists or advocates for conservative religious interests, disability groups, or ethnic activist organizations. Such guidelines mandate the excision of many hundreds of words and concepts that have been deemed “biased” or potentially offensive such as “fireman,” “actress,” “landlord,” “brotherhood,” and “cowboy,” and publishers willingly submit to this censorship. Ravitch did not say whether Israel’s enemies have won a slot on the not-to-be offended list, but it is clear from the books I have seen that Israel has no such favored spot in the world of educational publishing.

The American Textbook Council (ATC), an independent research organization which examines textbooks and seeks to promote civic education, came to conclusions similar to those of Ravitch. Its 2003 report, “Islam and the Textbooks,” compared history textbooks’ treatment of Islamic history and culture with the scholarly writings of historians such as Bernard Lewis and concluded that world history texts mislead students about the nature of important Muslim concepts and issues such as jihad, sharia (Muslim law), slavery, and the role of women. The textbooks, they discovered, did not inform students of the traditional meaning of jihad (an obligation to bring the world under Islamic law) or that, according to sharia, the state is the agent of the Muslim faith. Consequently, from these books, students would not be able to discern the large gap separating American jurisprudence from the system of Islamic law. A California-based advocacy group called The Council on Islamic Education, self-proclaimed to act as Islam’s liaison to the nation’s public schools, has worked with publishers “to ensure that they meet a certain standard of sensitivity,” the ATC reports. As textbook editors are doing the Council’s bidding, “history textbooks accommodate Islam on terms that Islamists demand.”

After the authors, consultants, and publishers come the final “schoolbook gatekeepers”--the reviewers in library journals. Librarians rely on reviews published in their professional journals as a basis for acquisitions. Reviewers, however, may be lacking in expertise in the area of review or may have their own biases. School Library Journal (SLJ), a very popular selection source for children’s materials, found Abdo’s series on World in Conflict, which includes Gunderson’s books, to be “politically balanced” in presenting the historical and political factors “contributing to the separate identities of Israel and Palestine.” Never mind that there is no nation of Palestine. SLJ also recommended Cath Senker’s new book, The Arab-Israeli Conflict, describing it as “nonjudgmental.” In contrast, the Association of Jewish Libraries’ children’s books reviewer Linda Silver found that the book “reflects the anti-Israeli sentiment that is prevalent in Europe [where this book was originally published]...The format is attractive until one notices the preponderance of armed and menacing Israeli soldiers juxtaposed with poor, peaceful looking Palestinian Arabs, mostly old people or children.... The text’s point of view is entirely pro-Palestinian as well. On the very first page, it is stated that ’Israel is an enemy of the Arab states. Israel was established through war. ’ “Silver has offered to write a column for School Library Journal that would discuss the reviewing of books on Israel. At the time of this writing, SLJ’s editors have not responded.

Changing the Status Quo

What can be done to change this culture of censorship and bias?

First, we need to become better informed. Good sources include Diane Ravitch’s book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); the American Textbook Council’s report on “Islam in the Textbooks,” accessible at www.historytextbooks.org; and websites such as www.memri.org, which posts translations from the Middle East media outlets, and www.pmw.org.il, the Palestinian Media Watch, not to be confused with the pro-Palestinian Palestine Media Watch.

Second, we need to become involved with organizations that are committed to correcting anti-Israel bias in library books and other media--organizations such as CAMERA and the recently established Librarians for Fairness (www.librariansforfairness.org).

Third, we as a community need to call for transparency in the educational publishing business. Book publishers should publicly release their sensitivity guidelines, along with the names and credentials of the members of their bias and sensitivity review panels. Diane Ravitch believes that “many things that are done surreptitiously cannot withstand the light of day.”

Bernard Lewis warns that we live in times when “great efforts are being made to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda.” We can see this process at work in our children’s library books and textbooks about Israel and the Middle East, and it’s time we act to stop it.

(Andrea Rapp is temple librarian at the Isaac M. Wise Temple in Cincinnati, Ohio. A Judaica librarian for more than twenty years, she holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in History from Northwestern University and a Master’s in Library Science from the University of Minnesota.)

COMIC BOOK DEPICTION OF HOLOCAUST UPSETS JEWS

Comic book depiction of Holocaust upsets Jews
By Roger Boyes in Berlin
Times of London
June 21, 2005

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1662391,00.html

Jewish leaders in Germany are deeply upset by attempts to use comic strips to depict the horrors of Auschwitz.

Two new comic books confront young Germans with the most graphic accounts ever of their country’s Nazi past. “You think it’s just going to be another story,” said Andreas Munch, 11, “and then, pow!” German officers are shown screaming at prisoners as they pile up corpses retrieved from the gas chambers. “All this has to be converted into cinders and ashes by the evening!” says the speech bubble in the story Auschwitz by the French artist Pascal Croci.

The cartoon versions of the Holocaust, published this week, are intended to introduce younger Germans to the tragic fate of Jews. The Holocaust is taught at all German schools and visits to a concentration camp are compulsory for older children, but pupils complain that the subject is too drily and too cautiously presented.

Now Ehapa, a German firm that also publishes Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, has translated the French and American works to make the subject more accessible.

The project has sparked a nervous, sometimes angry response. “A comic strip is not the appropriate form,” said Ezra Cohn, 64, of the Jewish community in Dusseldorf. “The subject is too serious to portray in this way.”

Paul Spiegel, 67, chairman of the German Jewish community, said: “We will have to watch very carefully indeed whether this kind of treatment really does address the people it is aimed for.”

The first attempt to break the Holocaust comic strip taboo, Maus by Art Spiegelman, tried to get round this problem by drawing Jews as mice, Poles as pigs and Nazis as cats. In the US, Spiegelman won a Pulitzer prize, but in Germany, until the mid-1990s, police were still confiscating posters displaying Spiegelman’s Jewish mouse hero over the Nazi swastika symbol.

Croci’s book comes the closest to the conventional comic book form, and as such has attracted the sharpest criticism. “Can you really show the savagery of the Holocaust as a comic?” asked the newspaper Bild. Croci’s argument is that Auschwitz has to be placed in the framework of current politics and be described in a form that leaves little scope for the imagination: it is time, he believes, to be direct with the younger generation.

“Growing up, I was repeatedly told, you are too young to understand,” said Croci. The turning point arrived at a Paris exhibition about the deportation of the Jews.

“An old woman approached me and I saw that she had a number tattooed on her arm - she was my first eyewitness.”

Croci interviewed more than 15 survivors. His story is told through the eyes of the fictional Kazik and Cessia and he complicates the storytelling by blending in scenes from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. The point is to show that the memory of the Holocaust has become a blend of images, some real, some an imaginative leap.

The test of fire of both books will come this week. If they become bestsellers, they could be introduced into schools. One German state, Thuringia, already uses Art Spiegelman comics to teach history.

Resend & update: Israeli leftists and centrists speak out against Gaza disengagement

June 21, 2005

Israeli leftists and centrists speak out against Gaza disengagement plan

June 20, 2005

[Note by Tom Gross]

LEFTISTS AGAINST THE GAZA WITHDRAWAL

The western media’s coverage of Israel’s planned withdrawal from Gaza is demonstrating, once again, how prejudicial and slanted much of the reporting from the Middle East is. Viewers and readers in north America, Europe and elsewhere have been left with the impression that the only people opposing withdrawal from Gaza (which is scheduled to begin on August 15, 2005) fit the stereotypical mold of an orthodox religious settler which the media have created for themselves over many years.

These prejudices in turn have led many in the media to unfairly represent the arguments as to why a majority of Israelis now tell pollsters they oppose the disengagement, and why even those of us who are on balance for it have grave reservations about it.

THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE BBC IN A WORLD OF THEIR OWN

For example, new New York Times correspondent Christine Hauser yesterday (Sunday) wrote about the dilemmas of disengagement by interviewing Michael Frier “a 24-year old religious student.” In her article, she observed that “Some of the men carry M-16’s or handguns.” The version of the article on the New York Times website was accompanied by a picture of a man with a skullcap and an M-16.

BBC online has been running a three-part series in which its correspondent Richard Miron has been spending a week in Jewish settlements in Gaza. He has been meeting with “some of the most hard-line members of the settler movement.” In the first of these dispatches Miron calls the second day a “well-armed family occasion” and goes on to say that “Some of the men carry guns; pistols sitting snugly in their belts or automatic rifles slung loosely over their backs.”

FORMER LABOR CABINET MINISTERS, ARMY CHIEFS AND MOSSAD HEADS SPEAK OUT

Due to this obsession by the western media to give the impression that the only people expressing opposition to disengagement are the most right wing and religious of settlers, many important voices in Israeli society have been completely shut out of the international media coverage.

To balance this coverage, I attach below remarks by some important voices on the Israeli left and center that are against the disengagement. Their opposition to the plan stems from their fear that it will bring on a new wave of violence and that a withdrawal from Gaza will not guarantee long-term stability or peace.

There is a fuller version of these quotes below, but in summary:

Former Labor Party Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, has warned of “catastrophe” and says the withdrawal plan “is liable to bring a renewal of violence [that] is liable to bring down the moderate Palestinian leadership... A retreat from Gaza with nothing in return and with no agreement will strengthen Hamas.”

Former Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, who is on the left-wing of the Labor Party, says: “A unilateral retreat perpetuates Israel’s image as a country that runs away under pressure... In Fatah and Hamas, they will assume that they must prepare for their third intifada – this time in [Judea and Samaria]... If we continue these unilateral steps, we will find ourselves establishing an enemy Palestinian state.”

Former General Security Service chief Ami Ayalon says: “The captain of the disengagement can be compared to the captain of a ship who takes it from port to a very stormy sea, without knowing at all where he wants to lead it... There is a high chance that shortly after the disengagement, the violence will be renewed. 2006 is liable to be a year of another round of violence.”

Ayalon added that the retreat from the northern Gaza communities – Dugit, Elei Sinai and Nisanit – is a “grave error. It has no demographic or security justification, and the price that it is liable to exact from us is not justified.”

Former Mossad head Ephraim Halevy says: “After the disengagement, Israel will face a diplomatic crisis the likes of which we have not known for years.”

Former Mossad head Shabtai Shavit says: “Immediately after the disengagement, Israel will find itself on a crash path with the United States.”

Others who have expressed strong concern about disengagement including former Air Force Commander Gen. Eitan Ben-Eliyahu, former IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Uzi Dayan, and former IDF Chief of Intelligence Gen. Shlomo Gazit.

(Some of the above-named people are subscribers to this email list.)

I also attach below an article from yesterday’s New York Times (reprinted in today’s International Herald Tribune) by Israeli Housing Minister Isaac Herzog, explaining why he supports disengagement but why it is much more painful and difficult than many people in Europe and America might realize. (The article again, however, gives the impression that only extreme rightists oppose the disengagement.)

BUILDING A SEA BARRIER

To illustrate how Israel is attempting to safeguard its security following the Gaza withdrawal, I also attach below an article from the Jerusalem Post reporting that the Israel navy has started building an underwater barrier leading out to sea from the north Gaza shore.

In the past there have been many attempted terror attacks on Israel from the sea. (The last major attempted attack by sea was last November.)

A highly vigilant Israeli radar and surveillance outposts have foiled most of them, but occasionally attackers have got through. For example, in 1979, the Palestinian Liberation Front (part of the PLO) murdered three Israeli civilians by infiltrating Israeli waters from Lebanon and breaking into an apartment in the northern Israel town of Nahariya.

FEMALE SUICIDE BOMBER PLANNED TO BLOW UP HOSPITAL TODAY

The third article below reports on the capture this morning of a 21-year-old female Palestinian suicide bomber at the Erez crossing. She said she planned to blow up a hospital in southern Israel.

This follows the arrest of a 15-year-old Palestinian boy at the Hawara checkpoint on Sunday. He was carrying five pipe bombs hidden in tubes of silicone alongside nails and bolts.

In the last two days Palestinian terrorists have murdered two Israelis. Sergeant Avi Karouchi was killed in Gaza yesterday and this morning Yevgeny Rider was killed in an ambush near Tulkarm as he drove from his home.

Even though a large contingent of additional foreign media is in the region accompanying Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, virtually none have mentioned these Israeli deaths in their reports.

It is not the first time terrorists have abused medical requests to enter Israel. In one recent thwarted attack, a terrorist pretended to have cancer to gain entry to an Israeli hospital.

ANOTHER MOSLEM DEPUTY ISRAELI MINISTER

It was announced today that Member of Knesset Majalli Whbee has been asked to serve as Deputy Education Minister. Majalli Whbee is an Israeli Moslem Druze and is another example of how virtually anyone can succeed in Israeli society should they try. No doubt those in the West who are obsessed with the idea of an “apartheid Israel” are not interested in this.

-- Tom Gross

FULL ARTICLES

ISRAELI LEFTISTS AGAINST DISENGAGEMENT

[This selection of quotes from some Israelis on the political left who have voiced concern about disengagement was assembled by a subscriber to this list who works at Israel National News.]

***

Former Labor Party Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, currently not a Knesset Member but leader of the left-wing Yahad/Meretz Party:

“If the disengagement does not lead to an immediate permanent status arrangement, it will bring a catastrophe upon both Israelis and Palestinians... It is liable to bring a renewal of violence [that] is liable to bring down the moderate Palestinian leadership...

“There is a concrete danger that following the disengagement, the violence will greatly increase in [Judea and Samaria] in order to achieve the same thing [i.e., withdrawal] as was achieved in Gaza... A retreat from Gaza with nothing in return and with no agreement will strengthen Hamas.”

***

Former Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, who is on the left-wing of the Labor Party:

“A unilateral retreat perpetuates Israel’s image as a country that runs away under pressure... In Fatah and Hamas, they will assume that they must prepare for their third intifada - this time in [Judea and Samaria / the West Bank]... If we continue these unilateral steps, we will find ourselves establishing an enemy Palestinian state.”

***

Former General Security Service chief Ami Ayalon:

“The captain of the disengagement can be compared to the captain of a ship who takes it from port to a very stormy sea, without knowing at all where he wants to lead it. And possibly even worse: He knows where he wants to lead it, but is hiding the information from his crew...”

“Retreat without getting anything in return is liable to be interpreted by some of the Palestinians as surrender. The plan is likely to strengthen extremist forces in the Palestinians society... There is a high chance that shortly after the disengagement, the violence will be renewed. 2006 is liable to be a year of another round of violence.”

Ayalon said that the retreat from the northern Gaza communities - Dugit, Elei Sinai and Nisanit - is a “grave error. It has no demographic or security justification, and the price that it is liable to exact from us is not justified.”

***

Former Air Force Commander Gen. Eitan Ben-Eliyahu:

“There is no chance that the disengagement will guarantee long-term stability. The plan as it stands can only lead to a renewal of terrorism... If there is no quick progress from the disengagement to a comprehensive retreat, [this will lead to] the one-state solution - bringing to an end of the Zionist dream, and the Jewish State will be lost.”

***

Former IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Uzi Dayan:

“Retreat from Nisanit, Dugit and Elei Sinai is a double mistake: Security-wise, it unnecessarily brings the Kassam rocket threat closer to Ashkelon, and diplomatically, it creates a dangerous precedent of unilateral withdrawal to the 1967 lines, which strengthens the PA demands to return to the June 4, 1967 lines.”

***

Former IDF Chief of Intelligence Gen. Shlomo Gazit:

“It is reasonable to assume that within a short time, we will face mortar shelling and Kassams from [Samaria and Judea]. These rockets and shells will hit Kfar Saba and maybe even reach Netanya.”

***

Former Mossad head Ephraim Halevy:

“After the disengagement, Israel will face a diplomatic crisis the likes of which we have not known for years.”

***

Former Mossad head Shabtai Shavit:

“The disengagement plan sabotages itself, creating a situation of instability. The plan does not create the necessary minimum of balance that would enable long-term coexistence... Immediately after the disengagement, Israel will find itself on a crash path with the United States.”

***

In addition to these statements of serious concern about the Gaza/Northern Samaria Evacuation Plan, it is also troubling to learn that Jibril Rajoub, Palestinian Authority Security Chief and former head of its secret police, said that while the present “period of calm” would remain in effect at least until Israel withdraws from Gaza, after this withdrawal “We will have to re-evaluate the situation...the period of quiet will not last longer than the scheduled withdrawal from Gaza unless it is actively renewed by the various organizations.”

MOVING FORWARD BY FALLING BACK

Moving forward by falling back
By Isaac Herzog
The New York Times
June 20, 2005

I recently received a letter from a former high school teacher of mine in Tel Aviv. He was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by a British Army unit in which my father served. Now, he was criticizing me for working on the government’s plan to withdraw from 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank. “How dare you pull Jews out of their homes?” he wrote.

“This is just like what the Nazis did to us!”

Unfortunately, I am no longer surprised when a Jew compares me and other Israeli officials to Nazis. It has become part of the rhetoric of those who oppose withdrawal, including the tiny minority who threaten violent resistance.

But my old teacher was not threatening me; he was crying out as if in the middle of a nightmare. My father, Chaim Herzog, eventually became president of Israel, and my teacher could not understand how his liberator’s son could displace other Jews.

Seen from America and Europe, the evacuation of some 8,000 Jews from their homes may seem simple. I have heard it compared to moving residents to make room for a railroad or highway. But, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has no doubt seen during her Middle East visit, what is happening here is a deeper psychological drama.

It brings out fears that are never far from the surface; memories of the displacement and murder of innocent Jews not only during the Holocaust but also in Islamic countries after Israel’s founding. And memories of wars Israel did not start, and of terrorist attacks that we fear will never stop.

What to do with Jewish settlers’ homes in the Gaza Strip after withdrawal, as well as factories and greenhouses, has occupied Israelis for some time. Those in favor of destroying the houses did not want to see Hamas gunmen making victory signs for CNN and Al Jazeera as they walked triumphantly into buildings left behind by Jews.

Others, myself included, have favored leaving everything except synagogues and graveyards untouched, thinking that destroying the houses would send a message of destruction rather than peace; we feared it might also be costly and could endanger Israeli soldiers’ lives.

But every member of the government understands the painful symbolism involved in displacing Jews, and also the public’s concern that Gaza will turn into Hamastan, a region controlled by terrorists.

Yet despite their memories and fears, most Israelis back the plan to withdraw. They know that Israel must take risks like this to set secure national borders, to ensure the future of a Jewish democratic state. They are reassured because Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the founder of the settlement movement, thinks the withdrawal is necessary. And they are ready to give the Palestinians’ prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, a chance to show he can be a partner for peace.

Another promising sign is that while the settlers’ leaders are telling their followers not to cooperate with the government, every day more and more settlers are coming to my ministry to find out how we can help them find new homes and rebuild their lives.

I hope that our Palestinian neighbors understand what we are going through. They should realize that this withdrawal is not a sign of weakness (as Hamas wants them to believe) but of strength and self-confidence. Israel clearly has other ways to answer terrorism - as shown by our forceful response to the intifada - but we have no other way to end the occupation except to separate from the Palestinians.

This withdrawal should be the first step toward a broader, negotiated two-state solution. To get there, the Palestinian leaders must ensure that terrorists do not disrupt the withdrawal and do not take over the land Israel leaves behind.

The Palestinians should also understand the feelings of Israelis like my high school teacher. Abbas can help now by telling his people, loudly and clearly, that Israel’s withdrawal will not represent a victory for armed struggle; it will be a victory for the silent majorities on both sides who don’t want their grandchildren to have the kinds of traumatic memories that haunt Israelis and Palestinians today.

(Isaac Herzog is Israel’s minister of construction and housing.)

ISRAEL TO BUILD TERROR BARRIER IN THE SEA

Navy builds terror barrier off Gaza
By Arieh O’Sullivan
The Jerusalem Post
June 17, 2005

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1118888337362

In a move designed to better isolate Israel from potential terrorist infiltration from the Gaza Strip, the navy has started building an underwater barrier leading out to sea from the north Gaza shore.

The barrier, which essentially extends the northern security road separating Gaza from Israel into the Mediterranean, is primarily aimed at thwarting Palestinian terrorists swimming up to the Israeli coast. It consists in its first 150 meters of cement pilings burrowed into the sandy bottom. Beyond that, the barrier will extend for a further 800 meters, in the form of a 1.8-meter-deep fence floating beneath the surface.

It is understood that one of the navy’s perceived imperatives for the new barrier is the loss of surveillance systems at the Tel Ridan base on the beach south of Gaza City when the IDF pulls out of Gaza this summer. Still, the barrier is not expected to be completed before August 15, when disengagement is set to begin.

It is not yet clear whether the navy intends to demarcate the territorial waters with buoys, as it did with Lebanon. Off the coast of Rosh Hanikra, there are seven linked buoys reaching out 4,200 meters from the coast.

In similar moves to better seal off Gaza, the Navy is also refurbishing its observation and radar station at the Erez border crossing, and is adding an antenna tower there similar to the 85-meter structure at its base in Rosh Hanikra.

Palestinian terrorists have made attempts to swim to the Israeli coast in the past, and have been foiled mainly because they were spotted by radar and surveillance outposts onshore in the Gaza area. The new barrier is intended to foil potential efforts in which swimmers go beyond such surveillance capacities.

The barrier would also back up naval patrols intercepting small vessels carrying terrorists.

Last November, a heavily armed Palestinian terrorist dressed in a wetsuit tried to swim in from the sea to attack a Jewish settlement in the northern Gaza Strip. Navy surveillance ground forces spotted him and shot him dead 400 meters from the beach.

He had on him a bomb, an AK-47, four grenades, five ammunition clips, a knife and a rubber dinghy. In essence, it is understood, the sea barrier represents an extension of the Gaza security fence that has proven highly effective in preventing suicide bombers infiltrating into Israel.

FEMALE SUICIDE BOMBER PLANNED TO BLOW UP HOSPITAL

Female bomber nabbed: Palestinian woman tells interrogators she
intended to blow up at southern hospital
By Hanan Greenberg
By Ynetnews
June 20, 2005

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3101498,00.html

Major attack thwarted: A 21-year-old would-be suicide bomber was detained by security forces at Gaza’s Erez crossing Monday morning.

Gaza resident Wafa Samir Ibraim Bas, 21 was carrying more than 10 kilograms (more than 22 pounds) of explosives and was picked up thanks to electronic anti-terror means utilized at the crossing.

Army officials said the woman surrendered only after attempting to detonate the charge at the crossing itself.

The woman was scheduled to arrive at Soroka hospital in the Southern town of Be’er Sheva for some tests Monday, and was hoping to take advantage of the medical appointment to carry out a suicide attack.

During her interrogation, the would-be bomber said she was sent by the Fatah’s al-Aqsa Brigades. The group sought to utilize the humanitarian permits issued to the woman and instructed her to carry out the attack at the hospital, she said.

The Erez crossing was closed Friday, and again Monday, as a result of terror warnings. Notably, security authorities received a warning regarding the planned attack several days ago, prompting the crossing’s closure on several occasions.

Sappers later blew up the explosives in a controlled detonation and authorities later reopened the crossing.

IDF official Avi Levy told Ynet that despite the incident, the army is “making a distinction between terror groups who want to carry attacks and Palestinian civilians who want to make a living.”

Although women generally refrained from taking part in terror attacks at first, their role has been increasing over time. In 2004, more then 50 women were involved in carrying out attacks.

Meanwhile, security forces have foiled 45 terror plots involving women during the more than four years of the intifada, while eight attacks were carried out.

A Shin Bet report prepared to summarize four years of fighting noted terror groups are exploiting the inherent advantages in using women to perpetrate terror attacks.

A tale of two museums: (1) Arafat’s belongings (2) Arabs respecting the Holocaust

June 16, 2005

[Note by Tom Gross]

TWO CONTRASTING MUSEUMS

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mohammed Abbas has announced that he will create a museum for the personal belongings of Yasser Arafat (without, no doubt, the many luxurious items that are in his widow’s apartment in the Champs Elysees).

In sharp contrast, Khaled Kasab Mahameed, a Moslem from Nazareth, has launched the first ever Arab museum dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust.

Effectively the Palestinian Authority is creating a shrine to the greatest murderer of Jews of the last half-century, whilst Mahameed, an Israeli-Arab, is demonstrating the importance of understanding the history of his Jewish neighbors. The day the Palestinian Authority incorporates accurate and truthful Holocaust education into its school curriculum is the day when peace may just be in sight.

GUANTANAMO 2

I also attach a piece from the Jerusalem Post regarding the claims by Palestinian detainees at Megiddo prison (north-east of Tel Aviv) alleging “Koran abuse.” The timing of these sudden accusations is unlikely to be a coincidence, and may reflect Palestinian jealously that recently their cause has not monopolized international media attention, and has been supplanted by stories – especially in the Muslim media – about alleged mishandling of the Koran at American-run detention facilities. By holding mass demonstrations last week in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas were not only bringing to the attention of the foreign media their (almost certainly unfounded) claims about Israeli prison abuse of the Koran, but hoping to influence opinion within the Muslim world and to ensure that the Palestinian agenda remains at the heart of it.

HOW MANY KORANS HAVE BEEN DESTROYED IN SHIITE BOMBINGS IN IRAQ?

Finally I attach an article by Max Boot from the LA Times titled “Who’s really abusing the Koran?” Although it is primarily focused on the US and its role in “Guantanamo 1” it is fair to say many of his arguments also apply to Israel and the scandal regarding its supposed mistreatment of Korans.

I attach four articles – from Berlin, Toronto, Jerusalem and Los Angeles – with summaries first for those who don’t have time to read them in full.

-- Tom Gross

SUMMARIES

MUSEUM PLANNED FOR ARAFAT’S PERSONAL BELONGINGS

“Museum planned for late PA leader Arafat’s personal belongings” (By DPA, the German Press Agency, as carried in Ha’aretz, June 6, 2005)

The Palestinian Authority is intending to collect late leader Yasser Arafat’s personal possessions for a museum, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said Sunday. According to his decree, a special committee will be formed to gather Arafat’s personal belongings and objects from his daily life, prior to his death in November. The decree said that relevant artifacts would be housed and displayed in a special museum dedicated to the man who led the Palestinian Liberation Organization for more than 30 years...

ARAB LAWYER PAYS TRIBUTE TO JEWISH TRAUMA

“Arab lawyer pays tribute to Jewish trauma” (By Mitch Potter, Toronto Star, June 4, 2005)

Most Palestinians think Khaled Kasab Mahameed has lost his mind. Two months ago, the Muslim lawyer from the biblical town of Nazareth took it upon himself to do what no Arab has ever before dared — he launched a museum dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust…

But as symbols go, Mahameed’s efforts have been hailed as a watershed moment in Israeli-Arab relations. In a conflict that trades on mutual exclusion, perceptions of hatred and the denial of pain other than one’s own, he appears to have risen above it all…

“What I say to Arabs is that the Jewish people are carrying the pain of 60 nuclear bombs. That is what they feel,” Mahameed told the Toronto Star.

“The Palestinian people just don’t understand this. For them, the Holocaust is a taboo... What I’m trying to do is change the mentality. We need to study it, to understand it, to accept it. Because our conflict is not about land... If not for the Holocaust, we could live together in peace.”

Not surprisingly, Mahameed has been shunned for his efforts by the Palestinian press, which remains so deeply suspicious it has given him no ink whatsoever. At best, he is viewed as a misguided soul; at worst, as a paid Israeli quisling determined to trample his own people’s claim to international sympathy.

... As an Arab student leader at Hebrew University in the early 1980s, he shocked his Israeli tutors by asking to study the Holocaust.

... Earlier this year he produced a pamphlet in Arabic about the Holocaust, intended for Palestinian eyes. “And when my 10-year-old son Jawdat read it, he said ‘Father, you must make something with this,’” Mahameed said.

“For me, that was the motivation. I don’t want my children to suffer another 50 years.” He began planning his museum... “It is so horrible. We can’t compare our nakba to this. When Palestinians describe the nakba as a Holocaust, I say to them, ‘Okay, if that is a Holocaust, then what do you call what Hitler did to the Jews in World War II?’ There is no comparison.”

Conversely, Mahameed contends Israel’s early leaders made a tragic mistake in maintaining silence on issues relating to the Holocaust. With more than 200,000 Holocaust survivors and their direct descendants in the country, he argues, Israeli society remains so traumatized it reflexively exaggerates the barriers to peace with its Arab neighbours as a defence mechanism...

“GUANTANAMO 2” ANGERS ISRAELI-ARABS

“‘Guantanamo 2’ angers Israeli-Arabs” (Yaakov Katz, The Jerusalem Post, June 7, 2005)

Incensed Palestinian security detainees from Megiddo prison announced plans to begin a hunger strike Wednesday morning, Israel Radio reported. The detainees had accused Prisons Service guards of ripping up and defiling three Korans during a routine search of their cells.

Calling the incident “Guantanamo 2” in reference to the recent US Defense Department acknowledgment that guards at Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba defiled several Korans, Sheikh Kamel Hatib, deputy head of the Islamic Movement’s northern branch, told The Jerusalem Post the Muslim world would react harshly to the desecration...

WHO’S REALLY ABUSING THE KORAN?

“Who’s Really Abusing the Koran?” (By Max Boot, Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2005)

All the headlines about “Abuse of the Koran at Gitmo” are absolutely accurate. Brig. Gen. Jay Hood’s internal investigation has uncovered some shocking incidents. On at least six occasions, Korans were ripped up. They were urinated on three times, and attempts were made to flush them down the toilet at least three other times.

Why aren’t millions of Muslims rioting in response to these defilements? Because the perpetrators were prisoners, not guards...

Too bad Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia, far from handing out Bibles at government expense, make it a crime to possess that holy book. Too bad Islamic fanatics have no compunction about blowing up churches and synagogues and slaughtering Christians and Jews. Too bad the murderous intolerance of Sunni terrorists extends to Shiite “idolaters” as well.

All the bombings of Shiites in Iraq have resulted not only in the deaths of thousands of Muslims but also, I imagine, the destruction of quite a few Korans.

It would be nice if the global Islamic community, the news media and assorted human rights agitators could display the same level of outrage about the real atrocities perpetrated by our enemies as they do about the imaginary horrors of the American Gulag...