FULL ARTICLES

BAHRAIN ENDS BAN ON ISRAELI GOODS

Bahrain Ends Ban On Israeli Goods
The Associated Press
September 24, 2005

Bahrain has repealed its economic boycott of Israel to comply with its free trade agreement with the United States, the Gulf state’s foreign minister was quoted as saying Friday.

The move makes Bahrain the first of the six Arab states of the Gulf to abolish its trade boycott of Israel, although others, such as Qatar and Oman, have taken limited steps in that direction.

The repeal coincides with signs of a thaw in relations between Israel and Arab and Muslim states following its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Earlier this month, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf met Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in New York, and the Israeli foreign minister held talks with his Qatari and Tunisian counterparts on the margins of the U.N. summit there.

Only three Arab states have full diplomatic relations with Israel at present: Egypt, Jordan and Mauritania.

“Bahrain took the decision to end the boycott of Israeli goods because this is one of the conditions of the free trade agreement” with the U.S., Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheik Mohammed bin Mubarak Al Khalifa, told the independent Arabic newspaper, Alwasat, in an interview in New York.

The minister did not say when the boycott was repealed. Foreign Ministry officials could not be reached Friday, the Muslim weekend in the island kingdom.

Bahrain, which hosts the base of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet, signed the free trade deal with the U.S. last year, becoming the first Gulf state to do so. Its parliament and king have endorsed the agreement, but it has not yet been ratified by the U.S. Congress.

The agreement calls for trade relations with all members of the World Trade Organization, which includes Israel.

Alwasat asked the foreign minister if Bahrain would forge diplomatic ties with Israel.

“That will depend on the general consensus of the Arab League,” Sheik Mohammed was quoted as replying. The League’s peace plan offers Israel full diplomatic relations in exchange for its withdrawal from all territories captured in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, the establishment of a Palestinian state and a solution for Palestinian refugees.

The practical effects of the minister’s statement remain to be seen. Up to now, Bahrain has refused to admit Israeli goods. A consignment of Israeli-made fuel filters and automotive parts were confiscated and destroyed in 2003.

It is also unclear whether Israeli business executives would be allowed to enter the kingdom. Officially, Israeli passport holders cannot pass through immigration at the island’s airport.

Moreover, there have been many anti-Israeli demonstrations in Bahrain since its political system was liberalized in 2002.

The Arab embargo against Israel goes back to the 1960s when the Arab League declared a boycott of all Israeli companies and products. A blacklist was drawn up that featured Western companies which did business with Israel. However, the boycott was heavily eroded after Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994 signed peace treaties with Israel.

 

ISRAEL DECLARES FRONTIER WITH GAZA AN INTERNATIONAL BORDER

Israel sets international border with Gaza
Reuters
September 21, 2005

Israel declared its frontier with the Gaza Strip an international border on Wednesday, formally setting part of a boundary for the first time with an eventual Palestinian state.

Israeli Interior Minister Ofer Pines-Paz called the measure, which he signed, “a first step to civilianise the passages and to turn them into borders” between Israel and Gaza after Israel completed a military pullout from the territory on September 12.

Sabine Haddad, a ministry spokeswoman, said Pines had turned four crossing points between Gaza and Israel into official border crossings. “For Israel this is now an international border,” he said.

Israelis and foreign nationals will now need a passport to move between Israel and all parts of Gaza, and will fill out border entry forms rather than military documents as they had before, Haddad said.

But she said the few Palestinians allowed into Israel for jobs or medical care would not need a passport to do so, and would still require security permits.

Palestinians, who dispute Israel’s efforts to retain control over Gaza’s key border crossings for now after declaring an end to 38 years of military rule there, dismissed the Israeli measure to set a border as premature.

“I don’t think we can classify it legally as an international border now because Gaza is not free of occupation,” chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said.

“I think international borders will be agreed once we finish permanent status negotiations on borders,” he said.

Palestinians are also unhappy that Israel, citing security needs, is keeping control over Gaza’s sea lanes and air space.

Israel has closed Gaza’s border crossing with Egypt for the next six months while discussions continue for possible international monitoring by a third party. Israel says it wants to prevent militants from smuggling weapons into the strip.

A U.S.-backed “road map” peace plan, endorsed by Israel and the Palestinians, calls for eventual Palestinian statehood in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Some 1.4 million Palestinians live in Gaza and 2.4 million in the West Bank.

Israel says it will resume peace talks only if Palestinians disarm militant groups bent on its destruction. Palestinians accuse Israel of delaying tactics to strengthen its hold on Jewish settlements in the West Bank that Israel wants to keep.

 

PALESTINIANS TAKE CONTROL OF GAZA BORDER

Palestinians Take Control of Gaza Border
By Lara Sukhtian
The Associated Press
September 23, 2005

Palestinians took charge of a border for the first time ever on Friday, allowing thousands to cross between the Gaza Strip and Egypt in a temporary opening of the frontier.

Hours before Palestinians in Gaza began tentatively testing their border authority at the Rafah crossing, Israeli forces pursuing Islamic Jihad militants in the West Bank killed three gunmen.

Israel shut down Rafah, Gaza’s only gateway to the outside world through Egypt, just before it concluded its troop pullout from the coastal strip last week after 38 years of occupation. Israel wants Rafah to remain sealed for months for a technological upgrade and to test the Palestinians’ ability to take control in Gaza.

In the meantime, Palestinians are to use an alternative, Israeli-controlled crossing a few miles away at the junction of the Israeli, Egyptian and Gaza borders. That crossing is to be opened next week though Palestinians object to this option.

Under these circumstances, Israel in effect retains control over Gaza’s borders. But it did not object when the Palestinians earlier this week announced plans to open Rafah for two days starting Friday, for the most part to allow for the passage of people seeking medical treatment, or studying or residing abroad.

Several thousand travelers were at Rafah on Friday morning to take advantage of that window, which is to remain open continuously until early Sunday morning.

Palestinians turned over travel documents to Palestinian border police at the gates of the once heavily guarded crossing, waiting for border officials to call them to board buses that would take them to the Rafah terminal, and from there, to Egypt. Some sat on suitcases napping as border officials called out names from the windows of the shuttle buses. Luggage was passed from hand to hand as the travelers and their bags started moving.

Inside the gate, new X-ray equipment was in place, and plastic still covered the new chairs in the air-conditioned waiting area.

Manal Hatem, 36, arrived at Rafah at 3 a.m. with her 11-month-old baby and a sister-in-law, en route to a religious pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

“This is the first time we cross without the Israelis standing over our heads, and that indeed is a blessing,” Hatem said.

Aeronautical engineer Sufyan Al Ali, 28, an employee of the long-grounded Palestinian Airlines, was on his way to Jordan for a 10-day refresher course. More than two hours after arriving at the crossing, he still hadn’t boarded a bus.

“This place wouldn’t be so chaotic if they gave us more than two days,” he said. “But at least there are no Israelis, and two days are better than nothing, for now.”

Thousands of Palestinians busted through the Gaza-Egypt border last week after the last of the Israeli troops withdrew, and weapons and other contraband were smuggled into Gaza. The frontier was later sealed to stop the chaos, reinforcing Palestinians’ perceptions that they are still occupied by Israel.

Rafah, an internationally recognized border crossing, is key to the economic recovery of Gaza, which was devastated by nearly five years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. Stable border arrangements there would encourage foreign investment in Gaza, and ensure the free flow of people, long cooped up under Israeli travel restrictions.

On Thursday, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz indicated Israel would speed up its plans to reopen the crucial crossing. Israel had originally said the crossing would be closed for six months to allow for new security and customs arrangements.

But Mofaz told military officers he intends to reopen it in January.

From next week, Palestinians will be able to use the new Kerem Shalom facility at the junction of the Israeli, Egyptian and Gaza borders, defense officials said. But Palestinians insist on free access in and out of Gaza through Rafah, with no Israeli presence, and object to the Kerem Shalom option.

Earlier Friday, Israeli forces killed three Palestinian gunmen in a West Bank raid.

Israeli forces went into the village of Ilar near Tulkarem after midnight, and surrounded a building to arrest senior Islamic Jihad militants holed up inside, the military said. Three gunmen fled in two separate directions, and were shot dead after opening fire on Israeli troops who pursued them, the military said.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms the Israeli incursion into Tulkarem, and the assassination of three Palestinians,” Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said.

Despite a cease-fire declared in February that has drastically reduced violence after five years of conflict, Israel continues to target Islamic Jihad cells. Shortly after the truce was declared, Islamic Jihad carried out a suicide bombing attack in Tel Aviv that killed five Israelis.

 

PA POWERLESS TO STOP SICKENING PLUNDER OF GAZA’S GREEN GEMS

Sickening plunder of Gaza’s green gems
By Corky Siemaszko
New York Daily News
September 22, 2005

A week after they descended like locusts on the greenhouses that Jewish settlers nurtured in Gaza, looters continue to pillage what should be a prize asset for a fledgling Palestinian state.

And the Palestinian Authority, which took over Gaza after the Israelis evacuated the territory, appears powerless to stop them.

When a Daily News correspondent visited abandoned Jewish settlements in Gaza, he found brazen vandals dismantling farms that once produced some of the world’s finest tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers.

The now-gutted greenhouses were gifts to the Palestinian people from U.S. philanthropists, who raised $14 million to buy them from departing settlers.

“It was our work for a long time and it was supposed to help even more people now,” said heartbroken Zaki Karim, 51, a Palestinian who worked at greenhouses in what was the Gadid settlement. “But it’s a mess.”

Palestinian Interior Ministry spokesman Tawfiq Abu Qusa insisted the damage was limited to 30% of the 4,000 or so greenhouses - and blamed most of the vandalism on spiteful Jewish settlers. “The Palestinians damaged so little you can’t even count it,” he said.

One of the philanthropists, Daily News Chairman and Publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman, called that assertion “ridiculous.”

“We thought it was a chance to show the Palestinians that there were more benefits from cooperation than confrontation,” Zuckerman said. “I’m just sad that they are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. ... It’s almost inexplicable.”

The World Bank reported 90% of the greenhouses were intact when the Israelis left. Facts on the ground reveal that much of that bounty is now gone.

“All over Gush Katif the greenhouses have been damaged and a lot was stolen from them,” Karim said, referring to former Jewish settlements in southwest Gaza. In Gadid, much of the expensive equipment used to tend the crops was stolen. So were the water pumps, irrigation lines and all the fuse boxes.

At the former Katif settlement, a Palestinian soldier, Pvt. Mohamed Cidawi, said looters made off with most of the metal support beams and even stole the plastic and canvas coverings that protected the vegetables from the hot sun.

“Go away,” Cidawi shouted when he spied a boy with a sledge hammer preparing to smash a fuse box. “If I see you here another time, I’ll kick your ass!”

In the nearby Neveh Dekalim settlement, there were no soldiers to stop 29-year-old Samir Al-Najar and his eight-man crew from demolishing a half-acre greenhouse. Al-Najar insisted the land was his family’s before Israel occupied it in 1967 and that he was reclaiming it.

“I want to reorganize the land so we’re clearing it out for now,” Al-Najar said as two workers carried off a stack of tall metal support beams. Asked whether he intended to sell the materials, Al-Najar shook his head. “We’ll probably rebuild with them, but I want the greenhouses to be our own, not Jewish ones,” he said.

FULL ARTICLES

PRESIDENT MUSHARRAF URGES US JEWISH LEADERS TO HELP MAKE PEACE

Pakistan leader urges U.S. Jews to help make peace
By Paul Eckert
Reuters
September 18, 2005

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told U.S. Jewish leaders on Saturday that granting the Palestinians statehood would help stop Islamic terrorism and lead to full diplomatic ties between Pakistan and Israel.

Speaking to the American Jewish Congress at a groundbreaking dinner that opened with the sharing of bread and Koranic prayers, Musharraf said his Muslim country had “no direct conflict or dispute with Israel” but that Pakistanis had deep sympathy for Palestinian aspirations for a separate state.

“Israel must come to terms with geopolitical realities and allow justice to prevail for the Palestinians,” he said, describing a Palestinian settlement as the key to security for Israel and an end to Middle East terrorism.

“As the peace process progresses toward the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, we will take further steps toward normalization and cooperation, looking to full diplomatic relations,” Musharraf said to lengthy applause.

His outreach to the influential Jewish group followed his handshake with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Wednesday at the United Nations and groundbreaking talks on September 1 between the Israeli and Pakistani foreign ministers in Istanbul.

In conciliatory comments that Pakistani analysts called strikingly candid in the Muslim world, Musharraf recalled the tragedy of the Holocaust and acknowledged compassion shown by Jewish groups in helping stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and in combating anti-Islamic prejudice after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Pakistan has been one of Israel’s harshest critics in the Muslim world. But Musharraf said the strife since the creation of Israel in 1948 was an “aberration in the long history of Muslim-Jewish cooperation and coexistence.”

Islam, Judaism and Christianity shared prophets and spiritual practices, but were now needlessly “pitted against each other” -- a situation it would take courage to reverse, he said. His remarks received several standing ovations from the audience of about 350 people.

Musharraf said suggestions that Islam rejected tolerance and promoted terrorism amounted to a “hate campaign” against the faith. But he acknowledged that most people involved in terrorism, and most who suffered from it, were Muslims.

“Obviously there is a deep disturbance and malaise within Islamic societies, which has become especially acute in recent years,” he said. Troubles in Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq caused “anger, desperation and humiliation,” he added.

The blunt-speaking army general said many Islamic societies had failed to embrace modernity and good governance.

“Many of us have remained trapped in a time warp, still struggling to reconstruct our political, social and economic systems to respond the challenges of our times,” he said.

 

MUSHARRAF: “SHOW COURAGE, AND SOLVE THE PALESTINIAN DISPUTE ONCE AND FOR ALL”

Musharraf: Israel must leave W. Bank
By David Horovitz
The Jerusalem Post
September 18, 2005

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1127010246579

In a landmark, unprecedented address to American Jewish leaders late on Saturday night, just days after he had shaken hands with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the UN General Assembly, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf urged Israel to show its “courage,” and the Jewish community to use its influence, to solve the “Palestinian dispute once and for all.”

He said this required Israel to pull out of the West Bank and agree a solution in Jerusalem that respected the city’s “international character.”

Resolution of the conflict, which Gen. Musharraf asserted lay “at the heart of terrorism in the Middle East and beyond,” would “usher in a period of peace and tranquility in the Middle East and perhaps the whole world.”

Among other things, it would certainly enable Pakistan to formalize full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, he indicated.

Speaking briefly to The Jerusalem Post shortly before making his address, Musharraf said he had no timetable for such ties. “We need to sit down and talk more [with the Israelis],” he told The Post, “and see how to move forward. We ought to be taking more steps.”

While unanimously praising Musharraf for addressing the gathering, arranged after two years of preparations that coincided with the formal opening of contacts between Pakistan and Israel, some Israeli and American Jewish participants expressed discomfort with some of the president’s comments, and especially his intimation that Israel’s presence on land it captured in the 1967 war constituted the root cause of Islamic terrorism.

Dan Gillerman, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, told The Post that he considered this assertion to be “very problematic.” Still, Gillerman said, at least there was now finally an opportunity to pursue a dialogue on this and other issues directly with the Pakistanis.

Gillerman added that he wished Musharraf had “gone further” of late and agreed to full ties with Israel. Again, though, now that direct contacts had been initiated, Israel could and would try to “push him along a little faster.”

The Pakistani leader described the groundbreaking dinner meeting, attended by a large cast of Jewish leaders and dignitaries assembled by the American Jewish Congress, as “a historic occasion.” Also present were Pakistani ministers, officials, dignitaries and journalists, Americans of Pakistani origin and a smattering of international diplomats.

He used the event to pledge that Pakistan ultimately intended to cement full diplomatic relations with Israel, and spoke warmly and at length about the need for a return to the centuries of positive interaction between the Islamic and Jewish communities and to end the past six decades’ “aberration” in that record of cooperation and co-existence. He vowed personally to help educate his people about the strong history of warm Jewish-Islamic ties.

At the same time, however, his recipe for healing placed the overwhelming onus on Israel.

He stressed that terrorism “cannot be condoned for any reason or cause” and that both Israelis and Palestinians “must shun confrontation and pursue peace and reconciliation.”

But he then went on to say that Israel’s rightful desire for security would remain “incomplete, until the creation of an independent and viable Palestinian state is assured.” Israel, he said, “must come to terms with geopolitical realities and allow justice to prevail for the Palestinians They want their own independent state and they must get it.”

Specifically, he continued, the welcome Israeli decision to pull out of Gaza should be followed “soon” by an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. And later, for the sake of “durable peace and harmony between Israelis and Palestinians – indeed between Israel and the Muslim world,” there would have to be a final settlement on the status of Jerusalem that would “respect the international character”of the city.

Over 1,400 years ago, he said, Caliph Omar annulled the 500-year exile of the Jewish people and invited them to return and build their homes in the Holy City. This kind of “gesture of reconciliation and realism” was now “required of Israel.”

In a short question and answer session after his speech, when asked why he was not prepared to follow the lead of a country like Turkey, which enjoyed full ties with Israel while simultaneously highlighting its support for Palestinian statehood, the general said that “57 years of bitterness hatred and animosity cannot be undone so fast.”

To try to sprint when barely walking risked “derailing the whole process,” he said. “We have to be a little patient I need more support in my endeavors to be able to take the Pakistani people along with me. The people of Pakistan are too involved with the Palestinians and the establishment of a Palestinian homeland.”

They had, he said, already “come a long way” in accepting Israel’s right to exist. But as Israel moved toward enabling the establishment of a Palestinian state “side by side with a secure Israel,” this would “allow us the flexibility” to fully normalize ties.

Asked whether he felt able to publicly champion Israel’s legitimacy in his contacts with the rest of the Muslim world, and to convey the message that Israeli territorial concessions would have to be met with a curtailing by the Palestinians of the demand for a “right of return” for refugees to Israel, Musharraf gave a vague response. He said all “the modalities” would now have to be considered, but that he hadn’t really given much thought to these kinds of specifics.

One of the most telling sentences in his speech came near the beginning, when he expressed pleasure at speaking “to so many members of what is probably the most distinguished and influential community in the United States.” Officials traveling with Musharraf privately confirmed that the president regards the support of US Jewry as an immensely valuable factor as he seeks to solidify his ties with the US administration.

One senior Pakistani official also cited, as central factors in the warming of ties, Musharraf’s recognition of common interests with Israel in the war on terror, a desire for a Pakistani role in peacemaking and a belief in inter-faith dialogue.

In a conversation with The Post, one of the president’s most trusted ministers, Dr. Nasim Ashraf, the minister of state for human development, said Pakistan also hoped it might now begin to build the kind of military partnership with Israel enjoyed by India. It would be excellent, Ashraf said, “If Israel could open up its military relationship” to Pakistan.

Musharraf devoted much of his address to the potential for Judaism, Christianity and Islam to serve as “a source of hope, tolerance and peace,” rather than being “pitted against each other.”

He bitterly rejected talk of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, and also rejected “attempts to associate Islam with terrorism.” Islam, he said, was a “religion of tolerance, compassion and peace” and those who denied this were engaged in “a hate campaign.”

Nonetheless, he acknowledged that “most of those involved in terrorist acts, as well as most of those who suffer the consequences of these acts, are Muslims. Obviously there is a deep disturbance and malaise within Islamic societies.”

This, he said, stemmed from “festering” problems such as those in Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq, which had “given rise to a deep sense of anger, desperation and humiliation in the Arab and Muslim populations.”

The consequent terrorism and extremism, he said, had to be addressed separately. “Terrorism has to met head on with all the force required to suppress and eradicate it.” In the case of extremism, on the other hand, “the battle has to be won in the hearts and minds of the people.”

He said that the “misuse of religion to spread militancy, hatred and violence has to be suppressed.” But at the same time, political disputes exploited by terrorists “to justify their criminal actions” had to be resolved. And among those ripe for resolution, he said, were the Palestinian and Kashmir disputes.

He did not have “an iota of doubt” that the Israeli-Palestinian problem “lies at the heart of terrorism in the Middle East and beyond.” Peace in Palestine would revive the historical ties between Judaism and Islam, he insisted, and “extinguish the anger and frustration that motivates resort to violence and extremism.”

 

A VIEW FROM PAKISTAN

Recognizing Israel
By Anwer Mooraj
Dawn (Pakistan’s leading English-language daily)

www.dawn.com/2005/09/19/op.htm

By now the thinking man in the land of the pure has probably fully recovered from the headlines which etched the friendly overtures made to the Jewish state by a country that has for 57 years carried on as if the Hebrew republic just did not exist.

Predictably, the Istanbul meeting, in which Mr Kasuri gave a friendly nod to the Israeli foreign minister, Mr Shalom, has stirred up a lively debate in the media in this country where readers look forward to a healthy controversy.

After glossing over the letters that have popped up in various sections of the press on a regular basis since that fateful day, it does appear that the Cavaliers have won the first round against the Roundheads, though some did point out that the Pakistan president had been unnecessarily secretive about the move, and should have taken the assemblies into confidence rather than the King of Saudi Arabia. Had he done so, chances are that the ARD parties might have supported the government and their allies, and the home office would eventually have had to go into overdrive producing rubber stamps to reverse that offensive passage in the Pakistan passport.

However, one cannot ignore the lobby, which includes a couple of former ambassadors, that has sharply reacted to the move and the many arguments that have been advanced why Pakistan should not in any event recognize Israel. The spontaneous reaction of Qazi Hussain Ahmed, chief of the Jamaat-i-Islami, who heads the thumbs-down faction and whose pronouncement was, in a sense, a distillation of the chorus of negative vibes that emanate from the political right, was that the move was ‘against the ideology of Pakistan’.

Unfortunately he did not specify what the ideology of Pakistan actually is, and how recognizing the Jewish state would undermine the principles and beliefs of the people of Pakistan. Nor did he elucidate just how an essentially political decision motivated by national self interest, like establishing contact with another state, would adversely affect and undermine the firm resolve of the faithful in this country.

The opposition to the move has little to do with ideology and is actually a reaction to the excessively brutal treatment meted out to the Palestinians by a string of Israeli prime ministers in which Mr Sharon has been singled out as something of a monster. They have been accused of doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to the Jews — treating them like Untermenschen. The anti-recognition lobby has put forward other arguments which while they don’t touch on religious tenets are nevertheless compelling. They go something like this: the eventual establishment of diplomatic relations is a one-time event, and Pakistan would lose leverage once it takes the plunge. Recognition will be seen as some kind of appeasement, where Pakistan is taking on the oleaginous heartiness of the small businessman trying to clinch a deal with a bigger one, and once full diplomatic relations are established Israel will improve its intelligence gathering network, making the assets of the only Muslim nuclear power even more vulnerable. An Israeli embassy in the capital with the Star of David fluttering in the Islamabad breeze will be the obvious target of terrorist attacks and will increase militancy in this country.

Recognition, for this lobby, implies condoning the continual occupation of Palestine and the fact that while Mr Sharon knocks down Jewish settlements in one occupied area he builds fresh settlements in another. And lastly, as Israel has paid no heed to the counsels of the United States, Russia and the European Union about settling the Palestine issue, why should they listen to Pakistan which poses no military threat to the Jewish state?

The pro-recognition lobby is currently much stronger and has put forward some compelling and seductive arguments, which appear to be tilting the scales in the establishment’s favour. The main thrust of the rhetoric is that it is time Pakistan started to think of its own national interest instead of always adopting a moralizing tone and behaving like a super Islamic sergeant-at-arms.

According to this group which has given the thumbs up signal, the eventual recognition of Israel would blunt some of the hostility felt by the American Jewish lobby against Pakistan and might influence a paradigm shift in US policy in South Asia. Pakistan will certainly benefit from Israeli technology and might even discover a new supplier of sophisticated weaponry.

There is also the old conflict theory — if Pakistan can recognize India with whom it has fought three wars, why can’t it recognize a country with which it has fought no wars and had no official contact whatsoever? If four Muslim countries have recognized Israel and another clutch of Muslim powers have established trade relations, in spite of the repressive policies the country has inflicted on the Palestinians, why shouldn’t Pakistan follow suit, especially when Pakistanis are not Arabs?

There’s also the moral argument. If Pakistan feels it has a moral right to oppose any country which has inflicted suffering on fellow Muslims, why does it continue to enjoy diplomatic relations with former colonial powers like France and Holland whose soldiers committed unspeakable atrocities in Algeria and Indonesia? The spokesmen for this lobby add that it would be in extremely bad taste if Pakistan suddenly went back on its gesture now that it has made its intention clear to the international community.

When the flack started to fly back home Mr Kasuri was quick to retort that Pakistan had only made a gesture of friendship and had not gone the whole distance and that full recognition would be made only when the Israeli occupation had ended and the Palestinian state had been fully established.

Mr Kasuri appears to have gotten away with it, but it does remind one of that delightful verbal exchange from Beyond the Fringe, the revue that took London by storm in the early 1970s, when Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore fuelled themselves on the iconoclasm of the time and targeted among others unctuous white clergymen, black members of parliament, landladies and foreign ministers.

After a little light-hearted banter involving social stratification and class consciousness, one of the quartet in a rare anti-Semitic jibe said he’d rather be working class than a Jew. There was a hush in the auditorium as dense as the forest. Suddenly Jonathan Miller, the only Semite in the group, said he wasn’t really a Jew, just Jewish — you know, not the whole hog. That is probably what Mr Kasuri was trying to say. He wasn’t going the whole hog — at least, not for the present.

If one digs a little deeper beneath the surface one would realize that Pakistan and Israel really have a lot in common. Both countries were created around the same time on the basis of religion. Both countries have embryonic infrastructures, economies based largely on agriculture and light industry and long virtually indefensible borders. Both countries have fierce nationalists, large swathes of ordinary nice people who are sick of war, hate politicians and want peace, and pockets of orthodoxy that provide focal points for extremism.

Both countries have been victims of some form of oppression-in the case of Pakistan it was colonization by a European power and the degradation that lies in its wake. In the case of Israel it was centuries of targeted persecution of the most humiliating kind followed eventually by intense wide spread ethnic cleansing.

Both countries have had hostile neighbours and faced military threats from an enemy that was many times larger. In Pakistan at the time of the 1965 war with India the population ratio was five to one, whereas in Israel at its very inception, when the country was invaded by the armies of seven countries, the combined populations of the invaders outnumbered that of Israel by a hundred to one!

But in spite of the fact that there is still widespread dislike of Zionism and accusations of racism practised by the Ashkenazi minority, the Israelis have managed to retain their sense of humour and make fun of everything and everybody, including Moses who one wit in a Haifa night club said made them suffer for 40 years in a desert and then selected as a home for the Jews the only spot in the Middle East which didn’t have any oil.

Perhaps the British politician had a point when he said that a race that can produce people like Emmanuel Lasker, Akiba Rubinstein and Aaron Nimzovitsch, Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifetz and Mischa Elman, and decided to finally stage Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde can’t be all that bad. All that remains is for Mr Sharon to complete Mr Bush’s roadmap.

 

A VIEW FROM THE SAUDIS

Musharraf Talks to Jewish Leaders
Barbara Ferguson,
Arab News (Saudi Arabia)
September 19, 2005

arabnews.com/?page=4§ion=0&article=70295&d=19&m=9&y=2005

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has become the first leader of a Muslim nation that has no diplomatic ties with Israel to hold a public dialogue with Jewish leaders, many of whom are already calling it an unprecedented event.

Musharraf told members during a dinner meeting with members of the American Jewish Congress on Saturday night that his country would take steps to build ties with Israel as the Middle East peace process progresses.

Musharraf’s historic address in New York began with bread being broken and prayers from the Qur’an recited before the Jewish audience.

He was given a standing ovation as he arrived for the meeting in which he called for the establishment of a Palestinian state to end violence in the Middle East and bring security to Israel.

“Israel must come to terms with geopolitical realities and allow justice to prevail for the Palestinians,” he said.

“I am convinced that peace in Palestine that does justice to both the Israelis and the Palestinians will bring to a close the sad chapter in the history of the Middle East (and) will revive the historical ties between Islam and Judaism.”

He also criticized Islamic societies for failing to embrace modernity. “Many of us remain wrapped in a time warp, still struggling to reconstruct our political, social and economic systems to respond to the challenges of our times,” he said.

“He was incredibly well received, and all the leadership of American Jewry was there — it was a very impressive gathering of American Jewish leadership,” said David Twersky, director of the AJC Council for World Jewry, the sponsor for the event.

“American Jews are hungry for acceptance and normalcy in their relationship with Muslims and Arabs, and this represented a gigantic step in that direction. It is an extremely positive development,” said Twersky.

The meeting comes three days after President Musharraf shook hands with Israel’s prime minister at the United Nations.

Both countries are said to have held two years of secret talks, which culminated in a meeting of their two foreign ministers in Turkey, two weeks ago. After the Istanbul talks Pakistan’s foreign minister said that his country had decided to “engage” with Israel after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.

Musharraf said he wants this relationship with “the most distinguished and influential community in America, which is the flip side of the anti-Semitic canard of an evil conspiracy by Jewish organizations that controls Bush, or whatever, to the detriment of Muslims,” said Twersky.

“And here comes a person of Musharraf’s stature who said he’s honored to speak with us, its almost a paradigm shift.”

In conciliatory comments that Pakistani analysts called strikingly candid in the Muslim world, Musharraf recalled the tragedy of the Holocaust and acknowledged compassion shown by Jewish groups in helping stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and in combating anti-Islamic prejudice after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Pakistan has been one of Israel’s harshest critics in the Muslim world. But Musharraf said the strife since the creation of Israel in 1948 was an “aberration in the long history of Muslim-Jewish cooperation and coexistence.” Islam, Judaism and Christianity shared prophets and spiritual practices but were now needlessly “pitted against each other” – a situation it would take courage to reverse, he said. His remarks received several standing ovations from the audience of about 350 people.

Pakistan has never recognized the state of Israel, and his speech yesterday irked some American Muslim leaders.

“I strongly believe that there should be no relations with the state of Israel before a comprehensive peace settlement is established, which is satisfactory to Palestinians and after Israel adheres to all United Nations resolutions and international law,” said Nihad Awad, executive director to the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“Otherwise any effort to move toward establishing relationship with Israel will undermine the Muslim world consensus on this very important and sensitive issue, ” Awad said.

Asked if he thought the Bush administration had pushed Musharraf to a rapprochement with Israel, Awad said: “I don’t know who’s pushing who, but I strongly believe Pakistan is a major world player, and we have to keep this in consideration regarding the need to unify the Muslim world. I agree with Musharraf that Muslims don’t have anything against Jews per say, but does have issues with the state of Israel.”

FULL ARTICLE

“ONE OF THE TRIGGERS THAT HELPED TO IGNITE THE SECOND INTIFADA”

Manufacturing Consent; or, the anatomy of an image
By Natasha Lehrer
Jewish Quarterly
Summer 2005 issue

All through the 20th century, photographs of agonised children have taken on iconic status as images of modern warfare. Think of the picture of the small child with his hands raised leaving the Warsaw Ghetto, his innocent gaze directly captured by the camera. Or the shot of a naked young girl, Kim Phuc, fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam in 1972, her body burned, her face contorted with pain and terror. Or the image of Mohammed Al-Dura, cowering with fear as his father tries in vain to shield him against a wall before he is shot dead by an Israeli soldier.

Because these images are of children, the innocent victims of the terrible wars waged by adults, they seem to encapsulate all the futility and evil of armed conflict and oppression. As Libby Brooks wrote in the Guardian (April 26th, 2003):

‘A child in pain and distress personifies innocence abused. As yet untainted by the complexities that attend the colour of their skin or the affiliations of their parents, they bring moral clarity to a world of seemingly amoral confusion. They offer the opportunity to tell a story . . . in a context where no straight narrative exists.’

Susan Sontag, in an essay in the New Yorker in 2002 (that later became a book, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003), describes war photography as helping to construct ‘a grammar .and an ethics of seeing’. She points out how images such as those from the Vietnam War

‘became important in bolstering indignation at this war which had been far from inevitable, far from intractable; and could have been stopped much sooner. Therefore one could feel an obligation to look at these pictures, gruesome as they were, because there was something to be done, right now, about what they depicted.’

A truly iconic image can have a greater power than simply influencing public opinion around the world. The image of a terrified Jamal and Mohammed al-Dura cringing from a barrage of gunfire as they tried to protect themselves from behind a concrete barrel - a still taken from a videotape - was one of the triggers that helped to ignite the second Intifada (it took place on September 30th 2000, just 2 days after Sharon’s infamous walk on the Temple Mount). With his death Mohammed became ‘the first child martyr of the Intifada’. Less than a fortnight after his murder two Israeli soldiers were lynched in Ramallah in revenge. When the murder of Daniel Pearl was filmed in January 2002, little Mohammed’s face could be seen on a poster on a wall behind the American journalist, suggesting that his kidnapping and murder were partly to avenge the killing of the Palestinian child.

I remember my horror when I saw the death of the boy caught on camera. Those days were grim; every day the situation in Jerusalem and the occupied territories gained a terrible momentum, which came to an unprecedented head at the Neztarim junction in Gaza the day Mohammed al-Durra, unable to run and hide, was picked out by the sights of an Israeli machine gun. Charles Enderlin, the Jerusalem Correspondent of French state-owned television station France 2, who was not actually in Gaza that day, edited a piece from raw footage filmed by Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian cameraman and longstanding contributor to France 2, into a 55 second piece with his own commentary: ‘The shooting comes from the Israeli position. One more volley and the kid will be dead’. The footage was beamed around the world that night thanks to the righteous refusal of France 2 to take money for syndicating the piece, not wanting to profit from the death of a child.

Mahmoud Darwish wrote a poem apostrophising the child’s martyrdom. Shimon Peres avowed that the shooting was ‘a catastrophe for each and every one of us’. The Israelis were quick to acknowledge, in a statement made by the IDF Chief of Staff on October 3rd, the likelihood that the shots were fired by Israeli soldiers. An independent enquiry was not aided by the decision of the IDF to raze the entire area a week after the shooting (see Amnesty International report Israel/OT/PA: Broken lives - a year of intifada, 2001), nor by the fact that in accordance with Muslim tradition the boy was buried just hours after his death, without an autopsy taking place which could have determined definitively if he had been killed by a bullet from an Israeli M16 - or a shot from a Palestinian kalashnikov.

But what if what we think we saw on the television that fateful day was not actually what happened? What if the boy’s death was not actually caught on camera? What if it was a shot fired not by an Israeli soldier but by a Palestinian that killed the boy? What if the boy wasn’t killed at all? Would it matter? Would the image be less powerful, less iconic a representation of one of the most bitter and long-standing conflicts of our time? Would all those revenge suicide bombings, lynchings, beheadings that the child’s murder was used to justify no longer be justified, even by those who had believed that they once had been? What of the notion of journalistic integrity? For most of us, after all, trust in the media is paramount, since radio, television and newspapers provide us with all we know of the bloody conflicts that take place all around the world.

Almost immediately doubts about the footage began to be voiced, in defiance of Sontag’s confident formulation that ‘the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art’. A small Francophone Israeli news and analysis agency, the Metula News Agency (MENA), with its administrative base in Luxembourg, set about analysing the footage, with the help of various ballistic and forensic experts. Going through the footage frame by frame they uncovered a series of anomalies in the footage itself.

* Footage from other sources of Israeli soldiers firing had been spliced into the film, leading some to question why this was deemed necessary if it was so obvious that an Israeli soldier was guilty of firing the fatal shots.

* The Israeli post was at a 30 degree angle to the right of the position of the victims, which would have made a direct shot impossible. Only bullets ricocheting off the ground could have hit them from that angle.

* Bullet holes that appear in the concrete wall behind the man and boy are round and regular; they could only have been from shots aimed directly from in front of Mohammed and his father. Even if the Israelis had managed to hit them directly with bullets fired at an angle from a position over 100m away, the holes they would have made in the wall would have been distended.

Doubts accumulated. In 2002 Esther Schapira, a journalist with close connections to Tsahal, made a documentary for German television investigating the shooting; she concluded that it was far from clear who had shot the child. The following year James Fallows went further in an article in the Atlantic Monthly. He discusses the reasons that investigators at the MENA, including physicist Nahum Shahaf, have concluded that the shooting was staged:

‘The reasons to doubt that the al-Duras, the cameramen, and hundreds of onlookers were part of a coordinated fraud are obvious. Shahaf’s evidence for this conclusion, based on his videos, is essentially an accumulation of oddities and unanswered questions about the chaotic events of the day. Why is there no footage of the boy after he was shot? Why does he appear to move in his father’s lap, and to clasp a hand over his eyes after he is supposedly dead?

Why is one Palestinian policeman wearing a Secret Service-style earpiece in one ear? Why is another Palestinian man shown waving his arms and yelling at others, as if ‘directing’ a dramatic scene? Why does the funeral appear - based on the length of shadows - to have occurred before the apparent time of the shooting? Why is there no blood on the father’s shirt just after they are shot? Why did a voice that seems to be that of the France 2 cameraman yell, in Arabic, ‘The boy is dead’ before he had been hit? Why do ambulances appear instantly for seemingly everyone else and not for al-Dura?’

French psychoanalyst Gerard Huber wrote a book exploring this thesis, Contre-expertise d’une mise en scene (Editions Raphael, 2003), in which he points out several other disturbing elements which contradict Enderlin’s report including the fact that the two doctors who received the body of Mohammed at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza have testified that the body was brought to the hospital before 1pm on September 30th. Yet Enderlin’s voiceover declares that the shooting took place at 3pm, and the shadows in the film would confirm that.

Talal Abu Rahma was the only cameraman to film the scene, though the disturbances throughout the morning at the Netzarim junction meant that there were several foreign journalists at the scene. He first tried to sell the footage to CNN who rejected it without any additional verification, so he called Enderlin, who was in Ramallah, and offered him the scoop. In an interview with the French weekly magazine Telerama in October 2000 Enderlin spoke of footage from the 27 minute long tape that showed the child’s ‘agonies’ before his death, describing them as so unbearable that he decided to cut them from his final report. Meanwhile, 3 days after the shooting, on 3rd October, Talal Abu Rahma testified under oath in the office and presence of lawyer Raji Surani at the Palestine Centre for Human Rights in Gaza (PCHR) that the victims had been targeted in cold blood by guns fired from the Israeli position (Abu Rahma’s testimony can be read at www.pchrgaza.org/special/tv2.htm). Two years later, in a letter addressed to France 2 in Jerusalem (though never publicly aired by the station), he retracted this statement, saying ‘I never told the PCHR that the Israelis had intentionally shot and killed Mohammed al Dura and injured his father.’

With the proliferation of uncertainty about the authenticity of the footage and of the story, late last year three senior French journalists were finally permitted by France 2 to view the full 27 minutes of the tape that Abu Rahma shot that day. Luc Rosenzweig, a former foreign editor at Le Monde, Denis Jeambar, editor of L’Express, and Daniel Leconte, a documentary filmmaker and publisher (and former reporter for France 2) viewed the film in the office of Arlette Chabot, head of news at France 2. It was on this occasion that Didier Epelbaum, an adviser to the channel’s head Marc Tessier (who is to stand down in September, having failed in his attempt to have his contract renewed), mentioned in passing that Abu Rahma had retracted his testimony; in effect acknowledging that the only known witness to the shooting of Jamal and Mohammed al-Durra - for of course their other witness to the episode, Charles Enderlin, had been in a different city altogether when it took place - was no longer able to verify the very facts that the three journalists were contesting.

In January this year Jeambar and Leconte published an article in Le Figaro (which was rejected by Le Monde who claim to find the story ‘bizarre’) in which they describe a hitherto unknown aspect of the video - which has otherwise been entirely embargoed by France 2 apart from a 3 minute extract which they gave to the Israeli army for their enquiry - in which the first 20 minutes are taken up with scenes of young Palestinian men playing at being shot, getting up again and smoking cigarettes nonchalantly. Additionally they were surprised, given Enderlin’s widely-quoted decision not to include the child’s ‘agonies’ in his report, that the cassette didn’t appear to contain footage of any death throes. In fact they cautiously affirm that there is nothing in the tape that definitively shows that the child is dead, nor is there anything in it which indicates that he was shot by Israeli soldiers, though Leconte has said that he does believe that the shooting was real, in contrast with the assertion of Stephane Juffa of the MENA that the whole episode was staged.

In the same article Enderlin is questioned by the two journalists as to why he was so convinced that the Israelis were guilty of the shooting. He responds that “the image corresponded to the reality of the situation, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank (my italics).”

France 2 remains tight-lipped. The station is bringing a defamation case against X, symbolically representing the authors of the proliferating accusations from around the world that Enderlin’s report was fabricated. One reason why France 2 is bringing the case against X - which is widely considered to be a strategy of intimidation - is because of the difficulty of bringing libel or defamation cases against internet bloggers, whose discussion of the affair has gained momentum over recent months. Marc Tessier, described by sources privately as being little more than Chirac’s stooge, and Arlette Chabot have closed ranks around Enderlin, the latter saying only, in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, that ‘four years later, no one can say for certain who killed [al-Durra], Palestinians or Israelis.’

The question remains unresolved. Enderlin will no longer discuss the affair. Spokespersons from France 2 claim that it is part of a conspiracy to discredit its foreign journalists and put pressure on Middle East correspondents in all parts of the media. The investigation into the shooting in Israel is closed. Questions raised in the Assemblיe Nationale and from various quarters of the French press for an proper investigation have so far yielded nothing more than a statement from the French media watchdog, the Conseil superieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA) in December 2004 demanding that French television identify its sources and exercise more caution when reporting on international conflicts.

It is unlikely that there will ever be a definitive answer as to what happened that day at the Netzarim junction. But it has raised serious questions as to the responsibility of the media in shaping and manipulating not only our understanding of conflicts but also the events themselves, for no one can deny the fury stoked in the Arab world by these few seconds of film, and the acts of violence that were subsequently perpetrated in the name of little Mohammed. L’Affaire Enderlin raises uncomfortable questions regarding the ethical standards and transparency and self-regulation of France 2 in particular and the French media in general, which has generally showed little interest in the details of the affair.

No less startling than any other aspect of what happened is the fact that the British media have totally ignored the whole affair. Tom Gross, a leading media commentator, says he doesn’t believe the British press has touched on this subject at all, even though there has been a fair amount of media coverage elsewhere around the world. Thus the British media have become collaborators in what may be one of the most damning indictments of journalistic integrity ever witnessed in our televisual age. Perhaps for the editors of the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph and other newspapers and periodicals which take their news reporting of the Middle East - and France - seriously, Enderlin’s statement is what counts: ‘the image corresponded to the reality of the situation’. In other words it fulfilled the world’s expectations of the bestial inhumanity of the Israeli occupation. The possible truth of what happened - that the child was killed in a terrible martyrdom operation staged by his fellow Palestinians as a propaganda exercise, or even that he wasn’t killed at all - is simply not part of Enderlin’s - or the British media’s - version of a possible ‘reality’.

 

FURTHER ARTICLE

WHEN PICTURES LIE

When pictures lie
A TV report that helped fuel the deadly Palestinian intifada appears to be false. So how is truth supposed to compete with a video fraud?
By David Gelernter
Los Angeles Times
September 9, 2005

www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gelernter9sep09,0,7325494.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

A 55-second video report, produced in 2000 by a French TV station and distributed free of charge around the world, has caused untold injury and grief to Israeli civilians. This month, the French author Nidra Poller analyzes the evidence in Commentary magazine and shows that the video is a fraud — “an almost perfect media crime,” the retired French journalist Luc Rosenzweig calls it. That Poller’s piece is conclusive is merely my own judgment, of course. But we are all required to make such judgments, in the light of such reports.

There is a wider story here also. We are vulnerable to video lies. Against purposeful lies, truth has never been so helpless, so weakly defended.

More than 500 Israeli civilians have been killed in the intifada, the Palestinian uprising that began five years ago. They were ordinary people chatting on a bus, eating ice cream in a restaurant; suddenly, a bright flash. The next moment the walls are spattered with blood and the bomb’s hellish odor fills the air. Some people are blinded, others are cut to pieces. Parents living the worst seconds of their lives cast about wildly for their children in the screaming, smoky chaos.

What explains such bestial crimes? The reported death of a Palestinian child, Mohammed Dura, in Gaza did as much as anything else to ignite the current uprising. In the short video segment produced on Sept. 30, 2000, and distributed immediately, a state-owned French television station called France 2 accused the Israeli army of deliberately shooting and killing the 12-year-old.

You may remember the footage: A man and boy crouch in fear. Shots hit a wall far from the pair; a final round of gunfire kicks up a dust cloud that hides father and son, who are “targets of gunfire from Israeli positions,” says the voice-over. When the dust clears, the boy is stretched at the man’s feet. The voice says that he is dead.

This version of the story was retold around the world — and it has figured in countless wall posters, an Al Qaeda recruiting video, an epic poem. Last June an aspiring suicide bomber was arrested on her way to a hospital — to kill Israeli children, she said, in memory of Mohammed Dura.

But, according to the Commentary article, the video is a fraud. The footage itself is ambiguous, the alleged main event hidden by dust. The voice-over is what makes us understand what we are seeing. It comes from Charles Enderlin, a correspondent at France 2 (and a French Jew who became an Israeli citizen 20 years ago). Enderlin has never claimed to have been anywhere near the scene of the alleged shooting. His Palestinian cameraman told him the story.

Lots of supporting evidence was supposed to back up the cameraman’s story — more footage of the supposed father and son pinned by Israeli fire, footage showing the child’s death throes. France 2 has since admitted, according to Poller, that no such footage exists.

The voice-over reports that the child is dead, yet the rest of the segment — which wasn’t aired but survives — shows the child propping himself on an elbow, shading his eyes with his hands. Poller saw the tape.

A boy named Mohammed Dura did die in a Gaza hospital that fateful Sept. 30. His face doesn’t match the face in the video. Presented with these facts, France 2 officials said that “they would look into the matter.”

In early 2005, Enderlin published an article in the French newspaper Le Figaro. His report “may have been hasty,” he wrote, but was justified because “so many children were being killed.” (But the intifada had barely started; “so many children” were not being killed — not yet.)

What did happen? Chances are we will never know for sure. But Poller reports that outtakes she saw show phony battle scenes staged by Palestinians. Painstaking analysis done by students at the Israeli Military Academy found the same actors playing multiple roles: “The injured and dead jump up, dust themselves off, play at offensive combat.”

Poller’s article raises far more doubts about the report’s authenticity than I can list here. But disproving a video report is much harder than getting people to believe it. You must convince people that their own eyes and ears have deceived them. They must follow the twists and turns of your logical argument, do their own thinking, reach their own conclusions. Give people an opportunity to switch off their brains and they will grab it.

How can cautious, painstaking truth compete with brazen video lies? If the report turns out to be just what it looks like, a despicable fake, who will produce another 55-second video telling the truth? Which TV stations will broadcast it? Where does Israel go to get its reputation back? What will it all matter to grief-stricken Israelis whose children, husbands, mothers and fathers have died in acts sparked by the Dura story?

The rational response is to insist fiercely on the transcendent importance of truth. Yet today we often hear that there is no truth. There are only competing narratives, we are told, all equally true or false.

Yet the truth of what happened on Sept. 30, 2000, is critical to the way the world works, the way people behave. The pictures we were shown and the story we were told is true or false, not both. Enderlin, France 2 and the larger media establishment have an obligation to tell us which it is. Because lies can kill. Lies do kill.

HOW MILITANT ISLAMISTS ARE INFILTRATING REUTERS

How militant Islamists are infiltrating Britain’s top companies
By Shiv Malik
The Independent on Sunday
September 11, 2005

news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article311824.ece

‘IoS’ investigation: Extremist organisation that Tony Blair wants to ban is active in unexpected places. Shiv Malik reports

A militant Islamist group that Tony Blair has said should be banned has members in some of Britain’s most important institutions, including the NHS and blue-chip companies such as IBM and Reuters, an Independent on Sunday investigation has revealed.

The Government is due to publish legislation this week to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is already proscribed in European countries such as Germany and in most of the Middle East. The Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, has undertaken to give the wording of the ban to the Opposition to secure cross-party agreement.

In contrast to other groups that the Government intends to ban, the membership of Hizb ut-Tahrir is mainly middle-class and well-qualified. A significant proportion are university-educated and work in areas such as finance, information technology, health and education.

Recently, the IoS disclosed that The Guardian had employed Dilpazier Aslam, a Hizb member, as a trainee journalist, and articles he wrote after the London bombings did not mention his connection with the group. He lost his job at the paper after refusing to give up his membership.

The IoS has now learned that at least two members of Hizb, which seeks to form a global Islamic state regulated by sharia law, work for the computer giant IBM, and that Reuters, the international news and financial information agency, has at least one member among its employees.

After being informed of this, a Reuters spokesperson said: “We require our journalists to be very sensitive to any activities which might lead to their impartiality being questioned. We of course recognise the right of people to hold their own views.

“We are not aware of any of our employees being members of Hizb ut-Tahrir. If it becomes illegal, then certainly we would review the matter on the ‘Do their private actions impact our public reputation?’ principle.”

An IBM spokesperson said the company was assessing the impact of any new legislation. It would not disclose personnel information “for reasons of data protection”.

Sajjad Khan, a prominent member of Hizb who runs classes on the group’s ideology and has delivered speeches at the group’s congresses, said: “Most of our members are graduates who work and pay taxes. Very few of them are unemployed or rely on state benefits.” A finance and IT specialist, he said he had worked for a number of large companies, including Tesco.

Several members of Hizb are medical practitioners, including its spokesman, Dr Imran Waheed, a psychiatrist practising in London. Its women’s representative, Nazreen Nawaz, is a qualified doctor who worked in cancer research. Another member is a manager at University College Hospital, London.

The group is also strong in the education sector, where a former member of the executive board lectures in IT in an east London college. The former headmistress of a prominent Islamic primary school in the same area is also a member of Hizb, as is the landlord of the building.

Although Hizb ut-Tahrir insists that it has never supported violence in Britain or the Middle East, security sources accuse it of being among groups which radicalise Muslims to the point where they attract the attention of terrorist recruiters.

A former Hizb ut-Tahrir activist told the IoS that behind closed doors he was encouraged to take up boxing and self-defence classes in order to “prepare for jihad”. Although he never accepted full membership, he was associated with the group for nearly a decade, and said two members had told him how they had joined the Territorial Army in order to get “real” military training. After TA rules were changed and it was no longer possible to opt out of military action if asked to take part, this stopped.

The organisation’s well-designed www.hizb.org.uk website replaced earlier sites such as www.1924.org, which until the London bombings used to contain material from the 100,000 leaflets and flyers handed out at mosques across Britain every Friday.

Though Hizb denies being anti-Semitic, a leaflet first published in 1999 said: “The Jews ... are a poisoned dagger thrust into the heart of the Islamic Ummah and [sic] evil cancerous gland which spreads deep within the Islamic countries.” Until last year the same statement was carried on Hizb’s websites.

When Britain’s first successful suicide bomber, Asif Hanif, blew himself up in a Tel Aviv bar in April 2003, he killed three others and injured 55. His partner, Omar Sharif, also from Derby, was found dead floating in the sea two weeks later, after his bomb failed to detonate.

The June edition of Khilafah magazine that year said: “This case more than anything has shown that though the Kaffir [unbelievers] wish to seduce the Ummah away from the problems Muslims face with corrupt Western ideas such as nation statehood and the British Muslim identity, it has certainly not deterred these two young men who grew up in Britain.”

A discussion on a Hizb website about Western citizenship spoke of killing kaffirs - infidels or non-Muslims. “Their bonds, equality and freedoms are lies and false ... We saw an Immigrant [muhajir] from Quraysh drawing closer to Allah by killing his kaffir relative,” it said. This was removed days after the 7 July attacks in London.

Approached for comment, Dr Waheed said the group always espoused non-violence. He denied that the Khilafah article could be interpreted “in any way” as praising violence. He refused to discuss the organisation’s membership beyond saying that they were professionals “serving their local communities”.

INSIDE HIZB

Hizb ut-Tahrir (Party of Liberation) was founded in 1953 by a Palestinian court clerk, Taqiuddin al-Nabhani. Its aim is to establish the Caliphate, a state based upon and governed by Islamic law. In Britain, the party is headed by Jalaluddin Patel, 28, an Indian IT engineer, and has up to 10,000 members. In 2002 it was outlawed in Germany after allegations of anti-Semitism and last year three British members were sentenced to five years in jail in Egypt.

 

ATTEMPTED ARREST OF ISRAELI OFFICER AT HEATHROW AIRPORT

Investigation urged after Israeli officer avoids arrest
By Vikram Dodd and Conal Urquhart
The Guardian
September 13, 2005

www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1568606,00.html

Scotland Yard was urged yesterday to launch a criminal investigation into officials at the Israeli embassy in London who helped a retired Israeli general wanted in Britain for war crimes to escape arrest. Doron Almog arrived on Sunday at Heathrow for a private visit to the UK. Unknown to him, a British court had issued a warrant for his arrest for war crimes on Saturday and detectives were waiting at the airport.

Mr Almog told the Guardian yesterday that, as he prepared to leave the plane, he was advised to wait by the cabin crew. Israel’s military attache in London then arrived on the plane to inform him that he faced arrest. Mr Almog stayed on the El Al plane until it flew back to Israel.

The 53-year-old former general told the Guardian: “I don’t know how he [the military attache] found out but I am glad he did. It was also fortunate that I was flying with El Al as they are loyal. I don’t know what would have happened if I had been on a British Airways flight.”

The war crimes arrest warrant was issued over allegations that Mr Almog ordered the destruction of 59 civilian homes in Gaza, in breach of the Geneva convention. Yesterday a lawyer representing the alleged Palestinian victims demanded that police investigate the actions of Israeli diplomats in aiding Mr Almog’s hasty departure. Daniel Machover said Israeli officials had been involved in “calculated interference” in thwarting British justice. “There needs to be a criminal investigation of the actions taken by Israeli embassy staff. They are not located here to assist Israelis to evade British justice,” he said.

Mr Machover also called for a police inquiry into how the information was leaked to the Israeli embassy and how the Israeli diplomat got through various layers of security at Heathrow to board the plane and warn Mr Almog.

Amnesty International criticised British police yesterday for failing to execute the warrant. “He could have been arrested; under UK law there is no reason for not arresting him once he’s on UK soil,” the human rights group said. Mr Almog was due to visit Jewish communities in Birmingham, Leicester and London to raise money for a centre for disabled children. His son Eran, 20, is severely disabled.

He said that neither he nor his country had any case to answer for the deaths of innocent Palestinians in their battle against militants. “As a soldier and a general I have never committed a crime. Many times I have saved Palestinian lives by risking my life and the lives of my soldiers,” he said. The actions of the army in Gaza were to prevent terrorist attacks against Israel, he said. Mr Almog was head of Israel’s southern command during the second intifada between 2000 and 2003.

He said he had no intention of returning to Britain to defend himself in court. “This is not about me versus the British legal system, it is against the state of Israel,” he said. Scotland Yard refused to answer any questions, including why detectives failed to board the plane to arrest Mr Almog, whether there was any investigation into the role of Israeli diplomats in helping him evade capture at the airport.

“We are not prepared to discuss at this stage anything to do with this episode,” said a spokesman for Scotland Yard.

 

JUSTICE SHOULD BEGIN AT HOME

Justice should begin at home
By Joshua Rozenberg
The Daily Telegraph
September 15, 2005

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/15/nlaw15.xml

A major diplomatic incident was narrowly avoided last weekend, putting pressure on Britain to change a little-known but far-reaching law.

In the meantime, we can expect rather fewer US military officers to stop over in London on their way home from Iraq for a spot of shopping.

The story begins with a retired Israeli general, Doron Almog, 54, who took the El Al flight from Tel Aviv to London last Sunday afternoon. About 60 people were looking forward to hear him speak at Solihull Synagogue about a project in the Negev that helps Israeli Jews and Arabs who have severe mental and physical disabilities. His son, Eran, 20, is severely disabled.

“We were about to get off the plane, and then one of the stewards came up to me and said the pilot had asked me to disembark last,” Mr Almog told Israel Army Radio.

After waiting, he was told that the Israeli military attache was on his way. “I phoned him and he told me not to get off the plane.” Mr Almog and his wife flew straight back to Israel.

What officials at the Israel Embassy in London had discovered was that a warrant had been issued for Mr Almog’s arrest a day earlier at Bow Street court. The Israelis will not say how they learned this, but it seems highly likely they were tipped off by the Foreign Office.

Daniel Machover, the solicitor who obtained the arrest warrant at a private hearing, is furious. He believes that anyone who frustrated Mr Almog’s arrest by revealing the existence of the warrant must be guilty of perverting the course of justice - a serious criminal offence. He also wants to know why the police, who were apparently watching all flights arriving from Israel, did not execute the warrant once Mr Almog’s plane had landed - “airside” areas of an airport are not exempt from the general law.

Mr Machover, who has joint British and Israeli citizenship and founded Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights in 1988, had been granted a warrant under the Geneva Conventions Act 1957 - the first time, he believes, that such a warrant has been issued. An attempt last year to arrest Shaul Mofaz, a former head of the Israeli army on a visit to London, was unsuccessful because, as Defence Minister, he has diplomatic immunity.

The 1957 Act was passed, somewhat belatedly, to allow Britain to ratify the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 for the protection of victims of war. Section 1 of the Act makes it an offence under English law for anyone to commit a “grave breach” of one of the conventions.

Article 147 of the fourth Geneva Convention defines grave breaches as including “extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly”.

The legislation applies to “any person, whatever his nationality. whether in or outside the United Kingdom”.

As head of the Israeli Defence Force’s Southern Command from 2000 to 2003, Maj Gen Almog is alleged to have “wantonly” destroyed 59 houses - one of them previously occupied by Abdul Matar, Mr Machover’s client. The incident was said to have happened in January 2002 at the town of Rafah, on what was - until the Israelis pulled out this week - the heavily guarded border between Gaza and Egypt.

Separate attempts to have Mr Almog arrested over three fatal incidents in Gaza were dismissed at Bow Street, apparently because more evidence was needed.

The warrant for Mr Almog’s arrest allowed for his release on bail, although he would not have been allowed to leave Britain while a decision was taken over whether to charge him. No proceedings may be brought under the 1957 Act without the consent of the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, though his permission was neither sought nor required for the arrest of Mr Almog.

Back in Israel, Mr Almog said that, as a soldier and as a general, he had never committed a crime. “Many times, I have saved Palestinian lives by risking my life and the lives of my soldiers,” he told The Guardian.

Reaction in Israel has, inevitably, been mixed. Gerald Steinberg said in the Jerusalem Post that EU-funded non-governmental organisations - such as the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, which backed the case - were exploiting “the language of human rights to pursue the goal of political genocide”. Writing in Haaretz, however, Michael Sfard accused the Israeli justice system of shirking its responsibility to investigate war crimes.

The Israeli Justice Minister, Tzipi Livni, said she would seek to persuade countries such as Britain to amend their laws, suggesting that they could otherwise be used against British military commanders over incidents in Iraq.

This move is unlikely to succeed. Lord Goldsmith is rightly proud of the fact that he successfully prosecuted Faryadi Zardad, the former Afghan warlord found living in London who was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the Old Bailey in July for torture and hostage-taking. Although it comes under different legislation, torture - like grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions - is a crime of universal jurisdiction and can be tried in one country even if it is said to have taken place in another.

But Zardad, and Anthony Sawoniuk, who was convicted in 1999 of war crimes committed 57 years earlier in Nazi-occupied Belarus, had chosen to live in Britain. No other country could have brought them to justice.

My view? London is not the right place to decide whether the destruction of homes in Gaza was justified by the “military necessity” of defending Israel against terrorist attacks. Our courts, after all, are not known for their willingness to investigate the legality of recent wars.

The best place for such charges to be tried is Israel, a country whose supreme court investigated alleged human rights abuses in Rafah in “real time” last year. Six of the seven specific complaints were upheld. The court stressed that “even in a time of combat, the laws of war must be followed”.

It is fortunate that the Israelis were tipped off last week. Otherwise, American commanders would be next. Universal jurisdiction may be a fine thing, but it comes a poor second to local justice.

FULL ARTICLES

HOLOCAUST DAY REGARDED AS OFFENSIVE TO MUSLIMS

Ditch Holocaust day, advisers urge Blair
By Abul Taher
London Sunday Times
September 11, 2005

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1775068,00.html

Advisers appointed by Tony Blair after the London bombings are proposing to scrap the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day because it is regarded as offensive to Muslims. They want to replace it with a Genocide Day that would recognise the mass murder of Muslims in Palestine, Chechnya and Bosnia as well as people of other faiths.

The draft proposals have been prepared by committees appointed by Blair to tackle extremism. He has promised to respond to the plans, but the threat to the Holocaust Day has provoked a fierce backlash from the Jewish community.

Holocaust Day was established by Blair in 2001 after a sustained campaign by Jewish leaders to create a lasting memorial to the 6m victims of Hitler. It is marked each year on January 27.

The Queen is patron of the charity that organises the event and the Home Office pays £500,000 a year to fund it. The committees argue that the special status of Holocaust Memorial Day fuels extremists’ sense of alienation because it “excludes” Muslims.

A member of one of the committees, made up of Muslims, said it gave the impression that “western lives have more value than non-western lives”. That perception needed to be changed. “One way of doing that is if the government were to sponsor a national Genocide Memorial Day.

“The very name Holocaust Memorial Day sounds too exclusive to many young Muslims. It sends out the wrong signals: that the lives of one people are to be remembered more than others. It’s a grievance that extremists are able to exploit.”

The recommendation, drawn up by four committees including those dealing with imams and mosques, and Islamaphobia and policing, has the backing of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain.

He said: “The message of the Holocaust was ‘never again’, and for that message to have practical effect on the world community it has to be inclusive. We can never have double standards in terms of human life. Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.”

Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of the charity Interpal, said: “There are 500 Palestinian towns and villages that have been wiped out over the years. That’s pretty genocidal to me.”

The committees are also set to clash with Blair on his proposal to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamic group. Government sources say they will argue that a ban is unjustified because the group, which is proscribed in much of the Middle East, neither advocates nor perpetrates violence in the UK.

A Home Office spokesman said it would consider the proposals for a separate Genocide Day for all faiths but emphasised that it regarded the Holocaust as a “defining tragedy in European history”.

Mike Whine, a director of the British Board of Deputies, said: “Of course we will oppose this move. The whole point is to remember the darkest day of modern history.”

Louise Ellman, Labour MP for Liverpool Riverside and a Holocaust Memorial trustee, said: “These Muslim groups should stop trying to evade the enormity of the Holocaust.”

The seven committees finalise their recommendations today at St George’s House, Windsor, and will submit them to Blair and Charles Clarke, the home secretary, on September 22.

 

BLAIR ADVISOR: BLAIR UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF A “SINISTER” GROUP OF JEWS AND FREEMASONS

Jews and Freemasons controlled war on Iraq, says No 10 adviser
By Toby Helm
(London) Daily Telegraph
September 12, 2005

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=3BTQ31ZE2RNELQFIQMGSNAGAVCBQWJVC?xml=/news/2005/09/12/nthom12.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/09/12/ixportal.html

Tony Blair decided to wage war on Iraq after coming under the influence of a “sinister” group of Jews and Freemasons, a Muslim barrister who advises the Prime Minister has claimed.

Ahmad Thomson, from the Association of Muslim Lawyers, said Mr Blair was the latest in a long line of politicians to have been influenced by the group which saw the attack on Saddam Hussein as a way to control the Middle East.

A Government spokesman confirmed last night that ministers and officials consulted Mr Thomson on issues concerning Muslims but refused to be drawn on his views. “We talk to a lot of people, including many whose views we do not necessarily agree with,” she said.

Mr Thomson said: “Pressure was put on Tony Blair before the invasion. The way it works is that pressure is put on people to arrive at certain decisions. It is part of the Zionist plan and it is shaping events.”

Mr Thomson wrote a book in 1994 in which he said Freemasons and Jews controlled the governments of Europe and America and described the claim that six million Jews died in the Holocaust as a “big lie”. In The Next World Order, Mr Thomson, a Muslim convert who was born Martin Thomson in Rhodesia, wrote: “When the majority of people in a predominantly Christian society cease to worship God, the result is fascism.

“When the people in a predominantly Jewish society cease to worship God, the result is either communism or capitalism. A predominantly Christian society is concerned primarily with establishing a political ideology, whilst a predominantly Jewish society is concerned primarily with establishing an economic system.”

This, he suggested, led to the rise of Adolf Hitler. Mr Thomson, who was called to the bar in 1979, wrote: “The fascism of Hitler was the Christian element in the increasingly “Jewish” environment in which he and his followers found themselves.”

He also wrote that the Jews have no right to live in “the Holy Land” because they are not a pure race and therefore not the true biblical Israelites and that Saddam was used as an excuse for US troops - “including thousands of Jews” - to occupy Saudi Arabia.

A Government source said: “It is by talking to people with varying views that we find out what the range of opinions is. It doesn’t mean we agree with what they are saying.”

FULL ARTICLES

EMPTY SYNAGOGUES ON FIRE… PALESTINIAN POLICE STOOD BY HELPLESSLY

Last Israeli Soldiers Pull Out of Gaza
By Lara Sukhtian,
The Associated Press
September 12, 2005

Thousands of triumphant Palestinians poured into abandoned Jewish settlements early Monday, setting empty synagogues on fire and shooting in the air, as the last Israeli soldier left the Gaza Strip, completing Israel’s pullout after 38 years of occupation.

Palestinian police stood by helplessly as gunmen raised flags of militant groups in the settlements and crowds smashed what was left in the ruins or walked off with doors, window frames, toilets and scrap metal. Initial plans by Palestinian police to bar the crowds from the settlements for the first few hours quickly disintegrated, illustrating the weakness of the Palestinian security forces and concerns about growing chaos after Israel’s departure.

Gaza’s night sky turned orange early Monday as fires roared across the settlements. Women ululated, teens set off fireworks and crowds chanted “God is great.”

Just after sunrise, the last column of tanks rumbled out of Gaza, passing through the Kissufim crossing into Israel. Gaza commander Brig. Gen. Aviv Kochavi drove through the crossing and became the last Israeli soldier to leave.

“The mission has been completed, and an era has ended,” he said after crossing into Israel. Israeli troops then raised their national flag, removed from Gaza military headquarters, on the Israeli side of coastal strip.

As Israel completed its pullout, Palestinian Jeeps decorated with the flags of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad militant groups stopped just near the border and a group of masked gunmen waved their weapons before Palestinian police began moving them away.

“Today is a day of joy and happiness that our people were deprived of in the past century,” said Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, adding that the Palestinians still have a long path toward statehood. He denounced Israeli rule in Gaza as “aggression, injustice, humiliation, killing and settlement activity.”

Israel’s pullout marks the first time the Palestinians will have control over a defined territory, and Gaza is seen as a testing ground for Palestinian aspirations of statehood.

Palestinians hope to build their state in Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem — areas that Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War — but fear that Israel will not hand over additional territory. They say Israel’s occupation of Gaza has not ended because it retains control over borders and the air space.

Israel removed some 8,500 Gaza settlers from their homes in 21 settlements last month, and razed homes and most buildings in the communities. However, the Israeli Cabinet decided at the last minute Sunday to leave 19 synagogue buildings intact, drawing complaints from the Palestinians and criticism from the United States.

After rushing into the settlements early Monday, Palestinians set fire to three empty synagogues, in the Morag, Kfar Darom and Netzarim settlements, as well as a Jewish seminary in Neve Dekalim. In Netzarim, two young Palestinians waving flags stomped on the smoldering debris outside the synagogue, and others took turns hitting the building with a large hammer.

Palestinian police appeared overwhelmed, watching the destruction from the sidelines. Police Col. Abdel Khader Abu Tayr said police didn’t have enough time to deploy because Israeli troops left without sufficient warning. “Now we are expending every effort to kick the people out and protect the buildings,” Abu Tayr said.

In the Neve Dekalim settlement, 22-year-old Abdel Rahman Barakat rode his bicycle through the streets, amazed at the space the settlers had enjoyed. “Oh my God, I feel so comfortable here,” he said. “It (the settlement) is very wide, it’s very big.”

In northern Gaza, university student Rami Rayan walked toward the abandoned settlement of Elei Sinai, where he said a cousin carried out a suicide bombing five years ago. “I want to feel that his blood wasn’t spilled in vain,” Rayan said, as he picked up bullet casings as souvenirs. “They (the Israelis) left because of resistance,” Rayan said.

After the pullout was completed, Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, head of Israel’s southern command, pointed toward the horizon and told the AP: “It’s a very strange feeling, almost unreal. I have a lot of memories from that place, a lot of friends who died.”

“The responsibility is of the Palestinian Authority,” he told reporters a few minutes later as Hamas and Islamic Jihad supporters gathered a few hundred meters behind him. “We hope that they will rise to the responsibility and enable all of us to live in peace and security.”

Late Sunday, Israeli troops lowered their national banner in Neve Dekalim, snapped farewell pictures and closed army headquarters, which were left intact for use by the Palestinians. In a somber farewell ceremony, the Israeli commander in Gaza, Brig. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, expressed hope the pullout would be a step toward peace.

“The gate that will close behind us is also the gate that will open,” he said. “We hope it will be a gate of peace and quiet, a gate of hope and goodwill, a gate of neighborliness.”

But he added a threat: “If a bad wind breaks through, then we will greet it with a force of troops ready and waiting.”

A field commander, Lt. Col. Tzvika Tzoran, sat on the turret of a tank on an isolated sand dune in his final moments in Gaza, bidding farewell to the Mediterranean coastline. Other soldiers took pride in the orderly withdrawal, in contrast to a hasty retreat from southern Lebanon five years ago.

But the withdrawal, code-named “Last Watch,” was overshadowed by Israeli-Palestinian disputes, including over border arrangements. The army was forced to cancel a formal handover ceremony, initially set for Sunday, after angry Palestinians said they wouldn’t show up.

The final phase of the pull began Sunday with twin decisions in the Israeli Cabinet — to end military rule in Gaza and not to raze 19 synagogues in former Jewish settlements there.

The last-minute decision to leave the synagogue buildings intact, a reversal of position, angered the Palestinians who said they would now be forced to demolish the buildings. In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Israeli Cabinet decision “puts the Palestinian Authority into a situation where it may be criticized for whatever it does.”

When settlers left Gaza, they took with them the sacred Torah scrolls and the other holy items from the synagogues.

The Palestinians want full control over the Gaza-Egypt border after Israel’s withdrawal, saying free movement of people and goods is essential for rebuilding Gaza’s shattered economy. Israel wants to retain some control, at least temporarily, fearing that militants will smuggle weapons into Gaza.

Israel last week unilaterally closed the Rafah border crossing, the main gateway for Gaza’s 1.3 million Palestinians, to the outside world.

Last week, Israel agreed in principle that foreign observers could eventually replace Israeli inspectors at Rafah. However, Israel said it could be months before the border reopens, and that a final deal would depend on Palestinian willingness to crack down on militant groups.

In the meantime, it plans to reroute border traffic through alternate Israeli-controlled crossings and turn over security control of the border to Egyptian forces, 750 of whom deployed at the border over the weekend.

 

750 EGYPTIAN TROOPS DEPLOYED ALONG GAZA BORDER

Egyptian Troops Deploy Along Gaza Border
The Associated Press
September 10, 2005

Egypt deployed the first of 750 border troops along its desert frontier with the Gaza Strip on Saturday, in line with Israel’s withdrawal from the volatile Palestinian area.

Mohammed Youssef, an official with the Egyptian State Information Service based in the border city of Rafah, said 200 soldiers were dispatched on Saturday and the remainder would take their places during the next week.

“This is the beginning of the deployment of 750 Egyptian border soldiers along the Philadelphi corridor according to the agreement between the Egyptians and the Israelis to maintain security along the Gaza-Egypt border after the Israeli withdrawal,” Youssef told The Associated Press.

Youssef said the soldiers will be responsible for preventing infiltration of weapons and drugs into the Palestinian-controlled area.

The soldiers deploying along the Philadelphi corridor known to Arabs as the Saladin corridor will be able to carry heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, Youssef added.

The troops are going to an area near the Rafah refugee camp, which has been a frequent scene of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians.

FULL ARTICLES

HAMAS’S SECRETIVE MILITARY BRANCH COMES OUT OF HIDING

Hamas’s secretive military branch reveals its structure
Details attacks in bid to get credit for Gaza pullout
The Associated Press
September 4, 2005

Hamas’s secretive military wing emerged from hiding yesterday, naming commanders and detailing how they attacked Israelis as part of a competition with the Palestinian Authority over who will get credit for Israel’s pullout from Gaza.

The battle over public opinion could determine who rules Gaza after the final Israeli soldiers leave Sept. 15. Hamas says it drove Israel out with attacks, while Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas credits his nonviolent approach.

Yesterday, a defiant Hamas delivered a new challenge to Abbas, who has come under increasing international pressure to disarm the group after the Israeli pullout, but is reluctant to do so.

On its website, the Hamas military wing, Izzedine al Qassam, laid bare its command structure for the first time, posting the names of seven top operatives, along with photos, biographies, and interviews. One of the commanders said the group had more volunteers for suicide missions than he could dispatch.

Hamas is also printing tens of thousands of fliers with the content of the website, to be distributed in coming days in mosques and at rallies.

The seven names were known to some in Gaza, but yesterday marked the first time Hamas itself presented them in public, along with their job titles. At the top of the pyramid was Mohammed Deif, who has been number one on Israel’s wanted list for years and has survived three attempts by Israel to kill him.

In comments posted on the website, Deif warned that Hamas would use force if Palestinian police tried to disarm or arrest members of the group.

“We will respond to any attack, whether from the authority or from the Israelis,” Deif was quoted as saying.

Deif also said Izzedine al Qassam would not disband, but would instead continue to develop weapons, including rockets.

He was evasive when asked whether the group would stick to an informal cease-fire with Israel, particularly after the Gaza pullout. Hamas is competing in parliamentary elections in January and appears reluctant to carry out attacks, amid concerns it could lose popularity among voters if held responsible for provoking reprisals.

Hassan Yousef, a Hamas leader in the West Bank, said Izzedine al Qassam came forward “to show the role of resistance in liberating Gaza.” Alluding to the competition with Abbas, he said the militants “felt that there are some people who wanted to downplay the role of the resistance.”

Abbas is also trying to win political capital from the Israeli pullout.

He stands to gain if Gazans, fenced in during nearly five years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, win some freedom of movement as a result of new border arrangements the Palestinian Authority is trying to negotiate with Israel.

In a visit to Palestinian schools at the start of the new school year yesterday, Abbas emphasized that the Israeli pullout will improve daily life.

“God willing, the people will live in peace and security,” Abbas told students in Gaza City. “The Israeli attacks will end, and then people will enjoy freedom of movement.”

A senior Israeli defense official, Major General Amos Gilad, reiterated yesterday that Israel would retaliate harshly against any attacks from Gaza, even after the pullout. He said the Palestinian Authority has the means, but not the political will to disarm Hamas.

“Hamas is basically setting itself up as an alternative Palestinian Authority,” he told Israel Radio.

Israel has demanded Abbas disarm the group -- in line with Palestinian obligations under the US-backed “road map” peace plan. Israel also opposes Hamas participation in parliament elections.

Abbas has been trying to co-opt the militants, offering them employment in the security services and urging them not to flaunt their weapons in public. Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said yesterday that “changes of government and power will be through ballots, not bullets.”

Abbas, however, might be forced to act if Hamas continues to embarrass him, as part of the growing competition over public support.

In his website comments, Deif described how Izzedine al Qassam gradually built bombs and rockets. He said the group’s first attack, in January 1992, was the killing of a rabbi in the Israeli settlement of Kfar Darom in Gaza. “He was shot by our brothers with a 7mm pistol . . . which was the only pistol that we had,” he said.

In 1995, after a few failures, Hamas built its first crude bombs, followed a few years later by rockets. He said the most effective weapon was the suicide blast, scores of which Hamas set off in Israel from the mid-1990s. Hundreds of Israelis, including many civilians, were killed in such bombings.

The other senior operatives named on the website were: Ahmed Jaberi, a Deif deputy; Raed Saed, commander of Gaza City; Ahmed al Ghandor, commander of northern Gaza; Mohammed Abu Shamaleh, commander of southern Gaza; Marwan Issa, a Deif deputy; and Mohammed al Sanwar, commander of the town of Khan Younis.

 

RANTISI’S WIDOW RUNS FOR ELECTION

Rantisi’s widow runs for election
By Khaled Abu Toameh
The Jerusalem Post
September 3, 2005

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1125717507226

Rasha Rantisi, the widow of slain Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, announced on Saturday that she was planning to run in parliamentary elections scheduled to be held next January.

In a statement issued in Gaza City, the widow called on female supporters of Hamas to follow suit and to present their candidacy for the elections. “We are now headed toward a more difficult period,” she said. “We are headed toward the phase of construction after liberation. Palestinian women are called upon to take an active and powerful role in the process of reconstruction.”

Rantisi, who is also known as Umm Muhammed, said she decided to participate in the elections so that she could bring about real changes and reforms and battle corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

She lauded the role of Palestinian women in the fight against Israel, specifically referring to those who carried out suicide attacks such as Reem al-Rayashi, Ayat al-Akhras and Hanadi Jaradat.

“Palestinian women have produced great heroes who resisted the occupation in a legendary fashion and dug underground tunnels that instilled fear in the hearts of the enemy,” she added. “It is with great honor that we see today the fruits of these sacrifices, as the enemy run away from our lands.”

Rantisi said the fight against Israel would not be over with the completion of Israel’s pullout from the Gaza Strip and parts of the northern West Bank. “Our case is not Gaza alone,” she stressed. “The other parts of Palestine and the Aksa mosque continue to suffer under the yoke of occupation.”

Addressing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the widow said: “Don’t ever think of returning to Gaza. You must know that what the world has witnessed marks the beginning of the destruction of your state. Gaza won’t lay down its weapon and will continue the struggle.”

In August 2002, the IDF released what it said was a telephone conversation between Rantisi’s wife and a Hamas activist.

In the conversation, which was broadcast on Israel’s Arabic- language satellite television station, the voice of a man, who identified himself as “a student of the martyr engineer Yehya Ayyash,” asks to speak with Muhammed, Rantisi’s son.

The woman on the other end of the line, who identified herself as Umm Muhammed [Muhammed’s mother], begged the man not to send her son on a suicide mission because he was her only son and had not yet finished school.

The call, intercepted and recroded by one of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces, was handed over to the IDF as part of security coordination between the two sides.

 

HAMAS DEVELOP IMPROVED QASSAM ROCKET

Hamas develops improved rocket
By Alex Fishman
Ynetnews
September 4, 2005

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3137343,00.html

Hamas terrorists have developed a Qassam rocket with a 16.5 kilometer (about 10 miles) range. As a result, the power station in the southern town of Ashkelon, as well as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s private residence, Sycamore Ranch, are now in range of the Qassams.

According to reports received by Israel recently, Hamas’ engineers were able to achieve a significant advance in their rocket technology. The new rockets are not operational yet, but rather, in advance stages of development and experimentation, but a senior security official said the Hamas will possess ready-to-use rockets in several months if development work continues.

Such rockets would threaten dozens of other Israeli communities as well as sensitive sites.

Officials here are concerned that the first cargo ships to reach the Gaza port following the disengagement will carry equipment that will allow terrorists to improve their Qassams.

“It’s already waiting in a warehouse somewhere,”an Israeli expert said Saturday. “If under improvised conditions they were able to produce such a quantity of rockets, we can expect very ‘hot’ days after the pullout.”

The expert also warned that better explosives would make the rockets more lethal and destructive.

According to intelligence information, terror groups in Gaza already possess rockets with an 11-12 kilometer range (about 7 miles) but have not fired them on Israel yet. The longest-range Qassam to be fired at Israel to date traveled nine kilometers (close to six miles.)

Intelligence assessments regarding the rocket threat lead to a decision to install the Red Dawn anti-Qassam alert system in Ashkelon. Currently, the system operates in the southern town of Sderot, ravaged by rocket attacks over the past year.

 

“THEY ARE NOT THE POLICE. THEY ARE ONLY MASKED MEN”

In Gaza, a young man’s stunt sparks rumble
By Ned Parker
Agence France-Presse (as carried in the Jordan Times)
September 5, 2005

www.jordantimes.com/mon/news/news6.htm

It could have been Detroit or London. Teenagers fighting over sneakers and a nasty look. But this was Rafah, one of the world’s grimmest border towns, where a young man’s grudge could drag families and militias to war and rattle society’s very foundations.

It started when 29-year-old Sidqi Barbakh revved the wheels of his blue Mercedes, spewing dirt in the faces of Hamas fighters manning a nighttime checkpoint.

Barbakh’s challenge set off events that brought the two Palestinian political heavyweights Hamas and Fateh to the brink of armed conflict, at a time when many fear a spike in inter-Palestinian fighting as political parties jockey for power after Israel completes its withdrawal.

Palestinian parties’ militias occasionally come to blows in the Gaza Strip. In July, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority and its Fateh supporters battled in Gaza City.

In gentler places, Barbakh’s hot-rod manoeuvre might have sparked a drag race, but in this traumatised city of 156,0000, where blood and political ties overlap, armed Hamas men vowed to hunt him down.

Both sides fell back on their connections. Barbakh leaned on his status as an intelligence agent in the Palestinian Authority and his tribal ties with his 15,000 strong clan that flaunts a reputation for never steering away from a fight.

“Every party depends on big families to support their cause,” says local Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoom.

According to tradition, Barbakh’s family sent an emissary to the aggrieved Hamas members’ relatives with a formal apology, but it was not enough.

The Hamas members jumped a car a few days later carrying someone they thought was Barbakh, whom they proceeded to beat.

A tense standoff ensued in Rafah’s Brazil refugee camp where the warring sides lived.

Tucked on a side street, Barbakh’s five-floor grey apartment building, spray-painted in red and black with the names of men killed in the Intifada, stood about 300 metres from the white home of a prominent Hamas member whose followers guarded the street at night.

Finally, Tuesday morning at 2:00am, the Hamas men hunting Barbakh for a week pumped 12 shots into his car when he tried to speed by their checkpoint. The bullet holes pierced the windshield next to a smiling decal of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Barbakh received a shrapnel wound in his back, his brother Walid had shrapnel in his neck. The pair tumbled to the ground and neighbours came out and shielded them from the Hamas members.

Within minutes, a car of men sprayed bullets into the home of Hamas’ political leader in Rafah, Issa Nashar, but wounded no one in the house.

At daylight, the Barbakhs’ filed an arrest warrant against four Hamas members, including Nashar’s son.

A policemen went to arrest one of the Hamas member and gunmen fired warning shots. At least 40 Fateh and Hamas men flooded the area, poised with weapons, and took positions across the city.

“The problem grew bigger because Barbakh was a member of the Palestinian security services,” Barhoom says.

In backroom meetings, the sheikhs from the Barbakh tribe and Hamas and Fateh leaders tried to defuse the crisis and reached a deal by sunset.

The sides agreed the Hamas members would offer an apology to the Barbakhs and the bands tucked their guns away. The fight was graded down to tribal and the political parties walked away, happy they had averted a bloodbath.

Limping outside his home, Barbakh, who wears a black beard, vented angrily about Hamas’ continued nighttime checkpoints on the streets of Rafah.

“I refused to stop at their checkpoints because they are not the police. They are only masked men,” the young man says to nods of approval from a dozen relatives, many of whom identified themselves as Fateh followers.

“They are out on the street because they want to demonstrate they are the real authority.”

His cousin Abdul Rauf Barbakh, a 32-year-old Fateh leader, with a rolling belly and thinning grey hair, warned that apology or not the Barbakhs would not just forget.

“Our family can strike Hamas. If any member of our family is killed or hurt, we will do it.

“The Palestinian Authority is working for a truce and has relations with Hamas, but as a family we don’t work with Hamas for anything.”

FULL ARTICLES

MUSLIMS RANSACK CHRISTIAN VILLAGE

Muslims ransack Christian village
By Khaled Abu Toameh
The Jerusalem Post
September 5, 2005

Efforts were under way on Sunday to calm the situation in this Christian village east of Ramallah after an attack by hundreds of Muslim men from nearby villages left many houses and vehicles torched.

The incident began on Saturday night and lasted until early Sunday, when Palestinian Authority security forces interfered to disperse the attackers. Residents said several houses were looted and many families were forced to flee to Ramallah and other Christian villages, although no one was injured.

The attack on the village of 1,500 was triggered by the murder of a Muslim woman from the nearby village of Deir Jarir earlier this week. The 30-year-old woman, according to PA security sources, was apparently murdered by members of her family for having had a romance with a Christian man from Taiba.

“When her family discovered that she had been involved in a forbidden relationship with a Christian, they apparently forced her to drink poison,” said one source. “Then they buried her without reporting her death to the relevant authorities.”

When the PA security forces decided to launch an investigation into the woman’s death, her family protested for fear that the relationship would be exposed. The family was further infuriated by the decision to exhume the body for autopsy.

The attack is one of the worst against Christians in the West Bank in many years. Residents said it took the PA security forces several hours to reach Taiba. Others complained that the IDF, which is in charge of overall security in the area, did not answer their desperate calls for immediate help.

“More than 500 Muslim men, chanting Allahu akbar [God is great], attacked us at night,” said a Taiba resident. “They poured kerosene on many buildings and set them on fire. Many of the attackers broke into houses and stole furniture, jewelry and electrical appliances.”

With the exception of large numbers of PA policemen, the streets of Taiba were completely deserted on Sunday as the residents remained indoors. Many torched cars littered the streets. At least 16 houses had been gutted by fire and the assailants also destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary.

“It was like a war, they arrived in groups, and many of them were holding clubs,” said another resident.

“Some people saw them carrying weapons. They first attacked houses belonging to the Khoury family [looking for the man who had the affair with the women, not realizing he had already fled the village.] Then they went to their relatives. They entered the houses and destroyed everything there. Then they tried to enter the local beer factory, but were repelled by PA security agents. The fire engine arrived five hours later.”

Col. Tayseer Mansour, commander of the PA police in the Ramallah area, said his men arrived late because of the need to coordinate their movements with the IDF. “The delay resulted in the torching of a number of houses and cars in the village,” he said.

Taiba, the only West Bank village that is completely inhabited by Christians, is famous for its Taiba Beer factory, which was established by the Khoury family in 1994.

The residents are Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox or Greek Catholic. The village was originally called Ephraim, and is thought to be the city to which Jesus came with his disciples before his crucifixion: “Jesus therefore walked no more openly among the Jews; but went thence unto a country near the wilderness, into a city called Ephraim” (John 11:54).

According to some accounts, Salah a-Din, who led the war against the Crusaders, was responsible for the name change. He is said to have found the villagers there to be nice and kind – in Arabic, taybeen – and the name stuck, to become Taiba.

 

MOUSSA ARAFAT KILLED IN GAZA

Arafat cousin killed in brazen challenge to Abbas
By Times (London) online and Associated Press in Gaza City
September 7, 2005

www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-1769209,00.html

A group of 100 masked militants stormed the home of Gaza’s former security chief before dawn today, dragged him out in his pyjamas and killed him in the street in a burst of gunfire.

The murder of Moussa Arafat, a cousin of the late Yassir Arafat, was being seen as the most brazen challenge yet to the authority of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, just days before the scheduled Israeli handover of Gaza to Palestinian rule.

Arafat, 65, was killed after a 30-minute gunbattle between the assailants and dozens of his bodyguards. The fighting with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles raged just a block from the headquarters of the Palestinian security service. Mr Arafat’s oldest son, Manhal, was kidnapped by the gunmen.

The Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a violent group made up largely of former members of Abbas’ Fatah movement, later claimed responsibility. The group said that it killed Arafat to punish him for alleged corruption after the Palestinian security forces had taken no action against him.

“We have implemented God’s law,” Mohammed Abdel Al, a PRC spokesman, told the Associated Press.

Mr Abbas said that he would track down the killers - a pledge immediately put to the test by the bold claim of responsibility. Mr Abbas has said that he will bring bring Fatah fighters under the control of his security forces within three weeks.

The killing heightened concerns that Mr Abbas and his weak security forces will not be able to restore order in the increasing lawless coastal strip where armed gangs control the streets.

Palestinian officials said they viewed the killing as an attack on the government. Mr Abbas convened his top security officials and Palestinian security forces were put on high alert.

While the PRC is made up mostly of former Fatah members, it also includes militants from the Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups. It has taken responsibility for numerous deadly attacks on Israelis.

Members of the group were also arrested by Palestinian police for alleged connection to a bombing against an American diplomatic convoy in October 2003 that killed three Americans. Some were later released for lack of evidence, and others were freed from Gaza’s central jail by fellow militants.

Arafat’s killing came just hours after Palestinian security forces were unable to contain dozens of rock-throwing youths who charged toward abandoned Israeli settlements and climbed on an Israeli tank. A Palestinian teenager was killed by Israeli troops firing to keep back the crowd.

In light of the chaos, the Israeli military sought permission to pull its last soldiers out of Gaza before the September 15 target date, Israeli security officials said. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, and senior Cabinet ministers were to consider the issue in a meeting later today.

Mr Abbas fired Arafat, who had many enemies and was the target of frequent corruption allegations, several months ago as part of government reforms. Mr Abdel Al, the PRC spokesman, said that Arafat “was responsible for killing, stealing and blackmail”.

“Now we have huge files about corrupt deals by Arafat and his son, Manhal, who is being interrogated and confessed to some of these corrupt deals,” he said in a telephone interview. Manhal is a senior security official.

In this morning’s military-style attack, about 100 gunmen overpowered dozens of bodyguards patrolling outside his four-storey home in an upscale Gaza City neighborhood. The attackers blew the iron gate off its hinges and tied up the bodyguards after a 30-minute gunbattle, Mr Abdel Al said.

After the attack, Arafat was dragged outside and shot in the sandy street. Palestinian police said three bodyguards were initially kidnapped, along with Manhal Arafat, but were later released. One bodyguard was shot in the leg. Residents said that they heard more than two dozen loud explosions.

The headquarters of the Preventive Security Service is just a block away, but security agents did not intervene. The security forces might have mistaken the shooting for one of the routine nightly training exercises militants stage in the area.

Cabinet minister Sufian Abu Zeideh said that the killing was an attack on the government. “He (Arafat) was a symbol of the authority,” he told Israel Army Radio. Arafat was a founder of the ruling Fatah movement and was a senior official in the Fatah Revolutionary Council, a top policy-making body.

After he was fired as security chief, Arafat was given the considerably less influential job of military adviser to Abbas. He was a target of previous assassination attempts and always traveled in a heavily guarded convoy, using an armored limousine that once transported Yassir Arafat.

 

HIZBULLAH “12,000 OF OUR ROCKETS CAN REACH ISRAEL”

‘12,000 of our rockets can reach Israel’
Reuters
September 3, 2005

Hizbullah Chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah says ‘any hand that reaches out to our weapons is an Israeli hand that will be cut off’

Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged Wednesday his organization had over 12,000 rockets capable of hitting the whole of northern Israel.

Nasrallah’s statement marks the first time an official Hizbullah source has disclosed specific information regarding the organization’s arsenal.

Under mounting international pressure to disarm, Nasrallah said Hizbullah would fight anyone who tried to take away its weapons.

“Any hand that reaches out to our weapons is an Israeli hand that will be cut off,” he told supporters on the fifth anniversary of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

“We do not want to attack anyone and will not allow anyone to attack Lebanon; but if anyone, anyone, thinks of disarming the resistance we will fight them like the martyrs of Kerbala,” Nasrallah said, referring to a battle in Islamic history central to Shiites.

The largely Shiite Muslim residents of the southern suburbs of Beirut, a Hizbullah stronghold, celebrated Nasrallah’s words with fireworks and cheering, witnesses said.

Nasrallah told thousands of supporters in the town of Bint Jbeil, part of a southern strip Israel occupied for 22 years, that Hizbullah, backed by Syria and Iran, would only use its weapons in defense of Lebanon.

“We do not want to drag the region into a war...We want to protect our country...” he said. “Any thought of disarming the resistance is madness.”

Hizbullah’s terror attacks were instrumental in prompting Israel to pull its troops out of the south in May 2000.

A United Nations Security Council resolution adopted in September demanded that Syrian forces pull out and all militias in Lebanon disarm. Damascus withdrew its forces in April.

FULL ARTICLES

ZARQAWI: KATRINA “BEGINNING OF THE END” FOR US

Zarqawi says Katrina ‘beginning of the end’ for US
Agence France Presse (AFP)
September 4, 2005

The group headed by Iraq’s most wanted man Abu Musab al-Zarqawi hailed in an Internet statement what it said was the “start of the collapse” of the United States after the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

“Congratulations to the Islamic nation, to our sheikh Osama abu Abdullah (Osama bin Laden) and to sheikh Ayman Zawahiri (bin Laden’s deputy) for the destruction of America, which is at the forefront of evil. It is the start of its collapse.”

The statement, whose authenticity could not be confirmed, was referring to the hurricane that has devastated New Orleans and left thousands feared dead.

 

AL QAEDA CONGRATULATES MUSLIM NATION ON HURRICANE KATRINA

Al-Qaeda Congratulates the Muslim Nation on what has befallen America
By Ubaidah Al-Saif
Translated by JUS
September 5, 2005

Statement issued by Al-Qaeda In The Land Of The Two Rivers (The Islamist term for Iraq -- TG)
Rajab 28th 1426 (The Islamic date corresponding with September 3, 2005 -- TG)

With a shattered New Orleans all but emptied out, an unprecedented refugee crisis unfolding across the United States, American governors and emergency officials are in a state of chaos. No one knows at this juncture how many people exactly were killed by Hurricane Katrina, but it is thought to be in the thousands, with some succumbing to death while waiting to be rescued due to a shortage of emergency services. But bodies are everywhere: hidden in attics, floating in the devastated city, crumpled in wheelchairs, abandoned on highways.

Since the American catastrophe began unfolding, journalists of all types and persuasions have been framing the disaster in terms of blowback from condition of war that the US is now embroiled in. None however have openly rejoiced louder than Al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, who released a statement yesterday congratulating the Muslim Ummah on the hardship that has befallen America.

Al-Qaeda Congratulates The Muslim Nation On What Has Befallen The Cross Worshippers

In The Name Of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful

Praise be to Allah, who caused every action to have a reaction, hence, He crushed the aggressors and destroyed them into scattered pieces. Peace and prayer be upon our prophet, who raised the Islamic banner with the sword and made the truth (about Islam) abundantly clear with Jihad. Peace be upon his family and companions who were the possessors of knowledge and wisdom.

“If there were a Qur’an with which mountains were moved or the earth were cloven asunder or the dead were made to speak (this would be the one!) But truly the Command is with Allah in things! Do not the Believers know that had Allah (so) willed He could have guided all mankind (to the Right)? But the Unbelievers never will disaster cease to seize them for their (ill) deeds or to settle close to their homes until the Promise of Allah come to pass for verily Allah will not fail in His promise” 13:31

Congratulation to the Nation of Islam; and Sheikh of Mujahideen Osama Abi Abdullah, and our Prince Mullah Mohamad Omar, and to Sheikh Al-Zawaheri, and to Fallujah, Al-Qa’im, Hadithah and Karabala. Congratulation to our people in Palestine and the whole Islamic nation for the prophesised and awaited destruction of the infidel’s head, America is at hand. This is showing the sign of their downfall. Every day disasters get closer to them.

{Now such were their houses,-in utter ruin,-because they practiced wrong-doing. Verily in this is a sign for people of knowledge.} 27:52

{....We did them no wrong, but they were used to doing wrong to themselves.} 16:118

Not long ago the USA was able to target and assault any one they like, starve who ever they wished to starve and kill who every they chose to kill. Now it turns to their door steps; they are short of supplies and fuel. This is Allah’s sorties targeting the Americans. This is the result of the prayers of the innocent who have been unjustly treated by the infidels.

{“So We opened the gates of heaven with water pouring forth”} 54:11

{“And We caused the earth to gush forth with springs so the waters met (and rose) to the extent decreed”} 54:12

Nation of the beloved Mohamad (SAW), it is Allah’s prayers we seek and your Dua’a. The victory is on the horizon. Allah’s fury has been unleashed on the nation of evil, tyranny and oppression. Their death tolls are in the thousands, and their losses are in the billions. You should pray victory and perform the Dua’a for the Allah’s support of the Mujahideen.

{“Say: “Can you expect for us (any fate) other than one of two glorious things (martyrdom or victory)? But we can expect for you either that Allah will send His punishment from Himself or by our hands. So wait (expectant); we too will wait with you.”} 113:52

If the Muslims on this earth fall short of the support of their faith then, Allah will counter the infidels. This is a wake up call to the Tyrant Arab regimes, the sorties of Allah in revenge through tidal waves, deluge, hurricanes and the Mujahideen is overtaking His enemies everywhere.

{... and none can know the forces of the Lord, except He, and this is no other than a reminder to mankind.} 74:31

{Say: O my people! Do whatever you can: I will do (my part): soon will you know who is it whose end will be (best) in the Hereafter: Certain it is that the wrong-doers will not prosper.} 06:135

O’ Allah, destroy the head of the Infidels, America,
O’ Allah, don’t leave one of them.
O’ Allah, punish them by our hand and yours,
O’ Allah, send them the Surge, Hurricanes and tidal waves,
O’ Allah, free our brothers and sisters in the jails of the crusaders and the apostates,
O’ Allah, give victory to the Mujahideen everywhere.
O’ Allah, protect our Mujahideen leaders Sheikh Osama, Mullah Omar and Shiekh Al- Zawahiri,
O’ Allah, bring harm to whoever wants to harm them,
O’ Allah, Author of the Koran, and the guider of clouds, grant us victory and defeat them
O’ Allah, Author of the Koran, and the guider of clouds, grant us victory and defeat them
O’ Allah, Author of the Koran, and the guider of clouds, grant us victory and defeat them.

{“These are some of the stories of communities which We relate unto thee: of them some are standing and some have been mown down” (by the sickle of time).}11:100

{“It was not We that wronged them: they wronged their own souls: the deities other than Allah whom they invoked profited them no whit when there issued the decree of thy Lord: nor did they add aught (to their lot) but perdition!”} 11:101

{“Such is the chastisement of thy Lord when He chastises communities in the midst of their wrong: grievous indeed and severe is His chastisement.”} 11:102

Allahu Akbar...Allahu Akbar... Glory is to Allah, His Prophet and Believers.

 

“KATRINA IS A WIND OF TORMENT AND EVIL FROM ALLAH”

Senior Kuwaiti Official: “Katrina is a Wind of Torment and Evil from Allah Sent to This American Empire”

MEMRI Dispatch - Kuwait
September 1, 2005

In reaction to Hurricane Katrina and the destruction in its wake, a high-ranking Kuwaiti official, Muhammad Yousef Al-Mlaifi, who is director of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Endowment’s research center, published an article titled “The Terrorist Katrina is One of the Soldiers of Allah, But Not an Adherent of Al-Qaeda.” (1) The article appeared August 31, 2005 in the Kuwaiti daily Al-Siyassa.

The following are excerpts from his article from Al-Siyassa (Kuwait), August 31, 2005:

“The Terrorist Katrina is One of the Soldiers of Allah...”

“... As I watched the horrible sights of this wondrous storm, I was reminded of the Hadith of the Messenger of Allah [in the compilations] of Al-Bukhari and Abu Daoud. The Hadith says: ‘The wind is of the wind of Allah, it comes from mercy or for the sake of torment. When you see it, do not curse it, [but rather] ask Allah for the good that is in it, and ask Allah for shelter from its evil.’ Afterwards, I was [also] reminded of the words of the Prophet Muhammad: ‘Do not curse the wind, as it is the fruit of Allah’s planning. He who curses something that should not be cursed the curse will come back to him.’

“When the satellite channels reported on the scope of the terrifying destruction in America [caused by] this wind, I was reminded of the words of [Prophet Muhammad]: ‘The wind sends torment to one group of people, and sends mercy to others.’ I do not think and only Allah [really] knows that this wind, which completely wiped out American cities in these days, is a wind of mercy and blessing. It is almost certain that this is a wind of torment and evil that Allah has sent to this American empire. Out of my absolute belief in the truth of the words of the Prophet Muhammad, this wind is the fruit of the planning [of Allah], as is stated in the text of the Hadith of the Prophet.

“But I began to ask myself: Doesn’t this country [the U.S.] claim to aspire to establish justice, freedom, and equality amongst the people? Isn’t this country claiming that everything it did in Afghanistan and Iraq was for truth and justice? How can it be that these American claims are untrue, when we see how good prevails in the streets of Afghanistan, and how it became an oasis of security with America’s entrance there? How can these American claims in the matter of Iraq be untrue, when we see that Iraq has become the most tranquil and secure country in the world?”

“But how strange it is that after all the tremendous American achievements for the sake of humanity, these mighty winds come and evilly rip [America’s] cities to shreds? Have the storms have joined the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization?

“The Disaster Will Keep Striking the Unbelievers for What They Have Done”

“How sad I am for America. Here it is, poor thing, trying with all its might to lower oil prices which have reached heights unprecedented in all history. Along with America’s phenomenal efforts to lower the price of oil in order to salvage its declining economy and its currency that is still falling due to the ‘smart’ policy America is implementing in the world comes this storm, the fruit of Allah’s planning, so that [the price of] a barrel of oil will increase further still. By Allah, this is not schadenfreude.

“Oh honored gentlemen, I began to read about these winds, and I was surprised to discover that the American websites that are translated [into Arabic] are talking about the fact that that the storm Katrina is the fifth equatorial storm to strike Florida this year... and that a large part of the U.S. is subject every year to many storms that extract [a price of] dead, and completely destroy property. I said, Allah be praised, until when will these successive catastrophes strike them?

“But before I went to sleep, I opened the Koran and began to read in Surat Al-R’ad [‘The Thunder’ chapter], and stopped at these words [of Allah]: ‘The disaster will keep striking the unbelievers for what they have done, or it will strike areas close to their territory, until the promise of Allah comes to pass, for, verily, Allah will not fail in His promise.’ [Koran 13:31].”

 

HURRICANE KATRINA TO COST $100 BILLION

Katrina price tag put at $100 billion
United Press International
September 3, 2005

The first estimate of economic losses from Hurricane Katrina has been put at $100 billion.

The new figures suggest that Hurricane Katrina will cost the insurance industry more than any other natural disaster on record, the New York Times said Saturday.

In making its estimate, Risk Management Solutions in Newark, Calif., said that private insurance probably would cover less than a quarter of that, with federal money and charitable contributions possibly handling the rest.

Company forecasters said that insured losses would range from $20 billion to $35 billion.

But there is far more that commercial insurers likely will not absorb, such as damage to roads, highways, utilities and public buildings, as well as the cost of government relief efforts. There is also the huge cost of not doing business, which the firm estimated at $100 million a day.

Katrina’s price tag is expected to pass Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which cost $21 billion in 2004 dollars.

 

ISRAEL SENDING RELIEF AID, VOLUNTEERS TO US

Israel sending relief aid, volunteers to U.S.
Ha’aretz
September 5, 2005

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/621184.html

The Bush administration has accepted Israel’s offers of assistance to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, with a first shipment of supplies expected to be sent on Tuesday.

Israel will send a search and rescue team, military rations and other emergency supplies to the United States to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, officials said Monday.

In the first stage, Israel is to deliver IDF-type “battle ration” field meals, preserved food, water, tents, generators, baby formula, diapers and bedding.

At the same time, a team of 25 volunteer medical, search-and-rescue and mental health workers will leave for Louisiana on Tuesday. The non-governmental aid is being organized by the “Israeli Flying Aid” group.

“Israel was one of the first nations to offer relief aid, if not the first,” said Israeli Ambassador to Washington Danny Ayalon, citing letters from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to President George Bush and the secretaries of state, defense, and homeland security.

“Even if it will be modest aid, even if it will be symbolic aid, it is still very important.

The flag at the Israeli embassy in Washington will be lowered to half-mast in memory of the victims of the disaster in line with flags throughout the United States, Ayalon said.

Israeli diplomats are working on an emergency footing. “We will continue to be in contact with the administration and with the [Jewish] communities in the field,” he told Israel Radio.

Apart from extending aid to Jewish evacuees from New Orleans, “We were happy to locate three missing Israelis yesterday,” he said. “To our sorrow, we still know of two [Israelis] missing in the Houston area.”

A delegation of defense and health experts accompanying the first shipment of supplies will be headed by the director-general of the Health Ministry and the chief of the IDF Medical Corps, said Health Minister Danny Naveh.

“We are organizing this morning in order to respond to all the needs that the Americans request,” said Health Minister Danny Naveh. “We are well-schooled in this matter, having sent relief aid to disaster-stricken countries around the world. In this case, with our greatest friend, we will certainly do everything in our power, with everything we can.”

“We know that when we have been in distress in the past, in wars and other difficult periords, the United States stood at our side. At a time when the U.S. is undergoing so terrible a disaster, it is the most natural, human thing for us to stand up and do what we can with our modest powers, the little that we have, in order to help.”

 

SADDAM LAWYER REJECTS TRIAL DATE AS TOO EARLY

Saddam lawyer rejects trial date as too early
By Mohammed Ramahi
Reuters
September 3, 2005

Saddam Hussein’s chief attorney dismissed statements from the Iraqi government that the former president’s trial would begin on October 19 as “invalid” and said on Saturday he needed “years” just to read the evidence.

“The defense team has not been informed about the decision and has not signed it. It is invalid,” Khalil Dulaimi told Reuters, adding that in any case he did not recognize the legitimacy of the Special Tribunal set up to try Saddam and his aides.

He also complained that there was not enough time to study all the documents related to the trial: “It will take years to study the 36 tonnes of files.”

It seems unlikely the lawyer’s protest will be heeded. Saddam and several aides will go on trial on October 19, an Iraqi government source said on Friday.

The process, for the killing of dozens of Shi’ite villagers at Dujail in 1982, will therefore be starting just a few days after a referendum on a new constitution that the U.S.-backed authorities intend to bury the legacy of his dictatorship.

The source, who is not attached to the Special Tribunal actually trying the deposed president and his aides for crimes against humanity, forecast a quick trial and execution.

“After what he did, how can we not execute him?” he said.

On Thursday, Iraq hanged its first three criminals since Saddam was overthrown in 2003 and officials in the Shi’ite-led government have made clear they want a death sentence for a man they blame for the deaths of many thousands.

The trial may stir passions among some minority Sunni Arabs, who dominated Iraq under Saddam and before. In some demonstrations this past week against the new constitution, his face reappeared in public, on placards and posters.

Saddam followers also play a role in the violence against U.S. troops and forces loyal to the Shi’ite-led government.

For that reason, the timing of the trial has been sensitive; judicial officials indicated last month that the Dujail hearings would be ready to start by the beginning of October, so the choice of Wednesday October 19 appears politically driven to avoid it clashing with the referendum campaign.

The timing of any conviction and sentencing, and indeed execution, may be similarly affected by a parliamentary election due in December. Officials say the trial will not run into years or anything like the time former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has been before the international court at The Hague.

Weeks rather than months, was a forecast by one official involved in the process. He also said recently it was possible that Saddam might be executed if convicted only of the killings at Dujail, so that further trials for mass murder against Kurds and Shi’ites and other offences might never take place.

The Iraqi government, reflecting a popular mood, seems keen on dispatching the former leader quickly, hence the choice of the relatively small Dujail case to begin the process.

Prosecutors have said Saddam’s direct responsibility for the deaths may be easier to prove. The case involves the deaths of possibly more than 140 men from the village, north of Baghdad, where Saddam survived an assassination attempt in 1982.

The trial, which officials have said will probably largely be televised, will be held in a specially prepared building inside the fortified Green Zone government compound which was once Saddam’s presidential palace complex on the Tigris.

 

SADDAM’S DAUGHTER PLANS DEFENSE STRATEGY

Saddam’s Daughter Plans Defense Strategy
By Jamal Halaby
The Associated Press
September 3, 2005

Saddam Hussein’s daughter has devised a strategy for the defense of Iraq’s ousted leader, including a media campaign and hiring of a new team of international lawyers, for the expected start of her father’s trial next month, she said Saturday.

Raghad Saddam Hussein said in a statement that the “future work plan” for the next six weeks was drafted after three days of consultations in Amman with unnamed legal consultants from Iraq, Jordan, Yemen, Sudan and Lebanon.

Her announcement came a day after an Iraqi official in Baghdad said authorities have set Oct. 19 as the start date for Saddam’s trial, which will follow a referendum on the new constitution.

But a Western diplomat in Iraq has discounted the report as “posturing” without providing further details.

Saddam is to face the first of perhaps a dozen trials before the Iraqi Special Tribunal next month. In July, the tribunal accused Saddam and three others in the 1982 massacre of about 150 Shiites in the town of Dujail north of Baghdad, killings allegedly carried out in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt against Saddam.

The daughter’s statement said a new “legal committee of international lawyers” will be formed to replace a squabbling assemblage of more than 1,500 Arab and Western attorneys fired last month amid accusations the group was harmful to Saddam because of conflicting legal advice and bickering among its members.

Saddam’s family has retained only Iraqi lawyer Khalil Dulaimi, who has met Saddam at least once since the legal team was fired Aug. 8.

The new team will assist Dulaimi and “prepare the necessary legal defense when the trial takes place,” according to Saddam’s daughter’s written statement made available to The Associated Press.

It said Dulaimi will also pick some Iraqi lawyers to help him in “preparing a legal defense in accordance with the laws of Iraq.”

Saddam will be “briefed on their names in order to give his approval,” it added. It did not name the lawyers nor say when they will be hired. At least two sources close to Saddam’s daughter declined comment.

Last month, Abdel Haq Alani, a Britain-based lawyer working as Raghad Saddam Hussein’s legal consultant, said Saddam’s family had approached a Queen’s Council barrister — the grouping of Britain’s top lawyers — to “instruct in the preparation of the defense and to assist Mr. Dulaimi in leading the defense.”

Alani was not immediately available for comment Saturday.

Other steps in Raghad Saddam Hussein’s defense strategy include “establishing a political and media affairs committee to keep the Arab and international public opinion well informed on developments in the case and to keep in touch with Arab organizations abroad, as well as with civil society organizations all over the world,” the statement said without elaborating.

It said Saddam’s family will “seek to find financial resources to support the defense efforts and to cover the expenses” of volunteers, including administrative and legal assistants to the defense team.

FULL ARTICLE

“ONE OF THE TRIGGERS THAT HELPED TO IGNITE THE SECOND INTIFADA”

Manufacturing Consent; or, the anatomy of an image
By Natasha Lehrer
Jewish Quarterly
Summer 2005 issue

All through the 20th century, photographs of agonised children have taken on iconic status as images of modern warfare. Think of the picture of the small child with his hands raised leaving the Warsaw Ghetto, his innocent gaze directly captured by the camera. Or the shot of a naked young girl, Kim Phuc, fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam in 1972, her body burned, her face contorted with pain and terror. Or the image of Mohammed Al-Dura, cowering with fear as his father tries in vain to shield him against a wall before he is shot dead by an Israeli soldier.

Because these images are of children, the innocent victims of the terrible wars waged by adults, they seem to encapsulate all the futility and evil of armed conflict and oppression. As Libby Brooks wrote in the Guardian (April 26th, 2003):

‘A child in pain and distress personifies innocence abused. As yet untainted by the complexities that attend the colour of their skin or the affiliations of their parents, they bring moral clarity to a world of seemingly amoral confusion. They offer the opportunity to tell a story . . . in a context where no straight narrative exists.’

Susan Sontag, in an essay in the New Yorker in 2002 (that later became a book, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003), describes war photography as helping to construct ‘a grammar …and an ethics of seeing’. She points out how images such as those from the Vietnam War

‘became important in bolstering indignation at this war which had been far from inevitable, far from intractable; and could have been stopped much sooner. Therefore one could feel an obligation to look at these pictures, gruesome as they were, because there was something to be done, right now, about what they depicted.’

A truly iconic image can have a greater power than simply influencing public opinion around the world. The image of a terrified Jamal and Mohammed al-Dura cringing from a barrage of gunfire as they tried to protect themselves from behind a concrete barrel - a still taken from a videotape - was one of the triggers that helped to ignite the second Intifada (it took place on September 30th 2000, just 2 days after Sharon’s infamous walk on the Temple Mount). With his death Mohammed became ‘the first child martyr of the Intifada’. Less than a fortnight after his murder two Israeli soldiers were lynched in Ramallah in revenge. When the murder of Daniel Pearl was filmed in January 2002, little Mohammed’s face could be seen on a poster on a wall behind the American journalist, suggesting that his kidnapping and murder were partly to avenge the killing of the Palestinian child.

I remember my horror when I saw the death of the boy caught on camera. Those days were grim; every day the situation in Jerusalem and the occupied territories gained a terrible momentum, which came to an unprecedented head at the Neztarim junction in Gaza the day Mohammed al-Durra, unable to run and hide, was picked out by the sights of an Israeli machine gun. Charles Enderlin, the Jerusalem Correspondent of French state-owned television station France 2, who was not actually in Gaza that day, edited a piece from raw footage filmed by Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian cameraman and longstanding contributor to France 2, into a 55 second piece with his own commentary: ‘The shooting comes from the Israeli position. One more volley and the kid will be dead’. The footage was beamed around the world that night thanks to the righteous refusal of France 2 to take money for syndicating the piece, not wanting to profit from the death of a child.

Mahmoud Darwish wrote a poem apostrophising the child’s martyrdom. Shimon Peres avowed that the shooting was ‘a catastrophe for each and every one of us’. The Israelis were quick to acknowledge, in a statement made by the IDF Chief of Staff on October 3rd, the likelihood that the shots were fired by Israeli soldiers. An independent enquiry was not aided by the decision of the IDF to raze the entire area a week after the shooting (see Amnesty International report Israel/OT/PA: Broken lives - a year of intifada, 2001), nor by the fact that in accordance with Muslim tradition the boy was buried just hours after his death, without an autopsy taking place which could have determined definitively if he had been killed by a bullet from an Israeli M16 – or a shot from a Palestinian kalashnikov.

But what if what we think we saw on the television that fateful day was not actually what happened? What if the boy’s death was not actually caught on camera? What if it was a shot fired not by an Israeli soldier but by a Palestinian that killed the boy? What if the boy wasn’t killed at all? Would it matter? Would the image be less powerful, less iconic a representation of one of the most bitter and long-standing conflicts of our time? Would all those revenge suicide bombings, lynchings, beheadings that the child’s murder was used to justify no longer be justified, even by those who had believed that they once had been? What of the notion of journalistic integrity? For most of us, after all, trust in the media is paramount, since radio, television and newspapers provide us with all we know of the bloody conflicts that take place all around the world.

Almost immediately doubts about the footage began to be voiced, in defiance of Sontag’s confident formulation that ‘the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art’. A small Francophone Israeli news and analysis agency, the Metula News Agency (MENA), with its administrative base in Luxembourg, set about analysing the footage, with the help of various ballistic and forensic experts. Going through the footage frame by frame they uncovered a series of anomalies in the footage itself.

* Footage from other sources of Israeli soldiers firing had been spliced into the film, leading some to question why this was deemed necessary if it was so obvious that an Israeli soldier was guilty of firing the fatal shots.

* The Israeli post was at a 30 degree angle to the right of the position of the victims, which would have made a direct shot impossible. Only bullets ricocheting off the ground could have hit them from that angle.

* Bullet holes that appear in the concrete wall behind the man and boy are round and regular; they could only have been from shots aimed directly from in front of Mohammed and his father. Even if the Israelis had managed to hit them directly with bullets fired at an angle from a position over 100m away, the holes they would have made in the wall would have been distended.

Doubts accumulated. In 2002 Esther Schapira, a journalist with close connections to Tsahal, made a documentary for German television investigating the shooting; she concluded that it was far from clear who had shot the child. The following year James Fallows went further in an article in the Atlantic Monthly. He discusses the reasons that investigators at the MENA, including physicist Nahum Shahaf, have concluded that the shooting was staged:

‘The reasons to doubt that the al-Duras, the cameramen, and hundreds of onlookers were part of a coordinated fraud are obvious. Shahaf’s evidence for this conclusion, based on his videos, is essentially an accumulation of oddities and unanswered questions about the chaotic events of the day. Why is there no footage of the boy after he was shot? Why does he appear to move in his father’s lap, and to clasp a hand over his eyes after he is supposedly dead?

Why is one Palestinian policeman wearing a Secret Service-style earpiece in one ear? Why is another Palestinian man shown waving his arms and yelling at others, as if ‘directing’ a dramatic scene? Why does the funeral appear - based on the length of shadows - to have occurred before the apparent time of the shooting? Why is there no blood on the father’s shirt just after they are shot? Why did a voice that seems to be that of the France 2 cameraman yell, in Arabic, ‘The boy is dead’ before he had been hit? Why do ambulances appear instantly for seemingly everyone else and not for al-Dura?’

French psychoanalyst Gerard Huber wrote a book exploring this thesis, Contre-expertise d’une mise en scene (Editions Raphael, 2003), in which he points out several other disturbing elements which contradict Enderlin’s report including the fact that the two doctors who received the body of Mohammed at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza have testified that the body was brought to the hospital before 1pm on September 30th. Yet Enderlin’s voiceover declares that the shooting took place at 3pm, and the shadows in the film would confirm that.

Talal Abu Rahma was the only cameraman to film the scene, though the disturbances throughout the morning at the Netzarim junction meant that there were several foreign journalists at the scene. He first tried to sell the footage to CNN who rejected it without any additional verification, so he called Enderlin, who was in Ramallah, and offered him the scoop. In an interview with the French weekly magazine Telerama in October 2000 Enderlin spoke of footage from the 27 minute long tape that showed the child’s ‘agonies’ before his death, describing them as so unbearable that he decided to cut them from his final report. Meanwhile, 3 days after the shooting, on 3rd October, Talal Abu Rahma testified under oath in the office and presence of lawyer Raji Surani at the Palestine Centre for Human Rights in Gaza (PCHR) that the victims had been targeted in cold blood by guns fired from the Israeli position (Abu Rahma’s testimony can be read at www.pchrgaza.org/special/tv2.htm). Two years later, in a letter addressed to France 2 in Jerusalem (though never publicly aired by the station), he retracted this statement, saying ‘I never told the PCHR that the Israelis had intentionally shot and killed Mohammed al Dura and injured his father.’

With the proliferation of uncertainty about the authenticity of the footage and of the story, late last year three senior French journalists were finally permitted by France 2 to view the full 27 minutes of the tape that Abu Rahma shot that day. Luc Rosenzweig, a former foreign editor at Le Monde, Denis Jeambar, editor of L’Express, and Daniel Leconte, a documentary filmmaker and publisher (and former reporter for France 2) viewed the film in the office of Arlette Chabot, head of news at France 2. It was on this occasion that Didier Epelbaum, an adviser to the channel’s head Marc Tessier (who is to stand down in September, having failed in his attempt to have his contract renewed), mentioned in passing that Abu Rahma had retracted his testimony; in effect acknowledging that the only known witness to the shooting of Jamal and Mohammed al-Durra – for of course their other witness to the episode, Charles Enderlin, had been in a different city altogether when it took place – was no longer able to verify the very facts that the three journalists were contesting.

In January this year Jeambar and Leconte published an article in Le Figaro (which was rejected by Le Monde who claim to find the story ‘bizarre’) in which they describe a hitherto unknown aspect of the video - which has otherwise been entirely embargoed by France 2 apart from a 3 minute extract which they gave to the Israeli army for their enquiry – in which the first 20 minutes are taken up with scenes of young Palestinian men playing at being shot, getting up again and smoking cigarettes nonchalantly. Additionally they were surprised, given Enderlin’s widely-quoted decision not to include the child’s ‘agonies’ in his report, that the cassette didn’t appear to contain footage of any death throes. In fact they cautiously affirm that there is nothing in the tape that definitively shows that the child is dead, nor is there anything in it which indicates that he was shot by Israeli soldiers, though Leconte has said that he does believe that the shooting was real, in contrast with the assertion of Stephane Juffa of the MENA that the whole episode was staged.

In the same article Enderlin is questioned by the two journalists as to why he was so convinced that the Israelis were guilty of the shooting. He responds that “the image corresponded to the reality of the situation, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank (my italics).”

France 2 remains tight-lipped. The station is bringing a defamation case against X, symbolically representing the authors of the proliferating accusations from around the world that Enderlin’s report was fabricated. One reason why France 2 is bringing the case against X – which is widely considered to be a strategy of intimidation - is because of the difficulty of bringing libel or defamation cases against internet bloggers, whose discussion of the affair has gained momentum over recent months. Marc Tessier, described by sources privately as being little more than Chirac’s stooge, and Arlette Chabot have closed ranks around Enderlin, the latter saying only, in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, that ‘four years later, no one can say for certain who killed [al-Durra], Palestinians or Israelis.’

The question remains unresolved. Enderlin will no longer discuss the affair. Spokespersons from France 2 claim that it is part of a conspiracy to discredit its foreign journalists and put pressure on Middle East correspondents in all parts of the media. The investigation into the shooting in Israel is closed. Questions raised in the Assemblיe Nationale and from various quarters of the French press for an proper investigation have so far yielded nothing more than a statement from the French media watchdog, the Conseil superieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA) in December 2004 demanding that French television identify its sources and exercise more caution when reporting on international conflicts.

It is unlikely that there will ever be a definitive answer as to what happened that day at the Netzarim junction. But it has raised serious questions as to the responsibility of the media in shaping and manipulating not only our understanding of conflicts but also the events themselves, for no one can deny the fury stoked in the Arab world by these few seconds of film, and the acts of violence that were subsequently perpetrated in the name of little Mohammed. L’Affaire Enderlin raises uncomfortable questions regarding the ethical standards and transparency and self-regulation of France 2 in particular and the French media in general, which has generally showed little interest in the details of the affair.

No less startling than any other aspect of what happened is the fact that the British media have totally ignored the whole affair. Tom Gross, a leading media commentator, says he doesn’t believe the British press has touched on this subject at all, even though there has been a fair amount of media coverage elsewhere around the world. Thus the British media have become collaborators in what may be one of the most damning indictments of journalistic integrity ever witnessed in our televisual age. Perhaps for the editors of the Guardian, the Times, the Telegraph and other newspapers and periodicals which take their news reporting of the Middle East – and France – seriously, Enderlin’s statement is what counts: ‘the image corresponded to the reality of the situation’. In other words it fulfilled the world’s expectations of the bestial inhumanity of the Israeli occupation. The possible truth of what happened – that the child was killed in a terrible martyrdom operation staged by his fellow Palestinians as a propaganda exercise, or even that he wasn’t killed at all – is simply not part of Enderlin’s – or the British media’s – version of a possible ‘reality’.