ISRAEL, SYRIA DISCUSS BIRD FLU

Report: Israel, Syria to discuss bird flu
Representatives of Israel, Syria, Iraq, to meet Thursday, Arabic-language papers report
By Roee Nahmias
Ynetnews
October 19, 2005

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3156659,00.html

Joining forces to confront the danger? Israeli, Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, and Palestinian officials are set to meet Thursday on the Sheikh Hussein bridge connecting Israel and Jordan, in order to discuss efforts to curb a bird flu epidemic.

A word of the planned meeting was leaked after Jordan’s agriculture minister met with his country’s parliament speaker and other parliament members, Arabic-language newspapers al-Sharq al-Awsat and al-Bayan reported Wednesday morning.

Meanwhile, the Agriculture Ministry confirmed a meeting on the matter will take place in Jordan on Thursday. The Health Ministry, however, said it was unaware of the meeting.

Later, Agriculture Ministry spokeswoman Daphna Yurista said Israeli officials will meet with their Jordanian counterparts - but not with representatives from other countries such as Syria and Iraq.

“The representatives may be briefed about the preparations of neighboring countries that Jordan maintains contacts with and Israeli doesn’t,” the spokeswoman said

According to the newspaper report, Jordan views the meeting as a “technical coordination session” in order to deal with the disease, and called to avoid politicization of the issue. The Jordanian minister refused to provide further details and said it will be attended by neighboring countries in order to learn about preventive steps that could help curb the spread of the disease.

On Tuesday, European Union foreign ministers characterized the spread of bird flu as a global threat in a session convened several hours after new cases of the disease were discovered in Romani.

The bird flu virus does not exist in Israel for the time being, head of the chicken branch in the Agriculture Ministry, Dr. Shimon Pokamonski, said Saturday, in wake of fears that the deadly virus spread to Israel.

“We are examining all reports in the chicken industry for fear of the disease or any problem,” he said. “Several reports were received over the weekend and we took samples in for laboratory testing. It revealed that there is no reason for concern.”

FULL ARTICLES

LETTERS TO THE NEW STATESMAN

Letters to the New Statesman (London)
October 17, 2005

www.newstatesman.com/nsletters.htm

While it becomes increasingly impossible to defend Israel’s policies, a new front has been opened by propagandists, namely Israel is singled out for criticism because of ongoing anti-Semitism. Nick Cohen fails to see that a country he lauds as a democracy is all the more culpable of human rights abuses, precisely because the inhabitants of that country, through the ballot box, are able to make the choice to oppress another people. He says that there is a free press, so Israelis do not have even the consolation of saying “we never knew”, as often happens under dictatorships.

It is indeed true that Israel is treated differently from other countries. It is allowed to occupy another people’s land, confiscate their resources and build walls to imprison the population.

Diana Neslen
Ilford, Essex

Nick Cohen’s essay had some insightful points regarding anti-Semitism and the left. I am certainly no supporter of the state of Israel, but I agree that the left concentrates a disproportionate amount of time on criticising it. As Cohen points out, this is embarrassingly difficult to explain. However, I believe that Israel’s policies in the occupied territories, and America’s support for them and greedy colonial meddling in the Middle East, are responsible for much of the animosity in world affairs today. It is an unnecessary focal point. I further disagree that opposing fascism means supporting George Bush’s warmongering. Some 25 million people across the world marching against a war that was a lie and is now a disaster suggests that the left is neither loony nor dead yet.

Matthew Kennedy-Good
London SE16

Nick Cohen used his article on anti-Semitism (Essay, 10 October) as a crude bludgeon against the left. The article was illustrated by a picture of a couple of people holding up a banner equating a Shield of David with a swastika. Who were the banner-holders? How does he know they were from the left? What really seems to annoy Cohen is that the big anti-war march of 2003 was organised by a ragbag of Islamic fundamentalists, the Socialist Workers Party and “every other creepy admirer of totalitarianism”. He adds that we should have talked with Saddam Hussein’s victims. I did talk to Iraqi Kurds, and saw not a trace of fundamentalists, creeps of any stripe or members of the SWP. Why? The march was bigger in every way than whoever may have organised it. Anti-Semitism? I marched with contingents from several Jewish organisations, joined by the Arab Labour Group. I can’t remember us being subject to a pogrom - though it was a bit embarrassing when one group applauded us.

Ross Bradshaw
Nottingham

Thanks goodness for Nick Cohen’s clear and well-thought-out article – by the way, I am an Irish American.

Gerard P Bradley
Albuquerque, New Mexico, US

To suggest that Hamas is at the centre of a multiheaded, anti-Semitic hydra is political paranoia. Israeli soldiers and settlers, with fists, boots and bullets, bulldoze the houses and crops of poor peasants, steal their water and land, kill their children and humiliate their elders, all in the name of the Jews. It is, after all, a Jewish state. Nick Cohen wonders why the illiterates of Hamas echo the absurdities of European anti-Semites? He muddles cause and effect and persists in looking down the telescope the wrong way.

Tony Greenstein
Secretary, Jews Against Zionism, Brighton

TEACHER IN BOMB JIBE

Teacher in bomb jibe
The Sun (London)
October 24, 2005

www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2005480378,00.html

A PALESTINIAN teacher tried to get his class in Co Durham to behave – by threatening to BLOW UP their bus.

Physics master Mazin Albarq made the remark when the kids aged 13 and 14 would not be quiet. He asked which bus they got home and told them he knew how to make a bomb.

A parent of one pupil said: “The children were terrified.”

Dad-of-one Mr Albarq – in his 40s – was a supply teacher at St Bede’s school, in Lanchester. He has since left but another teacher told cops about the bomb jibe and they have launched an inquiry.

Mr Albarq, of Darlington, Co Durham, said: “How sad a joke can cause such fuss.”

ANTI-SEMITIC POEM IN CHILDREN’S SCHOOL BOOK

Anti-Semitic poem in children’s school book
By Jeremy Last
European Jewish Press
October 16, 2005

www.ejpress.org/article/news/3663

A poem which praises the murder of Jews by the Nazis has been included in a book of children’s poetry to be distributed amongst schools in the UK.

The publication, entitled Great Minds, features the work of school children aged 11 to 18 who won a nationwide literary competition.

But one poem has generated outrage amongst Jewish groups, politicians and Holocaust charities for its anti-Semitic content.

The entry by the 14-year-old Gideon Taylor is apparently written from the viewpoint of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

It includes the lines “Jews are here, Jews are there, Jews are almost everywhere, filling up the darkest places, evil looks upon their faces.”

Another part reads: “Make them take many paces for being one of the worst races, on their way to a gas chamber, where they will sleep in their manger… I’ll be happy Jews have died.”

The book was produced by Forward Press who ran the Great Minds competition through its youngwriters.co.uk website.

Wining entries were rewarded with cash prizes of up to 20ukp for pupils and 1,000ukp for schools.

According to the Jewish Telegraph newspaper, the poem was the only entry in the entire book not to include the writer’s school or location.

Young Writers editor Steve Twelvetree, who also edited the book, said the poem was included as it illustrated how the writer was able to empathise with the infamous Nazi Fuehrer.

Twelvetree told the Telegraph: “From Gideon’s poem and my knowledge of the National Curriculum Key Stage 3 his poem shows a good use of technical writing and he has written his poem from the perspective of Adolf Hitler.”

The editor continued: “Key Stage 3 history requires pupils to show knowledge and understanding of events and places – to show historical interpretation and to explain significance of events, people and places, all of which World War II and the Holocaust is part of.

“The poem clearly states ‘I am Adolf Hitler’ and it recounts a historical fact, something Young Writers and Forward Press are not willing to censor.”

However, communal leaders were less than impressed with the poem’s inclusion in a book which they said could be influential on youngsters’ views of Jewish people.

Chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews Jon Benjamin said: “It is the duty of the publisher to consider the consequences of the poem.”

Jewish Labour MP, Louise Ellman, who represents the constituency of Liverpool Riverside, spoke of her concern.

She said: “It’s an incitement to racial hatred. The words are absolutely outrageous and appalling.”

And a spokesman for the Holocaust Educational Trust echoed Ellman’s views. The charity is now urging the publishers to issue a formal apology for the book and remove the offending poem.

A spokesman said: “It is totally insensitive and inappropriate for this kind of hatred to appear.

“It is also immensely insulting to those who lost their lives in the Holocaust and to those who survived.”

“IS THE WORLD GOING BONKERS?”

“Is the world going bonkers?”
From the weblog of Ruth Gledhill
Religious Affairs correspondent for The Times of London
October 21, 2005

timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2005/10/is_the_world_go.html#more

‘If this really is true, the world really is going bonkers. Come back political correctness, all is forgiven.’ So wrote a Jewish friend of mine in an anguished email this evening, Friday 21 Oct, before disappearing off for Shabbat.

The World Jewish Congress had posted on its website a story from Manchester’s Jewish Telegraph, in which it was stated that a poem praising the murder of Jews by the Nazis had been included in a book of children’s poetry to be distributed among schools in the UK. The publication, Great Minds, is produced by Young Writers who promote poetry and creative writing and publish the results in anthologies distributed to schools.

The latest anthology, featuring the work of 11-18 year olds, does indeed include an entry by 14-year-old Gideon Taylor written from the viewpoint of Adolf Hitler. It includes the lines, ‘Jews are here, Jews are there, Jews are almost everywhere, filling up the darkest places, evil looks upon their faces.’ Another part reads, ‘Make them take many paces for being one of the worst races, on their way to a gas chamber, where they will sleep in their manger. I’ll be happy Jews have died.’ It ends with the question, ‘At what price world domination?’

Steve Twelvetree, who edited the book, defended the poem’s inclusion. He said, ‘This poem shows a good use of technical writing and he has written his poem from the perspective of Adolf Hitler. Key Stage 3 history requires people to show knowledge and understanding of events and places, to show historical interpretation and to explain the significance of events, people and places, all of which World War II and the Holocaust is part of. The poem clearly states, I am Adolf Hitler and is not a reflection of the child’s view, the editor’s or the publisher’s. The poem recounts a historical fact, something which Young Writers and Foreward Press are not willing to censor.’

He said he was unable to agree with the view that the poem was racist. Nevertheless, it seems certain that some in the Jewish community will find it so.

This story dropped into my inbox just a few seconds after I had finished writing about the new Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, who since his election was announced in June has been receiving racist mail, including letters covered in excrement and even swastikas. There can be little doubt of the racist intent behind those attacks on the Church of England‘s number two. But in the course of writing this story, I interviewed, or tried to interview, Mukti Barton, the author of a book, Rejection, Resistance and Resurrection, which describes racism as a “poison” often unconsciously spread by white Christians. Ms Barton is Dr Sentamu’s adviser on black and Asian ministries and the Archbishop had contributed to the book, published in August, describing the Church as infected with institutional racism and as still a place of pain for many black Anglicans.

Ms Barton did not wish to be interviewed by The Times. In order to convey this to me, she attempted three times to negotiate her way past switchboards, mobile telephones and all the other obstacles placed by technology in the path of anyone attempting to speak to a real live journalist on a daily newspaper. She didn’t leave any message, but I called her back when her number came up on ‘caller display’. She said was so despairing of British society that she had attempted to launch her book with no attendant press publicity. She had given up even on the concept of educating us. She did not really wish to talk to me at all.

This breakdown of trust is just one example of the damage that is caused by racism in society. Of course, one half of me believes Ms Barton should be sent on the Church of England’s first available media training course. But the other half wonders if she might not have a point. Dr Sentamu has not campaigned ceaselessly against racism without having good grounds to do so. Members of the Jewish community are not concerned by a child’s poem about Hitler, even if written and published with good intentions, without reason. Racism is no less corrosive, just because it might be unintentional. Too many people are concerned about it for it to be dismissed as a problem of the past, just as some even today attempt to dismiss the Holocaust. It’s a problem that we are all living with, and need to find some way of dealing with, if the underlying anger it is generating is not one day going to lead to catastrophe.

NORWAY SCHOOL BANS STAR OF DAVID

Norway school bans Star of David; teacher may fight ban

School head bans Jewish symbol ‘for fear of provoking Muslim students’; teacher hires lawyers, vows to fight back
Ynetnews
October 8, 2005

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3152397,00.html

A teacher working at an adult education center who has been told to stop wearing a Star of David because it “provokes the many Muslim students at the school” in 2004 is now considering legal action against the ban, the Norwegian television network NRK has reported.

School head Kjell Gislefoss, said he thought that the Star of David can be seen to represent the State of Israel and is fearful of offending the school’s Muslim students, citing immigrants from the Palestinian territories.

“The Star of David would be a symbol for one side in what is perhaps the world’s most inflamed conflict at the moment.”

“Many have a traumatic past that they have escaped and then we feel that if they are going to learn Norwegian then they can’t sit an at the same time be reminded of the things they have traveled from,” said Gislefoss.

But Telhaug has vowed to stand up for his right to wear the Star and has hired lawyers ahead of a possible legal battle.

Inge Telhaug told NRK that his right to freedom of speech was violated by the banning.

“I can’t accept this. It is a small star, 16 millimeters (0.6 inches) that I have around my neck, usually under a T-shirt. I see it as my right to wear it,” Telhaug told NRK.

Telhaug, who is not Jewish, teaches the Norwegian language and culture to new immigrants at the school.

“I see it as the oldest religious symbol we have in our culture, because without Judaism there would be no Christianity,” he said.

The decision to ban the Jewish symbol from the school was slammed as “unacceptable” by head of local Education Association, Heidi Hauge Uldal.

Norway’s education minister, Kristin Clemet, said last year that she had no intention of banning the wearing of hijabs in Norwegian public schools.

“It is typically Norwegian clothing that has caused more problems in Norwegian schools,” she said.

NORWEGIAN CLAIMS SHE INFILTRATED MOSSAD

Norwegian Says She Infiltrated Mossad
By Doug Mellgren
The Associated Press
October 6, 2005

In a rare public claim, a leading Norwegian pro-Palestinian activist said Thursday she infiltrated the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad as a double agent in the 1980s.

Karin Linstad was a founding member of the Norwegian Palestine Committee and is married to a high-profile Norwegian Muslim, Trond Ali Linstad, who converted to Islam in the 1980s.

“I can’t go into detail about the people and the organizations,” she told The Associated Press. “My starting point and my loyalty has always been with the Palestinian side.”

Norway, the home of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been a key player in seeking Middle East peace, especially in secretly brokering the now-tattered 1993 Oslo Agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Linstad said she decided to reveal her former role because she is being identified as an agent in the Norwegian book “War and Diplomacy” being published next week.

According to the Norwegian media, the book by state television NRK Middle East correspondent Odd Karsten Tveit identifies Linstad as a former Mossad agent but does not address any role as a double agent.

Both the Israeli prime minister’s office and the Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the matter. The prime minister’s office said Mossad does not respond to reports in the media.

Linstad’s husband of 32 years said he had been unaware of his wife’s activities, but her being an agent could explain some past incidents.

“Karin came to me once and asked if someone came to her and asked her to be part of the underground intelligence, what should she do,” he told the AP by telephone. “I said if we can serve the Palestinian cause, it’s right.”

Linstad refused to give any details of her work for Mossad or as a pro-Palestinian double agent, and she would not say how long it lasted. Nor would she confirm that she worked for the Palestinians, saying only “there are others who also sympathize with the Palestinians.”

The Oslo newspaper Aftenposten said Mossad had been skeptical of Linstad’s offer to act as an agent but was drawn in by her claims of tight contact with leading Palestinians.

The newspaper, without citing sources, said she provided information about Palestinians in Beirut, Lebanon, ahead of Israel’s 1982 invasion.

Eldbjoerg Holte, who helped found the Norwegian Palestine Committee with the Linstads, said she was shocked by the revelation.

“Giving information about Palestinians, or me and my comrades in the Palestine Committee ... is rotten regardless of the motive,” she was quoted as telling the Norwegian news agency NTB.

DUTCH LOOK INTO BANNING ISLAMIC NIQAB

Holland looks into Banning Islamic Niqab
Asharq Al-Awsat
October 11, 2005

Brussels, Asharq Al-Awsat- Dutch Immigration and Integration Minister Rita Verdonk is to investigate the possibility of banning the wearing of the niqab which covers the body of the Muslim woman entirely and only shows her eyes.

She made the announcement during a session of the Dutch parliament, in answer to a question from right-wing independent MP Geert Wilders, but indicated the ban would not take effect immediately. Instead, it would come to effect after a law is passed forbidding women to wear the niqab, during certain times and in specific locations, after consulting the authorities, including the security services.

According to Wilders, those who wear the niqab are difficult to identify and be seen by those around them. He demanded the veil be outlawed in public spaces and government buildings.

An estimated million strong Muslim immigrants live in the Netherlands, the majority from Morocco and Turkey.

In the past, Wilders had made a number of requests in parliament, which caused great concern with the Muslim community in the Netherlands. In the wake of the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamic extremist of Moroccan origin, he pleaded for a number of mosques to be shut down and imams extradited.

In neighboring Belgium, a number of local councils have started to fine women who wear the niqab in public. With the federal government not interfering with local decisions, provinces are fee to act as it they fit and respond to local concerns.

FULL ARTICLES

LEIPZIG HOSTS FIRST JEWISH WEDDING SINCE 1938

First wedding in Leipzig since World War II
By Oliver Bradley
European Jewish Press (as carried in Ynet news)
October 21, 2005

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3155991,00.html

The German city of Leipzig has hosted its first traditional Jewish wedding in more than 67 years.

The couple – music scholar Rostislav Uciteli, 26, who grew up in Moldova and 25-year-old Maria Schapiro, a travel agent from Russia – said they were proud to take part in the groundbreaking ceremony. They have both lived in Germany for about 10 years.

American-born Rabbi Joshua Spinner, who runs the Lauder Foundation Yeshiva (Jewish Seminary) in Germany, conducted the wedding at the Keilstrasse synagogue.

Jewish weddings, whether Orthodox or Liberal (Reform), have been few and far between, in Germany’s 100,000 strong Jewish community.

And since 1938 there had been none at all in Leipzig, one of Germany’s largest cities.

Kuf Kaufmann, who heads the Leipzig community told the Juedische Allgemeine Zeitung Jewish newspaper that since the war the city’s aging Jewish population has not been very conducive to marriages. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, only 35 people belonged to Leipzig’s Jewish community.

But the influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union has boosted the community’s numbers. Today, it boasts several hundred members, all from the former Soviet Union and many slowly coming of age.

The Leipzig wedding is an example of the rise in traditionalism amongst modern Germany Jewry.

Jews have been living continuously in Germany for the past 2,000 years, despite episodic expulsions and countless annihilation attempts.

Secular emancipation, the Nazi catastrophe, postwar consumerism and 40 years of atheistic Communism caused many to discard the maintenance of Jewish traditions, including the chuppa, the time-honored Jewish wedding ritual.

Until recently, many Jews found themselves denying their heritage, or keeping it under cover – marrying in city halls or intermarrying into other religions.

However, increasing numbers of Germany’s Jewish community have now been coming forward to “marry properly.”

One newlywed couple told EJP they chose to remarry because they no longer felt that their liberal wedding had the spiritual foundation which they now believe in.

“We also took this step in order to encourage others to follow suit and accept the values that traditions bring with them – values which make a marriage more solid,” one said.

GERMAN JEWS FORESEE GOOD YEARS WITH MERKEL

German Jews foresee good years with Merkel
By Toby Axelrod
JTA
October 16, 2005

As Germany stands on the brink of a new political era – about to have its first woman and first former East German as chancellor – Jews are peering over the horizon with cautious optimism.

Seven years of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder turned out to be rather good for the Jews. But Angela Merkel isn’t exactly an unknown quantity either.

When it comes to relations with Israel and with Germany’s Jewish community, a Merkel administration isn’t likely to bring much change, observers say. And transatlantic relations, another issue of import to the Jewish community, are likely to improve.

In coming weeks, Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union and Schroeder’s party, the Social Democratic Union, will craft their coalition.

Paul Spiegel, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, reserved comment until the new Cabinet ministers are named, but others were less shy.

“There’s no ‘getting to know you,’ no breaking-in period needed,” Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress and president of the Claims Conference, said of Merkel in a telephone interview with JTA. “We know her commitments.”

Merkel “frequently finished a sentence that I began when we talked about Jewish issues. It’s rare that you sit with somebody whom you don’t need to win over and who is not only on the same page as you are, but on the same line as you are,” Singer said.

Merkel has “demonstrated considerable interest in a positive and dynamic relationship with the Jewish world,” Deidre Berger, head of the American Jewish Committee office in Berlin, who also has met frequently with the CDU leader, said in an e-mail interview.

Merkel’s track record on Jewish issues is “excellent,” said Michael Wolffsohn, a history professor at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich.

“She has always been in touch with the Central Council and the Israeli Embassy, ” Wolffsohn said in an e-mail comment. “Jewish-Israeli matters are close to her heart,” as they are for the leadership of her party in general.

Merkel “is a direct, serious, knowledgeable, hands-on person who listens, ” said Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, “and she has very clear views on issues of our concern.”

“I for one feel comfortable that her leadership will continue the dual tradition of taking responsibility for the past and being guided by it,” Foxman said.

Merkel was born in 1954 to a Lutheran pastor and a teacher. She studied physics and worked as a chemist before becoming involved in politics after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

She became a political protege of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and has headed the CDU since 2000.

A proponent of economic and social reform, Merkel wants to make Germany more competitive by allowing longer work-weeks and removing barriers to firing employees.

She is a strong advocate of transatlantic relations, and even supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq at a time when the view was most unpopular in Germany — a “high political risk” that Jewish leaders respected, Wolffsohn said.

In keeping with majority German opinion, however, Merkel rejects Turkish membership in the European Union.

For German Jews, the top items on the domestic agenda are integration of Jews from the Former Soviet Union, funding for cash-strapped Jewish communities, support for Jewish education and training of rabbis, security, and efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Internationally, the issues are close ties with Israel and the United States.

Under Schroeder, Jewish communal life took a great leap forward with the signing of an historic contract in 2003 between the Central Council and the German government that placed the Jewish community on a legal par with the Protestant and Catholic churches.

Schroeder’s foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, proved to be a great supporter of Israel, most observers agree.

The Schroeder administration also took a strong stand against anti-Semitism, particularly at the 2001 U.N. Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, where Fischer defended Israel, and at the conference on anti-Semitism in Europe convened by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and hosted in Berlin. Merkel was one of the speakers at the OSCE event.

“I look to Mrs. Merkel for at least as much understanding” as the past administration showed, Singer said. She “has always been sympathetic to us when she was in the opposition, and helped us on every issue in the last seven years,” including the fight for homecare payments to Holocaust survivors.

Growing up in East Germany taught Merkel “the importance of what it is like to live under the yoke of a system that is not amenable to human rights,” Singer said.

Foxman said Merkel had made “her own pilgrimage” to come to terms with the Nazi past.

“She said to us that her parents... tried to enlighten her contrary to what she was taught” in East Germany, which held that the Nazi perpetrators had all come from western Germany and which tended to deny the unique nature of the Jewish genocide.

Merkel “is aware of the poison that was fed to millions of Germans on the eastern side for years,” Foxman said. The government “has the responsibility not only to be aware of it but to deal with it.”

AL-AZHAR UNIVERSITY SHUT DOWN AFTER FATAH ATTACK

Fatah gangs run rampant throughout Gaza Strip
By Khaled Abu Toameh
The Jerusalem Post
October 13, 2005

www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1129113913322&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

Al-Azhar University in Gaza City has been shut down after gunmen belonging to the ruling Fatah party beat the institution’s president and some of his aides.

The attack took place on Wednesday when some 20 gunmen stormed the offices of university president Dr. Adnan al-Khaldi and forced him to flee after assaulting him.

Eyewitnesses said the attackers also dragged an employee from the university’s public relations department and dumped him outside the campus.

The attack was not the first of its kind on the university. Earlier this year another Fatah group stormed the campus and threatened to lynch the university president, who managed to escape unharmed.

The attack coincided with a report published by the PA Interior Ministry showing that Fatah’s armed wing, Aksa Martyrs Brigades, was largely responsible for the continued state of lawlessness and anarchy.

Figures released by the ministry showed that Fatah gunmen were involved last August in 20 incidents of lawlessness, while Hamas came in second with only 18 violations. The number of Palestinians killed in domestic violence since the beginning of the year was higher than those killed by the IDF, the figures showed.

Denouncing that attack on al-Azhar University as a “crime against education,” the university administration decided to suspend studies until the PA security forces put an end to the anarchy.

The university also appealed to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to interfere to halt the recurring attacks on its staff by members of his Fatah party.

Sources in Gaza City said the latest attack was apparently in response to the university’s decision to expel six Fatah-affiliated students for their involvement in previous cases of violence on campus.

On Wednesday, a Fatah gang kidnapped two Western journalists while they were traveling in a car near Khan Yunis.

The two, Jerusalem-based American correspondent Dion British photographer Adam Pletts, were on assignment for Knight Ridder newspapers when six gunmen seized them at gunpoint and forced them into a yellow Mercedes, which sped off toward Rafah.

The two were released unharmed later in the day. PA security sources said the kidnappers, who belong to a Fatah gang calling itself Black Panther, were demanding jobs and money.

PA Civil Police Chief Ala Hosni told reporters that the kidnappers were members of the al-Najjar family, one of the biggest clans in Khan Yunis. He said they wanted jobs in the Palestinian security forces and higher ranks for the clan’s members who are already serving in these forces.

The two journalists were the latest victims of a wave of abductions that has hit PA-ruled areas in the past few months. On Thursday, a family from Khan Yunis announced that their son had been kidnapped and that his captors were demanding a $140,000 ransom. The man, identified as 33-year-old Fayez Sawwali, was kidnapped eight days ago. He was working for the PA Ministry of Waqf. The family accused the PA security forces of failing to carry out their duties with regards to ending the hostage situation.

In another sign of growing lawlessness, a Palestinian man was killed and two others injured in armed clashes between rival Fatah gangs in the town of Kabatya near Jenin. The victim was identified as Ala Sabaneh, a policeman who was wanted by Israel for his role in terror activities. Residents said the gunmen were local members of rival factions of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

KNIGHT RIDDER JOURNALISTS ABDUCTED, THEN FREED IN GAZA

US, British journalists abducted, then freed in Gaza
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
Reuters
October 12, 2005

today.reuters.com/news/newsArticleSearch.aspx?storyID=231073+12-Oct-2005+RTRS&srch=israel

Palestinian gunmen briefly kidnapped an American reporter and a British photographer in Gaza on Wednesday in the latest sign of growing lawlessness in the coastal strip following Israel’s pullout last month.

The two men working for Knight Ridder newspapers were seized by assailants who stopped their car near the town of Khan Younis and took them away at gunpoint, their Palestinian translator, Ziad Abu Mustafa, said.

After the Palestinian Authority made contact with the kidnappers, the journalists were handed over to security forces that had mounted a search, Interior Ministry spokesman Tawfiq Abu Khoussa said. The two were held for about 10-1/2 hours.

“Both have been freed,” Khoussa said. “They are safe and in good health.”

The gunmen belonged to a little-known group calling itself the Black Panther, an armed, breakaway faction of President Mahmoud Abbas’s mainstream Fatah movement. The motive behind the kidnapping was not immediately known.

Mustafa said the journalists were Dion Nissenbaum -- an American who recently became Knight Ridder’s Jerusalem correspondent -- and a British photographer the translator knew only by the name Adam.

They were on assignment near Khan Younis when six masked assailants seized them at gunpoint and drove them away, Mustafa told Reuters. He was ordered to stay behind.

A number of foreign journalists and aid workers have been abducted in Gaza in recent months by militants pressing demands for jobs, the release of arrested comrades or an end to official corruption. All have been freed, usually within hours.

Abbas has been struggling to end armed chaos on the streets of Gaza since Israel completed its pullout on September 12 after 38 years of occupation.

Rival armed groups are trying to stake a claim to a share of power in the strip, seen as a proving ground for Palestinian aspirations for statehood in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Hamas, a militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction, is using its Gaza stronghold to build its challenge to Abbas’s ruling Fatah in January’s parliamentary election.

Abbas, under pressure from Israel and Washington to do more to disarm militants, has tried to persuade gunmen to give up their weapons, but has made little progress. Several gunfights have erupted in recent weeks between militants and policemen.

Some Palestinian security men complain they are outgunned by groups like Hamas. Israel has been reluctant to allow in arms for security forces that it fears could be turned against it.

NO U.S. AID TO PALESTINIAN GROUPS THAT INCLUDE “MARTYRS” IN NAME

No U.S. aid to some Palestinian groups
United Press International
October 9, 2005

The Palestinian Authority said Sunday the United States will not provide aid to Palestinian institutions that include the name “martyrs” in them.

Palestinian Public Works Minister Mohammad Eshtiyeh said all Palestinian official and non-government organizations have been informed of the American decision.

He added the United States will also hold back assistance to institutions that carry the name of any living or deceased Palestinian resistance leaders.

Eshtiyeh added that an educational institution that carries the name of slain Hamas spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, will not be qualified to receive U.S. funds, nor will any municipality that has named a street after any such Palestinian leaders.

Naming private institutions, schools, public buildings, streets and even soccer teams after Palestinian “martyrs” killed by the Israeli forces is common across the Palestinian territories.

HAMAS DEVELOPS ROCKETS IN THREE WEST BANK CITIES

Hamas develops rockets in 3 W. Bank cities
Middle East Newsline
October 10, 2005

www.menewsline.com/stories/2005/october/10_10_4.html

Palestinian insurgents have sought to produce mortars and missiles in at least three cities in the West Bank.

Israeli military sources said Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been developing missiles and mortars in Bethlehem, Jenin and Tulkarm. They said they believe the two groups were also using such cities as Jericho and Nablus to develop weapons.

“We are identifying efforts to transplant the main struggle to Judea and Samaria [West Bank],” Israel Security Agency director Yuval Diskin said.

Over the last year, officials said, Israel’s military halted several attempts to produce Kassam-class missiles in the West Bank. They said Hamas and Islamic Jihad have already tested rockets and mortars in the northern West Bank.

MORE THAN TWO-THIRDS OF ISRAELIS AGAINST ANY MORE PULLOUTS

Two-thirds of Israelis against more pullouts
Agence France Presse
October 14, 2005

More than two-thirds of Israelis are against any more pullouts from the West Bank until a final peace agreement with the Palestinians.

A survey for the Maariv daily showed that 59 percent supported the recent evacuation of troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip and four small West Bank settlements and 34 percent were opposed to it.

However, asked whether they would support a new round of pullouts from the occupied West Bank ahead of a permanent status agreement, 68 percent said there should be no more evacuations while 28 percent were in favour.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said that he has no plans up his sleeve for a further round of withdrawals but has acknowledged that some of the existing West Bank settlements will not remain in Israeli hands in the future.

A total of 532 people were questioned for Maariv by the Teleseker institute survey which has a 4.1 percent margin of error.

FROM MALAYSIA TO MOROCCO TO BRITAIN

Anti-Semitism isn’t a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It’s everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here

By Nick Cohen
New Statesman
October 10, 2005

www.newstatesman.com/200510100023

If you challenge liberal orthodoxy, your argument cannot be debated on its merits. You have to be in the pay of global media moguls. You have to be a Jew. By Nick Cohen

On the Saturday of the great anti-war demonstration of 2003, I watched one million people march through London, then sat down to write for the Observer. I pointed out that the march organisers represented a merger of far left and far right: Islamic fundamentalists shoulder to shoulder with George Galloway, the Socialist Workers Party and every other creepy admirer of totalitarianism this side of North Korea. Be careful, I said. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq has spewed out predatory armies and corpses for decades. If you’re going to advocate a policy that would keep a fascist dictator in power, you should at least talk to his victims, whose number included socialists, communists and liberals - good people, rather like you.

Next day I looked at my e-mails. There were rather a lot of them. The first was a fan letter from Ann Leslie, the Daily Mail’s chief foreign correspondent, who had seen the barbarism of Ba’athism close up. Her cheery note ended with a warning: “You’re not going to believe the anti-Semitism that is about to hit you.” “Don’t be silly, Ann,” I replied. “There’s no racism on the left.” I worked my way through the rest of the e-mails. I couldn’t believe the anti-Semitism that hit me.

I learned it was one thing being called “Cohen” if you went along with liberal orthodoxy, quite another when you pointed out liberal betrayals. Your argument could not be debated on its merits. There had to be a malign motive. You had to support Ariel Sharon. You had to be in the pay of “international” media moguls or neoconservatives. You had to have bad blood. You had to be a Jew.

My first reaction was so ignoble I blush when I think of it. I typed out a reply that read, “but there hasn’t been a Jewish member of my family for 100 years”. I sounded like a German begging a Gestapo officer to see the mistake in the paperwork. Mercifully, I hit the “delete” button before sending.

Rather than pander to racism, I directed my correspondents to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a member of the Socialist International which had decided after being on the receiving end of one too many extermination drives that foreign invasion was the only way. No good. I tried sending them to the Iraqi Communist Party, which opposed the invasion but understood the possibilities for liberation beyond the fine minds of the western intelligentsia. No good, either.

As the months passed, and Iraqis were caught between a criminally incompetent occupation and an “insurgency” so far to the right it was off the graph, I had it all. A leading figure on the left asked me to put him in touch with members of the new government. “I knew it! I knew it!” he cried when we next met. “They want to recognise Israel.”

I experienced what many blacks and Asians had told me: you can never tell. Where people stand on the political spectrum says nothing about their visceral beliefs. I found the far left wasn’t confined to the chilling Socialist Workers Party but contained many scrupulous people it was a pleasure to meet and an education to debate. Meanwhile, the centre was nowhere near as moderate as it liked to think. One minute I would be talking to a BBC reporter or liberal academic and think him a civilised man; the next, he would be screaming about the Jews.

Politicians I’d admired astonished me: Tam Dalyell explained British foreign policy as a Jewish conspiracy; Ken Livingstone embraced a Muslim cleric who favoured the blowing up of Israeli women and children, along with wife-beating and the murder of homosexuals and apostates.

I could go on. The moment when bewilderment settled into a steady scorn, however, was when the Guardian ran a web debate entitled: “David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man anti-Semitic”. Gorgeously, one vigilant reader complained that the title was prejudiced - the debate should be headlined: “David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen are enough to make a good man, or woman, anti-Semitic.”

Mustn’t forget our manners now, must we?

I resolved then to complete two tasks: to apologise to Ms Leslie, which was a matter of minutes; and to work out if there was now a left-wing anti-Semitism, which took a little longer.

As I’d had little contact with Jewish religion or culture, I’d rarely given anti-Semitism a thought. I suppose I’d assumed it had burned out in the furnaces of Auschwitz. When the subject came up, I dutifully repeated the liberal mantra that “not all anti-Zionists are anti-Semites” and forgot the corollary “but all anti-Semites are anti-Zionists”.

You have to clear away a heap of rubbish before you can distinguish between the two. At first glance, there’s a good case for saying that the liberal left is Jew-obsessed. Israel receives more criticism than far worse societies, most notably Sudan, Syria and pre-war Iraq. You can call the double standard anti-Semitism if you want, but I’m not sure it gets you anywhere. It is simply the ineluctable workings of what is known in the human rights trade as “selection bias”. Israel is a democracy with an independent judiciary and free press. Inevitably, it is easier in an open country to report abuses of power than cover, say, the deaths of millions and enslavement of whole black tribes in Islamist Sudan. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, came up with “Moynihan’s Law” to encapsulate the process. It holds that the number of complaints about a nation’s violation of human rights is in inverse proportion to its actual violation of human rights.

He wasn’t absolutely right, and the law certainly doesn’t work in Israel’s case, but you get the point. As long as people know biases exist, no harm is done. In any case, it’s not a competition, and it’s no defence of Israel to say it’s better to be Palestinian than Sudanese. Human rights are universal.

The issue is whether the liberal left is as keen on universal principles as it pretends. An impeccably left-wing group of Jewish academics, who are against the war in Iraq and occupation of the West Bank, gathered recently at [www.engageonline.org.uk as they could see parts of the left retreating into special pleading. Their union, the Association of University Teachers, had proposed that academics abandon the freedom to exchange ideas, on which intellectual life depends, by boycotting Israeli universities. Asked why the boycott applied only to Israel and not nations with far greater crimes to their names, the AUT had no reply.]

Racism is often subtle in England. David Hirsh, an Engage supporter, caught it well when he wrote that “the act of singling out Israel as the only illegitimate state - in the absence of any coherent reason for doing so - is in itself anti-Semitic, irrespective of the motivation or opinions of those who make that claim”.

I’d agree, if it weren’t for a brutal counter-argument that few have the guts to make. Get real, it runs. Universal values are for the birds. The left had a respectable record of exposing the dark corners of the right in South Africa, the Deep South, Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain and the Colonels’ Greece. Only the bravest had much to say about the Soviet Union, China or Cuba. On the whole, those monstrosities were opposed by the right. Looking back, you can see that good came out of the activism of both sets of critics. Equally, good will come from our obsession with Israel. The Palestinians need help and you shouldn’t ask too many questions about the helpers.

All of which sounds reasonable, until you ask a question that I’ve delayed asking for too long: what is anti-Semitism?

In its 19th- and 20th-century form, it was a conspiratorial explanation of power from the radical right. In this it differed from standard racism, which is generally resentment of powerless outsiders who look odd, lower wages and take jobs. The template was set by the reaction against the American and French revolutions. How could Americans proclaim such insane ideas as the rights of man, the counter-revolutionaries asked. How could the French overthrow the king who loved them and Holy Mother Church which succoured them? They couldn’t admit that the Americans and the French wanted to do what they had done. Their consent had to have been manufactured by the new rulers of the world. Originally these were the Freemasons, who were damned for peddling enlightened ideas. Only after Jewish emancipation opened the ghettos were the Jews press-ganged into the plot. They represented everything that was hateful about modernity: equal rights, religious toleration and the destruction of tradition.

I don’t like the term “Islamo-fascism” - fascist movements are national movements, not religions. Still, no one can fail to have noticed that in one indisputable respect the west is the “root cause” of Islamist terror: militant Muslims have bought the ideology of the European counter-revolution wholesale.

The appeal is understandable. There is a chosen people: the Germans, the Italians or the Spanish in classic fascism; Sunni Muslims in totalitarian variants of Islam. Domination is theirs by right, but they are denied their inheritance by a conspiracy of infidels, be they westernisers, Jews, sell-out leaders or the corrupters of women and youth.

You can read for yourselves the histories of the links between Nazism and the Arab world in the 1940s, but to bring you up to date, here is what Article 22 of Hamas’s covenant says of the Jews: “They were behind the French revolution, the communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.”

That’s right, Rotary Clubs.

Please don’t tell me that it helps the Palestinians to give the far right the time of day, or pretend that Palestinian liberals, socialists, women, gays, freethinkers and Christians (let alone Israeli Jews) would prosper in a Palestine ruled by Hamas. It’s not radical, it’s barely political, to turn a blind eye and say you are for the Palestinian cause. Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support. The Palestinian fight is at once an anti-colonial struggle and a clash between modernity and reaction. The confusion of our times comes from the failure to grasp that it is possible to have an anti-colonialism of the far right.

While we’re at it, don’t excuse Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the rest by saying the foundation of Israel and the defeat of all the Arab attempts to destroy it made them that way. Anti-Semitism isn’t a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It’s everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here. When the BBC showed a Panorama documentary about the ideological roots of the Muslim Council of Britain in the Pakistani religious right, the first reaction of the Council was to accuse it of following an “Israeli agenda”. The other day the Telegraph reported that Ahmad Thomson, a Muslim lawyer who advises the Prime Minister on community relations of all things, had declared that a “sinister” group of Jews and Freemasons was behind the invasion of Iraq.

To explain away a global phenomenon as a rational reaction to Israeli oppression, you have once again to turn the Jew into a supernatural figure whose existence is the cause of discontents throughout the earth. You have to revive anti-Semitism.

The alternative is to do what the left used to do. If you look at the list of late-20th-century leftist causes I have mentioned, you will see that the left, for all its faults and crimes, was against fascism. It used to know that the powerful used racism to distract the powerless, as they do to this day in Egypt, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, where the deployment of Jew hatred is positively tsarist. Although I know it’s hard to credit, the left also used to know that the opponents of fascism, including the opponents of Saddam, had to be supported.

But the liberal left has been corrupted by defeat and doesn’t know much about anything these days. Marxist-Leninism is so deep in the dustbin of history, it is composting, while social democracy is everywhere on the defensive. Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Christian fundamentalism are beating it in the struggle for working-class and peasant minds. An invigorated capitalism is threatening its European strongholds. There’s an awful realisation that Tony Blair and Bill Clinton may be as good as it gets. The temptation in times of defeat is to believe in everything rather than nothing; to go along with whichever cause sounds radical, even if the radicalism on offer is the radicalism of the far right.

In 1878, George Eliot wrote that it was “difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Jews] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print”. So it is again today. Outside the movies of Mel Gibson, Jews aren’t Christ killers any longer, but they can’t relax, because now they are Nazis, blood-soaked imperialists, the secret movers of neoconservatism, the root cause of every atrocity from 9/11 to 7/7.

It’s not that the left as a whole is anti-Semitic, although there are racists who need confronting. Rather, it has been maddened by the direction history has taken. Deracinated and demoralised, its partisans aren’t thinking hard enough about where they came from or - and more pertinently - where they are going.

MAKING A PIG’S EAR OF DEFENDING DEMOCRACY

Making a pig’s ear of defending democracy
By Mark Steyn
The Daily Telegraph (London)
October 4, 2005

www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=UE2SHXTVRWUX1QFIQMFCNAGAVCBQYJVC?xml=/opinion/2005/10/04/do0402.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/10/04/ixportal.html

A year and a half ago, I mentioned in this space the Florentine Boar, a famous piece of porcine statuary in Derby that the council had decided not to have repaired on the grounds that it would offend Muslims. Having just seen Looney Tunes: Back in Action, in which Porky Pig mentions en passant that Warner Bros has advised him to lose the stammer, I wondered if for the British release it might be easier just to lose the pig.

Alas, the United Kingdom’s descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and “pig-related items” will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee’s box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. And, as we know, Muslims regard pigs as “unclean”, even an anthropomorphised cartoon pig wearing a scarf and a bright, colourful singlet.

Cllr Mahbubur Rahman is in favour of the blanket pig crackdown. “It is a good thing, it is a tolerance and acceptance of their beliefs and understanding,” he said. That’s all, folks, as Porky Pig used to stammer at the end of Looney Tunes. Just a little helpful proscription in the interests of tolerance and acceptance.

And where’s the harm in that? As Pastor Niemoller said, first they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character and, if I was, I’m more of an Eeyore.

And aren’t we all? When the Queen knights a Muslim “community leader” whose line on the Rushdie fatwa was that “death is perhaps too easy”, and when the Prime Minister has a Muslim “adviser” who is a Holocaust-denier and thinks the Iraq war was cooked up by a conspiracy of Freemasons and Jews, and when the Prime Minister’s wife leads the legal battle for a Talibanesque dress code in British schools, you don’t need a pig to know which side’s bringing home the bacon.

A couple of years ago, when an anxious-to-please head teacher in Batley was banning offensive “pig-centred books”, Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain commented that “there is absolutely no scriptural authority for this view. It is a misunderstanding of the Koranic instruction that Muslims may not eat pork.” Mr Bunglawala is a typical “moderate” Muslim - he thinks the British media are “Zionist-controlled”, etc - but on the pig thing he’s surely right. It seems unlikely that even the exhaustive strictures of the Koran would have a line on Piglet.

So these little news items that pop up every week now are significant mostly as a gauge of the progressive liberal’s urge to self-abase and Western Muslims’ ever greater boldness in flexing their political muscle.

After all, how daffy does a Muslim’s willingness to take offence have to be to get rejected out of court? Only the other day, Burger King withdrew its ice-cream cones from its British restaurants because Mr Rashad Akhtar of High Wycombe, after a trip to the Park Royal branch, complained that the creamy swirl on the lid resembled the word “Allah” in Arabic script.

It doesn’t, not really, not except that in the sense any twirly motif looks vaguely Arabic. After all, Burger King isn’t suicidal enough to launch Allah Ice-Cream. But, after Mr Akhtar urged Muslims to boycott the chain and claimed that “this is my jihad”, Burger King yanked the ice-cream and announced that, design-wise, it was going back to the old drawing-board.

Offence is, by definition, in the eye of the beholder. I once toured the Freud Museum with the celebrated sex therapist Dr Ruth, who claimed to be able to see a penis in every artwork and piece of furniture in the joint. Yet, when I suggested one sculpture looked vaguely like the female genitalia, she scoffed mercilessly.

Likewise, Piglet is deeply offensive and so’s your chocolate ice-cream, but if a West End play opens with a gay Jesus, Christians just need to stop being so doctrinaire and uptight. The Church of England bishops would probably agree with that if, in their own misguided attempt at Islamic outreach, they weren’t so busy apologising for toppling Saddam.

When every act that a culture makes communicates weakness and loss of self-belief, eventually you’ll be taken at your word. In the long term, these trivial concessions are more significant victories than blowing up infidels on the Tube or in Bali beach restaurants. An act of murder demands at least the pretence of moral seriousness, even from the dopiest appeasers. But small acts of cultural vandalism corrode the fabric of freedom all but unseen.

Is it really a victory for “tolerance” to say that a council worker cannot have a Piglet coffee mug on her desk? And isn’t an ability to turn a blind eye to animated piglets the very least the West is entitled to expect from its Muslim citizens? If Islam cannot “co-exist” even with Pooh or the abstract swirl on a Burger King ice-cream, how likely is it that it can co-exist with the more basic principles of a pluralist society? As A A Milne almost said: “They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace/ Her Majesty’s Law is replaced by Allah’s.”

By the way, isn’t it grossly offensive to British Wahhabis to have a head of state who is female and uncovered?

I doubt whether the Post Office will be in any rush to issue another set of Pooh commemorative stamps, or the BBC to revive Pinky and Perky. Forty years ago, Britain’s Islamic minority didn’t have the numbers to ban Piglet and change the Burger King menu. Now they do. What will be deemed “unacceptable” in the interests of “tolerance” in 20 or even five years’ time?

It has been clear since July 7 that the state has no real idea what to do to reconcile the more disaffected elements of its fastest-growing demographic. But at some point Britons have to ask themselves - while they’re still permitted to discuss the question more or less freely - how much of their country they’re willing to lose. The Hundred-Acre Wood is not the terrain on which one would choose to make one’s stand, but from here on in it is only going to become more difficult.