* This dispatch primarily concerns Jews who either deliberately work for Israel’s destruction, like Tony Judt and Tony Kushner, or well-meaning but naive left-wing Jews who coddle up to the enemy, as explored in the pieces below by Dennis Prager and Julia Gorin
* This dispatch concerns America’s so-called “good Jews”; for more on their European equivalents, see Jews against Israel: King, Kaufman, & Judt, Europe’s so-called “good Jews” (Dec. 1, 2005)
CONTENTS
1. The New York Times gets in on the act
2. Troubled Jews at the forefront of many anti-Semitic movements
3. Dershowitz on the “The Israel Lobby”
4. “If you believe the left is morally confused… the Jews’ disproportionate involvement on the left is nothing less than a tragedy”
5. Brandeis to honor Tony Kushner
6. Penn State Univ. closes down art exhibit on Palestinian anti-Semitism
7. “Jews and Israel: More voices” (New York Times, April 22, 2006)
8. “A Jewish lobby? Let’s talk about it” (New York Times, April 20, 2006)
9. Unpublished letters to the New York Times in response to Tony Judt’s op-ed
10. “Why are so many Jews liberal?” (By Dennis Prager, Townhall.com, April 25, 2006)
11. “In Birmingham, the benevolent face of jihad” (By Julia Gorin, JWR, April 26, 2006)
THE NEW YORK TIMES GETS IN ON THE ACT
I have not covered the tedious piece of pseudo-scholarship titled “The Israel Lobby” by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, published a month ago in The London Review of Books, because others have already effectively dismantled it for the shoddy, half-baked piece of conspiracy theory that it is.
The London Review of Books, owned and edited by an anti-Israeli Jew (Mary-Kay Wilmers), is known for its diatribes against the existence of the Jewish state. Few take its articles about the Middle East seriously.
The New York Times, which couches its anti-Zionism more carefully, is however taken seriously, and it strikes me as altogether more worrisome that it would invite Tony Judt on to its editorial pages last week to write a follow up to the Walt-Mearsheimer London Review of Books piece. Judt, a Jewish professor at NYU, has for some time campaigned for the destruction of Israel.
TROUBLED JEWS AT THE FOREFRONT OF MANY ANTI-SEMITIC MOVEMENTS
Judt’s article is riddled with falsehoods, distortions, and appeals to the authority of various non-authoritative opinions, all of them Jewish, of course. No doubt Judt is hoping that readers might not be aware that some troubled Jews have been at the forefront of almost every anti-Semitic movement in history, from those Jews who converted to Catholicism only to then advise the Spanish rulers to carry out the inquisition, to those Jewish communists who urged Stalin to persecute “the Jews,” to those Jews in Germany who even asked to join the Nazi party in 1930s Germany.
I don’t attach Judt’s piece – both because of its inaccuracies and because it has already received wide enough circulation on Islamist and far-right websites. I do, however, include a selection of letters (by Christopher Hitchens and others) criticizing the article published by The New York Times, and a further two, which were not. If you have time, I suggest these be read in full.
DERSHOWITZ ON THE “THE ISRAEL LOBBY”
For those outside the U.S. who may wish to know more about the reaction to the “The Israel Lobby” article, I suggest you read the extensive article on it by Alan Dershowitz, the leading Harvard law professor (and a subscriber to this email list).
www.ksg.harvard.edu/research/working_papers/dershowitzreply.pdf
Dershowitz adds: “Walt and Mearshimer repeatedly claim that they have written their paper, at least in part, in order to stimulate dialogue concerning the influence of the Lobby. They claim that it is the pro-Israel side that seeks to suppress public discussion: ‘[The Lobby] does mot want an open debate on issues involving Israel, because an open debate might cause Americans to question the level of support they currently provide.’ Yet the pro-Israel side has risen to the Walt- Mearsheimer challenge and has participated in the marketplace of ideas, only to be greeted by silence from the authors, who have generally refused to defend their views.”
“IF YOU BELIEVE THE LEFT IS MORALLY CONFUSED… THE JEWS’ DISPROPORTIONATE INVOLVEMENT ON THE LEFT IS NOTHING LESS THAN A TRAGEDY”
I also attach below a piece by Dennis Prager who writes that “The most frequently asked question I receive from non-Jews about Jews is, why are Jews so liberal?” (I should emphasize that the Jews to which Prager is referring are not hostile to Israel, like Judt is, but in Prager’s view misguided.)
After listing six reasons to explain why Jews are so liberal (a preoccupation with social justice, and so on), Prager concludes with two scenarios “If you believe that leftist ideas and policies are good for America and for the world, then you are particularly pleased to know how deeply Jews – with their moral passion, intellectual energies and abilities, and financial clout – are involved with the Left. If, on the other hand, you believe that the Left is morally confused and largely a destructive force in America and the world, then the Jews’ disproportionate involvement on the Left is nothing less than a tragedy – for the world and especially for the Jews.”
The final article below, by Julia Gorin, concerns the recent invitation by Rabbi Jonathan Miller of Temple Emanu-El in Birmingham, Alabama, to host Bosnia’s Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric. Ceric was invited to address an interfaith audience at his synagogue so that Jews and Christians might “make room in our hearts and souls for others who believe differently from us.”
Gorin, who then explains exactly who Ceric is and why she thinks he is dangerous, warns (perhaps somewhat alarmingly) that “If Jews continue public relations efforts for movements that wish them ill, they’ll find themselves in a position similar to what they were in during WWII.”
BRANDEIS TO HONOR TONY KUSHNER
Tony Kushner wrote the screenplay for the recent Steven Spielberg movie “Munich,” which many criticized for its sympathetic portrayal of anti-Israel terrorists, and its falsification of history. For more on Kushner, see Munich (2): Spielberg: “For me this movie is a prayer for peace” (Dec. 15, 2005).
Now, perhaps in part because of praise for “Munich” (the anti-Israeli polemicist Robert Fisk said the film was “magnificent”), Tony Kushner is to be awarded an honorary degree by Brandeis University on May 21, 2006.
What makes this decision even more strange is that Louis Brandeis, after whom the university is named, was not only a justice of the Supreme Court, but also a key figure in the history of American Zionism.
Not surprisingly, given Kushner’s record of attacking Israel, a student campaign has begun against this decision. Here is Kushner in his own words, supplied by the “Stop Kushner campaign” at Brandeis University:
* “[Israel was] founded in a program that was ethnic cleansing, and that today is behaving abominably towards the Palestinian people.”
– Yale Israel Review (winter 2005)
* Kushner: “Establishing a state means fucking people over. However, I think that people in the late 20th century or early 21st century – having seen the Holocaust, having seen the 20th century and all of its horrors – cannot be complacent in the face of that.”
Ha’aretz reporter: “But you are saying that the very creation of Israel as a Jewish state was not a good idea.”
Kushner: “I think it was a mistake.”
– Ha’aretz (April 7, 2004)
* “I’ve never been a Zionist. I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state. It would have been better if it never happened.”
– The New York Sun reporting Kushner comments made at a conference in New York (October 14, 2002)
* “I am not a Zionist, in case you haven’t noticed.” Kushner cited “the shame of American Jews for failing to denounce Israel.”
– Chicago Tribune (April 10, 2002)
* “The existence of the state of Israel, because of the terrible way that the Palestinian people have been treated, is now in great peril and the world is in peril as a consequence of it. And we have now the spectacle of Jewish people all over the world, who in the past century had an absolutely magnificent tradition of rejecting barbarism and right-wing murderous politics, rallying behind Ariel Sharon who 10 years ago would never have been acceptable anywhere.”
– In These Times interview (March 4, 2002)
* “Israel is a foreign country. I am no more represented by Israel than I am by Italy.”
– Ha’aretz (April 7, 2004)
* “The Israeli-built security wall should come down.”
– Baltimore Jewish Times (June 4, 2004)
* “ [Israel is involved in] a deliberate destruction of Palestinian culture and a systematic attempt to destroy the identity of the Palestinian people.”
– New York Sun (October 4, 2002)
PENN STATE UNIV. CLOSES DOWN EXHIBIT ON PALESTINIAN ANTI-SEMITISM
Pennsylvania State University has forced the closure of an exhibit about the effects of Palestinian terrorism. The creator of the exhibit, Joshua Stulman, was told that the 10-piece exhibit titled “Portraits of Terror” “did not promote cultural diversity or opportunities for democratic dialogue.” The exhibit aimed to raise questions about anti-Semitic propaganda and cartoons in Palestinian newspapers and the indoctrination of Palestinian youth into terrorist acts.
By contrast, in 2003 Pennsylvania State University paid for an event titled “Islam Awareness Week.”
-- Tom Gross
LETTERS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jews and Israel: More voices
The New York Times
April 22, 2006
To the Editor:
Tony Judt says that I characterized the work of John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as “slightly but unmistakably smelly.” But I was not referring to their criticism of Israeli conduct in the occupied territories: criticism that I stipulated was weaker than that policy deserves.
I was challenging their two further assertions that Israel (a) has induced the United States government to intervene in Iraq and (b) has brought the wrath of Al Qaeda on the United States.
Mr. Judt himself does not defend either of these highly dubious propositions. If an Israeli “lobby” were covertly manipulating our foreign policy, we would have intervened first in Iran. And if Osama bin Laden were moved principally by the suffering of the Palestinians – rather than by his demand to impose a caliphate on Afghans, Iraqis, Turks, Egyptians and others – then he would be at least morally in the right.
That last assumption probably deserves a much stronger condemnation than the word “smelly.”
Christopher Hitchens
Washington, April 19, 2006
***
NO MONOLITHIC “DOMESTIC PRESSURE GROUP, THE ‘ISRAEL LOBBY’”
To the Editor:
Re “A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy,” by Tony Judt (Op-Ed, April 19):
As a leader in the American Jewish community for three decades, I must point out that there is no monolithic “domestic pressure group, the ‘Israel Lobby.’”
Israel Policy Forum has publicly advocated a two-state solution – Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side in peace and security – for more than a decade, supported Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan and is urging the Bush administration to bolster those Palestinians who seek peace with Israel.
Other Jewish organizations have opposed these positions. Some have taken similar ones.
Beginning with President Harry S. Truman’s, every American administration has viewed Israel as an important strategic ally. Members of these administrations must have been stunned to read that they were “uncritical” of “Israeli behavior.”
They also must have been shocked to read that “American influence” in the Middle East “rests almost exclusively on our power to make war.” American influence led to peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, and between Israel and Jordan.
It is only American influence that can achieve an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, which will redound to America’s benefit around the world.
Seymour D. Reich
President, Israel Policy Forum
New York, April 20, 2006
***
“AMERICANS ARE SIMPLY NOT AFRAID TO DEBATE ISRAEL POLICY”
To the Editor:
Americans are simply not afraid to debate Israel policy. Editorial and opinion pages reflect that debate almost every day. What Americans should be afraid of is partisan political advocacy and thinly veiled anti-Semitism masquerading as scholarship.
There is also cause for concern when academics like Tony Judt, a constant critic of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, suggests that condemnation of the biased pseudo-scholarship of John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt amounts to stifling legitimate policy debate.
Mr. Judt’s contention that “fear” has caused a “continued silence” on the subject in the Jewish community is just wrong. The Anti-Defamation League, for one, has called the Walt-Mearsheimer essay exactly what it is – shabby scholarship and a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control.
Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Anti-Defamation League
New York, April 19, 2006
“THE REASON AMERICANS SUPPORT ISRAEL IS THAT IT IS A DEMOCRACY THAT SHARES THEIR VALUES”
A Jewish lobby? Let’s talk about it
The New York Times
April 20, 2006
To the Editor:
Re “A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy,” by Tony Judt (Op-Ed, April 19):
Why should Jews apologize for having a powerful lobby that advances their interests? The elderly and Latinos have very powerful lobbies; no one accuses them of divided loyalties, starting wars or other conspiracy nonsense.
The reason Americans support Israel is that it is a democracy that shares their values. The United States is a democracy, and Zionists have every right to influence public opinion.
If others disagree, they can form their own organizations. Their inability to do so does not indicate a conspiracy, but a lack of a cogent argument the American people will accept.
Jonathan D. Reich
Lakeland, Fla., April 19, 2006
***
“PERHAPS IT IS THE EUROPEANS WHO HAVE FAILED TO UNDERSTAND THE PLIGHT OF THE ISRAELIS”
To the Editor:
In his discussion of “The Israel Lobby,” the essay by Stephen Walt of Harvard and John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, Tony Judt (Op-Ed, April 19) cites David Aaronovitch, “a Times of London columnist who, in the course of criticizing Mearsheimer and Walt, nonetheless conceded that ‘I sympathize with their desire for redress, since there has been a cock-eyed failure in the U.S. to understand the plight of the Palestinians.’”
This is nonsense. Americans are inundated with news about the Palestinians; newspapers almost daily print articles about their dire situation. I would argue that it is not American understanding that is lacking.
Americans seem to understand the situation in Israel very well. But unlike the Europeans, who are awash in anti-Semitism, Americans are not inclined to excuse the brutality of the Palestinian attacks.
Perhaps it is the Europeans who have failed to understand the plight of the Israelis.
Ronald Gans
New York, April 19, 2006
***
“MR JUDT WOULD BE HAPPIER IF ISRAEL DID NOT EXIST AT ALL”
To the Editor:
Tony Judt wears his anti-Zionism lightly, but nobody should be deceived: Mr. Judt would be happier if Israel did not exist at all, as he made clear in an essay published in The New York Review of Books three years ago.
The “uncritical” American support that Mr. Judt unfavorably compares with the virulently anti-Israel attitudes that prevail in Europe has not been uncritical at all. This is immediately apparent on a moment’s reflection on the various “reassessments” of American policy under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, as well as President Bill Clinton’s heroic efforts on behalf of territorial compromise.
What bothers Mr. Judt is not uncritical support, but any support at all for a small, besieged democracy that he considers a strategic liability.
Yes, the pro-Israel lobby is effective. But it is working in a hospitable environment. This environment is shaped by the fundamental decency of the American public and its instinctive sympathy for a democracy that has repeatedly sought compromise with its enemies and been answered by mass murder, vicious anti-Semitism and a fanatical commitment to its destruction.
Howard F. Jaeckel
New York, April 19, 2006
***
“WHAT IS TONY JUDT TALKING ABOUT?”
To the Editor:
What is Tony Judt talking about?
The issue of American support for Israel is debated openly and vigorously on every newspaper op-ed and letters page, on the Internet and on university campuses across the United States.
Mr. Judt’s dislike of the outcome of these debates hardly marks “a failure to consider a major issue in public policy.”
Joshua A. Brook
New York, April 19, 2006
***
“QUITE THE OPPOSITE OF BEING A TABOO…”
To the Editor:
After I read “The Israel Lobby” by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the one thing that stood out to me was the shocking lack of new information. I had heard it all before.
Since I’ve never studied international relations or spent much time outside the United States, and since I knew it all already, I find it hard to believe that criticizing America’s Israel policies is a legitimate taboo.
Taboos are things people avoid out of fear of ostracism. Here, it seems to me, people proudly proclaim their intention to criticize Israel, noting the dangers they face in shattering this supposed taboo, reminding everyone that it’s not necessarily anti-Semitic to do so.
Quite the opposite of being a taboo, criticizing Israel resembles a kind of intellectual ritual, with its distinct pattern and style.
Chad Levinson
Chicago, April 19, 2006
Attached below are some other unpublished Letters to The New York Times in response to Tony Judt’s op-ed:
IDEAS “WITHOUT BASIS IN FACT”
To the Editor:
When Tony Judt asks why the American news media do not debate the U.S.-Israeli relationship, one wonders what media he consumes.
Mr. Judt’s deeper objection seems to be that the American mainstream encompasses neither his own views nor those of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, who attribute the invasion of Iraq to insidious Jewish and Israeli influence over the White House. Pity the professors whose controversial opinions make headlines only in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. Pity them more for having to endure the very debate they had called for.
However Mr. Judt may complain, he and like-minded people will have to continue to stomach criticism so long as they have the courage to speak their minds. Like it or not, stern criticism is what they will get when their loudly announced ideas remain so objectionable and without basis in fact.
Josh Pollack
Washington D.C.
***
“SUPPORTING A GOOD CAUSE REMAINS THE FINAL TEST”
To the Editor:
Taking positions hostile to American-Israeli relations is not new to Mr. Judt nor to the markedly left-wing paper he cites, the London Review of Books (to which I have been a subscriber). In supporting the Walt Mearsheimer diatribe on the subject of the “Israeli lobby” in the United States (published in the London Review of Books), Mr. Judt makes one very valid point: The subject should be discussed. But this is precisely what he does not do.
Instead he offers a rant in support of this report and very much opposed to America’s support for Israel. Indeed, at the end of his rant, Mr. Judt refers to Israel as a “small, controversial, Mediterranean client state.” I doubt that any Israeli or most objective observers would find that description accurate or unbiased although some Israelis might well revel in being found “controversial” and most would agree it’s “small”.
It is certainly true that there are organizations in this country which support Israel and which seek to influence public policy. It is also true that there are organizations in this country which support the Palestinian cause and seek to influence public policy, as there are organizations which seek to support all sorts of causes from curing diseases to promoting trade in Africa. Our governments policies are set by our elected representatives in the Executive and Legislative branches. These folks are free to pick and choose independently and from a wide menu of lobbying positions. That a majority has tended to favor a small, modern, democratic state which supports freedom of speech and religion, a unique phenomenon in its corner of the world, over neighbors who are rife with corruption and violence and sworn to its destruction, may have been influenced by the “Israeli lobby” but even if that were demonstrably the case, supporting a good cause remains the final test, and that test has been met.
Very truly yours,
Edmund Glass
New York City
WHY ARE SO MANY JEWS LIBERAL?
Why are so many Jews liberal?
By Dennis Prager
Townhall.com
April 25, 2006
www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/dennisprager/2006/04/25/194915.html
The most frequently asked question I receive from non-Jews about Jews is, why are Jews so liberal?
The question is entirely legitimate since Jews (outside of Israel) are indeed overwhelmingly liberal and disproportionately left of liberal as well. For example, other than blacks, no American group votes so lopsidedly for the Democratic Party. And the question is further sharpened given that traditional Jewish values are not leftist. That is why the more religiously involved the Jew, the less likely he is to be on the Left. The old saw, “There are two types of Jews – those who believe Judaism is social justice and those who know Hebrew,” contains more than a kernel of truth.
In no order of importance, here are six reasons:
1. Judaism is indeed preoccupied with social justice (as well as with holiness and personal morality), and many Jews believe that the only way to achieve a just society is through leftist policies.
2. More than any other major religion, Judaism has always been preoccupied with this world. The (secular) Encyclopedia Judaica begins its entry on “Afterlife” by noting that “Judaism has always affirmed belief in an afterlife.” But the preoccupation of Judaism has been making this world a better place. That is why the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) is largely silent about the afterlife; and it is preoccupied with rejecting ancient Egyptian values. That value system was centered on the afterlife – its bible was the Book of the Dead, and its greatest monuments, the pyramids, were tombs.
3. Most Jews are frightened by anything that connotes right wing – such as the words “right-wing” and “conservative.” Especially since the Holocaust, they think that threats to their security emanate from the Right only. (It is pointless to argue that Nazism stood for National Socialism and therefore was really a leftist ideology. Whether that is theoretically accurate doesn’t matter; nearly everyone regards the Nazis as far Right, and, therefore, Jews fear the Right.) The fact that the Jews’ best friends today are conservatives and the fact that the Left is the home of most of the Jews’ enemies outside of the Muslim world have made little impact on Jews’ psyches.
4. Liberal Jews fear most religion. They identify religion – especially fundamentalist religion and especially Christianity – with anti-Semitism. Jews are taught from birth about the horrors of the Holocaust, and of nearly 2,000 years of European, meaning Christian, anti-Semitism. They therefore tend to fear Christianity and believe that secularism guarantees their physical security.
5. Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every “ism” of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew’s belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian’s belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas the believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry.
The Jews’ religious fervor emanates from the origins of the Jewish people as a religious people elected by God to help guide humanity to a better future. Of course, the original intent was to bring humanity to ethical monotheism, God-based universal moral standards, not to secular liberalism or to feminism or to socialism. Leftist Jews have simply secularized their religious calling.
6. Liberal Jews fear nationalism. The birth of nationalism in Europe planted the secular seeds of the Holocaust (religious seeds had been planted by some early and medieval Church teachings and reinforced by Martin Luther). European nationalists welcomed all national identities except the Jews’. That is a major reason so many Jews identify primarily as “world citizens”; they have contempt for nationalism and believe that strong national identities, even in America, will exclude them.
Just as liberal Jews fear a resurgent Christianity despite the fact that contemporary Christians are the Jews’ best friends, leftist Jews fear American nationalism despite the fact that Americans who believe in American exceptionalism are far more pro-Jewish and pro-Israel than leftist Americans. But most leftist Jews so abhor nationalism, they don’t even like the Jews’ nationalism (Zionism).
If you believe that leftist ideas and policies are good for America and for the world, then you are particularly pleased to know how deeply Jews – with their moral passion, intellectual energies and abilities, and financial clout – are involved with the Left. If, on the other hand, you believe that the Left is morally confused and largely a destructive force in America and the world, then the Jews’ disproportionate involvement on the Left is nothing less than a tragedy – for the world and especially for the Jews.
IN BIRMINGHAM, THE BENEVOLENT FACE OF JIHAD
In Birmingham, the benevolent face of jihad
By Julia Gorin
Jewish World Review
April 26, 2006
jewishworldreview.com/julia/gorin042606.php3
What is the world coming to when rabbis in Birmingham are inviting muftis from Bosnia?
Earlier this month, Rabbi Jonathan Miller of Birmingham’s Temple Emanu-El hosted Bosnia’s Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric to address an interfaith audience at his synagogue so that we Jews and Christians might “make room in our hearts and souls for others who believe differently from us,” as his op-ed in The Birmingham News read. According to one attendee, the mufti packed a big house and the evening was replete with Martin Luther King tie-ins and civil rights-era imagery.
The rabbi should have done some research first. Ceric recently called on the world to stand by Syria, a state that sponsors terrorism against Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq, among other targets. During the March, 2004 pogroms in Kosovo against Orthodox Christian Serbs by Albanian Muslims – in which 19 people were killed, dozens of churches and cemeteries destroyed, and close to 4,000 of Kosovo’s minority Serbs displaced – BBC.com reported that Ceric “expressed concern about the rise of anti-Islamic hysteria in the West.” He added that there was “no such thing as Islamic terrorism,” and assured reporters that there were no charities linked to al-Qaeda operating in Bosnia.
In fact, a CNSNews.com article titled “Jihadists Find Convenient Base in Bosnia” reported that “terrorists who previously targeted the U.S. are now in Bosnia, where they have access to a ‘one-stop shop’ of jihad training camps, weapons and illegal Islamic ‘charities’ – all at the doorstep of Europe.”
One charity that was funding millions of dollars to al Qaeda – the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation – closed in 2002 and then reopened under the name Vazir – an “association for sport, culture and education.”
“More ominously,” reported the Washington Times in 2003, “the greatest threat to peace and stability stems from the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia, which seeks to either wipe out or convert all Christians in the region. The country now serves as a base for al Qaeda operatives, where numerous terrorist cells are active and plotting attacks on targets throughout Europe. In the past, Saudi Arabia has sent millions of dollars in aid to “humanitarian” agencies that encourage Bosnian Muslims to promote the doctrines of Wahhabism…. Mosques have been established throughout the Muslim-Croat federation, many of whom preach the need for ‘jihad’ against the country’s Catholic Croats and Orthodox Christian Serbs.”
Further, “Osama bin Laden is actively directing terrorist cells in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia,” read an October 2004 AFP dispatch. According to terror expert and author Yossef Bodansky, Bosnia’s Zenica region provided the training ground for the terrorists who conducted a series of suicide attacks in Baghdad in August 2003, including the UN bombing there that killed 22 people.
More damning still, at least two of the 9/11 hijackers – Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi – trained and fought in Bosnia, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “also honed his jihadist skills in Bosnia and financed some of the mujahedin operations there,” Brendan O’Neill wrote for The New Statesman in 2004.
Last October, a raid on a Sarajevo apartment turned up suicide vests, 65 pounds of exploding bullets, rifles and a machine gun, to be used in an imminent attack on the British embassy in Sarajevo. What’s more, reported the International Herald Tribune, “Bosnia gave passports to more than 800 former fighters and aid workers from the Middle East,” including to known terrorists and sometimes under aliases.
Even more disturbing, the Islamists have been creating cells of “White al Qaeda” – Caucasian Bosnian Muslims who can evade ethnic profiling. The rabbi might also be interested to know that the suicide attack in Netanya in December, which killed five and wounded 95, was organized by a Bosnian-based group called Al-Asifa. There are Balkans ties as well to the London and Madrid attacks, as well as New York on 9/11.
That a rabbi would invite a terror enabler to ingratiate himself and his religion to a Judeo-Christian audience is a disgrace. Miller isn’t doing Americans any favors by helping the Islamic PR campaign.
Yet he is not alone in his misguided efforts. Last year, the American Jewish Committee launched the Chicago Coalition for Interreligious Learning to “produce changes in how differing religions were presented in textbooks and classrooms in an effort to promote respect among communities.”
But the organization’s own counter-terrorism division warned about Islamist groups using interfaith to gain legitimacy, noting that most mainstream Muslim organizations are “pro-Saudi and pro-Muslim Brotherhood” and have learned that “interfaith dialogue is a good way to spread the ideology” since it “gives such organizations a public legitimacy that their ideology would deny them if they expressed it outright.” Further, “these organizations come to the Jewish community to talk about ‘interfaith,’ while they still teach anti-Western and anti-Christian doctrines to their followers.”
The dangers of inculcating fair-minded American masses aside, the vision of a Muslim cleric lecturing a Western audience on “making room in our hearts and souls for others who believe differently from us” borders on the obscene. “If we can do it here in Birmingham,” instructs the rabbi, “who knows, but that we might spread this message to all the corners of the world. And then wouldn’t God be pleased with us?” The glaring flaw in this pre-school-level thinking is that the Western world has done it, but the Muslim world isn’t taking an example – its religious foundations running precisely counter to openness. Nor would God be pleased with us, as he surely has little respect for those who are unwilling to defend their way of life – which is already perilously over-tolerant toward ideologies that abhor its very tolerance.
The rabbi and some Christian friends came together to bring the mufti to the Birmingham synagogue to “speak for a tradition of the one true living God” – a reference to the false but endlessly repeated cliche that Muslims believe in the same God as Christians and Jews. In fact, Islam teaches that only it knows “the true nature of God that Judaism and Christianity tell lies about,” as Balkans expert Dr. Serge Trifkovic has written.
If Jews continue public relations efforts for movements that wish them ill, they’ll find themselves in a position similar to what they were in during WWII. At that time, the mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler to offer support. Thousands of Bosnian Muslims answered the mufti’s call to volunteer for service in the Waffen SS. Al-Husseini is photographed proudly inspecting his Bosnian Muslim Nazi troops.
When we finally arrive at the logical conclusion of the current state of affairs, in which Jews are fleeing Europe once again and six million in Israel are threatened with “erasure” from the map, it won’t be because “the world” looked the other way. It’ll be because of my fellow Jews’ own fatal ignorance.
Never again? What a joke. Shame on this so-called rabbi, and shame on every Jew and Christian in the audience who applauded the speaker on cue.
CONTENTS
1. “Guilty of apostasy, unbelief, and denial of the Islamic established facts”
2. “We are fully aware of their hiding places”
3. Saad Eddin Ibrahim another Muslim “dissident”
4. “The mushroom cloud is on its way”
5. American victim of Tel Aviv bombing loses part of leg, kidney & spleen
6. Hamas hopes for more funds from Belgian foreign ministry
7. New Olmert government to have 27+ ministries
8. Amir Peretz to defense?
9. Text of the death threat issued to Muslim reformers
10. New York City rally: “Israelis, how many women have you raped today?” (Counterterrorism blog, April 21, 2006)
“GUILTY OF DENIAL OF THE ISLAMIC EXTABLISHED FACTS”
This is a follow-up to several dispatches on Arab reformers, including Speaking out against Sharia-backed sexual abuse of women and children (April 6, 2006). I feel it is important that the western media do much more to support the efforts of Arab reformers just as they should do much more to expose the Muslim extremists which some western politicians, such as the mayor of London, continue to coddle up to.
A group most likely from Egypt, calling itself in Arabic “Al-Munasirun li Rasul al Allah” (“Supporters of God’s Messenger”), has released a list of moderate Muslims whom they say will be killed if they fail to renounce their views. These include Dr. Wafa Sultan, mentioned previously on this list, who pointed out that the source of the latest threat differed from the dozens she had previously received because it was made by a group and not by an individual and because the threat included personal information about the recipients, as well as the names of some of their spouses and children.
The reformers are pronounced “guilty of apostasy, unbelief, and denial of the Islamic established facts” and given three days to “announce their repentance and disavow their writings in denial of the traditions of our prophet and to repent their support of the countries of unbelief and their rulers.” It demanded that repentance was made “publicly in the newspapers that they write in, and never to return to these writings and deeds again.”
“WE ARE FULLY AWARE OF THEIR HIDING PLACES”
The message from “Al-Munasirun li Rasul al Allah” (attached below) says “We are fully aware of their hiding places, their houses, their children’s schools, and the times when their wives are alone at home.”
The communiqué, signed by Abu Dhar al Maqdishi, identified as the group’s media spokesperson, was e-mailed to over 30 prominent political and religious reformers, including many in the West.
Some analysts have argued that this communiqué is indicative of the inner struggle in Islam. Threats have been used in the Middle East for over half a century to silence moderates who work to combat fanaticism, militancy and Fascistic tendencies among fellow Muslims.
SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM, ANOTHER MUSLIM “DISSIDENT”
Among the targets is Egyptian sociologist and human-rights and democracy campaigner Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Ibrahim has argued in favor of a normalization of relations between Egypt and Israel. He was previously imprisoned by the Egyptian government for standing up for Coptic Christian rights and demanding free elections in Egypt. (For more information on Egyptian Copts, see the dispatch Red Cross: Persecution of Christians “outside our area of expertise” (& other items), Nov. 3, 2005.)
“THE MUSHROOM CLOUD IS ON ITS WAY”
“The mushroom cloud is on its way” and “The real Holocaust is on its way” were some of the slogans chanted in Arabic outside the Israeli Consulate in midtown Manhattan last Thursday during a rally held by the Queens-based Islamic Thinkers Society (ITS) to celebrate last week’s Tel Aviv bombing.
The protesters also held up signs saying “Islam will Dominate,” and a picture showing an Islamic flag flying over the White House, the New York Sun and other media (but not thus far The New York Times) report.
According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, the Islamic Thinkers Society is a spin-off of the London-based group Al-Muhajiroun, which is most infamous for attempting to hold “The Magnificent 19” rally in memory of the 9/11 terrorists. (See London convention will celebrate 9/11 (and other items) Sept. 7, 2004.)
The Islamic affairs commentator Daniel Pipes sees last week’s Manhattan rally as “potentially an important turning point as it shows the burgeoning confidence of U.S.-based Islamists, who no longer think they must work within the system and [no longer] care at all what non-Muslims think.”
AMERICAN VICTIM OF TEL AVIV BOMBING LOSES PART OF LEG, KIDNEY & SPLEEN
This is an update to the note about the American teenager injured in last week’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, mentioned in the dispatch “The victims are no different from those slain on September 11, 2001” (April 18, 2006).
Danny Wultz, 16, who lives in Weston, southern Florida, has now undergone his third operation: the latest to remove his leg from the knee down. He had already lost a kidney and his spleen. His father is recuperating with a broken leg in the same hospital. Mr Wultz and his son were having a light lunch in Tel Aviv last Monday when the Palestinian murderer struck at random. Danny Wultz was passionate about basketball, and had been expected to play competitively.
HAMAS HOPES FOR MORE FUNDS FROM BELGIAN FOREIGN MINISTRY
On April 20, the French-language magazine “Le Pere Ubu” reproduced a letter written by the Palestinian representative to the European Union, Leila Shahid, to Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht dated April 10. This letter carried the emblem of the PA as well as a map of “Palestine” reaching from the Mediterranean to Jordan. Mrs. Shahid called Hamas the “movement of hope”. She thanked the Council of Ministers and minister de Gucht in particular for the financial aid given to the delegation in 2005 as well as previous years, along with its participation in the costs of the functioning of the delegation. She presented “a new request for 100,000 Euros (approximately $124,000) for 2006” and “firmly hoped that this request will receive the support of the Council of Ministers and of the Belgian Foreign Minister.”
NEW OLMERT GOVERNMENT TO HAVE 27+ MINISTRIES
According to Israeli press reports, the Kadima party that won 29 seats in last month’s Israeli elections will oversee a coalition government that comprises either 27 or 29 ministries or ministers, the largest government in Israel’s history. By comparison, the United States has 15 departments (the equivalent of ministries) in its executive branch; and Britain has 20 ministries. Considering that the Israeli coalition needs only 61 mandates to govern the 120-seat Knesset, the appointment of 27-29 of these 61 as government ministers is staggering
The movement for Quality Government in Israel called it “party hack welfare” and a gross waste of valuable economic resources.
Ha’aretz’s main editorial today states: “Ehud Olmert will lead a large cabinet in a small country, where ministers with and without portfolios will converge and look for something with which to occupy themselves, which will not always be found. A cabinet that is apparently meant to include about 30 ministers is not a real governing body that constitutes ‘the executive branch of the country’ by virtue of the Basic Law on government... Much of the quarter of a billion shekels needed, by some estimates, for annual maintenance of the cabinet – its ministers, deputy ministers and advisers – could have been used for far more important purposes than to be nice to everyone... If we add to the ministerial festivities some eight deputy ministers, who are considered part of the executive branch, then we will find that one-third of the Knesset members take no part in the obligation of parliamentary criticism of the cabinet.”
The Jerusalem Post writes today: “At what point in the coalition negotiations do the parties jointly decide, ‘it’s not our money, let’s stick it to the voters’? It is difficult to interpret the decision to form a government of a minimum of 27 ministers in another manner. Such profligacy is a form of corruption, and clearly starts the nascent government on the wrong foot.”
AMIR PERETZ TO DEFENSE?
Equally disconcerting for those who care about Israel’s security is the reported appointment by Olmert of Labor party leader Amir Peretz to the position of defense minister. Peretz has no military command experience, and he will lead Israel at a time of increasing Hamas militancy, Katyusha and Qassam rocket attacks and a possible confrontation with an Iranian government that is about to go nuclear and last week again swore to wipe Israel off the map.
Many in Israel had hoped that Shaul Mofaz, who is himself Iranian-born and understands very well the nature of the Iranian threat, would retain the post of defense minister.
Like Peretz, Olmert also has virtually no command-level military experience, in contrast to the previous Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon. (As an ordnance officer in Israel’s parachute brigade, Peretz was badly wounded in a military operation in 1974 and confined to a bed for a year.)
As predicted in the note of the dispatch of April 4, it seems Olmert is desperate to keep the Labor leader out of the finance ministry. If appointed finance minister, Peretz, a former trade unionist, was expected to severely set back Israel’s economic recovery begun during the period in which Benjamin Netanyahu served as finance minister.
I attach two items below relating to the above note.
-- Tom Gross
“WE WILL HUNT THEM IN EVERY PLACE AND EVERY TIME”
The following is the text of the death threat issued to Muslim reformers: (Translation courtesy of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, Washington, DC)
“Statement Number 1 from the Supporters of God’s Messenger, Muhammad peace be upon him, to unbelievers, apostates, atheists and those who may ally with them.
“God, Allah almighty said ‘Say to the Unbelievers, if they desist their past would be forgiven them; but if they persist, the punishment of those before them is already.’ and also said ‘O Prophet! strive hard against the Unbelievers and the Hypocrites, and be firm against them. Their abode is Hell, an evil refuge indeed.’ And the messenger of God also said ‘He who changes his religion, kill him’.
“We, the Supporters of God’s Messenger, after discussion and consultation with our brothers, the leaders of the Islamic groups and organizations in the Muslim lands, and after they were informed of the verdicts that we reached in our consultation committee, concerning the expulsion of the leaders of apostasy [from the community of Islam], along with those who publicly deny our prophetic tradition, and who also call on others to join in their unbelief. After they departed from Islam and the Muslim umma, they have publicly supported leaders of unbelief, the worshipers of the cross, the Christians with whom they attend conferences, helping them against our spiritual leaders, and even demanding for them the right of ruling over our Muslim lands. Also, they support and cooperate with the sons of pigs and monkeys [i.e. Jews] against our brothers in our homeland of our Al-Aqsa Mosque.
“The consultation committee decided to give those who were found guilty of apostasy, unbelief, and denial of the Islamic established facts, three days’ time for them to announce their repentance and disavow their writings in denial of the traditions of the our prophet and to repent their support of the countries of unbelief and their rulers. They must announce this repentance publicly in the newspapers that they write in, and never to return to these writings and deeds again. If they do not respond to God and His messenger, we will hunt them in every place and every time. They are not far from the swords of the righteous, they are closer to our swords than to our shoes, they are under our eyes and ears (surveillance) day and night, we are totally aware of the their hiding places, residences, schools of their sons, and the times when their wives are alone at home. We have issued our commands to the soldiers of God to worship God by pouring out their blood and burning their homes.
“We thank God that most of these heads of unbelief and atheism do not live in Islamic lands, which will not be polluted by their rotten blood. They live in the lands of unbelief, the homelands of those who worship the cross and idols, countries like America, Switzerland, Canada and Italy. If they were in Islamic countries, we would wash the places in which they are killed seven times, once with dust to purify the Islamic homeland of their rotten blood. Their women are to be abducted; their children enslaved, and their money confiscated .This applies the ruling of Islam in handing over the possessions of the unbelievers to those who kill them.
“These are the names of those sentenced to be killed by the command of the consultation committee, if they do not repent three times:
Ahmed Subhy Mansour, leader of the Ahl ul-Quran, who escaped to the United States, the land of unbelief, with his sons; Muhammad, Sherif, Amir, Hosam, Sameh, Moner, and his wife.
Othman Muhammad Ali, leader of the Ahl ul-Quran in the Islamic land of Egypt, who escaped to Canada, the land of unbelief, and his wife.
Gamal Al-Banna, Egypt.
Abdelfattah Assaker, Egypt.
Mohamed Shebl, Egypt.
Mohamed Saied El Moshtohry, Egypt.
Mohamed Saied El Ashmawy, Egypt.
Hassan Ahmed Omar, Egypt.
Abdellatif Saied, Egypt.
Ayman Mohamed Abdelrahman, Egypt.
Waleed Mohamed Abdelrahman, Egypt.
Taha Helal, Egypt,
Khaled Helal, Italy.
Essam Nafiea, Egypt.
Ahmed Shaaban, Egypt.
Amr Abu Rassaa, Jordan
Ramadan Abdel Rahman Ali, Jordan.
Mohamed Shaalan, Egypt.
Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the owner of Ibn Zionist (Ibn Khaldun) center, Egypt.
Amr Ismaiel, Egypt.
Mohamed El Badri, Egypt.
Abdel Karim Soliman, Egypt.
Salah Mohsen, Canada.
Shaker Elnabulsi, USA
Nedal Na’eisa, USA.
Samir Hassan Ibrahim, Syria.
Wafa Sultan, USA.
Adli Abadeer, Switzerland.
Magdi Khalil, USA
Zakareya Botros, Holland.
Nahed Metwalli, Holland.
Alafeef Al-Akhdar, France.
Faten Nour, USA.
Signed by: Abu Dhar El Makdishi, media amir (commander)
The following web pages contain news in Arabic of the above death threats:
www.alarabiya.net/Articles/2006/04/09/22700.htm
www.elaph.com/elaphweb/ElaphWeb/Politics/2006/4/140660.htm?KeyWords =
www.asharqalawsat.com/details.asp?section=4&issue=9994&article=357349
www.ildp.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=594
www.copts-united.com/gnews/mixgn.php?subaction=showfull&id=1144497867&archive=&start_from=&ucat=12&
www.shbabmisr.com/XPage.asp?browser=View&EgyxpID=5466
www.rezgar.com/debat/show.art.asp?aid=61759
www.rezgar.com/debat/show.art.asp?aid=61850
www.rezgar.com/debat/show.art.asp?aid=61799
“HOW MANY WOMEN HAVE YOU RAPED TODAY?”
Islamists’ message to Israel at New York City rally: “The mushroom cloud is on its way!”
By Steven Emerson
Counterterrorism blog
Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Newswire
April 21, 2006
counterterrorismblog.org/2006/04/islamists_message_to_israel_at_1.php
The Queens-based Islamic Thinkers Society (ITS) held a rally yesterday outside of the Israeli Consulate in Manhattan. Members of the Islamic Thinkers Society are easily identified by their Khilafah flags and provocative signs as well as rhetoric against homosexuals, Jews, Christians, Danes and others, depending on the hot button issue at the moment. Yesterday’s rally was held in response to last week’s Tel Aviv bombing that killed 9 and injured scores. While carrying signs including “Islam will Dominate” with a picture of an Islamic flag over the White House, the small but loud group of men chanted threatening slogans:
Excerpts:
Leader (in Arabic): With our blood and our lives we will liberate al Aqsa!
[The rest also respond in Arabic:] With our blood and our lives we will liberate al Aqsa!
Israeli Zionists What do you say? The real Holocaust is on its way
Takbeer!
Response: Allahu Akbar!
Takbeer!
Response: Allahu Akbar!
Israeli Zionists, What do you say?
How many women have you raped today?
Israeli Zionists, What do you say?
How many children have you killed today?
Zionists, Zionists You will pay! The Wrath of Allah is on its way!
Israeli Zionists You shall pay! The Wrath of Allah is on its way!
The mushroom cloud is on its way! The real Holocaust is on its way!
We are not your average Muslims, We are the Muslims of Was al Sunnah
We will not accept the United Nations, they are the criminals themselves
They get paid by the Israeli and the US government to do their job.
We don’t recognize United Nations as a body
We only recognize Allah
Israel won’t last long… Indeed, Allah will repeat the Holocaust right on the soil of Israel
Takbeer!
Response: Allahu Akbar!
No wonder they call you sons of apes and pigs because that’s what you are.
We know many government services are watching us
Such as the FBI…CIA…Mossad, Homeland Security…
We know we are getting on their nerves
And so are you….
So we say the hell with you!
May the FBI burn in Hell
CIA burn in Hell
Mossad burn in Hell
Homeland Security burn in hell!!
Islam will dominate the world
Islam is the only solution
Islam will dominate the world
Islam is the only solution
Takbeer!
La ilaha il Allah, Muhammad-ur Rasool Allah
Another mushroom cloud, right in the midst of Israel!
Takbeer!! Allahu Akbar!
CONTENTS
1. A few dissident voices
2. Reveling in blood
3. “Arab Tel Aviv”
4. Egyptian government newspaper lauds attack
5. Al-Arian pleads guilty
6. American teen fights for life
7. Giving out sweets
8. The Independent’s “activists”
9. The BBC bends the truth, as usual
10. “Ill-timed excuses [in the NY Times]” (New York Sun, April 18, 2006)
11. “Islamic Jihad set up unit of bombers” (UPI, April 18, 2006)
12. “A look at Islamic Jihad” (Associated Press, April 17, 2006)
Here are a few observations about yesterday’s deadly suicide attack at a Tel Aviv sandwich and falafel stand. The attack, which was carried out by the Iranian government-funded terror group Islamic Jihad and praised by the Hamas-led Palestinian government, killed at least nine people, and injured over 60, some severely. A 22-year-old Palestinian man attacked the same restaurant in January, killing himself and wounding two dozen Israelis.
A FEW DISSIDENT VOICES
My “Arab affairs” contacts tell me that on the Jihadi internet forums, following yesterday’s suicide bomb, there were several calls to stop such attacks because “they do not achieve the results we are striving for.” These calls are not very common.
REVELING IN BLOOD
However, in general such websites have reveled in the murder of Jews and have posted photos of the attacks too gruesome to be reprinted in most western papers.
For example, scroll down to see the photos (complete with a laughing yellow face) on:
http://www.palestinianforum.net/forum/showthread.php?t=57356&page=16
These sites are widely read by Arabic extremists not just in the Middle East but in America, Canada and Europe too.
“ARAB TEL AVIV”
Also of interest is the growing use of the Arab name of Tel Aviv on these forums. “Aviv,” as many of you may know, means “Spring” in Hebrew, and the name has started to be translated to Arabic as “Tel al-Rabi.” (“Rabi” means spring in Arabic.) This is part of the increasing efforts to erase Israeli identity.
EGYPTIAN GOVERNMENT NEWSPAPER LAUDS ATTACK
The Egyptian state-controlled newspaper Al Gomhuria today praised yesterday’s suicide attack in Tel Aviv, calling it an act of sacrifice and martyrdom.
Al Gomhuria is one of the country’s three biggest newspapers. Its editor was appointed by President Hosni Mubarak.
In its lead editorial, Al Gomhuria calls the murders “heroic.” “There will be more later,” the daily adds, reminding readers that “In the Islamic faith, a martyr goes to heaven.”
AL-ARIAN PLEADS GUILTY
As part of his deal to avoid further prosecution in return for deportation, Professor Sami al-Arian has pleaded guilty to aiding Islamic Jihad, the group that carried out yesterday’s Tel Aviv bombing:
The Florida bureau of Reuters reports today that: “Former Florida university professor Sami al-Arian has pleaded guilty to aiding the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad and agreed to be deported, according to documents made public on Monday by a U.S. court in Florida.
“Al-Arian and three co-defendants were arrested in 2003 and charged with helping the group carry out attacks in Israel. In December, a federal jury found al-Arian not guilty on eight charges and failed to reach a verdict on nine others after a six-month trial. Al-Arian accepted the plea agreement on Friday to avoid another trial on the deadlocked charges.”
AMERICAN TEEN FIGHTS FOR LIFE
Among the injured still fighting for their lives following yesterday’s attack is an American teenager. The 16-year-old, who suffered severe injuries to his internal organs, is at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. His name has not been made public at the request of his family. The bomb was laced with nails and other sharp objects designed to cause maximum injury.
GIVING OUT SWEETS
As is the Palestinian tradition following the “successful” murder of Jews, in parts of Gaza, Islamic Jihad gunmen gave out sweets to celebrate the attack yesterday, reports Reuters.
On Monday U.S. ally Qatar said it would give another $50 million in aid to Hamas.
Japan said today it would not give new aid via the PA government until Hamas committed itself to peace. Japan has given $840m, and is one of the Palestinian Authority’s largest donors. Japan, which is strongly reliant on Mideast oil, says it will however continue to provide funds to private Palestinian NGOs.
THE INDEPENDENT’S “ACTIVISTS”
The British liberal-left newspaper The Independent today begins its front page report on yesterday’s attack by saying it was carried out by “a youthful activist.” Their piece then continues on with some sympathetic quotes from the bomber’s family and some strange remarks about “Jews... confiscating... olive, almond and fruit trees.”
The Independent is the only British newspaper to be edited by a Jew, Simon Kelner. It is difficult to know what Kelner and some of his anti-Israeli colleagues (some of whom are Jewish) make of the fact that on his website, David Irving, one of the world’s leading Holocaust revisionists, nominates the Independent’s Mideast correspondent Robert Fisk as “Bravest Journalist of the Year” and reproduces some of Fisk’s pieces from the Independent.
THE BBC BENDS THE TRUTH, AS USUAL
The BBC world service coverage, while less hostile to Israel than it has been in the wake of even worse suicide attacks 2-3 years ago, nevertheless contained a lot of drivel about “cycles of violence,” and nonsense about “massive Israeli retaliation.”
The BBC’s main online home page did use the word terrorist – but felt the need to put quotes round the word. On air, the BBC, of course, scrupulously avoided the use of the term. For more, please see The BBC discovers ‘terrorism,’ briefly.
Some British newspapers are now criticizing the BBC for this. For example, the lead editorial in today’s conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph starts:
“Yesterday’s suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv restaurant, described as ‘self-defence’ by Hamas, was a wicked act of terrorism. That is the first and most important thing to say (though the BBC once again declined to use the word ‘terrorism’ on its website to describe the slaughter of innocent civilians). The murders are a disaster not just for the victims and their families, but for the Palestinian people as a whole and – arguably – Hamas, which took over the running of the Palestinian Authority from the deeply corrupt Fatah following January’s elections. Hamas’s reference to ‘self-defence’ gives the impression that it approved of the atrocity... the ‘militants’ (as the BBC calls them) who are motivated by a Nazi-like determination to exterminate Israel; or Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, which has never come to terms with losing control of the Authority and all the lovely cash that went with it...”
I attach three pieces below. There will be no more dispatches this week due to very heavy other work commitments.
-- Tom Gross
“AMERICANS DON’T NEED THE NEW YORK TIMES AND HAMAS TO TELL THEM WHAT THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND. THEY KNOW THAT THE VICTIMS SLAIN YESTERDAY IN TEL AVIV ARE NO DIFFERENT FROM THOSE SLAIN ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001”
Ill-timed excuses
New York Sun (Editorial)
April 18, 2006
www.nysun.com/article/31175?access=904599
Talk about timing. The suicide bombing that killed nine Israelis in an attack on a Tel Aviv felafel restaurant was preceded only a day by a full-page advertisement that was rolled out in the New York Times, claiming “Hamas has held a unilateral ceasefire for a year, while Israel has ignored it and continues its attacks.” The “ceasefire” must come as news to the families of the nine killed and nearly 70 wounded, as well as to those who read on the Web site of the Jerusalem Post that this particular felafel restaurant “was hit in a similar suicide attack three months ago, injuring 20 people.” And the “ceasefire” claim could have been checked by the Times quality control people with a few keystrokes.
According to Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, seven suicide bombing attacks were made in 2005. They killed 23 persons and injured 160. It reports that another 15 suicide attacks were thwarted in progress. The Israeli foreign ministry says, “Hamas was responsible for the suicide bombing at the Beersheba bus station on 28 August 2005 in which two security guards were seriously wounded. In September 2005, Hamas terrorists abducted and murdered Jerusalem businessman Sasson Nuriel.” Lest it be said that the other suicide bombings took place over the objections of Hamas, a spokesman for the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority Interior Ministry, Khaled Abu Helal, yesterday blamed Israel for the terrorist attack, saying, “We think that this operation ... is a direct result of the policy of the occupation and the brutal aggression and siege committed against our people.”
The suicide bomber was sent by Islamic Jihad, the same terrorist organization that Sami al-Arian just confessed to conspiring to help. Al-Arian’s confession was accepted by the federal judge in the case yesterday. The suicide bombing came the same day that the New York Post published Robert Novak sharply criticizing Israel for restricting movement of Arabs into Israel from the West Bank. Not a peep out of Mr. Novak in respect of Egypt’s Easter-time oppression of its Christians, known as Copts, which has been frontpage news in The New York Sun.
Hamas’s line, that Israel is to blame for the suicide bombers killing Israeli civilians, is gaining ground in elite intellectual circles. Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, went so far as to bring in an Israeli leftist, Tom Segev, to argue that Israeli settlements are to blame. Yale University is trying to hire the anti-Israel professor Juan Cole, according to Mitch Webber and Eliana Johnson, writing on the adjacent page. Princeton is poised to bring aboard the most famous of Columbia’s anti-Israel professors, Rashid Khalidi, and Harvard’s Kennedy School is harboring as its academic dean Stephen Walt, another anti-Israel academic. Mr. Walt and his coauthor are featured on the Web site of the organization that ran the ad in the Times touting the falsities of Hamas.
Anyone with doubts about Hamas’s intentions can consult its charter, which contains such gems as “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.” Or that “enemies... used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destructive spying organizations...Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Or they can consult the words of one of Hamas’s financial backers, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, who has repeatedly vowed to wipe Israel off the map. Iran was just voted vice chairman of the United Nations Disarmament Commission, Fox News’s Brit Hume reported last night.
The Times ad claims “Many Americans do not understand that Hamas is a typical anti-colonial insurgency responding to an Israeli occupation and what amounts to government terror against Palestinian civilians. It is not at all related to al-Qa’ida or 9/11.” In fact Hamas represents colonialism by Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in the West Bank and Gaza. Its ideology reeks of Al Qaeda and bin Laden. Americans don’t need the New York Times and Hamas to tell them what they don’t understand. They know that the victims slain yesterday at a felafel restaurant in Tel Aviv are no different from those slain on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center. They are casualties in a war being levied by an enemy that aims to reestablish the caliphate and enforce Islamic law worldwide, an enemy that kills civilian women and children while Western sympathizers make ill-timed excuses.
“QUALITATIVE OPERATIONS AGAINST THE ZIONIST ENTITY”
Islamic Jihad set up unit of bombers
United Press International
April 18, 2006
Islamic Jihad said its military wing has set up a special detachment of suicide bombers ready to retaliate to Israeli attacks.
The announcement, made today by the commander of al-Quds Brigades, signaled a further escalation of Middle East violence.
The unidentified Brigades’ commander said in a statement released to the press that the detachment included 70 male and female bombers “who are ready to respond to the crimes of the occupation forces and waiting the moment of blowing themselves up.”
He said “resisting occupation is a sacred and legitimate duty,” vowing “qualitative operations against the Zionist entity.”
“The response to the crimes of occupation forces will be through martyr attacks and the continuation of resistance by dealing painful strikes to the terrorist Israeli army which has kept up its aggression against Palestinians,” the commander said.
He said the suicide attack which took place Monday in Tel Aviv and in which nine Israelis were killed “was the beginning of a series of operations which will be carried out by the Quds Brigades against the occupation and the settlers.”
He also cautioned Israel against “committing any stupidity” by targeting Jihad leaders, “because that will not weaken our movement or intimidate our mujahideen.”
BACKED BY IRAN AND SYRIA
A look at Islamic Jihad
The Associated Press
April 17, 2006
Islamic Jihad, a virulently anti-Israel group backed by Iran and Syria, claimed responsibility for Monday’s suicide attack in Tel Aviv, the deadliest Palestinian attack in 20 months.
The group has been behind most of the Palestinian attacks against Israel since the sides declared a truce in February 2005. It says the violence is a legitimate response to an Israeli crackdown on its members.
Islamic Jihad has claimed responsibility for eight of nine suicide attacks in Israel and the West Bank since the cease-fire declaration, and its militants in Gaza continue to fire homemade rockets at Israel on a daily basis.
The group is believed to have about 2,000 militants armed with M-16 and AK-47 automatic rifles, grenades and anti-tank weapons.
Last month, it claimed responsibility for firing a long-range Katyusha rocket into Israel. The attack, which caused no damage or injuries, marked a significant increase in its abilities.
Islamic Jihad is led by Ramadan Shallah, a Palestinian from Gaza who now lives in exile in Syria. It considers the 1979 Iranian Revolution to be the beginning of a new era for the Muslim world and wants to turn all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza into an Islamic state. It rules out compromise with Israel.
Shallah, visiting Iran this week, said his group would step up its efforts to attack Israel with suicide bombers and rockets.
I attach a piece by myself published by National Review Online, one of America’s two most read opinion websites. I hope that even those of you who don’t follow soccer, will find this piece of interest.
-- Tom Gross
Football killing fields
Outrage and disbelief as world soccer body condemns Israel, not Hamas
By Tom Gross
National Review Online
April 11, 2006
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/gross200604111311.asp
Israel is used to being singled out for unjust criticism and subjected to startling double standards by the United Nations, the European Union, much of the western media and numerous academic bodies. But now FIFA – the supposedly non-political organization that governs the world’s most popular sport, soccer – is getting in on the act as well.
FIFA has condemned Israel for an air strike on an empty soccer field in the Gaza Strip that was used for training exercises by Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa martyrs brigade. This strike did not cause any injuries. But at the same time FIFA has refused to condemn a Palestinian rocket attack on an Israeli soccer field last week which did cause injuries.
With the soccer World Cup, which takes place only once every four years, just weeks away, it is a time of mounting emotion for the hundreds of millions of people across the globe who passionately follow the game.
As FIFA meets in the next few days to decide what action to take against Israel, the double standards involved could not be more obvious. Up to now FIFA, which sees itself as a purely sporting body, has gone out of its way to avoid politics, and has refrained from criticizing even the most appalling human rights abuses connected to soccer players and stadiums.
NOT A WORD ABOUT SADDAM AND THE TALIBAN
When Saddam Hussein’s son Uday had Iraqi soccer players tortured in 1997 after they failed to qualify for the 1998 FIFA World Cup Finals in France, FIFA remained silent. Uday, who was chairman of the Iraqi soccer association, had star players tortured again in 1998. And in 2000, following a quarterfinal defeat in the Asia Cup, three Iraqi players were whipped and beaten for three days by Uday’s bodyguards. The torture took place at the Iraqi Olympic Committee headquarters, but FIFA said nothing.
Again, FIFA simply looked the other way while the Taliban used UN-funded soccer fields to slaughter and flog hundreds of innocent people who had supposedly violated Sharia law in front of crowds of thousands chanting “God is great”. (Afghan soccer coach Habib Ullahniazi said that as many as 30 people were executed in the middle of the field during the intermissions of a single soccer match at Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium.)
FIFA equally failed to speak out when soccer stadiums in Argentina were turned into jails.
AND CHILE AND CHECHNYA
FIFA’s silence was no less deafening when, according to the International Red Cross, about 7,000 prisoners were detained (and some tortured) in Chile’s national soccer stadium after Augusto Pinochet seized power in 1973.
Nor did the organization threaten Russia with sanctions after Chechen president Akhmad Kadyrov was murdered by a bomb explosion at Grozny’s Dynamo stadium.
As for the Middle East, FIFA refused to criticize the decision to name a Palestinian soccer tournament after a suicide terrorist who murdered 31 people at a Passover celebration at the Park Hotel in Netanya in 2002. (At the tournament, organized under Yasser Arafat’s auspices in 2003, the brother of the suicide bomber was given the honorary role of distributing the trophies to the winning team.)
FIFA also failed to condemn the suicide bomb at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa in October 2003 which injured three officials from the leading Israeli soccer team Maccabi Haifa.
ISRAEL IS DIFFERENT…
But then last week, FIFA finally found a target worthy of its outrage, and leapt into action. That target was Israel.
The international governing body for soccer condemned the Jewish state, and announced that it was considering possible action over the Israeli air strike last week on the Gaza soccer field that had been used for terrorist training exercises. The field, which had also reportedly served as a missile launching pad, was empty at the time; the strike itself came in response to the continuing barrage of Qassam rocket attacks directed at Israeli towns and villages.
Only a couple of days earlier, one of those Qassam rockets landed on a soccer field at the Karmiya kibbutz in southern Israel, causing light injuries to one person. Several other Israeli children and adults needed to be treated for shock. The attack was claimed by the Al-Quds brigades, an armed wing of Islamic Jihad. The soccer pitch is regularly used by children and it was only a matter of luck that there were not greater injuries. (Since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza last year, several members of the kibbutz, including a 10-month-old baby, have been wounded after their homes took direct hits from Qassams. Israelis elsewhere have died after being hit by these weapons.)
… BUT NOT QASSAM ROCKETS
In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Jerome Champagne, FIFA’s Deputy General Secretary, who had personally condemned the attack on the Palestinian soccer pitch, refused to extend a similar condemnation to the attack on the Israeli pitch.
Champagne said he had discussed the matter with FIFA president Sepp Blatter and that a decision on what action to take against Israel would be announced soon. Champagne, a French national, also sent an official letter to the Israeli Ambassador to Switzerland. (FIFA is based in Zurich.)
A FIFA condemnation of Israel is no small matter. The incredible passions that soccer arouses in most countries around the globe seem to have few boundaries. For example, it was said that the only time the guns fell silent during the Lebanese civil war was during the 1982 World Cup matches.
Individual Israelis, outraged by FIFA’s blatantly one-sided decision, have been sending emails to FIFA asking why “they care more about the grass on an empty soccer pitch than the human lives saved by strikes on the Qassam launching pads.”
ANTI-SEMITIC BANNERS AND CHANTS
They have also asked where FIFA is when anti-Semitic banners go up in European soccer stadiums, and there are chants from spectators about sending Jews to the gas? And where, they wonder, are the FIFA sanctions against the Arab or Asian countries that refuse to allow Israel to compete in Asia?
Other questions have been raised, too – why, for instance, FIFA has moved games from Israel because guest teams were afraid to come to Israel, but has never banned any other national teams from playing home games on account of local Islamic violence. Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey were allowed to continue playing matches at home.
In response to some of this criticism Champagne – perhaps unaware of the phenomena of some radical Jews being at the forefront of whipping up hate against the Jewish state – wrote to the Jerusalem Post saying he couldn’t possibly be biased against Israel because his wife was Jewish.
AP FAILS TO MENTION QASSAM ATTACK
In its widely circulated report on the FIFA condemnation of Israel, the Associated Press also failed to mention the Qassam rocket attack on the Israeli soccer pitch. As a result, and not for the first time, AP gave its readers around the globe an unbalanced impression of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The popularity of soccer ensured AP’s story was used by dozens of news outlets – among others, Al-Jazeera, CBC News of Canada, and the Los Angeles Times. Only the Israeli press mentioned the Qassam attack on the kibbutz Karmiya soccer pitch, an attack which the Islamic Jihad website admits to carrying out.
“WE ARE NOT IN POLITICS”
The outrage felt in soccer-mad Israel at these astonishing double standards is all the greater since FIFA president Sepp Blatter has made it clear that FIFA should not become involved in politics. Following calls last December from German politicians that Iran should be banned from participating in the forthcoming World Cup (which starts in Germany on June 9, 2006) because of repeated Holocaust denial by the Iranian president, Blatter said “We’re not going to enter into any political declarations. We in football, if we entered into such discussions, then it would be against our statutes. We are not in politics.”
Indeed so emboldened does Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now feel by FIFA’s support that he announced last week that he will likely attend Iran’s opening match against Mexico in Nuremberg on June 11. Holocaust denial is a serious crime punishable by a prison term of up to five years in Germany, but Ahmadinejad no doubt feels that powerful international bodies like FIFA will protect him.
A BLIND EYE TO DUBAI
Meanwhile FIFA (and other sporting bodies) continually turn a blind eye to boycotts of Israeli sportsmen.
In February, Tal Ben Haim – the Israeli national soccer team captain, who plays his club soccer for the English Premiership team Bolton Wanderers – was banned from joining his Bolton teammates for their training matches in Dubai. FIFA pointedly ignored this. So did Bolton despite the fact that the team claims to be among the leaders of the campaign to “Kick racism out of football” in the UK.
Only last week, another English club, West Ham, left their two Israeli players, Yossi Benayoun and Yaniv Katan, at home when they went to Dubai. FIFA naturally had nothing to say.
Whilst Israel is often slandered as an “apartheid state," (despite having several Arabs playing in its national team), Dubai has received no criticism for what appears to be a clear “apartheid” policy.
Indeed, were Israel allowed to compete against other Asian teams for a World Cup berth, rather than against the likes of England and France, the relatively strong Israeli team would most probably have been able to qualify for this year’s World Cup.
RONALDINHO AIDS TERROR VICTIMS
Not all is rotten in world soccer. Some individuals still seem to know right from wrong. Last week, Ronaldinho, the Brazilian superstar widely regarded as the best current player in the world, donated signed footballs and shirts to Israeli child suicide bomb survivors, saying he hoped his gifts would “warm the hearts of the children who have suffered so much.”
But FIFA, meanwhile, apparently thinks it is acceptable for Palestinian terror groups to continue targeting such Israeli children, firing missiles from the Gaza Strip, even though Israel has left the area.
(Tom Gross is the former Jerusalem correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News. Among his previous pieces for NRO is “Jeningrad”.)
* Saudis admit Israel was right to destroy Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981
* Saudis to construct security fence along border with Iraq: no international outcry
* Iran’s nuclear program: “A problem for every civilized country”
[* This is an update to a number of recent dispatches on Iran, the last of which was “How Iran duped the west”; Iranian Holocaust (denial) conference “begins today” (March 7, 2006)]
CONTENTS
1. Saudi approval, 25 years later
2. Saudis “launch nuclear program”
3. Saudis to construct security fence along border with Iraq
4. Iranian flag on Chinese bikinis
5. Iran sets up “proxy front” on Israel’s northern border
6. Small coalition to pressure Iran
7. Ahmadinejad: “very good nuclear news in the coming days”
8. “Sabre-rattling”
9. Israel “unable to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities”
10. U.S. denies planning attack on Iran
11. France denies visas to Hamas parliamentarians
12. “A problem for every civilized country”
13. “Iranian hawk swoops on universities to crush dissent” (Guardian, March 27, 2006)
14. “Iran hard-line regime cracks down on blogs” (AP, March 29, 2006)
15. “‘Israel should not be on the forefront of a war against Iran’” (Time, April 9, 2006)
SAUDI APPROVAL, 25 YEARS LATER
Twenty-five years after Israel targeted Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, a senior Saudi official has admitted that Israel was right to do so. The entire world, including the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan, strongly condemned Israel at the time. Some newspapers, including The New York Times, were particularly vicious in their criticism of Israel and its Prime Minister Menachem Begin for the attack.
When asked a few days ago whether the Saudi government now welcomed the destruction of the Osirak nuclear reactor, given Iraq’s subsequent aggression against Kuwait, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., answered, “Probably, yes.” Faisal appeared caught off guard by the question, which came after he called on Israel to disarm to create a nuclear-free Middle East, according to the JTA news agency.
SAUDIS “LAUNCH NUCLEAR PROGRAM”
Meanwhile, on Saturday the German magazine Cicero reported that Saudi Arabia has launched its own nuclear program with assistance from Pakistan. Western intelligence sources quoted by the magazine suggested that Saudi Arabia began its nuclear program in 2003 in response to Iranian threats.
In one visit, between October 2004 and January 2005, Pakistani scientists spent up to three weeks away from their Saudi hotels to work on Riyadh’s nuclear program. The Pakistanis were said to have been disguised as Islamic pilgrims.
SAUDIS TO CONSTRUCT SECURITY FENCE ALONG BORDER WITH IRAQ
Saudi Arabia has invited bids for the construction of a security fence along the entirety of its desert border with Iraq. The barrier is intended to secure the Kingdom’s 4,000 miles of borders to improve both external and internal security.
As of yet, there has been no international condemnation of the Saudis for their “apartheid wall”. The General Assembly of the United Nations has yet to refer the Saudis to the International Court of Justice. And European and American universities have yet to call for a boycott of Saudi universities.
The Saudi decision comes only months after India decided to accelerate the construction of a 2,500 mile fence to seal its border with Bangladesh. For more, see the dispatch The real apartheid: Saudi teacher to be flogged for 15 weeks for praising Jews (Nov. 17, 2005).
IRANIAN FLAG ON CHINESE BIKINIS
Here’s something that Danish newspapers might be reluctant to reprint: Chinese bikini models proudly featuring the flag of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Chinese models wore the bikinis with the flags of all the countries competing in the upcoming soccer World Cup, as part of the China Fashion Week in Beijing last week.
IRAN SETS UP “PROXY FRONT” ON ISRAEL’S NORTHERN BORDER
Iran has invested tens of millions of dollars in setting up a number of sophisticated monitoring posts along Lebanon’s border with Israel. An Israeli army commander told the British Daily Telegraph newspaper that “The Iranians are using Hizbullah to spy on us so that they can collect information for future attacks. And there is very little we can do about it.”
According to the Telegraph, Iranian Revolutionary Guards are training Hizbullah forces in new terror tactics. Iran has supplied Hizbullah with sophisticated weapons including heavy mortars and rockets with a 30-mile range.
SMALL COALITION TO PRESSURE IRAN
On March 30, 2006 the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution calling on Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment activities. Iran has 30 days to cease those activities.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki slammed the UN declaration as an “angry precedent” and a “bad move.” Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Javad Zarif, said Iran would not bow to threats to give up its “right” to nuclear energy and added that his country was “allergic to pressure.”
Yehya Rahim Safavi, an Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander, recently warned that the “Americans should accept Iran as a great regional power and they should know that sanctions and military threats are not going to be benefit them.”
U.S. officials are also seeking other international help beside the UN. The Los Angeles Times reports that they hope to form a small coalition with Britain, France and others to exert economic and diplomatic pressure to persuade Iran’s rulers to halt uranium enrichment activities and cooperate with international inspectors.
AHMADINEJAD: “VERY GOOD NUCLEAR NEWS IN THE COMING DAYS”
European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said yesterday that the EU could consider slapping sanctions on Iran, including a visa ban, if current UN-centered diplomatic efforts fail.
In a speech carried live on state television yesterday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed he would not back down “one iota” over Iran’s nuclear programme. Speaking from the northeastern city of Mashhad, he said “Our enemies know they are unable to even slightly hurt our nation and they cannot create the tiniest obstacle on its glorious and progressive way.” Ahmadinejad also promised “very good nuclear news in the coming days.”
“SABRE-RATTLING”
In a concerted show of “sabre-rattling,” Iran has in the last two weeks announced several new developments in its military hardware, including a stealth flying boat, a radar-evading missile with multiple warheads, a rocket-torpedo, and an anti-ship missile that cannot be jammed. These developments came in the context of naval war games around the Straits of Hormuz, through which two fifths of the world’s oil passes, and were aimed “to display the Islamic system’s defensive capabilities.”
However, some doubt has been cast on the validity of the claims about these weapons. Several weapons experts described them as a combination of lies, exaggeration, wishful thinking and propaganda. Uzi Rubin, an Israeli missile expert, suggested that “they could be bluffing” about the radar-evading missile (known as the Fajr-3 missile). Rubin added “I definitely don’t believe that the Iranians could cook up such a sophisticated missile indigenously.”
ISRAEL “UNABLE TO DESTROY IRAN’S NUCLEAR FACILITIES”
Israel’s military is unable to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to a former leading U.S. intelligence chief. (Ret.) Col. Patrick Lang, director of the Middle East section of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, said that Israel does not have sufficient assets or support for a major attack required to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He cited the absence of Israeli aircraft carriers and the need for warplanes to enter the air space of Arab rivals.
Lang added that the United States is the only country in the world that has capability of carrying out the estimated thousand strike sorties needed to destroy the Iran’s nuclear program. He added that “The objective has to be not to destroy the program, but to set it back a desired number of years.”
According to the UPI news agency, a “prominent armchair strategist,” has asserted that two U.S. B-2 bombers “could do the job in a single strike against multiple targets… With a crew of two per bomber, only four American lives would be at risk, an all-time record in the history of warfare.”
For more on the claim that the Iranian nuclear installations could be taken out in one night, see the article “In a Single Night” in the dispatch (1) Iranian fatwa approves use of nuclear weapons (2) Contain Iran: Admit Israel to NATO (February 22, 2006).
U.S. DENIES PLANNING ATTACK ON IRAN
Whilst much of the mainstream media has covered in great detail the recent article by radical investigative journalist Seymour Hersh about plans being developed by the Bush administration to bomb Iran, President George W. Bush said on Monday that reports of an attack on Iran were “wild speculation.”
Robert Baer, who was a C.I.A. officer in the Middle East, is quoted as saying in Hersh’s article that Ahmadinejad and his Revolutionary Guard colleagues “are capable of making a bomb, hiding it, and launching it at Israel. They’re apocalyptic Shiites. If you’re sitting in Tel Aviv and you believe they’ve got nukes and missiles – you’ve got to take them out. These guys are nuts, and there’s no reason to back off.”
Iran dismissed the article as American “psychological war.” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a weekly news conference that “This is a psychological war launched by Americans because they feel angry and desperate regarding Iran’s nuclear dossier.”
FRANCE DENIES VISAS TO HAMAS PARLIAMENTARIANS
In a marked change of European attitudes towards Palestinian terrorism, France has denied visas to two Hamas members of the Palestinian legislature invited to talks at the Council of Europe, the headquarters of Europe’s leading human rights organization.
France and other members of the European Union have declared Hamas a terrorist organization and thus are now denying visas to the group’s members.
In another development, Norway, which is not a member of the EU but is closely associated with the “Palestinian cause” due to the failed Oslo accords, yesterday announced it would cut funding to Hamas. Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere said that his nation cannot support a government regardless of its policies and as a result it would withhold a $57 million donation to the Palestinian Authority government.
“A PROBLEM FOR EVERY CIVILIZED COUNTRY”
I attach three articles below. The first reports that Iranian “President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is cracking down on Iran’s universities in an effort to crush a student pro-democracy movement and strengthen the hardliners’ grip on power.”
The second relates how the Iranian regime is also cracking down on bloggers: “Dozens of Iranian bloggers have faced harassment by the government, been arrested for voicing opposing views, and fled the country in fear of prosecution.”
The final piece is an interview in this week’s Time magazine with Ehud Olmert. On the subject of Iran, the man likely to be Israel’s next prime minister says that Israel should not be “on the forefront of this war… It’s a problem for every civilized country. Iran is a major threat to the well-being of Europe and America just as much as it is for the state of Israel.” Olmert adds that “it is incumbent upon America and Europeans to form a strategy and implement it to remove this danger of unconventional weapons in Iran.”
-- Tom Gross
“THEY WANT TO GAIN HEGEMONIC CONTROL OVER THE UNIVERSITIES”
Iranian hawk swoops on universities to crush dissent
By Robert Tait
The Guardian
March 27, 2006
www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1740267,00.html
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is cracking down on Iran’s universities in an effort to crush a student pro-democracy movement and strengthen the hardliners’ grip on power.
Leading student activists have been jailed or expelled from their studies, and lecturers have been sacked, while the government has proposed subjecting academics to strict religious testing.
The authorities have also begun a programme of burying the bodies of unknown soldiers on campus grounds in what student leaders say is a thinly disguised attempt to bring religious extremists into the universities on the pretext of holding “martyrs’ ceremonies”. Students fear that such a presence will be used to violently suppress their activities.
In one recent incident students at Tehran’s Sharif University were attacked by plain-clothed Basij (religious volunteers) during an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the burial of three soldiers from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war inside the campus mosque. The incident was overseen by Mehrdad Bazrpash, a close aide to Mr Ahmadinejad and a former Basij leader.
The event took place against a backdrop of speeches by Mr Ahmadinejad, a former university lecturer, stressing the need for “martyrdom” in Iran’s confrontation with the west over its nuclear programme.
Student leaders say the developments amount to a takeover of the universities by Mr Ahmadinejad’s ultra-conservative forces. The campuses were hotbeds of pro-democratic protest during the presidency of the former, reformist leader, Mohammad Khatami. “They want to gain hegemonic control over the universities, which have always been important in influencing the social and political atmosphere and which normally support pro-democracy rather than authoritarian forces,” said Abdollah Momeni, an activist appealing against a five-year sentence imposed for leading a student protest.
“Through burying martyrs on campus they open the doors for the entry of armed militias and thus add the universities to their fiefdoms.”
Other activists have had their studies terminated after the intervention of Iran’s intelligence services. Students also say they have been denied permission for low-level political activities that were allowed during Mr Khatami’s presidency.
The purge has extended to academics and university administrators. One political science lecturer was dismissed for belonging to a human rights group.
The chancellor of Tehran’s Science and Industry University resigned in protest at government interference. Mr Ahmadinejad has also been accused of overturning an established practice of appointing chancellors and faculty heads from academic staff in favour of trusted cronies. A radical cleric was recently appointed to head Tehran University.
“EVERY BLOGGER IN IRAN WHO WRITES IN HIS/HER NAME MUST BE CAREFUL”
Iran hard-line regime cracks down on blogs
By Lara Sukhtian
The Associated Press
March 29, 2006
seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/1700AP_Iran_Cracking_Down_on_Blogs.html
On his last visit to Iran, Canadian-based blogger Hossein Derakhshan was detained and interrogated, then forced to sign a letter of apology for his blog writings before being allowed to leave the country.
Compared to others, Derakhshan is lucky.
Dozens of Iranian bloggers have faced harassment by the government, been arrested for voicing opposing views, and fled the country in fear of prosecution over the past two years.
In the conservative Islamic Republic, where the government has vast control over newspapers and the airwaves, weblogs are one of the last bastions of free expression, where people can speak openly about everything from sex to the nuclear controversy.
But increasingly, they are coming under threat of censorship.
The Iranian blogging community, known as Weblogistan, is relatively new. It sprang to life in 2001 after hard-liners – fighting back against a reformist president – shut down more than 100 newspapers and magazines and detained writers. At the time, Derakhshan posted instructions on the Internet in Farsi on how to set up a weblog.
Since then, the community has grown dramatically. Although exact figures are not known, experts estimate there are between 70,000 and 100,000 active weblogs in Iran. The vast majority are in Farsi but a few are in English.
Overall, the percentage of Iranians now blogging is “gigantic,” said Curt Hopkins, director of an online group called the Committee to Protect Bloggers, who lives in Seattle.
“They are a talking people, very intellectual, social, and have a lot to say. And they are up against a small group (in the government) that are trying to shut everyone up,” said Hopkins.
To bolster its campaign, the Iranian government has one of the most extensive and sophisticated operations to censor and filter Internet content of any country in the world – second only to China, Hopkins said.
It also is one of a growing number of Mideast countries that rely on U.S. commercial software to do the filtering, according to a 2004 study by a group called the OpenNet Initiative. The software that Iran uses blocks both internationally hosted sites in English and local sites in Farsi, the study found.
The filtering process is backed by laws that force individuals who subscribe to Internet service providers to sign a promise not to access non-Islamic sites. The same laws also force the providers to install filtering mechanisms.
The filtering “is systematically getting worse,” said Derakhshan, who was detained and questioned during a visit to Iran last spring, just before the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But is the government threatened because the tens of thousands of Iranian blogs are all throwing insults at it, or calling for revolution? Not quite.
The debates on Iranian weblogs are rarely political. The most common issues are cultural, social and sexual. Blogs also are a good place to chat in a society where young men and women cannot openly date. There are blogs that discuss women’s issues, and ones that deal with art and photography.
But in Iran, activists say all debates are equally perceived as a threat by the authorities. Bloggers living in Iran understand that better than anyone else.
“I am very careful. Every blogger in Iran who writes in his/her name must be careful. I know the red lines and I never go beyond them,” said Parastoo Dokouhaki, 25, who runs one of Iran’s most popular blogs. “And these days, the red lines are getting tighter.”
Dokouhaki doesn’t directly write about politics. She sticks mostly to social issues, but in Iran, that is also a taboo subject.
“I write about the social consequences of government decisions and they don’t like it, because they can’t control it,” said Dokouhaki.
Outright political bloggers have an even tougher time.
Hanif Mazroui was arrested in 2004 and charged with acting against the Islamic system through his writings. He was jailed for 66 days and then acquitted.
“It’s normal for authorities to summon and threaten bloggers,” said Mazroui. The government continued to harass him and three months ago, he was summoned once again by the authorities and told never to write about the nuclear issue. Soon after his release, he shut down his weblog.
“They kept pressuring me,” he said.
Arash Sigarchi, an Iranian journalist and blogger, was arrested and charged with insulting the country’s leader, collaborating with the enemy, writing propaganda against the Islamic state and encouraging people to jeopardize national security.
He had been in jail for 60 days when he was sentenced to 14 years in prison. He appealed, and was released on bail. Although his sentence has been reduced to three years, he still faces charges of insulting the leader and writing propaganda.
Another, Mojtaba Saminejad, has been in prison since February 2005. He was first arrested in November 2004 for speaking out against the arrest of three colleagues. According to the Committee to Protect Bloggers, Saminejad’s Web site was hacked into by people linked to the Iranian Hezbollah movement.
After his release, he launched his blog at a new address, which led to his second arrest in February 2005. He was sentenced to two years in prison, and then given an extra 10 months for inciting “immorality.”
Despite the crackdown, most Iranian bloggers say the government is not interested in eliminating blogging. Instead, they believe authorities want to use blogging to further their own goals.
Farid Pouya, a Belgian-based Iranian blogger, notes the government has just launched a competition for the best four blogs. The subjects: the Islamic revolution and the Quran.
“The government has observed carefully and learned that blogs are important ... and they want to capitalize on that,” he said. “They want to lead the movement, they want to control it.”
“IT’S A PROBLEM FOR EVERY CIVILIZED COUNTRY”
“Israel should not be on the forefront of a War against Iran”
By Romesh Ratnesar
Time Magazine
April 9, 2006
In an exclusive interview with TIME, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister warns about the threat from Iran, praises President Bush and vows to press ahead with West Bank withdrawals
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with TIME World Editor Romesh Ratnesar for a two-hour interview at Olmert’s home in Jerusalem. Here are excerpts from their discussion.
TIME: Would Israel take military action to stop Iran’s nuclear program?
Olmert: As the one who has to take the decision, I can tell you that I genuinely don’t think Israel should be on the forefront of this war. I don’t know why people think this is first and foremost a war for Israel. It’s a problem for every civilized country. Iran is a major threat to the well-being of Europe and America just as much as it is for the state of Israel. I don’t think America can tolerate the idea of a leader of nation of 30 million people who can openly speak of the liquidation of another country. And therefore it is incumbent upon America and Europeans to form a strategy and implement it to remove this danger of unconventional weapons in Iran. To assume that Israel would be the first to go into a military confrontation with Iran represents a misunderstanding of this issue.
TIME: How often do you speak to President Bush?
Olmert: I’ve spoken to him maybe three times since I became Prime Minister. There is a very strong emotional bond between the two of us, every time we speak we both feel it deeply. I know how he feels and he (knows) how I feel. I think it grew out of his first trip to Israel, when I hosted him in Jerusalem. He knows that I like him. I very much depend on the understanding and cooperation of President Bush. The reason I think (disengagement) can be done is because of the trust and understanding we have for each other. In my opinion President Bush will emerge in history as the person who had more courage to change the Middle East than any person before him. I know the war in Iraq is controversial in the States, but for us in the Middle East it has made a great and significant impact. The decision of the President made an enormous impact on the lives of Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians – every country who was the potential target of the aggression of Iraq and Saddam Hussein. The sense of mission that Bush feels about war on terror is of enormous significant. When I think from the perspective of an Israeli and who is the partner, the natural partner who I speak with about fighting terror, it’s President Bush.
TIME: You’ve said that you intend to begin a unilateral withdrawal from some settlements in the West Bank, which goes further than even what Sharon said he would do. Why are you pushing to do this now?
Olmert: I’m not certain that all those who are trying to be the authentic interpreters of Sharon’s legacy can say with great accuracy what he would have done. When Arik collapsed, Hamas was not in power and the prospect of possible negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority was entirely different. This has changed as a result of Hamas coming to power. To continue the same old rhetoric only because I have to think what would Sharon have done is a mistake. I have to think about what is best to do under present circumstances – what can be done, what ought to be done. If there’s one thing Sharon represented it’s not so much the old thing than the desire not to sit and do nothing. I’m sure that he would also have changed the way he thinks if he witnessed these developments.
TIME: There’s a lot of opposition to the plan from the settler community and their supporters. Are you worried that your plan will split Israel?
Olmert: I believe that inside the population of settlers there is a significant group that understand that the time has come for us to redraw the lines. If we handle it with sufficient sensitivity, I believe that we can avoid unnecessary eruptions of emotional reactions. And the plan is not just about dismantling settlements – it’s also aimed at focusing and moving forward to augment the three major blocs of settlements in the West Bank.
TIME: Will the lines in place at the end of it be the political borders of Israel?
Olmert: At least for a period of time. They will be very very close to what may be the final borderlines. The idea is that we will be separated from the overwhelming majority of Palestinians. The whole idea is to separate Israelis from the Palestinians and to allow territorial contiguity for the Palestinians from which they can take the necessary steps to build and develop and independent Palestinian state alongside the state of Israel. I guess if at some point afterward there will be negotiations to finalize everything and in order to reach a comprehensive peace then maybe some adjustments. But the lines I want to draw are very close to the lines that I believe will become the political borders.
TIME: Would you consider going back to negotiations rather than continue with the unilateral strategy? Do you see any prospect for negotiations with Hamas if they moderate their rhetoric?
Olmert: They can’t just change their rhetoric They need to change their entire way of life, they need to change entirely their state of mind about Israel’s existence. It’s so much deeper than rhetoric. To just believe that if Ismail Haniyeh tomorrow starts using different words, that will make the difference? No way. This is a typical fundamentalist, extremist religious movement that does not think in political terms the way we’re accustomed to. Therefore I’m not very optimistic they can change overnight. They can change their rhetoric but they can’t change substance.
Their inability to accept the existence of two states and their total dedication to an Islamic religious fundamentalist state all across the Middle East to Africa to Asia is still their most dominant driving force. Don’t get it wrong, some of them are very sophisticated, well educated people. But they have a different concept of life.
TIME: Hamas says that if the international community – including the U.S. and Israel – continues to restrict aid, there is a real possibility of a humanitarian crisis in the territories. Doesn’t Israel have an interest in preventing a collapse of Palestinian society?
Olmert: We’re not going to wait for a collapse. We’re going to prevent it from the outset without any hesitation. I’m concerned about it independently of the issue of whether it would harm Israeli interests or not. It’s enough that it should do something bad for innocent human beings that I will want to prevent it. That doesn’t mean I have to cooperate with the Palestinian government. We have to find a way how to help the people without helping a government that can easily use these funds that will be transferred to them for different purposes altogether without any sense of regret or responsibility for the human needs of the population. We promise we will do everything we can to help meet the humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people without any hesitation whatsoever.
TIME: How?
Olmert: There are many non-governmental organizations that can be of assistance, and money can be transferred directly to them. It doesn’t always have to go across the administration of the PA in order to become meaningful. We’re thinking about it. I’m having a discussion with my top advisers to see what we can do.
TIME: Will you release the $50 million in tax duties that you’ve withheld from the Palestinians?
Olmert: Don’t expect us to release the money to the Palestinian government. This is a terrorist government and there’s no way I can be sure that the money I release will go to the needs you want them for. They might go for financing terror – to Bin Laden, to Hezbollah – I have no idea. If we release the money it will not go through the Palestinian administration.
TIME: Do you visit Sharon in the hospital?
Olmert: Not at all. I have not been. I can’t talk to him. He’s unconscious. I talk to his doctors twice a week, so I know exactly what his situation is and I talk to his sons. For me Arik Sharon – I remember his courage and inspiration. I want to remember him the way he really was – not as an aging 80 year old man living in bed helpless and unconscious.
The last meeting I had with him was on the day of his collapse. He was to have an operation the next day. I was supposed to be acting Prime Minister for three hours while he had the operation. He asked me to meet with him. I remember joking with him and saying, “I’m not going to make any decision tomorrow except changing all your staff.” At the end of the meeting I stood up and said “Arik, this country needs you. Stay well. Come back. I am looking forward to hearing your voice on the phone tomorrow saying ‘Ehud I relieve you of your responsibilities. I’m back in town.’” Then I hugged him and he hugged me, and I said goodbye. I want to remember that.
TIME: Do you feel lucky to have been handed the opportunity?
Olmert: I’ve been working 33 years to reach this minute. I’ve been doing what I thought was right for the state of Israel. I was never hiding my opinions. I always was at the forefront in all the political battles over the last three decades. I am where I’m supposed to be. I don’t believe it was the only possible development that I would be Prime Minister. But I was among the 5 or 6 people in the room who everyone with political understanding would think could get the job.
So what happened was a natural outcome of a process of which I was a major part. There are things that can prepare you for doing this job – your wisdom or lack of it, your experience or lack of it, your personality, your frame of mind. But nothing totally prepares you for it because you’ve never been there before – you’ve never been in the place where as President Truman said, “The buck stops here.” It’s your decision that will count. I hope that I’m as ready as I can get. I hope that I’m as capable as I think I am to assume responsibility. But I’m not afraid, I’m not intimidated by anything. All my life I did everything to be ready now.
TIME: Do people treat you differently now that you’re Prime Minister?
Olmert: It takes getting used to. I received one of my friends at home the other day. I was in shorts and a T-shirt, which was fine. Then he had to leave, I saw him out the main door, and when I was outside, he said go back in the house. I said why, I thought he was worried about security, because the security doesn’t let me go outside. He said, ‘“Look how you’re dressed! You’re the Prime Minister!’” I thought, What the heck? This is how I dress. But life has changed, that’s for sure. I can’t go to the soccer game anymore, or I can’t go to the market. You have to measure the joy it gives you against the inconvenience to the average person.
TIME: Still, you became Prime Minister in pretty extraordinary circumstances, after Ariel Sharon’s stroke. Did you feel prepared for the job?
Olmert: A friend of mine who’s known me for 25 years told me, that perhaps the most striking effect for him was the fact I look so well-prepared for the job that’s unbelievable, as if I’ve prepared all my life. In a way he’s right. I know the professional experts of Israeli politics had other forecasts. But I knew one day I would be PM. I’ve felt for a long time that I knew what needs to be done and that I knew inside me that I had the emotional powers to be able to carry the burden that comes with it. It’s not something that was guiding me in everything I did every morning,. I’m not that kind of person, it’s just that I knew that one day I had to be ready to assume responsibility a the highest level, and that I had to think in this manner. There’s nothing that’s happened to me in the last few months that struck me as entirely different than anything else that I ever did in my entire life.
* This is another in the occasional series of dispatches about the news media itself. Included are articles from America, Australia and Britain.
CONTENTS
1. Al-Jazeera International launch postponed until September
2. Half the story
3. Robert Fisk claims 9/11 may have been the work of… Americans
4. “First impressions are not the same as thoughtful commentary”
5. More on Ghada Jamshir
6. “Aggressors and victims on both sides of the wall” (By Vincent Graff, IoS, April 2, 2006)
7. Letter to the Independent by Arnold Roth
8. “Are they all mad?” (By Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun, Australia, March 29, 2006)
9. “Hold that opinion” (By Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe, April 5, 2006)
10. “Micklethwait to edit Economist” (Guardian, March 23, 2006)
[Note by Tom Gross]
AL-JAZEERA INTERNATIONAL LAUNCH POSTPONED UNTIL SEPTEMBER
The launch of Al-Jazeera International has been postponed again – my sources tell me until September. This follows all the recent press saying May was the launch date, following the January postponement.
The New York Times recently (Sunday, March 26, 2006) devoted almost 3000 words in two articles publicizing the launch of Al-Jazeera International. The Times described Al-Jazeera as “a uniting voice for the Arab world” and claimed its international launch was “the most ambitious television network start-up in recent years.”
Following in the footsteps of Sir David Frost (the leading former BBC presenter) and Rageh Omaar (the former BBC world affairs correspondent), among the latest western journalists to be lured by Al-Jazeera’s increased pay offers is Lucia Newman, CNN’s first and only correspondent in Havana, who has jumped to the new Al-Jazeera International network.
HALF THE STORY
The Sunday version of the British newspaper, the Independent, last weekend ran a piece on the western media’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, dubiously claiming that both sides are equally sinned against by media misreporting.
Arnold Roth, whose 15-year-old daughter Malki, was murdered in the Sbarro pizzeria suicide bomb in Jerusalem, tells The Independent: “In Western countries, the broad perception of Israel is of it being powerful and privileged… For someone like me, whose daughter was murdered by people who danced in the street afterwards, it is hard to take that viewpoint.”
In the same article, David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post, cites the Israeli security barrier as an example of how the media only cover half the story. “Newspapers never talk about the thousands of Israeli children whose lives it has saved,” says Horovitz, who adds that “certain parts of the media are in the grip of an extreme misconception about who is the aggressor and who is the underdog.”
(Please note that attached after the Independent article below is a letter to the paper by Arnold Roth, who is a subscriber to this email list. The letter has not yet been published. For more on Malki Roth, see Zionists “secretly control” both Al-Jazeera and the National Geographic (December 15, 2004).)
ROBERT FISK CLAIMS 9/11 MAY HAVE BEEN THE WORK OF… AMERICANS
Andrew Bolt, writing in the Australian newspaper the Herald Sun, praises Tony Blair on his recent trip to Australia and suggests that the British prime minister appears “sane” because “much of the rest of the Left sounds so mad.”
Bolt highlights Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent, as indicative of “madness in the Left”. Bolt asks “did you hear writer Robert Fisk, in a special ABC broadcast of his speech just the night before, suggest the September 11 attacks may have been the work of... Americans?
“What on earth has happened to the Left when it has made a conspiracy monger like Fisk one of the hottest speakers on our literary and activist circuit, and a best-selling author and much-petted guest on the ABC?”
For more on Fisk, see “The dangers of Fisking” (November 14, 2003).
“FIRST IMPRESSIONS ARE NOT THE SAME AS THOUGHTFUL COMMENTARY”
In the penultimate article below, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby writes on the release of Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter released last week in Baghdad, and the rush to judgment that followed it. Jacoby wonders if the emphasis on speed within opinion journalism today is leading to “shallow, half-baked, or unfair commentary.”
Jacoby warns that “the pressure to generate instant reaction is only going to grow more intense… But it is an unhealthy impulse, and commentators – in every medium – should resist it. First impressions are not the same as thoughtful commentary. It’s nice to be first. It’s better to be right.”
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