* Deliberately blowing up children in cars “is not terrorism”
* Telling the UN the truth, face-to-face, as seen on YouTube
* Saudis prevent entry of Israeli journalist traveling with UN chief
* Live crocodiles seized at Israel-Gaza border crossing
This dispatch mainly concerns the media itself, with an initial item about the United Nations.
CONTENTS
1. Drama at UN Human Rights Council 4th session
2. Editor of French weekly found not guilty of insulting Muslims
3. Taliban demands met for Italian journalist
4. BBC accused of “shameful hypocrisy” for covering up Balen Report
5. Deliberately blowing up children in cars “is not terrorism”
6. How many BBC employees does it take to change a light bulb?
7. U.S. Congress passes resolution for persecuted Bangladeshi journalist
8. Newspaper ad revenues plunge
9. Digital decision threatens job cuts at the Guardian
10. “If you have a good product, you must sell it in a good way. The United States is a very good product.”
11. And finally... Live crocodiles seized at Israel-Gaza border crossing
12. “BBC pays £200,000 to ‘cover up report on anti-Israel bias’” (Daily Mail, March 23, 2007)
13. “Television Takeover” (Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2007)
14. “Saudi Arabia bars Israeli journalist traveling with U.N. chief” (NY Times, March 24, 2007)
DRAMA AT UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL 4TH SESSION
As a follow up to the dispatch titled Saudi gang-rape victim gets 90 lashes for International Women’s Day (March 8, 2007), it is worth watching the speech delivered by a UN Watch representative to the UN Human Rights Council last Thursday in Geneva.
Finally someone tells the truth directly to the faces of what he calls “the despots who run the UN who seek to distort and pervert the very language and idea of human rights.”
His short speech can be watched here.
An astonished UN Human Rights Council President Luis Alfonso De Alba then responds as follows:
“For the first time in this session I will not express thanks for that statement. I shall point out to the distinguished representative of the organization that just spoke, the distinguished representative of United Nations Watch, if you’d kindly listen to me. I am sorry that I’m not in a position to thank you for your statement. I should mention that I will not tolerate any similar statements in the Council. The way in which members of this Council were referred to, and indeed the way in which the Council itself was referred to, all of this is inadmissible. I would urge you in any future statements to observe some minimum proper conduct and language. Otherwise, any statement you make in similar tones to those used today will be taken out of the records.”
EDITOR OF FRENCH WEEKLY FOUND NOT GUILTY OF INSULTING MUSLIMS
In what is being hailed as an important victory for freedom of speech, a French court has ruled in favor of a French satirical weekly that faced charges brought by two Muslim groups after it republished Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed.
The charges were brought by the Paris Mosque and by the Union of Islamic Organizations of France. They accused the newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, and its editor-in-chief, Philippe Val, of “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion.”
If found guilty, Val could have faced a six-month prison term, and the newspaper would have been fined 22,000 euro ($29,000).
On the cover of its February 8, 2006 edition, Charlie Hebdo republished the twelve Danish Mohammed cartoons and an original drawing by the French cartoonist Cabu depicting a crying Mohammed with his head in his hands, saying, “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.” The cartoons were published in solidarity with the Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten, who published them in September 2005, and whose staff then faced death threats from Muslim radicals.
The French court said that given the context of its publication, it saw no “deliberate intention of directly and gratuitously offending the Muslim community.” Last September, a Danish court rejected a similar lawsuit against Jyllands Posten.
Two leading center-right French presidential candidates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Franηois Bayrou, supported the French weekly, while left-wing candidates stayed mum in a bid to court the Muslim fundamentalist vote in France’s upcoming presidential elections.
To view the Mohammed cartoons, see this page.
TALIBAN DEMANDS MET FOR ITALIAN JOURNALIST
An Italian journalist was freed by the Taliban last week after the Afghan government caved in to the kidnappers’ demands, releasing five Taliban prisoners at the urging of Italy’s left-wing government.
The journalist, Daniele Mastrogiacomo, was freed after two weeks in captivity. The reporter’s Afghan driver, who was also seized, was beheaded, and the fate of his translator is not known.
Mastrogiacomo, who writes for Italy’s La Repubblica newspaper, and the two Afghans traveling with him were kidnapped by the Taliban on March 5 in Helmand province.
Mastrogiacomo arrived in Rome on a flight from Kabul last week, and was met at the airport by Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi. The journalist raised his fists in exultation as he stepped off the plane and waved at reporters.
Alfredo Mantovano, an opposition senator and member of a parliamentary committee that oversees Italy’s secret service agencies, commented, “Italy is in Afghanistan... to help with the country’s reconstruction, achieving that also by combating terrorism... Now it turns out that terrorists are released in exchange for the release of an Italian. There are no known precedents for that in Italian missions abroad.”
Mastrogiacomo told RAI Tg3 News this week that whilst in captivity he saw his captors cut off the head of one of the two Afghans kidnapped with him and thought he would be next to die.
BBC ACCUSED OF “SHAMEFUL HYPOCRISY” FOR COVERING UP BALEN REPORT
The first article attached below reports that “The BBC is spending £200,000 [$390,000] trying to prevent publication of a report on alleged bias in its Middle East reporting. It will fight a landmark [British] High Court action [brought by a London solicitor, who is Jewish] appealing against a ruling under the Freedom of Information Act that the findings should be revealed. Last night it faced the twin accusation that it was wasting licence payers’ money and that it was guilty of ‘gross hypocrisy’, having used the Freedom of Information legislation itself many times to break news stories.”
The BBC has hired one of Britain’s top barristers to fight the case. The Balen Report was compiled in 2004 by BBC editorial advisor Malcolm Balen after allegations of pro-Palestinian bias in BBC reporting. It is thought the report runs to 20,000 words and is highly critical of the BBC’s coverage in the region.
Conservative MP David Davies said: “An organisation which is funded partly to scrutinise governments and other institutions in Britain appears to be using taxpayers’ money to prevent its customers from finding out how it is operating. That is indefensible.
“I think the BBC is guilty of shameful hypocrisy. What could possibly be in this report that could be worth £200,000 to bury? What is it they feel is so awful in this report?”
The BBC is regularly accused of lying about Israel. For example, last year it made up a story that a Lebanese town had been wiped out.
In 2004 the Israeli government wrote to the BBC accusing its then Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin of anti-Semitism and “total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups” in a report on a would-be suicide bomber.
I also attach a selection of readers’ comments after the article below as an indication of how Daily Mail readers so-called “Middle England” view the BBC, which is very different from the British elites many of whom love the twisted news about Israel and the U.S. which has become a hallmark of BBC news broadcasts.
The Times of London has also followed up the Daily Mail story in an article today titled “BBC asks court to block Israel report.”
DELIBERATELY BLOWING UP CHILDREN IN CARS “IS NOT TERRORISM”
Both the BBC and Reuters, as has been noted on this email list/website before, do not call a terrorist a terrorist. This has long been the case when busloads of Israeli schoolchildren were targeted by Palestinian suicide bombers. Now it is being applied to Iraq too. Reuters yet again failed to mention the word “terror” after a particularly horrendous attack last week in Iraq, in which terrorists sent a car with children into a crowded market in Baghdad, ran out and then detonated it with the children still inside. (Children in the car had lowered the suspicion of guards at a nearby checkpoint.)
Reuters called the attackers “insurgents” and the attack a “militant” one, but nowhere does the word terrorist appear. Apparently it was not an act of terror, according to Reuters.
For more, see the articles “The Case of Reuters, A news agency that will not call a terrorist a terrorist” and “The BBC discovers ‘terrorism,’ briefly, Suicide bombing seems different when closer to home”.
HOW MANY BBC EMPLOYEES DOES IT TAKE TO CHANGE A LIGHTBULB?
Another waste of British taxpayers’ money has come to light, as BBC staff have been stopped from replacing light bulbs.
The corporation is paying up to £10 ($19) for each replacement bulb to be fitted by an electrician. The farcical situation came to light when Louise Wordsworth, a project manager with the BBC, complained in a letter to the BBC’s in-house magazine.
“I called up to ask for a new light bulb for my desk lamp and was told that this would cost £10... On telling them I’d buy and replace the bulb myself (bought for the bargain price of £1 for two bulbs) I was told that it was against health and safety regulations.”
U.S. CONGRESS PASSES RESOLUTION FOR PERSECUTED BANGLADESHI JOURNALIST
In a rare show of bi-partisanship, the U.S. Congress has passed House Resolution 64 which makes it the “sense of the U.S. Congress” that charges against crusading Muslim journalist, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury be dropped and all harassment against him ended.
As explained in previous dispatches on this list, Choudhury is the Bangladeshi Muslim jailed and tortured after urging relations with Israel, advocating interfaith dialogue with Jews, and exposing the rise of radical Islam in Bangladesh. He faces a possible death penalty for his “crimes”.
In a message, Choudhury thanked the United States, and said that it will “help Muslims who oppose extremism to stand up against it without fleeing to the West, since they know they will have protectors.”
NEWSPAPER AD REVENUES PLUNGE
While many American newspapers still have healthy profit margins, advertising revenue declined dramatically last month. At USA Today, the U.S.’s biggest newspaper, ad revenue was down 14 percent this February, compared with February last year. Ads in the print edition of the New York Times declined 7.5 percent to $93.7 million, and at the Wall Street Journal by 10 percent. Whilst ad spending on newspaper web sites rose, many industry watchers were wondering whether the February declines were part of a short-term slump or whether they signal a deepening problem.
The newspaper companies blamed the declines on the continuing shift of classified advertisers from print to online, especially to mostly free sites like Craig’s List.
DIGITAL DECISION THREATENS JOB CUTS AT THE GUARDIAN
Job cuts at the Guardian group in Britain have become more likely as it became the latest media company to integrate its print and online operations.
The publisher of The Guardian, The Observer and the Guardian Unlimited website has told employees that the group had to cut costs and modernize to progress. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said the company was still run in three “silos” with the newspapers and website run as separate operations and was hampered by “an old media mentality”.
Cost cuts will help finance more than 100 new jobs in its digital media operations over the next 12 months as the group prepares for a “24/7 news operation”. The paper is aggressively attempting to expand its presence and political agenda globally through the Internet.
For more on Rusbridger, see: “New Prejudices for Old: The European press and the Intifada”.
“IF YOU HAVE A GOOD PRODUCT, YOU MUST SELL IT IN A GOOD WAY. THE UNITED STATES IS A VERY GOOD PRODUCT”
Attached below are three articles. The second, from the Wall Street Journal, is on the U.S.- taxpayer-financed Arabic television station Al-Hurra. According to Iraqi politician Mithal al-Alousi, and others, the television station is “becoming a platform for terrorists.”
Alousi says “until now, we were so happy with Al-Hurra. It was taking stands against corruption, for human rights, and for peace. But not anymore.”
Stories that he believes should be investigated further, such as recent arrests of those accused of supporting terrorists in Iraq, are instead getting mere news-ticker mentions at the bottom of the screen. And moderate Arab voices, which used to be given airtime on Al-Hurra, are noticeably absent.
“Al-Hurra should have the role of transporting democracy, and to help Iraqis understand freedom,” Alousi says. “If you have a good product, you must sell it in a good way. The United States is a very good product.”
For more on al-Alousi, see Mithal al-Alousi: Paying a heavy price for recognizing Israel’s existence (Feb. 10, 2005).
***
The final article below reports that Saudi Arabia has barred entry to a Washington-based Israeli journalist traveling with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on his current Middle East tour.
Orly Azoulay, the Washington bureau chief of Yediot Ahronot, was unable to obtain a visa to Saudi Arabia despite assurances the Saudi mission in New York gave the United Nations last week, said Michele Montas, Mr. Ban’s spokeswoman.
No newspaper columnists have compared Saudi Arabia to apartheid South Africa in recent days even though this Israeli journalist was barred from entering a country simply on the basis of her ethnicity. (Israeli Arabs are allowed into Saudi Arabia but not Israeli Jews.)
AND FINALLY... LIVE CROCODILES SEIZED AT ISRAEL-GAZA CROSSING
On Monday, guards at the Rafah crossing between Israel and Gaza noticed a Palestinian woman who looked “unusually fat,” so she was taken to an examination room to be searched by a female guard. Moments later the female guard ran out of the room screaming. She had found three live crocodiles strapped to the woman’s body. She said she wanted to sell them to private crocodile collectors among Palestinian government officials.
Wael Dahab, a spokesman for the Palestinian guards at the crossing, said another woman recently tried to bring in a monkey tied to her chest, and another traveler tried to smuggle in a tiger cub.
-- Tom Gross
BBC PAYS £200,000 TO “COVER UP REPORT ON ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS”
BBC pays £200,000 to ‘cover up report on anti-Israel bias’
By Paul Revoir
The Daily Mail
March 23, 2007
www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=444074&in_page_id=1770
The BBC is spending £200,000 trying to prevent publication of a report on alleged bias in its Middle East reporting.
It will fight a landmark High Court action next week appealing against a ruling under the Freedom of Information Act that the findings should be revealed.
Last night it faced the twin accusation that it was wasting licence payers’ money and that it was guilty of “gross hypocrisy”, having used the Freedom of Information legislation itself many times to break news stories.
The Balen Report was compiled in 2004 by BBC editorial advisor Malcolm Balen after allegations of pro-Palestinian bias in BBC reporting.
London solicitor Steven Sugar, who is Jewish, has been fighting ever since to have its findings made public.
The report is believed to run to 20,000 words and to be critical of the corporation’s coverage in the region.
BBC bosses have faced repeated claims that their reporting of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been skewed towards the Palestinian cause.
One particularly controversial incident came when Middle East correspondent Barbara Plett revealed that she had cried as Yasser Arafat was close to death in 2004.
But politicians say the corporation’s decision to pursue the case appealing against a ruling by the Freedom of Information adjudicator is “absolutely indefensible” on an issue of clear public interest.
They say it also flies in the face of the stated BBC policy of openness and transparency.
The corporation has hired one of the country’s top public law barristers to fight the case, which has the potential to run all the way to the European Court in Strasbourg.
It claims it is defending a principle, that public broadcasters should not have to disclose material that is held for the purposes of “journalism, art or literature” and that it should be allowed to protect the integrity of its journalists.
But its determination to fight has only served to intensify suspicions that Balen was damning in his assessment.
Conservative MP David Davies said: “An organisation which is funded partly to scrutinise governments and other institutions in Britain appears to be using taxpayers’ money to prevent its customers from finding out how it is operating. That is indefensible.
“I think the BBC is guilty of shameful hypocrisy. What could possibly be in this report that could be worth £200,000 to bury? What is it they feel is so awful in this report?”
The corporation was accused of anti-Israeli bias last year when it wrongly reported that a Lebanese town had been wiped out. It received a string of complaints but stood by the despatch, arguing that anyone who had seen the pictures would have found it hard to contest the scale of destruction.
In 2004 the Israeli government wrote to the BBC accusing its then Middle East correspondent Orla Guerin of anti-semitism and “total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups” in a report on a would-be suicide bomber.
She was moved from her role as Middle East correspondent at the end of 2005.
The Israeli government also imposed a boycott on the corporation in 2003 following a documentary about the country’s weapons of mass destruction.
While the BBC did not publish the Balen Report, it did last year make public the findings of an independent panel report into the issue of impartiality on the Middle East.
That report said that the BBC’s approach had at times been “inconsistent”, but that many viewers felt that if there was any bias at all, it was pro-Israel.
Critics, however, claimed that the independent panel report only took a snapshot of the BBC’s activities and should have looked more deeply at the reporting of the worst moments of the conflict.
Mr Sugar said he was prepared to take the case all the way to Europe.
“This is an important document which will give us an insight into what the BBC itself thinks of its own performance,” he said. “I would like to see the BBC facing up to its professed interest in transparency and openness.
DAILY MAIL READERS’ COMMENTS ON THE ABOVE ARTICLE
The BBC’s charter requires accurate, unbiased and independent news reporting. Clearly the BBC doesn’t meet these requirements. BBC license payers should be refunded, with interest, for the failure of the BBC to comply with its charter. The BBC should then be privatised and the license fee scrapped.
- James, St Albans, England
The BBC just falls in line with the one-rule-for-us-another-for-them stance of any dishonest and morally corrupt elitist institution. This excuse for a news organization should be done away with. There is no place for a taxpayer funded government mouthpiece in any true democracy.
- Garry Williams, New York, USA
The BBC has always been anti-Israel. Its reports never call anyone terrorists. They only show one side, the Arab side, in their reports. If and when the Palestinian terrorist murder their recently kidnapped reporter I wonder how they will report such an incident.
- Sam, Essex, UK
The BBC has shown spectacular bias against Israel and have abused their obligations as a publicly funded service. If the report were to come out, it would blow their cover as political organisation rather than a news service.
- Patrick Henry, Bristol, UK
Thats 200,000 less to ransom the BBC man held captive in Gaza.
- Dov Koret
AL-HURRA “IS BECOMING A PLATFORM FOR TERRORISTS”
Television Takeover
U.S.-financed Al-Hurra is becoming a platform for terrorists.
By Joel Mowbray
The Wall Street Journal
March 18, 2007
opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009801
Fighting to create a secular democracy in Iraq, parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi had come to rely on at least one TV network to help further freedom: U.S. taxpayer-financed Al-Hurra.
Now, however, he’s concerned. The broadcaster he had seen as a stalwart ally has done an about-face. “Until now, we were so happy with Al-Hurra. It was taking stands against corruption, for human rights, and for peace. But not anymore.”
Stories that he believes cry out for further investigation, such as recent arrests of those accused of supporting the terrorists in Iraq, are instead getting mere news-ticker mentions at the bottom of the screen. And Arab voices for freedom, which used to have a home on Al-Hurra, are noticeably absent. “They’re driving out the liberals,” he complains.
Mr. Alusi is not the only one concerned about the recent changes at Al-Hurra. Ken Tomlinson, the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors the congressionally-created panel charged with overseeing Al-Hurra, among other government-funded broadcasters is currently demanding answers about the network’s decision last December to broadcast most of a speech by Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah.
Sitting up straight and raising his index finger, he states emphatically, “It’s the single worst decision I’ve witnessed in all my years in international broadcasting.”
The airing of the Nasrallah speech is a sign of the network’s new direction since it was taken over by a longtime CNN producer, Larry Register, last November. Launched in February 2004, Al-Hurra broadcasts three separate feeds: to Europe, Arab nations and one for Iraq. The network is supposed to be a key component of our public diplomacy to the Arab world. Its mission statement calls for it to showcase the American political process, and just as important, report on things that get little attention on other Arabic networks, such as human-rights abuses and government corruption.
Within weeks of becoming news director, Mr. Register put his own stamp on the network. Producers and on-air talent quickly understood that change was underway. Investigations into Arab government wrongdoing or oppression were no longer in vogue, and the ban on turning the airwaves over to terrorists was lifted. For those who had chafed under Mr. Register’s predecessor who curbed the desire of many on staff to make Al-Hurra more like al-Jazeera the new era was welcomed warmly.
“Everybody feels emboldened. Register changed the atmosphere around here,” notes one staffer. “Register is trying to pander to Arab sympathies,” says another.
The cultural shift inside the newsroom is evident in the on-air product. In the past several months, Al-Hurra has aired live speeches from Mr. Nasrallah and Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, and it broadcast an interview with an alleged al Qaeda operative who expressed joy that 9/11 rubbed “America’s nose in the dust.”
While a handful of unfortunate decisions could be isolated, these actions appear to be part of Mr. Register’s news vision. Former news director Mouafac Harb, a Lebanese-born American citizen, was not shy about his disdain for terrorists and had a firm policy against giving them a platform. But Mr. Register didn’t wait long to allow Hamas officials on the air to discuss Palestinian politics.
At a staff meeting announcing the reversal of the ban on terrorists as guests, Mr. Register “bragged” about his personal relationship with Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar, a top Hamas official, according to someone who was present. Contacted on his cell phone for comment, Mr. Register declined, indicating that he couldn’t spare even two minutes anytime in the coming days.
Perhaps it is because Mr. Register is so casual in his attitude to terrorists that interviewers now toss softball questions to fiery anti-Western guests, while also taking digs at one of America’s closest Middle Eastern allies, Israel.
The new Al-Hurra was on full display Feb. 9, when riots broke out following Israel’s implementation of security measures that limited access to the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
In roughly two hours of breathless live “breaking news” coverage which outdistanced al-Jazeera by 30 minutes Al-Hurra’s Muslim guests vilified Israel, and one spun conspiracy theories about the Jewish state’s “plans” to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque. No doubt the Islamic talking heads were egged on by the Al-Hurra anchors asking questions such as, “Do you think that the timing of these actions is as innocent as Israel pretends?” (Translations were provided by a fluent Arabic-speaking U.S. government official.)
This powder keg of a panel included Ikrima Sabri, imam of the Al Aqsa Mosque, who is best known for his tenure as Yasser Arafat’s hand-picked mufti of Jerusalem. During the broadcast, Mr. Sabri accused Israel of firing guns and throwing bombs into the mosque, then refusing to allow medical care for the wounded.
Mr. Sabri’s propaganda should not have come as a surprise. Just weeks before 9/11, Mr. Sabri delivered a passionate Friday sermon, broadcast nationally on official Palestinian Authority radio. He prayed for the destruction of Israel, Britain and the United States.
If anyone should be savvy about people like Mr. Sabri, it ought to be Mr. Register. With two decades of experience at CNN, including three years running the Jerusalem bureau, he should know that live TV is the wrong venue for firebrands or guests prone to outrageous commentary.
Complicating matters is that once someone is on Al-Hurra live, Mr. Register lacks the basic requirement to stay on top of unfolding coverage; he doesn’t speak Arabic. Had Mr. Register been able to understand Mr. Nasrallah’s Dec. 7 speech, perhaps he would have rushed to cut away early on. Before the five-minute mark, Mr. Nasrallah told the audience to stop their celebratory gun-firing, explaining, “the only place where bullets should be is the chest of the enemies of Lebanon: the Israeli enemy.”
Former Broadcasting Board of Governors member Norman Pattiz understands the perils of turning over the airwaves to the likes of Mr. Nasrallah. Though he wouldn’t comment on anything relating to recent months he left the board last year, before Mr. Register’s arrival Mr. Pattiz said bluntly, “Simply handing a microphone over to a terrorist and letting them spew is not what I would call good journalism.”
Though Mr. Pattiz is a well-known Democrat who feuded constantly with Mr. Tomlinson, a Republican, the two men had one area of agreement: Mr. Harb, Al-Hurra’s original news director. Sounding remarkably similar to Mr. Tomlinson, Mr. Pattiz said, “The direction Al-Hurra launched in is the direction in which it should continue to go, because it was very successful.”
Mr. Alusi, the Iraqi parliamentarian, agrees. “Al-Hurra should have the role of transporting democracy, and to help Iraqis understand freedom,” he says. “If you have a good product, you must sell it in a good way. The United States is a very good product.”
SAUDIS BAR ISRAELI JOURNALIST TRAVELING WITH BAN KI-MOON
Saudi Arabia bars Israeli journalist traveling with U.N. chief
By Warren Hoge
The New York Times
March 24, 2007
Saudi Arabia has barred entry to a Washington-based Israeli journalist traveling with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on his current Middle East tour, the United Nations said today.
Mr. Ban is going to Riyadh on Tuesday for two days of the summit meeting of the League of Arab States.
Orly Azoulay, the Washington bureau chief of Yediot Aharonot, was unable to obtain a visa to Saudi Arabia despite assurances the Saudi mission in New York gave the United Nations last week, said Michιle Montas, Mr. Ban’s spokeswoman.
Ms. Montas said that both Lebanon and Saudi Arabia initially refused to grant Ms. Azoulay a visa, but that Lebanon had dropped its objections last week and given her the needed stamp.
Ms. Azoulay, 53, an Israeli-born dual citizen of France and Israel, sought the visa on her French passport. She said she had traveled during the past two years to Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Iraq and Pakistan and had gone to Saudi Arabia in 2000 with correspondents covering then-Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.
When the Saudi consulate in New York returned the passports of the 11 news reporters and broadcasters to United Nations headquarters on Friday afternoon, only Ms. Azoulay’s bore no Saudi visa. Ms. Montas said this occurred despite repeated appeals to the Saudis during the week from Vijay Nambiar, Mr. Ban’s chief of staff.
Mr. Azoulay joined the trip in London on Thursday, and Ms. Montas said that the United Nations had been told that the visa might come through while the United Nations group proceeded to Cairo and Jordan.
In recent days, though, she said, the Saudi mission did not return calls from United Nations officials, and they have now concluded that Ms. Azoulay will be not be allowed to accompany the United Nations group to Riyadh.
“The Saudis have a lot of countries coming which have no relations to Israel, and it appears they had more concern about that than they did about the United Nations,” said an organization official who asked not to be identified so as to speak frankly.
Mr. Ban will be in Israel on Sunday and then go to Riyadh with only a six-hour stopover in Jordan for a working lunch with King Abdullah II.
Israel granted visas to all 11 news people, including at least 3 who are Arab- or Iranian-born and traveling on European passports.
“When the secretary general decides that he will take under his auspices a group of journalists, then there is some kind of responsibility that he takes upon himself and we respect this and this is the reason Israel granted the visas without hesitation,” said Daniel Carmon, Israel’s deputy United Nations ambassador.
Asked the United Nations’ reaction, Ms. Montas said, “What she was trying to do was to report objectively, which would improve the political climate in the region and would have been an asset to the secretary general’s mission.”
* Contrary to repeated misinformation in the European media, financial aid to the Palestinians rose by 20% in 2006, according to The New York Times, and continues to increase sharply
* Palestinian militants install air-conditioning in preparation for war
This dispatch mainly concerns Palestinian issues.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: “ENGLISH BABES V. ISRAELI BABES”
* As a follow-up to yesterday’s dispatch, titled Why the elites are driving Tony Blair from office (& The Sun’s guide to Tel Aviv), Britain’s most popular daily paper The Sun continues its admiration for Israel in the run up to Saturday’s big Israel-England soccer game.
Today, the paper carries this “slideshow”. (The Sun also invites people to vote on whether England or Israel has the “hottest babes”.)
In an unrelated development, the so-called “beer ‘n’ babes” magazine Maxim will send photographers to Israel next week for a photo shoot of good-looking Israeli women. The Israeli foreign ministry hopes the magazine will help redefine Israel’s image. “All the surveys we have done show that the biggest PR problem Israel has is with males from the age of 18-35,” said Israel’s consul for media and public affairs. “This could all change now.”
The nine-person Maxim team, including photographers, a reporter, hairstylists and make-up people, will arrive for a five-day photo-shoot on Tuesday. The glossy magazine, launched in the U.S. in 1997, boasts a circulation of 2.5 million and claims to be the “#1 men’s lifestyle magazine in the world.”
On a more serious note, a group of England fans in Israel for Saturday’s match will tomorrow morning become the first organized group of soccer supporters to visit Yad Vashem. They plan to lay a St. George Cross wreath with cards from the supporters reading: “Never Forget” and “Never Again.” The London England Fans supporters group will also attend a 16-team children’s soccer tournament tomorrow afternoon in Tel Aviv with teams made up of Arab and Jewish children.
Around 6,000 fans are expected to travel from England to Israel for the match.
CONTENTS
1. “Wasatia” is Arabic for “moderation”
2. UN under threat in Gaza
3. Fatah al-Islam and Fatah-Intifada clash in Lebanon, leaving two dead
4. Islamic Jihad work accident kills one and injures twenty
5. Financial aid to Palestinians rose by 20% in 2006
6. Hamas TV: Gaza evacuation will lead to destruction of Israel
7. New 12th grade Palestinian textbooks say destroying Israel is a religious duty
8. Unreported in the mainstream media: Libya threatens to deport Palestinians
9. Manchester University twinned with “Terror University”
10. “Palestinian militants install air-conditioning in preparation for war”
11. “New Islamic party seeks the center” (San Francisco Chronicle, March 21, 2007)
12. “Straight talk on Palestine” (Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2007)
13. “Children of Palestinian suicide bomber Rim Al-Riyashi on Hamas TV: Mama killed five Jews and she is in paradise” (MEMRI, March 15, 2007)
14. “Hamas digs in for war in Gaza” (The Australian, March 16, 2007)
“WASATIA” IS ARABIC FOR “MODERATION”
A new Palestinian movement was launched yesterday directed at the more moderate sections of Palestinian society. It is called “Wasatia”, which means “moderation” in Arabic.
As Matthew Kalman writes in an exclusive article for The San Francisco Chronicle (attached below), it “is the first Islamic religious party to advocate a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a tolerant, democratic society at home.”
The new party, created by political science Professor Mohammed Dajani, director of the American Studies Institute at al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, hopes to “foster a culture of moderation and attract Palestinian voters who are moderate in their religious beliefs. The existing Palestinian Islamic parties breed radicalism and fundamentalism.”
They are expected to endorse a founding platform that blends verses from the Quran, extolling the virtues of moderation and tolerance, with calls for a negotiated peace with Israel and solutions to the economic, social and political problems plaguing Palestinian society.
In contrast to all other major Palestinian parties, it does not endorse the return of the descendants of Palestinian refugees to “return” to homes in what is now Israel.
Centrist parties won only six of 132 seats in the January 2006 Palestinian elections.
UN UNDER THREAT IN GAZA
Palestinian Authority officials have admitted that Islamist gunmen have launched a campaign to expel or seize control of the UN Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip. The officials said the militia have driven out nearly all foreign staffers of UNRWA as they seek to control operations in refugee camps in the Palestinian Authority.
On March 16, Palestinian gunmen attempted to abduct UNRWA operations chief John Ging, one of the few senior officials left in the Gaza Strip. The gunmen blocked an armed convoy and fired at least five times at Ging’s vehicle. Nobody was hurt and the gunmen escaped.
It is thought that the terrorists are attempting to gain access to hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and supplies for the refugee camps. The attacks have surprised UNRWA who thought they were immune from Palestinian attack after decades of giving money to Palestinians.
FATAH AL-ISLAM AND FATAH-INTIFADA CLASH IN LEBANON, LEAVING TWO DEAD
Gunbattles broke out between rival Palestinian factions in northern Lebanon on Monday. Lebanon’s state-run news agency said at least two Palestinians were killed and five wounded in the battle.
The clash between Fatah al-Islam and Fatah Intifada started after an argument between members of the two groups in the Nahr al-Bared camp near the northern city of Tripoli.
The situation has been tense since Lebanon’s Interior minister Hassan Sabei last week announced the arrest of four Syrian members of the little-known Fatah al-Islam group an offshoot of the Damascus-based Palestinian Fatah-Intifada. Sabei said those arrested had confessed to being behind the February 13 bombings of two buses northeast of Beirut that killed three Lebanese people and wounded 20.
ISLAMIC JIHAD WORK ACCIDENT KILLS ONE AND INJURES TWENTY
An explosion tore through the house of an Islamic Jihad terrorist in the central Gaza Strip on Monday, killing him and injuring 20 others. The militant was identified as 30-year-old Ala al-Hessi.
Islamic Jihad spokesman Abu Anass said al-Hessi was killed when explosives he was handling went off. Officials said children were among the wounded in the blast.
Islamic Jihad has continued firing Qassam rockets into Israel from Gaza despite the so-called ceasefire.
The new Palestinian unity government is not expected to prevent Fatah and Hamas from building up their militias. Both movements are rearming and training in expectation of major clashes in the Gaza Strip in the next few weeks. “The unity government will be in name only and meant to satisfy Saudi Arabia, who has promised plenty of money,” a PA security source said. “It will have almost no affect on what is taking place on the ground.”
In the last 24 hours, four Palestinians have been killed and many injured in internal fighting in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian sources in Gaza said they were unsure if these incidents were all related to factional violence, or family disputes. The clashes were sparked after a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades was murdered.
A few days ago a member of the Palestinian military intelligence died after he was shot directly in the head by unidentified gunmen near Deir al-Balah cemetery in central Gaza.
FINANCIAL AID TO PALESTINIANS ROSE BY 20% IN 2006
One of the main stories in the New York Times (and also in the NY Times-owned International Herald Tribune) yesterday was that “Despite the international embargo on aid to the Palestinian Authority since Hamas came to power a year ago, significantly more aid was delivered to the Palestinians in 2006 than in 2005, according to official figures from the United Nations, United States, European Union and International Monetary Fund.”
It is a welcome surprise that The New York Times, which has traditionally sided with the more corrupt and dictatorial elements in Palestinian society, published this article. The Times went on to say that “While the United States and the European Union have led the boycott, they, too, provided more aid to the Palestinians in 2006 than 2005. Washington increased its aid to $468 million in 2006, from $400 million in 2005.” (Instead of going to the Palestinian Authority, much of the money was given directly to individuals or through independent agencies.)
This conflicts with the misinformation regularly broadcast by European-based media like the BBC, who have repeatedly told viewers that there is great financial hardship in the Palestinian territories.
Interestingly, a senior European diplomat was asked by The New York Times if the European Union would spend any more money on the Palestinians if it recognized the new Palestinian government, and the diplomat laughed and said, “We’d probably spend less.”
Salam Fayyad, the new finance minister in the Palestinian unity government, thinks the Palestinians received at least 250 percent more in direct support when cash from Iran and Arab nations is counted, as well as the amount smuggled in by Hamas officials after trips abroad. “I say the minimum for direct budgetary support was $880 million in 2006 compared to about $350 million the year before,” Fayyad said. He estimates total aid in 2006 was closer to $1.35 billion.
“These numbers are quite stunning,” said Alexander Costy, head of coordination for Αlvaro de Soto, the United Nations special Middle East envoy, “given the relatively small size of the population of the Palestinian territory.”
Despite the huge financial aid the Palestinians are already receiving (much of it is being used to buy guns and other weapons), in 2007 the United Nations began a “humanitarian appeal for the Palestinians” doubling the amount requested in 2006 and third only in the world after Sudan and Congo, ahead of 18 other “disasters”.
HAMAS TV: GAZA EVACUATION WILL LEAD TO DESTRUCTION OF ISRAEL
Palestinian Media Watch reports that Hamas’s new al-Aqsa Satellite TV broadcasts have this month been repeatedly broadcasting a statement made in 2005 by Ahmad Yassin, the founder and former head of Hamas, in response to Israel’s plan to evacuate Israeli towns from Gaza.
Yassin’s message states that since terror was forcing Israel to leave Gaza, the Palestinians would now only have to keep up the terror in Israel’s other cities and Israelis would “run” from those as well.
“If death and murder chase them in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Netanya and everywhere among them, then they will say: ‘I want to flee and go back to Europe and America’,” says Yassin in a message currently being broadcast several times a day on TV in Gaza and the West Bank.
The message can be viewed here.
NEW 12TH GRADE PALESTINIAN TEXTBOOKS SAY DESTROYING ISRAEL IS A RELIGIOUS DUTY
Palestinian Media Watch has also presented to the Knesset (Israeli parliament) Education Committee a report on new Palestinian schoolbooks that say that hating and working to destroy Israel is a religious duty.
The new schoolbooks were written by Fatah-appointed officials at the Palestinian Authority Center for Developing the Palestinian Curricula, and were formally released by the PA Ministry of Higher Education.
The report says that “Instead of seizing the opportunity to educate future generations to live with Israel in peace, the PA schoolbooks glorify terror and teach their children to hate Israel, vilify Israel’s existence and define the battle with Israel as an uncompromising religious war the new PA curriculum is ingraining [hate] into the next generation’s consciousness, and packaging the war against Israel as existential, mandatory and religious.”
The 35-page report cites many examples of the delegitimization of Israel in the new books. As a result, Knesset Education Committee Chairman Michael Melchior (a member of the leftist Labor-Meimad party) said “You can’t have agreements while this kind of hatred is inculcated in the children I intend to demand from Prime Minister [Ehud Olmert] that he present the findings [of a new report on the textbooks] to Abu Mazen [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas] at their next meeting.”
UNREPORTED IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA: LIBYA THREATENS TO DEPORT PALESTINIANS
Libya, as a form of protest against the policies of the new Palestinian government, is considering a plan to deport thousands of Palestinians from their homes.
The PA expressed concern about the possible Libyan move. PA Minister for refugee affairs Dr. Atef Adouan told the London-based newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi that, “We hope that the Libyan leadership will act wisely and with patience. Deporting the Palestinians from Libya would cause greater suffering.”
As commentator Michael Freund wrote on his blog, “you won’t be reading much about this in the mainstream press, nor will you hear nary a peep of protest from much of the left and its sympathizers over the cruelty and brutality of such a move.”
MANCHESTER UNIVERISTY TWINNED WITH “TERROR UNIVERSITY”
The student union of the University of Manchester (in England) has been twinned with al-Najah University in the West Bank after a motion was passed by the Manchester union last week.
Nineteen Palestinian suicide bombers have originated from al-Najah university, and in 2001, the university organized a display to celebrate and recreate the suicide bomb attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem.
As part of the motion, a plaque will be installed at the entrance to Manchester University’s student union building heralding the new relationship with al-Najah. The motion was put together by an alliance of far-right Islamists and far-left socialists.
For more on the Sbarro pizzeria attack, see here.
PALESTINIAN MILITANTS INSTALL AIR-CONDITIONING IN PREPARATION FOR WAR
I attach four articles below. The first, referred to above, is by Matthew Kalman. The second (from The Wall Street Journal) is by Khaled Abu Toameh, the Palestinian affairs editor of The Jerusalem Post. Abu Toameh, who is a longtime subscriber to this email list, comments, on behalf of moderate Palestinians, on the new Palestinian unity government. “The international community must demand an end to the era of ambiguity and double-talk. If the new government is opposed to terror, there is no reason why it should not state this loudly and clearly There is no point in pouring millions of dollars on the ‘unity’ government as long as it’s not prepared to make a clear and firm commitment to halt terror and recognize Israel’s right to exist.”
For more on Abu Toameh, see: When was the last time you saw Khaled Abu Toameh interviewed on BBC or CNN? (Jan. 4, 2006).
The third item below, from MEMRI, is a transcript of an interview with the children of Palestinian suicide bomber Rim Al-Riyashi, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on March 8, 2007. The interviewer asks the youngest child how many Jews his mother killed. It is worth reading this item in full.
(The MEMRI blog also points to a picture of a young Palestinian girl pictured with explosives on an online forum affiliated with the Hamas Website. The little girl is dressed in a combat vest and an al-Qassam Brigades headband with the caption, “Have you seen the new child martyr who will soon shake Israel [to the core]?” This picture can be seen here.)
The final article below reports that “Hamas is busily fortifying the Gaza Strip with the help of Iranian expertise and funding for what may be the fiercest fighting the embattled enclave has seen.” Abraham Rabinovich, writing in The Australian, says “A major clash with Hamas threatens to be far bloodier than the war with Hezbollah.”
“They’re digging bunkers and tunnels 20m underground equipped with air-conditioning. That’s something the Iranians taught them.”
-- Tom Gross
NEW ISLAMIC PARTY SEEKS THE CENTER GROUND
New Islamic party seeks the center
By Matthew Kalman
San Francisco Chronicle
March 21, 2007
A new Palestinian movement being launched today is aimed at the moderate middle of Muslim politics.
Wasatia Arabic for “moderation” is the first Islamic religious party to advocate a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a tolerant, democratic society at home.
The new party is the brainchild of political science Professor Mohammed Dajani, director of the American Studies Institute at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.
Dajani hopes to build Wasatia into a movement with a social and political wing that will eventually compete with Hamas for the votes of what he calls the silent majority of Palestinians.
“Wasatia is a term from the Quran which means ‘centrism,’ ‘balance’ or ‘moderation,’” Dajani said. “The new party will foster a culture of moderation and attract Palestinian voters who are moderate in their religious beliefs. The existing Palestinian Islamic parties breed radicalism and fundamentalism.”
Dajani said most Palestinians are proud of their Muslim heritage and respect the religious identity of Islamic groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but many are uncomfortable with the fundamentalism of those groups and after years of disastrous armed resistance, also are tired also of their extreme militarism.
“We want to foster a culture of moderation so that our children do not grow up just with the literature of hate and violence,” he said. “We want our children to grow up in a culture where people can co-exist in peace and harmony.”
Palestinian politics are now dominated by Hamas a hard-line Islamic party that refuses to recognize Israel and by Fatah. The two parties have just formed a power-sharing government.
The meeting this evening brings together Islamic religious leaders from several West Bank towns, former prisoners in Israeli jails, women, intellectuals and youth. They are expected to endorse a founding platform that blends verses from the Quran, extolling the virtues of moderation and tolerance, with calls for a negotiated peace with Israel and solutions to the acute economic, social and political crises plaguing Palestinian society.
In common with the mainstream Fatah movement, the Wasatia platform calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. But in contrast to all other major Palestinian parties, it does not endorse the return of the estimated 4 million Palestinian refugees to their homes in what is now Israel.
“I would say to the refugees: ‘Move on with your life.’ We cannot let the past bury the future, even though it should always be remembered,” said Dajani.
Among the founders of Wasatia is Bashar Azzeh, a doctoral student in conflict system management who spent seven years studying and working in Kentucky before returning to the West Bank to work for a Palestinian development organization.
“The image of Islam in the United States is that it is extremist, but we have found that hardliners are not the majority among Palestinians,” Azzeh said. “I have been to the villages and talked to people. There is a feeling that people have tried violence, they have tried everything, and this is what we need now. People want a moderate political culture and an end to violence and ignorance. They want a reflection of what we are.”
Surveys suggest that many of those who swept Hamas to power in the January 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections were casting votes against the institutional corruption of Fatah. A poll by Near East Consulting found that 54 percent of Hamas voters also supported the peace process with Israel. “A moderate, centrist Islamic party will take support from Hamas voters who will not vote for secular parties,” said Hanna Siniora, a veteran Palestinian activist and publisher of the Jerusalem Times.
But Mahdi Abdel Hadi, director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, said that centrist parties won only six of 132 seats in last January’s election.
“Without alliances with powerful elites in society, this new initiative will be born dead,” said Abdel Hadi.
Nicolas Pelham, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Jerusalem, agreed that Wasatia faces a major challenge.
“Political power relies on patronage,” said Pelham. “Those factions which do maintain some form of popular allegiance are those which can offer services and jobs and some access to the remaining centers of power or salaries.”
Dajani said that Wasatia will spend the next year building itself as a movement, undertaking voluntary work, creating new jobs and economic opportunities.
“Charity and voluntarism this is Islam,” he said. “The creation of new jobs does not have to be related to arms and violence.”
STRAIGHT TALK ON PALESTINE, FROM A PALESTINIAN
Straight talk on Palestine
The new government still hasn’t renounced terror or recognized Israel.
By Khaled Abu Toameh
The Wall Street Journal
March 20, 2007
www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009808
Even before the Palestinian “unity” government was sworn in Saturday at least five European countries announced that they would resume their business with the Hamas-led coalition.
The U.S. has endorsed Israel’s position on the Palestinian government--namely, that its political platform does not meet the conditions set by the so-called “Quartet” of the U.S., EU, U.N. and Russia for ending the boycott. Washington is now under heavy pressure from its Arab allies in the Middle East to deal with it.
But the U.S. should stand firm. The Palestinian government is not committed to the Quartet’s demands that it renounce violence, recognize Israel and abide by agreements signed with Israel in the past. The speeches delivered by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his new Hamas partner, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, at Saturday’s parliamentary session show that the Palestinians are determined instead to continue their strategy of double-talk.
Neither the president nor the prime minister openly called for an end to terrorism or for recognizing Israel’s right to exist. And to add to the confusion, the two men came up with a political program that contains many contradictions and ambiguities.
The wording of the program was drafted in such a way as to allow both Hamas and Fatah to argue that neither party had totally abandoned its traditional position. The equivocal tone is also designed to appease the Americans and Europeans. After all, the main goal of the new coalition is to get the international community to resume desperately needed financial aid.
With regard to the three main demands of the Quartet, the program leaves the door wide open for different interpretations.
On the issue of terrorism, the program states that the new government “stresses that resistance is a legitimate right of the Palestinian people... and our people have the right to defend themselves against any Israeli aggression.” But the program also says that the new government will “work toward consolidating the tahdiya [period of calm] and extending it [to the West Bank] so that it becomes a comprehensive and mutual truce.”
The program sets a number of conditions for halting the “resistance” ending the “occupation” and achieving independence and the right of return for Palestinian refugees, as well as an end to Israeli security measures in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (including the construction of the security fence). In other words, Fatah and Hamas are saying that the violence will continue as long as Israel does not meet these demands.
Regarding Israel’s right to exist, the program does not even mention the name Israel. Instead, it refers to Israel as “The Occupation.” It also makes no mention of the two-state solution. Rather, it reiterates the Palestinians’ opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state with temporary borders.
Although the document declares that the “key to peace and stability is contingent on ending the occupation of Palestinian lands and recognizing the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination,” it does not specify which “lands” those captured by Israel in 1967 or 1948.
Fatah representatives, of course, argue that the program refers only to the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem. Hamas, on the other hand, will be able to argue that the phrase “Palestinian lands” applies also to all of Mandatory Palestine.
Referring to the third demand of the Quartet--abiding by agreements between the PLO and Israel the political program states that the new government will only “respect” agreements signed by the PLO.
Hamas leaders have already explained that there is a huge difference between “respecting” an agreement and making a pledge to fulfill it. In other words, Hamas is saying that while it accepts the agreements with Israel as an established fact, it will not carry them out.
Elsewhere in the program, the new government says that it will abide by unspecified U.N. and Arab summit resolutions, leaving the door open for Fatah to claim that this is tantamount to recognizing the two-state solution and all the agreements with Israel. Fatah will cite the 2002 Arab peace plan that implicitly recognizes Israel.
Hamas, on the other hand, can always claim that among the Arab summit resolutions that it intends to abide by is the one taken in Khartoum, Sudan, in September 1967. The resolution contains what became known as “the three no’s” of Arab-Israel relations: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel.
Although the program makes it clear that the PLO, and not the new Hamas-led coalition, will be responsible for conducting negotiations with Israel, it also seeks to tie the hands of President Abbas by stating that any “fateful” agreement must be approved by the Palestinians in the PA-controlled areas and abroad through a referendum.
The program, moreover, closes the door to any potential concessions on the problem of the refugees by emphasizing their “right of return to their lands and property [inside Israel].”
The international community must demand an end to the era of ambiguity and double-talk. If the new government is opposed to terror, there is no reason why it should not state this loudly and clearly.
If it recognizes Israel--as some of its members claim then why not announce this in unequivocal language? The international community must insist that the messages coming out of the Palestinian leaders be the same in both English and Arabic.
There is no point in pouring millions of dollars on the “unity” government as long as it’s not prepared to make a clear and firm commitment to halt terror and recognize Israel’s right to exist.
“MAMA KILLED FIVE JEWS AND SHE IS IN PARADISE”
Children of Palestinian suicide bomber Rim Al-Riyashi on Hamas TV: Mama killed five Jews and she is in paradise
MEMRI
March 15, 2007
www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD150307
The following are excerpts of an interview with the children of Palestinian suicide bomber Rim Al-Riyashi, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on March 8, 2007.
To view this clip visit: www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1398.
“How Many Jews Did Mama Kill?”
Interviewer: “Let’s talk with the two children of the jihad-fighting martyrdom-seeker Rim Al-Riyashi, Dhoha and Muhammad. Dhoha, you love Mama, right? Where did Mama go?”
Dhoha: “To Paradise.”
Interviewer: “What did Mama do?”
Dhoha: “She committed martyrdom.”
Interviewer: “She killed Jews, right?”
Interviewer: “How many did she kill, Muhammad?”
Muhammad: “Huh?”
Interviewer: “How many Jews did Mama kill?”
Muhammad: “This many...”
Interviewer: “How many is that?”
Muhammad: “Five.”
Interviewer: “Do you love Mama? Do you miss Mama?
“Where is Mama, Muhammad?”
Muhammad: “In Paradise.”
Interviewer: “Dhoha, what would you like to recite for us?”
Dhoha: “In the name of Allah the Merciful the Compassionate: ‘When comes the help of Allah, and victory, and you see people entering the religion of Allah in troops, then celebrate the praise of your Lord, and ask His forgiveness, for He is ever ready to show mercy.’”
Interviewer: “What else would you like to recite? You have read the surah, ‘When comes the help of Allah, and victory.’ What would you like to recite for us now?”
Dhoha: “‘Mama Rim.’”
Interviewer: “Recite the poem ‘Mama Rim’ for us. Recite anything. What would you like to recite?”
“I Want to Talk About Kindergarten”
Interviewer: “Muhammad, do you know how to recite?”
Muhammad: “Yes.”
Interviewer: “Go on then, recite something for us. What would you like to recite?”
Dhoha: “I just remembered.”
Muhammad: “I am in kindergarten.”
Interviewer: “Are you doing well in kindergarten?”
Muhammad: “Yes.”
Dhoha: “I am in kindergarten, I want to tell.”
Interviewer: “Go on then, tell us. You’re in kindergarten too? Are you in kindergarten, Dhoha? In kindergarten or at school?”
Dhoha: “In kindergarten.”
Interviewer: “That’s great.
“One should talk about the innocence of children...”
Muhammad: “I’m in kindergarten too.”
Interviewer: “You’re in kindergarten too.”
Dhoha: “I want to talk about kindergarten, I want to talk.”
“Rim, You Are a Firebomb, Your Children and Submachine Gun Are Your Motto”
Interviewer: “What would you like to recite for us? Have you heard the poem ‘Mama Rim’? Go on then, recite it for us.”
Dhoha: “Rim, you are a fire bomb.”
Interviewer: “Go on, recite it.”
Dhoha: “‘Your children and submachine gun are your motto.’”
Interviewer: “Muhammad, go ahead and recite...”
Muhammad: “I’m in kindergarten.”
Dhoha: “That’s it, I’m done.”
Interviewer: “OK, do you want to go to Mama?”
Dhoha: “Yes.”
“A MAJOR CLASH WITH HAMAS THREATENS TO BE FAR BLOODIER THAN THE WAR WITH HIZBULLAH”
Hamas digs in for war in Gaza
By Abraham Rabinovich
The Australian
March 16, 2007
www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21390536-2703,00.html
Hamas is busily fortifying the Gaza Strip with the help of Iranian expertise and funding for what may be the fiercest fighting the embattled enclave has seen.
“They’re digging bunkers and tunnels 20m underground equipped with airconditioning,” retired Israeli intelligence officer Brigadier General Shalom Harari said this week. “That’s something the Iranians taught them.”
Since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza 18 months ago, hundreds of Hamas fighters have gone to Iran for intensive military training sometimes lasting months, according to Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin. Iranian experts have also reportedly reached Gaza.
Mr Diskin said on Tuesday that militants last year smuggled more than 30 tonnes of explosives into the Strip, mostly through tunnels from Egypt. According to an Israeli assessment, there are 120,000 automatic weapons in Palestinian hands in the 40km-long strip.
Mr Diskin told the Knesset foreign affairs and defence committee that Hamas had significantly upgraded its rocket arsenal. Some could now hit Israeli towns 20km away. Hamas had also acquired in recent months Russian missiles capable of penetrating heavily armoured tanks. Newly acquired anti-aircraft missiles would challenge Israel’s domination of the skies over Gaza for the first time.
Brigadier General Harari said: “Hamas and Iran have formed a strategic alliance. Iran sees Hamas as part of a pincer aimed at Israel.”
The other arm of the pincer, in Lebanon, is Hezbollah.
Like Iran, Hezbollah belongs to the Shia branch of Islam. Though Hamas members are Sunni, they share Iran’s fundamentalist ethos and its militancy towards Israel.
Iran is also funding militant groups in the West Bank, which borders Israel’s heartland. However, Israeli forces are still deployed in the West Bank and almost nightly arrests of militants have prevented Hamas from gaining traction.
Israel is closely monitoring developments in Gaza and has drawn up detailed plans for a large-scale incursion that it would like to press home before Hamas reaches Hezbollah’s level of military sophistication.
“Hamas wants quiet now so that it can continue its preparations,” Brigadier General Harari said. “But their build-up will oblige an Israeli operation, probably before the end of the year.”
A major clash with Hamas threatens to be far bloodier than the war with Hezbollah.
South Lebanon, where most of last summer’s war was waged, is a thinly populated rural area. Its residents were warned by Israel through leaflets and radio broadcasts to flee before their villages were bombed or shelled. Gaza, by contrast, is one of the world’s most densely populated areas, with few secure places to which civilians could flee. If Israeli forces wished to root out Hamas armories and rocket workshops, they would have to fight their way into built-up areas.
In all the years of skirmishing, Israeli troops have never engaged in significant house-to-house fighting in Gaza City or other urban locations.
Given the lacklustre showing of the Israeli Defence Force against Hezbollah last year, it is highly motivated to seek a decisive victory against Hamas. But international pressure could prove a restraining force if many civilians were killed.
Hamas has mined the approaches to Gaza’s towns and is expected to mine streets and buildings inside the towns when fighting appears imminent. It is also believed to have dug tunnels under the Israeli border fence to infiltrate fighters behind the Israeli lines.
Israel has drawn up plans for an orderly evacuation of settlements bordering the Gaza Strip when and if fighting starts.
* His crime? Supporting the removal of the fascist dictator Saddam Hussein and of the hellish Taliban regime. Supporting Israel’s right to defend itself
* Why there are “Tony Blair Wanted” posters on the London underground
* “Great capital city. Shame about the awful BBC”
This dispatch mainly concerns the United Kingdom but the points in it have important implications for the future of the Middle East and the longevity of Western democracy.
CONTENTS
1. The BBC-led elites take aim for Tony Blair
2. “The elites have long loathed the PM (and America and department stores and Israel)”
3. “The Trial of Tony Blair”
4. The Sun’s guide to Tel Aviv
5. “Like Bin Laden accusing Ahmadinejad of being a bit harsh on the Jews”
6. “Blair of the Critics” (National Review, March 5, 2007)
7. “The Biased Broadcasting Corporation” (New York Times, March 15, 2007)
8. “Great capital city. Shame about the awful BBC” (Times of London, March 16, 2007)
[Note by Tom Gross]
Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, is only 53. It is less than two years since he was re-elected by a wide margin (his Labour Party has a comfortable 66 seat majority), and he still has more than three years of his term to run. (The next election doesn’t have to be held until June 3, 2010.) The British economy remains buoyant. And yet within the next few weeks, Blair is likely going to be driven out of office by his own Labour party.
His crime? Supporting the removal of the fascist dictator Saddam Hussein and the hellish Taliban regime. Supporting Israel’s right to defend itself last summer against attack from the Iranian-controlled Islamic fundamentalists of Hizbullah. Not siding with dictators against America.
The article below, by Jonathan Foreman in the National Review, explains what is puzzling to many outside observers. How the BBC-led elites in the UK have literally driven Tony Blair from office with their incessant propaganda against his foreign policy.
“THE ELITES HAVE LONG LOATHED THE PM (AND AMERICA AND DEPARTMENT STORES AND ISRAEL)”
As Foreman, who is one of the founder subscribers to this email list eight years ago, writes: “Tony Blair is loathed by the British establishment to a degree that is hard for many Americans to appreciate. Unlike the Bush hatred so endemic in Democratic and mainstream-media circles, Blair hatred is not a strictly partisan affair. Indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that the prime minister is reviled by most of the political class.
“At the extremes, the left-wing Independent and the right-wing Daily Mail have long loathed the PM (and America and department stores and Israel) with equal passion. But now almost all the papers are frothing at the mouth with anticipation of the prime minister’s supposedly imminent fall It apparently infuriates the chattering class that Blair remains in power so long after he was declared finished by elite opinion ”
“Bizarrely the visceral hatred of Blair similar to Thatcher hatred, Clinton obsession, and Bush loathing in its intensity has little or nothing to do with any of his ill-considered constitutional reforms (a separate legislature for Scotland, etc.) or any of the other failures of his administration
“No, Tony Blair is hated mostly for the big things that he has done right the really important, civilization-protecting things like overthrowing Saddam and the Taliban, and intervening in Sierra Leone to stop a savage civil war. Many on the Left hate him for being a liberal interventionist and of course for being such a close ally of Uncle Sam...
“THE TRIAL OF TONY BLAIR”
“How bad is it? Well, to really appreciate elite hatred of Blair you have to check out the London cultural scene.
“A couple of weeks ago Britain’s Channel 4 ran a massively promoted show called ‘The Trial of Tony Blair.’ The program was advertised by ‘Tony Blair Wanted’ posters on the London underground. It envisioned a 2017 trial of the former PM for ‘War Crimes’. As one leading columnist wrote in anticipation of the program ‘Tomorrow night, we will finally have our revenge.’
“There’s also a new play, or rather a theatrical happening, entitled ‘Called to Account: The indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq a Hearing’
“January saw the opening of an art exhibition at the Tate Britain museum entitled ‘State Britain’. It recreates the antiwar installation (sample poster: ‘stop genocide of Iraq’) and includes a painting of Blair washing his hands in a bowl filled with blood
“To most Americans and other fair-minded people there is something bizarre about the notion of Tony Blair as a ‘war criminal’ deserving of the full Nuremberg treatment. After all, if he’s the villain, who then are the good guys, besides Saddam and his supporters, and the fanatics who think it’s O.K. to set off suicide bombs in crowded nightclubs?”
I recommend reading Jonathan Foreman’s piece (below) in full. It has lessons for what the elites may succeed in doing in future in America, Australia and elsewhere, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the future ability of the free world to defend itself.
THE SUN’S GUIDE TO TEL AVIV
In contrast to the elites, Israel remains popular with some working class people in the UK. For example Britain’s most popular newspaper, The Sun, has this positive guide to Tel Aviv, published in advance of Saturday’s crucial Israel-England international soccer match. They even mention Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend Bar Rafaeli who was cited in my last dispatch. The Sun is owned by Rupert Murdoch and some of its senior editors subscribe to this email list.
The Sun’s positive article about Tel Aviv contrasts greatly with articles in The Guardian in recent days which have demanded that Israel be thrown out of all international sporting events.
“LIKE BIN LADEN ACCUSING AHMADINEJAD OF BEING A BIT HARSH ON THE JEWS”
I also attach below two recent articles on the BBC. The first, from the New York Times, is written by Frank H. Stewart, a visiting scholar at New York University.
Stewart writes that the “BBC World Service plans to start an Arabic television service this fall If the BBC’s Arabic TV programs resemble its radio programs, then they will be just as anti-Western as anything that comes out of the Gulf, if not more so. They will serve to increase, rather than to diminish, tensions, hostilities and misunderstandings among nations.”
Stewart says “The British are among our closest and most reliable allies, and it is strange that their government pays for these broadcasts, many of which are produced in Cairo rather than in London. If the BBC models its Arabic television service on its Arabic radio service, yet another anti-Western, antidemocratic channel will find its place on the Arab screen.”
As a result of Stewart’s article in the New York Times, Gerard Baker published a piece in the Times of London castigating the BBC. “When the editorial pages of The New York Times accuse the BBC of anti-Western bias it is worth taking notice. It is a little like Osama bin Laden accusing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of being a bit harsh on the Jews. It suggests that in other, even pretty unlikely, parts of the world, people are waking up to the menace to our values represented by the BBC. The British sadly, seem curiously content to remain in thrall to it.”
-- Tom Gross
“TONY BLAIR IS HATED MOSTLY FOR THE BIG THINGS THAT HE HAS DONE RIGHT”
Blair of the Critics
The British prime minister has been uniformly maligned by ill-informed critics.
By Jonathan Foreman
National Review
March 5, 2007
article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmUyOTlkOTY5ZWU0YjhmNmJlZjNkMzgxODkwY2QxMjc=&w=MA==
Tony Blair is loathed by the British establishment to a degree that is hard for many Americans to appreciate. Unlike the Bush hatred so endemic in Democratic and mainstream-media circles, Blair hatred is not a strictly partisan affair. Indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that the prime minister is reviled by most of the political class.
Check out the newspapers. (The British are the biggest newspaper readers of the world and British pols are terrified of the press) At the extremes, the left-wing Independent and the right-wing Daily Mail have long loathed the PM (and America and department stores and Israel) with equal passion. But now almost all the papers are frothing at the mouth with anticipation of the prime minister’s supposedly imminent fall their columnists fed tidbits by the staff of his would-be successors, the comically treacherous Chancellor Gordon Brown and the Tories’ apostle of political correctness David Cameron. As the dubious police investigation into “cash for honours” scandal gets rapturously overblown coverage, the whole tone has become relentless and shrill, the pundits basically screaming: “Why won’t he go already?”
It apparently infuriates the chattering class that Blair remains in power so long after he was declared finished by elite opinion. More than a year ago Blair was definitively deemed a discredited lame duck by the BBC’s Today Programme, the oracular flagship radio show listened to by every MP and treated with Pravda-like deference by all of Fleet Street. Yet he refuses to resign. Can’t he see that it’s all over? That his “illegal” wars are a disaster? That his slavish deference to Bush has provoked terrorist attacks? That all of us have decided that it’s time for him to go?
Bizarrely the visceral hatred of Blair similar to Thatcher hatred, Clinton obsession, and Bush loathing in its intensity has little or nothing to do with any of his ill-considered constitutional reforms (a separate legislature for Scotland, etc.) or any of the other failures of his administration, nor even because of the ghastly youth-worshipping “Cool Britannia” ethos of his early years.
No, Tony Blair is hated mostly for the big things that he has done right the really important, civilization-protecting things like overthrowing Saddam and the Taliban, and intervening in Sierra Leone to stop a savage civil war. Many on the Left hate him for being a liberal interventionist and of course for being such a close ally of Uncle Sam.
Some of the Right hates him for the same reasons, though others only oppose the war on terror because Tony Blair is for it. This portion of Tory opinion hates him and this is not a joke because his government banned fox-hunting on horseback. Anything and everything else he has done since is deemed equally wrongheaded or even evil.
How bad is it? Well, to really appreciate elite hatred of Blair you have to check out the London cultural scene.
A couple of weeks ago Britain’s Channel 4 (the network behind last year’s docudrama fantasy about the assassination of President Bush) ran a massively promoted show called The Trial of Tony Blair. The program was advertised by “Tony Blair Wanted” posters on the London underground. It envisioned a 2017 trial of the former PM for “War Crimes” against Iraq in the International Court in the Hague. As one leading columnist wrote in anticipation of the program much praised for its ham-handed, supposedly biting satire “Tomorrow night, we will finally have our revenge.”
There’s also a new play, or rather a theatrical happening, entitled Called to Account: The indictment of Anthony Charles Lynton Blair for the crime of aggression against Iraq a Hearing. It is running at a fashionable London theater called the Tricycle. The professional-class audiences whoop it up as a senior barrister Philippe Sands a member of the same radical firm as Tony Blair’s wife Cherie “tries” the prime minister for his alleged crimes.
If that weren’t enough, January saw the opening of an art exhibition at the Tate Britain museum entitled State Britain. It recreates the antiwar installation of well-known Parliament Square protester Brian Haw, (sample poster: “stop genocide of Iraq”) and includes a painting of Blair, Chancellor Brown, and former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw washing their hands in a bowl filled with blood and labeled Iraq. It has been widely praised.
To most Americans and other fair-minded people there is something bizarre about the notion of Tony Blair as a “war criminal” deserving of the full Nuremberg treatment. After all, if he’s the villain, who then are the good guys, besides Saddam and his supporters, and the fanatics who think it’s O.K. to set off suicide bombs in crowded nightclubs?
These vengeful fantasies of prosecution for alleged “war crimes” reveal a callow ignorance as to what war crimes really are. They also reflect a European elitism. After all, Blair could not have more democratic legitimacy: he won his last election after the beginning of both “illegal” wars.
It’s obvious that the people who put these shows on and those who watch them know little and understand less about the real war in Iraq (as opposed to a fantasy war in which SS-like British and American troops deliberately target Iraqi civilians for murder and torture).
They are as clueless and self-indulgent as the Hollywood actor-activist Tim Robbins and his politically illiterate play Embedded. (Certainly they have no idea that most of the civilian deaths in Iraq have been inflicted by Sunni militants, former regime elements, and Wahhabi volunteers.) Nor do these anti-Blair crusaders believe that there is any real terrorist threat other than that “provoked” by Bush and Blair’s wars.
I have met senior judges and lawyers who really, truly believe that Blair and Bush lied about WMDs. I pointed out to one top barrister that if Saddam’s WMD threat had been a lie rather than an error, then surely the Coalition would have been better prepared for the moment when no WMDs turned up. Or if the Bush-Blair alliance was so evil, would it not have been willing to fake the discovery of the forbidden weapons? It was clear the barrister had never even thought the matter through.
Moreover the British chattering classes are convinced almost to a man (or woman) that Guantanamo is at best a gulag in which all the detainees are innocent victims of paranoia and aggression, and where the quotidian tortures rival those of the Gestapo. They “know” that the war in Iraq is really about stealing oil, doing Israel’s evil bidding, boosting corporate profits, or some vicious combination of all three. The war in Afghanistan is equally “pointless” and “unwinnable.”
They fully buy the media line that radical Islamism is somehow a creation of these wars rather than a phenomenon that predated 9/11, and that solving the Palestinian question will somehow bring peace between Shia and Sunni and end bin Ladenite dreams of restoring the medieval caliphate.
But even if the Blair haters did have a clue about the reality of terrorism and today’s wars, the really important thing about anti-Blairism is that it is a cipher for the envious, ill-informed, elitist, and bigoted anti-Americanism that is endemic among the British upper middle class. Blair is constantly, endlessly condemned as “Bush’s poodle.” Supposedly he is so keen to win Washington’s favor that he has ignored and even endangered British interests. Indeed by (allegedly) uncritically siding with the U.S. on all foreign policy and security questions, he has supposedly provoked Islamist terrorism in the U.K. as if Islamist extremism didn’t exist here before the Afghan and Iraq wars. There are shades here of the Nuclear Disarmament hysteria of the 1970s when British governments were said to have endangered an otherwise safe island by allowing the basing of U.S. nuclear bombers in the U.K.
The fact that Blair has shown enormous moral courage and not given in to the anti-Americanism of many of his erstwhile friends and colleagues has only made his unpopularity worse. Nor does the fact that many ordinary people, especially the pro-American working class still support Blair and the war, do him any favors. (The proletariat also eat at McDonalds, watch trash TV, and take sweaty vacations at Florida Disneyland instead of Tuscany and the Dordogne their pro-Americanism is a measure of their vulgar ignorance.) Indeed, each day that he stands his ground in the war against terrorism and for Western democratic values, the more he incurs the loathing of the bien-pensant.
Now that Blair’s days in office are numbered, the papers in London are filled with snide columns about the huge amount of money the former PM may make when he goes on lecture tours in the U.S. One can only hope that the columnists are correct and that a grateful America makes him a very rich man indeed.
THE BIASED BROADCASTING CORPORATION
The Biased Broadcasting Corporation
By Frank H. Stewart
The New York Times
March 15, 2007
www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/opinion/15stewart.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Last summer, the Archbishop of Algeria remarked to this newspaper that when satellite dishes first appeared in Algeria, they were typically positioned to receive French broadcasts. Now the majority receive programming from the Persian Gulf.
“If you watch Western television, you live in one universe,” said the archbishop, “and if you watch Middle Eastern television, you live in another altogether.” The Middle Eastern broadcasts, he added, tended to depict the West in a negative light.
Washington is well aware of this problem and has tried to address it. In 2004, the United States established its own Arabic-language satellite television station, Al Hurra. But Al Hurra has not been a success, and stations like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyya, based in the Gulf states, continue to dominate the region.
Those stations will soon face a formidable rival. The BBC World Service plans to start an Arabic television service this fall, and the BBC knows what it is doing. It has been broadcasting in Arabic on the radio for more than 60 years and has a huge audience.
This new television station might sound like good news for America. Many of us pick up BBC broadcasts in English, and we respect their quality. But the World Service in English is one thing, and the World Service in Arabic is another entirely. If the BBC’s Arabic TV programs resemble its radio programs, then they will be just as anti-Western as anything that comes out of the Gulf, if not more so. They will serve to increase, rather than to diminish, tensions, hostilities and misunderstandings among nations.
For example, a 50-minute BBC Arabic Service discussion program about torture discussed only one specific allegation, which came from the head of an organization representing some 90 Saudis imprisoned at Guantαnamo. This speaker stated that the prisoners were subject to disgusting and horrible forms of torture and suggested that three inmates reported by the United States to have committed suicide were actually killed. Another participant insisted that the two countries guilty of torturing political prisoners on the largest scale were Israel and the United States.
At the same time, the authoritarian regimes and armed militants of the Arab world get sympathetic treatment on BBC Arabic. When Saddam Hussein was in power, he was a great favorite of the service, which reported as straight news his re-election to a seven-year term in 2002, when he got 100 percent of the vote. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria enjoys similar favor. When a State Department representative referred to Syria as a dictatorship, his BBC interviewer immediately interrupted and reprimanded him.
The Arabic Service not only shields Arab leaders from criticism but also tends to avoid topics they might find embarrassing: human rights, the role of military and security forces, corruption, discrimination against minorities, censorship, poverty and unemployment. When, from time to time, such topics do arise, they are usually dealt with in the most general terms: there may, for instance, be guarded references to “certain Arab countries.”
By contrast, the words and deeds of Western leaders, particularly the American president and the British prime minister, are subject to minute analysis, generally on the assumption that behind them lies a hidden and disreputable agenda. Last summer, when the British arrested two dozen people alleged to have been plotting to blow up airplanes crossing the Atlantic, a BBC presenter centered a discussion on the theory that these arrests had taken place because Tony Blair, embarrassed by opposition to Britain’s role in the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, wanted to distract the public while at the same time associating Muslims with terrorism.
The British are among our closest and most reliable allies, and it is strange that their government pays for these broadcasts, many of which are produced in Cairo rather than in London. If the BBC models its Arabic television service on its Arabic radio service, yet another anti-Western, antidemocratic channel will find its place on the Arab screen.
GREAT CAPITAL CITY. SHAME ABOUT THE AWFUL BBC
Great capital city. Shame about the awful BBC
By Gerard Baker
The Times of London
March 16, 2007
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/gerard_baker/article1522471.ece
For someone who has not lived in the city for more than a decade, the occasional trip to London is a reminder of how richly it deserves its new reputation as the world’s capital.
As my colleague James Harding wrote in times2 this week, there’s a vibrancy about London these days that easily eclipses New York or Paris or Tokyo. To many residents, perhaps, life in London may be a struggle against rising crime and a crowded Tube and overpriced housing, but from an international perspective, it is truly the world’s preeminent urban locale.
In fact, in anything other than the most literal, geographic expression of the term, London is really no longer an English city at all. Its great economic dynamo, the City, powers corporations from Shanghai to Seattle. Its labour force, drawn to it by the opportunities of its free markets, is much more polyglot and multinational than any other urban concentration in the world.
But there’s salt to this strawberry. London’s political culture has been uprooted from its English heritage. It is run if you can call it that by a sort of postmodern communist Mayor, whose political voice minus the annoying nasal whine would sound right at home in Paris, Bologna or San Francisco. It hosts a metropolitan elite that loftily gazes three ways: outward, at the supposed superiority of anything not British; inward, at its own ineffable genius; and down its elegantly pampered nose, at the provincial trivialities that consume the dreary lives of the rest of the population.
But worst of all; much more, much more baleful than any of these irritations, is the political, cultural and intellectual hegemony exercised by the ultimate self-serving metropolitan monopoly, the BBC. Much worse because, unlike mayors and snobs, its domination of the rest of the country is so complete and so permanent.
On a recent trip back to Britain, I happened to hear on the BBC an interview with Helen Mirren, shortly before her Oscars triumph. Amid the usual probing sort of questioning that is the currency of celebrity journalism (“How do you manage to look so young? Is there anyone since Shakespeare who has come close to matching your talent?”) one particular gem caught my attention.
Dame Helen was asked how difficult it had been to play such an “unsympathetic character” as the Queen, the eponymous heroine of her recent film. She replied, quite tartly, that she didn’t find the Queen unsympathetic at all and launched into her now familiar riff about how she thought Elizabeth II really, surprisingly, quite agreeable.
It was a little incident, a small crystal in the battering hailstorm of drivel that pours daily through the airwaves. And yet to my mind it signified something so large. It had nothing to do with politics or Iraq or America. It was so telling in its revelation of prejudices and presumptions precisely because it was on such a slight matter as the sensibilities of an actress.
It betrayed an absolutely rock-solid assumption that the Queen is fundamentally unsympathetic, and that anyone who might still harbour some respect for the monarch or indeed for that matter, the military or the Church, or the countryside or the joint stock company or any of the great English bequests to the world must be some reactionary old buffer out in the sticks who has not had the benefit of the London media’s cultural enlightenment.
More than that, the question all fawning and fraternal and friendly contained within it an assumption that, of course, every thoughtful person shares the same view.
You really do have to leave the country to appreciate fully how pernicious the BBC’s grasp of the nation’s cultural and political soul has become. The groupthink and assumptions implicit in almost everything broadcast by BBC News, and even less explicitly by much else of the corporation’s output, lie like a suffocating blanket over the national consciousness.
This is the mindset that sees the effortless superiority, at every turn, of benign collectivism over selfish individualism, exploited worker over unscrupulous capitalist, enlightened European over brutish American, thoughtful atheist over dumb believer, persecuted Arab over callous Israeli; and that believes the West is the perpetrator of just about every ill that has ever befallen the world from colonialism to global warming.
I’m often told, when I take on like this, that I’m ignoring the quality of BBC output. But I spent almost a decade in the employ of the BBC and I can say, without demeaning my gifted colleagues at The Times, that it has probably one of the highest concentrations of talent of any institution in the world. But that, of course, is the problem. It perpetuates its power by attracting and retaining an educated elite that is distinguished by its unstinting devotion to collectivist values. I’ve no doubt it does what it does very well. It is what it does I object to.
A necessary word here about our sponsor. Anything critical of the BBC written by an employee of Rupert Murdoch is instantly dismissed. It’s not an unreasonable instinct. Outside Murdochland it is solemnly assumed that each morning the drones of News Corporation are given their marching orders on how to interpret every event so that it conforms precisely to the commercial and political instincts of the proprietor.
In the real world, not only does the Murdoch media have only a fraction of the reach of the BBC, but a casual glance at its output demonstrates it is far less monolithic in its outlook than is the BBC.
Fortunately, in the US this week, I was struck by an article on the oped pages of The New York Times, the very citadel of leftish political correctness. Written by an apparently completely sane professor at a prestigious US university and entitled “Biased Broadcasting Corporation”, it assailed the BBC’s Middle Eastern services for their consistently antiWestern tone and content.
When the editorial pages of The New York Times accuse the BBC of anti-Western bias it is worth taking notice. It is a little like Osama bin Laden accusing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of being a bit harsh on the Jews. It suggests that in other, even pretty unlikely, parts of the world, people are waking up to the menace to our values represented by the BBC. The British sadly, seem curiously content to remain in thrall to it.
* Among Israeli Arab college graduates the figure was even higher 33 percent think Jews made up the Holocaust
* Arab woman to deliver Hebrew news
* Leonardo DiCaprio tours Yad Vashem with his Israeli girlfriend
* Supreme U.S. Commander in Europe: Israel is a “model state”
This dispatch mainly concerns Israel.
CONTENTS
1. Supreme U.S. Commander in Europe: Israel is a “model state”
2. U.S. and IDF hold joint exercise on response to nuclear attack
3. UN to open permanent probe on Israel
4. Tania Reinhardt, campaigner against Israel’s existence, dies
5. Israel singled out by UN as being supposed abuser of women!
6. At start of the Lebanon war, France urged Israel to hit Syria
7. Poll: 28 percent of Israel’s Arabs believe the Holocaust never happened
8. Arab woman to deliver Hebrew news
9. Israel approves Jordan rail link
10. Monument dedicated to 4,000 Ethiopians who died en route to Israel
11. Leonardo DiCaprio and Bar Rafaeli tour Yad Vashem
12. Hooters heads for Tel Aviv
13. Israel to start amateur football association
14. “The struggle of free peoples in our age”
15. “Europe’s Israel problem” (Jerusalem Post, March 7, 2007)
16. “Why Europeans should support Israel” (Brussels Journal, March 12, 2007)
17. “Sudanese in Israel hope they have found a home” (NY Times, March 18, 2007)
SUPREME U.S. COMMANDER IN EUROPE: ISRAEL IS A “MODEL STATE”
The supreme commander of NATO operations in Europe and head of the U.S. European Command (EUCOM), John Craddock, has called Israel a “model state”.
Speaking before the U.S. House Armed Services Committee in Washington, Craddock said Israel was “a model state that encouraged democratic ideals and pro-Western values and economics.” He also said Israel should remain a prime beneficiary of U.S. security aid funds and was a “critical military partner” in what he called “this entangled seam of the Middle East.” Craddock’s extremely forthright comments (made last Thursday) were unusual for such a senior U.S. military officer.
U.S. AND IDF HOLD JOINT EXERCISE ON RESPONSE TO NUCLEAR ATTACK
Israel and the United States are conducting a joint military exercise the main aim of which, according to military officials in both countries, is to improve the allies’ abilities to fend off missiles equipped with nuclear, biological or chemical warheads.
This drill, however, will not now involve intercepting live missiles due to logistical constraints resulting from last summer’s Lebanon war and from U.S. deployments elsewhere.
Israel is testing the latest version of the Arrow and Patriot PAC-2 anti-missile systems. The Americans are testing, for the first time, the capabilities of their Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Patriot PAC-3 systems. The aim of the exercise is to measure the response time in the event of a missile attack on Israel, the missile interception capabilities and the communications, battle management and command-and-control systems of both countries.
UN TO OPEN PERMANENT PROBE ON ISRAEL
The United Nations’ Human Rights Council is expected to place Israel under permanent investigation for its alleged “violations” of international law. The council is currently in its fourth session which will run until April 5.
The UN body was created last June to replace the Human Rights Commission, which was dismantled upon pressure from former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton because it had a faulty membership composition and repeatedly singled out Israel for attack.
But since it was inaugurated, the 47-member body (which includes such human rights abusers as Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China) has continued to single out the Jewish State.
It has issued eight anti-Israel resolutions, and none against any other nation. It has also held three special sessions on Israel.
In the current session, the Human Rights Council is set to hear a report compiled by UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard that compares Israel to apartheid South Africa.
* For more on the false comparisons between Israel and apartheid South Africa, please see “Israeli Apartheid Week” kicks off around the world (Feb. 13, 2007).
TANIA REINHARDT, CAMPAIGNER AGAINST ISRAEL’S EXISTENCE, DIES
Meanwhile Prof. Tania Reinhardt, one of the organizers of the above-mentioned “Israeli Apartheid week,” died yesterday in her sleep in New York, aged 63.
Reinhardt had called for a worldwide boycott of Israel, and had opposed the Oslo accords on the grounds that they were designed to leave a Jewish state in existence next to a Palestinian one.
Her opinions were so extreme that she was shunned even by other far left Israelis such as Uri Avneri. “Compared to her I was a distinguished Zionist. She rejected the existence of the State of Israel,” said Avneri.
Reinhardt, a linguistics researcher, was very close to her doctoral advisor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Prof. Noam Chomsky. She also subscribed to The Guardian newspaper and urged others to read it for “the truth”.
ISRAEL SINGLED OUT BY UN AS BEING SUPPOSED ABUSER OF WOMEN!
Last Friday, the UN surpassed itself as it finished its annual session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women by singling out Israel and only Israel (which actually has a very good record on women’s rights) as being the only state “found in violation of women’s rights.”
The hundreds of thousands of women who have been killed, raped, mutilated and displaced in Sudan, the women whipped in Saudi Arabia, hanged for “adultery” in Iran, forced to abort in China, murdered in honor killings in Holland, England and elsewhere, all these were ignored by the UN as it attacked only Israel.
The vote against Israel was 40 for and 2 against, with only the United States and Canada voting against. Amazingly (or perhaps not) Germany, on behalf of the European Union, voted against Israel.
For more, see this excellent article published today on National Review Online by Anne Bayefsky. (Both Anne Bayefsky and the editors at the National Review are longtime subscribers to this list.)
AT START OF THE LEBANON WAR, FRANCE URGED ISRAEL TO HIT SYRIA
According to a report on Israeli army radio yesterday, French President Jacques Chirac told Israel at the start of last year’s war with Hizbullah that France would welcome an Israeli assault on Syria. In a message delivered by Chirac to Israel via a secret channel, the French president suggested that Israel invade Damascus and topple the regime of Bashar Assad. In exchange, Chirac promised that Israel would receive full French support.
Former Israeli ambassador to France Nissim Zvilli told Army Radio, “President Chirac saw Syria as directly responsible for the attempt to undermine the Lebanese regime. He saw them as directly responsible for the murder of [former Lebanese prime minister] Rafik Hariri and directly responsible for arming Hizbullah. Likewise, he saw Syria as the one giving Hizbullah orders on how to operate.”
POLL: 28 PERCENT OF ISRAEL’S ARABS BELIEVE THE HOLOCAUST NEVER HAPPENED
More than a quarter of Israel’s Arab citizens believe the Holocaust never happened, according to an extensively prepared poll published by the University of Haifa yesterday (Sunday).
The poll, conducted by Sami Smoocha, a prominent sociologist, showed 28 percent of Israeli Arabs believe the Holocaust is a myth, and that among college graduates the figure was even higher 33 percent.
Asked about last summer’s war with Hizbullah, nearly half of the Israeli Arabs polled 48 percent said they believed that Hizbullah’s rocket attacks on northern Israel were justified, even though numerous Arabs were killed and wounded in those attacks.
Half of Israeli Arab respondents said Hizbullah’s abduction of IDF reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev from Israeli territory was justified. (For more on Hizbullah, see: www.tomgrossmedia.com/HizbullahIran.html)
Israeli-Arab Member of the Knesset Ahmed Tibi said he was dismayed by the poll findings. He added that the Holocaust was “the worst crime ever against humanity” and that Holocaust denial is “immoral.”
Meantime, Palestinians celebrated the forming of the Hamas-Fatah unity government yesterday by firing five Qassam rockets into Israel in an attempt to murder Israeli civilians. Even though the BBC and others reported the formation of the Palestinian government as their main international news story yesterday, they completely failed to mention the rocket attacks on Israel in news broadcasts.
One of the rockets landed in an industrial zone in southern Ashkelon very close to a strategic facility.
This morning a long-distance Palestinian sniper from Gaza shot and wounded an Israeli repairman working over the border at a gas terminal near Kibbutz Nahal Oz. He has been evacuated to Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital.
Norway has become the first European state to welcome the new extremist Palestinian government.
ARAB WOMAN TO DELIVER HEBREW NEWS
An Arab woman is to be the new Hebrew-language anchor for Israel’s popular Channel 10 television news. Lucy Aharish, an Israeli Arab graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said she was looking forward to the job.
Aharish, 25, told the Hebrew daily Ma’ariv that although she has experienced racism in Israel, she believes Arabs can overcome such challenges and succeed. Having barely survived an attack on her family car when she visited Gaza as a child, she also voiced some antipathy to Palestinian terrorism.
Aharish is the fourth generation of a Muslim family who moved to Nazareth but spent most of her life in the southern town of Dimona, where she celebrated Jewish festivals and served in Gadna, Israel’s paramilitary youth training program.
“The truth is that I don’t regret for a moment that my parents raised me in a Jewish environment. They gave me the privilege to be broad-minded and look at the whole picture. I am grateful for this,” she said.
ISRAEL APPROVES JORDAN RAIL LINK
The Israeli government has approved an extensive regional cooperation project which includes the creation of a railway linking Jordan to the northern Israeli port of Haifa.
The plan, dubbed the “economic peace corridor,” is spearheaded by Minister for Regional Development Shimon Peres, and includes a wide variety of projects between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians.
The project includes the construction of a 160-kilometre canal between the Red Sea and the gradually-evaporating Dead Sea, a joint airport for the three countries, and the creation of a regional industrial zone. One of the most ground-breaking projects would be linking Israel’s railway system to Jordan’s railway to allow future transport of goods from Iraq and Jordan to Haifa.
The bulk of the project will be financed by the World Bank and foreign governments, said Peres.
MONUMENT DEDICATED TO 4,000 ETHIOPIANS WHO DIED EN ROUTE TO ISRAEL
A monument commemorating more than 4,000 Ethiopian Jews who died in Sudan while attempting to reach Israel was dedicated at Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem last week.
Thousands of Ethiopian Jews immigrated to Israel via Sudan in the 1970s. In 1984, Operation Moses airlifted thousands more who had been residing in camps in Sudan. However, that operation was halted after details were leaked to the media. While residing in Sudan, the Ethiopians were robbed, murdered and raped, and suffered from hunger and disease. More than 4,000 died.
“Finally, we will have a place of mourning,” said Ethiopian-Israeli Uri Rada, who campaigned for years to have the monument erected. “We will be able to commune with the memories of our loved ones in a dignified place.”
The dedication ceremony was attended by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other dignitaries.
LEONARDO DICAPRIO AND BAR RAFAELI TOUR YAD VASHEM
Hollywood heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio and his girlfriend, Israeli model Bar Rafaeli, toured the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum last week, which opened after hours especially for their visit to avoid the venue being disrupted by DiCaprio’s legions of fans.
DiCaprio apparently showed great interest in the tour and was moved by the experience, asking many questions and pausing thoughtfully at various displays, according to staff at Yad Vashem who subscribe to this email list.
HOOTERS HEADS FOR TEL AVIV
Hooters, the U.S. restaurant chain, famous for waitresses in low-cut blouses and short skirts, and for its spicy chicken wings, has announced it is to open its first branch in Tel Aviv this summer.
Ofer Ahiraz, the man responsible for bringing the franchise to Israel told Reuters, “I strongly believe that the Hooters concept is something that Israelis are looking for
Hooters can suit the Israeli entertainment culture.”
Ahiraz said a specific location in Tel Aviv, Israel’s most cosmopolitan city, had yet to be chosen, but he said it would not open restaurants near large religious populations, and they would not be kosher. In the next few years there could be as many as five Hooters restaurants in Israel, including one in Eilat.
International food chains such as Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and Hard Rock Cafe have already failed in Israel where local restaurants and cafes are often particularly good.
ISRAEL TO START AMATEUR FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION
Following hot on the heels of the launch of a professional baseball league this summer, Israel will start an amateur tackle football association in the fall.
Steve Leibowitz, president of Israel’s flag football association, announced the formation of the new four-team league in a ceremony last week at the Kraft Family Stadium.
In attendance was Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots of the National Football League. Kraft donated the money for the stadium, the only one in Israel designed for American football. The IFL plans to kick off with teams in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and Kfar Saba.
For more on the Israeli baseball league, see Israel to have its own baseball league (& Iran bars women from soccer matches) (May 19, 2006).
“THE STRUGGLE OF FREE PEOPLES IN OUR AGE”
I attach three articles below.
The first is an editorial from the Jerusalem Post. It says that “Perhaps the best explanation, then, is one given by Stephan Vopel of the German Bertelsmann Foundation for why many more Americans and Israelis favor a military strike against Iran than Germans: “While Israelis subscribe to the maxim ‘never again,’ the German dictum is ‘never again war.’” Pacifism, in other words, is the driving force behind European animus toward both the U.S. and Israel.”
The second article is from Brussels Journal, a popular European blog “set up by European journalists and writers to restore three values that are so lacking in the so-called ‘consensus-culture’ of contemporary Europe: Freedom, the quest for Knowledge, and the Truth.”
The blog post, written by “Fjordman”, a Norwegian contributor, is in agreement with the Jerusalem Post editorial: “The Holocaust was an unspeakable crime. It also did massive damage to Europe’s own identity and cultural confidence, and is one of the major causes of Europe’s seeming inability to withstand the ongoing Islamic Jihad.”
The final article below, is a rare positive piece on Israel from the New York Times. It is a report on the black Sudanese refugees now being given protection in Israel having fled from their Arab attackers in Sudan.
It reports that “roughly 200 of the Sudanese in Israel are Muslim, including about 100 who fled the bloodshed in Darfur.” According to the article, the refugees come from Egypt: “After they began hearing that they would be jailed in Israel, they still came, so desperate were they to leave Egypt.”
-- Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLES
EUROPE’S ISRAEL PROBLEM
Europe’s Israel problem
Editorial
The Jerusalem Post
March 7, 2007
Two recent polls tell us what we already knew: Israel is relatively popular among Americans and the subject of considerable antipathy among European democracies. The data suggest that Americans see themselves with Israelis in the same boat, while Europeans have an almost opposite point of view. Why is this so and what, if anything, can be done about it?
The US poll, conducted by Gallup, found that Americans are more pro-Israel than they were 10 and 20 years ago and now sympathize with Israel three times more than with the Palestinians: 58 percent to 20%. Since 2000, Gallup polls have shown that fewer Americans express no preference on the conflict, with most of the shift from the undecided column moving in Israel’s favor.
In the second poll, the BBC asked people in 27 nations to rate a group of countries and found that Iran and Israel were almost tied for the spot of the country most people saw as a “mainly negative influence.” Only in the US and Nigeria did a plurality see Israel as a “mainly positive” influence. By contrast, in Germany, France and Great Britain, 77%, 66% and 65%, respectively, viewed Israel as having a “mainly negative” influence.
These same European countries viewed Iran even more dimly 78%, 86% and 76% negative, respectively, and the US in an only slightly less negative light 74%, 69% and 57% negative, respectively.
Some may interpret these data as evidence of European anti-Semitism. It is, indeed, difficult to entirely avoid such conclusions when the Jewish state is so blithely painted with the same brush as Iran, a dictatorship that opposes every value Europeans claim to believe in, openly foments terrorism and is racing to obtain nuclear weapons.
Yet, according to the BBC poll, Germans and French see the US and Israel in almost identically negative terms, with the British showing slightly less anti-American sentiment.
Perhaps the best explanation, then, is one given by Stephan Vopel of the German Bertelsmann Foundation for why many more Americans and Israelis favor a military strike against Iran than Germans: “While Israelis subscribe to the maxim ‘never again,’ the German dictum is ‘never again war.’” Pacifism, in other words, is the driving force behind European animus toward both the US and Israel.
Europeans realize that Iran is a threat, but they are almost as, if not more, opposed to confronting that threat than they are fearful of the threat itself.
The US and Israel, as the nations that are perceived both as Iran’s main targets and as those most actively fighting back, are threats to the European strategy of lying low and hoping that their adversary will go away.
Further, America and Israel are both seen as provoking Iran and therefore making things worse.
Is there anything Israel or the US, for that matter can do to change this European environment? Though it might not be decisive, the most powerful thing the US can do to shift European opinion is to speak with one voice, at least in areas of bipartisan agreement. While Democrats and Republicans disagree on Iraq, they agree that a nuclear Iran is unacceptable and that sanctions must be tightened dramatically to force the Iranian regime to back down.
If a bipartisan message to this effect were to emerge from Washington, it could help signal Europeans that it is not just the “cowboy” Bush administration that is pushing for draconian sanctions, but liberal Democrats who believe that confronting Teheran now with nonmilitary means is the best way to avoid both war and the threat of a nuclear Iran.
Israel, for its part, needs to stress that it faces a struggle for existence against the same jihadi axis that threatens Europe, as symbolized by the hugs this week between Hamas’s Khaled Mashaal and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Teheran.
Ultimately, it will be difficult to convince Europeans that they need to help defend Israel, at least morally, when they do not accept the need to defend themselves. Such, however, is the struggle of free peoples in our age, a struggle that must be won.
“EUROPEANS NEED TO UNDERSTAND HOW CLOSELY INTERTWINED ARE THE FATES OF ISRAEL AND OF EUROPE ITSELF”
Why Europeans should support Israel
By Fjordman
Brussels Journal
March 12, 2007
www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1965
One of the most frustrating things to watch is the powerful anti-Israeli and sometimes outright anti-Semitic current that is prevalent in too much of Europe’s media. Bat Ye’or’s predictions about Arab anti-Semitism spreading in Europe as the continent’s Islamization and descent into Eurabia continues have so far proved depressingly accurate. This trend needs to be fought, vigorously, by all serious European anti-Jihadists. Not only because it is immoral and unfair to Israelis, which it is, but also because those who assist it are depriving Europeans of the opportunity to fully grasp the threat and understand the nature of the Jihad that is now targeting much of Europe as well.
In 2005 the Norwegian police issued a mobile security alarm to Carl I. Hagen, leader of the right-wing Progress Party. Mr. Hagen had criticized Islam and could see no similarity with the concept of morality and justice found in Christianity. During the 1990s, Mr. Hagen was one of the few politicians who protested against giving money to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as a part of the Norwegian-brokered Oslo Peace Process.
Hagen said that if Israel loses in the Middle East, Europe will succumb to Islam next. He felt that Christians should support Israel and oppose Islamic inroads into Europe. In an unprecedented step, a group of Muslim ambassadors to Norway blasted Carl I. Hagen in a letter to the newspaper Aftenposten, claiming that he had offended 1.3 billion Muslims around the world. Other Norwegian politicians quickly caved in and condemned Hagen. Maybe Norway, “the country of peace” and home to the Nobel Peace Prize, will get along just fine with Islam, “the religion of peace.”
Although some political leaders such as Mr. Carl I. Hagen have a clear understanding of what’s going on, they are unfortunately few and far between. Most European media commentators are hostile to the Jewish state of Israel, partly because they get angry with anybody defending themselves against Islamic Jihad instead of surrendering, and partly because they want to project their own feelings of guilt from the Holocaust onto Israel by recasting the Jews as villains and the Palestinians as victims.
French filmmaker Pierre Rehov made the film Suicide Killers where he interviewed the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He warns that we are facing “a neurosis at the level of an entire civilization,” a “culture of hatred in which the uneducated are brainwashed to a level where their only solution in life becomes to kill themselves and kill others in the name of a God. I hear a mother saying ‘Thank God, my son is dead.’ Her son had became a shaheed, a martyr, which for her was a greater source of pride than if he had became an engineer, a doctor or a winner of the Nobel Prize. [...] They don’t see the innocent being killed, they only see the impure that they have to destroy.”
Rehov believes that we are dealing with “a new form of Nazism” that it is going to spread to Europe and the United States, too.
Spanish journalist Sebastian Villar Rodriguez claims that Europe died in Auschwitz: “We assassinated 6 million Jews in order to end up bringing in 20 million Muslims!” Yet in 2007, Ciempozuelos, a small Madrid suburb, refused to commemorate Holocaust Day and opted instead to commemorate the ‘Day of Palestinian Genocide.’ In Britain following Muslim pressure, the Bolton Council scrapped its Holocaust Memorial Day event. The Muslim Council of Britain asked for a Genocide Day to protest the Israeli “genocide” against the Palestinians. The secretary-general of the MCB, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, has earlier compared the situation of Muslims in Britain to Jews under Hitler.
We thus have the absurd situation where the Nazis of today are presented as Jews while the Jews are presented as Nazis.
French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut thinks that Auschwitz has become part of the foundation of the European Union, a culture based on guilt. “I can understand the feeling of remorse that is leading Europe to this, but this remorse goes too far.” It is too great a gift to present Hitler to reject every single aspect of European culture. This is said by the Jewish son of an Auschwitz prisoner.
The Holocaust was an unspeakable crime. It also did massive damage to Europe’s own identity and cultural confidence, and is one of the major causes of Europe’s seeming inability to withstand the ongoing Islamic Jihad.
As Hugh Fitzgerald notes, “Fortunately for so many, and for the Arabs, the victory of Israel in the Six-Day War promptly provided a reason to depict Jews as villains, not victims. This found an eager audience of Europeans, who were already eager for psychological reasons to find fault with Jews so as to avoid thinking unduly about the behavior of many European peoples and states during the war. [...] The damage done to the morale of Europe because of the destruction of European Jewry has been great. If Western Europe, or the West generally, were after all that has happened to permit Israel to go under, Europe would not recover.”
He warns that those who believe sacrificing Israel would in any way stop the global Jihad are very wrong. On the contrary, “The loss of Israel would fill the Arabs and Muslims with such triumphalism that their Jihad in Western Europe and elsewhere (including the Americas) would receive a gigantic boost. The duty is to make sure that Islam covers the globe; that Islam dominates, and Muslims rule.”
Europeans need to understand how closely intertwined are the fates of Israel and of Europe itself. The term “Judeo-Christian” is not a cliche. We cannot defend Western civilization without defending its Jewish component, without which modern Western culture would have been unthinkable.
The religious identity of the West has two legs: The Christian and the Jewish ones. It needs both to stand upright. Sacrificing one to save the other is like fighting a battle by chopping off one of your legs, throwing it at the feet of your enemies and shouting: “You won’t get the other one! We will never surrender!” We could always hope that our enemies will laugh themselves to death faster than we bleed to death, the Monty Python way of fighting. Maybe that works, but most likely it will leave us crippled and pathetic, if not dead.
I agree with Mr. Finkielkraut: To reduce absolutely everything about Europe to gas chambers, thereby allowing the Nazis the opportunity to expropriate everything that has been created during thousands of years, is to grant Adolf Hitler victory posthumously. We should not award him that pleasure, especially since what would replace Western civilization would be Islamic culture, the most warlike and anti-Semitic on earth, and greatly admired by Mr. Hitler for it.
We cannot change what has happened in the past. We should, however, consider it our duty to combat anti-Semitism in the here and now and make sure that the remaining Jews both in Europe and in Israel are safe. This is not just because it is our moral and historical obligation, which it is, but also because we only gain the right to defend ourselves against Islamization of we grant the same right to Israel. Likewise, we can only begin to heal our self-inflicted civilizational wounds if we embrace the Jewish component of our cultural identity.
FLEEING SUDAN TO THE SAFETY OF ISRAEL
Sudanese in Israel hope they have found a home
By Dina Kraft
The New York Times
March 18, 2007
www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/world/africa/18sudanese.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin
It is a simple tin shed on the edge of a carrot field, but the young man from Darfur is relieved to call it home.
There is room enough for a pair of beds, a small refrigerator and a stove. Outside, a wooden table is propped under a tree. Here, he savors his meals, feels the sun on his face and fills his notebook with the details of his long journey to Israel.
It is a welcome change from the 13 months he spent in an Israeli prison, locked up for illegally entering the country one of some 300 Sudanese arrivals whose illegal entry via Egypt and status as citizens from an enemy country landed them in prison.
The son and grandson of a line of ruling sheiks in his village, the 29-year-old prefers not to be identified by name. He fears for his family’s safety should it be discovered that he has ended up seeking refuge in Israel, a place he once knew only as an enemy.
In his journal, the young man recorded his first day out of jail as “Freedom Day.”
“It was a very important day in my life, a turning point,” he said. “I felt as if it was my first day in Israel. I never had really seen Israel before.”
After rounds of Supreme Court appeals, parliamentary hearings and a public push by human rights groups, some of the detained Sudanese are beginning to be released to collective farms known as kibbutzim and moshavim, while their official refugee status can be determined and a country of asylum found. About 190 remain in custody.
Roughly 200 of the Sudanese in Israel are Muslim, including about 100 who fled the bloodshed in Darfur. Others include Christians who say they are fleeing persecution from southern Sudan and those simply looking for work.
In Egypt, their prior haven, they struggled with poverty and dismissiveness and sometimes outright hostility from the authorities. Some of them had been part of a Sudanese encampment in a Cairo park in December 2005, meant to try to pressure officials in the nearby United Nations office to relocate them. When they refused to follow the orders of Egyptian authorities to disperse, they were blasted with water cannons and dragged away. Twenty-seven people were reportedly killed in the melee.
Some of the Sudanese in Egypt then began moving on. Israel attracted them simply because it is easy to get there from Egypt, but many say they would be content to stay if granted asylum. Most begin their trip by bus from Cairo to towns closer to the Israeli border. From there they cross the desert on foot, sometimes with hired Bedouin guides.
Once in Israel, they usually sit by the roadside waiting for an army patrol to pick them up. When they first started coming, they assumed they would be taken to local United Nations offices. After they began hearing that they would be jailed in Israel, they still came, so desperate were they to leave Egypt.
The young man now living in the tin shed said he had no choice but to leave Egypt after being followed and harassed by security police after he was ousted from the Cairo encampment in the 2005 raid that cost his wife her life. He found her name on a list of the dead, he said, after days of going from hospital to hospital searching for her.
The presence of refugees from the Darfur conflict, which the United States calls genocide, presents Israel with a particularly difficult problem.
Israel, founded in the shadow of the Holocaust, has felt a responsibility to harbor refugees plucking Vietnamese boat people out of international waters, for example.
But now, government officials fear that if word spreads that Israel is a good place to settle, their country could be overwhelmed by large waves of refugees from Sudan and elsewhere in Africa. Mediterranean countries, particularly Spain and Malta, have been stunned by surging African migration, much of it illegal.
“Israel is endeavoring to be as humane as possible,” said Mark Regev, a Foreign Ministry spokesman. “Israel has a special understanding of the genocide in Darfur. We have a very real compassion for the refugees, and no one is being turned back.” But, he added, “Israel does not have the capability to deal with all of Africa’s refugees, so we have to be mindful.”
Mr. Regev said Israeli authorities were in discussion with Egypt about sending some Sudanese back there, and with other governments and international organizations about their possible repatriation.
Israeli human rights groups like the Committee for Advancement of Refugees from Darfur, which has led efforts to get the Sudanese out of jail, say officials are deliberately exaggerating the likelihood of drawing more refugees as an excuse for inaction.
Even after the government agreed to substitute their time in prison with placements on farms for a time, the release process is slow, advocates say.
Yosef Lapid, a former justice minister, noted the parallel with “the historical curiosity” of German Jews who escaped Hitler, landing in England only to be put in detention camps because they, like today’s Sudanese refugees in Israel, were considered enemy nationals.
“I don’t think that the Jewish people can look the other way when such a horrible genocide is being conducted. It is our obligation to be as of much help as we can,” said Mr. Lapid, a Holocaust survivor.
[A group of Sudanese recently were taken on a tour of the museum at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. They stood silently, some wiping away tears as they looked at photographs of corpses and cases displaying children’s dolls and a mother’s final postcard. “It was very hard to see this, really shocking,” said a 24-year-old man who fled Darfur last year. “It reminded me of my own people. I hope one day we can have a museum like this in Darfur.”]
Theo Kaminer, who is coordinating the kibbutz movement’s efforts to take in the Sudanese, said the farms felt a moral obligation.
“If not us, who will help them?” he said. “No one else is lifting a hand. These people are refugees from a Holocaust.”
The young man now living in the tin shed emerged from a low-security jail in central Israel last month, arm in arm with other Darfur refugees.
He and another of the released Sudanese, who also asked not to be named, now spend their days working the farm’s irrigation system in the eucalyptus- and cedar-lined fields.
The second refugee, 39, said he was relieved to be out of prison, but grateful that it had been so different from his time in Sudanese custody. Then, he said, he was beaten routinely. Now, he prays to be reunited with his family.
During a break from work, the young man sits at the table by the tin shed and thumbs through his notebooks.
In neat blue ink, he has written a timeline of his life and the names of his relatives and their birthdates.
The day Arab militiamen swept their village, shooting to kill and setting fires, he fled to the nearby hills on foot. He remembers dense smoke and screams. But he does not know the fate of his mother and eight siblings, including his twin sister.
When he crossed into Israel, after an all-night trek through the desert, his throat was parched and his hands bloodied. But he felt a need to record what happened.
“I had one pen in my pocket and started writing,” he said.
He says he wants a permanent home be it in Israel or some other country that will accept him.
For now he awakes at dawn to pray and takes in the sunrise.
“I feel like my life was hidden in darkness and now there is a little bit of light,” he said. Then he climbed on a tractor and headed to work.
* Extreme Islamists issue warning to “sluts” at Gaza universities
* Hitler might lose German citizenship
* This dispatch mainly concerns Palestinian affairs.
CONTENTS
1. BBC and Palestinians acknowledge biased BBC reporting
2. Islamic movement condemns Palestinian lesbian conference
3. Outcry forces Hamas to rescind “bird” book ban
4. Turkey bans YouTube after Greeks insult Ataturk
5. Demands for USAID to stop funding “Hamas’s University”
6. Hamas website sharply criticizes al-Qaeda’s no.2 al-Zawahiri
7. Fatah military wing claims its leader escaped assassination attempt in Gaza
8. Hamas legislator demands kidnapping of more Israeli soldiers
9. Extreme Islamic group issues warning to “sluts” at Gaza universities
10. Saddam verdict judge “flees Iraq, seeks asylum in UK”
11. Followers mark Bin Laden’s 50th birthday
12. Hitler might lose German citizenship
13. Saudi barbarism and the liberal media
14. “Iranian official lashes out at Hollywood movie ‘300’ for insulting Persian civilization” (Xinhua, March 12, 2007)
15. “Gay Arab activists in Israel forge ahead with plans for conference” (AP/Advocate, March 13, 2007)
16. “Palestinian minister admits aid millions lost” (Sunday Telegraph, March 11, 2007)
BBC AND PALESTINIANS ACKNOWLEDGE BIASED BBC REPORTING
BBC Middle East correspondent Alan Johnston has, unfortunately, been kidnapped by Palestinian gunmen in the Gaza strip.
Impartial observers have long recognized that Johnston is particularly anti-Israeli in his reporting. But now the BBC has acknowledged his bias too. The BBC website, in an article about their kidnapped correspondent, includes a quote from BBC diplomatic editor Paul Adams confirming that Johnston wasn’t interested in presenting the Israeli side, but it was “his job to bring us day after day reports of the Palestinian predicament.”
The Nablus TV news agency also acknowledges this. In a report specially located and translated for this website / email list, it says: “The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate has issued a call to release Johnston as soon as possible, saying Johnston must not be hurt as he is famous for his opinions which are supportive of the Palestinians.”
For more, in Arabic, see: www.nablustv.net/details.asp?newsID=1385&cat=14
The Qatar News Agency also says that Johnston is known for “his quality and objectiveness”: www.qnaol.com/linkit.php?date=2007-03-12&no=0127
Last year a Fox News reporter who had been kidnapped in Gaza was released after a $2 million ransom was paid by the Fox network (although officially Fox denies this).
No one had been charged or convicted of involvement in any of the recent kidnappings of western journalists and aid workers by Palestinian gunmen.
ISLAMIC MOVEMENT CONDEMNS PALESTINIAN LESBIAN CONFERENCE
A rare conference of Palestinian lesbians, scheduled to be held in Haifa at the end of the month, has been sharply criticized by leaders of Israel’s Islamic Movement.
Arab members of the Israeli Knesset, Ibrahim Sarsur and Abas Zkoor (United Arab List-Ta’al) published a statement calling on “all respectable people to stand up against preaching sexual deviance.”
The Haifa-based Asawat, a Palestinian gay women’s organization, whose 85 members hail from Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, has called the March 28 conference to mark its five-year anniversary.
The Islamic Movement statement also said, “We must not let this fatal cancer spread in our community.” It warned it would respond as it saw fit.
For more, see the second article below titled “Gay Arab activists in Israel forge ahead with plans for conference”.
OUTCRY FORCES HAMAS TO RESCIND “BIRD” BOOK BAN
The Hamas-run Palestinian Education Ministry on Saturday rescinded its decision to pull an anthology of Palestinian folk tales from school libraries and destroy all copies.
There had been a widespread public outcry in the West Bank after Hamas said they would destroy a favorite Palestinian children’s book, “Speak Bird, Speak Again,” because it was allegedly “unIslamic”. Some 1,500 copies of the book had already been destroyed as the militant Muslim group continues to try to impose its beliefs on Palestinian society.
The 400-page anthology of folk tales narrated by Palestinian women was first published in English in 1989 by the University of California at Berkeley. It was published in Arabic in 2001, and angered Hamas because two of the 45 tales contained what some might consider vague sexual innuendo, referring to body parts of birds.
TURKEY BANS YOUTUBE AFTER GREEKS INSULT ATATURK
A Turkish court last week ordered access to YouTube’s website blocked, after a prosecutor recommended the ban because videos were posted deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Turk Telekom, Turkey’s largest telecommunications provider, immediately began enforcing the ban.
Visitors to the YouTube site from Turkey were greeted with the message: “Access to this site has been blocked by a court decision!”
A message in both Turkish and English at the bottom of the page said, “Access to www.youtube.com site has been suspended in accordance with decision no: 2007/384 dated 06.03.2007 of Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court.”
During the past week, Turkish media publicized what some called a “virtual war” between Greeks and Turks on YouTube, with people from both sides posting videos to belittle and berate the other. The Greek-posted video prompting the ban alleged, among other things, that Ataturk was gay.
Insulting Ataturk or “Turkishness” is a crime in Turkey punishable by prison. Turkey, which has applied to join the European Union, has been condemned for not doing enough to curb nationalist sentiments and to protect freedom of expression.
For more on YouTube, see YouTube becoming site of choice for al-Qaeda to spread propaganda (Feb. 21, 2007).
DEMANDS FOR USAID TO STOP FUNDING “HAMAS’S UNIVERSITY”
An Illinois congressman, Mark Kirk, has demanded to know why USAID is helping to fund the Hamas-linked Islamic University in Gaza. Kirk, the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee, made his request in an open letter to the U.S. Inspector General’s office, shortly after State Department officials defended giving the institution some $140,000 from USAID.
Kirk, a Republican, pointed out that last month Fatah forces “raided a Hamas base at the university, reportedly confiscating 2,000 AK-47 rifles, hundreds of RPG launchers and ammunition.”
Kirk also said senior Palestinian sources told Yediot Ahronot that kidnapped Israeli teenager Gilad Shalit had been kept at the Islamic University for much of 2006.”
Kirk quoted Jameela El Shanty, professor and Hamas lawmaker, as telling the Baltimore Sun in 2006, “Hamas built this institution. The university presents the philosophy of Hamas.”
Former Hamas leader Abdel al-Rantissi was a lecturer at the university. For more on Rantissi, see Dr Abdel al-Rantissi, “the Pediatrician of Death,” in his own words (April 18, 2004).
FATAH MILITARY WING CLAIMS ITS LEADER ESCAPED ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT IN GAZA
The Yasser Arafat group, which is part of the Fatah-affiliated al-Aqsa Brigades, has revealed that its leader, Abu Fuad, escaped an assassination attempt on Monday.
In a statement, the group’s spokesman, Abu Marwan, blamed Hamas. Abu Marwan said Hamas should be proud of The Yasser Arafat group because they had been responsible for launching 121 rockets at Israel last month alone.
HAMAS LEGISLATOR DEMANDS KIDNAPPING OF MORE ISRAELI SOLDIERS
“Fathi Hamad, a Hamas member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, demanded the kidnapping of more Israelis,” according to the Palestinian newspaper, Al Ayyam (March 10, 2007 edition).
Separately, the Hamas Movement affirmed last Thursday in a press statement it issued (largely ignored by the Western media but widely covered in the Arabic one) that it will not compromise “an inch of historical Palestine despite the sacrifices it might pay for this,” and stressed that the “resistance option was and still is the strategic option of the Movement in the march of liberating all of Palestine.”
In a separate incident, a senior commander of Hamas’ armed Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades was killed yesterday evening during a gun battle with members of Fatah in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian eyewitnesses described it as an assassination: gunmen stopping the car in which Ali Haddad was riding and then opened fire at point-blank range. Nine others were wounded, one critically. Hamas has promised to avenge the killing.
EXTREME ISLAMIC GROUP ISSUES WARNING TO “SLUTS” AT GAZA UNIVERSITIES
A group calling itself “Swords of the truth in the land of steadfastness” claimed responsibility on Sunday for the execution of another senior Hamas member in Gaza, calling him one of “the symbols of corruption in the Gaza Strip.” They said they are “complying with God’s jurisdiction on Earth.”
In a statement the group said it would “not make any exceptions regarding the punishment for violations of God’s laws,” adding it would “reach all those who were involved with the individuals who were punished, because we have the proofs and the confessions.” It said “their [Hamas] rank will not protect them from punishment.”
The same group prohibited Internet cafιs in Gaza from opening late, describing them as “night prostitution houses.”
The group also revealed that it has a list of girls’ names whom it depicted as “sluts and corrupting others at the universities.” The group threatened to punish all these girls if their families do not deter them.
The group also announced that drug dealers would be killed.
SADDAM VERDICT JUDGE “FLEES IRAQ, SEEKS ASYLUM IN UK”
Al-Jazeera Television in Doha, Qatar, has reported that the Iraqi judge who passed the death sentence against Saddam Hussein has fled Iraq and asked for asylum in Britain.
FOLLOWERS MARK BIN LADEN’S 50TH BIRTHDAY
Followers of Osama bin Laden flooded Islamic websites with pledges of allegiance, videos and pictures on Saturday to mark the al-Qaeda leader’s 50th birthday. This is seem by some as illustrating his continuing importance as a radical Islamic symbol even though he has not shown his face since he appeared on an al-Qaeda video on October 29, 2004.
“Osama bin Laden turns 50. God protect our leader, our Sheik Osama bin Laden. God reward him for his words and actions,” wrote an admirer on one website.
Another message titled the “Manhattan invasion” featured footage of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States and the wills of the men who hijacked the planes. Another follower posted a poem of dedication to bin Laden.
A spokesman for U.S. troops in Afghanistan expressed disgust over the celebrations.
HITLER MIGHT LOSE GERMAN CITIZENSHIP
Sixty-two years after his death, efforts are being made to strip Hitler of his German citizenship. Germany’s Social Democratic party, the junior member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic party-led coalition government, says it is attempting to posthumously revoke the Austrian-born Hitler’s citizenship. The Social Democratic party was banned by Hitler in the 1930s.
I attach three articles below, the first of which quotes an Iranian official who has lashed out at the new Hollywood movie “300” for supposedly insulting Persian civilization. The final article quotes the new Palestinian finance minister who has warned foreign donors that he has no idea where much of the $700 million that has flowed into Palestinian government coffers from abroad since the election that brought Hamas to power last year has been spent.
-- Tom Gross
SAUDI BARBARISM AND THE LIBERAL MEDIA
Many blogs linked to my dispatch last week titled Saudi gang-rape victim gets 90 lashes for International Women’s Day (March 8, 2007). These include leading writers Andrew Sullivan (of The Atlantic, and Sunday Times of London), Ruth Gledhill (the highly respected religious affairs correspondent of the Times of London) and Kathryn Jean Lopez, a senior editor at the National Review.
As Sullivan says: Is it Islamophobic to call this barbarism?
Yet the BBC, The New York Times and other supposedly liberal media are still to report on the lashes meted out to this teenage gang rape victim by the Saudi “justice” system.
“PART OF A COMPREHENSIVE U.S. PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR AIMED AT IRANIAN CULTURE”
Iranian official lashes out at Hollywood movie “300” for insulting Persian civilization
Xinhua
March 12, 2007
english.people.com.cn/200703/12/print20070312_356565.html
An Iranian official on Sunday lashed out at the Hollywood movie “300” for insulting the Persian civilization, local Fars News Agency reported.
Javad Shamqadri, an art advisor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accused the new movie of being “part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Iranian culture”, said the report.
Shamqadri was quoted as saying “following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the U.S. initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture,” adding “certainly, the recent movie is a product of such studies.”
The movie’s effort would be fruitless, because “values in Iranian culture and the Islamic Revolution are too strongly seated to be damaged by such plans”, said the Iranian official.
Shamqadri, who is also a filmmaker, said that production of more domestic and artistic films which portray Iranian achievements is a proper response to movies like “300”.
“300,” an ancient epic about the famous Battle of Thermopylae in Greek history, set a new record at the box office in North America this weekend.
The Warner Bros. adaptation of the 480 B.C. battle took an estimated 70 million U.S. dollars in its debut weekend, according to figures released on Sunday by Los Angeles-based box office track firm Media by Numbers.
The R-rated film, based on comic book writer Frank Miller’s graphic novel, tells the story that an army of 300 Spartan warriors led by their king Leonidas fought to the death to delay a massive Persian army’s invasion, so that the Greeks could reorganize a counterattack.
“THE MEETING IS IMPORTANT SIMPLY BECAUSE IT IS TAKING PLACE”
Gay Arab activists in Israel forge ahead with plans for conference
By Diaa Hadid
The Associated Press / Advocate.com
March 13, 2007
www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid42850.asp
A rare gathering of openly gay Arab activists is slated to be held in Israel this month, drawing the ire of religious conservatives. Headlined “Home and Exile,” the March 28 meeting is meant to spark discussion of homosexuality among Israel’s 1 million Arab citizens, said Roula Deeb, a prominent Arab feminist and one of the scheduled speakers.
The conference is being organized by Aswat, an Arab lesbian group based in Haifa, a coastal city home to both Jews and Arabs.
Around 100 to 150 people are expected to show up, Deeb said. With homosexuality a taboo topic in much of the Arab world, the meeting is important simply because it is taking place.
Israel is generally tolerant of homosexuality, and the country’s secular metropolis, Tel Aviv, is home to a thriving gay community. But Israel’s Arabs, who make up 20% of the population, live mostly in separate communities where homosexuality is still considered out of bounds.
When news of the conference, which was advertised on Aswat’s Web site, reached the Islamic Movement in Israel, it sparked a war of words between Arab liberals and Muslim conservatives.
“Lesbians... need treatment they don’t need to spread their strange ideas in the Arab community,” said Mohammed Zbidat, a spokesman for the Islamic Movement, a conservative force that has grown increasingly influential in the Arab Israeli community in recent years.
Homosexuality is strictly forbidden by Islam, and an earlier statement issued by the Movement described it as a “cancer” in the Arab community.
The conference draws its supporters mostly from the ranks of secular and educated Arabs. It is sponsored by two Haifa cafes popular among Arab intellectuals and artists, and an Arab women’s rap group is scheduled to perform.
“This is a political issue,” said Raja Zaatry, a journalist at the left-leaning Ittihad (Unity) newspaper, who condemned the Islamic Movement’s stance in an editorial last week.
“Today, they are attacking gays and women. Tomorrow, who else?” he said in an interview. “We shouldn’t compromise. We have to challenge this fundamentalist stream in our society.”
In Lebanon, perhaps the Arab world’s most liberal state, gay people have held news conferences and run a magazine called Barra, meaning “out,” the only publication of its kind. But nearly everywhere in the Arab world, individuals face persecution if they come out openly.
Still, violence against participants in the Haifa conference is not expected. “We’ve called on people to fight this in all legal means. We don’t condone violence,” said the Islamic Movement’s Zbidat.
The conference’s organizers did not want to respond to the controversy. “We are focusing all our energies on the conference right now,” a spokeswoman said.
“THE SYSTEM IS IN A STATE OF TOTAL DISREPAIR”
Palestinian minister admits aid millions lost
By Josh Mitnick
The Sunday Telegraph
March 11, 2007
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/11/whamas11.xml
A former World Bank official who is about to become the Palestinian finance minister has warned foreign donors that he has no idea where much of their money has been spent.
In the 14 months since Hamas won elections, Palestinian finances have descended into such chaos that there is now no way to confirm whether aid is going to its stated purpose, according to Salam Fayyad, 54, who is poised to start his second stint as treasury chief once the rival Hamas and Fatah factions finalise a “unity” government.
An estimated £362.5 million has flowed into Palestinian government coffers from abroad since the election that brought Hamas to power and ushered in a period of internal conflict that came close to all-out civil war.
The European Union alone provided £59.5 million last year and sent a far greater sum directly to hospitals, power generation projects and to families in need.
Now, Palestinian Authority spending is out of control, salaries are being paid to workers who never turn up, and nobody can track where the money is going, according to Mr Fayyad.
There was no way to be certain that aid was being used as intended, he admitted. “Please write this: no one can give donors that assurance. Why? Because the system is in a state of total disrepair.”
Five years ago, Mr Fayyad who had worked at the US Federal Reserve Bank - was asked to create order out of Palestinian finances by the president at the time, Yasser Arafat. Now, he is confronting the fact that his accounting reforms have all unravelled, there is a ballooning wage bill, a yawning budget shortfall and an international financial boycott of Hamas.
Mr Fayyad conceded that until he assumed office he could not be sure of the depth of the crisis or how to fix it. He expected it to take weeks to regain enough control over Palestinian funds to restore oversight over new donations. It would take several months to begin reining in the inflated salary bill.
Hours earlier, the World Bank had published a 197-page report warning the Palestinians to control a wage bill that totals two thirds of all spending, and of a “dire” budget deficit, estimated at £57 million per month.
Hamas refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist and is widely viewed as a little more than a terrorist faction. Last year, a ban on funding it was enforced by the EU, the US, many Arab states and international banks.
Ironically foreign aid to Palestinians increased, either carried across the border into Gaza in cash-stuffed briefcases by Hamas officials, or through a special financial channel to the office of President Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the rival Fatah faction with whom the West is prepared to work.
As a result, Mr Fayyad said, incoming funds have been widely dispersed with no central authority to monitor them. Some have gone to people who do not appear on the Palestinian budget ledger. “Where is the control?” asked Mr Fayyad. “It’s gone. Where is all the transparency? It’s gone.”
He said his first objective would be to make the finance ministry the sole conduit for incoming aid, and to reinstate proper audits. That meant no more financial back channels or border smuggling, he said. “It’s not my intention to manage the Palestinian budget system through the brown bag.” The Palestinian Authority’s unchecked proliferation of government jobs growing by 11 per cent a year is another threat to its existence, the World Bank said. Mr Fayyad acknowledged that the problem of thousands of absentee employees was “serious”, but said it would take up to five years to bring wages into line with income.
He was reluctant to say how he would do that, perhaps understandably, given that unpaid security forces have a habit of barging into government offices with guns blazing, and that gunmen recently shot up the outside of his office.
Now some of Mr Abbas’s presidential guard is assigned to his premises a stark reminder of the connection between restoring security and bringing finances under control. “This will be extremely difficult,” he said. “It’s virtually impossible.”
* Israeli Professor Toaff’s blood libel book being seized on to slander Jews
* NBC TV criticized for broadcasting “anti-Semitic” episode of “Law and Order”
* A Belgian book partly blames the Holocaust on the United States
* This dispatch concerns anti-Semitism, attacks on Israel, and Jewish self-hate.
CONTENTS
1. “Passover of blood: European Jews and ritual homicides”
2. “I call for a Nobel Prize to be awarded to the Israeli Jewish historian, the son of the chief rabbi of Rome”
3. “Why do Israeli universities tolerate such liars?”
4. The fraudulent Ilan Pappe, darling of Israel haters at Western universities
5. Belgian book blames the Holocaust on the United States
6. Ramallah isn’t Warsaw
7. Vichy-era law still forces Jews to pay more for French property
8. Perhaps George Soros will speak up?
9. Australian soccer players attacked orthodox Jew
10. NBC TV criticized for broadcasting “anti-Semitic” episode of “Law and Order”
11. “Egyptian researcher Muhammad Al-Buheiri discusses Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Blood Libel which still occurs today” (MEMRI, March 2, 2007)
12. “Bar Ilan’s blood libel scandal” (By Steven Plaut, Jewish Press, Feb. 28, 2007)
“PASSOVER OF BLOOD: EUROPEAN JEWS AND RITUAL HOMICIDES”
The first part of this dispatch is a follow-up to two recent dispatches which included notes on Professor Ariel Toaff, whose new book, published in Italy, claimed that medieval anti-Semitic blood libels were true. (Such fabricated blood libels sparked centuries of pogroms and helped pave the way for the Holocaust.)
Professor Toaff, who teaches at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, has been criticized for being “out of his mind” by other academics. He joins a small but vociferous band of Israeli and Jewish academics who, largely to gain publicity, attention and book sales for themselves, have published outrageous untruths about Israelis and Jews which have played into the hands of anti-Semites everywhere.
After several European Jewish leaders sharply attacked Toaff for promoting anti-Semitism, he asked his Italian publisher to halt distribution of his book (“Pasque di Sangue,” or “Passover of Blood: European Jews and ritual homicides”) so that “clarifications can be inserted”. Prof. Toaff says his research and writings, which he claimed had been misinterpreted, were not in any way meant to be used as a justification for blood libel. Few believe this excuse, and Toaff’s father, who is a former chief rabbi of Rome, says he won’t speak to his son.
* For previous items on Toaff, see the second note in Stanford University to show Turkish blood libel film (& Saudi Prince to build hotel in Tel Aviv) (Feb. 19, 2007), and the thirteenth note in YouTube becoming site of choice for al-Qaeda to spread propaganda (Feb. 21, 2007).
“I CALL FOR A NOBEL PRIZE TO BE AWARDED TO THE ISRAELI JEWISH HISTORIAN, THE SON OF THE CHIEF RABBI OF ROME”
Although Toaff’s book is in Italian, it is being widely and prominently reviewed around the world. For example, it was flagged on the front cover of the prestigious Times Literary Supplement (TLS) of London last week.
The TLS gave Toaff’s book a scathing review, but others have not. Seizing on press reports which have already appeared in mainstream media throughout the world, anti-Semites in the Arab world and elsewhere are predictably using the book as justification to slander Jews. (This is despite the fact that publication of the book has been suspended and Toaff has now retracted his thesis.)
For example, Egyptian researcher Muhammad Al-Buheiri, interviewed on Nile Culture TV on February 25, 2007, cites Toaff’s false claim that Jews really did carry out blood sacrifices of gentile children and asks “Have the Jews, with all their extremists, especially in Israel, given up these customs and religious rituals, which are important to them?”
Al-Buheiri, a past recipient of an Egyptian Ministry of Culture prize continues: “The Jews have made great efforts to conceal the issue of the Passover blood. They even called it ‘blood libel.’ In Jewish culture, this is called the ‘blood libel’ lie about the use of Christian blood to prepare matzos.”
He continues: “This man proved scientifically and objectively... He’s an academic, who heads the department of Jewish history at the Israeli Bar-Ilan University. We are not talking about an amateur, a fraud, or someone looking to get famous. We are talking about an academic, who follows scientific and objective principles.”
“I call for a Nobel Prize to be awarded to the Israeli Jewish historian, the son of the chief rabbi of Rome,” Al-Buheiri told TV viewers in Egypt and beyond.
(For more, see the interview below translated by The Middle East Media Research Institute, which I recommend reading in full to see the kind of anti-Semitic lies so prevalent in the media of even supposedly moderate pro-Western Arab states like Egypt. The video, with English subtitles, can also be viewed here.)
“WHY DO ISRAELI UNIVERSITIES TOLERATE SUCH LIARS?”
In the second article attached below, Haifa University professor Steven Plaut, who is a subscriber to this email list, points out that “Toaff would not be the first academic in Israel to produce anti-Jewish materials that are picked up and utilized by anti-Semites. Israel has scores, if not hundreds, of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel radical faculty members.”
Plaut writes: “Had these merely been the charlatan claims of an Islamist extremist or some other garden variety anti-Semite, no one would have paid them any attention. But as every neo-Nazi website on the planet has already publicized with jubilation, here we have an Italian-Israeli ‘scholar’ who has published a book that claims Jews in the Middle Ages engaged in ritual murder and used Christian blood for religious rites.”
Plaut quotes Sever Plocker, a columnist for Yediot Ahronot, who writes, “Professor Toaff’s book has nothing whatsoever to do with academic freedom. The man raised an unfounded argument, which was rejected outright by the world’s finest historians and experts on the period the book refers to.”
Plaut expresses surprise that Bar Ilan and other Israeli universities are so tolerant of the extremists within their midst, however outrageous their lies are. “Professors promoting offensive ideas or exhibiting behavior offensive to their employers have been fired in the U.S. Professors have been stripped of tenure for the mere expression of crackpot ideas in American universities. The University of Colorado’s Ward Churchill, who justified the 9/11 attacks and called the victims inside the WTC towers ‘Little Eichmanns’ was removed from a number of campus positions and may well be fired altogether.
“Similarly, academics caught committing explicit fraud have been fired and dismissed from academic positions. Luk van Parijs was fired from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for fraud, as were a professor in the UK and an economics professor in Northern Kentucky.”
THE FRAUDULENT ILAN PAPPE, DARLING OF ISRAEL HATERS AT WESTERN UNIVERSITIES
Plaut adds: “Within Israel, there have been some well-known cases of blatant fraud in research by Israeli academics. The most famous is the notorious Tantura story pushed by Dr. Ilan Pappe and his MA student Teddy Katz. Katz fabricated a massacre of Arabs in the town of Tantura south of Haifa, supposedly perpetrated by the Palmach Jewish militia in 1948.
“Not a scrap of evidence of any such massacre exists. Katz was sued for libel by the veterans association of the Palmach unit in question. In court and under counsel from his attorney, Katz confessed that he had fabricated the massacre, but later renounced his own confession,” says Professor Plaut. “Pappe, for his part, continues to tout the non-existent massacre in anti-Israel propaganda outlets all over the world.”
* For more on Pappe, see: the seventh note in the dispatch “Israeli Apartheid Week” kicks off around the world (Feb. 13, 2007), and the fifth note in the dispatch AUT 2: British Mideast minister calls for resolution of Israel academic boycott (May 18, 2005).
* The senior staff at MEMRI (cited above) and at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Yad Vashem (cited below) are, like Professor Plaut, longtime subscribers to this email list.
BELGIAN BOOK BLAMES THE HOLOCAUST ON THE UNITED STATES
Following protests by Jewish organizations, one of Belgium’s largest bookstore chains has stopped selling a novel containing extracts from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
The Centre Europιen Juif d’Information (CEJI) and the Simon Wiesenthal Center had called on the Relay-Press Shop chain to stop carrying the book, a novelized version of the “Protocols.”
CEJI have also called on the Belgian government to investigate the publication of the book, which partly blames the Holocaust on the United States and implicates Western states in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The authors, Belgians Patrick Henderickx and Patrice De Bruyne, claim in the book that they added the text of the “Protocols,” “so that everyone can reach their own judgment.”
The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a 19th-century forgery, describes a supposed Jewish plot to take over the world. Its publication has been banned in many countries under laws to prevent incitement to racial hatred and anti-Semitism.
CEJI called on the Belgian Center for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism to investigate and press charges against the authors on the grounds of incitement to racial hatred.
“The Protocols have been linked to many anti-Semitic incidents, and as such have been the cause of much harm,” CEJI Director Robin Sclafani said. “The fact that they resurface disguised as a novel is frightening. We hope the Belgian state will make clear that this work, which is banned in neighboring countries, is not welcome here either.”
RAMALLAH ISN’T WARSAW
A top German cardinal, Karl Lehmann, has condemned a statement made by leading members of a group of 27 German bishops following a pilgrimage to Ramallah and Bethlehem last week in which they compared the Palestinian situation to that of Jews in the Nazi ghettos of World War Two Europe.
However, officials at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem said that for Lehmann merely to call such an outrageous comparison “inappropriate” did not go nearly far enough.
Yad Vashem said the bishops’ remarks illustrated “a woeful ignorance of history and a distorted sense of perspective. They serve to diminish the memory of victims of the Holocaust and mollify the consciences of those who seek to lessen European responsibility for Nazi crimes.”
In the Warsaw ghetto alone, some 445,000 Jews were sealed off by the Nazis in a small space, where they were either starved to death, shot, or transported to extermination camps. There were other equally deadly ghettos established by the Nazis and their allies across Eastern Europe.
The Israeli government and some German media commentators also condemned the bishops, but the present pope, Benedict XVI, who is German, has not done so. Predictably, the Islamic Republic News Agency (the official news service for Iran) has welcomed the bishops’ comments.
In an opinion piece for Israel’s biggest paper Yediot Ahronot, Eldad Beck said the comments raised the question of “just how tainted with anti-Semitism the Catholic church and German society remained.”
Various recent polls in Germany show that 30 percent of Germans believe Israel’s attitude to the Palestinians is “identical” to the Nazi attitude towards the Jews.
Last week, vandals attacked a Jewish cemetery in Bad Windsheim, in the southern German state of Bavaria, damaging some 60 graves, roughly half of them beyond repair.
VICHY-ERA LAW STILL FORCES JEWS TO PAY MORE FOR FRENCH PROPERTY
A municipal regulation in the southern French Riviera city of Nice requires buyers of apartments “to have French citizenship and not to be Jewish.” According to the Nice Matin newspaper, the regulation was formulated in the days France collaborated with the Nazis during World War Two, but remains valid to this day.
As a result of the regulation, Jews in Nice who want to buy an apartment need to skirt around the law and pay an added fee of between 900-7,000 Euros ($1,200 $9,000).
The law states that for someone to own a building, they have to make the following declaration: “[They] are French citizens”, “not Jews” and “are not the spouse of a Jew.”
“Even though is it is not being enforced, that such a regulation remains valid is disgraceful,” Martine Ouaknine, spokeswoman for the Nice branch of the Council of Jewish Institutions in France told French media.
PERHAPS GEORGE SOROS WILL SPEAK UP?
Some Hungarian Jews have expressed concern that Jewish residents and institutions could be attacked by right-wing extremists on the upcoming March 15 Hungarian National holiday. A permanent protest against Jews and foreigners has been set up across from the parliament building and extremists there are asking subway commuters to sign an anti-Semitic petition.
Budapest, home to around 100,000 Jews, today has the highest proportion of Jewish residents of any major city in Europe. One of the best-known Hungarian-born Jews is George Soros. (Soros is now American.) Soros has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to various charities and political organizations, including anti-Israeli ones, but next to nothing to help Jews.
CLARIFICATION: Reliable correspondents in Budapest inform me that “the permanent protest opposite parliament was actually cleared away some time ago and since then parliament has been surrounded by metal fences of about a hundred meters all around. The small right-wing protest is five minutes from parliament. There have been no anti-Semitic incidents such as physical attacks on synagogues or graveyards in the last couple of years and Jewish communal life is thriving. Both government and opposition Fidesz politicians have condemned anti-Semitism.”
However, last week Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said anti-Semitism was rising in an interview with Adam LeBor and Roger Boyes of The Times of London:
The prime minister said: “I have to say there have never been so many anti-Semitic remarks as now [since World War II]. My wife is a lecturer at the department of law. Last week she left the central building of the university, and she was handed a leaflet the likes of which we have never seen in the last 50 years in Hungary. It is very clear and unambiguous anti-Semitic pamphlet. This does not only outrage me because my wife is of Jewish descent. [Last autumn] in this square a list of 50 allegedly Jewish politicians was read out. An hour later Fidesz politicians went up on the same stage. They did not say, ‘Please do not do this, that we don’t need your support at this price.’ There is something horrible happening.”
AUSTRALIAN SOCCER PLAYERS ATTACKED ORTHODOX JEW
Australian police last week charged three men with assaulting Menachem Vorchheimer, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, in an attack that left him with a deep cut to his face.
The assault took place several months ago in Melbourne, after a busload of players from Ocean Grove Football Club passed Vorchheimer as he walked to synagogue with his children. In contrast to the police attitude following attacks on Jews in France and elsewhere in Europe in recent years, the Australian police say they will press charges in a vigorous way.
NBC TV CRITICIZED FOR BROADCASTING “ANTI-SEMITIC” EPISODE OF “LAW AND ORDER”
Several pro-Israel organizations have strongly criticized the popular U.S. television crime series “Law and Order,” for a recent episode referring to “Israeli brutality” and “appearing to promote anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as disloyal American citizens.”
The plot of the February 27 installment of “Law and Order: Criminal Intent,” which is broadcast in America on NBC, and later internationally on many networks around the world (including in Israel) centered on a journalist who is poisoned after his girlfriend uncovers a foul-up by Israeli intelligence.
The show depicted Israeli bulldozers destroying Palestinian schools, and a Jewish police captain who agrees to cover up for Israel by closing down a criminal investigation at the urging of the head of a local pro-Israel group. The Irish detective asks the Jewish one: “Are you a Jew first and a cop second?” Another character refers to “Israeli brutality.”
In a statement to The Jerusalem Post, NBC said, “As noted on air, the program is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event.”
-- Tom Gross
“SOME ARABS WANT TO BE HOLIER THAN THE POPE...”
Egyptian researcher Muhammad Al-Buheiri discusses Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Blood Libel which still occurs today
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)
March 2, 2007
www.memri.org/bin/opener_latest.cgi?ID=SD148507
The following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian researcher Muhammad Al-Buheiri, which aired on Nile Culture TV on February 25, 2007. Al-Buheiri is a past recipient of an Egyptian Ministry of Culture scholarship (1) and maintains a website. (2)
To view this clip visit: www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=S9&P1=1393
Interviewer: “What is this story of the blood matza, which some authors even Arab ones say is antisemitic lies and nonsense, while others say it is true?”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “Unfortunately, some Arabs want to be holier than the Pope...”
Interviewer: “A journalist like Salah ’Issa, for example, wrote in Nahdhat Masr that we don’t need to decide whether the blood matza story was true or not, but that we should examine how we deal strategically with the Jews and the Israelis in the 21st century.”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t deal with such issues. Let’s not forget that the West in its entirety globally celebrated Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. So why shouldn’t we do the same? I called for a Nobel Prize to be awarded to the Israeli Jewish historian, the son of the chief rabbi of Rome...”
Interviewer: “He’s the son of the chief rabbi of Italy...”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “He’s the son of the chief rabbi of Rome, who is still alive at 90 years of age.”
Interviewer: “He wrote Bloody Passover, the book we are discussing.”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “This man proved scientifically and objectively... He’s an academic, who heads the department of Jewish history at the Israeli Bar-Ilan University. We are not talking about an amateur, a fraud, or someone looking to get famous. We are talking about an academic, who follows scientific and objective principles. He reached the conclusion that there was indeed a group of extremist Jews, who used to slaughter Christian children, and to collect their blood in order to make the Passover matza. It had to be a child who had not reached puberty. They would abduct him, and put him into a barrel designed for this purpose, which had holes in the sides at the place of the arteries. They would insert iron skewers through the barrel, and make the boy’s blood flow that way. Then they would collect the blood, and use it for Passover. Some sources in Jewish halacha say that preparing a single matza on Passover this way is sufficient for all the Jews. Others believe that such matzos should be prepared in each country separately.”
Interviewer: “They sacrifice Christian children... When was it? In what century?”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “It has been substantiated since the Middle Ages.”
Interviewer: “Since then?”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “Yes.”
Interviewer: “My question is: Until when did it happen?”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “That is the question we must ask. Have the Jews, with all their extremists, especially in Israel, given up... Have they given up these customs and religious rituals, which are important to them? There were very many cases. There were similar cases in Syria. There were similar cases in 1700 and 1800. Such children were abducted.”
Interviewer: “I have another question. Who are the people who prepare these matzos? Are they Jewish extremists or moderates? As a researcher specializing in inter-faith dialogue, do you believe this still occurs in Israel? I’m rephrasing the question.”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “I believe it does, because these are religious rituals.”
[...]
Interviewer: “In some Israeli newspapers and media, we have seen that they take an Israeli hen or rooster, and shed its blood, and they say that this is a form of Israeli sacrifice that brings blessing. We have witnessed this on several occasions. The question is why this important book, Bloody Passover, provoked the Jews throughout the world, who said that this renowned Israeli historian is antisemitic.”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “First of all, we should be aware that the Jews always implement a rule they consider basic: A loud voice is capable of erasing the truth.”
Interviewer: “A loud voice?”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “Yes.”
Interviewer: “They are quite loud, aren’t they?”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “Precisely. If they attack somebody, they announce in the media and propaganda tools, which they control so skillfully, throughout the world... They turn the facts upside down. They turn the attacker into the attacked.”
Interviewer: “The media are controlled by the Jews.”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “The Jews have made great efforts to conceal the issue of the Passover blood. They even called it ‘blood libel.’ In Jewish culture, this is called ‘blood libel’ the lie about the use of Christian blood to prepare matzos.”
Interviewer: “Some people say that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and we are talking about the Israeli blood matza is a complete fabrication about the history of the Jews and Judaism. How do you respond to this as a researcher?”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “By Allah, even if I did not have historical proof, like the proof obtained by the Israeli historian Ariel Toaff, the current reality proves that it is true, or, at the very least, raises the possibility that it is true. We await a generation of new Israeli historians, who are characterized by scientific objectivity, and, incidentally, deserve our respect. We’re waiting for them to look into this issue, and it will surely turn out to be true.”
[...]
Interviewer: “Are the Jews of the Banu Nazir and Banu Qurayza tribes, from the time of the Prophet Muhammad are they the same Jews who live in Israel today? Some commentators, historians, and professors say that this is not true that the Jews from the time of the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews of Al-Madina are not the same Jews who live in Israel today. What do you think about this?”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “Of course, this is true. No Israeli researcher can claim that his lineage goes back to the Jews of Banu Nazir or Banu Qaynuqa, or to the Jews of the Arabian Peninsula. They are all from Romanian, Polish, Russian, or English families. Not a single one... Only very few... There are Jewish families who have lived since bygone times in Palestine, and, by the way, these families are very...”
Interviewer: “Your response is very important, because it will make us consider the Jews in Israel in a different light that they are not the accursed Jews, that they are not the Jews mentioned in the Koran. What do you think?”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “No, the fact that they are the accursed Jews is not restricted to any geographical region. This is because of their religion. If you believe in this religion, you believe some instructions that contradict the true religions and the instructions of monotheistic religion, and therefore, you deserve this curse. So this issue is not connected to any specific geographical region, but to an ideological theory.”
Interviewer: “What you are explaining now is that the Jews of Israel are not the Jews of Al-Madina.”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “That’s right.”
Interviewer: “But this does not mean they are not the Jews cursed in the Koran.”
Muhammad Al-Buheiri: “No, because they were cursed on account of their behavior. If you adopt this religious theory and these rituals, you deserve to be cursed.”
Endnotes:
(1) The scholarship was for the completion of his book titled, “The Arabs of 1948 between Persecution & Criticism.”
(2) www.postpoems.com/members/mbihairy
“ACADEMIC FRAUD, PSEUDO-SCHOLARSHIP AND LIES”
Bar Ilan’s Blood-Libel Scandal
By Steven Plaut
The Jewish Press
February 28, 2007
www.jewishpress.com/page.do/20844/Bar_Ilans_Blood-Libel_Scandal.html
By now just about everyone in the Jewish world has heard about the blood libel affair that has emerged from Bar Ilan University in Israel. It involves a professor of history there, Ariel Toaff, who claims that Jews used gentile blood for ritual purposes in Italy in the Middle Ages.
Last week, The Jewish Press ran a letter by Prof. Toaff in which he wrote inter alia: “In light of the false and distorted interpretation given to my recently published book, I have requested the Italian publishing house El Molino to immediately stop further distribution of the book in order that I may re-edit those passages which comprised the basis of the distortions and falsehoods that have been published in the media. I was astounded by the sheer force of these misrepresentations, which turned what is a research book into a vehicle used to harm Judaism and the Jewish people and, God forbid, as a justification for blood libel.”
He added that he apologizes to those who have been offended by his “research” and offered to donate royalties from this book to the Anti-Defamation League.
All very nice, except that Toaff has not really repudiated any of his false claims. The real scandal in all of this has to do with academic fraud, pseudo-scholarship and lies. Toaff’s posturing notwithstanding, the problem is not that the media have “distorted” Toaff’s claims, but rather that Toaff made fraudulent claims in the first place, based largely on “confessions” made by Jews being tortured in Inquisition courts.
It was Toaff who assigned the decidedly undistorted title to the book that states everything needed to know about it: Pasque di Sangue, or Passover of Blood. His promise to send any royalties to the ADL that he may or may not receive is a worthless gesture.
To put this matter into perspective, let me emphasize that Toaff would not be the first academic in Israel to produces anti-Jewish materials that are picked up and utilized by anti-Semites. Israel has scores, if not hundreds, of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel radical faculty members. Many of these are documented at www.israel-academia-monitor.com. What is unusual in the Toaff affair is that it comes out of Bar Ilan University, a school established mainly to serve Orthodox Jewish student and that is now refusing to take disciplinary action against a professor publishing fraudulent material about Jews.
There are numerous precedents from all over the democratic world of universities firing tenured professors for fraud and for open promotion of lunatic, obviously false “theories.” Several Holocaust deniers have been fired from tenured jobs, with France’s Robert Faurrison perhaps the most notorious. (Of course, there are open Holocaust deniers who have been allowed to retain academic jobs.)
Professors promoting offensive ideas or exhibiting behavior offensive to their employers have been fired in the U.S. Professors have been stripped of tenure for the mere expression of crackpot ideas in American universities. The University of Colorado’s Ward Churchill, who justified the 9/11 attacks and called the victims inside the WTC towers “Little Eichmanns” was removed from a number of campus positions and may well be fired altogether.
Similarly, academics caught committing explicit fraud have been fired and dismissed from academic positions. Luk van Parijs was fired from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for fraud, as were a professor in the UK and an economics professor in Northern Kentucky. Even people willing to defend the most offensive campus opinions in the name of “academic freedom” generally agree that a professor should be fired if he commits fraud. Professors in Western countries who have endorsed or collaborated with terrorism have also been fired.
Within Israel, there have been some well-known cases of blatant fraud in research by Israeli academics. The most famous is the notorious Tantura story pushed by Dr. Ilan Pappe and his MA student Teddy Katz. Katz fabricated a massacre of Arabs in the town of Tantura south of Haifa, supposedly perpetrated by the Palmach Jewish militia in 1948.
Not a scrap of evidence of any such massacre exists. Katz was sued for libel by the veterans association of the Palmach unit in question. In court and under counsel from his attorney, Katz confessed that he had fabricated the massacre, but later renounced his own confession.
Pappe, for his part, continues to tout the non-existent massacre in anti-Israel propaganda outlets all over the world.
There is some precedent for firing tenured faculty in Israel when fraud has been committed. An associate professor of anthropology was fired by the Hebrew University when it was discovered that she’d published fraudulent research. A half-hearted but unsuccessful attempt was even made within the University of Haifa, where Ilan Pappe is employed, to get Pappe stripped of his tenure and fired.
All of which brings us back to the case of Toaff. Had these merely been the charlatan claims of an Islamist extremist or some other garden variety anti-Semite, no one would have paid them any attention. But as every neo-Nazi website on the planet has already publicized with jubilation, here we have an Italian-Israeli “scholar” who has published a book that claims Jews in the Middle Ages engaged in ritual murder and used Christian blood for religious rites.
True, Toaff says the Jews in question were heterodox sectarians from outside the established Jewish community, but that is not exactly a serious reason for treating Toaff with any leniency.
Toaff’s book is a complete fraud, at least the sections in it about blood rituals (and they raise serious doubts about all the rest of Toaff’s “research”). Of course, no Jew has ever used blood, human or animal, for ritual purposes, other than animal sacrifices in the Temple of Solomon. Nevertheless Toaff writes: “Over many dozens of pages I proved the centrality of blood on Passover. Based on many sermons, I concluded that blood was used, especially by Ashkenazi Jews, and that there was a belief in the special curative powers of children’s blood. It turns out that among the remedies of Ashkenazi Jews were powders made of blood.”
Toaff claims that “a black market flourished on both sides of the Alps, with Jewish merchants selling human blood, complete with rabbinic certification of the product kosher blood.” Here is the son of a rabbi who apparently does not know that blood of any sort can never be kosher.
Toaff’s fraud has been universally denounced by Jews and Christians. Even Israeli secularists were outraged. Writing in Yediot Aharonot, Sever Plocker (a leftist) wrote: “Professor Toaff’s book has nothing whatsoever to do with academic freedom. The man raised an unfounded argument, which was rejected outright by the world’s finest historians and experts on the period the book refers to. The blood libel against the Jews has remained an evil plot.”
Meanwhile, Bar Ilan University officials, facing a worldwide explosion of rage, have politely distanced themselves from Toaff. But they have not taken any serious action against him, have not stripped him of his tenure for fraud nor fired him, and in fact have been going out of their way to circle the wagons and defend Toaff’s “academic freedom.” Suddenly lies and fraud are protected academic scholarship at Bar Ilan.
As noted, Toaff has offered to pull the book off the shelves for a little while in order to insert some “clarifications.” The problem is not deficient clarity but rather all-too-clear anti-Semitic lies. His duplicitous “apology” aside, Toaff is sticking to his guns about his main claims, and told the Jerusalem Post he would not repudiate them even if it means “he gets crucified” (his words). Accusing Jews of being behind crucifixion is of course entirely consistent with his brand of scholarship.
Toaff’s shenanigans illustrate perfectly why Israeli universities are sinking into a quagmire of mediocrity and how the unwillingness to act against charlatans and fraud is destroying Israeli academia.
* After being kidnapped at knifepoint, gang-raped 14 times by her captors and then beaten by her brother, a young Saudi woman is sentenced to 90 lashes for meeting a man who was not a relative
* Reported in the Arab media and on Fox News, but...
* Where is the reporting in The New York Times?
* The BBC World service also ignores it, instead leading with a bogus anti-Israel story
***
This dispatch is dedicated to the real women victims around the world, not the often phony official campaigns in the West held to mark today’s International Women’s Day.
CONTENTS
1. Afterwards, she tried to commit suicide
2. “Adopt a universal standard of human rights”
3. Women’s rights activists arrested in Teheran
4. Update on Jimmy Carter and CAIR
5. “How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam” (London Times, March 7, 2007)
6. “Saudi gang-rape victim faces 90 lashes” (AFP, March 5, 2007)
AFTERWARDS, SHE TRIED TO COMMIT SUICIDE
Today, March 8, marks International Women’s Day. The mainstream media, including the New York Times and the BBC, have true to form, since they specialize only in skewering the news against Israel and the U.S. completely ignored the news that “A Saudi woman who was kidnapped at knifepoint, gang-raped and then beaten by her brother has been sentenced to 90 lashes for meeting a man who was not a relative.”
The sentencing earlier this week has been reported by AFP and in Arab media, including the Khaleej Times (published in the United Arab Emirates) and the Saudi Gazette. But as far as I can tell the only Western mainstream media outlets to have covered the story are Fox News and the Scotsman (a Scottish newspaper). This is despite the fact that most Western media subscribe to AFP.
The 19-year-old Saudi woman was abducted by a gang of men wielding kitchen knives who took her to a farm where she was raped 14 times by her captors. Five men were arrested for the rape and given jail terms ranging from 10 months to five years by a panel of judges in the eastern Saudi city of Qatif, near the teenager’s hometown.
But the judges also decided to sentence the young woman, identified only as “G,” to 90 lashes. “G” was told by one of the judges that she was lucky not to have been given jail time. She said yesterday that she would appeal against her sentence.
The woman told the Saudi Gazette that she tried to commit suicide because of her ordeal and was beaten by her younger brother because the rape had brought shame on their family.
Unrelated men and women are forbidden from interacting in public in Saudi Arabia, which strictly enforces Islamic Sharia law of a kind many European Muslims say they would like to introduce in countries like Britain and France.
* On the official International Women’s Day website, there is nothing about Saudi Arabia, just publicity for the “Lighting candles for Women in Palestinian society” event.
* For more on Saudi Arabia see the dispatch Saudi police ban the sale of cats and dogs (& Gaddafi’s son: Pope must convert) (Sept. 21, 2006), in which two of the notes were on a six-year-old girl burned to death in an “honor” killing in Birmingham, England, and a horrific 12-day gang rape of a mother and daughter in Pakistan as punishment for the daughter wanting to go to college.
“ADOPT A UNIVERSAL STANDARD OF HUMAN RIGHTS”
The first article below is by Phyllis Chesler, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the City University of New York, who for a short time was married to an Afghan man.
Chesler (who is also a long-time subscriber to this email list) writes in The Times of London of what she witnessed as a bride in Afghanistan. In an article titled “How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam: Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?” she says:
“Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes and that such ‘colourful tribal customs’ are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.
“Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist ‘Islamophobe’ for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.”
Chesler urges Western intellectuals to “adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.”
I recommend reading Chesler’s piece (below) in full, including her experience of how she became a “captive in Kabul” of “a charming, seductive and Westernized Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college.” “Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger.”
As Chesler says, “Ibn Warraq has written a devastating work that will be out by the summer. It is entitled ‘Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism.’ Will Western intellectuals also dare to defend the West?”
Tom Gross adds: the great Ibn Warraq a real expert on Islam has been all but ignored by liberal left media who instead for years have promoted the untruths espoused by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said. Will they take his latest book seriously?
WOMEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS ARRESTED IN TEHERAN
In honor of International Women’s Day, I also repeat the following item from yesterday’s dispatch:
Iranian security forces on Sunday arrested 33 women’s rights activists rallying outside a Teheran court where a group of their fellow campaigners were standing trial for having demonstrated last year. The 33 were taken to the notorious Evin prison, which has the largest number of political prisoners in Iran and where many prisoners say they have been tortured.
The arrests on Sunday were part of a crackdown against political activity by women and protests in general since President Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005.
Five women were standing trial for organizing an “unauthorized” rally to ask for equal rights for women. Seventy people, most of them women, were arrested at the protest last June when they called for improved rights and changes to laws discriminating against women. Under Iranian law, married women have to go through a lengthy process to be granted a divorce, and the testimony of two women is equal to that of one man.
* Today marks International Women’s Day, and some western NGOs (predictably) use the occasion to attack Israel and America. Next year they might want to try criticizing the following practices against women, which are widespread in the Muslim world:
1. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)
2. Trafficking of women
3. Incest
4. Honor Killings
And instead of attacking Israel, they also might like to demand the rights of women to:
1. Freedom of religion
2. Education
3. Free speech
4. Participation in the electoral process
UPDATE ON JIMMY CARTER AND CAIR
This is an update to previous dispatches on this email list / website on Jimmy Carter’s anti-Israel book, which led to many resignations from the Carter Center and was denounced for its lies about Israel even by many American leftists.
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), regarded by many as an extremist group with increasing influence in American society and politics, is sending free copies of Carter’s book to library administrators throughout the U.S.
A letter from CAIR to U.S. libraries has been obtained by the LittleGreenFootballs blog. It can be seen here.
CAIR, which now has 32 offices across the U.S. and Canada, this week also lashed out at the leading moderate Muslims many of whom, like Amir Taheri, subscribe to this email list who have been holding a secular Islam conference in recent days in Florida. Phyllis Chesler, mentioned above, chaired the opening panel of the conference.
As Investor’s Business Daily, one of the only mainstream media sources unafraid to criticize CAIR, writes this week: “In CAIR’s kooky world, the Zionists are behind everything, even 9/11. But if anyone was behind 9/11, it was the Saudis. And guess who bankrolls CAIR? Right: the Saudis.”
I attach two articles below.
-- Tom Gross
“WHAT WE NEED NOW IS AN AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD”
How my eyes were opened to the barbarity of Islam
Is it racist to condemn fanaticism?
By Phyllis Chesler
The Times of London
March 7, 2007
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1480090.ece
Once I was held captive in Kabul. I was the bride of a charming, seductive and Westernised Afghan Muslim whom I met at an American college. The purdah I experienced was relatively posh but the sequestered all-female life was not my cup of chai nor was the male hostility to veiled, partly veiled and unveiled women in public.
When we landed in Kabul, an airport official smoothly confiscated my US passport. “Don’t worry, it’s just a formality,” my husband assured me. I never saw that passport again. I later learnt that this was routinely done to foreign wives perhaps to make it impossible for them to leave. Overnight, my husband became a stranger. The man with whom I had discussed Camus, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams and the Italian cinema became a stranger. He treated me the same way his father and elder brother treated their wives: distantly, with a hint of disdain and embarrassment.
In our two years together, my future husband had never once mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children. Nor did he tell me that I would be expected to live as if I had been reared as an Afghan woman. I was supposed to lead a largely indoor life among women, to go out only with a male escort and to spend my days waiting for my husband to return or visiting female relatives, or having new (and very fashionable) clothes made.
In America, my husband was proud that I was a natural-born rebel and free thinker. In Afghanistan, my criticism of the treatment of women and of the poor rendered him suspect, vulnerable. He mocked my horrified reactions. But I knew what my eyes and ears told me. I saw how poor women in chadaris were forced to sit at the back of the bus and had to keep yielding their place on line in the bazaar to any man.
I saw how polygamous, arranged marriages and child brides led to chronic female suffering and to rivalry between co-wives and half-brothers; how the subordination and sequestration of women led to a profound estrangement between the sexes one that led to wife-beating, marital rape and to a rampant but hotly denied male “prison”-like homosexuality and pederasty; how frustrated, neglected and uneducated women tormented their daughter-in-laws and female servants; how women were not allowed to pray in mosques or visit male doctors (their husbands described the symptoms in their absence).
Individual Afghans were enchantingly courteous but the Afghanistan I knew was a bastion of illiteracy, poverty, treachery and preventable diseases. It was also a police state, a feudal monarchy and a theocracy, rank with fear and paranoia. Afghanistan had never been colonised. My relatives said: “Not even the British could occupy us.” Thus I was forced to conclude that Afghan barbarism was of their own making and could not be attributed to Western imperialism.
Long before the rise of the Taleban, I learnt not to romanticise Third World countries or to confuse their hideous tyrants with liberators. I also learnt that sexual and religious apartheid in Muslim countries is indigenous and not the result of Western crimes and that such “colourful tribal customs” are absolutely, not relatively, evil. Long before al-Qaeda beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan and Nicholas Berg in Iraq, I understood that it was dangerous for a Westerner, especially a woman, to live in a Muslim country. In retrospect, I believe my so-called Western feminism was forged in that most beautiful and treacherous of Eastern countries.
Nevertheless, Western intellectual-ideologues, including feminists, have demonised me as a reactionary and racist “Islamophobe” for arguing that Islam, not Israel, is the largest practitioner of both sexual and religious apartheid in the world and that if Westerners do not stand up to this apartheid, morally, economically and militarily, we will not only have the blood of innocents on our hands; we will also be overrun by Sharia in the West. I have been heckled, menaced, never-invited, or disinvited for such heretical ideas and for denouncing the epidemic of Muslim-on-Muslim violence for which tiny Israel is routinely, unbelievably scapegoated.
However, my views have found favour with the bravest and most enlightened people alive. Leading secular Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents from Egypt, Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria and exiles from Europe and North America assembled for the landmark Islamic Summit Conference in Florida and invited me to chair the opening panel on Monday.
According to the chair of the meeting, Ibn Warraq: “What we need now is an age of enlightenment in the Islamic world. Without critical examination of Islam, it will remain dogmatic, fanatical and intolerant and will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality, originality and truth.” The conference issued a declaration calling for such a new “Enlightenment”. The declaration views “Islamophobia” as a false allegation, sees a “noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine” and “demands the release of Islam from its captivity to the ambitions of power-hungry men”.
Now is the time for Western intellectuals who claim to be antiracists and committed to human rights to stand with these dissidents. To do so requires that we adopt a universal standard of human rights and abandon our loyalty to multicultural relativism, which justifies, even romanticises, indigenous Islamist barbarism, totalitarian terrorism and the persecution of women, religious minorities, homosexuals and intellectuals. Our abject refusal to judge between civilisation and barbarism, and between enlightened rationalism and theocratic fundamentalism, endangers and condemns the victims of Islamic tyranny.
Ibn Warraq has written a devastating work that will be out by the summer. It is entitled Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Will Western intellectuals also dare to defend the West?
“NO RAPE VICTIM IS GUILTY”
Saudi gang-rape victim faces 90 lashes
Agence France Presse (AFP)
March 5, 2007
A Saudi woman who was kidnapped at knifepoint, gang-raped and then beaten by her brother has been sentenced to 90 lashes for a meeting a man who was not a relative, a newspaper reported on Monday.
In an interview with the Saudi Gazette, the 19-year-old said she was blackmailed a year ago into meeting a man who threatened to tell her family they were having a relationship outside wedlock, which is illegal in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom.
After driving off together from a shopping mall near her home, the woman and the man were stopped and abducted by a gang of men wielding kitchen knives who took them to a farm where she was raped 14 times by her captors.
Five men were arrested for the rape and given jail terms ranging from 10 months to five years by a panel of judges in the eastern city of Qatif, near the woman’s hometown.
But the judges also decided to sentence the woman, identified by the newspaper only as ‘G,’ and the man to lashes for being alone together in the car.
Unrelated men and women are forbidden from interacting in public in Saudi Arabia, which strictly enforces Islamic Sharia law.
‘G’ said one of the judges told she was lucky not to have been given jail time. ‘I was shocked at the verdict. I couldn’t believe my ears,’ said the woman, who has appealed against her sentence.
The woman also told the paper she tried to commit suicide because of her ordeal and was beaten by her younger brother because the rape had brought shame on their family.
Fuziyah Al Ouni, described as an activist by the paper, said she was outraged by the case. ‘By sentencing her to 90 lashes they are sending a message that she is guilty. No rape victim is guilty,’ she said.
There are severe legal restrictions on women in Saudi Arabia, including a strict dress code required outside the home and a ban on driving.
* Nuclear insignia on one side of the note; a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini on the other
* In what some are calling another signal as to it genocidal intent towards Jews, Iranian government announces it will print exactly six million of the new bills
* The new notes will be circulated on March 12, ahead of the Iranian New Year which commences on March 21
This dispatch concerns Iran.
CONTENTS
1. Top Iranian general disappears
2. Ahmadinejad: Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan
3. Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric “is part of his personality”
4. Iranian scholars denounce Holocaust conference
5. Ahmadinejad completes first official visit to Saudi Arabia
6. The Saudi-Iranian talks “blew up”
7. CIA: Hizbullah “plays leading role in Iranian strategy”
8. Ahmadinejad urges Palestinians to continue “resistance”
9. Israel says Iran is training Hamas operatives
10. Women’s rights activists arrested in Teheran
11. Interpol may help nab Iranian suspects in Jewish bomb including Rafsanjani
12. New Iranian banknote includes nuclear insignia
13. “The chemical blow that hit Halabjah was an Iranian one”
14. Pakistan “holds key to Iran’s nukes”
15. “Iran touts nuclear prowess with new banknote” (AFP, March 3, 2007)
16. “Iraq: Tariq Aziz says Iran, not Iraq, hit Kurds with chemical weapons” (Quds Press, March 5, 2007)
17. “Analysis: What actually happened in Riyadh?” (Jerusalem Post, March 4, 2007)
TOP IRANIAN GENERAL DISAPPEARS
The mysterious disappearance of a top Iranian general, Gen. Ali Reza Asgari, in Turkey in early February has led to speculation that he has either been kidnapped or may have defected.
There are conflicting reports about how and when Asgari disappeared. According to Turkish and Israeli press reports, the general arrived in Istanbul from Damascus on February 7. Some reports suggest Asgari has defected and (with his entire family) is now in a European country, where he is cooperating with the U.S. Other reports suggest that he may have been kidnapped by the Israeli secret service, the Mossad.
“This is a fatal blow to Iranian intelligence,” a CIA source told ABC news, explaining that Asgari knows sensitive information about Iran’s nuclear and military projects. Iran called tens of its Revolutionary Guard agents working at embassies and cultural centers in Arab and European countries back to Teheran out of fear that Asgari might disclose secret information about their identities, according to the analyst.
Ali Nouri Zade, an Iranian living in London writes in Asharq Al-Awsat, an influential Saudi paper published in London, that according to Iranian Police Chief Ismail Ahmadi, Asgari arrived in Turkey via Damascus. An “inside source from the Iranian army” is further quoted as confirming that Asgari is currently in the hands of the Americans in one of the countries in Northern Europe, and that the Americans are preparing to send him to the U.S. For more, see this article (which has been specially located for this email list/website).
By contrast, the London Daily Telegraph speculated on Monday that Asgari could have been abducted by Israel to shed light on the whereabouts of missing Israeli Air Force navigator Ron Arad, who Israel says might be being held by Iran. It is believed that Asgari was involved in a deal to transfer Arad from his Lebanese kidnappers to the Iranians in exchange for a large sum of money.
Asgari’s years with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian defense ministry would make him an invaluable source of information. He was reportedly based in Lebanon in the 1990s and was in charge of ties between Iran and Hizbullah.
He was also in charge of military purchases at the Iranian defense ministry and exposed widespread corruption there which led to the arrest of a number of officials. Most recently, he worked as a consultant for the defense ministry.
As is the case for any senior spy, little is known about Gen. Azkari’s career. He also served as deputy defense minister under former defense minister Gen. Ali Samahani.
AHMADINEJAD: ZIONISTS ARE THE TRUE MANIFESTATION OF SATAN
On a visit to Sudan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said “The Zionists [the Jews] are the true manifestation of Satan.” The comments came when Ahmadinejad addressed a meeting of Sudanese Islamic scholars during a state visit last week. The Iranian leader went on to denounce “the Zionists’ hedonistic and materialistic tendencies.”
Prior to leaving Iran, Ahmadinejad told the state-run Iranian IRNA news agency that his meetings with Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir would play an important role in promoting mutual relations and cooperation in political, economic and cultural fields.
Iran has threatened Israel with genocide. Sudan is actively helping the genocide of non-Arab peoples in its Darfur region.
AHMADINEJAD’S RHETORIC “IS PART OF HIS PERSONALITY”
Following comments by Ahmadinejad last week that Iran’s nuclear program is “an unstoppable train without brakes,” the Iranian President has faced a round of sharp criticism at home.
The conservative daily paper Resalat chided Ahmadinejad, saying “neither weakness nor unnecessarily offensive language is acceptable in foreign policy... Our foreign policy must reflect the ancient Iranian civilization and rich Islamic culture of the Iranian nation,” the newspaper said.
Ahmadinejad’s critics have grown more vocal since his allies suffered a humiliating defeat in local elections in December. Iranian political analyst Iraj Jamshidi told AP that it appeared “the top leadership has cautioned him about his remarks,” but he added that Ahmadinejad’s tough rhetoric “is part of his personality.”
Nevertheless such fiery language is helping to whip up popular support among many Iranians for the idea of using a nuclear weapon on Israel.
IRANIAN SCHOLARS DENOUNCE HOLOCAUST CONFERENCE
In a statement sent to The New York Times and circulated on the Internet, a group of Iranian academics, writers and artists have denounced the Holocaust conference held in Teheran last December, calling it a move that endangered peace and hurt the reputation of Iranian academics.
More than 20 academics, writers and artists, many of whom live outside of Iran, signed the statement, saying “Those who perpetuate the discourse on Holocaust denial ignore the feelings of the people directly affected by this event... The accuracy of the accounts has been acknowledged by many academic, political and religious authorities, including the Catholic Church.”
In addition the statement said that denying the Holocaust would not help the Palestinian cause.
Among those joining the Iranian president at the conference were European Holocaust deniers, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and a group of self-hating, highly disturbed Jews called Neturei Karta.
AHMADINEJAD COMPLETES FIRST OFFICIAL VISIT TO SAUDI ARABIA
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Riyadh on Saturday in his first official visit to Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia, a trip that many in the region hoped would help calm Shia-Sunni tensions threatening Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.
The Iranian president previously visited the kingdom in December 2005, but only to participate in an Islamic summit in the city of Mecca.
Saudi newspapers, which are government-vetted, struck a welcoming tone in editorials, saying they hoped Ahmadinejad’s visit signaled an Iranian willingness to revise its regional policies. “We wish you the very best on your first official visit to Saudi Arabia,” said the Saudi Gazette.
King Abdullah, the Saudi monarch, personally received Ahmadinejad at the airport, the official Saudi Press Agency news agency reported.
THE SAUDI-IRANIAN TALKS “BLEW UP”
In an article from the Jerusalem Post attached below, Guy Bechor, head of Middle Eastern Studies at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, attempts to ascertain “What actually happened in Riyadh.”
Bechor believes that “the talks blew up” since it was strange for Ahmadinejad “not to have stayed at least a night on such an important visit, one that had been prepared ahead of time. Shortly before midnight, it was announced suddenly that Ahmadinejad was returning to Teheran.”
Bechor continues: “The fact remains that Ahmadinejad and the Saudis did not voice any intention of continuing talks after the visit. Also, no official message on the meeting was published, as is the norm. Ahmadinejad has a hot temper, and he tends to get offended. Maybe he thought that the Saudis were interfering in something that was none of their business.”
“As he returned to Iran, Ahmadinejad was met at the Teheran airport by reporters. He told them that he had spoken with the Saudis on Iraq, the ethnic issue, Lebanon, and the Palestinians, and did not mention the nuclear program an additional indication that this was the subject that had caused the crisis.”
For more on Iran-Saudi relations, see the dispatch Saudis “to buy nuclear bomb” from Pakistan to counter Iranian threat (Dec. 17, 2006).
CIA: HIZBULLAH “PLAYS LEADING ROLE IN IRANIAN STRATEGY”
U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Hizbullah is playing an increasingly significant role in Iran’s asymmetrical warfare strategy.
CIA officials said Iran has been financing and training Hizbullah to strike U.S. interests in retaliation for any U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. They said Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards have been working with Hizbullah to designate U.S. targets in the Middle East and elsewhere.
AHMADINEJAD URGES PALESTINIANS TO CONTINUE “RESISTANCE”
In a meeting yesterday with Hamas chief Khaled Meshal, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on Muslim states to support the new Palestinian unity government.
“The Zionist regime of Israel is in its worst period of life and its condition is deteriorating. Muslim states are required to support the popular government of Palestine,” he said.
Ahmadinejad continued: “Divine victory, which is the result of resistance and faith of the oppressed Palestinian nation, is imminent. The Palestinian people should be wise and support the Palestinian government-elect, thus preparing the ground for liberation of noble Quds [Jerusalem].”
Contrary to misreports on the BBC, Meshal clearly re-stated Hamas’ resolve not to recognize Israel. The Iranian Foreign Minister, Manushehr Mottaki also said Teheran will give tens of millions more dollars to the Palestinian Authority.
ISRAEL SAYS IRAN IS TRAINING HAMAS OPERATIVES
The chief of Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, has told The New York Times and other papers that Hamas had sent dozens of terrorists from Gaza to Iran for military training.
“We know that Hamas has started to dispatch people to Iran, tens, and a promise of hundreds,” the intelligence chief, Yuval Diskin, told a small group of correspondents in a rare on-the-record briefing. They are receiving highly sophisticated training in how to maximize Israeli deaths.
WOMEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS ARRESTED IN TEHERAN
Iranian security forces on Sunday arrested 33 women’s rights activists rallying outside a Teheran court where a group of their fellow campaigners were standing trial for having demonstrated last year. The 33 were taken to the notorious Evin prison, which has the largest number of political prisoners in Iran and where many prisoners say they have been tortured.
The arrests on Sunday were part of a crackdown against political activity by women and protests in general since Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005.
Five women were standing trial for organizing an “unauthorized” rally to ask for equal rights for women. Seventy people, most of them women, were arrested at the protest last June when they called for improved rights and changes to laws discriminating against women. Under Iranian law, married women have to go through a lengthy process to be granted a divorce, and the testimony of two women is equal to that of one man.
* This week saw International Women’s Day, and some western NGOs (predictably) used the occasion to attack Israel and America. Next year they might want to try criticizing the following practices against women, which are widespread in the Muslim world:
1. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM)
2. Trafficking of women
3. Incest
4. Honor Killings
And instead of attacking Israel, they also might like to demand the rights of women to:
1. Freedom of religion
2. Education
3. Free speech
4. Participation in the electoral process
INTERPOL MAY HELP NAB IRANIAN SUSPECTS IN JEWISH BOMB INCLUDING RAFSANJANI
Interpol yesterday issued “red notices,” or international wanted requests, calling for the arrest of nine former prominent Iranian officials sought in connection with Argentina’s worst terrorist attack. The nine, wanted in Argentina for the 1994 bombing of the capital’s Jewish cultural center (which killed 86 people and wounded over 200), include former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, as well as Iran’s former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati and former intelligence minister Ali Fallahian.
With 186 member countries, Interpol is the world’s largest international police organization. It facilitates cross-border police cooperation, including worldwide distribution of arrest warrants and alerts for capture issued by member states.
NEW IRANIAN BANKNOTE INCLUDES NUCLEAR INSIGNIA
Iran is to issue a new high-denomination banknote marking the country’s achievements in nuclear technology.
The new 50,000 rial note (roughly five dollars), worth more than twice the value of any other note in circulation, displays a picture of the standard nuclear insignia of electrons in orbit around an atom.
“If the science exists in this constellation, men from Persia will reach it,” says the calligraphic legend beside the atomic orbit, quoting a saying from the Prophet Mohammed.
On the front of the note is a picture of the Islamic republic’s founder, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
“In the first phase six million bills will be printed and before the end of the year another six million notes will be printed,” the Iranian government said. Others noted this was the figure of Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
The new notes will be circulated on March 12, ahead of the Iranian New Year which commences on March 21. (For more see the first article attached below.)
Germany is continuing to increase business with Iran, rather than decrease it as those calling for trade sanctions to halt Iran’s nuclear program are asking. The latest example came yesterday when German utility E.On AG said it was in talks with Iran about a potential deal to buy liquid natural gas a step that could help Germany ease its dependence on Russian gas.
“THE CHEMICAL BLOW THAT HIT HALABJAH WAS AN IRANIAN ONE”
Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister and one of the most prominent political figures in the Saddam era, has testified in the ongoing Al-Anfal case that it was not Iraq but Iran that shelled the region of Halabjah with chemical weapons and killed hundreds. (In fact thousands of Kurds were killed; and needless to say, Tariq Aziz is also not the most reliable source about who ordered the attack T.G.)
Aziz cited a U.S. Pentagon report which was released in 1989 “that confirmed that the chemical blow that hit Halabjah was an Iranian one and not an Iraqi one. This report is still on the Internet site of this institute.”
Aziz added: “The gases that led to the deaths in Halabjah are cyanide, which is fatal, and during that time, Iran had cyanide gas but Iraq did not.” For more, see the second article attached below.
PAKISTAN “HOLDS KEY TO IRAN’S NUKES”
Pakistan is said to hold a significant key to the U.S. intelligence effort against Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Former Indian Cabinet secretary B. Rahman says that Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan was more knowledgeable than U.S. intelligence on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He added Khan was a key consultant in uranium enrichment and other elements of Iran’s nuclear program.
“It is likely that A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, who clandestinely collaborated with Iran with the approval of the Pakistan Army and supplied the centrifuges, is a storehouse of information on Natanz if not on Isfahan,” Raman writes in a new report entitled “The Man Who Knows More About Natanz Than CIA.” “It is very important that the U.S. gets hold of him and interrogates him thoroughly before finalizing its options.”
In a separate report, the Pakistani newspaper “Pak Tribune” writes that former Pakistani intelligence chief, Gen. Hameed Gul, has said that the United States wants to use Pakistan’s territory for any attack on Iran.
I attach three articles below.
-- Tom Gross
“IF THE SCIENCE EXISTS IN THIS CONSTELLATION, MEN FROM PERSIA WILL REACH IT”
Iran touts nuclear prowess with new banknote
AFP (Agence France Presse)
March 3, 2007
news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070303/wl_mideast_afp/irannucleareconomy_070303164939
Iran is to issue a new high-denomination banknote marking the country’s achievements in nuclear technology at a time of mounting tension with the West over its atomic programme, the IRNA agency reported Saturday.
The new 50,000 rial note at around five dollars worth more than twice the value of any other note in circulation sports a picture of the standard nuclear insignia of electrons in orbit around an atom.
“If the science exists in this constellation, men from Persia will reach it,” says the calligraphic legend beside the atomic orbit, quoting a saying (Hadith) from the Prophet Mohammed.
On the front of the note is a picture of the Islamic republic’s founder, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which according to the law must be on all Iranian currency.
Iran has defied UN demands for a halt to sensitive nuclear activities and instead has pressed on with its atomic programme which has become a source of national pride.
The head of printing at the Islamic republic’s central bank, Jalal Jalilian, denied there was any link between the issuing of the note and rising prices of basic foodstuffs in Iran.
“Bank notes are a medium of exchange and (their printing) has nothing to do with depreciation of the national currency,” he said.
The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been criticised by economists for expansionary policies that risk fuelling inflation. Prices of poultry, red meat and vegetables have risen in recent months.
The official rate of inflation is put at around 13 percent although unofficial rates put the figure much higher.
Jalilian said that the new notes would be circulated on March 12 ahead of the Iranian new year which commences on March 21.
“In the first phase six million bills will be printed and before the end of the year another six million notes will be printed. Its printing will continue next year too,” Jalilian said.
The note is the first new bill issued since February 2004 when Iran’s Central Bank introduced a 20,000 rial bill. A dollar is now worth roughly 9,300 rials. Prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution it stood at 70 rials.
TARIQ AZIZ: IRAN, NOT IRAQ, HIT KURDS WITH CHEMICAL WEAPONS
Iraq: Tariq Aziz says Iran, not Iraq, hit Kurds with chemical weapons
Text of report by Quds Press web news agency, in Arabic
Quds Press
March 5, 2007
Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister and one of the most prominent political figures in the Ba’th Party era, has testified in the Al-Anfal case in which six senior officials of the former regime are being tried. The six officials are charged with committing mass annihilation of the Kurds in Halabjah in northern Iraq using chemical weapons. Aziz said that it was not Iraq but Iran that shelled the region of Halabjah with chemical weapons and killed hundreds.
Tariq Aziz was one of the most prominent political figures in Iraq during the rule of former President Saddam Husayn. He was the Foreign Minister of Iraq from 1983 to 1991 before he occupied the post of deputy prime minister that was often occupied by Saddam Husayn. Aziz also gained prominence as Iraq’s representative in several international forums in view of his strong personality and diplomatic acumen.
After Aziz entered the courthouse, a verbal altercation ensued between him and Judge Muhammad al-Uraybi. Aziz glorified the late president and described him as a wise leader, which angered Judge Al-Uraybi who threatened Aziz to take strict deterrent measures against him if he glorified the late president again.
Aziz said: “I wish to clarify several essential points related to the northern region and to the events that took place there. In 1984, the Turkish Foreign Minister visited Iraq and asked for permission to allow Turkish forces to enter Iraqi territory to a distance of five kilometres by land and 20 kilometres by air in order to pursue the Kurdish Workers’ Party”.
Aziz added, “The Iraqi government approved this request on condition that Iraq be given a similar status on Turkish soil. This agreement was signed in the Foreign Ministry and Muhammad al-Haj Mahmud, the present Foreign Ministry Undersecretary, was the head of the Legal Department at the time”. Aziz went on to say, “The second point to which I wish to refer is that the Defence Institute in the US Pentagon released a report in 1989 that confirmed that the chemical blow that hit Halabjah was an Iranian one and not an Iraqi one. This report is still on the Internet site of this institute”.
Aziz added, “This research study points out that the weapon that was used by Iraq during that period was mustard gas, which is not fatal. The rate of mortality resulting from the use of this gas does not exceed 2 per cent”. He went on to say, “The gases that led to the deaths in Halabjah are cyanide, which is fatal, and during that time, Iran had cyanide gas but Iraq did not”.
Addressing the judge, Aziz said: “You can verify this fact with Iraqi chemical experts”. He added, “A Kurdish delegation headed by Jalal Talabani negotiated with the Iraqi government on the issues of self-rule, the posts they occupy, and the role of the Kurdish parties. There was no mention of a Kurdish genocide”.
He added, “In 1991, Jalal Talabani and Mas’ud al-Barazani asked for compensation for the villages that were destroyed during the Iraqi-Iranian war. They inquired about the Kurdish political detainees and those that were dismissed from their jobs and how they could be reinstated. They did not discuss genocidal crimes against the Kurds”. Aziz said that the defendants in the Al-Anfal case are being tried for the war against Iran and not for a genocidal war against the Kurds.
THE TENSION BUILDS
Analysis: What actually happened in Riyadh?
By Dr. Guy Bechor
The Jerusalem Post
March 4, 2007
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1171894567872&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
It would have been a sensitive visit in any case a meeting between the two most prominent figures in the Middle East today, who represent the Shi’ite and Sunni worlds Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Saudi king Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz VI.
Everyone understood that this was a visit that would have to be prepared carefully. Ahmadinejad’s personal representative Ali Larijani visited Riyadh. Larijani is Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, and the subject of the Riyadh visit was obvious. Larijani came to Riyadh twice, and Saudi Arabia’s third-ranking official, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, traveled to Teheran.
Bandar’s father, Prince Sultan (the country’s minister of defense) is next in line to the Saudi throne, as his half-brother Abdullah is already over 85. Bandar maintains close ties with the Muhabarat [special police force] in Saudi Arabia, whose main function is protecting the country from terror (mainly Shi’ite), and is expected to succeed his father as king.
Iran worries the Saudis greatly, especially its nuclear potential, which, as far as the Saudis are concerned, is the number one problem on the agenda. Obviously, this visit was significant for the Saudis.
Saturday evening, Ahmadinejad landed in Riyadh to a king’s welcome. Feasts were prepared for him. Abdullah meant to speak with him about everything, but first and foremost the nuclear issue. Because they don’t share a common language (Ahmadinejad knows only Farsi, and Abdullah doesn’t speak it) the conversation was conducted through an interpreter. Abdullah was obviously trying. He sat close to Ahmadinejad, something he doesn’t often do with his guests, and tried to smile for the cameras before the meeting.
There are still no details on the conversation itself, but Abdullah apparently warned Ahmadinejad about the Americans, who are increasing their presence in the Persian Gulf. I believe that Abdullah offered to mediate between the Iranians and the Americans, and he has the ability to do so comparatively well. After the first round of talks, they left for dinner, and later resumed talks.
Shortly before midnight, it was announced suddenly that Ahmadinejad was returning to Teheran. I believe that the talks blew up, since it’s strange for him not to have stayed at least a night on such an important visit, one that had been prepared ahead of time.
The fact remains that Ahmadinejad and the Saudis did not voice any intention of continuing talks after the visit. Also, no official message on the meeting was published, as is the norm. Ahmadinejad has a hot temper, and he tends to get offended. Maybe he thought that the Saudis were interfering in something that was none of their business.
As he returned to Iran, Ahmadinejad was met at the Teheran airport by reporters. He told them that he had spoken with the Saudis on Iraq, the ethnic issue, Lebanon, and the Palestinians, and did not mention the nuclear program an additional indication that this was the subject that had caused the crisis.
The Iranian president essentially spurned the Saudis’ hand, extended in hopes of preventing a major crisis in the Gulf. The Saudis themselves are also afraid of such a crisis, with its many possible scenarios. Could the 15 percent of their Shi’ite population begin an uprising? Could Iran attack them? This scares them.
Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, sales talk and when to make his move. Apparently he has decided that it isn’t yet time to let Iran off its crazy merry-go-round, and continues to defy the United States and the West.
This week, the UN Security Council is supposed to decide on harsher sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, though not economic ones, and the Americans continue to up their presence on Iran’s borders and coast. The tension builds.
* This dispatch concerns the United States
CONTENTS
1. Gallup poll: Jews are strongly opposed to Iraq war
2. “It’s not America’s enemies who hate the United States most”
3. Iran’s many minorities asserting themselves against Persian domination
4. Farrakhan recommends several anti-Semitic books to his followers
5. Is Teheran targeting New York?
6. U.S. Imam sentenced to seven years in prison for helping Hamas
7. Afghan beheaded in Pakistan for being “a U.S. spy”
8. U.S. congressman visits persecuted Bangladeshi journalist
9. Professional baseball moves a step closer to becoming a reality in Israel
10. “US Jews toughest foes of Iraq war” (Jerusalem Post, Feb. 26, 2007)
11. “Hatred of America unites the world” (Sunday Telegraph, Feb. 25, 2007)
12. “US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran” (Sunday Telegraph, Feb. 25, 2007)
13. “Farrakhan ‘reading list’ includes anti-Israel books, ADL says” (Yediot Ahronot, Feb. 27, 2007)
GALLUP POLL: JEWS ARE STRONGLY OPPOSED TO IRAQ WAR
Ever since the Iraq war began in 2003, and even before that, several anti-war groups in Europe (and also some in the U.S.) have made assertions, often bordering on anti-Semitism, that this was a “Jewish war” and that American Jews and Israelis were prime movers behind it. (This is despite all the evidence to the contrary, including the fact that Ariel Sharon, who was then Israel’s prime minister, warned President Bush against it.)
For this reason, it is especially ironic that a thorough new Gallup poll has found that Jews are more strongly opposed to the Iraq War and have been since before it began than any other American religious group.
According to an analysis of Gallup polls conducted since 2005 that was released last weekend, asked if “the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq,” 77 percent of American Jews said it had, while only 21 percent believed the deployment was not a mistake. This figure is in marked contrast to the American average, where only 52 percent indicated opposition to the war and 46 percent indicated support.
The Jewish opposition to the war, according to Gallup figures, is not new. In the first two years of the war (2003 and 2004), when 52% of Americans supported the war, 61% of Jews opposed it. Even within the Democratic Party, Jewish opposition to the war was significantly greater than that expressed by non-Jewish Democrats.
According to Gallup, the two groups closest to Jews in their opposition to the war are Americans with no religion and African-American Protestants. The Gallup poll does not explain exactly why Jews oppose the toppling of Saddam more than other groups. The most likely explanation is that Jews in America (other than Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union) tend to be the most left-wing group in American society. For more on this, see my article “Puerto Ricans have moved on. Why not Jews? US presidential voting habits remain a puzzle.”
Eran Lerman, head of the American Jewish Committee’s Israel/Middle East office, told The Jerusalem Post (in Haviv Rettig’s article below) that the poll results proves “that the argument put forward by some players in America and elsewhere that the Jews pushed Bush to go to Iraq is little more than anti-Semitic rubbish.”
“There may also be the fear [among American Jews],” Lerman added, “that if this war doesn’t succeed, somebody will blame the Jews [for it].”
“IT’S NOT AMERICA’S ENEMIES WHO HATE THE UNITED STATES MOST”
In the second article below, British historian Niall Ferguson (writing in the London Sunday Telegraph), examines why the world seemingly hates America. Ferguson points out that “It’s not America’s enemies who hate the United States most, it’s people in countries that are supposed to be America’s friends, if not allies.”
According to another Gallup poll, which surveyed 10,000 Muslims in 10 different countries, wealthier, better-educated Muslims are more likely to be politically radical and anti-American.
Other findings from this poll indicate that “One in four Indians, two out of five Egyptians and one out of every two Pakistanis favor a nuclear-armed Iran. A third of Britons, half of all Indians and three quarters of Egyptians welcomed the success of Hamas in last year’s Palestinian elections.”
Ferguson concludes his piece on global attitudes to America: “For it turns out that power not only corrupts, as Lord Acton famously observed, it also tends to isolate. It’s not for nothing that they say it’s lonely at the top.”
IRAN’S MANY MINORITIES ASSERTING THEMSELVES AGAINST PERSIAN DOMINATION
The third article below reports that “America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear programme.”
Various incidents and actions have been carried out by the Kurds in the west of Iran, the Azeris in the north-west, the Ahwazi Arabs in the south-west, and the Baluchis in the south-east. Non-Persians make up 40 per cent of Iran’s 69 million population, with around 16 million Azeris, seven million Kurds, five million Ahwazis and one million Baluchis.
FARRAKHAN RECOMMENDS SEVERAL ANTI-SEMITIC BOOKS TO HIS FOLLOWERS
The fourth and final article notes that “Minister Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic and racist leader of the Nation of Islam, concluded his Saviors’ Day address by recommending to his audience several notoriously anti-Semitic and anti-Israel books.”
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Director Abe Foxman notes: “Farrakhan may have held his anti-Semitic views in check while on the dais, but if this is what he wants people to read, then the leopard hasn’t changed his spots.”
Among the books Farrakhan recommends are “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews”, which argues that the history of slavery in the New World was dominated by Jewish ship owners and merchants; “The Secrets of the Federal Reserve,” by Eustace Mullins, an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory propagandist; “The Synagogue of Satan,” written by nation of Islam member Ashahed Muhammad.
And finally Farrakhan recommends the recent book published by former President Jimmy Carter, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,” which has been widely criticized as demonizing Israel.
For more on the Carter book, see the dispatch Jimmy Carter called an anti-Semite live on American TV (Dec. 6, 2006).
IS TEHERAN TARGETING NEW YORK?
A report in the latest issue (March 5, 2007) of Newsweek suggests that “Increasing tensions between Washington and Teheran have revived New York Police Department concerns that Iranian agents may already have targeted the city for terror attacks.”
These attacks could be aimed at bridges and tunnels, Jewish organizations and at Wall Street, NYPD security experts warn.
In November 2003, Ahmad Safari and Alireaza Safi, described as Iranian United Nations Mission “security” personnel, were detained by transit cops when they were seen videotaping subway tracks from Queens to Manhattan at 1:10 in the morning. The men later left New York.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly told Newsweek, “We’re concerned that Iranian agents were engaged in reconnaissance that might be used in an attack against New York City at some future date.”
U.S. IMAM SENTENCED TO SEVEN YEARS IN PRISON FOR HELPING HAMAS
Mohamed Shorbagi, an Imam at a mosque in the American state of Georgia, was on Tuesday sentenced to seven years, eight months in prison for providing money and logistical support to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Shorbagi pleaded guilty last August to providing material support to Hamas in a case in which the agreement, charges and even the plea hearing were handled in secret. (They were made public in October.)
U.S. Attorney David Nahmias said in a statement following Tuesday’s sentencing that “This case illustrates that people who illegally support foreign terrorist organizations may be found in the United States.”
The U.S. formally designated Hamas as a terrorist organization in October 1997. From that time until December 2001, prosecutors alleged Shorbagi provided financial support to Hamas, even while knowing the group had been labeled by the government as a terrorist organization.
AFGHAN BEHEADED IN PAKISTAN FOR BEING “A U.S. SPY”
Islamic extremists in Pakistan yesterday beheaded a moderate Afghan cleric they accused of spying for U.S. forces fighting insurgents in Afghanistan. The murdered cleric, Akhtar Usmani, 30, had spoken out against militancy in a Pakistani region on the Afghan border where some observers say the government has virtually handed over power to the Taliban. Usmani was found dumped beside a road in South Waziristan, while his head was placed in the middle of the road nearby. A note found with the body accused Usmani of spying for America.
Militants in North and South Waziristan have killed dozens of people they accused of being U.S. spies. In fact they were moderate Muslims and the spying accusations were almost certainly nothing but a fabricated pretext to behead them. The murder of these brave Afghani moderates is rarely mentioned in the western press.
U.S. CONGRESSMAN VISITS PERSECUTED BANGLADESHI JOURNALIST
This is a follow-up to the sixth note in the dispatch So busy attacking Israel, they forgot about these beheadings (Nov. 21, 2006).
Last Friday, Republican Congressman Steve Chabot of Ohio held a thirty minute meeting with dissident journalist Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury at the U.S. Embassy in Bangladesh.
Choudhury is a Bangladeshi journalist who said that Bangladesh should have peaceful relations with Jews, and as a result of this statement is currently on trial in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka on multiple counts of sedition, treason and blasphemy and could face the death penalty. Choudhury, the former editor of “The Weekly Blitz,” an English language newspaper published in Dhaka, angered authorities after he published articles saying Israel should be allowed to exist and after he criticized radical Islam.
Choudhury has faced continued persecution since 2003. He has been beaten, tortured and imprisoned for his efforts, and mobs have been allowed to attack him and bomb his newspaper office. Speaking from Dhaka, Choudhury said he was touched by the congressman’s concern for his situation.
Chabot received assurances that the charges against Choudhury would be dropped. Yet as soon as he left, the Bangladeshi authorities announced his trial would resume on March 8 and in a sign of how unfair the trial is likely to be, the Judge (Judge M. Momin Ullah) has already stated in writing that he sees no reason to acquit Choudhury.
(Journalists on this email list who wish to cover Choudhury’s case should contact Dr. Richard Benkin, who is a subscriber to this list and is trying to help Choudhury, at drrbenkin@comcast.net.)
PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL MOVES A STEP CLOSER TO BECOMING A REALITY IN ISRAEL
Israel moved a step closer to the world of professional baseball on Monday in New York.
Former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer, who will serve as the league’s commissioner, joined Israeli league founder Larry Baras and Dan Duquette, a former pro-manager, at a news conference to outline the six-team league’s 45-game season.
Eighty players have already been signed and another 50 have been lined up. Among the players and managers are a “Who’s Who” of Jewish baseball players from recent years, including the Mets’ Art Shamsky, the Cubs’ Ken Holtzman and Yankee Ron Blomberg. Play starts June 24.
For more on the Israeli baseball league, see the dispatch Israel to have its own baseball league (& Iran bars women from soccer matches) (May 19, 2006).
I attach four articles below.
-- Tom Gross
JEWS ARE MORE STRONGLY OPPOSED TO THE IRAQ WAR THAN ANY OTHER AMERICAN RELIGIOUS GROUP
US Jews toughest foes of Iraq war
By Haviv Rettig
The Jerusalem Post
February 26, 2007
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1171894518362&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Jews are more strongly opposed to the Iraq War and have been since before it began than any other American religious group, according to an analysis of Gallup polls conducted since 2005 that was released over the weekend by The Gallup Organization.
Asked if “the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq,” 77 percent of American Jews said it had, while only 21% believed the deployment was not a mistake. This figure is in marked contrast to the American average, where only 52% indicated opposition to the war and 46% indicated support.
The Jewish opposition to the war, according to Gallup figures, is not new, and preceded most Americans turning against the war. In the first two years of the war (2003 and 2004), when 52% of Americans supported the war, 61% of Jews opposed it. Even before the beginning of hostilities in 2002 and early 2003, US Jews supported the war by just 49% to 48%. Americans generally supported it by 57% to 37%.
The Gallup figures also show that Jewish opposition to the war is not explainable by the high Democratic Party affiliation among Jews. Even within the Democratic Party, Jewish opposition to the war was greater than that expressed by non-Jewish Democrats. In polls taken from 2005 to 2007, 89% of Jewish Democrats opposed the war and just 8% supported it, while non-Jewish Democrats opposed the war by 78% to 20%.
“This just goes to prove that the argument put forward by some players in America and elsewhere that the Jews pushed Bush to go to Iraq is little more than anti-Semitic rubbish,” Col. (res.) Eran Lerman, head of the American Jewish Committee’s Israel/Middle East office in Jerusalem, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
“Traditional liberal values are deeply implanted” among American Jews, Lerman added, noting that US Jews “are anti-war generally and tend to be suspicious of the Bush administration specifically.
“There may also be the fear,” he surmised, “that if this war doesn’t succeed, somebody will blame the Jews [for it].”
The Gallup Organization itself noted that “these data show that the average American Jew even those who are Republicans and may support the Bush administration on other matters opposes the war.”
“Most of the Jews [in America] always believed that most of the non-Jews suspect they are not loyal to the United States,” agreed Prof. Eytan Gilboa, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University who specializes in American Jewish-Israeli relations and has written a book on such polls.
But, he added, these Jews were usually wrong. “In fact, most of the non-Jews have thought the opposite, and I think this is still true today, [particularly] in a period when there is a distancing between American Jews and Israel, and a new generation [of young American Jews] that doesn’t know much about Israel,” he said, adding that “American Jewry’s position [on the Middle East] is complex. The Israel issue is part of it, but it doesn’t have a veto. American Jewry wants first of all to see itself as American.”
Yet, despite this, “over the last two years, Israel’s enemies have succeeded in pushing them into the corner, putting them on the defensive,” he believes. “You see accusations not from the fringes that the war in Iraq only took place in order to help Israel,” he said, and “the Jews are accused of dual loyalties.”
The study also found that, though Protestants as a whole were evenly divided on the war (49% for and 48% against), African-American Protestants (who were grouped with other Protestants because the study divided according to religions) opposed the war in equal measure to the Jews, with 78% opposing the war and 18% supporting.
The Jews even outpaced Americans with “no religious affiliation,” who took second-place with 66% opposed and 33% in favor. Catholics came in third with 53% opposed and 46% in favor. Mormons, meanwhile, were most supportive of the war, with 72% in favor and 27% against.
IT’S LONELY AT THE TOP
Hatred of America unites the world
By Niall Ferguson
The (London) Sunday Telegraph
February 25, 2007
www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/02/25/do2501.xml
Being hated is no fun. Few of us are like those pantomime villains who glory in the hisses and boos of an audience. And few people hate being hated more than Americans. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked the plaintive question: “Why do they hate us?” and another for each of the different answers I’ve heard. It’s because of our foreign policy. It’s because of their extremism. It’s because of our arrogance. It’s because of their inferiority complex. Americans really hate not knowing why they’re hated.
The best explanation is in fact the simplest. Being hated is what happens to dominant empires. It comes sometimes literally with the territory. George Orwell knew the feeling. As a young man he served as an assistant police superintendent in British-run Burma, an experience he memorably described in his essay “Shooting an Elephant”. Called upon to kill a rogue pachyderm that had run amok, Orwell was suddenly aware “of the watchful yellow faces behind” him:
“The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh.”
Eric Blair, as Orwell was known then, could scarcely have been better prepared for his role as a colonial official. Born in Bengal, the son of a colonial civil servant, he had been educated at Eton, where boys learn not to worry much about being hated. Yet even he found the resentment of the natives hard to bear: “In the end the sneering... faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves ... [It] was perplexing and upsetting.”
That’s a feeling American soldiers in Baghdad must know pretty well. How does that old Randy Newman song go? “No one likes us I don’t know why. / We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try.”
But who hates Americans the most? You might assume that it’s people in countries that the United States has recently attacked or threatened to attack. Americans themselves are clear about who their principal enemies are. Asked by Gallup to name the “greatest enemy” of the United States today, 26 per cent of those polled named Iran, 21 per cent named Iraq and 18 per cent named North Korea. Incidentally, that represents quite a success for George W. Bush’s concept of the “Axis of Evil”. Six years ago, only 8 per cent named Iran and only 2 per cent North Korea.
Are those feelings of antagonism reciprocated? Up to a point. According to a poll by Gallup’s Centre for Muslim Studies, 52 per cent of Iranians have an unfavourable view of the United States. But that figure is down from 63 per cent in 2001. And it’s significantly lower than the degree of antipathy towards the United States felt in Jordan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Two thirds of Jordanians and Pakistanis have a negative view of the United States and a staggering 79 per cent of Saudis. Sentiment has also turned hostile in Lebanon, where 59 per cent of people now have an unfavourable opinion of the United States, compared with just 41 per cent a year ago. No fewer than 84 per cent of Lebanese Shiites say they have a very unfavourable view of Uncle Sam.
These figures suggest a paradox in the Muslim world. It’s not America’s enemies who hate the United States most, it’s people in countries that are supposed to be America’s friends, if not allies.
The paradox doesn’t end there. The Gallup poll (which surveyed 10,000 Muslims in 10 different countries) also revealed that the wealthier and better-educated Muslims are, the more likely they are to be politically radical. So if you ever believed that anti-Western sentiment was an expression of poverty and deprivation, think again. Even more perplexingly, Islamists are more supportive of democracy than Muslim moderates. Those who imagined that the Middle East could be stabilised with a mixture of economic and political reform could not have been more wrong. The richer these people get, the more they favour radical Islamism. And they see democracy as a way of putting the radicals into power.
The paradox of unfriendly allies is not confined to the Middle East. Last week was not a good week for Americanophiles in Europe. Tony Blair announced British troop withdrawals from southern Iraq, an unfortunate signal on the eve of the American “surge”. Meanwhile, in Rome, his counterpart Romano Prodi had to resign because his coalition partners would not agree either to keep Italian troops in Afghanistan or to enlarge a US military base at Vicenza. Anti-Americanism is nothing new in European politics, to be sure, particularly on the Left. But there is something novel going on here, which extends to traditionally pro-American constituencies.
Back in 1999, 83 per cent of British people surveyed by the State Department Office of Research said that they had a favourable opinion of the United States. But by 2006, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, that proportion had fallen to 56 per cent. British respondents to the Pew surveys now give higher favourability ratings to Germany (75 per cent) and Japan (69 per cent) than to the United States a remarkable transformation in attitudes, given the notorious British tendency to look back both nostalgically and unforgivingly to the Second World War. It’s also very striking that Britons recently polled by Pew regard the US presence in Iraq as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran or North Korea (a view which is shared by respondents in France, Spain, Russia, India, China and throughout the Middle East).
Nor is Britain the only disillusioned ally. Perhaps not surprisingly, two thirds of Americans believe that their country’s foreign policy considers the interests of others. But this view is shared by only 38 per cent of Germans and 19 per cent of Canadians. More than two thirds of Germans surveyed in 2004 believed that American leaders wilfully lied about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction prior to the previous year’s invasion, while a remarkable 60 per cent expressed the view that America’s true motive was “to control Middle Eastern oil”. Nearly half (47 per cent) said it was “to dominate the world”.
The truly poignant fact is that when Americans themselves are asked to rate foreign countries, they express the most favourable views of none other than Britain, Germany and Canada.
Back in the 1990s, Madeleine Albright pompously called the United States “the indispensable nation”. Today it seems to have become the indefensible nation, even in the eyes of its supposed friends.
There are, admittedly, a few scraps of good news in the international polls. Very few Europeans, for example, would welcome China’s becoming a serious military rival to the United States. There is overwhelming European opposition to Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons. And there is a surprising amount of hostility towards the Palestinian radicals of Hamas in both France and Germany. But look again at some of America’s supposed allies. One in four Indians, two out of five Egyptians and one out of every two Pakistanis favour a nuclear-armed Iran. A third of Britons, half of all Indians and three quarters of Egyptians welcomed the success of Hamas in last year’s Palestinian elections.
Orwell would have understood. Just as it was the educated beneficiaries of British rule in Asia who were the most strident anti-imperialists in Orwell’s day, so the British Empire’s most natural allies France and the United States were anything but Anglophile. For it turns out that power not only corrupts, as Lord Acton famously observed, it also tends to isolate.
It’s not for nothing that they say it’s lonely at the top.
“U.S. FUNDS SEPARATIST GROUPS TO SOW CHAOS IN IRAN”
US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran
By William Lowther in Washington DC and Colin Freeman
The (London) Sunday Telegraph
February 25, 2007
America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear programme.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime is accused of repressing minority rights and culture.
In a move that reflects Washington’s growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran’s border regions.
The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime.
In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials.
Such incidents have been carried out by the Kurds in the west, the Azeris in the north-west, the Ahwazi Arabs in the south-west, and the Baluchis in the south-east. Non-Persians make up nearly 40 per cent of Iran’s 69 million population, with around 16 million Azeris, seven million Kurds, five million Ahwazis and one million Baluchis. Most Baluchis live over the border in Pakistan.
Funding for their separatist causes comes directly from the CIA’s classified budget but is now “no great secret”, according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph.
His claims were backed by Fred Burton, a former US state department counter-terrorism agent, who said: “The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran’s ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime.”
Although Washington officially denies involvement in such activity, Teheran has long claimed to detect the hand of both America and Britain in attacks by guerrilla groups on its internal security forces. Last Monday, Iran publicly hanged a man, Nasrollah Shanbe Zehi, for his involvement in a bomb attack that killed 11 Revolutionary Guards in the city of Zahedan in Sistan-Baluchistan. An unnamed local official told the semi-official Fars news agency that weapons used in the attack were British and US-made.
Yesterday, Iranian forces also claimed to have killed 17 rebels described as “mercenary elements” in clashes near the Turkish border, which is a stronghold of the Pejak, a Kurdish militant party linked to Turkey’s outlawed PKK Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
John Pike, the head of the influential Global Security think tank in Washington, said: “The activities of the ethnic groups have hotted up over the last two years and it would be a scandal if that was not at least in part the result of CIA activity.”
Such a policy is fraught with risk, however. Many of the groups share little common cause with Washington other than their opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose regime they accuse of stepping up repression of minority rights and culture.
The Baluchistan-based Brigade of God group, which last year kidnapped and killed eight Iranian soldiers, is a volatile Sunni organisation that many fear could easily turn against Washington after taking its money.
A row has also broken out in Washington over whether to “unleash” the military wing of the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an Iraq-based Iranian opposition group with a long and bloody history of armed opposition to the Iranian regime.
The group is currently listed by the US state department as terrorist organisation, but Mr Pike said: “A faction in the Defence Department wants to unleash them. They could never overthrow the current Iranian regime but they might cause a lot of damage.”
At present, none of the opposition groups are much more than irritants to Teheran, but US analysts believe that they could become emboldened if the regime was attacked by America or Israel. Such a prospect began to look more likely last week, as the UN Security Council deadline passed for Iran to stop its uranium enrichment programme, and a second American aircraft carrier joined the build up of US naval power off Iran’s southern coastal waters.
The US has also moved six heavy bombers from a British base on the Pacific island of Diego Garcia to the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which could allow them to carry out strikes on Iran without seeking permission from Downing Street.
While Tony Blair reiterated last week that Britain still wanted a diplomatic solution to the crisis, US Vice-President Dick Cheney yesterday insisted that military force was a real possibility.
“It would be a serious mistake if a nation like Iran were to become a nuclear power,” Mr Cheney warned during a visit to Australia. “All options are still on the table.”
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany will meet in London tomorrow to discuss further punitive measures against Iran. Sanctions barring the transfer of nuclear technology and know-how were imposed in December. Additional penalties might include a travel ban on senior Iranian officials and restrictions on non-nuclear business.
“THE LEOPARD HASN’T CHANGED HIS SPOTS”
Farrakhan ‘reading list’ includes anti-Israel books, ADL says
Jewish organization says Nation of Islam’s ‘racist’ leader recommended books that purport to expose ‘the truth’ about Jews; Jimmy Carter’s book on Israel-PA conflict also on reading list. ‘Leopard hasn’t changed his spots,’ Abe Foxman says
Yediot Ahronot
February 27, 2007
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3370306,00.html
“Minister Louis Farrakhan, the anti-Semitic and racist leader of the Nation of Islam, concluded his Saviors’ Day address by recommending to his audience several notoriously anti-Semitic and anti-Israel books,” the Anti-Defamation League said Tuesday.
“Farrakhan may have held his anti-Semitic views in check while on the dais, but if this is what he wants people to read, then the leopard hasn’t changed his spots,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.
“Minister Farrakhan’s reading list includes books that purport to expose ‘the truth’ about Jews and their control of the federal banking system or their role in the African slave trade. It’s a shame that Farrakhan had an opportunity to change his legacy, and he didn’t,” added Foxman.
The ADL said in a statement that “Toward the conclusion of his Saviors’ Day address at Ford Field in Detroit, which was described as his last major speech, Minister Farrakhan told his audience, ‘I want you to become readers’ and put these names down.’
According to the ADL, among the authors and books Farrakhan recommended were:
* The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which argues that the history of slavery in the New World was dominated by Jewish ship owners and merchants. The book presents a multi-layered attack against the Jewish people, assaulting the integrity of the Jewish religion, the meaning of Jewish history, and the foundations of Jewish scholarship upon which the book’s own fraudulent charges are based.
* The Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins, an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory propagandist, one of the key conspiracy books claiming that the banking system in the U.S. is controlled by a few elite families (most of them Jewish). It is a key text used by anti-Semites on the far right.
* By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky, a discredited book that makes unsubstantiated claims about Israel’s Mossad.
* Palestine Peace Not Apartheid by President Jimmy Carter, a biased, simplistic and distorted view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that portrays Israeli policies in dealing with Palestinians in the territories as inherently racist.
* Copies of The Synagogue of Satan, written by nation of Islam member Ashahed Muhammad, which claims that the world is being manipulated and corrupted by Satanic powers led by Jewish elites, were available for purchase at the event.