* Anti-Zionist Israeli lights torch in honor of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades to mark Israeli Independence Day
* “My belief in the righteousness of El Salvador’s cause knows no bounds”
* Baseball icon Sandy Koufax drafted by Israeli baseball league
CONTENTS
1. Anti-Israel ads on Washington subway
2. Anti-Zionist Israeli to direct movie for Israel’s 60th birthday
3. 148,000 new babies in Israel
4. Haifa railway station named after Katyusha victims
5. Haifa and al-Quds universities team up on learning disabilities
6. Healthier Coke arrives in Israel
7. CSKA Moscow’s anti-Semitic display
8. Baseball icon Sandy Koufax drafted by Israeli baseball league
9. “My belief in the righteousness of El Salvador’s cause knows no bounds”
10. “The middle of nowhere” (By Edward Luttwak, Prospect Magazine, May 2007)
11. “Israel’s army eyes female role in battle” (AP, April 29, 2007)
ANTI-ISRAEL ADS ON WASHINGTON SUBWAY
The subway system of America’s capital, Washington DC, is to be adorned with 20 poster ads filled with anti-Israel rhetoric.
The “U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation” are to place the ads showing “an imposing tank pointing its main firing turret at a child with a schoolbag walking along a dirt road.”
The posters state “Imagine if this were your child’s path to school. Palestinians don’t have to imagine,” before continuing to call for an end to U.S. aid due to “Israel’s brutal military occupation... paid for by U.S. taxpayers like you.”
According to a report in the Canadian Jewish News, “CBS Outdoor, the New York-based firm that places in-station advertising for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), at first refused to consider the poster, but eventually relented to pressure from WMATA and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).”
Both the executive of CBS Outdoor, Jodi Senese, and ACLU’s Legal Director in Washington, Arthur Spitzer, are Jewish, yet apparently don’t see anything wrong with these ads although they are a flagrant distortion of the true picture of life today in the West Bank and Gaza.
ANTI-ZIONIST ISRAELI TO DIRECT MOVIE FOR ISRAEL’S 60TH BIRTHDAY
Eyal Sivan, a self-proclaimed “anti-Zionist” has been hired by Israeli television channel 8 to direct a film marking the 60th anniversary of the establishment of Israel next year.
Sivan will be given a grant of 650,000 shekels ($160,000), paid for by Israeli taxpayers, to direct a film for next year’s Israel Independence Day. The film will be part of the “Past and Present in Israel” project, meant to promote Israel’s “Jaffa” brand citrus fruit.
Sivan, who has lived in Paris for the past 15 years, directed the 1999 film “The Specialist,” which used footage from Adolf Eichmann’s trial to portray the architect of the Final Solution as just a Nazi party bureaucrat, Israel radio reported. The film also attempted to present Sivan’s view that Eichmann’s Jewish victims could have done more to prevent themselves from being murdered. In 2001, Sivan told the French newspaper “Le Monde,” that the UN’s 1947 partition plan, which called for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was a “historical mistake.”
Sivan has also blamed Israel for the recent rise in French anti-Semitism. (Only last Thursday, a 22-year-old French woman, who was wearing a Star of David necklace, was attacked by youths at a Marseille railway station; they lifted up her shirt and carved a swastika on her stomach.)
During the fighting on the Lebanon-Israel and Gaza-Israel borders last summer, Sivan joined a group of Israeli filmmakers in signing a petition pledging support for the Lebanese and Palestinians. The petition read: “We the signatories are absolutely against the brutality and cruelty of the State of Israel as shown in the news from recent weeks.”
At an “alternative” Independence Day ceremony last week, another well-known anti-Israel Israeli, Tali Fahima, lit a torch in honor of Zakaria Zubeidi, the commander of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades (Fatah’s terrorist wing). “I light this for my friend Zakaria Zubeidi, with whom I have demolished fortresses,” she said.
Both Sivan and Fahima have been widely denounced in Israel as self-loathing Jews, and Alan Finkelkraut, the leading French intellectual, called Sivan’s movie “incitement to murder”.
For a previous reference to Sivan, see the sixth note in the dispatch “Israeli Apartheid Week” kicks off around the world (Feb. 13, 2007).
148,000 NEW BABIES IN ISRAEL
Israel celebrated its 59th Independence Day last Tuesday. Figures published by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics before the annual celebration indicate that the current population of Israel is 7,150,000.
When the state was founded in 1948, there were 806,000 residents. A third of those still live in the country. Of the current population, 5,725,000 (or 80 percent) are Jewish, and most of the remainder are Arab.
In 1948, Tel Aviv was the only city with more than 100,000 residents. Today, Israel has five cities with over 200,000 inhabitants: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Rishon Lezion and Ashdod.
Since last Independence Day, 148,000 babies have been born in Israel. The Arab birthrate remains higher than the Jewish one.
HAIFA RAILWAY STATION NAMED AFTER KATYUSHA VICTIMS
Israel Railways have announced that the Haifa central train station will be renamed after the eight railway workers who were killed when a Hizbullah rocket hit it during last summer’s Lebanon-Israel War.
The dedication ceremony for the station, which will be renamed “Haifa Central – The Eight”, will take place on the anniversary of their deaths on July 16.
For more, see the sixth picture on this page.
This afternoon the Winograd Committee will present Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz with a draft report of its investigation into last summer’s war. The report is expected to be highly critical of their conduct and that of former chief of staff Dan Halutz. Halutz has already resigned and Olmert and Peretz are expected to come under intense pressure to do so.
The vast majority of the draft report will focus on the decision-making process that led to the war. The committee has limited itself in this report to analyzing the five first days of the war. The final report is due in the summer.
In further trouble for Olmert, his close ally Abraham Hirchson, Israel’s Finance Minister, who is suspected of theft, has decided to suspend himself until the end of a police investigation. Hirchson has recently been questioned on charges of embezzlement. He continues to deny the allegations.
HAIFA AND AL-QUDS UNIVERSITIES TEAM UP ON LEARNING DISABILITIES
Up until now diagnostic tests for learning disabilities in Israeli Arab schoolchildren have always been translated from Hebrew. As a result of cultural differences this has often produced inaccurate results, reports the Jerusalem Post.
This should now change following a $1.5 million U.S. government grant to finance a project to produce the test in three versions: for Jewish-Israelis, Arab- Israelis and Palestinians. The cooperative project is being conducted by the University of Haifa and al-Quds University in east Jerusalem.
Professor Zvia Breznitz, director of the University of Haifa’s Center for Brain Research and Learning Disabilities said: “We always talk about grandiose ideas of peace, justice, love, and we never make any progress… But if a connection starts with a specific, professional project, at the end of the day friendships are established. In my opinion, this is the recipe for coexistence.”
As a result of the project, a center for children at risk has been established at al-Quds University.
HEALTHIER COKE ARRIVES IN ISRAEL
Israel is among the first counties to successfully produce a much healthier version of Coca-Cola free of any preservatives or artificial coloring, while maintaining the drink’s taste, claim the manufacturers of the soft drink according to Israeli press reports.
Muhtar Kent, worldwide president of the Coca-Cola Company, has given his Israel branch the go-ahead to implement the advanced technological procedure, calling the breakthrough “a great achievement.”
The new formula, which is kosher, and will include both regular and diet Coke, will be on the market as of this week.
CSKA MOSCOW’S ANTI-SEMITIC DISPLAY
CSKA Moscow, the Russian basketball team, beat Maccabi Tel Aviv to progress to the Euroleague’s final-four stage in Athens.
Prior to their third and final confrontation at the Moscow stadium, Maccabi’s players and fans found themselves watching what many regarded as an anti-Semitic laser show aimed at livening up the local audience.
Macabbi Tel Aviv was presented at the laser show as an ultra-orthodox Jew wearing a traditional fur hat, being run over by a steam train, wearing the Moscow colors.
The heads of the Israeli team have filed an official complaint with their Moscow counterparts.
BASEBALL ICON SANDY KOUFAX DRAFTED BY ISRAELI BASEBALL LEAGUE
Forty-one years after he retired from baseball, Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax was the final player chosen in the draft for the six teams taking part in the inaugural season of the Israel Baseball League.
Koufax, 71, was picked by the Modi’in Miracle in the draft conducted last Thursday. “His selection is a tribute to the esteem with which he is held by everyone associated with this league,” said former big leaguer Art Shamsky, who will manage the Miracle.
In the 1965 World Series, Koufax refused to pitch Game 1 for Los Angeles because it fell on Yom Kippur, a day considered by Jews to be the holiest of the year. Koufax retired due to an arm injury after the 1966 season and was later voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The Israeli league begins play June 24 with the six teams playing a 45-game schedule. Players from nine nations were drafted, with only a minority of the 120 players in the league expected to be Israeli citizens.
For more, see Israel to have its own baseball league (& Iran bars women from soccer matches) (May 19, 2006).
“MY BELIEF IN THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF EL SALVADOR’S CAUSE KNOWS NO BOUNDS”
I attach an article below, by Edward Luttwak, a senior adviser at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. Robbie Millen, a writer on the Times of London’s blog, “Comment Central,” had this to say about the piece:
“I’m sure that like me you’ve got strong views on the rights and wrongs of the ‘Soccer War’ of 1969. Honduras’s treatment of El Salvador and its noble people is an enduring international shame; the Peace Treaty of 1980 was a sham which robbed the victimised Salvadoreans of their land. I am still very diligent in boycotting Honduran produce; I will never, despite numerous invitations, attend a lecture given by a Honduran academic; naturally, I have disinvested my large stake in the Honduran economy. My belief in the righteousness of El Salvador’s cause knows no bounds.
“You would think me mad, a stranger to that region, if I held such strong views about a tiny sliver of land in Central America. But it’s no madder than Brits who get overexcited about a tiny sliver of land in the Middle East and join the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, organise boycotts of Israeli universities and demand that British companies not do business in Israel. I’ve never understood why the Israel-Palestine conflict gets so much coverage (many more people die in African border wars but they only make the news-in-brief columns) or why Western statesmen think that they should get involved in pointless summiteering there.
“Do we have any strategic interests there? Not really. Maybe it’s the frontline in a clash of civilisations, and we need to bolster Israel against the forces of Islamofascism? Well, given that Osama bin Laden seems to be as upset that Spain pushed out the Moors as any perceived injustice against the Palestinians, I’m not sure that a peace deal between Israel and Palestine will stop al-Qaeda lunatics trying to blow us up. Sure, if I had to choose, I would rather be an Arab living in Israel than in any of the neighbouring Arab kleptocracies and failed states, but still I don’t feel like I have a dog in that fight.
“So am I mistaken? Am I missing something fundamental? Edward Luttwak in a brilliant article for Prospect reassures me that the Middle East is really quite irrelevant (unless you happen to be a Middle Easterner).”
The second article below looks at the role of women in the Israeli army as an “army-appointed commission of academics and officers is studying whether to integrate the army’s last all-male preserve: infantry, armor and special forces.”
-- Tom Gross
“THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT HAS BEEN ALMOST IRRELEVANT SINCE THE END OF THE COLD WAR”
The middle of nowhere
Western analysts are forever bleating about the strategic importance of the middle east. But despite its oil, this backward region is less relevant than ever, and it would be better for everyone if the rest of the world learned to ignore it
By Edward Luttwak
Prospect Magazine
May 2007
www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9302
Why are middle east experts so unfailingly wrong? The lesson of history is that men never learn from history, but middle east experts, like the rest of us, should at least learn from their past mistakes. Instead, they just keep repeating them.
The first mistake is “five minutes to midnight” catastrophism. The late King Hussein of Jordan was the undisputed master of this genre. Wearing his gravest aspect, he would warn us that with patience finally exhausted the Arab-Israeli conflict was about to explode, that all past conflicts would be dwarfed by what was about to happen unless, unless… And then came the remedy – usually something rather tame when compared with the immense catastrophe predicted, such as resuming this or that stalled negotiation, or getting an American envoy to the scene to make the usual promises to the Palestinians and apply the usual pressures on Israel. We read versions of the standard King Hussein speech in countless newspaper columns, hear identical invocations in the grindingly repetitive radio and television appearances of the usual middle east experts, and are now faced with Hussein’s son Abdullah periodically repeating his father’s speech almost verbatim.
What actually happens at each of these “moments of truth” – and we may be approaching another one – is nothing much; only the same old cyclical conflict which always restarts when peace is about to break out, and always dampens down when the violence becomes intense enough. The ease of filming and reporting out of safe and comfortable Israeli hotels inflates the media coverage of every minor affray. But humanitarians should note that the dead from Jewish-Palestinian fighting since 1921 amount to fewer than 100,000 – about as many as are killed in a season of conflict in Darfur.
Strategically, the Arab-Israeli conflict has been almost irrelevant since the end of the cold war. And as for the impact of the conflict on oil prices, it was powerful in 1973 when the Saudis declared embargoes and cut production, but that was the first and last time that the “oil weapon” was wielded. For decades now, the largest Arab oil producers have publicly foresworn any linkage between politics and pricing, and an embargo would be a disaster for their oil-revenue dependent economies. In any case, the relationship between turmoil in the middle east and oil prices is far from straightforward. As Philip Auerswald recently noted in the American Interest, between 1981 and 1999 – a period when a fundamentalist regime consolidated power in Iran, Iran and Iraq fought an eight-year war within view of oil and gas installations, the Gulf war came and went and the first Palestinian intifada raged – oil prices, adjusted for inflation, actually fell. And global dependence on middle eastern oil is declining: today the region produces under 30 per cent of the world’s crude oil, compared to almost 40 per cent in 1974-75. In 2005 17 per cent of American oil imports came from the Gulf, compared to 28 per cent in 1975, and President Bush used his 2006 state of the union address to announce his intention of cutting US oil imports from the middle east by three quarters by 2025.
Yes, it would be nice if Israelis and Palestinians could settle their differences, but it would do little or nothing to calm the other conflicts in the middle east from Algeria to Iraq, or to stop Muslim-Hindu violence in Kashmir, Muslim-Christian violence in Indonesia and the Philippines, Muslim-Buddhist violence in Thailand, Muslim-animist violence in Sudan, Muslim-Igbo violence in Nigeria, Muslim-Muscovite violence in Chechnya, or the different varieties of inter-Muslim violence between traditionalists and Islamists, and between Sunnis and Shia, nor would it assuage the perfectly understandable hostility of convinced Islamists towards the transgressive west that relentlessly invades their minds, and sometimes their countries.
Arab-Israeli catastrophism is wrong twice over, first because the conflict is contained within rather narrow boundaries, and second because the Levant is just not that important any more.
The second repeated mistake is the Mussolini syndrome. Contemporary documents prove beyond any doubt what is now hard to credit: serious people, including British and French military chiefs, accepted Mussolini’s claims to great power status because they believed that he had serious armed forces at his command. His army divisions, battleships and air squadrons were dutifully counted to assess Italian military power, making some allowance for their lack of the most modern weapons but not for their more fundamental refusal to fight in earnest. Having conceded Ethiopia to win over Mussolini, only to lose him to Hitler as soon as the fighting started, the British discovered that the Italian forces quickly crumbled in combat. It could not be otherwise, because most Italian soldiers were unwilling conscripts from the one-mule peasantry of the south or the almost equally miserable sharecropping villages of the north.
Exactly the same mistake keeps being made by the fraternity of middle east experts. They persistently attribute real military strength to backward societies whose populations can sustain excellent insurgencies but not modern military forces.
In the 1960s, it was Nasser’s Egypt that was mistaken for a real military power just because it had received many aircraft, tanks and guns from the Soviet Union, and had many army divisions and air squadrons. In May 1967, on the eve of war, many agreed with the prediction of Field Marshal Montgomery, then revisiting the El Alamein battlefield, that the Egyptians would defeat the Israelis forthwith; even the more cautious never anticipated that the former would be utterly defeated by the latter in just a few days. In 1973, with much more drama, it still took only three weeks to reach the same outcome.
In 1990 it was the turn of Iraq to be hugely overestimated as a military power. Saddam Hussein had more equipment than Nasser ever accumulated, and could boast of having defeated much more populous Iran after eight years of war. In the months before the Gulf war, there was much anxious speculation about the size of the Iraqi army – again, the divisions and regiments were dutifully counted as if they were German divisions on the eve of D-day, with a separate count of the “elite” Republican Guards, not to mention the “super-elite” Special Republican Guards – and it was feared that Iraq’s bombproof aircraft shelters and deep bunkers would survive any air attack.
That much of this was believed at some level we know from the magnitude of the coalition armies that were laboriously assembled, including 575,000 US troops, 43,000 British, 14,663 French and 4,500 Canadian, and which incidentally constituted the sacrilegious infidel presence on Arabian soil that set off Osama bin Laden on his quest for revenge. In the event, two weeks of precision bombing were enough to paralyse Saddam’s entire war machine, which scarcely tried to resist the ponderous ground offensive when it came. At no point did the Iraqi air force try to fight, and all those tanks that were painstakingly counted served mostly for target practice. A real army would have continued to resist for weeks or months in the dug-in positions in Kuwait, even without air cover, but Saddam’s army was the usual middle eastern façade without fighting substance.
Now the Mussolini syndrome is at work over Iran. All the symptoms are present, including tabulated lists of Iran’s warships, despite the fact that most are over 30 years old; of combat aircraft, many of which (F-4s, Mirages, F-5s, F-14s) have not flown in years for lack of spare parts; and of divisions and brigades that are so only in name. There are awed descriptions of the Pasdaran revolutionary guards, inevitably described as “elite,” who do indeed strut around as if they have won many a war, but who have actually fought only one – against Iraq, which they lost. As for Iran’s claim to have defeated Israel by Hizbullah proxy in last year’s affray, the publicity was excellent but the substance went the other way, with roughly 25 per cent of the best-trained men dead, which explains the tomb-like silence and immobility of the once rumbustious Hizbullah ever since the ceasefire.
Then there is the new light cavalry of Iranian terrorism that is invoked to frighten us if all else fails. The usual middle east experts now explain that if we annoy the ayatollahs, they will unleash terrorists who will devastate our lives, even though 30 years of “death to America” invocations and vast sums spent on maintaining a special international terrorism department have produced only one major bombing in Saudi Arabia, in 1996, and two in the most permissive environment of Buenos Aires, in 1992 and 1994, along with some assassinations of exiles in Europe.
It is true enough that if Iran’s nuclear installations are bombed in some overnight raid, there is likely to be some retaliation, but we live in fortunate times in which we have only the irritant of terrorism instead of world wars to worry about – and Iran’s added contribution is not likely to leave much of an impression. There may be good reasons for not attacking Iran’s nuclear sites – including the very slow and uncertain progress of its uranium enrichment effort – but its ability to strike back is not one of them. Even the seemingly fragile tanker traffic down the Gulf and through the straits of Hormuz is not as vulnerable as it seems – Iran and Iraq have both tried to attack it many times without much success, and this time the US navy stands ready to destroy any airstrip or jetty from which attacks are launched.
As for the claim that the “Iranians” are united in patriotic support for the nuclear programme, no such nationality even exists. Out of Iran’s population of 70m or so, 51 per cent are ethnically Persian, 24 per cent are Turks (“Azeris” is the regime’s term), with other minorities comprising the remaining quarter. Many of Iran’s 16-17m Turks are in revolt against Persian cultural imperialism; its 5-6m Kurds have started a serious insurgency; the Arab minority detonates bombs in Ahvaz; and Baluch tribesmen attack gendarmes and revolutionary guards. If some 40 per cent of the British population were engaged in separatist struggles of varying intensity, nobody would claim that it was firmly united around the London government. On top of this, many of the Persian majority oppose the theocratic regime, either because they have become post-Islamic in reaction to its many prohibitions, or because they are Sufis, whom the regime now persecutes almost as much as the small Baha’i minority. So let us have no more reports from Tehran stressing the country’s national unity. Persian nationalism is a minority position in a country where half the population is not even Persian. In our times, multinational states either decentralise or break up more or less violently; Iran is not decentralising, so its future seems highly predictable, while in the present not much cohesion under attack is to be expected.
The third and greatest error repeated by middle east experts of all persuasions, by Arabophiles and Arabophobes alike, by Turcologists and by Iranists, is also the simplest to define. It is the very odd belief that these ancient nations are highly malleable. Hardliners keep suggesting that with a bit of well-aimed violence (“the Arabs only understand force”) compliance will be obtained. But what happens every time is an increase in hostility; defeat is followed not by collaboration, but by sullen non-cooperation and active resistance too. It is not hard to defeat Arab countries, but it is mostly useless. Violence can work to destroy dangerous weapons but not to induce desired changes in behaviour.
Softliners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. They keep arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge. Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners.
The operational mistake that middle east experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily, once they recognised that maxi-trials merely handed over control to a newer and smarter mafia of doctors and lawyers. With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the middle east should finally be allowed to have their own history – the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them.
That brings us to the mistake that the rest of us make. We devote far too much attention to the middle east, a mostly stagnant region where almost nothing is created in science or the arts – excluding Israel, per capita patent production of countries in the middle east is one fifth that of sub-Saharan Africa. The people of the middle east (only about five per cent of the world’s population) are remarkably unproductive, with a high proportion not in the labour force at all. Not many of us would care to work if we were citizens of Abu Dhabi, with lots of oil money for very few citizens. But Saudi Arabia’s 27m inhabitants also live largely off the oil revenues that trickle down to them, leaving most of the work to foreign technicians and labourers: even with high oil prices, Saudi Arabia’s annual per capita income, at $14,000, is only about half that of oil-free Israel.
Saudi Arabia has a good excuse, for it was a land of oasis hand-farmers and Bedouin pastoralists who cannot be expected to become captains of industry in a mere 50 years. Much more striking is the oil parasitism of once much more accomplished Iran. It exports only 2.5m barrels a day as compared to Saudi Arabia’s 8m, yet oil still accounts for 80 per cent of Iran’s exports because its agriculture and industry have become so unproductive.
The middle east was once the world’s most advanced region, but these days its biggest industries are extravagant consumption and the venting of resentment. According to the UN’s 2004 Arab human development report, the region boasts the second lowest adult literacy rate in the world (after sub-Saharan Africa) at just 63 per cent. Its dependence on oil means that manufactured goods account for just 17 per cent of exports, compared to a global average of 78 per cent. Moreover, despite its oil wealth, the entire middle east generated under 4 per cent of global GDP in 2006 – less than Germany.
Unless compelled by immediate danger, we should therefore focus on the old and new lands of creation in Europe and America, in India and east Asia – places where hard-working populations are looking ahead instead of dreaming of the past.
ISRAEL’S ARMY EYES FEMALE ROLE IN BATTLE
Israel’s army eyes female role in battle
The Associated Press
April 29, 2007
When Alice Miller petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court in 1995 to let her become an air force pilot, the country’s president, himself a famous airman in his younger days, laughingly compared women flying planes to men darning socks.
But the court ruled in her favor, opening combat jobs to women for the first time. One of them was Keren Tendler, a flight technician killed last summer when her helicopter was shot down by Hezbollah guerrillas over Lebanon.
The fighting Israeli woman soldier may endure as a stereotype, but in reality, a female death in combat is extremely rare. Save for isolated cases in the Jewish state’s 1948 war for independence, women traditionally were confined to clerical and support jobs. But things have changed, and now an army-appointed commission of academics and officers is studying whether to integrate the army’s last all-male preserve: infantry, armor and special forces.
Commission member Naomi Chazan, a prominent feminist and a former lawmaker, says the focus will be on “increasing the equality” of women in uniform – and that means admitting them to tank and infantry formations.
The move is not crucial for the army, Chazan said, but for Israeli women. The army plays a central role in Israel, Chazan said, and “If the army consciously creates inequality on any basis, these values get into Israeli society.”
But Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general, says such principles cannot drive military policy in a country that feels its national survival is at stake.
“As we’ve seen in other armies, gender integration causes sexual tension and is detrimental to combat performance, and it’s just not worth it,” Amidror said. “It’s not coincidental that throughout human history, men have done the fighting.”
Feminists might call his views old-fashioned, but they face a question: Do Israeli women even want to be on the front lines?
Lt. Col. Liora Rubinstein, a women’s affairs adviser to the military chief of staff, acknowledges that few women volunteer for combat units. Many are turned off by having to sign on for an extra year to serve in most combat jobs.
“My son does soccer and judo, and my daughter does ballet. But then we tell her: ‘Go to the army, be equal to the men, go ahead.’ But of course it doesn’t work like that,” Rubinstein said.
Lt. Sivan Ben-Ezra, 21, commands a platoon in a mixed-gender “light infantry” unit, currently the closest women can get to front-line infantry. She isn’t surprised more women aren’t interested in jobs like hers.
“We have girls who come for the boots and the cool uniform. Those girls don’t last,” she said.
All Israelis except Arabs and ultra-orthodox Jews are drafted – men for three years, women for two.
Ben-Ezra’s unit is 70 percent female, and its main duty is to patrol Israel’s peaceful borders with Egypt and Jordan. Another mixed unit operates remote cameras and sensors to police the more sensitive Syrian and Lebanese borders, and women also serve in the border police and checkpoint units that maintain the occupation of the West Bank.
During last summer’s Lebanon conflict, a small number of women soldiers fired artillery shells and cluster bombs, served on navy vessels and flew combat sorties as pilots and weapons system operators. All told, around 1,500 women serve in combat jobs – some 2.5 percent of female conscripts, according to army figures.
The turning point was Miller’s Supreme Court petition, which provoked then-president Ezer Weizman to belittle her in a phone conversation as a “maidele,” Yiddish for a young girl, and ask if she could imagine a man darning socks. He later said the comment was in jest.
Miller, then 23, failed the flight school entrance exams, but the court ruling forced the army to open all jobs to women or present a good reason not to.
Some Orthodox Jews protested that mixing the sexes was immodest, and other Israelis voiced concerns that the public would not tolerate women being killed or falling captive. But even the grim circumstances of Tendler’s death last summer – rescue forces spent a day and a half in enemy territory searching for her body, then carried it on a stretcher back to Israel – did not draw calls to reverse the policy, suggesting it has won broad acceptance.
The military has taken the precaution of making strict separation of barracks and bathrooms mandatory, and many commanders bar all physical contact save for shaking hands and patting shoulders.
The reformers are inspired by Canada and several European nations which have integrated infantry units, and from the apparent easing of the U.S. military’s ban on women in ground combat.
Lory Manning, a retired U.S. Navy captain at the Virginia-based Women’s Research and Education Institute, said women have been quietly serving with U.S. ground combat forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and over 70 have died there.
“The consensus is that the women serving with these troops are doing very well,” said Manning.
Says feminist Chazan: “People ask me, do you really want your daughter to serve in a unit like that? Well, I want my daughter to be able to decide, just like your son.”
CONTENTS
1. Coming out of the closet as political activists
2. Palestinian journalists launch a “Free Alan Johnston” web site
3. Ken Livingstone pleads for Johnston’s release on Arab TV, praises Johnston as “friend of the Palestinian cause”
4. UK doctors call for boycott of Israeli Medical Association
5. “Palestinians attend a demonstration against violence in Gaza, April 23, 2007”
6. There was a ceasefire?
7. Palestinian murder of children ignored by international media
8. New terrorist organization in Iraq named in honor of Hamas
COMING OUT OF THE CLOSET AS POLITICAL ACTIVISTS
Following the recent British National Union of Journalists’ decision, more and more “news reporters” are declaring themselves to be political activists.
Here, for example, is a letter to The Guardian yesterday signed by 20 CNN, BBC and other journalists, led by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, the most overrated news reporter of our time:
www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,2064046,00.html
Letters
The Guardian
Tuesday April 24, 2007
The world needs a tough arms treaty
Ten years ago the treaty to ban landmines was signed in Ottawa, Canada. As journalists who have seen the devastating impact of conflict first-hand, we applauded the agreement.
Today a more ambitious treaty is being developed at the United Nations: a global arms trade treaty to regulate sales of all conventional arms. The challenge is to build a strong treaty to stop arms transfers that are likely to fuel serious human rights violations, conflict and poverty.
It is time that all governments took responsibility for the individual tragedies perpetrated with the weapons they supply: the woman raped at gunpoint, the young man crushed under the tracks of a battle tank, the child forced to become a soldier.
Currently, the UN secretary general is asking governments what they want the arms trade treaty to cover. We call on all governments to listen to the millions of people around the world who live in daily fear of armed violence, and build a treaty tough enough to protect them.
Christiane Amanpour CNN
Martin Bell ex-BBC correspondent
Sebastian Junger Vanity Fair
Jon Lee Anderson The New Yorker
Don McCullin freelance photographer
Paul Moreira Canal Plus
Jon Snow Channel 4 News
Charles Wheeler ex-BBC correspondent
and 12 others
PALESTINIAN JOURNALISTS LAUNCH A “FREE ALAN JOHNSTON” WEB SITE
Almost everyone (apart from the BBC itself who don’t want to admit their anti-Israeli bias, since as a publicly-funded entity they are under a British legal obligation to be impartial) recognizes that kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston, like many of those the BBC chooses to hire as news journalists, was a “friend of the Palestinians.”
Now Palestinian journalists have launched a “Free Alan Johnston” web site.
Among the comments on it from Palestinian journalists:
* Mohammad El Gomasy: “The Palestinian People love Alan Johnston.”
* Emad Al-Masri: “Free Alan! he is our friend.”
Of course, the BBC have yet to understand that coddling up to terrorists doesn’t buy you immunity when the terrorists have run out of other people to kidnap.
Thankfully, Johnston is almost certainly still alive despite reports that his kidnappers had executed him. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has told BBC Director-General Mark Thompson that an intermediary from the Palestinian security forces asked his kidnappers the name of Johnston’s cat to prove he had not been killed. They came back with the correct answer – Mombasa.
KEN LIVINGSTONE PLEADS FOR JOHNSTON’S RELEASE ON ARAB TV, PRAISES JOHNSTON AS “FRIEND OF THE PALESTINIAN CAUSE”
London mayor Ken Livingstone appeared on the Arabic-language al-Hiwar TV station on Monday night to call for the release of Alan Johnston. Livingstone said the capture of the BBC journalist was a “catastrophic miscalculation”.
“If you wanted to find a person whose abduction could damage the Palestinian cause, you couldn’t find anyone better to do the job,” Livingstone said of Johnston.
For more on Livingstone, see London Mayor Ken Livingstone may be Jewish: “I could be a self-hater, couldn’t I?” (Nov. 30, 2005).
UK DOCTORS CALL FOR BOYCOTT OF ISRAELI MEDICAL ASSOCIATION
Given the incredible amount Israeli doctors and scientists have achieved for the world in the field of medicine, medical research and innovative life-saving techniques (including for the benefit of the Palestinians), the new call by some British doctors to boycott Israeli ones beggars belief.
This letter by Dr Derek Summerfield, Professor Colin Green, Dr Ghada Karmi, Dr David Halpin, Dr Pauline Cutting and 125 other doctors, published in The Guardian, is part of a new campaign to expel Israel from the World Medical Association. It is the second letter here. (There are so many lies crammed into it that it would take half my day to dissect them.)
This comment about British journalists by a columnist in the Washington Post yesterday can equally be applied to those British doctors:
“The British journalists, like the academics before them, dare to tread where an army of goons has gone before. If they do not recognize the ember of anti-Semitism still glowing within them, they ought to park themselves before a mirror and ask why, of all the nations, they single out Israel for reprimand and obloquy. This business of assigning to Jews a special burden, for seeing in them more of mankind’s bad qualities and less of its good, has a dark and ugly pedigree: the Chosen People, again – and again in the wrong way.”
“PALESTINIANS ATTEND A DEMONSTRATION AGAINST VIOLENCE IN GAZA, APRIL 23, 2007”
Much of what is wrong with the international media’s coverage of the Middle East stems from the two big news agencies, the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters. Almost every major news outlet in the world subscribes to one or both of these agencies and gets much of their information, photographs and video footage from them.
Both the Palestinian and non-Palestinian employees of these agencies have opinions that are heavily slanted against Israel and cloud their coverage.
Look, for example, at the caption Reuters gave to these photos by one of its Gaza photographers, Ibraheem Abu Mustafa.
The caption, “Palestinians attend a demonstration against violence in Gaza April 23, 2007,” was almost certainly written not by the Gaza photographer but by a Reuters employee at their main office dealing with the Mideast, which is in London. And that employee was likely a member of Britain’s 40,000 member National Union of Journalists, who finally went public with their view of Israel earlier this month.
As American blogger Charles Johnson, who has emerged as one of the most astute commentators in the post-9/11 era, observes: “And to supersize the irony, notice the Nike ‘Just Do It’ t-shirt.”
THERE WAS A CEASEFIRE?
Meanwhile, virtually the entire world media yesterday reiterated the AP and Reuters lies that the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority had somehow been observing a truce with Israel.
For example, Reuters Gaza correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi started his piece: “Hamas’s armed wing broke a five-month ceasefire on Tuesday by firing rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip.”
And the BBC story, headlined “Hamas fighters end Israel truce,” began: “The armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement has said it is ending its five-month truce with Israel. Earlier in the day the group launched a sustained barrage of rockets and mortars into Israel, the first such attack since November.”
HonestReporting.com points out that while the western media insist that the Palestinians have maintained a “cease-fire” against Israel for the past five months, the following incidents have taken place so far this month alone:
* Islamic Jihad terrorist captured near Tel Aviv after his bomb belt fails to detonate
* Palestinian bride arrested on suspicion of planning to carry out suicide bombing
* 3 Israelis injured in shooting attack near Modi’in
* Hamas calls for further kidnappings of Israeli soldiers
* Israeli cars shot at in West Bank
* Israeli civilian wounded in West Bank drive-by shooting
* Arrests prevent huge Hamas-planned car bomb in Tel Aviv
* Egypt arrests would-be Hamas suicide bomber near Israeli border
* Palestinian rockets hit Sderot home; several Israelis treated for shock
This website has been meticulous in documenting the ongoing rocket attacks into Israel during the supposed ceasefire.
Britain’s Sky News claimed in their headline this morning that “Hamas broke the ceasefire by firing rockets at Israeli settlements.” But the rockets were not fired at settlements, but at towns in southern Israel. For the benefit of Sky viewers, all Israeli settlements in Gaza have been removed.
For more on Reuters, see here.
PALESTINIAN MURDER OF CHILDREN IGNORED BY INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
At the same time, the media continue to ignore the ongoing violence inside Gaza, since Israel could not be blamed for it.
For example, on Monday night a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was killed as Palestinian gunmen traded fire with each other.
Also on Monday, in a separate incident, a 5-year-old girl suffered serious head wounds when she was hit by another stray bullet.
Also on Monday, in central Gaza, masked gunmen shot a pharmacist and his son, wounding them.
Three Palestinians were hurt in an explosion Monday at a Hamas terrorist’s home, near the Gaza beach. The explosion was triggered by the mishandling of explosives inside the home. Three of the man’s fingers were severed as a result of the misuse of explosives, notes the Palestinian-run Maan news agency: www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=21474
On Sunday night, another Palestinian boy was shot dead by his abductors in the northern Gaza Strip:
www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=21468
NEW TERRORIST ORGANIZATION IN IRAQ NAMED IN HONOR OF HAMAS
A new terrorist organization in Iraq has been named in honor of Hamas.
This Wikipedia entry mentions it, although it is not 100 percent accurate.
According to specialist sources researched exclusively for this website. Hamas of Iraq was in fact founded on March 26, 2007, to mark four years of “American occupation”: www.ikhwan.net/vb/showthread.php?t=30234
Their “military wing” provides information on its attacks and its philosophy here (www.kataeb20.net/index.php) and promises more clips and videos soon, such as an interview with the head of their “missile section”.
It is unclear from their statements whether they have any organizational contacts with Palestinian Hamas. Nevertheless they seem to adopt Hamas’s strategy and speak in admiration of Hamas’s “success” through terrorism.
-- Tom Gross
* Abbas hails Chirac as a “great man”
* Robert Redeker remains in hiding
CONTENTS
1. The French go to the polls
2. Ramallah to name street after outgoing President Chirac
3. “What was once unthinkable in France has already come to pass”
4. “The Redeker Affair” (Commentary magazine, Jan. 2007)
5. “France’s new surrender” (New York Sun, April 11, 2007)
The spate of anti-Semitic attacks France has witnessed during the Chirac years is also continuing. For example, on Wednesday a French rabbi, Elie Dahan, was attacked in a Paris train station, the Gare du Nord. Dahan needed brief hospital treatment for his injuries. The police have yet to make any arrests.
“WHAT WAS ONCE UNTHINKABLE IN FRANCE HAS ALREADY COME TO PASS”
I attach two articles below.
The first concerns the French philosophy teacher Robert Redeker, who remains in hiding with his wife and three children because of an article he wrote in Le Figaro last year critical of Islam. (Redeker’s article was linked to in the first note in this dispatch.)
Redeker and his family have had to move from city to city, from secret location to secret location at their own expense, under police protection.
In the piece below on the “Redeker Affair”, Christian Delacampagne, a professor of French literature and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, writes that: “Today in France, research on the most contested issues of race and religion is taboo unless one exhibits the ‘right’ politics.” As a result he concludes “things have changed. What was once unthinkable in France has already come to pass.”
He also writes that “the growing anti-Semitism one encounters in France, combined with the increasing tendency of the country’s elite to speak of Israel as a ‘temporary’ state, is not only dangerous in itself but bad for France.”
The second article is by Anthony Grant, an assistant Internet editor at “France 24,” the new French 24-hour news channel. Grant writes that neither the murder of Ilan Halimi nor the recent attack on a Jewish cemetery was covered on France 24.
“The Web site, France24.com, receives so many anti-Semitic hate mails that the editors have considered eliminating user reactions to news items altogether.”
-- Tom Gross
FRANCE’S NEW SURRENDER
France’s new surrender
By Anthony Grant
The New York Sun
April 11, 2007
www.nysun.com/article/52226?page_no=1
This time, it’s cultural.
Proud, cocky France has given up yet again, and on two fronts at once: an all-Arabic version of the cable news network that is mostly government-funded, France 24, launched this week, and the ink is barely dry on an agreement France signed with Abu Dhabi to open a branch of the Louvre in that desert emirate.
These developments are not unrelated. Which one underscores more the deep malaise affecting the French nation is debatable, but clearly France is in no mood to put up a fight for things taken rather more seriously in centuries past, such as preserving a sense of national identity.
The very launch of France 24, a 24-hour news network meant to rival CNN and hailed by some in France, albeit prematurely, as punching its equivalent in French weight, is indicative of a nation adrift.
After all, CNN has been broadcasting for a quarter century now, and while that network ushered in the era of news around the clock, the French resisted hopping on the headline highway until they realized just how irrelevant France was beginning to look in the mirror of a globalized society in the 21st century. Clinging to the notion that the French language towers above all others didn’t help either, but broadcasting France 24 in French as well as English and Arabic was supposed to help.
Maybe that’s laudable. After all, as the propaganda that passes for news on Al Jazeera gains in popularity around the world, wouldn’t it be better to know that Arabic audiences are getting their facts on, say, the Middle East peace process from a newsroom in Paris rather than Qatar?
On the other hand, will the millions of Muslims living in France tune in to the news in French and Arabic, or stick with what many of them already know best – Arabic news not from France? The former would only be bad – France’s Muslim communities are already largely cut off from mainstream French society, as the nationwide riots in 2005 so jarringly demonstrated.
The addition of France 24 in Arabic risks making things worse. The Muslims who speak French might watch both stations, but the majority of France does not speak Arabic and thus will not watch the Arabic version of the newscast. The editorial line-up for the network is supposed to be the same regardless of language, but where linguistic fault lines begin, societal fractures often follow.
This is happening in a climate of ambient anti-Semitism and political correctness that permits attacks against Jews to be carried out with more frequency than any nation that collaborated with the Nazis and claims to have atoned for it. There was the brutal torture and murder last year of Ilan Halimi, a young Parisian singled out because he was Jewish. He was reburied earlier this year in Israel. On March 31, another Jewish cemetery was desecrated, this time in the northern city of Lille. Neither event – the Halimi reburial or cemetery attack – was covered on France 24, in any language. How do I know that? I work there. The Web site, France24.com, receives so many anti-Semitic hate mails that the editors have considered eliminating user reactions to news items altogether.
In the meantime, thanks to an agreement signed last month between France’s minister of culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and the authorities in Abu Dhabi, that emirate will now be able to borrow the name “Louvre” for their new branch of it in exchange for about a billion euro. It will also be able to borrow hundreds of works of art, which will find their way into a huge orb-shaped satellite of the Louvre Museum branch that is to be built soon on an artificial island in Abu Dhabi.
This would be much less interesting were the Louvre a private museum like the Guggenheim, which has plans for an Abu Dhabi satellite as well. But the Louvre is publicly funded, and arguably more emblematic of Paris and France than the Eiffel Tower. Mr. De Vabres, unsurprisingly, has hailed the deal as a bridging of cultures, but only a fool could believe him.
Economic indicators looking dicey? Who needs hard work and market reform? Just sell off the Louvre.
In a very real sense it’s a fait accompli. And assuming that cultural bridges like other bridges go both ways, France can look forward to any number of cultural contributions from a country that doesn’t hold elections for any public office, where migrant workers – the kind who’ll be building the Louvre-by-the-bay – are confined to labor camps, and dissent of any kind is silenced effectively.
And of course, France can look forward to all those euro, some of which may even find their way into the subsidies that underwrite France 24 and its latest mission to reach out to the Arab world.
This might all sound bizarre, but this isn’t the first time France has cozied up to folks most everyone else seems to have rightly assessed as enemies or those who might too readily sympathize with the enemy. In the past, such behavior has only left France weaker on the world stage, and perhaps less obviously, weaker from within.
* “Israeli melons have AIDS”
* BBC postpones its “Weddings and Beheadings” “comedy”
* Hate-filled UK journalist: Israel probably murdered Alan Johnston
CONTENTS
1. Israeli Holocaust survivor named as hero of Va. Tech shootings
2. Guardian editor condemns UK journalists’ call to boycott Israel
3. Published on The New York Times letters page
4. 200,000 Turks call for secular state guarantee
5. Israeli photographer wins Pulitzer Prize for picture of settler
6. BBC: “Weddings and Beheadings” postponed
7. Hate-filled UK journalist: Israel probably murdered Alan Johnston
8. Reporter’s captors want $5m. ransom
9. Obsession with Alan Johnston: what about Parnaz Azima?
10. “Death to America” on the BBC
11. Holland says no to Hamas
12. Israelis shot: almost no reporting outside Israel
13. Palestinian guards beat journalists
14. Christian bookstore, Internet cafes bombed in Gaza
15. “Israeli melons have AIDS”
16. DiCaprio to be daddy-o
17. “Guardian editor condemns U.K. journalists’ call to boycott Israel” (Ha’aretz, April 18, 2007)
18. “UK reporters in Israel ignore boycott” (Jerusalem Post, April 17, 2007)
19. “Brothers and sisters, I’m off” (By Michael Gove, UK Times, April 18, 2007)
ISRAELI HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR NAMED AS HERO OF VA. TECH SHOOTINGS
A Romanian-born Holocaust survivor has been widely praised for his heroic role during the massacre at Virginia Tech university on Monday, when South Korean-born native Cho Seung-hui shot 32 people dead.
Professor Liviu Librescu, 76, an Israeli who taught engineering at Virginia Tech, used his body to block the door, allowing himself to be repeatedly shot while giving time for other students to escape by opening windows and jumping out.
Many of Librescu’s students have sent thankful e-mails to his wife, and to his son in Israel, explaining how he gave his life to save their lives. By coincidence, he was murdered on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
His body is being returned to Israel for burial. Even papers usually hostile to anything Israeli have praised Librescu. For example, the front page of the Independent of London (the paper of Robert Fisk) says today: “The Hero: Brilliant professor who escaped Holocaust died saving his students.”
GUARDIAN EDITOR CONDEMNS UK JOURNALISTS’ CALL TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL
This is a follow-up to: For first time, British journalists officially vote to boycott Israeli goods (April 14, 2007).
Alan Rusbridger, the editor of the (London) Guardian, has condemned the British journalists’ resolution. “The Guardian disapproves of these kinds of boycotts and does not think they serve a useful purpose. It was a misguided motion,” he said.
For more on Rusbridger, and his comparisons between Israel and “apartheid,” see “New Prejudices for Old”.
Another “senior British journalist” told Ha’aretz that the motion was “an embarrassment for us all.” For more, see the first article attached below.
The second article below, from the Jerusalem Post, reports that the motion is “being ignored by Israel-based UK journalists.” The Sky News Jerusalem bureau chief told the Post: “I can speak for everyone working for Sky News [here] and none of us will be boycotting any time in the near future.” I am among the journalists quoted in this article.
The third article below is by celebrated British commentator Michael Gove, a founder member of this email list seven years ago, who says today in the London Times that he will now quit the journalists’ union.
The union has a membership of nearly 40,000 British journalists, who work in all the leading media outlets in the UK. The last time they made such a politically controversial move was in 1986, when its delegate conference sent a “telegram of condolence” to Colonel Muammar Gadhafi after the U.S. bombing of Libya.
PUBLISHED ON THE NEW YORK TIMES LETTERS PAGE
This is a rare occasion when The New York Times publishes a letter that hits the nail on the head:
New York Times
April 12, 2007
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
David Brooks reports that “moderate Arab reformers” have traced the problems in Iraq, Iran and other Middle East hot spots to a country roughly the size of Massachusetts that dominates the affairs of its Arab neighbors and operates a puppet government in Washington as well.
O.K., but what do the hard-liners think?
Michael Smith
Cynthiana, Ky.
200,000 TURKS CALL FOR SECULAR STATE GUARANTEE
There are of course moderates in the Middle East, notably in Turkey and Iran. On Saturday, over 200,000 Turks gathered in the country’s capital, Ankara, to voice their opposition to the possibility that the ruling Justice and Development Party will select Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to be its candidate for president. The protestors said they feared Erdogan’s Muslim background and the Islamist nature of his party could push modern Turkey away from its secular origins if he is elected. Modern Turkey was established a century ago as a secular state by its founding father Kamal Ataturk.
ISRAELI PHOTOGRAPHER WINS PULITZER PRIZE FOR PICTURE OF SETTLER
Oded Balilty, an Israeli photographer working for the Associated Press, won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography on Monday. Balilty’s prize-winning photo shows a lone Jewish settler trying to resist eviction from the West Bank settlement outpost of Amona by Israeli security forces on Feb. 1, 2006. About 200 Jewish settlers were wounded during the demolition of nine Jewish homes at the site.
The photo can be viewed here.
BBC: “WEDDINGS AND BEHEADINGS” POSTPONED
Has the BBC been mugged by reality? With claims by Palestinian Islamic terrorists in Gaza that they have executed BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, the BBC appears to be toughening up on its usual almost sympathetic attitude to Muslim terrorism.
BBC radio was planning to broadcast tomorrow what the BBC had described as a comedy, titled “Weddings and Beheadings,” about an Iraqi cameraman who earns his income filming the beheadings of hostages.
Apparently now that one of their own has possibly been beheaded, the BBC no longer finds the subject funny, and the BBC Radio web site now says the “broadcast has been postponed.” (See: www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_reading.shtml)
But will this sudden reality check prove merely temporary, as a similar reality check did after the London transport bombings of 2005? (See: www.tomgrossmedia.com/BBCDiscoversTerrorism.html)
(For more on “Weddings and Beheadings” see: www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7916)
HATE-FILLED UK JOURNALIST: ISRAEL PROBABLY MURDERED ALAN JOHNSTON
This is an update to previous mentions on this list of kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent Alan Johnston.
Johnston, 44, was abducted by gunmen in Gaza City on March 12 and has not been seen or heard from since then. On Sunday, a Palestinian Islamist group, “The Brigades of Tawheed and Jihad,” said it had killed Johnston to support demands for the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. But Palestinian officials have said they could not confirm the claim.
Now Alan Hart, a former reporter for ITN and BBC in the UK, has been the first of the anti-Israeli British media to make the incredible allegation that Israel killed Johnston. Hart writes on his blog:
“Alan was not only the BBC’s man… he was the best and most informed provider of news about the Palestinian side of the story; a story which, in many of its details, is an embarrassment to Israel and those governments, most notably the Bush and Blair regimes, which support Israel’s efforts to break the will of the Palestinians to continue their struggle.
“... There is a case for saying (repeat a case) that the party with most to gain from Alan Johnston’s permanent disappearance was Israel… If Alan Johnston is dead, it’s my hope that the BBC at executive management level will rise above its fear of offending Zionism too much and allow its reporters (Frank Gardner and Jeremy Bowen are second to none) to make a full, thorough and honest investigation.”
Tom Gross adds: Even among the multitude of partisan journalists against Israel, Alan Hart, is one of the most hate-filled. A former correspondent for ITN’s News At Ten and the BBC’s Panorama program, he has never ceased to attack Israel. His latest book is “Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.”
Hart joins other conspiracy theorists who blame Israel and / or “the Jews” for everything from the Asian Tsunami, to starting the Second World War.
REPORTER’S CAPTORS WANT $5M RANSOM
Yesterday, the leading London-based Saudi-owned daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Alan Johnston’s captors are demanding $5 million for his release. (This fact has been known to me for over a month but I had been asked to refrain from making it public by British officials. It has now been widely reported this morning in the British and Israeli press.)
This renewed demand for ransom contradicts unconfirmed reports that he has been killed.
As reported previously on this email list / website, last year Fox news paid $2 million to obtain the release of its two kidnapped employees in Gaza. Fox news has vigorously denied paying any ransom, but the fact that $2 million in cash in a suitcase was taken by third parties acting on behalf of Fox news from Israel into Gaza in order to secure their release, has been confirmed to me by both Palestinian and Israeli officials.
OBSESSION WITH ALAN JOHNSTON: WHAT ABOUT PARNAZ AZIMA?
While we should all be concerned about Johnston’s well being, the enormous coverage granted to his plight on the BBC, CNN International, al Jazeera and Sky News, contrasts greatly with the almost complete lack of coverage by the BBC and others about an American journalist who is being held against her will in Teheran.
Radio Farda broadcaster Parnaz Azima, who has dual American and Iranian nationality, arrived in the Iranian capital on January 25th in order to visit a family member who is sick, and immediately had her passport confiscated.
Yesterday, Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi called upon the Iranian authorities to return Azima’s passport.
Azima is a broadcaster with Radio Farda, the Persian-language service run jointly by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Voice of America.
President Jeffrey Gedmin (who is a subscriber to this email list) has called on the Iranian authorities to allow Azima to leave “without further delay.”
“DEATH TO AMERICA” ON THE BBC
It is interesting to learn of the personal background of the kind of journalist that the BBC – which as a publicly funded institution is under a British legal requirement to broadcast balanced and impartial news coverage – employs as a leading foreign correspondent.
See, for example, the opening paragraphs here, of its new series “Death to America: Anti-Americanism examined”.
Needless to say, the BBC fails to mention its own central role in stoking anti-Americanism with its highly selective and one-sided reporting in dozens of languages throughout the world.
HOLLAND SAYS NO TO HAMAS
While other European Union countries are beginning to cooperate with the new Hamas-led Palestinian unity government, despite its extremist positions, the Dutch have announced that Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniya will be refused entry to participate in a “Palestinians in Europe” conference in Rotterdam on May 5, 2007.
Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said Haniya should not bother to apply for a visa, since his application would be rejected. “We consider Hamas, to which Haniya is affiliated, a terrorist group,” he said.
The Dutch have significantly toughened up their position on Hamas, although the left-wing Dutch Labor Party, a member of the coalition, is urging a rethink of the policy of not speaking with Hamas.
The date chosen for the conference, Saturday 5th May, is particularly significant in Holland as it has been designated “Freedom Day”, marking the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of Holland from Nazi occupation.
ISRAELIS SHOT: ALMOST NO REPORTING OUTSIDE ISRAEL
Yesterday the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades – a constituent part of “moderate” Palestinian President Abbas’s Fatah party – claimed responsibility for a shooting attack in the morning that injured four Israeli civilians in the West Bank, including a 30-year-old pregnant woman and another woman, 25, who were waiting at a hitchhiking post.
Barely any western media bothered to report this.
PALESTINIAN GUARDS BEAT JOURNALISTS
Yesterday security guards at the Palestinian parliament beat with rifle butts Palestinian journalists who were demonstrating in support of kidnapped BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, pushing back reporters and beating at least two of them.
About 200 journalists had gathered outside the building, seeking information about Johnston. When journalists tried to enter parliament to talk to lawmakers about the case, the guards violently pushed them back and barred them from entering.
This was reported in places like America and China, for example here in the Miami Herald: “Palestinian Guards Beat Journalists,” (April 17, 2007); and here in the China People’s Daily: “Palestinian police repress BBC reporter solidarity rally,” (April 17, 2007).
But it was almost unreported in Europe. For example, neither the BBC nor the Guardian mentioned this development. No doubt they don’t want to paint the Palestinian Authority in a bad light.
CHRISTIAN BOOKSTORE, INTERNET CAFES BOMBED IN GAZA
Three explosions in Gaza City at around 3 a.m. on April 15, damaged two Internet cafes and a Christian bookstore. The “vice squad” of Muslim militants called “Swords of Truth,” are believed to be behind the attacks.
Many Christian bibles were burned in the explosion. Some 3,000 Christians live among 1.5 million Muslims in Gaza.
In recent months, about three dozen Internet cafes and shops selling pop music have been attacked in Gaza, with assailants detonating small bombs outside businesses at night, causing damage but no injuries.
“ISRAELI MELONS HAVE AIDS”
“Beware of Israeli melons infected with AIDS arriving in Saudi Arabia!” is the latest rumor being spread by SMS throughout Saudi Arabia.
The text message reads: “The Saudi Interior Ministry warns its citizens of a truck loaded with AIDS-infected melons that Israel brought into the country via a ‘ground corridor.’”
The Saudi Interior Ministry have denied making such an announcement, and the head of the center for chemicals and toxins in Mecca, Dr Ahmad Elias, also stressed that spreading the HIV virus via melons was a scientific impossibility.
Nevertheless, the rumor is continuing to spread like wildfire, according to sources in Saudi Arabia. It has also gained widespread attention in the Arab world and was on the front page of Asharq Al-Awsat, one of the leading Saudi and pan-Arab newspapers.
DICAPRIO TO BE DADDY-O
The UK’s second bestselling newspaper, The Mirror, reports that Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Israeli supermodel Bar Rafaeli are expecting a baby in the fall, preceded by June nuptials in Israel. Others have denied the report.
The two have been dating for 15 months, and recently sent the Israeli press into a frenzy when DiCaprio visited the quiet Tel Aviv suburb of Hod Hasharon to meet Rafaeli’s family. The Dan Accadia Herzliya Hotel has been contacted about staging the wedding, according to the Mirror.
* For the Mirror report, see: www.mirror.co.uk/showbiz/3am/tm_headline=caprio-to-be-a-daddio&method=full&objectid=18892315&siteid=89520-name_page.html
* For more on DiCaprio, see: the eleventh note in the dispatch Chirac “secretly urged Israel to topple Assad” (& 28% of Israeli Arabs say Holocaust is a myth) (March 19, 2007).
-- Tom Gross
GUARDIAN EDITOR: “IT WAS A MISGUIDED MOTION”
Guardian editor condemns U.K. journalists’ call to boycott Israel
By Charlotte Halle
Ha’aretz
April 18, 2007
www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/849987.html
The editor of the London Guardian on Tuesday condemned as “misguided” a resolution passed by a British journalists’ union last week that called for a boycott of Israeli goods.
“The Guardian disapproves of these kinds of boycotts and does not think they serve a useful purpose. It was a misguided motion,” editor of the British daily Alan Rusbridger told Ha’aretz by telephone last night.
On Friday, at its annual meeting, the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the UK voted for a boycott of Israeli goods in protest of last year’s Lebanon war and Israeli “aggression” in the territories.
The vote, which carried 66 to 54, read: “This ADM [annual delegate meeting] calls for a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions and the TUC [Trades Union Congress] to demand sanctions to be imposed on Israel by the British government,” according to reports in the British press. It followed an earlier motion, which was passed by a larger majority, condemning the “savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon by Israel” last year and the “slaughter of civilians by Israeli troops in Gaza and the IDF’s continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hezbollah.”
The union has a membership of nearly 40,000 British journalists, who work in all the leading media outlets in the UK.
“My guess is that the majority of working journalists would feel very uneasy and hostile to the motion which was published in their names,” one senior British journalist told Ha’aretz. “It’s just an embarrassment for us all,” said another.
Members of the Foreign Press Association (FPA) in Israel discussed Tuesday at their annual general meeting whether to submit a formal response to the NUJ, said the organization’s chairman Simon McGregor-Wood, of ABC News, who is British. “The resolutions seem to go against some of the core ethics of journalism that we are here to protect, such as balance and objectivity. I don’t think any representative body of journalists should be taking a side,” he said.
Much of Tuesday’s FPA meeting was devoted to discussing further demonstrations to protest the kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston, thought to have been forced from his Gaza apartment by masked men on March 12.
It is not the first time the NUJ has made political moves likely to be out of sync with its membership. In 1986 its delegate conference sent a “telegram of condolence” to Colonel Muammar Gadhafi after the U.S. bombing of Libya, a book about the 100-year-old union recalls.
The British journalists’ union boycott follows a short-lived academic boycott a year ago by Britain’s university lecturers’ union, which was overturned four days after it passed. The Church of England synod has also called for disinvestment from Israel.
Zvi Heifetz, Israel’s ambassador in London, commented on the NUJ motion to Ha’aretz: “It is a shame that an organization that represents journalists threatens to boycott goods from Israel only one day after worrying rumors surfaced about the fate of one of the union’s own members. The timing of this move is also peculiar in light of the recent bi-weekly meetings between PM Olmert and President Abbas and the attempts made by the Arab world and Israel to revive the peace process, based on the Saudi initiative.”
Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said: “We obviously view such activity negatively, but I wouldn’t overstate the significance of this event.”
BRITISH REPORTERS IN ISRAEL SPEAK OUT ON BOYCOTT
UK reporters in Israel ignore boycott
By Yaniv Salama-Scheer
The Jerusalem Post
April 17, 2007
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1176152819433&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
A motion to boycott Israeli goods that was passed by Britain’s National Union of Journalists on Friday is being ignored by Israel-based UK journalists.
Most British correspondents working in Israel and the Palestinian Authority are not members of the NUJ. One who is, Donald Macintyre of The Independent, said he did not know anything about the union’s actions until he read it in the Israeli media.
“The job of the NUJ is to protect journalists and not adopt political postures, Right or Left,” Macintyre told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. “It certainly won’t affect my job or my professional outlook.”
“We are here to report on Israel as well as the Palestinians. If they [the NUJ] want to get involved in Middle East issues, they should join the brave campaign for [kidnapped BBC Gaza correspondent] Alan Johnston by the brave Palestinian journalists supporting him,” he said.
The BBC’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Simon Wilson, said Johnston’s situation was far more important and pressing than the boycott call. “I have a missing journalist in Gaza,” he said. “I have no time for anything else. Besides, [the boycott] is not something we would comment on.”
British TV’s Sky News Jerusalem bureau chief, Yael Lavie, told the Post: “I can speak for everyone working for Sky News [here] and none of us will be boycotting any time in the near future.”
The boycott, approved in a 66-54 vote at the National Union of Journalists’ annual delegates meeting, is intended to protest Israel’s “military adventures” in the Gaza Strip and its “savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon” last summer.
Its language would appear to require that union members here be restricted to the PA territories so they do not contribute to the Israeli economy.
“If that is the case, the boycott is absolutely ridiculous, but I can’t even say if that’s what they are in fact calling for because I haven’t been sent a text of the motion,” a Jerusalem-based British journalist said.
The motion was stoutly defended by the NUJ’s public relations director, Tim Gopsill. He told the Post: “Who can condemn the NUJ’s boycott when the EU and USA are boycotting the Palestinians and leading to worse economic situations for those in the [PA] territories? Members’ sympathies lie with the people in Palestinian areas.”
Gopsill blamed the Palestinian economic situation for Johnston’s kidnapping. “Taking Alan Johnston [captive],” he said, “demonstrates the Palestinians’ desperate way of drawing attention to their problems.”
NUJ member Toby Harnden, the Daily Telegraph’s Washington reporter and a former Jerusalem correspondent, called the boycott “insulting to the intelligence,” adding, “This kind of thing is what gives British trade unions their loony Left image.”
Tom Gross, a former Jerusalem correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph, said British trade unions had taken a fashionably left-turn in their views over the past few years, echoing the positions taken by the “international Left” in targeting Israel.
“With Britain as the base for influential international media such as the BBC, Financial Times, Economist magazine and Reuters news agency, British media lies about Israel have ramifications far beyond Britain,” he said. “If British journalists really want to boycott Israeli goods, they better give up their desktop and notebook computers and their mobile phones, all of which have components developed and manufactured in Israel.”
Opponents of the boycott have asked in various Web postings why Israel is being targeted by journalists who should be working without restrictions or preconception, and/or why other countries and regimes are not being similarly boycotted. Notably, some critics wrote, despite the Johnston kidnapping, there has been no move to boycott the PA.
Other Web postings, meanwhile, have endorsed the action, some praising it as similar to an NUJ boycott of apartheid-era South Africa.
MICHAEL GOVE QUITS NUJ
Brothers and sisters, I’m off
By Michael Gove
The Times (London)
April 18, 2007
I have been a member of a trade union for nearly 20 years now. The union to which I belong, the National Union of Journalists, kept me fed and watered when I was a young trainee and out on strike. I was grateful for the support and camaraderie of its members and appreciated the virtues of solidarity. As time has worn on I’ve kept faith with the union because it kept me going at a difficult time.
With the benefit of hindsight I realise that the strike for which I came out in support was mishandled. Better men and women than I, with much more to lose, lost it in a vain struggle. Yet they made those sacrifices in defence of a principle in which they believed, and they thought that their actions would protect younger journalists like me most. So it would have been more than churlish to fail to respect their sacrifice.
But now, reluctantly, I fear that I will have to part company with the union, even as I continue to respect the men and women who went out on strike, in its name, in Aberdeen nearly two decades ago. Because the NUJ recently passed a motion at its conference calling for a boycott.
This boycott is not of a repressive state that outlaws free expression (of which, sadly, there are still too many) but of one of the few states in the Middle East with a proper free press: Israel.
The NUJ exists to defend, among other virtues, freedom of speech. That virtue is better defended in Israel than in any other nation of the Middle East and it comes under assault daily from forces driven by fanaticism.
Now is a time, for all sorts of reasons, for showing solidarity with those defending democracy in that region, not for passing on the other side of the road. So, with no little sadness, I feel that I have to leave.
* Leading Arab-Israeli: “The Holocaust is the greatest crime in the history of the world”
* Controversially, Daniel Pearl honored with Holocaust victims in Miami
* British teachers drop the Holocaust “to avoid offending Muslims”
* Lawsuit to German government: Recognize 2nd generation as Holocaust victims. Children of survivors plan to file class action demanding German government recognize traumas caused by childhoods in shadow of the Holocaust
Israel is today holding its annual Holocaust memorial day. With Holocaust denial increasing around the world, especially by those in the Middle East and their supporters elsewhere who wish to cause another Holocaust, knowledge about the Holocaust and contemporary anti-Semitism form an important background to understanding Middle Eastern current affairs.
CONTENTS
1. Auschwitz death toll was higher, UK government archives reveal
2. Israel marks Holocaust Day
3. Leading Arab-Israeli: “The Holocaust is the greatest crime in the history of the world”
4. Vatican ambassador reverses decision to shun Holocaust remembrance
5. Daniel Pearl honored with Holocaust victims in Miami
6. Anti-Semitic attacks in Chicago, Lille and Montreal
7. Anti-Semitic incidents worldwide doubled in 2006
8. German town strips Hitler of honorary citizenship just before G8 summit
9. Seychelles restaurant displays Nazi bank notes
10. Anti-Semitic South Korean children’s book withdrawn
11. UK schools dropping the Holocaust from history lessons
12. DePaul University to honor Norman Finkelstein with tenure
13. David Irving, visiting Auschwitz, denies gas chambers
14. Cancer risk up to 9 times greater for Holocaust survivors
15. Lawsuit: Recognize 2nd generation as Holocaust victims
16. Irena Sendlerowa, 97, Kansas school kids and “Life in a Jar”
17. “Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims” (S. Mail, April 2, 2007)
18. “Saved from scraps, music of the camps” (S. Telegraph, April 1, 2007)
19. “I’m no hero, says woman who saved 2,500 ghetto children” (Guardian, March 15, 2007)
20. Poland to mark little-known Nazi camp (Associated Press, March 16, 2007)
AUSCHWITZ DEATH TOLL WAS HIGHER, UK GOVERNMENT ARCHIVES REVEAL
[Note by Tom Gross]
The release by the British government National Archives of a chilling, hand-written confession letter by Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss, strongly suggests that the death toll at Auschwitz was two million, not 1.5 million as previously thought, reports the (London) Jewish Chronicle in a front-page article.
Hoss’s letter was neatly written out and counter-signed by his British jailer. He matter of factly states that he “personally arranged on the instructions of Himmler in May 1941, the gassing of two million persons, between June-July 1941 and the end of 1943, during which time I was commandant of Auschwitz.”
In an accompanying note, British officials say that the confession was written entirely voluntarily. Hoss was later executed by the Polish authorities.
ISRAEL MARKS HOLOCAUST DAY
The State of Israel is today honoring the six million Jews who were murdered by the Nazis.
The ceremonies started last night, when six elderly Holocaust survivors living in Israel were asked to light the memorial torches in front of gathered dignitaries, including Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Acting President Dalia Itzik, scores of ambassadors from around the world, and hundreds of Holocaust survivors who were sitting in the front rows.
The stories of these six survivors can be viewed here.
This morning at 10 am, the whole of Israel came to a standstill for two minutes. All television and radio stations suspended broadcast and cars stopped in mid-travel while passengers got out to stand in the street in silence. All places of entertainment in Israel are closed today.
CNN International showed Israelis observing the two minutes silence without commentary live at 10 am Israel time. The BBC (unsurprisingly) ignored it.
Over 200,000 Holocaust survivors are thought to be still living in Israel, about one-third of them in poverty, according to recent welfare reports. The insufficient help given to these impoverished survivors by the Israeli government and by the often wealthy official Jewish charities, particularly by the Claims Conference, has been disgraceful.
LEADING ARAB-ISRAELI: “THE HOLOCAUST IS THE GREATEST CRIME IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD”
This morning, Arab-Israeli Member of the Knesset Ahmed Tibi (who was previously viewed as an extremist when he served as chief advisor to Yasser Arafat) said that “the Holocaust is the greatest crime in the history of the world.” Those that deny or downplay the Holocaust, including in the Islamic world, must be condemned, he added.
For more on Arab-Israeli views of the Holocaust, see
* Chirac “secretly urged Israel to topple Assad” (& 28% of Israeli Arabs say Holocaust is a myth) (March 19, 2007)
* The Holocaust’s Arab heroes (& Polish righteous Gentile recommended for Nobel Prize) (Oct. 11, 2006).
VATICAN AMBASSADOR REVERSES DECISION TO SHUN HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE
The Vatican Ambassador to Israel, Monsignor Antonio Franco, at the last moment reversed a decision to boycott last night’s Holocaust memorial services in Jerusalem.
The decision to attend follows a ferocious row over the Vatican’s failure to acknowledge its passivity and the active role taken by some Roman Catholic leaders in the murder of Jews in the Holocaust.
The Holocaust memorial authorities at Yad Vashem said it would have marked the first time in which a foreign emissary deliberately skipped the ceremony, which was attended by many other ambassadors and foreign dignitaries.
There is growing controversy over the Vatican’s plans to beatify the wartime Pope Pius XII, who remained deliberately silent as Jews, including those of Rome, were being murdered in the Holocaust.
When he was elected pope in 1939, Pius XII shelved a letter against racism and anti-Semitism that his predecessor had prepared. In December 1942, he abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews. When Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, the pope watched passively.
In Croatia, Slovakia and elsewhere Roman Catholic priests actively participated with the Nazis in the slaughter of Jews.
Many in Israel are calling for the Jewish state to break off diplomatic relations with the Vatican if the Vatican makes Pope Pius XII a saint as it plans to later this year or next.
Franco, who took up his position in Jerusalem last year, said his previous decision not to attend yesterday evening’s official state ceremony was a “personal” one, and not made by his superiors at the Vatican.
DANIEL PEARL HONORED WITH HOLOCAUST VICTIMS IN MIAMI
Slain Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl was yesterday included on the Holocaust Memorial Wall in Miami Beach. His is the first name of 30,000 on the wall that was not killed in the Holocaust.
Pearl was forced to say “I am a Jew” before being decapitated by his killers, who included an upper-middle class British-born Muslim.
His father, Judea Pearl (who is a subscriber to this email list), said his son died for the same reasons as the six million Jews that were killed. “The forces of barbarity and evil are still active in our world. The Holocaust didn’t finish in 1945.”
Renowned violinist Ida Haendel, played during the ceremony in Miami yesterday. Pearl was a classically trained violinist.
A movie starring Angelina Jolie based on the memoirs of Pearl’s widow, Mariane, is scheduled to be released this year.
Holocaust victims and survivors were also honored during the ceremony. There are nearly 3,800 Holocaust survivors still alive in Miami-Dade County.
While mourning over his death, some think it highly inappropriate for a non-Holocaust victim like Daniel Pearl to be honored on a Holocaust memorial.
SYNAGOGUE IN CHICAGO VANDALIZED
Even though anti-Semitic acts in America are more uncommon than in most other countries, they continue to occur. On April 5, for example, Chicago police say a synagogue in Chicago was spray-painted with offensive language and derogatory messages and phrases including “Death to Israel.”
Some of the phrases were written in Arabic. The desecration was condemned by Islamic officials in Chicago, as well as Jewish ones.
53 JEWISH TOMBSTONES DAMAGED IN LILLE
53 Jewish tombstones have been damaged in an attack on a Jewish cemetery in the northern French city of Lille. The mayor’s office described it as a “hateful anti-Semitic act” and said it was “shocked” and “disgusted”.
The attack on the Lille Jewish cemetery (which includes memorial stones to Holocaust victims) comes only weeks after The Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF) reported a 45 percent increase in anti-Semitic attacks in France between 2005 and 2006.
Meanwhile, over 7,000 French Jews have sent a signed petition to the U.S. congress, asking for political asylum in the United States due to anti-Semitism in France. “We believe that the United States, known for its traditional welcome to those under threat in their native lands, must open its doors to us,” the petition says.
For an example of a particularly brutal act of anti-Semitism in France, see The barbarians of Europe, The brutal murder of Ilan Halimi.
French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen said yesterday that “Jacques Chirac shouldn’t have apologized for Jews’ deportation” in “the so-called Final Solution.” Over one out of eight French people say they will vote for Le Pen in the elections next Sunday.
BOMB EXPLODES OUTSIDE JEWISH CENTER IN MONTREAL
Also on April 3, a homemade bomb exploded outside a Jewish community center in Montreal. A fire resulted, but no one was injured, according to police spokeswoman Lynne Labelle.
The explosion came two days before the third anniversary of the firebombing of a Jewish elementary school in Montreal.
According to Canadian Jewish groups, there has been a 13 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Canada last year. The number of attacks has doubled compared to five years ago and is four times higher than 10 years ago. These include various firebombings and death threats made anonymously against Canadian Jews.
ANTI-SEMITIC INCIDENTS WORLDWIDE DOUBLED IN 2006
According to a report released yesterday at Tel Aviv University, last year witnessed a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents worldwide, and the highest total number since 2000.
The incidents are getting more violent too. The report stated that the number of physical assaults on Jews was twice as high as it was in 2005.
The countries with the greatest rise in anti-Semitism were Britain, Australia, France and Canada. Professor Dina Porat of Tel Aviv University said the two principle events that encouraged anti-Semitism were the efforts of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deny the Holocaust, and the way the Second Lebanon War was covered by media.
During the war, “even the world’s mainstream journalism portrayed the figure of the Jew as characterized by brutality,” Porat said.
For more, see: www.tomgrossmedia.com/Anti-IsraelCartoons2006.html.
GERMAN TOWN STRIPS HITLER OF HONORARY CITIZENSHIP JUST BEFORE G8 SUMMIT
The German Baltic Sea resort of Bad Doberan last week stripped Hitler of his honorary citizenship, only two months before the town hosts the Group of Eight Summit.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel is due to host world leaders there in June.
The town of 12,000 had granted Hitler honorary citizenship in 1932. Hartmut Polzin, the town’s mayor, said he hoped the move would end a “not pretty and unnecessary” discussion, Deutsche Welle reported.
SEYCHELLES RESTAURANT DISPLAYS NAZI BANK NOTES
The Seychelles, usually known as a serene vacation destination, has become the subject of controversy after Jewish groups asked it to prevent the display of Nazi memorabilia.
Taking pride of place in the Seychelles La Scala restaurant is a large framed display of Nazi-period German banknotes.
The proprietor of the restaurant, Silvana Torsi, claimed that her husband was “a collector”. However, there are no bank notes displayed from any other country during the same period.
ANTI-SEMITIC SOUTH KOREAN CHILDREN’S BOOK WITHDRAWN
A South Korean publisher has agreed to withdraw a best-selling children’s book from stores after it was accused of spreading anti-Semitism.
The series of comic books, titled “Meon Nara, Yiwoot Nara,” or “Far Countries, Near Countries” and authored by visual arts professor Rhie Won-bok, claims to teach children about the world and has sold more than 10 million copies since the first volume was published in 1987.
One of three books on the U.S. published in 2004 contains a chapter claiming Jews were the driving force for the hatred that led to the September 11 attacks, that they exert control over all U.S. media and also prevent Korean-Americans from succeeding in the United States.
Korean-American groups joined Jewish-American groups in urging the publisher to stop selling the book.
UK SCHOOLS DROPPING THE HOLOCAUST FROM HISTORY LESSONS
The first article attached below reports that schools in the UK “are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.”
“Some teachers dropped the Holocaust completely from lessons because of fears that Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic reactions. One school also avoided teaching the Crusades because its ‘balanced’ handling of the topic would directly contradict what was taught in local mosques.”
British Jewish leaders have again largely been silent about this matter, as many were in the 1930s as Hitler initiated anti-Jewish measures. They might like to ponder why it takes a Lebanese Christian living in America to warn about the danger of British schools dropping teaching of the Holocaust and the Crusades. You can watch her warning here.
DEPAUL UNIVERSITY TO HONOR NORMAN FINKELSTEIN WITH TENURE
One of the leading contemporary Jewish anti-Semites (there were also some delusional Jews who expressed support for Hitler in 1930s Germany) is at the center of a row over the campaign by DePaul University (in Chicago) to grant him tenure.
Norman Finkelstein is widely regarded as one of the world’s most dangerous Holocaust revisionists, partly because he himself is Jewish and he hides behind the fact that his parents suffered under Hitler to claim that other Jews have lied about the Holocaust.
As the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung wrote about Finkelstein: His “assertions are pure invention... No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate, without taking the time to carefully compare his claims with the sources he cites.”
Finkelstein has also defamed and insulted real Holocaust scholars and survivors. For example, he called Nobel Prize winner Ellie Wiesel a “resident clown of the Holocaust circus” and “a ridiculous character.”
Yet DePaul is set to honor such dangerous and irresponsible scholarship, by awarding Finkelstein tenure.
Finkelstein has attracted over 3500 signatures in support of his tenure in an online petition, with petitioners leaving some really hateful comments about Jews and the Holocaust.
A counter petition launched calling on DePaul not to grant him tenure has only about 2000 signatures at present.
For more on Finkelstein, see:
* The fifth note in the dispatch “Israeli Apartheid Week” kicks off around the world (Feb. 13, 2007)
* The first note in David Irving: Auschwitz “was a tourist attraction” (& British Muslims scrap Holocaust Day) (January 31, 2007).
DAVID IRVING, VISITING AUSCHWITZ, DENIES GAS CHAMBERS
Holocaust denier David Irving has appeared on Italian television again claiming there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Irving was shown at the former German Nazi death camp in Poland where he claimed that engineering techniques were not sufficient to allow the Nazis to gas people en masse.
A spokesman for the Auschwitz museum, Jaroslav Mensfelt, said Irving likely visited recently, but without the knowledge or consent of museum officials. “He is a persona non grata here,” Mensfelt said. “It would be best if he never came here. Such people desecrate the place and are not welcome,” he told The Associated Press.
Irving was released from jail in Vienna in December after serving 13 months of a three-year sentence for Holocaust denial.
CANCER RISK UP TO 9 TIMES GREATER FOR HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
The first comprehensive study on the risk of cancer among Holocaust survivors has shown that Holocaust survivors are up to nine times more likely to have cancer than their peers.
Cancer of the large intestine among male Holocaust survivors was found to be nine times that of men the same age who immigrated to Israel from Europe before World War II. Among women, the rate was 2.25 times higher for survivors of the Holocaust.
The study, carried out at the University of Haifa’s School of Public Health, was based on National Cancer Registry statistics. The team found that the younger the Holocaust survivor was during the war, the greater their cancer risk. Women Holocaust survivors were 1.5 times more likely to have breast cancer than pre-war immigrants.
AMCHA, the National Israeli Center for Psychosocial Support of Survivors of the Holocaust and the Second Generation, confirms the research findings. “A day doesn’t go by when I don’t sign a letter that is somehow connected to a cancer patient,” Tel Aviv branch director Hani Oron said.
“The exposure to starvation and malnutrition during childhood and adolescence, when the body is in a period of accelerated growth, was found to amplify the risk of developing cancer,” the study says.
LAWSUIT: RECOGNIZE 2ND GENERATION AS HOLOCAUST VICTIMS
At least 60 children of Holocaust survivors are planning to file a joint class action with the German government for their suffering. The Fisher Fund, established seven years ago by attorney Gideon Fisher, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, is holding talks with senior German officials in a bid to receive financing for mental treatments required by some second-generation Holocaust survivors. Many children of Holocaust survivors suffer from various traumas, often severe.
The Fisher Fund, an independent body, grants scholarships and assists in places where other organizations such as AMCHA don’t have sufficient resources to help.
“While working on the lawsuit, we heard shocking stories,” Fisher said last week. “We heard of people who put their shoes next to the door every night preparing to escape, or of people who wake up every morning at 4 am and look for their father under the bed.
“This is what they went through during their entire childhood. Every night their father went under the bed, hid there and begged them not to take him away, and they had to take him out of there and convince him that everything was okay.”
IRENA SENDLEROWA, 97, KANSAS SCHOOL KIDS AND “LIFE IN A JAR”
I attach four articles below. The first reports on UK schools which have dropped Holocaust (and Crusader) studies from the syllabus. The second article features the collection of Francesco Lotoro, a professional pianist who for 16 years has been scouring Europe’s capitals to amass his collection of the music played and sung by the victims of the Holocaust.
The third article reports on Irena Sendlerowa, 97, who has been nominated for this year’s Nobel peace prize. She is a Polish social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish babies and children from Nazi death camps by placing them with Christian families under assumed names. Amazingly, Sendlerowa (also known as Sendler), who now lives in a Warsaw nursing home, does not consider herself a heroine.
Unlike the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,000 Jews by employing them at his Krakow factory and is widely recognized thanks to an award-winning book and film, Sendlerowa’s story remained relatively unknown until recently when a group of school children in the American state of Kansas researched and wrote a play about her, called “Life in a Jar.”
Sendlerowa buried jars containing both the real and assumed names of the children she saved, in the hope they could later learn the names of their biological families and be reunited with them after the war. In the event almost all their real parents were killed.
Sendlerowa’s activities were cut short when she was arrested by the Gestapo in October 1943, who then tortured her, breaking her legs and feet. She still has to use crutches today as a result of her injuries. Despite her torture she never revealed the location of the jar with the addresses and real names of the hidden children.
(For more, see www.irenasendler.org.)
The Polish Communist government, which encouraged anti-Semitism, suppressed any knowledge of Sendlerowa, but the new upper house of the Polish parliament has unanimously approved a resolution putting her name forward for the Nobel peace prize.
The final article below details the move by Polish authorities to mark the forgotten Pustkow concentration camp, where 15,000 people were killed.
-- Tom Gross
UK SCHOOLS DROPPING THE HOLOCAUST FROM HISTORY LESSONS TO AVOID OFFENDING MUSLIMS
Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims
By Laura Clark
The Mail on Sunday (UK)
April 2, 2007
www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=445979&in_page_id=1770
Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.
It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.
Teachers fear backlash over crackdown in the classroom.
There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades – where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem – because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.
The findings have prompted claims that some schools are using history ‘as a vehicle for promoting political correctness’.
The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, looked into ‘emotive and controversial’ history teaching in primary and secondary schools.
It found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class.
The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework.
The report said teachers feared confronting ‘anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils’.
It added: “In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils.
“But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques.”
A third school found itself ‘strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination’.
The report concluded: “In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.”
But Chris McGovern, history education adviser to the former Tory government, said: “History is not a vehicle for promoting political correctness. Children must have access to knowledge of these controversial subjects, whether palatable or unpalatable.”
The researchers also warned that a lack of subject knowledge among teachers – particularly at primary level – was leading to history being taught in a ‘shallow way leading to routine and superficial learning’.
Lessons in difficult topics were too often ‘bland, simplistic and unproblematic’ and bored pupils.
“IT SEEMED ABSURD THAT THERE WAS MUSIC IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS. BUT IT’S WHAT WE DID ALL DAY”
Saved from scraps, music of the camps
By Malcolm Moore in Rome and Miles Goslett
The Sunday Telegraph (London)
April 1, 2007
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/04/01/wholo01.xml
Scribbled in notebooks, diaries and even on pieces of lavatory paper, they provide a remarkable history of the music played and sung by the victims of the Holocaust.
Scores for thousands of waltzes, tangos, operas and folk songs will soon be made available to the public, thanks to the dedication of Francesco Lotoro, a professional pianist who for 16 years has been scouring Europe’s capitals to amass his collection.
Mr Lotoro, 42, stumbled across his first piece of Holocaust music on a trip to Prague in 1991.
“I was interested and decided to bring some back with me,” he said. “In the end, I had to buy a new suitcase because I found 300 works.”
Much of the music is sad and plaintive. The lyrics of one song by Josef Kropinski read: “In Buchenwald, the birch trees rustle sadly, as my heart sways languishing in woe.”
Despite the privations of life, there are several upbeat songs and plenty of wry Jewish humour. “There’s no life like life at Auschwitz!” read the lyrics to another song.
Much of Mr Lotoro’s collection comes from Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, a concentration camp used by the Third Reich as a propaganda exercise to hide its extermination plans. Consequently, music was allowed, and orchestras and bands were permitted to perform. There was even a jazz band called the Ghetto Swingers.
Nevertheless, 33,000 of the 140,000 Jews who were sent there died, and 90,000 were sent to other camps, where many also perished. One musician that Mr Lotoro discovered had been interned there was Rudolf Karel, a Czech composer arrested for taking part in the resistance in Prague.
Despite suffering from dysentry, he used lavatory paper to compose a five-act opera and a nonet - a composition for nine instruments. The last of his works was an upbeat Prisoners’ March, dated four days before his death in March 1945.
Another set of music came from William Hilsley, a British pianist born in 1911, who survived imprisonment at Spittal and Kreuzburg in Germany and who died four years ago.
Anita Lasker Walfisch, 81, who was a prisoner at Auschwitz and Belsen, played the cello in bands throughout the war. Her talent enabled her to survive and, eventually, to emigrate to Britain, where she was a founder member of the English Chamber Orchestra.
“One was very lucky to be able to be part of it because it postponed one being killed,” she said. “It seemed absurd that there was music in concentration camps. But it’s what we did all day.”
Mr Lotoro’s collection, already comprising 4,000 manuscripts and 13,000 microfiches, as well as letters, drawings and photographs, will go on display in a new library at Rome’s Third University in September.
“I felt it was my mitzvah, my duty as a Jew, to preserve this cultural heritage, this art of the people who were unseen,” said Mr Lotoro, who converted to Judaism five years ago.
He sees his job as just beginning. “Of course, many documents were destroyed during the liberation, or by the Germans as they retreated. Though even now, while I scour through bookshops I find notebooks with a couple of pages of music in them.
“A friend told me the other day about a song that the Italian prisoners sang in Auschwitz which came from a folk song. In Israel, of course, there are many people who remember the songs they sang. But I have to move fast, the generation is dying out and the music will be lost for ever.”
Mr Lotoro paid special tribute to Aleksander Kuliewicz, a Pole who, after surviving imprisonment in Germany, dictated 700 songs that he had memorised to nurses at his bedside. Mr Lotoro is now working on recording these on to a cycle of 32 CDs.
“I’M NO HERO,” SAYS WOMAN WHO SAVED 2,500 GHETTO CHILDREN
I’m no hero, says woman who saved 2,500 ghetto children
• Poland puts 97-year-old forward for Nobel prize
• Social worker smuggled Jews out of Warsaw
By Kate Connolly in Berlin
The Guardian
March 15, 2007
www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2034132,00.html
A Polish social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the Nazi death camps was yesterday honoured as a national hero by the Polish parliament.
Irena Sendlerowa, 97, who has been nominated for this year’s Nobel peace prize, changed the identity of the children she rescued from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943 and placed them with Polish families.
As a member of Zegota, a secret organisation set up by the Polish government in exile in London in the second world war to rescue Polish Jews, she organised a small group of social workers to smuggle the children to safety. She worked in the Warsaw health department and had permission to enter the ghetto, which had been set up in November 1940 to segregate the city’s 380,000 Jews.
She and her team smuggled the children out by variously hiding them in ambulances, taking them through the sewer pipes or other underground passageways, wheeling them out on a trolley in suitcases or boxes or taking them out through the old courtyard which led to the non-Jewish areas.
She noted the names of the children on cigarette papers, twice for security, and sealed them in two glass bottles, which she buried in a colleague’s garden.
After the war the bottles were dug up and the lists handed to Jewish representatives. Attempts were made to reunite the children with their families but most of them had perished in concentration camps.
Unlike the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,000 Jews by employing them at his Krakow factory and is widely recognised thanks to an award-winning book and film, Mrs Sendlerowa’s story remains relatively unknown. A few years ago it was picked up in America by a group of Kansas school children who wrote a play about it, Life in a Jar.
Yesterday at a special session in Poland’s upper house of parliament, members unanimously approved the resolution to honour Mrs Sendlerowa for rescuing “the most defenceless victims of the Nazi ideology – the Jewish children”. President Lech Kaczynski said she was a “great hero who can be justly named for the Nobel peace prize”.
He added: “She deserves great respect from our whole nation.”
But Mrs Sendlerowa, who is in a Warsaw nursing home, insisted she did nothing special.
In an interview she said: “I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality.”
“The term ‘hero’ irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little.”
She was arrested in October 1943 and taken to Gestapo headquarters where she was beaten. Her legs and feet were broken and she was then driven away to be executed. But a rucksack of dollars paid by Zegota secured her release. She was knocked unconscious and left by the roadside. She still has to use crutches today as a result of her injuries.
One of the “names in a jar” was Michal Glowinski, now a professor of literature. “I think about her the way you think of someone you owe your life to,” he said.
Elzbieta Ficowska was smuggled out of the ghetto by Mrs Sendlerowa in a toolbox on a lorry when she was just five months old.
“In the face of today’s indifference, the example of Irena Sendlerowa is very important. Irena Sendlerowa is like a third mother to me and many rescued children,” she said, referring also to her real mother and her Polish foster mother.
Due to the Communist regime’s suppression of history and its encouragement of anti-semitism, few Poles were aware of Zegota’s work until a marble plaque dedicated to the organisation was unveiled near the former Warsaw Ghetto in 1995.
“PUSTKOW WAS TAKEN APART AND NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT IT”
Poland to mark little-known Nazi camp
Pustkow labor camp, where 15,000 inmates died, dismantled before end of war; local official says it needs to be recognized before its existence is forgotten with passage of time
The Associated Press
March 16, 2007
www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3377318,00.html
Polish Authorities are working on plans to mark a little-known Nazi concentration camp and nearby military installation.
The Pustkow labor camp, where 15,000 inmates died, was dismantled before the end of the war, and local official Andrzej Regula said it needs to be recognized before its existence is forgotten with the passage of time.
“If 15,000 people were killed here, the world should know about this,” Regula said in a telephone interview from the area, about 180 miles south of Warsaw. “Everyone knows about Auschwitz because it was left there, but Pustkow was taken apart and no one knows about it.”
Current ideas include a museum or reconstructing some of the camp’s barracks, Regula said.
Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, said the idea to commemorate the camp with a monument or a museum is “extremely important and praiseworthy” but that rebuilding part of the camp could be “somewhat troubling.”
The Nazis established Pustkow in 1941 and inmates were used as forced laborers on the nearby military installation. Most of the inmates were Russian POWs, but some 3,000 Jews also died in the camp, Regula said.
All that remains of the camp is a hill over most of the ruins known as the “mountain of death,” part of the camp’s gate, and fragments of access roads through the woods, he said.
* With Britain as the base for influential international media such as the BBC, Financial Times, Economist magazine and Reuters news agency, British media lies about Israel have ramifications far beyond Britain
CONTENTS
1. British journalists need to stop using cellphones and computers
2. “Inshallah”: The BBC “goes native”
3. “NUJ votes to boycott Israeli goods” (The Guardian, April 13, 2007)
4. Email exchange between a BBC listener and a BBC news executive over the use of the term “Inshallah” by a “star” BBC Middle East reporter
[Note by Tom Gross]
I’ve been reviled and abused by some fellow British journalists for suggesting they are partisan against Israel. One particularly anti-Israel BBC correspondent told another BBC employee (a subscriber to this list) that he personally wanted to “kill” me.
Well here we have it. An official admission from many British journalists of antipathy towards Israel. For the first time, Britain’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) voted to boycott a country, and that country is Israel.
The vote was taken late yesterday afternoon by delegates representing different branches of the NUJ.
Just to show what disregard British (and indeed most European) journalists have for the truth about Israel “The motion called for the end of Israeli aggression in Gaza.” In case they haven’t noticed, Israel withdrew from Gaza in the summer of 2005, and indeed is maintaining a ceasefire even while Palestinian rockets continue to be fired from Gaza on an almost daily basis into Israel, aimed at civilians.
The NUJ motion also spoke of “last year’s war in Lebanon.” Of course there was a war in Israel too, where hundreds of civilians were killed and injured by Hizbullah rockets, but the National Union of Journalists seems not to have noticed.
Indeed the absence of those evil Israelis in Gaza has given free reign for the journalists’ beloved Palestinians to kill and intimidate and kidnap who they want. One of the latest kidnap victims is the BBC’s Alan Johnston, who no longer had the Israeli army there to protect him.
If British journalists really want to boycott Israeli goods, they better give up their desktop and notebook computers and their mobile (cell) phones, all of which have components developed and manufactured in Israel.
“INSHALLAH”: THE BBC “GOES NATIVE”
Meanwhile, the identification with Islam by some (non-Muslim) BBC staff seems to grow by the day.
I attach as the second item below correspondence between a British citizen (and hence a license-fee contributor to the BBC’s lavish news budget) and a BBC news executive after one of the BBC’s “star” Middle East correspondents, Hugh Sykes, in a report last month from Baghdad on BBC Radio Four’s PM programme, said: “The Deputy Prime Minister will, inshallah, be in hospital by now.”
The BBC’s Assistant Editor at Broadcasting House in London then defends his reporter’s use of the term “inshallah.”
-- Tom Gross
NUJ VOTES TO BOYCOTT ISRAELI GOODS
NUJ votes to boycott Israeli goods
By Stephen Brook
The Guardian
April 13, 2007, 5.15pm breaking news
media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2056880,00.html?gusrc=ticker-103704
The National Union of Journalists has voted at its annual meeting for a boycott of Israeli goods as part of a protest against last year’s war in Lebanon.
Today’s vote was carried 66 to 54 – a result that met with gasps and a small amount of applause from the union delegates present.
The vote came during a series of motions on international affairs and reads: “This ADM [annual delegate meeting] calls for a boycott of Israeli goods similar to those boycotts in the struggles against apartheid South Africa led by trade unions and the TUC [Trades Union Congress] to demand sanctions be imposed on Israel by the British government and the United Nations.”
The motion was originally brought by the union’s South Yorkshire branch and opposed by the Cumberland branch, which said it was too political and was not tied closely enough to journalistic matters.
After a show of hands twice failed to give a clear result, union scrutineers were called in and the doors to the conference room closed.
The vote on the motion was taken after it was split from a larger motion that condemned the “savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon by Israel” last year.
This motion, known as Composite B in Order Paper 4, was carried by a large majority and also condemned the “slaughter of civilians by Israeli troops in Gaza and the IDF’s [Israeli Defense Forces] continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hezbollah”.
The motion called for the end of Israeli aggression in Gaza and other occupied territories.
The union’s national executive committee has been instructed to support organisations including the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, Jews for Justice in Palestine and the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding.
“INSHALLAH”: THE BBC “GOES NATIVE”
The following is an email exchange (sent to my colleague Melanie Phillips) between a BBC listener and a BBC news executive over the use of the word “Inshallah” by a “star” BBC Middle East reporter on BBC Radio Four’s PM programme.
-- Tom Gross
Subject: Re: Hugh Sykes’s ‘inshallah’
Sent: 25 March 2007 03:09
To: PM Feedback
From: Brian Gilbert
Dear PM,
Did I hear correctly – did Hugh Sykes in his report from Baghdad on Friday 23.3.07 say ‘inshallah’, personally, and not as a quotation? Has he converted to Islam? I think we should know. Or is he using ‘inshallah’ casually as one might the English phrase ‘God willing’ which in contemporary usage has little religious content? Can ‘inshallah’ be so used – drained of religious content? Or does Sykes intend it piously?
It is shocking to hear BBC reporters, who have a duty of impartiality, using religious phrases as their own from faiths they do not in fact share. Is it to become the fashion for non-Muslim reporters (many of whom may be atheists), to say ‘The Prophet, Peace be upon him’? The BBC should be clear to its listeners about this. If there is to be a mouthing of religious phrases in an effort at cultural ingratiation this should be a declared policy, and you should inform your listeners about it.
Yours sincerely
Brian Gilbert
Subject: Re: Hugh Sykes’s ‘inshallah’
Date: 27/03/2007 17:40:58 GMT Standard Time
To Brian Gilbert
From: Roger Sawyer
Dear Mr Gilbert,
Thank you for your email. I don’t agree that Hugh’s use of ‘inshallah’ was shocking. As I am sure you are aware, the phrase is used constantly, very often fatalistically, as an expression of hope that a certain course of events comes to pass and is not necessarily religiously loaded. It was not inappropriate for Hugh to use it.
If you wish to take your complaint further, details of how to do so can be found at: www.bbc.co.uk/complaints
Yours sincerely,
Roger Sawyer
Assistant Editor
Broadcasting House/PM
Subject: Re: Hugh Sykes’s ‘inshallah’
Date: 27/03/2007 21:01:25 GMT Standard Time
To: Roger Sawyer
From: Brian Gilbert
Dear Roger,
When I hear reporters on Al Jazeera using ‘For Jesus Christ’s sake’ or ‘Deo volente’ or ‘Shalom’ I might begin to regard ‘inshallah’ as value neutral. Until then, you’re kidding yourself and your listeners – and poor old sentimental, lugubrious Hugh Sykes has, in the old unfortunate phrase, ‘gone native’ ...
Sincerely
Brian Gilbert
Subject: Re: Hugh Sykes’s ‘inshallah’
Date: 28/03/2007 08:42:09 GMT Standard Time
From: Roger Sawyer
To: Brian Gilbert
Dear Mr Gilbert,
I’ve heard Hugh say ‘Shalom’ to someone during an interview. It’s about empathy and has no more significance than his using ‘bonjour’ in a piece from France. Or indeed, a foreign reporter saying ‘goodbye’ in English, meaning as it does ‘God be with you’.
As I mentioned in my first email, there is a mechanism for you to escalate your complaint.
Yours sincerely,
Roger Sawyer
Assistant Editor
Broadcasting House/PM
Subject: Re: Hugh Sykes’s ‘inshallah’
Date: 28/03/2007 16:59:30 GMT Standard Time
From: Brian Gilbert
To: Roger Sawyer
Dear Roger,
Thanks for your reply. Empathy is good, although in this case Hugh was not speaking to his Iraqi but to his Radio 4 audience. Let’s hope Al Jazeera’s reporters show similar cultural empathy in their dealings...
Best wishes
Brian Gilbert
28/03/07
Dear BBC,
Please find below copies of the e-mails I have exchanged with Roger Sawyer of the PM programme regarding Hugh Sykes’s casual use of ‘inshallah’ in a report to his British audience 23.3.07.
I find it extraordinary that a reporter for the BBC can so casually use ‘inshallah’ as an equivalent for ‘God willing’ or ‘with any luck’ when addressing a British audience. Why should he do this? As a special effort at empathy? You must remember that many of those hoping to kill British and American soldiers, as well as innocent Iraqis, will be using the same expression regularly, and with religious intent. I have heard such fanatics do the same when interviewed by the BBC.
Using ‘inshallah’ to show empathy to Muslim Iraqis is something, I suspect, that is quite lost on Sykes’s British audience, who will not hear it as a simple ‘bonjour’ or ‘goodbye’ as Mr Sawyer asserts, but rather as a devout wish by a believer in Islam.
Sykes’s ‘inshallah’ is an example of cultural cringe, or sycophancy, or simply adopting the psychology of the adversary - a mental strategy well-known in times of stress – but to be avoided, especially when, for example, a young student at Clare College, Cambridge, remains in hiding for fear of his life because he dared crack a joke about Islam in his college paper...
His head will still be on his neck in the months to come, ‘inshallah’!
Yours Sincerely
Brian Gilbert
“THE DECADENT WEST DOESN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT PATIENCE IS”
[Note by Tom Gross]
Due to particularly heavy work commitments, there will be no dispatches this week.
In the meantime, you may wish to look at three new “Cartoon and Photo pages” that have been posted recently on my website. These kinds of photos are either not published at all in influential liberal media such as The New York Times, or are significantly downplayed.
THE DEADLY THREATS OF HIZBULLAH AND IRAN
www.tomgrossmedia.com/HizbullahIran.html
“We have the patience needed to destroy the Jews and spread Islam throughout the world,” one Iranian Islamic fundamentalist said recently. “After all, we have been weaving carpets for thousands of years. The decadent West doesn’t understand what patience is.”
This photo essay concerns the Islamic regime in Iran, its Lebanese client militia Hizbullah, and its sympathizers and fellow travelers in the West.
This page is forward looking and contains useful items to note for any future conflict with Iran and / or Hizbullah.
ISLAMIC MILITANCY
www.tomgrossmedia.com/IslamicMilitancy.html
This page shows the murder of a moderate Muslim by Islamic Jihad in the West Bank city of Jenin, the dispute over cartoons of Mohammed, and a glimpse of the worldwide violent reaction by extremist Muslims to one small passage from a lengthy speech made by the pope in German.
The pictorial portrayal of Mohammed is not forbidden in the Koran, but only in relatively recent interpretations of Sharia law. This page includes examples of Muslims themselves portraying Mohammed. Such depictions were commonplace until the modern growth of Islamic fundamentalism.
ANTI-ISRAELI AND ANTI-SEMITIC CARTOONS
www.tomgrossmedia.com/Anti-IsraelCartoons2006.html
This page contains a cross-section of anti-Israeli (and often overtly anti-Semitic) cartoons from the international media. The cartoons, from South Africa, New Zealand, Spain, Britain, Norway, Poland, Russia, Brazil, Syria and China, are only a small sampling of works from five continents over a one-month period.
While many in the Islamic world and in the West have strongly condemned cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims, there is near-silence among western media and NGOs about these kinds of anti-Semitic cartoons.
* Israeli scientists develop revolutionary new software that enables computers to communicate directly with one another without the Internet
* Next they say they can develop software allowing cell phone users to speak for free without the need for using a cellular operator
* Bullet-proof Israeli ambulance enters Ramallah to save Palestinian baby
* Canadian philosophy professor compares 9/11 bomber Mohammed Atta to Jewish biblical hero
This dispatch mainly concerns Israel.
CONTENTS
1. Arab language academy to be established in Israel
2. Israeli team creates communication between computers without the Internet
3. Poland interested in training its air force pilots in Israel
4. “No pot on Passover”
5. Poll: 77 percent of Israeli Jews believe in God
6. Arab lesbians hold conference in Haifa
7. Israeli ambulance enters Ramallah to save Palestinian baby
8. Olmert: Abbas reneged on promise to free Shalit
9. Palestinian rocket fire at Israel continues despite “truce”
10. Canadian choir to present biblical Jewish hero as suicide bomber
11. “In Mideast, a growing linguistic divide” (Washington Post, April 1, 2007)
12. “Portable ECG machine uses cell technology” (San Fran. Chronicle, March 26, 2007)
13. “Choir to depict bible hero as a suicide bomber” (National Post, March 28, 2007)
ARAB LANGUAGE ACADEMY TO BE ESTABLISHED IN ISRAEL
The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, has passed a law to establish an academy for Arabic language and culture in Israel. The new academy will operate in parallel to the existing Hebrew Language Academy.
In Israel, Hebrew and Arabic are the official languages of the state. Ibrahim Abu Shindi, co-director of the Citizens’ Accord Forum, who spearheaded the initiative, said, “This is a big step forward and is an official recognition by the state of the identity and culture of Israel’s Arab minority and its important contribution to Israeli culture and public life.”
It is hoped that the academy will be a center for research, and for nurturing Arabic language – with an emphasis on the local dialect, culture and folklore of Arab citizens of Israel. The academy, which will open in early 2008, will work with Arabic departments at universities both in and outside Israel.
Each of the Hebrew and Arabic academies are to receive similarly-sized generous government funding. Academies for the preservation of Yiddish and Ladino will also receive much smaller funding from the authorities.
Below, I attach an article from the Washington Post, which (because in the Post’s opinion there is little else to report on in the rest of the world other than to highlight the problems they can find with Israel) devotes 1500 words to what they call the “growing linguistic divide” between Jews and Arabs. “As their physical separation grows, a shrinking number of Israelis and Palestinians are studying each other’s language, a casualty of the enduring hostility between two peoples still sharing one land,” claims the Post.
ISRAELI TEAM CREATES COMMUNICATION BETWEEN COMPUTERS WITHOUT THE INTERNET
A group of Israeli scientists from the Technion in Haifa led by Professor Roi Friedman have developed WiPeer – a new software that enables mobile and desktop computers to communicate directly with one another in a local area without any mediating factor, such as an Internet server. The software, which is available for free on the Net, enables users to send messages, pictures, files, movies and games to one another wirelessly within a 100-300 meter radius.
The user-friendly application platform enables simple communication between computers in close proximity – 100 yards inside a building, and up to 300 yards in the open air. Users can transfer dozens of pictures from one computer to another in less than a minute, and even a 700 MB file can be transferred in up to 15 minutes. It is also possible to carry on chats without disturbing anyone in the vicinity or to play collaborative games like chess. And all of this will be possible without any Internet connection.
“For example,” says Friedman, “employees who go abroad on company business may be seated separately from one another in the airplane. With this software, they can work together on their presentation during their flight.”
The software was completed earlier this year and two weeks ago became available at www.wipeer.com. Since it was published, many thousands of people have downloaded it and it has attracted much attention on web sites and blogs throughout the world.
The next achievement the Haifa team are aiming for is to develop software for the cellular phone which can bypass cellular operators and offer free calls to anyone within close proximity, such as a shopping mall, a school, or a sports stadium.
Israeli scientists have also developed a portable electrocardiograph machine that can transmit highly detailed data on heart activity to physicians by cell phone. For more, see the second article below, from the San Francisco Chronicle.
POLAND INTERESTED IN TRAINING ITS AIR FORCE PILOTS IN ISRAEL
In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Poland’s foreign minister Aleksander Szczyglo said that his country is interested in training its air force pilots in Israel.
Szczyglo, in Israel to sign an expanded military cooperation agreement, noted that the Polish Air Force had purchased F-16 fighter aircraft from the United States and wished to train its pilots in Israel, where they could take advantage of the experience and reputation of the Israel Air Force.
The Polish foreign minister was also hopeful of cooperation between the two countries in the fight against terrorism: “Israel has much experience in fighting terror and our army and security forces are interested in holding joint training in various areas including the war against terror.”
During his recent visit, Szczyglo also praised relations between Israel and Poland. “In the past several years, Poland has represented and expressed Israeli interests without reservation in the European Union, and that is not something that can be taken for granted,” he said.
“NO POT ON PASSOVER”
Israel’s pro-marijuana political party has announced that pot is forbidden for observant Jews on Passover, the Jerusalem Post reveals. A spokesman for the Green Leaf party announced that cannabis was among the substances Jews are forbidden to consume during the week-long Jewish festival, that began on Monday.
Biblical laws prohibit eating leavened foods during Passover, replacing bread with flat crackers called matza. Those rules have also been extended to forbid other foods like beans and corn, and more recent rulings by rabbis have further expanded the ban to include hemp seeds, which today are found in some health oils – and in marijuana.
Green Leaf is a small political party that lobbies for the legalization of marijuana, which is a popular drug among Israelis despite being illegal. Although the political party is by no means a Jewish religious authority, the group decided to warn its observant supporters not to use the drug during Passover. “You shouldn’t smoke marijuana on the holiday, and if you have it in your house you should get rid of it,” Michelle Levine, a party spokeswoman said.
However, the rabbinic injunctions banning hemp were never adopted by Sephardi Jews, who come from countries in the Middle East and North Africa. That means there is no reason they can’t keep smoking marijuana, Levine said – except of course that the drug remains illegal, despite her party’s best efforts.
POLL: 77 PERCENT OF ISRAELI JEWS BELIEVE IN GOD
In an extensive poll of over 1,000 Israeli Jews carried out for Israel’s biggest newspaper Yediot Ahronot before the Passover holiday and published on April 2, 2007, 77 percent of Israelis said they believed in God. 8 percent said they believed in “not God but some greater power” and 12 percent said they were outright atheists.
Regarding religious practice, 50 percent said they were Secular, 30 percent described themselves as Traditional, 12 percent as Orthodox, and 8 percent as Ultra-orthodox.
ARAB LESBIANS HOLD CONFERENCE IN HAIFA
The following is an update to Islamic fury at Palestinian lesbian conference in Haifa (& Arab praise for kidnapped BBC man) (March 14, 2007).
Defying threats of violence from Islamic extremists, Arab lesbians gathered in the Israeli city of Haifa last week for a rare public event. Homosexuality is strictly forbidden by Islam, and a statement issued by one of Israel’s main Muslim groups described it as a “cancer” in the Arab community.
As a result only a few of the Arab women in the crowd of about 250 were gay, said Samira, 31, a conference organizer, who came to the event with her Jewish Israeli girlfriend. This, she added, was a sign of how much Arab women feared being identified as lesbians in a society where “honor killings” remain a problem.
Many of the attendees said they were sad that the only place safe enough to hold a conference for gay Arab women was in a Jewish area of Haifa, which has a mixed Arab-Jewish population.
“This conference is being held, somehow, in exile, even though it’s our country, but it’s not being held in Nazareth or Umm el-Fahm (two large Israeli Arab towns),” said Yussef Abu Warda, a playwright.
ISRAELI AMBULANCE ENTERS RAMALLAH TO SAVE PALESTINIAN BABY
A bullet-proof Israeli ambulance last week entered the West Bank city of Ramallah to save a six-month old baby who was in critical condition after inhaling toxic substances.
This was the first time an Israeli ambulance had entered into Palestinian territory for six years. After Israeli ambulances were attacked by Hamas and Fatah gunmen, in recent years they would only go as far as the Israeli army checkpoints, where they would pick up Palestinian patients in need of medical care in Israel.
The paramedics evacuated the unconscious baby, just a few hours after two other babies, who went to the same daycare center as the boy, died of similar symptoms. Upon arriving in Ramallah, the ambulance was escorted by a convoy of Palestinian police, who accompanied it all the way to the hospital, and blocked roads to ensure it got through safely.
The baby along with his parents was taken to the Chaim Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer in central Israel after receiving a special permit from the Israeli army due to his serious condition.
PALESTINIAN ROCKET FIRE AT ISRAEL CONTINUES DESPITE “TRUCE”
Palestinian gunmen in northern Gaza fired another Qassam rocket into Israel yesterday as Jews celebrated the Passover holiday. Almost 200 rockets have been fired at Israel since the November 2006 “truce.” 150 have landed inside Israel. The Israeli government, fearful of international criticism, has largely failed to respond to these rockets.
OLMERT: ABBAS RENEGED ON PROMISE TO FREE SHALIT
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has violated his concrete promise to free kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit before a Palestinian national unity government was formed.
Olmert revealed that Abbas had made the commitment a number of times in meetings between the two leaders, and also during three-way summits that included U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and foreign heads of state.
For more on Gilad Shalit, see the dispatch Saving Corporal Shalit (June 28, 2006).
CANADIAN CHOIR TO PRESENT BIBLICAL JEWISH HERO AS SUICIDE BOMBER
The third and final article below is from the National Post in Canada. The paper reports that “a Victoria choir will next month present Samson as a suicide bomber. Simon Capet, music director of the Victoria Philharmonic Choir, says he wanted to update Handel’s Samson oratorio to be relevant to today’s audiences by drawing comparisons to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. ‘We didn’t want to just present the work as a simple morality tale,’ says Mr. Capet. ‘There is a social and political commentary here that’s important.’”
The setting of the oratorio will be 1946 Jerusalem. Capet says he chose the period to draw comparisons to the bombing of the British headquarters at the King David Hotel.
Capet continues, “Is there any difference between pulling down a pillar or blowing a bomb? ...Samson killed thousands of people. To show him in the traditional mythological sense does a disservice.”
Comparing Samson to a terrorist is becoming more widespread. Shadia Drury, a philosophy professor and Canada Research Chair for Social Justice, recently compared Samson to World Trade Center bomber Mohammed Atta.
-- Tom Gross
A GROWING LINGUISTIC DIVIDE
In Mideast, a growing linguistic divide
Shrinking numbers of Israelis, Palestinians studying each other’s language
By Scott Wilson
The Washington Post
April 1, 2007
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/31/AR2007033101104.html
Recruiters from Israel’s military intelligence first identified Ran Vittelson, a stellar Arabic student, as a blue-chip prospect when he was a sophomore at the large public high school here.
Quiet and studious, Vittelson has a rare talent for Arabic, a language of dwindling interest to Israeli Jews, many of whom identify it with their enemy.
“I’ll be translating Arabic texts and listening also to avoid terror attacks,” said Vittelson, 18, who will begin his compulsory army service after graduation in a few months.
Malek Iram, a Palestinian merchant, is also a talented language student. The aluminum siding salesman is studying Hebrew, a language of declining interest to Palestinians who identify it with their enemy, at a small institute in the West Bank city of Hebron.
“I have to understand what the Israeli businessmen are saying,” Iram, 26, said after class on a recent afternoon. “Otherwise, I’ll be at a disadvantage.”
As their physical separation grows, a shrinking number of Israelis and Palestinians are studying each other’s language, a casualty of the enduring hostility between two peoples still sharing one land. Those Israelis and Palestinians studying Arabic and Hebrew, both official languages of the Jewish state, are doing so for reasons that reveal vastly different outlooks on the future.
“The attitude on both sides toward the other language, and by extension those who speak it, is very disappointing,” said Sasson Somekh, who helped found the Arabic department at Tel Aviv University nearly 40 years ago. Now retired, he is lobbying against its closure. “Both sides are just very afraid of the other,” he said.
Judging by enrollment in universities and private institutes, the number of Israeli Jews and Palestinians choosing to study the languages has fallen by a third in some places and nearly disappeared in others since 1993, when the Oslo peace accords established the semiautonomous Palestinian Authority and began separating the two peoples.
Many Israelis look to Europe as their prime economic and cultural reference point. In business, the language they need is more likely to be English or French than Arabic. Today, among those Israeli Jews studying Arabic, many more than a decade ago are doing so for one reason: preparing for service in the Israeli security agencies.
By contrast, many Palestinians view Israel’s thriving economy as the nearest path to prosperity, even though fewer and fewer of them have permission to work in Israel. For ambitious Palestinians, Hebrew remains the lingua franca of business and a useful tool for navigating the Israeli military checkpoints.
“At the end of this there will be two states,” said Mazen Abu Shamsiya, who runs the Hebrew language institute in Hebron that Iram attends. “But I am convinced Israel will never live without the Arabs, so long as there is an economic connection.”
In Israel’s Jewish public school system, Arabic is technically compulsory through the 10th grade, although about 35 percent of students choose instead to study French or Russian or to enroll in religious schools where Arabic is not required.
Israeli Arab students, who attend separate schools, are required to study Arabic and Hebrew. All Israeli students must pass an English exam to graduate. In the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the Palestinian Authority does not teach Hebrew in public schools.
In a survey commissioned last year by Israel’s Education Ministry, Israeli high school teachers said the main challenge in teaching Arabic was the “low image” of the language among Jewish students, a majority of whom said it should no longer be compulsory.
“If you study French, you are part of a sophisticated literary culture,” said Shlomo Alon, the ministry’s head of Arabic instruction in the Jewish school system for nearly two decades. “That’s the true explanation, but no one wants to say it.”
On Alon’s office door hangs a poster featuring the Arabic alphabet, the insignia of Israel’s military intelligence appearing prominently in one corner. The branch gives teachers classroom materials and tests the brightest students in their sophomore year. Only 2.5 percent of Jewish 11th- and 12th-graders choose to study Arabic at the highest level, a number unchanged since the start of the most recent Palestinian uprising six years ago.
Military intelligence recruits serve in safer posts than their classmates in the infantry. The classical Arabic taught in high school does not help with conversation in a language complicated by various dialects. But it is the form used in TV and radio news broadcasts in the Arab world, which the recruits monitor.
“My friends think it’s a bit odd that I study Arabic,” Vittelson said amid the din of his high school’s hallways clearing out for Passover break. “But they are wrong.”
Rosh Haayin, a town of 30,000 on Israel’s coastal plain, highlights the demographic challenge facing military recruiters as the flow of Jews from Arabic-speaking countries dries up and the first new immigrant generation dies off.
Jews from Yemen, raised speaking Arabic, once dominated Rosh Haayin. But they now account for roughly 10 percent of the population, composed mostly of middle-class Jews with European and Russian backgrounds who have little interest in Arabic. “There are very few native Arabic speakers left in the Jewish population,” said Carmit Bar-On, who teaches the language at the high school here. “There is a problem teaching Arabic because there is a problem between Arabs and Jews.”
After military service, fewer and fewer Israelis are studying the language in university, threatening the future of some Arabic departments.
At 73, Somekh, the retired professor, is the dean of Arabic studies in Israel. He arrived a native Arabic speaker from Baghdad in 1951 after graduating from high school there. His Arabic classes swelled following the 1973 Middle East war, then dipped when the first Palestinian uprising began in 1987, he said. Since the Oslo accords, enrollment has fallen more than 30 percent, even though, he said, “the threat to Israel is higher than ever.”
Reflecting the mood in Israel, he lamented, “A friend of mine tells me we are now a high-tech economy that the Arabs have nothing to do with, so now we can turn our eyes to the West.”
Three years ago, after Somekh had stopped teaching full time, the university president told him that he was considering closing the department. “I told him the whole world will say the largest university in Israel just closed its Arabic department,” Somekh said. “That scared him. But there is still this feeling of needing to get away from them as far as possible. This is the attitude shown toward Arabs and toward Arabic.”
Last month, Israel’s parliament voted to establish the state’s first Arabic academy to promote the language.
Ulpan Akiva, a language school that occupies a seaside compound in Netanya, is the first stop for many new Jewish immigrants seeking to learn Hebrew.
Before the uprising and Israel’s construction of a separation barrier, scores of Palestinians also studied Hebrew there each year, including a Hamas spokesman who uses the language in Israeli television interviews. Today, two West Bank doctors are the only Palestinians in the course.
The school also offers Arabic, which once attracted Israelis from a variety of political and professional backgrounds, including Jewish settlers from the West Bank. Most Jewish adults now enrolled in its Arabic courses work for the government as teachers, police and military officers.
“It’s the wall, it’s anger, it’s fear,” said Esther Perron, the institute’s ebullient director. “But whatever happens, they will be here and we will be here. So let’s talk.”
Yasser Khatib, director of the Palestinian Yasser Cultural Center in Hebron, learned Hebrew at Ulpan Akiva in better days. Now he runs his own language institute.
The school’s Hebrew teacher learned the language in an Israeli prison, where many Palestinian political leaders jailed during the uprisings learned it from fellow inmates.
Before the most recent uprising, Khatib said, hundreds of Palestinians were enrolled in his three-month Hebrew courses. “Now,” he said, “you can count them on one hand.”
On the eve of that uprising, which began in September 2000, the Israeli government allowed 100,000 Palestinians from the West Bank to work and trade in Israel. Now that number is 50,000, among them a satellite dish salesman, two cut-stone merchants and a traveling toy vendor studying in Abu Shamsiya’s second-floor classroom in Hebron.
A female medical student fields Abu Shamsiya’s questions, hoping Hebrew will help her secure a gynecology residency at Jerusalem’s prestigious Hadassah Hospital. Then there is Hanadi Tahaboub, a 32-year-old homemaker wearing a pink head scarf.
“When I am at checkpoints and I hear Israeli soldiers talking among themselves, I feel like an illiterate,” Tahaboub said. “Now at least I will know what they are saying.”
Special correspondent Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
NEW ISRAELI TECHNOLOGY CAN TRANSMIT HEART DATA DIRECTLY TO DOCTORS
Portable ECG machine uses cell technology
Israeli firm’s device can transmit heart data directly to doctors
By Matthew Kalman
San Francisco Chronicle
March 26, 2007
Israeli scientists have developed a portable electrocardiograph machine that can transmit highly detailed data on heart activity to physicians by mobile phone.
The CardioSen’C is considered an advance in portable heart-monitoring devices because it uses many more electrodes to measure heart activity and is equipped to communicate the results instantaneously to a cardiologist.
SHL, the Israeli company behind the CardioSen’C, says its machine can dramatically reduce deaths from heart attacks through early diagnosis of patients who might otherwise hesitate before calling a doctor or rushing to a hospital to be monitored.
This is how it works: Patients attach 12 electrodes to their chest and upper body and strap the battery-powered unit on the front of their chest. Automatic digital transmission allows the electrocardiograph, or ECG, results to be transmitted at the highest-quality available and at a high speed to the patient’s cardiologist for instant diagnosis.
The machine is so small that readings can be taken anywhere, even while traveling. The unit is automatically connected via digital cell phone to a dedicated medical control center.
The company has also developed a system called “double transmission monitoring,” which allows the control center to direct the operation of the electrocardiograph and the transmission and download of data by remote control while medical staff talk to the patient.
Patients who suffer from heart disease, are recovering from bypass treatment or simply feel they are at risk are now in a position to measure their heart activity.
According to a report in the March issue of the journal Emergency Medical Services, coronary heart disease causes about 1.5 million Americans to suffer acute myocardial infarctions – or heart attacks – every year, resulting in about 500,000 deaths. Nearly half die before reaching a hospital.
The CardioSen’C can diagnose arrhythmia, ischemia and myocardial infarction.
Erez Alroy, co-chief executive officer of SHL, which specializes in telemedicine technology, said patients who don’t feel well can use the machine to measure their heart activity and consult instantaneously with physicians reading the data in real time.
“When people don’t feel well, it can take time to make the decision to go to a physician or a clinic. Maybe they put it off until the next day. This is a crucial time, when there can be irreversible damage to the heart,” said Alroy.
Heart patients who until now have been scared to travel for fear of being too far away from a doctor or clinic to measure their condition can now test themselves and be in immediate contact with an expert who speaks their own language.
“We have customers who are transmitting their ECG from any part of the world you can imagine,” said Alroy. “Most people hesitate before going to a local doctor abroad. They are worried about problems with the language, about the lack of medical history. We find that people prefer to call ... back home, where they can speak their own language and then take instructions. People on holiday find it a very useful tool.”
Alroy said the unit would make taking an ECG no more trouble than taking your temperature. “We believe in the future more and more people will have various medical measuring devices at home,” he said.
SHL plans to market the CardioSen’C first in Israel, where the company already has more than 70,000 cardiac patient subscribers, and then in Europe. The company plans to market the unit later in the United States, where it is expected to cost several hundred dollars.
The company’s first ECG machine developed for patient use has already been approved for use in the United States. Its CardioBeeper 12/12 is a handheld ECG transmitter capable of sending a full ECG reading to the monitor center in 12 seconds via a standard phone line. The company has also developed a simple pin-prick blood test that can determine in seconds whether a patient has suffered a heart attack.
Mobile ECG machines that transmit data by phone to physicians are already available in the United States, but SHL said the CardioSen’C has several advantages over the existing services.
One of the competitors to SHL is CardioNet Inc., whose Mobile Cardiac Outpatient Telemetry unit is designed for use at home by patients and is already operating in more than 25 states.
The CardioNet unit consists of a sensor, monitor and base. Patients wear three leads attached to a lightweight sensor worn on a neck strap or belt clip that continuously transmit two channels of ECG data to the monitor.
The information is transmitted by wireless to the base unit, which transfers the data by landline or cell phone to the CardioNet Monitoring Center for review by a certified monitoring technician.
Irit Alroy, chief technology officer at SHL, said that while both devices collect ECG data and use cellular technology to transfer the information, SHL’s “CardioSen’C is a 12-lead ECG, similar to machines found in hospitals. There is a significant medical difference between a 12-lead ECG and a two- or three-lead ECG. (The 12-lead ECG can) diagnose many more types of cardiac events, in fact any condition that can be diagnosed by a full ECG in a hospital. Also, the cell-phone technology in the CardioSen’C is in a chip embedded in the device. It does not require an additional monitor and a base unit.”
CANADIAN CHOIR TO DEPICT SAMSON AS A ZIONIST TERRORIST
Choir to depict bible hero as a suicide bomber
Samson to be a Zionist terrorist
By Sarah Petrescu, CanWest News Service
National Post (Canada)
March 28, 2007
www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=249e7155-1044-463f-a1d4-6f5cafa5912b&k=80884
In the Bible, Samson is a hero who used his superhuman strength to do God’s will by pulling down pillars in a Philistine temple, killing thousands and himself in an act of vengeance.
But in what’s sure to be a controversial interpretation of the story, a Victoria choir will next month present Samson as a suicide bomber.
Simon Capet, music director of the Victoria Philharmonic Choir, says he wanted to update Handel’s Samson oratorio to be relevant to today’s audiences by drawing comparisons to ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.
“We didn’t want to just present the work as a simple morality tale,” says Mr. Capet. “There is a social and political commentary here that’s important.”
While the music will not change, the setting of the oratorio will be 1946 Jerusalem. Mr. Capet says he chose the period to draw comparisons to the bombing of the British headquarters at the King David Hotel by the militant Zionist group Irgun in that year. Menachem Begin, who ordered the attack, would later become Israel’s prime minister and win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Capet says presenting Samson as a terrorist is not meant to offend anyone or point the finger at one group, but to challenge our notions of what a terrorist is.
“Is there any difference between pulling down a pillar or blowing a bomb?” asks Mr. Capet.
“Samson killed thousands of people. To show him in the traditional mythological sense does a disservice,” Mr. Capet says.
The choir would not be the first to drawing comparisons between Samson and terrorism.
“There’s a large focus on this right now, with Israel being presented as the Samson figure,” says Andrew Rippin, dean of humanities at the University of Victoria and a specialist in Islamic studies. American journalist Seymour Hersh coined the term “the Samson option” in his book about Israel’s development of a nuclear arsenal.
Shadia Drury, a philosophy professor and Canada Research Chair for Social Justice, recently compared Samson to World Trade Center bomber Mohammed Atta in a talk at UVic. In her book, Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics and the Western Psyche, she argues that terrorism is a biblical problem.
“The concept of a collective guilt is a flawed morality,” she says. “The idea that ‘We’re on the side of God and everyone else is evil’ has and always will be disastrous.”
Ms. Drury says she thinks the choir’s modern interpretation of Samson – scheduled to run April 5, 7 and 8 – is heroic.
But local Rabbi Itzchak Marmorstein says comparing Samson and the Irgun bombing will offend Jews and Israelis.
“It’s an inappropriate comparison that promotes a shallow understanding of history,” says Rabbi Marmorstein. “Israelis never supported Irgun or that kind of terrorism. They weren’t heroes ... and Begin went into politics legitimately decades later. He wasn’t some crazy terrorist.”
One man who is already uneasy about the performance is Samson himself, played by Vancouver Island tenor Ken Lavigne.
“I’m really struggling with this,” says Mr. Lavigne, 33. “I can’t help but feel that a number of people will not enjoy this rejigging of a biblical hero.”
Mr. Lavigne says he has warmed up to the idea of putting on an Irgun uniform and wearing a bomb-belt to sing the emotionally charged part since discussing it with Mr. Capet.
“Simon wants to get people talking about music and its relevance today,” Mr. Lavigne says. “In the end I’ve had to accept that whoever I thought Samson was, what he committed was an act of mass murder.”