FULL ARTICLES

WHILE LOCAL FACTORIES WERE BOMBED, THE DEATH CAMP REMAINED UNTOUCHED

Why wasn’t Auschwitz bombed?
By Michael Berenbaum
Ha’aretz
January 18, 2008

When President George W. Bush visited Yad Vashem last Friday, he paused before a photograph of Auschwitz, called over Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and said, “We should have bombed Auschwitz.” We should applaud his sentiments, yet the issue is far more complex.

The question, “Why wasn’t Auschwitz bombed?” is not only historical. It is also a moral question emblematic of the overall Allied response to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust.

First to the historical issues: The question of bombing Auschwitz arose only in the summer of 1944, more than two years after the gassing of Jews had begun, by which time more than 90 percent of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were already dead. It could not have arisen earlier, because not enough was known specifically about the camp, and Allied bombers were not in range to bomb the camps. By July, information about Auschwitz and its function was available – or could have been made available - to those undertaking the mission. German air defenses were weakened, and the accuracy of Allied bombing was increasing. All that was required was the political will.

That March, Germany had invaded Hungary. In April, Jews were ghettoized. Between May 15 and July 8, 437,402 Jews were deported from Hungary, overwhelmingly to Birkenau, the death camp of Auschwitz. To accommodate them, a railroad spur was built directly into Birkenau. Four out of five arriving Jews were sent directly to their death. Birkenau’s gas chambers operated around the clock and its crematoria were so overtaxed that bodies were being burned in open fields. Any interruption in the killing process might have saved thousands of lives.

Yet bombing a concentration camp filled with innocent civilian prisoners also posed a moral dilemma to the Allies. To be willing to sacrifice the prisoners’ lives, one had to perceive accurately camp conditions and presume that the loss of those killed in Allied bombings would be justified by the interruption of the camp’s killing process. In short, one had to accept the fact that those in the camps would soon die anyway. Such information was not available until the spring of 1944.

It is generally assumed that anti-Semitism or indifference to the plight of the Jews was the primary cause of the refusal to support bombing of the camps. Again, the issue is more complex. On June 11, the Jewish Agency Executive Committee, meeting in Jerusalem, refused to call for the bombing of Auschwitz. Jewish leadership in Palestine was clearly neither anti-Semitic nor indifferent to the situation of their brethren. David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the executive, said: “We do not know the truth concerning the entire situation in Poland and it seems that we will be unable to propose anything concerning this matter.” What concerned Ben-Gurion and his colleagues was that bombing the camps could cause the death of many Jews or even one Jew. Although no specific documentation reversing the decision of June 11 has been found, by July, officials of the Jewish Agency in London were forcefully calling for the bombing.

By then, presumably, the heads of the Jewish community in Palestine, like the Allied representatives; but not the Allied leaders; had seen the report filed by Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, two escapees from Birkenau, who documented the killing process and provided maps and other specific details, together with an urgent request to bomb the camps. Vrba, who escaped on April 7, worked at the camp’s ramp, and revealed the
construction of the rail spur.

Anyone who had read the Vrba-Wetzler Report could perceive what was happening in the Auschwitz complex, and would therefore presumably be far more willing to risk Jewish lives on the ground in order to slow down or stop the gassing.

What is known is that Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), head of the Jewish Agency’s political department, and Agency president Chaim Weizmann appealed to British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, who took the issue to prime minister Winston Churchill. Churchill told Eden on July 7, “Get anything out of the Air Force you can and invoke me if necessary.” Yet the British never followed through on the bombing.

Requests were also made to U.S. officials to bomb Auschwitz. The Americans gave several reasons for their refusal: Military resources could not be diverted from the war effort, which was reaching its crescendo in the post-D-Day battles; bombing Auschwitz might prove ineffective, and might even provoke more vindictive German action. Nowhere did the Americans claim that Auschwitz was not within range of American bombers.

In fact, as early as May 1944, the U.S. Air Force had the capability to strike Auschwitz at will. The rail lines from Hungary were also well within range. On July 7, 1944, American bombers flew over the railway lines to Auschwitz. On August 20, 127 Flying Fortresses dropped 1,336 500-pound bombs on the I.G. Farben synthetic oil factory less than five miles east of Birkenau. The death camp remained untouched.

For three decades, the issue of bombing Auschwitz was a minor sidebar to the war and to the Holocaust. But in 1978, American historian David Wyman wrote an article in Commentary Magazine, entitled “Why Auschwitz Wasn’t Bombed.” The effect of that piece was reinforced by the startling photographs that were published a short time later by two leading CIA photo interpreters, Dino Brugioni and Robert Poirier, the very photographs President Bush saw on Friday. Developed with technology available in 1978, but not in 1944, these images seemingly gave a vivid demonstration of what American intelligence could have known about Birkenau, if only it had been interested. One photograph shows bombs dropping over the camp; because the pilot released the bombs early, it appeared as though bombs targeted for the I.G. Farben plant were dropped on Birkenau. Another visually details Jews on the way to the gas chambers.

Wyman’s claims gained considerable currency and the issue of bombing became synonymous with American indifference. In 1993, the issue was raised at a Washington, D.C. symposium linked to the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and attended by both Holocaust scholars and military historians of divergent points of view. Historians are uncomfortable with the counterfactual speculating, “What if...” But such is the debate over bombing Auschwitz.

We know that in the end, the pessimists won. They argued that nothing could be done; and nothing was done. The optimists did not even have their proposals considered. Given the reality of what happened in Birkenau during the summer of 1944, the failure to bomb has become a symbol of indifference to many. Inaction helped the Germans achieve their goals and left the victims with little power to defend themselves. And bombing was not offered even as a gesture of protest. It is always important for the president of the United States to believe that something can be done; and more important, that something must be done to stop genocide.

 

“ONE IN 40 IRAQIS KILLED SINCE INVASION,” BLARED THE GUARDIAN

The Lancet’s outlandish exaggeration
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
January 13, 2008

Few medical journals have the storied reputation of The Lancet, a British publication founded in 1823. In the course of its long history, The Lancet has published work of exceptional influence, such as Joseph Lister’s principles of antiseptics in 1867 and Howard Florey’s Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on penicillin in 1940. Today it is one of the most frequently cited medical journals in the world.

So naturally there was great interest when the Lancet published a study in October 2006, three weeks before the midterm US elections, reporting that 655,000 people had died in Iraq as a result of the US-led war.

Hundreds of news outlets, to say nothing of antiwar activists and lawmakers, publicized the astonishing figure, which was more than 10 times the death toll estimated by other sources. The Iraqi health ministry, for example, put the mortality level through June 2006 at 50,000. Iraq Body Count, a nonpartisan anti-war group that maintains a public database of the war’s victims, tallied some 45,000 Iraqi dead. If The Lancet’s number was accurate, more Iraqis had died in the 2½ years since the US invasion than during the eight-year war with Iran.

President Bush, asked about the study, dismissed it out of hand: “I don’t consider it a credible report.” Tony Blair’s spokesman also brushed it off as “not ... anywhere near accurate.”

But the media played it up, for the most part unquestioningly. “One in 40 Iraqis killed since invasion,” blared a front-page headline in the Guardian, a leading British paper. CNN.com’s story began: “War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the US-led invasion, a new study reports.” The CBS Evening News announced “a new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq ... 655,000 Iraqis -- 2.5 percent of the entire population -- have died as a consequence of the war.”

Few journalists questioned the integrity of the study or its authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns Hopkins University ‘s Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Iraqi scientist Riyadh Lafta. NPR’s Richard Harris reported asking Burnham, “Right before the election you’re making this announcement. Is this politically motivated? And he said, no, it’s not politically motivated.” Burnham told Newsweek the same thing: “There’s no political motivation in this. I feel very confident in the numbers.”

But the truth, it turns out, is that the report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should have inspired anything but confidence.

In an extensively researched cover story last week, National Journal took a close look under the hood of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins study. Reporters Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon found that it was marred by grave flaws, such as unsupervised Iraqi survey teams, and survey samples that were too small to be statistically valid. The study’s authors refused to release most of their underlying data so other researchers could double-check it. The single disk they finally, grudgingly, supplied contained suspicious evidence of “data-heaping” – that is, fabricated numbers. Researchers failed to gather basic demographic data from those they interviewed, a key safeguard against fraud.

“They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication,” Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center, told the reporters.

Bad as the study’s methodological defects were, its political taint was worse:

* Much of the funding for the study came from the Open Society Institute of leftist billionaire George Soros, a strident critic of the Iraq war who, as Munro and Cannon point out, “spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004.”

* Coauthors Burnham and Roberts were avowed opponents of the Iraq war, and submitted their report to The Lancet on the condition that it be published before the election. Roberts, a self-described “advocate” committed to “ending the war,” even sought the Democratic nomination for New York’s 24th Congressional District. “It was a combination of Iraq and Katrina that just put me over the top,” he told National Journal.

* Lancet editor Richard Horton “also makes no secret of his leftist politics,” Munro and Cannon write. At a September 2006 rally, he publicly denounced “this axis of Anglo-American imperialism” for causing “millions of people ... to die in poverty and disease.” Under Horton, The Lancet has increasingly been accused of shoddiness and sensationalism. In 2005, 30 leading British scientists blasted Horton’s “desperate headline-seeking” and charged him with running “badly conducted and poorly refereed scare stories.”

The claim that the US-led invasion of Iraq had triggered a slaughter of almost Rwandan proportions was a gross and outlandish exaggeration; it should have been greeted with extreme skepticism. But because it served the interests of those eager to discredit the war as a moral catastrophe, common-sense standards were ignored. “In our view,” the Baltimore Sun editorialized, “the Hopkins study stands until someone knocks it down.”

Now someone has, devastatingly. But will the debunking be trumpeted as loudly and clearly as the original report? Don’t hold your breath.

 

USEFUL IDIOTS – THEN AND NOW

The Spirit of the Oxford Union
Useful idiots – then and now
By Clifford D. May
National Review Online
January 17, 2008

Seventy-five years ago next month, the Oxford Union debated the following resolution: “That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” The motion passed 275 votes to 153.

Winston Churchill called that a “disgusting symptom” that would breed “contempt”– not least in Germany, where Hitler was already making plans to wipe various European nations off the map. The Manchester Guardian disagreed, noting the mistakes British politicians had made in wars past and the hypocrisy they exhibited in the present.

The spirit of the Oxford Union lives on, not least on America’s campuses. Professor Ward Churchill’s characterization of the victims of the September 11, 2001, atrocity as “little Eichmanns” is only the most infamous example.

Here’s a more recent more: after five Iranian swift boats threatened U.S. Navy vessels in the Straits of Hormuz, Juan Cole – a professor at the University of Michigan and former president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) – was quick to blame America first: “This episode is just about the most pitiful thing I have seen since Bush came to power, and believe me I’ve seen plenty,” Cole wrote. “The Iranian Revolutionary Guards issued their own video and audio of the encounter, which shows a routine identity check. ... The Iranian press is suspicious about the timing of the Pentagon videotape, noting that it was released just as Bush was heading to the Middle East to try to convince the Arab allies of the US to make common cause with Israel against Iran.”

Hollywood moguls also have adopted the Oxford Union approach to national security, reheating Pogo’s Big Idea of the 1970s: that we have met the enemy and he is us. Among recent propaganda flicks: Lions for Lambs (right-wing politicians selling an unpopular war), Rendition (CIA torturers and a sexy suicide bomber), Redacted (U.S. Marines raping and murdering children), and even The Good Shepherd, a film about the CIA’s early years, featuring American secret agents letting loose locust plagues on Third World farmers and waterboarding an innocent man. Why would anyone fight for such a country?

But those of you who do – be warned: You may turn into homicidal maniacs! Last Sunday, the New York Times ran a front-page piece headlined “Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles.” The story suggested that military service in Iraq and Afghanistan is transforming nice young men into crazed killing machines.

Just hours after the papers landed on doorsteps, the Powerline blog’s John Hinderaker was asking why the Times had not bothered to compare the murder rate among veterans to the murder rate for young American men generally. Hinderaker and others crunched the numbers themselves and found the murder rate much higher for young men who stayed home. Columnist Ralph Peters estimates that recent war vets are about one-fifth as likely to be implicated in a homicide as the average 18- to 34-year-old man.

In what other hearts does the Oxford Union spirit dwell? A group of Muslim scholars recently wrote a letter to Christian leaders asserting the need for “peace and justice” between these two great religious communities. Good for them. But the Christian leaders responded with a letter asking “forgiveness” for Christian sins against Muslims “in the past (e.g. in the Crusades) and in the present (e.g. in excesses of the ‘war on terror’).” Note the quotes around that last phrase. Note that the many sins committed by extremist Muslims against Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and moderate Muslims were not mentioned.

At the Oxford Union, there was, at least, respect for freedom of speech. In Canada, today, by contrast, Orwellian “human rights commissioners” are persecuting Mark Steyn, author of America Alone, for simply arguing that Western civilization is worth defending and for predicting that, if current trends continue, Europe will soon be Arab- and Islamic-dominated. Such ideas, Steyn’s critics charge, “promote ill will” toward Muslims and must be punished.

Also summoned by government commissioners – commissars? – was Canadian publisher Ezra Levant, who dared to reprint Danish cartoons lampooning Islamist terrorism. Levant stood up to the Grand Inquisitors, saying: “We have a heritage of free speech that we inherited from Great Britain that goes back to the year 1215 and the Magna Carta. We have a heritage of eight hundred years of British common law protection for speech, augmented by 250 years of common law in Canada.”

Yes, but there also is the tradition of the Oxford Union circa 1933. And right now it is not certain which tradition will prevail.

[Note by Tom Gross]

A lot of readers tell me they like the occasional lighter, non-Middle East items to help complement and balance the often distressing Middle East ones. The other dispatch I am posting tomorrow contains only Mideast news and articles. This dispatch includes some of the items on other subjects that I have published in recent days on the National Review’s Media Blog.

***

I include three items at the end on global warming to provide a small counterweight to the mainstream media (and to the Nobel prize and Oscar committees) which refuse to properly air the opinion of those who express doubts about the global warming orthodoxy. Some on the left (and far-right) are using global warming issues as a kind of post-Marxist method of attacking capitalism and America.

As I report below, with record cold temperatures and unprecedented levels of snowfall recently in Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Siberia (minus 57!), Argentina, Peru, Chile, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and in parts of the U.S. and Canada, one might at least consider allowing some of the scientists who are being shunned by the mainstream media to express their findings about what they say is the myth of man-made global warming.

Some (though of course not all) of the prominent global warming activists are deliberately using the subject to deflect attention from what others feel are even more important issues, such as the Iranian rush to acquire a nuclear arsenal and instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan.

 

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

ON JOURNALISTS AND MEDIA DEVELOPMENTS

Sunday, January 20, 2008

A WELL-DESERVED APOLOGY FROM THE WASHINGTON POST

Following recent criticism by myself and others about a piece prominently highlighted on The Washington Post’s home page on January 7, which suggested Israel was somehow following in the footsteps of Nazi Germany, the newspaper has issued a rare apology.

The piece, part of the Post’s religion column, was penned by Arun Gandhi, grandson of India’s legendary leader “Mahatma” Gandhi, and was titled “Jewish Identity Can’t Depend on Violence.”

The Washington Post has often been criticized by Jewish groups for running pieces highly slanted against Israel, but it is extremely unusual for the paper to acknowledge bias.

In a statement on Friday, The Washington Post wrote that readers “found Gandhi’s initial remarks anti-Semitic and his subsequent apology insufficient. When we undertook this project over a year ago, we wrote that our goal was to shed light on a subject – religion – that too often generates heat. The Gandhi post failed to comply with that mission, and we can only ask our readers to extend ‘On Faith’ a measure of forbearance and tolerance as the site endeavors to conduct a civil and illuminating conversation. We regret the initial posting, and we apologize for the episode.”

Arun Gandhi’s original piece also appeared on the Newsweek website.

 

Saturday, January 19, 2008

BELARUS JAILS EDITOR FOR THREE YEARS FOR PRINTING MOHAMMED CARTOONS

Yesterday Belarus – one of the world’s most oppressive states – jailed for three years a newspaper editor who reproduced cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that first appeared in Denmark in 2005.

Alexander Sdvizhkov was sentenced in a closed session of the court for incitement of religious and national hatred.

Miklos Haraszti, media freedom representative for the 56-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, protested against Sdvizhkov’s jailing, calling the case against him “shocking” and saying he should be freed. His lawyer said there would be an appeal.

(Scroll down here to see the controversial cartoons.)

 

Friday, January 18, 2008

REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS CRITICIZES SAUDI ARABIA

Reporters Without Borders have finally criticized Saudi Arabia after the regime in Riyadh refused to allow Gideon Kouts, a journalist who holds an Israeli passport, into the country as part of the media delegation accompanying French President Nicolas Sarkozy to the kingdom earlier this week.

“The discrimination practiced by Saudi Arabia with respect to Israeli journalists is unacceptable,” Reporters Without Borders announced.

 

Friday, January 18, 2008

EUROPEAN JOURNALIST MURDERED BY TALIBAN IN KABUL HOTEL

Carsten Thomassen, 39, the correspondent for the Norwegian paper Dagbladet, was among seven people killed as Taliban “militants” (the AP’s word) stormed Kabul’s leading hotel.

The Taliban attacked the luxury five-star Serena hotel with guns, grenades, and a suicide bomb, after forcing their way through a heavily fortified gate by lobbing grenades at the guards.

It was the first attack on a Kabul hotel since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001. Until recently suicide bombers in the country mostly hit military targets, although many civilians also died in the blasts.

The Serena is patronized by diplomats, journalists and dignitaries. When it opened in 2006, the hotel was hailed “an oasis of luxury in a war-ravaged city.”

Taliban violence greatly increased last year, with 140 recorded suicide attacks in 2007.

 

Sunday, January 20, 2008

ROBERT FISK’S “INDEPENDENT” IN FINANCIAL TROUBLE?

Media insiders in London say that The Independent, the British paper of which the viciously anti-American and anti-Israeli polemicist Robert Fisk is the star foreign correspondent, is in dire financial straights and is now considering launching a “free edition” to boost circulation and shore up its advertising revenues.

The Independent’s editor, Simon Kelner, has denied the reports but the rumors persist.

Circulation for The Independent was 228,400 in December, down 4.3% compared with November and down 5.7% compared with the previous year. This is now well below sales for each of the other dozen or so British national daily papers.

About 40,000 of The Independent’s December sales are estimated to be bulk copies, sold to airlines, gyms and hotels and then distributed to customers for free.

Nevertheless the paper continues to have influence far beyond its immediate readership, with articles by Fisk and others republished on anti-American websites the world over.

Among those who have praised the writings of Fisk is Osama Bin Laden.

 

Friday, January 18, 2008

COMING SOON: OPRAH’S VERY OWN TV NETWORK

Fresh from having made the most significant endorsement of the 2008 presidential election campaign to date – which many analysts have credited with reviving Barack Obama’s run for the White House – talkshow queen Oprah Winfrey is getting her own TV network, it has been announced in New York.

Winfrey has signed a deal with Discovery Communications to create “OWN” – the Oprah Winfrey Network – next year. It will be available in more than 70 million homes.

“I always felt my show was just the beginning of what the future could hold,” said a thrilled Winfrey (whose own father, Vernon, is currently writing a tell-all book about her).

No teaming up as Obama’s running mate for Oprah then, as some have suggested?

 

ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Friday, January 18, 2008

WHITE HOUSE STUDY FOUND 473 DAYS OF E-MAIL GONE

Whoops.

The Washington Post reports today:

The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday.

 

Sunday, January 20, 2008

SHOULD NABOKOV’S SON DESTROY HIS FINAL MANUSCRIPT?

Writer Ron Rosenbaum, who has been corresponding with Dmitri Nabokov about this issue for the last two years, reveals a fascinating dilemma in Slate:

Says Rosenbaum: It’s the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed – as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.

... It’s a decision that has fallen to his sole surviving heir (and translator), Dmitri Nabokov, now 73. Dmitri has been torn for years between his father’s unequivocal request and the demands of the literary world to view the final fragment of his father’s genius, a manuscript known as The Original of Laura.

Dmitri’s predicament goes beyond Laura. It’s one that raises the difficult issue of who “owns” a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it’s in?

... Dmitri’s past pronouncements suggest that Laura is not merely another scrap of paper. At one point he called it “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity.”

 

Friday, January 18, 2008

IT LOOKS LIKE FACEBOOK’S VERSION OF SCRABBLE MAY SPELL L-A-W-S-U-I-T

The companies that make Scrabble are trying to shut down Scrabulous, an online version of the game which has become an instant hit on the Facebook website.

Indeed with 2.4 million weekly users worldwide (600,000 of whom play every day), Scrabulous is now Facebook’s most popular game.

Created last July by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, two young brothers from Kolkata (the Indian city that was until 2001 called Calcutta), Scrabulous has become an internet phenomenon. Revenue from advertising alone makes the pair, the younger of whom is still at university, $25,000 a month.

Now the world’s two largest toymakers, Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada, and Mattel, which owns the rights elsewhere, are claiming that the Facebook electronic version infringes their copyrights and trademarks.

Lawyers’ letters have been sent to Facebook’s U.S. headquarters and to the brothers. But the brothers say they are undeterred and have announced plans for a Scrabulous championship, as well as a Facebook version of chess.

Facebook, devised by Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, now accounts for 1% of all traffic on the Internet.

 

Friday, January 18, 2008

MUSLIM STORE WORKER REFUSES TO SELL “UNCLEAN” BIBLE BOOK TO GRANDMOTHER

Yet another sign of creeping Islamicization in Britain?

The Daily Mail reports:

A Muslim store worker at Marks & Spencer refused to serve a customer buying a children’s book on biblical stories because she said it was “unclean”.

Sally Friday, a customer at a branch of one of the famous stores, felt publicly humiliated when she tried to pay for First Bible Stories as a gift for her young grandson.

When the grandmother put the book on the counter, the assistant refused to touch it, declared it was unclean.

... Conservative MP Philip Davies said the refusal to serve Mrs. Friday, 69, was “unacceptable” and “damaging” to community relations.

... Mrs. Friday said “Had this been a copy of the Koran I am confident any Christian person would be happy to do her job, and for this to happen in a Marks & Spencer of all places beggars belief.”

 

Friday, January 11, 2008

NICOLAS SARKOZY’S EX ATTACKS “STINGY” HUSBAND WHO “LIKES NO-ONE, NOT EVEN HIS CHILDREN”

The Élysée palace soap opera descends to new depths of vitriol.

The Daily Telegraph reports:

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s ex-wife Cécilia has branded him a “stingy philanderer” with a “behavioral problem” who is an “unworthy president” of France.

Cécilia Sarkozy is reported to have made the comments before Mr. Sarkozy hinted that he will marry the ex-supermodel Carla Bruni following a whirlwind affair of less than three months.

... Mrs. Sarkozy alleged that her 52-year-old ex-husband was “a man who likes no-one, not even his children”.

According to a new book, she even called the president’s other female friends “a bunch of slappers” and young female government ministers “boring wallflowers”.

 

Thursday, January 17, 2008

CONGRATULATIONS JENNA (A NEW GENERATION OF BUSH POLITICIANS ON ITS WAY?)

President Bush’s daughter Jenna, 26, and her fiancé, Henry Hager, 29, are to be married on May 10, according to a report on People magazine’s website. (This date might interfere with Bush’s plan return to Israel for a second visit this May, to help celebrate the state’s 60th birthday.)

The wedding will apparently be held at the president’s 1,600-acre ranch in Crawford, Texas. A spokeswoman for first lady Laura Bush said she could not confirm the report and had no comment on it.

“It’s going to be a small wedding,” a source told People, adding Jenna had already selected her bridesmaids. “She’s very excited. They make a great couple.”

And if Hager, who comes from a prominent Republican family and worked on the president’s re-election campaign, one day has greater political ambitions of his own, perhaps he can even find himself added to this website.

 

Friday, January 11, 2008

TWINS SEPARATED AT BIRTH, WHO MARRIED EACH OTHER BY ACCIDENT, GRANTED DIVORCE

A bizarre and sad story is dominating the media in Britain today, as a married couple makes a devastating discovery:

The Times of London writes:

Twins who were separated at birth married each other without knowing they were brother and sister. The couple were adopted as babies by different families, and neither was told that they had a twin.

They met, fell in love and got married before discovering that they were blood relatives. The British couple were recently granted an annulment at a special hearing at the High Court in London, the Evening Standard reported today.

... Professor Lord Alton, who uncovered the case, said that the twins’ experience demonstrated the need to strengthen the rights of children to know the identity of their biological parents.

The Daily Telegraph adds:

The couple’s identities, along with details of how they met and fell in love, remain a closely-guarded secret.

Lord Alton said: “They were never told they were twins. They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of their marriage that they entered into, and all the issues of their separation. The right for children to know the identity of their biological parents is a human right.

“There will be more cases like this if children are not given access to the truth. The needs of the child must always be paramount.”

 

ON GLOBAL WARMING

BR-R-R! WHERE DID GLOBAL WARMING GO?

As snow blanketed the deserts of Iran for the first time in living memory yesterday and Iranian motorists froze to death in their cars, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby asks “Where did all the Global Warming go?”

Was Al Gore too busy collecting prizes in 2007 to notice?

Jacoby writes:

The stark headline appeared just over a year ago. “2007 to be ‘warmest on record,’ “ BBC News reported on Jan. 4, 2007. Citing experts in the British government’s Meteorological Office, the story announced that “the world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007,” surpassing the all-time high reached in 1998.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the planetary hot flash: Much of the planet grew bitterly cold.

In South America, for example, the start of winter last year was one of the coldest ever observed... The death toll for the 10-day cold wave was the highest for any single weather event in Argentina in recent history.” In Buenos Aires, it snowed for the first time in 89 years, while in Peru the cold was so intense that hundreds of people died and the government declared a state of emergency in 14 of the country’s 24 provinces. In August, Chile’s agriculture minister lamented “the toughest winter we have seen in the past 50 years,” which caused losses of at least $200 million in destroyed crops and livestock.

Latin Americans weren’t the only ones shivering. University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming, a specialist in temperature and heat flow, notes in the Washington Times that “unexpected bitter cold swept the entire Southern Hemisphere in 2007.” Johannesburg experienced its first significant snowfall in a quarter-century. Australia had its coldest ever June. New Zealand’s vineyards lost much of their 2007 harvest when spring temperatures dropped to record lows.

Closer to home, 44.5 inches of snow fell in New Hampshire last month, breaking the previous record of 43 inches, set in 1876. And the Canadian government is forecasting the coldest winter in 15 years.

... Just last month, more than 100 scientists signed a strongly worded open letter to [UN Sec.-Gen.] Ban pointing out that climate change is a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Because slashing carbon dioxide emissions means retarding economic development, they warned, “the current US approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.”

Climate science isn’t a religion, and those who dispute its leading theory are not heretics. Much remains to be learned about how and why climate changes, and there is neither virtue nor wisdom in an emotional rush to counter global warming – especially if what’s coming is a global Big Chill.

***

For some background stories on this issue, see:
(1) Weather Channel boss calls global warming “the greatest scam in history”
(2) Al Gore’s inconvenient judgment

 

Saturday, January 12, 2008

NOW THE GLOBAL COOLING REACHES IRAQ AND SAUDI ARABIA

Following up my item earlier in the week (Br-r-r! Where Did Global Warming Go?), snow yesterday reached Baghdad, Reuters reports:

Snow fell on Baghdad on Friday for the first time in memory, and delighted residents declared it an omen of peace.

“It is the first time we’ve seen snow in Baghdad,” said 60-year-old Hassan Zahar. “We’ve seen sleet before, but never snow. I looked at the faces of all the people, they were astonished,” he said.

Tom Gross adds: The next day snow fell in areas of Saudi Arabia where it had also not fallen in living memory.

 

Friday, January 18, 2008

EMERGENCY WARNING FOR SIBERIA: MINUS 67 FAHRENHEIT

After the unprecedented snow storms in Iraq and Iran, yet more signs of global warming?

Siberia has issue an emergency warning as a near record bout of cold weather is forecast. Temperatures are predicted to reach minus 55 degrees Celsius (minus 67 Fahrenheit) which officials fear may lead to dozens of people freezing to death. They say the extreme chill is expected to last until January 21st.

-- Tom Gross

[All notes below by Tom Gross]

“AHMADINEJAD SECRETLY MET WITH U.S. DEFENSE SECRETARY ROBERT GATES IN QATAR”

Citing Russian, Arab and Swiss sources, the Iranian publication Entekhab reports on a secret meeting between Iran’s dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in Qatar.

According to these sources Gates and Ahmadinejad agreed a non-aggression pact and the meeting occurred on the same day that the Pentagon and the CIA released the hitherto top secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report on Iran’s nuclear program to the media. (The meeting, according to the sources, preceded the release of the NIE report by a few hours.)

The Arabic source is al-Watan al-Arabi.

Entekhab appears to be an opposition publication and it is of course possible that these reports are incorrect. (Entekhab used to be a popular daily in Iran, and it is currently run as a news agency from the U.S. Entekhab means “choice” or “election” in Farsi.)

Nevertheless, as Iran expert and Giuliani advisor Michael Rubin points out to me, rumors can be important in their own right in a region where perception means more than reality. “Certainly, if the White House had been more consistent and transparent on Iran policy, such rumors wouldn’t fly,” he adds.

U.S. President George W. Bush is currently on the second day of an eight-day tour of the Middle East. In Israel yesterday, Israeli defense and security officials showed Bush classified information that demonstrates that the American National Intelligence Estimate suggesting that Iran abandoned plans for nuclear weapons in 2003, is wrong.

(For background on the NIE, see:
* British intelligence: Israelis are right, U.S. is wrong; Iran is rushing to acquire nukes (Dec. 11, 2007)
* Ahmadinejad doesn’t want a nuclear bomb? Just like there are no gays in Iran? (Dec. 6, 2007)

 

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS AND DEANS “PLAN TO APOLOGIZE TO AHMADINEJAD”

Iran’s Mehr News Agency reports that a group of senior professors and deans of faculties from Columbia University plans to travel to Iran in order to present their “formal apologies” for “the insulting remarks Columbia University President Lee Bollinger made to President Ahmadinejad.”

The report is in Farsi here. And in English here and also here.

While condemning Bollinger, the delegation – which is said to include deans and/or professors from the faculties of history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, philosophy and Islamic studies – have failed to properly condemn Ahmadinejad for his Holocaust denial and his threats to further the genocide of the Jews by wiping out Israel.

UPDATE: The “Teheran apology” trip has now been confirmed by sources at Columbia.

(For background on Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia, see:
* Deny Holocaust? Get welcomed by Columbia University (Sept. 24, 2007)
* “Bravo, bravo, bravo, Columbia!” (& Hillary Clinton “confirms” Israel took out Syrian nukes) (Sept. 27, 2007)

 

PROTESTS AGAINST THE LOS ANGELES TIMES’S “ANTI-SEMITIC CARTOON”

There have been widespread protests against The Los Angeles Times after it carried what many said was a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon earlier this week to accompany yet another piece slurring Israel by the historical revisionists Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.

The cartoon showed America, dressed as Uncle Sam, in a concentration camp inmate-type uniform, with his hands manacled in handcuffs shaped as a Star of David.

As I have documented previously on this website, Professors Walt and Mearsheimer have done much to stir up anti-Semitic feeling in the United States and beyond in the last two years with a series of false and slanderous accusations against American Jews.

***

There has also been criticism of The Times of London which ran a lengthy feature yesterday full of untrue statements about Israel. Even the article’s byline was incorrect, referring to “a wall built on 2500 years of implacable enmity and hatred”. Islam was in fact only founded in the 7th century AD.

 

LIBYA VETOES UN CONDEMNATION OF ROCKET ATTACK ON ISRAEL FROM LEBANON

Last week, in a move that shocked people who genuinely care about human rights (as opposed to the many phony “human rights groups”), Libya assumed the presidency of the United Nations Security Council.

In one of its very first moves, Libya blocked a resolution yesterday condemning the unprovoked firing the day before of Katyusha rockets by Hizbullah or a related terror group from Lebanon into civilian homes in the Israeli town of Shlomi.

Israel says that the attack – which much of the international media failed to report – was a clear and serious violation of UN Resolution 1701, which ended the war between Israel and Hizbullah in the summer of 2006.

Libya’s term in the rotating UN presidency lasts one month.

 

ISRAEL COMPLAINS THAT UNIFIL IS LEAKING INFORMATION TO HIZBULLAH

Israel has also once again complained to the Italian and French-led UNIFIL forces in south Lebanon that they are doing next to noting to prevent the smuggling of Syrian and Iranian arms across the Syrian-Lebanese border. Nor, says Israel, have they taken any action at all to disarm the militias in south Lebanon, in accordance with the UN Security Council resolutions.

On Tuesday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told a conference of military officials that Hizbullah now had more – and longer-range – missiles than it had prior to the war it fought against Israel during the summer of 2006. UNIFIL was supposed to disarm the terror group.

Furthermore Israeli defense officials yesterday raised concerns that information they were regularly passing on to UNIFIL concerning Hizbullah’s military buildup in southern Lebanon was then being leaked to Hizbullah, either directly, or indirectly by Lebanese army officials with whom UNIFIL shared the Israeli information with.

For more on Hizbullah, see here.

 

PALESTINIAN DOCTOR HELD BY LIBYA FILES TORTURE CHARGES

A Palestinian doctor who was imprisoned with five Bulgarian nurses by Libya for eight years on trumped up charges of deliberately infecting Libyan children with AIDS, has filed a complaint with the UN Human Rights Committee charging that he was tortured during his captivity. Ashraf Al-Hazouz and the nurses were pardoned last summer after a deal with the Libyan government was brokered by France. (In return, France arranged for Libya to received hundreds of millions of dollars in economic benefits.)

At the time of their release, all six were forced by the Libyan regime to sign a statement saying they were treated well while in captivity. But immediately after they arrived in Bulgaria they gave interviews outlining what they said was “horrific torture,” including the use of electric shocks, beatings and violation of their bodies with blunt instruments.

The Associated Press reports that Dr. Al-Hazouz has been warned by European Union officials not to sue because it could undermine diplomatic relations between European states and Libya. Al-Hazouz says he will ignore the European Union warnings.

 

OLMERT PREVENTS ISRAELI TERROR VICTIMS FROM CONDEMNING FATAH

There was anger among many in Israel yesterday after the Jerusalem police, acting on orders from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, arrested a group of Israeli mothers who had lost their children in Palestinian suicide bombings, for distributing a booklet to foreign journalists detailing Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement’s involvement in terrorist attacks.

They had been handing out the booklet to coincide with George W. Bush’s visit to Jerusalem yesterday. Police released the group without charge once most of the foreign journalists had moved on to Ramallah in the West Bank.

The booklet, “Fatah as ‘Moderate’: A Hard Look Post-Annapolis,” can be found in English here.

***

In a not very nice welcome yesterday, Reuters reports that 20,000 Islamists in Gaza protested against “Vampire” Bush. Using international aid money still pouring into Gaza, they brandished thousands of placards showing George W. Bush as a vampire swigging Muslim blood.

***

And today Palestinians in Gaza launched a rocket attack on the local American International School in protest against President Bush’s visit. Witnesses said large parts of the school were damaged by rockets, mortars and explosive devices. The attack came hours after several Palestinian groups called on Palestinians to kill Bush.

***

The Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv today asks why Israel has not devoted greater resources to explaining the plight of Jews who were forced to leave Arab and Islamic countries in the years after 1948. The editors assert that “Someone must remind Bush: There were more Jewish refugees from Arab countries than Palestinian refugees, and more Jewish property was confiscated than Palestinian property.”

And The Jerusalem Post today opines that “the most important thing Bush can do in Ramallah is to say to the Palestinians that if they want a state they must stop spewing hatred and glorifying terrorism. Rather than constantly using the ‘right of return’ as code for Israel’s destruction, Abbas must tell his people the truth: a Palestinian state requires giving up the dream of Greater Palestine, making peace with the Jewish democracy of Israel, and building a state alongside it in most of the West Bank and Gaza.”

 

PALESTINIAN POLL AS BUSH VISITS: ONLY 9% SAY ISRAELI OCCUPATION IS THEIR MAIN CONCERN

President Bush, who today visited the West Bank, might want to consider the results of this poll, taken by a leading Palestinian polling company. It shows that contrary to what Condoleezza Rice and various journalists would have us believe, most Palestinians are much less concerned about ending the Israeli “occupation” than they are about finding reliable and honest leaders to govern any future Palestinian state.

The poll was taken in the run-up to Bush’s visit by the Near East Consulting company in Ramallah on the West Bank. 959 Palestinians over the age of 18 from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were interviewed by phone.

Among the results:

What is the main issue that makes you feel concerned?
The economic hardship of my household: 29%
The absence of security for my family and me: 19%
The internal power struggle: 27%
The Israeli occupation: 9%
Family problems: 3%
I have no concerns: 13%

Do you support the security plan by the caretaker (Palestinian) government, and the collection of weapons (from Palestinian militia)?
Support: 83%
Oppose: 17%

What is your level of optimism about the future?
Very optimistic: 10%
Optimistic: 56%
Pessimistic: 25%
Very Pessimistic: 9%

Do you think the new aid to the Palestinians will be managed properly by the Palestinian Authority?
Yes: 59%
No: 41%

Which party do you support?
West Bank residents:
Fatah: 34%
Hamas: 12%
PFLP: 3%
Islamic Jihad: 2%
Others: 3%
I trust none of these factions: 47%

Gaza residents:
Fatah: 44%
Hamas: 19%
PFLP: 2%
Islamic Jihad: 5%
I trust none of these factions: 27%

Perceptions about Hamas’ position towards the elimination of Israel, according to region:
West Bank residents:
Hamas should maintain its position: 35%
Hamas should change its position: 65%

Gaza Strip residents:
Hamas should maintain its position: 39%
Hamas should change its position: 61%

 

“I DIVORCE YOU BY TEXT MESSAGE BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T ANSWER YOUR HUSBAND”

The Egyptian government-run daily al-Akhbar reports from Cairo that a woman is seeking clarification from a court on whether her husband’s declaration of divorce by text message is legally valid.

After missing a call from her husband on her mobile phone, Iqbal Abul Nasr received a text message from him which read: “I divorce you because you didn’t answer your husband.”

In line with Sharia law, Egyptian men do not need to go to court to file for divorce. A unilateral declaration of divorce by a man, repeated three times, formally ends a marriage. Mrs. Abul Nasr, an engineer from Cairo, received three such text messages from her husband, says the newspaper.

If a family court declares the couple divorced, it would be the first reported case of divorce by SMS text message in Egypt.

 

SPREADING JIHAD BY CELL PHONE

First (as I reported on my January 2 dispatch) al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al Zawahri announced he was becoming a blogger. Now al-Qaeda says it is preparing propaganda videos you can download to your cell phone, reports The Associated Press from Cairo:

In an effort to extend its influence and its message, al-Qaeda is reissuing batches of its video recordings in formats suitable for viewing on cell phones.

Al-Qaeda’s media wing, al-Sahab, has announced the move on websites commonly used by Islamic militants. Yesterday eight previously recorded videos were made available including a tribute to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, killed by U.S. forces in June 2006.

... Watching videos on cell phones is increasingly popular in the Middle East. Clips showing former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s execution in December 2006 showed up on cell phones soon after his death. In Egypt, images showing police brutality have been passed around via handsets...

 

U.S. ARMY BLOGGER DIES IN IRAQ, WRITES ABOUT HIS OWN DEATH

An American army officer who blogged from Iraq for The Rocky Mountain News in Colorado has been killed in an attack in the north of the country.

The U.S. army said Major Andrew Olmsted died with another American soldier when insurgents attacked with small arms near Sadiyah, 100 miles north-east of Baghdad.

But before he left for Iraq in July, he penned a final entry about his death in the event that he did not make it back, and this has now been published posthumously.

“I’m dead,” he wrote in July 2007 as he arrived in Iraq for an 18-month tour of duty. “But if you’re reading this, you’re not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.”

“[Being dead] sucks, at least for me and my family and friends,” he wrote. “But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss.”

In his final post, Olmsted, 37, warned against making his death an argument for or against the war.

“My life isn’t a chit to be used to bludgeon people to silence on either side,” Olmstead wrote. “I have my own opinions about what we should do about Iraq, but since I’m not around to expound on them I’d prefer others not try and use me as some kind of moral capital to support a position I probably didn’t support.”

He added that one of the things he would miss the most would be “not being able to blog any longer… The ability to put my thoughts on (virtual) paper and put them where people can read and respond to them has been marvelous, even if most people who have read my writings haven’t agreed with them.

“If there is any hope for the long term success of democracy, it will be if people agree to listen to and try to understand their political opponents rather than simply seeking to crush them.”

The editor of The Rocky Mountain News, John Temple, said news of Olmstead’s death was “devastating”:

“The major was a brave man who obviously thrived on sharing his experiences and thoughts on his blog. He provided a perspective on Iraq that would have been impossible for a journalist.”

 

U.K. BISHOP WARNS OF “NO-GO ZONES FOR NON-MUSLIMS ACROSS BRITAIN”

Writing in the (London) Sunday Telegraph, one of Britain’s most senior clerics, the Rt. Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, has warned that people of different faiths risk physical attack if they live or work in communities in Britain dominated by radical Muslims.

Islamic extremists have created “no-go” areas across Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter, writes Bishop Nazir-Ali, who is the Church of England’s only Pakistani-born bishop.

Bishop Nazir-Ali added that attempts are being made to give Britain an increasingly Islamic character by introducing the call to prayer and wider use of sharia law, a legal system based on the Koran.

 

OXFORD MOTHERS CONDEMN SCHOOL’S HALAL MEAT DECISION

Scarcely a day goes by without further reports of Islamic customs encroaching on the British way of life.

The Oxford Mail reports from Britain’s famous university town:

Mums have criticised an Oxford [primary] school for serving halal meat in children’s lunches without their knowledge.

Parents of pupils at Rose Hill Primary School, in The Oval, were angered by a letter they received from headmistress Sue Mortimer.

It informed them the halal meat, which involves slaughtering animals in a special way for consumption by Muslims, had been used in all school meals as part of the school’s inclusion policy.

The letter said the reason for the decision was that since halal meat was not forbidden by any religion or culture, its use would allow everyone to choose a meat dish for lunch.

But parents had not been consulted… Mum-of-three Sharon Haynes, 35, from Radford Close, said: “Why should we let our kids eat halal meat?”

 

I attach two articles below. The first relates to the chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace as Bush visits. The second argues that the lack of reaction last Sunday by the U.S. Navy (as five armed Iranian speedboats belonging to the Revolutionary Guard harassed American naval ships in international waters in the Gulf of Hormuz) “guarantees that American sailors will die at Iranian hands in the future.” (The writers of both articles are subscribers to this email list, as is Michael Rubin, mentioned above.)

-- Tom Gross

[Note by Tom Gross]

Friday, December 28, 2007

EGYPTIAN MAGAZINE CONFIRMS ARAFAT WAS BEHIND MUNICH OLYMPIC AND OTHER MURDERS

The latest edition of the Egyptian magazine Al-Ahram Al-Arabi has confirmed what many in the West have suspected for a long time: that Yasser Arafat personally directed the Black September terrorist organization that claimed responsibility for the 1971 murder of Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi at-Tal, the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and other atrocities.

The Cairo newspaper quotes a new book by PLO leader Marwan Kanafani, “Years of Hope,” to be published soon.

There have also long been claims that Arafat’s longtime deputy Mahmoud Abbas, who is still widely known in the Middle East by his nom de guerre Abu Mazen, was very closely involved in the Munich Olympics massacre. For more, see here.)

 

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

PALESTINIANS PAY TRIBUTE TO SADDAM HUSSEIN ONE YEAR AFTER HIS HANGING

Agence France Presse reports from the West Bank:

Some 700 Palestinians observed a minute’s silence on Monday as they marked the first anniversary of the hanging of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

… Holding Saddam portraits and gripping Iraqi and Palestinian flags, rally participants recited poems praising the dictator who was hanged on December 30, 2006 in Iraq after a court sentenced him to death for his role in the slaughter of tens of thousands of ethnic Kurds in 1988.

In spite of the AFP story, very few mainstream media outlets mentioned this Palestinian show of solidarity. And hardly any have reported the ongoing Fatah-Hamas Palestinian infighting in Gaza, which on Monday and Tuesday alone resulted in eight Palestinians being shot dead (including a 10-year-old boy) and 30 being wounded. Both Hamas and Fatah are continuing to buy ever more sophisticated weapons using the international aid money given to the Palestinian Authority by Western states.

 

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN DEATHS DOWN, THANKS TO SECURITY BARRIER

While the number of Palestinians killed by Israel dropped 43% in 2007 to the lowest number since the second intifada began, the overall number of Palestinians killed in 2007 reached a record high because of the 344 Palestinians killed in intra-Palestinian fighting, the human rights group B’Tselem said in its year-end report.

The report also found a significant drop in the proportion of Palestinian civilians killed, with the vast majority of those dying in 2007 being militants. The number of Israeli civilians killed last year in Palestinian terror attacks was also greatly down, further proof that Israel’s security barrier and checkpoints are working.

 

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

BUT FATAH STILL KILLING ISRAELIS

At the same time, Israel has expressed anger that the murderers of two young Israeli hikers last Friday belonged to President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, and had been armed by them. Western media regularly refer to Fatah as a “moderate” organization.

Fatah activists said the attack was “to celebrate Fatah’s 43rd anniversary this week,” and that the attackers, they explained, were apparently hoping to send a message to the Palestinian public that, contrary to claims by Hamas, Fatah has not abandoned “the path of armed struggle.” They added that the $9 billion just pledged to the Palestinians over the next three years by the international community would come in handy in this regard.

 

Monday, December 24, 2007

NEW FATAH MAP SHOWS ALL OF ISRAEL AS PALESTINE

Fatah is marking its 43rd anniversary with a new poster that presents all of Israel as Palestine. The poster, posted on a number of Fatah-affiliated websites, features a map of Israel that is entirely draped with a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf.

The poster, which has been endorsed by the Fatah leadership, also carries a drawing of a rifle as a symbol of the “armed struggle” against Israel.

Analysts say that the underlying message to its own supporters is that Fatah, like Hamas, does not recognize Israel’s existence and the two groups merely disagree on tactics and the level of religiosity in Palestinian society.

 

Thursday, December 13, 2007

TONY BLAIR: I WOULD HESITATE TO CEDE THE WEST BANK TO THE PALESTINIANS AFTER THE “NIGHTMARE” ISRAEL HAS FACED SINCE THE GAZA WITHDRAWAL

Now that the new Mideast peace envoy Tony Blair has spent a bit of time in Israel and the Palestinian-run areas since he stepped down as British prime minister last summer, he says he has gained a better understanding of the threat Israel is under.

“For people on the outside it is hard to understand the problems that the [Israelis] are having. Today I understand more than when I was the prime minister the difficulties here,” he said yesterday in Jerusalem. (For starters, Blair doesn’t have to rely anymore on the lies about Israel by the BBC and British newspapers, but can see the situation for himself.)

Yesterday alone the supposedly cash-strapped Palestinians fired 37 missiles on the southern Israeli working class town of Sderot – a record number for a single day. Five Israeli civilians were injured.

Blair: Israel faced post-pullout nightmare
The Jerusalem Post
Dec 13, 2007

If he were an MK (Member of the Knesset), the Quartet’s Middle East envoy Tony Blair would hesitate to cede land in the West Bank to the Palestinians after the “nightmare” that the Israelis faced after they disengaged from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, he said yesterday.

However Blair, addressing the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, added that Israel must continue with the peace process despite its security concerns.

“I understand and sympathize with the problems that the [Israelis] are having. For people on the outside it is hard to understand… today I understand more than when I was the prime minister the difficulties here,” said Blair.

Blair told the committee about the economic programs that he hopes to launch to bolster the Palestinian economy. He explained that a diplomatic process would be useless unless there were real changes on the ground to improve the lives of the Palestinian people.

Likud MK Limor Livnat was angered when Blair refused to answer her question regarding PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“He would not, or could not, answer the question of why the Palestinians leadership was entering into peace talks without recognizing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state,” she said.

 

Thursday, December 27, 2007

EGYPT TO COPYRIGHT PYRAMIDS

Las Vegas beware.

Egypt plans to pass a law requiring payment of royalties to the Egyptian regime whenever its ancient monuments, from the Pyramids to the Sphinx, are reproduced in full-scale fashion.

Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said on Christmas Day that the move was necessary to pay for the upkeep of the country’s thousands of historic sites.

“The new law will completely prohibit the duplication of Egyptian monuments which the Supreme Council of Antiquities considers 100 per cent copies,” he said.

He did not explain how Egypt intended to enforce the law.

 

Monday, December 10, 2007

ISRAELIS IN MECCA

Ahmad Jum’a, a 25-year-old student from Nazareth, feels the need to defend Israel from the misconceptions and untruths he hears from fellow Muslims during the Haj.

Explaining that he is a Muslim Arab with Israeli citizenship often leaves his audience gobsmacked [reports The Media Line] ...

Jum’a also encounters anti-Israel views. He holds the Arab media partially to blame for this, for failing to provide an accurate and comprehensive picture of Israeli culture and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The Arab media always shows negative things about Israel and as a Muslim Arab living inside Israel I want to show a positive side of the country. I tell them there are good things in Israel and that we live side by side with the Jews. There are problems sometimes but the relations with our Jewish neighbors are generally good.”

… On his recent trip to Medina he found a group of four Palestinians from a refugee camp in Lebanon. They told him they agreed with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel should be wiped off the map.

… The Muslims in Israel have freedom and passports, he tells them. They have a good economic situation and good jobs; they get along with their Jewish neighbors and they benefit from Israel’s services.

… Jum’a is not alone in this conviction. Sheikh ‘Ali Bakr, 47, an imam from northern Israel… has been to Saudi Arabia 24 times on pilgrimages. Bakr does not feel a contradiction in holding Israeli citizenship and attending the Haj.

… “Some think that Israeli Arabs are neglected and underprivileged, so we tell them that’s not the case, that we live here as equal citizens and that we fit well into the Jewish social fabric.”

***

I attach two articles below. The second in particular is worth reading. It reiterates the fact that, as the late Lord (Peter) Bauer and others have noted, foreign aid does not work. It corrupts and distorts an economy; and the greater the amounts involved, the greater the damage. The Palestinians have received more per capita aid in recent years than any other nation in world history, and the result has been to stifle incentive for useful economic development in the Palestinian Authority-run areas.

-- Tom Gross

ITEMS ON THE MEDIA

[Note by Tom Gross]

At the present time I am giving an intensive round of interviews, lectures, and media workshops. I have, however, continued to regularly publish items on the National Review's Media Blog, and I attach a selection below, and in four accompanying dispatches this week. Some of these may be familiar to some of you by now, though I hope that most of them won't be. The items below relate to the media in general.

 

Friday, December 7, 2007

BBC “TOOK TERRORIST TRAINERS PAINTBALLING”

This is an extraordinary story, even by the BBC’s standards.

The BBC, it should be remembered, is using U.K. taxpayers’ money to fund such activities.

Incidentally, Phil Rees, who produced the show in question for the BBC, now works for the Arabic TV station al-Jazeera.

BBC ‘took terrorist trainers paintballing’
By Adam Sherwin, Media Correspondent
The Times (of London)
December 5, 2007

The BBC funded a paintballing trip for men later accused of Islamic terrorism and failed to pass on information about the 21/7 bombers to police, a court was told yesterday.

Mohammed Hamid, who is charged with overseeing a two-year radicalisation programme to prepare London-based Muslim youths for jihad, was described as a “cockney comic” by a BBC producer.

The BBC paid for Mr Hamid and fellow defendants Muhammad al-Figari and Mousa Brown to go on a paintballing trip at the Delta Force centre in Tonbridge, Kent, in February 2005. The men, accused of terrorism training, were filmed for a BBC programme called Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, screened in June 2005.

The BBC paid Mr Hamid, an Islamic preacher who denies recruiting and grooming the men behind the failed July 2005 attack, a £300 fee to take part in the programme, Woolwich Crown Court was told.

It was alleged that Mr Hamid told a BBC reporter that he would use the corporation’s money to pay a fine imposed by magistrates for a public order offence.

Nasreen Suleaman, a researcher on the programme, told the court that Mr Hamid, 50, contacted her after the July 2005 attack and told her of his association with the bombers. But she said that she felt no obligation to contact the police with this information. Ms Suleaman said that she informed senior BBC managers but was not told to contact the police.

Ms Suleaman told the court that Mr Hamid was keen to appear in the programme. She said: “He was so up for it. We took the decision that paintballing would be a fun way of introducing him.”

… Ms Suleaman said she was not aware that Ramzi Mohammed and Hussein Osman, two of the July bombers, had joined Mr Hamid at the Tonbridge paintball centre on July 3, 2005.

… Mr Hamid is charged with Mr al-Figari, 42, Mr Brown, 41, Kader Ahmed, 20, and Kibley Da Costa, 24. Atilla Ahmet, 43, has admitted soliciting murder.

Mr Hamid denies providing weapons training, five charges of soliciting murder and three of providing training for terrorism.

 

Sunday, December 23, 2007

TIME MAGAZINE GETS RIDS OF ITS TWO CONSERVATIVE COLUMNISTS

Last week, Time magazine rewarded Vladimir Putin for his increasingly dictatorial ways by anointing him “Person of the Year.” (There was never any chance, of course, of a pro-American European leader like Nicholas Sarkozy winning the award from a magazine whose owners also run CNN.)

Now America’s “leading news magazine” has apparently dropped its only two conservative-leaning columnists, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol.

Asked by The New York Observer if he would have preferred to stay with the magazine, Krauthammer, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The Washington Post, replied that he didn’t have a choice. “It’s a hypothetical that didn’t arise,” he said.

 

Sunday, December 30, 2007

THE NY TIMES HIRES A CRITIC

I reported before Christmas (see item above) that Time Magazine was getting rid of its two conservative columnists. Now, in a surprise move, one of them, William Kristol, has been snapped up by The New York Times.

It seems that the Times is reacting to the serious threat Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is likely to make next year, by ever so slightly diversifying from its left-wing op-ed base.

For those who don’t know, Kristol is the editor and co-founder of The Weekly Standard, a Washington political magazine with a conservative viewpoint. He regularly appears on Fox News, and served as Vice President Dan Quayle’s chief of staff during the administration of President George H.W. Bush.

Kristol will write his first weekly column for the January 7 issue of the Times.

The Washington newspaper, The Politico, reports that word of the hiring “caused a frenzy in the liberal blogosphere, with threats of canceling subscriptions and claims that the Gray Lady had been hijacked by neo-cons.”

But Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal told The Politico that he fails to understand “this weird fear of opposing views.”

“The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual – and somehow that’s a bad thing,” Rosenthal added. “How intolerant is that?”

Rosenthal may have finally discovered liberal intolerance but The Nation is still fuming: “What ever happened to meritocracy? For Kristol to get a Times column – after being fired from Time magazine no less – is as meritocratic as, um, George W. Bush becoming the leader of the free world… What this hire demonstrates is how successfully the right has intimidated the mainstream media. Their constant demonizing of The New York Times as the tool of the liberal elite worked.”

So the Times will have one conservative columnist alongside all the liberal ones (Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman and so on) and even this is too much diversity for the close-minded.

 

Friday, January 4, 2008

NYT REPORTERS FINALLY FLY THE SULZBERGER WAY

So much for their constant lecturing us about global warming and carbon emission.

The New York Times has hired corporate jets to fly their reporters from Iowa to New Hampshire at 6 am on Friday morning.

A spokesperson for the Times said it was “most cost-effective” and they wanted to avoid long delays expected Friday at the Des Moines International Airport, as thousands of journalists return rental cars and line up for security checks.

Politico’s first readers’ comment on the report was true to form from the nasty left:

That’s odd... I heard their jet was already booked this Friday picking up Bill Kristol from hell.

 

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

JOURNALIST DEATHS TOTAL 171 IN 2007

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called 2007 a year of “unlimited human tragedy.” It said 171 journalists and media workers were killed in 2007 as a result of political unrest, war and attacks on press freedom around the world.

Though journalists working in Iraq were most at risk, where 65 were killed, unrest in Pakistan and Somalia contributed to 17 more deaths and five were killed in Afghanistan and three in Sri Lanka.

In Africa, two journalists were killed as part of a crackdown on press freedom and in Mexico, several were killed covering the drug trade. The IFJ said journalists most at risk are usually those working in their own countries.

2007 was the second worst year on record for press safety after 2006, when the number of journalists killed while working was 177. The previous year saw 150 deaths and in 2004, 129 journalists were killed at work.

The IFJ will release its full report in mid-January.

 

Monday, December 17, 2007

FREE MARK STEYN!

America may be “alone,” but Mark Steyn isn’t. He has millions of admirers and supporters around the world.

Canada’s Thought Police
New York Post (editorial)
December 16, 2007

Celebrated author Mark Steyn has been summoned to appear before two Canadian judicial panels on charges linked to his book “America Alone.”

The book, a No. 1 bestseller in Canada, argues that Western nations are succumbing to an Islamist imperialist threat. The fact that charges based on it are proceeding apace proves his point.

Steyn, who won the 2006 Eric Breindel Journalism Award (co-sponsored by The Post and its parent, News Corp), writes for dozens of publications on several continents. After the Canadian general-interest magazine Maclean’s reprinted a chapter from the book, five Muslim law-school students, acting through the auspices of the Canadian Islamic Congress, demanded that the magazine be punished for spreading “hatred and contempt” for Muslims.

The plaintiffs allege that Maclean’s advocated, among other things, the notion that Islamic culture is incompatible with Canada’s liberalized, Western civilization. They insist such a notion is untrue and, in effect, want opinions like that banned from publication.

Two separate panels, the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and the Canadian Human Rights Commission, have agreed to hear the case. These bodies are empowered to hear and rule on cases of purported “hate speech.”

Of course, a ban on opinions – even disagreeable ones – is the very antithesis of the Western tradition of free speech and freedom of the press.

Indeed, this whole process of dragging Steyn and the magazine before two separate human-rights bodies for the “crime” of expressing an opinion is a good illustration of precisely what he was talking about…

 

Friday, December 14, 2007

(AB)ORIGINAL SIN: GANG-RAPISTS OF 10-YEAR-OLD AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL GIRL GO FREE, YET MEDIA COVERAGE SCARCE

This gang-rape case may not be as bad as the recent Saudi one in the sense that the victim hasn’t been sentenced to 200 lashes and a prison term.

But nevertheless, as was originally the case with the Saudi miscarriage of justice, it deserves a great deal more international media attention than it is getting.

Judge condemned over Aborigine child rape case
Barbara McMahon in Sydney
The Guardian

A judge in Australia was facing calls to step down today after she failed to jail a group of nine males who admitted gang-raping a 10-year-old girl in an Aboriginal community, saying the young victim “probably agreed” to have sex with them.

Instead of jailing the three adults, aged 17 to 26, one of whom was a repeat sex offender, and giving custodial sentences to the six juveniles aged 14 to 16, Queensland District Court judge Sarah Bradley handed out suspended sentences and probation orders.

The lenient sentencing was greeted with outrage and disbelief across Australia, which has been wrestling with the problem of child sex abuse in indigenous communities after a report, Little Children Are Sacred, released earlier this year, described the problem as widespread and endemic.

The newly elected prime minister, Kevin Rudd, said he was “appalled and disgusted” by the details of the case while Queensland’s attorney-general, Kerry Shine, said he would appeal the judge’s decision. Indigenous leaders said it sent a terrible message to vulnerable girls and women living in fear in Australia’s communities.

“If this was a white girl in white suburban Brisbane’ there’s no way the defendants would have walked out of court,” said child protection campaigner Hetty Johnston.

… Queensland’s premier, Anna Bligh, said that the girl, who had been returned to the community after being put in foster care, was once more back in foster care, receiving medical and other treatment, and is reportedly doing well.

 

Friday, December 07, 2007

“MEDIA MUST STOP CREATING CELEBRITIES OUT OF LUNATICS”

Do journalists unwittingly enable the kind of gunmen who wrecked havoc in Omaha, at Virginia Tech, and elsewhere?

MarketWatch columnist Jon Friedman thinks so. Let’s hope news execs take Freidman’s point seriously before more innocent lives are pointlessly lost.

Jon Friedman: I want the media to stop the practice of identifying crazed fame-seekers, such as the gunman who killed eight people Wednesday in an Omaha mall before taking his own life. Don’t release their names or photos.

By taking such a bold step, television, print and Web executives could help society and maybe even save lives. Media do-gooders often point to the positive ways in which they help people to live better lives. Now, those in charge can accomplish something truly noteworthy by doing nothing at all, and it wouldn’t cost a dime.

Like everyone else, I winced when I heard that yet another troubled young man had gunned down innocent bystanders. This time, it happened in Omaha, but the script didn’t seem all that different from the tragedies at Virginia Tech and Columbine.

I’ll leave it to sociologists and psychiatrists to try to make sense of it. But I believe that media executives can help to minimize the possibilities of future incidents if they ceased to provide such high-profile publicity to these deranged gunmen.

The “gunman” in the Omaha episode was actually a teenager who desperately wanted the kind of publicity that the 24/7 media establishment could give him. He reportedly left behind a note proclaiming, “Now I’ll be famous.”

… It doesn’t have to be this way, though. What if the media covered all the nuances of the story but ceased naming the vicious and disturbed murderers who kill for the kicks of getting their names on the evening news and on the front pages of newspapers, magazines and Web sites?

 

Friday, December 14, 2007

HARVARD MAGAZINE EXPOSES PROFESSORS WHOSE ASSISTANTS DO THE WRITING

The current issue of the magazine 02138 reveals how some of Harvard’s top professors actually produce their books: They do it “with the help of a small army of student assistants who research, edit, and sometimes even write material for which they are never credited.”

These ghost writers are paid $11.50 an hour, says the magazine, which points out that if Harvard students handed in term papers written by somebody else, they would be expelled. It appears this rule doesn’t apply to their professors.

 

Monday, December 17, 2007

HARVEY WEINSTEIN GETS HITCHED

A pretty impressive guest list:

Among those attending on Saturday night at Weinstein’s Westport estate were New York Post and Wall Street Journal owner Rupert Murdoch, New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman, Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, Vogue’s Anna Wintour, Harper’s Bazaar’s Glenda Bailey, plenty of film stars (Cameron Diaz, Renée Zellweger, Jennifer Lopez, Quentin Tarantino, and many others), plenty of models (including Helena Christensen, Karolina Kurkova, Jacquetta Wheeler and Natalia Vodianova) and several politicians.

Robert De Niro gave the toast. “Chicago” director Rob Marshall surprised Weinstein with a choreographed revue in his honor to “He Had It Coming.”

Bill and Hillary Clinton couldn’t make it but sent a gushing video tribute.

Weinstein, 55, married fashion designer Georgina Chapman, 31. Miramax, the film company he co-founded with his brother Bob, is named after his parents Miriam and Max Weinstein. Instead of sending gifts, guests were invited to contribute to the Robin Hood Foundation’s education programs for underprivileged children in New York City and to Give2Asia’s program in support of the disadvantaged in India.

[Note by Tom Gross]

At the present time I am giving an intensive round of interviews, lectures, and media workshops (including to the popular Iranian pro-democracy radio, Radio Farda, and to Radio Free Afghanistan). Because of this there are fewer dispatches than normal.

I have, however, continued to regularly publish items on the National Review’s Media Blog, and I attach a selection below, and in four accompanying dispatches this week. Some of these may be familiar to some of you by now, though I hope that most of them won’t be. Not all relate to the Mideast; some are lighter items, or items relating to the media in general, or to US and world politics.

In some of these five dispatches I also attach a number of items not posted on the National Review.

 

AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION STARTS TODAY

The voting process for the next American president begins today with the Iowa caucuses this evening. This is arguably the most important – and most open – American election in modern history.

The Democratic and Republican caucuses begin at 6.30pm and 7 pm respectively, and consist of local meetings in which voters either cast their vote by secret ballot or publicly, by standing with other supporters of their candidate.

One new aspect of the year-long campaign thus far has been the widespread use of the Internet, particularly YouTube, to reach out to new voters.

In July, for example, I sent out the risqué video “I Got a Crush on Obama,” which has now generated millions of views and became the second most watched video worldwide on YouTube last year.

Also popular was the response from Rudy’s girls who fought back in a joint release with Obama’s girls of a Giuliani v. Obama “political debate song”.

 

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

JOHN McCAIN: VOTE FOR ME OR YOU’LL DIE

Even though in many ways I think John McCain is an extremely worthy candidate and would make a fine president, this last-minute “Foreign Policy Alert” to Iowa and New Hampshire voters is a little over the top.

 

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

STUDY: HILLARY HIT HARDEST BY MEDIA; FOX MOST BALANCED

TV election news has been hardest on Hillary Clinton during the last few months, while Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee have been the biggest media favorites, according to a new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University.

The study also found that Fox News Channel’s evening news show provided more balanced coverage than any of its counterparts on the broadcast networks.

And having praised Fox as the most balanced, the liberal-leaning CMPA felt the need to add next to their headline that this is “not a typo”.

 

Thursday, December 27, 2007

BRITISH MEDIA HUMOR

Confusing Afghanistan with the United States, the headline from Iowa running right across the top of the world news page of this morning’s (London) Daily Telegraph is:

“Tribal leaders” choose the next president

(For clarity, the online version adds “US”: “Tribal leaders” choose the next US president.)

 

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

IRANIAN HARDLINERS APPEAR TO ENDORSE MIKE HUCKABEE

Given their unusually enthusiastic language in describing an American politician, it would appear that Iran’s hardline Fars News Agency would like Mike Huckabee to win the Republican nomination.

These are the same Islamist extremists who are hoping the next American president will go easy on them as they complete their drive to acquire a nuclear bomb.

 

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

THE IMPLICATIONS AMONG MUSLIMS OF BARACK OBAMA HAVING CONVERTED TO CHRISTIANITY

Barack Obama is today a practicing Christian, a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ. But, asks Daniel Pipes, was he ever a Muslim or seen by others as a Muslim? More precisely, might Muslims consider him a murtadd (apostate), that is, a Muslim who converted to another religion and, therefore, someone whose blood may be shed?

Pipes writes:

“I’ve always been a Christian,” said Obama, focusing on his own personal lack of practice of Islam as a child to deny any connection to Islam. But Muslims do not see practice as key. For them, that he was born to a line of Muslim males makes him born a Muslim. Further, all children born with an Arabic name based on the H-S-N trilateral root (Hussein, Hassan, and others) can be assumed to be Muslim, so they will understand Obama’s full name, Barack Hussein Obama, to proclaim him a born Muslim.

… Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times reported … The childhood friends say Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque. “We prayed but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque,” Zulfin Adi said. “But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played.” … Obama’s younger sister, Maya Soetoro, said in a statement released by the campaign that the family attended the mosque only “for big communal events,” not every Friday.

Recalling Obama’s time in Indonesia, the Times account contains quotes that Obama “went to the mosque,” and that he “was Muslim.”

Summarized, available evidence suggests Obama was born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian step-father. At some point, he converted to Christianity.

… Obama’s conversion to another faith, in short, makes him a murtadd… One must assume that some Islamists would renounce him as a murtadd and would try to execute him. Given the protective bubble surrounding an American president, though, this threat presumably would not make much difference to his carrying out his duties.

More significantly, how would more mainstream Muslims respond to him, would they be angry at what they would consider his apostasy? That reaction is a real possibility, one that could undermine his initiatives toward the Muslim world.

 

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

THE FALL OF ROME?

The Financial Times has released a list of its most read stories in 2007, according to its web traffic:

1. Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned
2. Chinese military hacked into Pentagon
3. Iran on course for nuclear bomb, EU told
4. Google’s goal: to organise your daily life
5. Pelosi backtracks on Armenia ‘genocide’ bill
6. Industry caught in carbon ‘smokescreen’
7. Vista marks end of an era for Microsoft
8. Memo to Obama: win Iowa or lose the race
9. Gates warns on US immigration curbs
10. Globalisation backlash in rich nations

 

Sunday, December 30, 2007

“MUSHARRAF BLOCKED BHUTTO FROM HIRING U.S. BODYGUARDS”

Benazir Bhutto had tried to hire American and British security professionals to protect her, the (London) Sunday Telegraph reports today.

But President Pervez Musharraf refused to allow the foreign personnel into Pakistan to help, according to Mark Siegel, Bhutto’s U.S. spokesperson. “She and her husband repeatedly tried to get visas for such protection, but they were denied by the government of Pakistan.”

Following the suicide bomb attacks that killed more than 140 during her homecoming parade on October 19, Bhutto had tried to bring in guards from the American Blackwater private security firm, and from the London-based Armor Group, which guards British diplomats in the Middle East. A Blackwater spokesman yesterday confirmed that Bhutto had approached them.

The report will add to the controversy over Bhutto’s security arrangements, which have been criticized as completely inadequate given the dangers she faced.

 

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

THE BBC INVESTIGATES ATTACKS ON ITS MOSCOW STAFF

The BBC is examining the possibility that three journalists working for its Russian language service, each of whom was beaten up in Moscow in the same week, were deliberately targeted because of their reporting.

The BBC World Service, along with the American-backed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, continues to broadcast uncensored reports in Russian about what is happening under Vladimir Putin’s increasingly dictatorial regime. (Several RFE/RL journalists have been murdered in the last year, as I reported previously.)

A BBC spokesperson said the World Service was “extremely concerned” by the “spate of attacks” on its journalists, all of whom were assaulted in separate incidents just before Russia’s parliamentary elections. “Although we have no evidence that the attacks were motivated by the victims’ employment, we are exploring that possibility,” he said.

David Quadrat, a Russian who works for the BBC’s Central Asian Service, was assaulted on November 24 on his way home from the BBC’s Moscow bureau. His attackers shouted racist abuse as they beat him at a crowded Moscow metro station.

Another BBC Russian staff member, Mikhail Denisov, was attacked near his home the following day. They broke his nose, damaged his ribs, and stole his wallet.

Then on November 30, another BBC Russian staff member, Yevgeny Demchenko, was assaulted while on the way home from work. He suffered head injuries and required stitches.

Independent commentators suggested that the attackers might be linked to the pro-Putin youth group Nashi, who have recently staged demonstrations outside the British embassy in Moscow.

In August, the Kremlin blocked the BBC Russian Service’s FM frequency, severely curtailing the BBC World Service’s ability to broadcast in the Moscow area. The BBC continues to broadcast on medium and short waves.

 

Monday, December 17, 2007

DEMOCRACY, RUSSIAN-STYLE

From the British satirical magazine, Private Eye.

 

Monday, December 10, 2007

ON PUTIN AND STALIN

Germany today is a democracy which doesn’t threaten its neighbors. This is largely because it underwent an intensive and successful program of de-Nazification.

But Russian society has yet to fully acknowledge, understand and condemn Stalin’s crimes. Unless it does so, it may not be able to “save the democratic processes that started” after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, as historian Nikita Petrov makes clear in this article:

100 Volumes of History To Shed Light on Stalin
By Bagila Bukharbayeva
The Associated Press

Historians have announced the start of a project to increase understanding of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s rule and help Russians come to terms with one of the grimmest pages of their history.

The project’s ambitious aim is to publish 100 volumes by Russian and foreign historians in the next three years. The first five books were issued last week.

“There still has been no legal assessment of Stalin’s terror, of the Soviet system’s crimes,” historian Nikita Petrov, one of the contributors to the project, said. “We have not bothered to analyze that bloodshed and its legacy.”

Russians must understand and condemn Stalin’s crimes if they want to “save the democratic processes that we’ve started” since the 1991 Soviet collapse, he said.

President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, has rolled back the country’s democratic achievements, restored Soviet-era symbols and tried to soften public perceptions of Stalin.

In June, he told history teachers that although Stalin’s political purges were one of the most notorious episodes of the Soviet era, Russia should not be made to feel guilty because “in other countries even worse things happened.”

In a new book for history teachers commissioned by the Kremlin, Stalin is portrayed as an effective manager.

… Also in the book, published earlier this year, the United States is cast as an evil power seeking world dominance.

Under Stalin, who ruled from 1922 until his death in 1953, hundreds of thousands were branded enemies of the state and executed. Millions more became inmates of the gulag, the system of thousands of slave labor camps.

“We have not gotten over Stalinism yet because we have not yet come to understand it fully,” said Arseny Rochinsky, a member of Memorial, a nongovernmental organization that studies Stalin’s repressions.

“Look around, all the attributes of Stalinism are still here,” he said. Rochinsky cited the Kremlin’s intolerance of dissent and hunt for external and internal enemies and the lack of an independent judicial system…

 

Thursday, December 13, 2007

TAJIKISTAN LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN AGAINST WITCHCRAFT

The last bastion of witchery is set to fall?

DUSHANBE (Reuters, Dec. 13) – Tajikistan is launching a crackdown on witchcraft and fortune-telling as part of an anti-poverty drive after earlier banning lavish weddings and expensive funerals.

Occultism is on the rise in Muslim Tajikistan. It is the poorest nation in ex-Soviet Central Asia, borders Afghanistan and was ravaged by a 1992-97 civil war. Queues to see sorcerers are often longer than those for regular doctors.

“Those indulging in sorcery and fortune-telling shall be fined between 30 and 40 times the minimum monthly wage (85 to 113 pounds),” says the text of a draft law backed by the lower chamber of the Tajik parliament on Wednesday.

The draft law has to be passed by the upper house and signed by President Imomali Rakhmon to become law. But this is widely seen as a formality.

THE SEASON OF GOODWILL – EXCEPT TO ISRAEL

[Note by Tom Gross]

At the present time I am giving an intensive round of interviews, lectures, and media workshops (including to the popular Iranian pro-democracy radio, Radio Farda, and to Radio Free Afghanistan). Because of this there are fewer dispatches than normal.

I have, however, continued to regularly publish items on the National Review’s Media Blog, and I attach a selection below, and in four accompanying dispatches this week. Some of these may be familiar to some of you by now, though I hope that many won’t be.

In some of these five dispatches I also attach a number of items not posted on the National Review.

 

Thursday, December 27, 2007

CHRISTMAS SMEAR

It has become something of a Christmas tradition for many Western journalists. Bashing Israel has again been in plentiful supply this festive season.

This year it is not just the liberal-left media that has had its fair share of such stories. On Christmas Eve, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial by Kenneth Woodward, a contributing editor at Newsweek, titled The Plight of Bethlehem, in which Woodward – who admitted in his piece who that he hadn’t actually been to Bethlehem in seven years – claimed Israel’s security measures “make it impossible” for Christians to visit their holy shrines there.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post website ran a story (linked prominently to on the Post’s home page) titled Christmas in a Strangled Bethlehem – which turned out to have been written from Qatar.

The truth is that with the Palestinian intifada virtually crushed and Israel’s security barrier making it extremely difficult for terrorists to operate, calm has returned to Bethlehem and this Christmas has been a bumper one for Christians.

Thousands of Bethlehem Christians have visited Jerusalem this December. Even one in six Christians from the Gaza strip applied for and was given a one-month travel visa by Israel to visit Israel and the West Bank during the Christmas season. (Israel Eases Bethlehem Christmas Travel, The Associated Press, December 18, 2007)

None other than the BBC – which has an almost unparalleled record for Israel-bashing – acknowledges this in an online piece titled “Better times return to Bethlehem.”

This year, the BBC piece notes, “Hundreds of thousands more visitors have come to Bethlehem” – four times more people than in December 2005.

“This year is like 2000,” Palestinian tour guide Adil Dweib tells the BBC, referring to the millennium year, a bumper time for Bethlehem tourism.

“I feel safer here than I do walking down some streets in the UK,” the BBC quotes British tourist Mike Quincy as saying.

 

Thursday, December 27, 2007

ISRAEL: THE ONLY COUNTRY IN THE MIDEAST WITH A GROWING CHRISTIAN POPULATION

Contrary to the false picture of Christians faring badly under Israel, painted in many media reports in December, demographic statistics show the opposite is true.

After Jordan captured the West Bank during Israel’s war of independence in 1948, Bethlehem’s Christian population began falling in response to Muslim intimidation. After the 1967 six-day war, when Israel recaptured Bethlehem, its Christian population started rising as it had before 1948. But after Bethlehem came under the rule of the Palestinian Authority following the 1993 Oslo accords, Bethlehem’s Christian population went into a nosedive from which it has yet to recover.

Israel is in fact the only country in the Middle East with a growing Christian population. Israel’s Christian community has risen by 270 percent since the founding of the state in 1948. (For more, see the article by Nina Shea below.)

 

Friday, December 21, 2007

CATHOLIC LEADER REJECTS ISRAEL’S JEWISH IDENTITY

Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah, an Arab from Nazareth and the Roman Catholic Church’s top cleric in the Holy Land, has said Israel should not be designated a Jewish state. At the same time as he made these remarks, Sabbah refused to answer a question about whether Jews should be allowed to live near Jewish holy sites in any future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Sabbah was widely criticized by Jewish leaders for his comments.

 

Thursday, December 27, 2007

JEB BUSH IN ISRAEL FOR CHRISTMAS

Among those visiting Israel for Christmas was Jeb Bush, the younger brother of the American president. Accompanied by his family for the holidays, Bush, who is also governor of Florida, visited Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Nazareth and Masada. President George W. Bush is due to visit Israel and several friendly Arab states next week on an official visit.

By contrast, other U.S. politicians, including Senator Arlen Specter and Congressman Patrick Kennedy (JFK’s nephew), have instead visited Syria in recent days, thus further boosting the Assad regime even as France severs ties with it for its continuing thwarting of the democratic process in neighboring Lebanon.

 

Thursday, December 27, 2007

PRIESTS BRAWL AT JESUS’ SUPPOSED BIRTHPLACE

Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests attacked each other with brooms and stones inside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity in the Palestinian-controlled West Bank as long-standing tensions erupted in violence during holiday cleaning today.

The clean-up turned ugly after some of the Orthodox faithful stepped inside the Armenian church’s section, sparking off a fight between about 50 Greek Orthodox and 30 Armenians. Four priests were wounded.

 

Monday, December 24, 2007

THE REAL SCROOGE “WAS A DUTCH GRAVEDIGGER”

Perhaps more than any other writer, Charles Dickens, through his stories – above all A Christmas Carol – is responsible for creating our image of what a modern Christmas should be like, including eating a lot, games, festivities, the importance of families being together, and general goodwill. (Before Dickens there was much less fuss made about Christmas in England and many other countries.)

This story, from the front page of today’s (London) Daily Telegraph, provides a further possible insight into one of the influences on him:

He is synonymous with the traditional image of the Victorian English Christmas but Ebenezer Scrooge may have his roots much further afield.

According to Sjef de Jong, a Dutch academic, the Charles Dickens character may have been inspired by the real life of Gabriel de Graaf, a 19th century gravedigger who lived in Holland.

De Graaf, a drunken curmudgeon obsessed with money, was said to have disappeared one Christmas Eve, only to emerge years later as a reformed character...

 

Thursday, December 27, 2007

HA’ARETZ EDITOR TO RICE: AMERICA PLEASE “RAPE” US

The “intellectual” Israeli daily Ha’aretz, while having some fine writers and analysts, has long been widely criticized for also promoting leftist views so extreme that they virtually amount to Jewish self-hate. Some of its more virulent anti-Israeli articles are regularly reprinted on Jihadist websites and have even appeared, with approval, on the sites of western Holocaust deniers.

Its articles often contain pseudo-facts that provide fuel and support for the enemies of Israel the world over and give both the extreme left and extreme right a good conscience about attacking Israel.

Now criticism of Ha’aretz has come to a head after its editor, David Landau, told Condoleezza Rice that America ought to “rape” Israel in order to ensure a peace settlement. The comments caused such a stir among the 20 or so high profile attendees at a confidential briefing with the secretary of state on a recent visit to Israel that they have been leaked by some of the others present. The incident took place at the private residence of America’s ambassador to Israel, Richard Jones.

Landau, who was seated next to Rice at the dinner, is reported to have described Israel as a “failed state” and told her that the Israeli government wanted “to be raped” and that it would be like a “wet dream” for him to see this happen.

Rice’s response to his remarks, Landau said, was “fantastic” in that she was “completely unfazed” by them, and remained “urbane and diplomatic.”

Landau denied making the “wet dream” remark but stood by everything else he was reported to have said. He told The Jewish Week that he had no regrets and that, on the contrary, he was pleased, adding that he was later congratulated by “several professors” in the room.

Landau, a British-born Jew, is renowned for his outspoken views. He formerly wrote anonymously (and some would say in an anti-Israel manner) as the Jerusalem correspondent for Britain’s prestigious Economist magazine.

In fact Landau’s new message to the U.S. is suicidal. What it is saying, by implication, is: Please destroy me, America. And if you are not going to destroy me yourself, then please make sure my enemies are in a position to destroy me.

 

Monday, December 31, 2007

CHECKING EMAIL BEFORE BED “IS THE EQUIVALENT OF DRINKING TWO ESPRESSOS”

A new study in Scotland provides a warning for those who like to check their email before going to sleep.

“Checking cellphones, BlackBerrys or laptop computers shuts down the brain’s natural preparations for sleep and is essentially the equivalent of drinking a double espresso last thing at night,” said Dr Chris Idzikowski of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre, which carried out the study.

“Research has shown that light from a laptop or BlackBerry is concentrated enough to signal your brain to stop production of melatonin, a natural hormone known to aid sleep disturbances.

“Being in a relaxed environment and incorporating essential wind-down time into your day is your best chance of securing a great night’s sleep – along with silence, darkness and comfort.”

(For a previous post on BlackBerrys, see: here.)

 

Monday, December 31, 2007

AMSTERDAM’S DRUG POLICE REFUSE TO KICK THE HABIT

Law and order, Dutch-style means the police smoke cannabis too. Whatever happened to staying alert even off duty?

The Times of London reports:

When it comes to turning a blind eye to cannabis use in Europe’s most tolerant city, police in Amsterdam are demanding the right to practice what they preach.

Officers in the capital of the Netherlands are in open revolt against a new code of behavior that orders them to stop taking drugs in their free time.

… “Police should not be put in pigeonholes in which they can no longer be themselves,” said Hans van Duijn, the chairman of the Nederlandse Politie Bond, the police union. “If you allow people in the country to smoke [cannabis], you would be a hypocrite to say to the police officers, ‘You are not allowed to do that’.

The new rules are due to come in to force on January 1.

***

I also attach one article not written by myself, below, about the plight of Christians in the Middle East.

-- Tom Gross

[Note by Tom Gross]

At the present time I am giving an intensive round of interviews, lectures, and media workshops (including to the popular Iranian pro-democracy radio, Radio Farda, and to Radio Free Afghanistan). Because of this there are fewer dispatches than normal.

I have, however, continued to regularly publish items on the National Review’s Media Blog, and I attach a selection below, and in four accompanying dispatches. Some of these may be familiar to some of you by now, though I hope that most of them won’t be.

 

Monday, December 24, 2007

POLL OF SAUDIS: DON’T LIKE JEWS AND CHRISTIANS, WANT ISRAEL DESTROYED AND SAUDIS TO HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Opinion polls among Saudi citizens are extremely rare. This survey was conducted for Terror Free Tomorrow by D3 Systems of Vienna, Virginia and KA Europe SPRL. Interviews were conducted by phone from a facility in a country neighboring Saudi Arabia.

The survey was conducted in Arabic, among a random national sample of 1,004 Saudi Arabian citizens aged 18 and older. Among the results:

Please tell me your opinion of each group of people. Is your opinion very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable?

Iranians
Very Favorable: 23.4%
Somewhat Favorable: 27.9%
Somewhat Unfavorable: 15.5%
Very Unfavorable: 24.0%
Refused: 2.5%
Don’t Know: 6.7%

Jews
Very Favorable: 2.1%
Somewhat Favorable: 3.9%
Somewhat Unfavorable: 7.0%
Very Unfavorable 81.7%
Refused: 4.1%
Don’t Know: 1.1%

Christians
Very Favorable: 13.7%
Somewhat Favorable: 25.5%
Somewhat Unfavorable: 14.0%
Very Unfavorable: 40.3%
Refused: 2.5%
Don’t Know: 4.1%

If all diplomatic means fail to stop the Iranian government from developing nuclear weapons, would you favor the United States and other countries accepting a nuclear-armed Iran, or would you favor the United States and other countries taking military action against Iran to try and prevent the Iranians from having nuclear weapons?

Favor US Accepting A Nuclear Armed Iran: 26.6%
Favor US and Other Countries Taking Military Action to Prevent Nuclear Armed Iran: 38.1%
Refused to answer: 19.9%
Don’t Know: 15.4%

Please listen as I read the following statements and tell me which is closest to your own opinion?

I would favor a peace treaty recognizing the State of Israel, if an independent Palestinian state is established: 29.6%

I oppose any peace treaty recognizing the State of Israel, and I favor all Arabs continuing to fight until there is no State of Israel in the Middle East: 51.3%

Refused to answer: 13.2%
Don’t Know: 5.9%

Do you favor or oppose the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia developing nuclear weapons?

Strongly Favor: 34.7%
Somewhat Favor: 17.3%
Somewhat Oppose: 12.1%
Strongly Oppose: 19.1%
Refused to answer: 9.3%
Don’t Know: 7.5%

***

(Items on these dispatches are regularly linked to elsewhere and I don’t usually mention this, but I would like to thank these and other sites for being particularly generous in referring to my work as “always interesting”.)

 

Sunday, December 30, 2007

BIN LADEN ATTACKS HIZBULLAH

One surprising aspect of the 56-minute diatribe posted yesterday evening by Osama Bin Laden on the internet is that he criticized al-Qaeda’s fellow terrorist group, Hizbullah.

Bin Laden said that he is angry with Hizbullah for accepting the deployment of United Nations forces in south Lebanon after its war with Israel in 2006.

He said the U.N. force was there to “protect the Jews,” which to Bin Laden is obviously unacceptable.

But while al-Qaeda, which is a Sunni group, may have its theological differences with Hizbullah, a Shia group, Bin Laden can in fact rest assured that they have both made explicit that one of their goals is killing Jews and wiping out Israel.

 

Monday, December 17, 2007

THE AL-QAEDA INTERNET COMMENT BOARD IS NOW OPEN

Zawahri joins the blogosphere. According to this ABC News report, he is “just like any other blogger”.

ABC News (America)
By Rehab El-Buri
December 17, 2007

Expanding its use of the internet, al Qaeda now is asking that online users submit their questions – even “hostile” ones – to its No. 2 man, Ayman al Zawahri.

And like any other blogger, Zawahri says he is prepared to engage. He made the offer on a video posted on a jihadist Web site Sunday touting Britain’s withdrawal from Basra as a success for insurgents there.

The almost two-hour long video features Ayman al Zawahri answering questions in front of book-lined shelves from an off-camera interviewer with intermittent video clips. When the interviewer asked which is the most important field al Qaeda fighters are wrestling with, Zawahri answered, “Iraq is the most important of these fields.” Zawahri describes the state of resistance fighting in Iraq as “excellent.”

At the end of the video, entitled “A Review of Events,” a written message invites individuals, organizations and media outlets to submit questions for Zawahri to answer one month from his video’s release. The message solicits all questions, “whether they be friendly or hostile.”

 

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

OSAMA APPARENTLY STAYING IN CAVE, OFF LINE

Following up the post yesterday (above) about al-Qaeda’s No. 2 Ayman al Zawahri becoming a blogger, it seems his boss Osama Bin Laden is still in hiding and may not want to join the blogosphere for fear his location may be revealed:

Musharraf: Laden is hiding in Bajaur area of Afghanistan
Punjab Newsline Network
December 17, 2007

ISLAMABAD: The Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf today asserted that the well known terrorist and al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden is hiding in the Bajaur area of Afghanistan.

Interacting with the media Musharraf said that he could be in the area that borders Pakistan’s Bajaur tribal agency and Afghanistan’s Kunar province.

Responding to, whether Pakistan can contain the threat from the extremists, Musharraf said “We are combating it, and I think we are on the winning side.”

When asked whether the U.S. had abandoned him, Musharraf said, “I have nothing against President Bush. I think he has been most supportive; he has been a very sincere friend. I must say he understands fully the Pakistan environment. He understands why I had to act and what I’m facing.”

 

Sunday, December 23, 2007

TELEVISION IS SINFUL AND UN-ISLAMIC, SAYS NEW FATWA

Al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamic groups regularly produce videos and even risk exposing their whereabouts, so eager are they to deliver them to be shown on TV channels such as al-Jazeera. But on the other hand, TV is now apparently haram:

Television is sinful and un-Islamic, says new fatwa
December 20, 2007

On the one hand, al-Qaeda and other extremist Islamic groups regularly produce videos and even risk exposing their whereabouts so eager are they to deliver them to be shown on TV channels such as al-Jazeera. On the other hand, TV is, apparently, haram:

A radical Islamic seminary in Uttar Pradesh has issued a fatwa against Muslims watching television, calling the device “haram (sinful)”. The fatwa was issued by the Dar-ul Uloom in Deoband, near Muzaffarnagar, in response to a madarsa teacher’s plea to clarify whether watching Islamic channels and televised debates on religious issues was right.

The teacher, a resident of Saharanpur, had asked whether watching an Islamic TV channel showing a debate on religious topics was right or wrong. Dar-ul Uloom took the stand that in the due course of watching television, people inevitably browse through channels that show “immoral” and “vulgar” programs.

 

KUWAITI PAPER: IRAN EXPORTING AIDS VIRUS TO IRAQ

According to this report, the Kuwaiti newspaper as-Siyasah claims that Iran is exporting the AIDS virus to Iraq.