FULL ARTICLES

ISRAELI COMPANY DEVELOPS SYSTEM THAT SEES THROUGH WALLS

Israeli company develops radar system that sees through walls
By Guy Grimland
Ha’aretz (Technology section)
June 12, 2008

It’s not easy to locate Camero’s offices in the Kfar Neter industrial zone, but it may have just gotten easier. The startup has developed a system that allows users to see through walls.

It sounds just like a comic book fantasy come true - after all, who hasn’t dreamt of getting to peek into the boss’s office or the spouse’s doings in the other room? Not so fast, budding Poirots: Camero’s product is designed not for the entertainment of our inner child, but for use primarily in military and search and rescue operations.

And such technology could indeed be beneficial for special unit soldiers, for instance, or for locating people trapped in burning buildings.

“The idea of seeing through walls has been around since the 1960s, but modern technology is now ripe enough to enable it to happen,” explains Camero’s technology director, Amir Beeri. “When we established the company in 2004, we intended to develop sufficiently high vision resolution to allow an untrained user to see through a wall.”

Camero’s unique radar utilizes Ultra Wide Band (UWB), a technology that has only come of age in recent years, and with the use of special algorithms can process data picked up by the detector to give a reasonable image of anything behind that wall. Lacking imaging algorithms, the system made by its competitor, Time Domain is able to reveal only whether there is someone on the other side of the wall.

Although the first version developed by Camero, the Xaver 800, which includes a 82cm by 82cm screen on a tripod and weighs about 10 kg, making the system too clumsy for use in battle conditions, the Xaver 400 and Xaver 300 are both lighter weight and smaller sized, meant for use as a quick-to-use tactical tool.

The systems are capable of penetrating various types of walls, but not solid metal ones, like the walls of shipping containers.

Camero CEO Aharon Aharon says that the company has already sold the system to various armies and police forces around the world, and is optimistic about the future of the technology.

“Like the Israeli army’s night vision system, which was once an expensive product and eventually came into broad, general use, we hope that our radar too will become standard issue for all military units,” Aharon said.

 

2,000-YEAR-OLD SEED SET TO BEAR FRUIT

2,000-year-old seed set to bear fruit in three years
By Judy Siegel-Itzkovich
The Jerusalem Post
June 13, 2008

A 2,000-year-old date seed discovered at Masada four decades ago may provide new cures to numerous ailments, Israeli scientists say, after making significant advances, against all odds, in producing fruit from the seed.

Having been germinated, astoundingly, by an Israeli team more than three years ago, and kept alive since, the “Judean date” sapling appears likely (but not certain) to yield a now-extinct species of date that was renowned in ancient times as a treatment for heart disease, chest problems, the spitting of blood, weakened memory and other medical conditions, possibly even symptoms of cancer and depression.

The seed was discovered during the 1960s archaeological excavations of Masada by Prof. Yigael Yadin, an eminent Israeli archeologist, political leader and the second IDF chief of General Staff.

The Judean Dead Sea region was famous for its extensive and high-quality date culturing in the first century CE. High summer temperatures and low precipitation at Masada contributed to the seed’s exceptional longevity.

The plant’s current location is being kept secret because of its great scientific and financial value. It could produce fruit at the age of seven years, according to Dr. Sarah Sallon, a physician and director of Hadassah University Medical Center’s Louis Borick Natural Medicine Research Center (NMRC) in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem.

She heads the team that succeeded in planting, germinating and growing the date seed and describes its findings and hopes for it in the Friday issue of the prestigious journal Science.

The date project is part of the NMRC’s Middle Eastern Medicinal Plant project aimed at conserving, developing and researching the rich legacy of medicinal plants in Israel. The extinct “Judean date” is regarded by NMRC as having particular importance.

The ancient seed in Sallon’s experiment was procured from Bar-Ilan University, and germination was handled by Dr. Elaine Soloway, an expert on desert agriculture at the Arava Institute of the Environment at Kibbutz Ketura, in the Arava valley.

When the seedling was 15 months old, direct radio-carbon dating on shell fragments performed by Dr. Egli of Zurich University showed an age compatible with the Roman siege of Masada almost 2,000 years ago, thus making it the oldest seed ever to be germinated.

Early genetic analysis of the seedling - performed by Dr. Yuval Cohen of the Volcani Institute at Beit Dagan - shows differences from modern cultivated date species.

Further analysis is planned in the hope of discovering particular genetic characteristics that made the Judean dates famous both as a prized source of food and as a valuable medicine, Sallon told The Jerusalem Post.

“Our next stage will be to grow more dates, in the hope of better understanding their genetics and possibly breeding the ancient date as a modern one,” she continued.

“We need to reintroduce ancient crops and plants that once flourished in this region and to investigate them scientifically for their properties. As much as Hadassah is involved in the most modern medical technologies, it also promotes our desire to discover new cures for diseases out of ancient sources.”

 

THE OLDEST SEED EVER TO GERMINATE

Date palm seed from Masada is the oldest to germinate.
The seed is found to be 2,000 years old. Planted three years ago, it has produced a healthy tree.
By Wendy Hansen
The Los Angeles Times
June 13, 2008

Scientists using radiocarbon dating have confirmed that an ancient Judean date palm seed among those found in the ruins of Masada in present-day Israel and planted three years ago is 2,000 years old – the oldest seed ever to germinate.

The seed has grown into a healthy, 4-foot-tall seedling, surpassing the previous record for oldest germinated seed – a 1,300-year-old Chinese lotus, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science.

The tree has been named Methuselah after the oldest person in the Bible. It is the only living Judean date palm, the last link to the vast date palm forests that once shaded and nourished the region.

Sarah Sallon, who directs the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center in Jerusalem, became interested in the ancient date palm as a possible source of medicines. She enlisted Dr. Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura to coax the seeds out of dormancy.

One sprouted. Scientists estimated that it was about 2,000 years old based on carbon dating of other seeds found at the site, but they had no way of directly testing the planted seed without risking its chance of germinating.

After the Methuselah seed germinated, Solowey found fragments of the seed shell clinging to the roots – enough for dating.

The shell fragments initially dated to AD 295, give or take 50 years, but a small percentage of “modern” carbon incorporated as the seed germinated made it appear 250 to 300 years younger. Correcting for this factor, the researchers reported that the seed dates from 60 BC to AD 95, similar to the other seeds from the site.

That placed the seed at Masada a few years after the Roman siege there in 73, when, according to the ancient historian Josephus, nearly 1,000 Jewish Zealots in the Masada fortress committed mass suicide rather than capitulate to the Romans. They burned most of their food stores, leaving a single cache to show that they did not starve to death.

“These people were eating these dates up on the mountain and looking down at the Roman camp, knowing that they were going to die soon, and spitting out the pits,” Sallon said. “Maybe here is one of those pits.”

Archaeologists excavating the ancient fortress of Masada unearthed the seeds in 1965, and they sat in storage for four decades before being planted.

The seeds probably survived for so long because of the extremely arid conditions of the Masada mesa, said Cary Fowler, seed preservation expert and executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which maintains the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

Preliminary comparison of Methuselah’s DNA with modern date palms shows a 20% to 50% difference from current varieties, differences which may include lost traits for resistance to pests and diseases.

Sallon and her colleagues hope to cultivate more ancient date seeds and eventually reintroduce the Judean date palm to the area. “It should be there because that’s where it belongs,” she said.

They also plan to test the tree for the medicinal properties hinted at in historical writings.

“Is it really the tree of life?” Sallon asked. That question won’t be answered until around 2010, when Methuselah – if female – may bear fruit.

 

GENETICALLY ALTERED BACTERIA DESIGNED TO PROVIDE “RENEWABLE PETROLEUM.”

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide ‘renewable petroleum’
Chris Ayres
The Times (of London)
June 14, 2008

“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”

He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.

Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new world”.

Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the urgency,” Mr Pal says.

What is most remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw materials from which it is made.

LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. “How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.

Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.

The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.

Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.

“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.

Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug excretion in their cars? “It’s not the same as with food,” Mr Pal says. “We’re putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire universe is in that tank. When we’re done with them, they’re destroyed.”

Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. “I have two children, and climate change is something that they are going to face. The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a collective responsibility to do this.”

Power points:

* Google has set up an initiative to develop electricity from cheap renewable energy sources.

* Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has created a company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically engineered bugs.

* The US Energy and Agriculture Departments said in 2005 that there was land available to produce enough biomass (nonedible plant parts) to replace 30 per cent of current liquid transport fuels.

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“I’M NOT INTERESTED IN THE NEXT QUARTER. I’M INTERESTED IN THE NEXT 20 YEARS.”

People vs. Dinosaurs
By Thomas Friedman
The New York Times
June 8, 2008

Tefen Industrial Park, Israel:

Question: What do America’s premier investor, Warren Buffett, and Iran’s toxic president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have in common? Answer: They’ve both made a bet about Israel’s future.

Ahmadinejad declared on Monday that Israel “has reached its final phase and will soon be wiped out from the geographic scene.”

By coincidence, I heard the Iranian leader’s statement on Israel Radio just as I was leaving the headquarters of Iscar, Israel’s famous precision tool company, headquartered in the Western Galilee, near the Lebanon border. Iscar is known for many things, most of all for being the first enterprise that Buffett bought overseas for his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett paid $4 billion for 80 percent of Iscar and the deal just happened to close a few days before Hezbollah, a key part of Iran’s holding company, attacked Israel in July 2006, triggering a monthlong war. I asked Iscar’s chairman, Eitan Wertheimer, what was Buffett’s reaction when he found out that he had just paid $4 billion for an Israeli company and a few days later Hezbollah rockets were landing outside its parking lot.

Buffett just brushed it off with a wave, recalled Wertheimer: “He said, ‘I’m not interested in the next quarter. I’m interested in the next 20 years.’” Wertheimer repaid that confidence by telling half his employees to stay home during the war and using the other half to keep the factory from not missing a day of work and setting a production record for the month. It helps when many of your “employees” are robots that move around the buildings, beeping humans out of the way.

So who would you put your money on? Buffett or Ahmadinejad? I’d short Ahmadinejad and go long Warren Buffett.

Why? From outside, Israel looks as if it’s in turmoil, largely because the entire political leadership seems to be under investigation. But Israel is a weak state with a strong civil society. The economy is exploding from the bottom up. Israel’s currency, the shekel, has appreciated nearly 30 percent against the dollar since the start of 2007.

The reason? Israel is a country that is hard-wired to compete in a flat world. It has a population drawn from 100 different countries, speaking 100 different languages, with a business culture that strongly encourages individual imagination and adaptation and where being a nonconformist is the norm. While you were sleeping, Israel has gone from oranges to software, or as they say around here, from Jaffa to Java.

The day I visited the Iscar campus, one of its theaters was filled with industrialists from the Czech Republic, who were getting a lecture – in Czech – from Iscar experts. The Czechs came all the way to the Israel-Lebanon border region to learn about the latest innovations in precision tool-making. Wertheimer is famous for staying close to his customers and the latest technologies. “If you sleep on the floor,” he likes to say, “you never have to worry about falling out of bed.”

That kind of hunger explains why, in the first quarter of 2008, the top four economies after America in attracting venture capital for start-ups were: Europe $1.53 billion, China $719 million, Israel $572 million and India $99 million, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Israel, with 7 million people, attracted almost as much as China, with 1.3 billion.

Boaz Golany, who heads engineering at the Technion, Israel’s M.I.T., told me: “In the last eight months, we have had delegations from I.B.M., General Motors, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart visiting our campus. They are all looking to develop R & D centers in Israel.”

Ahmadinejad professes not to care about such things. He was – to put it in American baseball terms – born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. Because oil prices have gone up to nearly $140 a barrel, he feels relaxed predicting that Israel will disappear, while Iran maintains a welfare state – with more than 10 percent unemployment.

Iran has invented nothing of importance since the Islamic Revolution, which is a shame. Historically, Iranians have been a dynamic and inventive people – one only need look at the richness of Persian civilization to see that. But the Islamic regime there today does not trust its people and will not empower them as individuals.

Of course, oil wealth can buy all the software and nuclear technology you want, or can’t develop yourself. This is not an argument that we shouldn’t worry about Iran. Ahmadinejad should, though.

Iran’s economic and military clout today is largely dependent on extracting oil from the ground. Israel’s economic and military power today is entirely dependent on extracting intelligence from its people. Israel’s economic power is endlessly renewable. Iran’s is a dwindling resource based on fossil fuels made from dead dinosaurs.

So who will be here in 20 years? I’m with Buffett: I’ll bet on the people who bet on their people – not the people who bet on dead dinosaurs.

 

MUCH OF CONTEMPORARY WESTERN CULTURE IS DEEPLY COMMITTED TO A BELIEF IN THE GOODNESS OF ALL MANKIND ... DESPITE ALL THE EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY

Iran and the Problem of Evil
By Michael Ledeen
The Wall Street Journal
June 7, 2008

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121279291616353311.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Ever since World War II, we have been driven by a passionate desire to understand how mass genocide, terror states and global war came about – and how we can prevent them in the future.

Above all, we have sought answers to several basic questions: Why did the West fail to see the coming of the catastrophe? Why were there so few efforts to thwart the fascist tide, and why did virtually all Western leaders, and so many Western intellectuals, treat the fascists as if they were normal political leaders, instead of the virulent revolutionaries they really were? Why did the main designated victims – the Jews – similarly fail to recognize the magnitude of their impending doom? Why was resistance so rare?

Most eventually accepted a twofold “explanation”: the uniqueness of the evil, and the lack of historical precedent for it. Italy and Germany were two of the most civilized and cultured nations in the world. It was difficult to appreciate that a great evil had become paramount in the countries that had produced Kant, Beethoven, Dante and Rossini.

How could Western leaders, let alone the victims, be blamed for failing to see something that was almost totally new – systematic mass murder on a vast scale, and a threat to civilization itself? Never before had there been such an organized campaign to destroy an entire “race,” and it was therefore almost impossible to see it coming, or even to recognize it as it got under way.

The failure to understand what was happening took a well-known form: a systematic refusal to view our enemies plain. Hitler’s rants, whether in “Mein Kampf” or at Nazi Party rallies, were often downplayed as “politics,” a way of maintaining popular support. They were rarely taken seriously as solemn promises he fully intended to fulfill. Mussolini’s call for the creation of a new Italian Empire, and his later alliance with Hitler, were often downplayed as mere bluster, or even excused on the grounds that, since other European countries had overseas territories, why not Italy?

Some scholars broadened the analysis to include other evil regimes, such as Stalin’s Russia, which also systematically murdered millions of people and whose ambitions similarly threatened the West. Just as with fascism, most contemporaries found it nearly impossible to believe that the Gulag Archipelago was what it was. And just as with fascism, we studied it so that the next time we would see evil early enough to prevent it from threatening us again.

By now, there is very little we do not know about such regimes, and such movements. Some of our greatest scholars have described them, analyzed the reasons for their success, and chronicled the wars we fought to defeat them. Our understanding is considerable, as is the honesty and intensity of our desire that such things must be prevented.

Yet they are with us again, and we are acting as we did in the last century. The world is simmering in the familiar rhetoric and actions of movements and regimes – from Hezbollah and al Qaeda to the Iranian Khomeinists and the Saudi Wahhabis – who swear to destroy us and others like us. Like their 20th-century predecessors, they openly proclaim their intentions, and carry them out whenever and wherever they can. Like our own 20th-century predecessors, we rarely take them seriously or act accordingly. More often than not, we downplay the consequences of their words, as if they were some Islamic or Arab version of “politics,” intended for internal consumption, and designed to accomplish domestic objectives.

Clearly, the explanations we gave for our failure to act in the last century were wrong. The rise of messianic mass movements is not new, and there is very little we do not know about them. Nor is there any excuse for us to be surprised at the success of evil leaders, even in countries with long histories and great cultural and political accomplishments. We know all about that. So we need to ask the old questions again. Why are we failing to see the mounting power of evil enemies? Why do we treat them as if they were normal political phenomena, as Western leaders do when they embrace negotiations as the best course of action?

No doubt there are many reasons. One is the deep-seated belief that all people are basically the same, and all are basically good. Most human history, above all the history of the last century, points in the opposite direction. But it is unpleasant to accept the fact that many people are evil, and entire cultures, even the finest, can fall prey to evil leaders and march in lockstep to their commands. Much of contemporary Western culture is deeply committed to a belief in the goodness of all mankind; we are reluctant to abandon that reassuring article of faith. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, we prefer to pursue the path of reasonableness, even with enemies whose thoroughly unreasonable fanaticism is manifest.

This is not merely a philosophical issue, for to accept the threat to us means – short of a policy of national suicide – acting against it. As it did in the 20th century, it means war. It means that, temporarily at least, we have to make sacrifices on many fronts: in the comforts of our lives, indeed in lives lost, in the domestic focus of our passions – careers derailed and personal freedoms subjected to unpleasant and even dangerous restrictions – and the diversion of wealth from self-satisfaction to the instruments of power. All of this is painful; even the contemplation of it hurts.

Then there is anti-Semitism. Old Jew-hating texts like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” now in Farsi and Arabic, are proliferating throughout the Middle East. Calls for the destruction of the Jews appear regularly on Iranian, Egyptian, Saudi and Syrian television and are heard in European and American mosques. There is little if any condemnation from the West, and virtually no action against it, suggesting, at a minimum, a familiar Western indifference to the fate of the Jews.

Finally, there is the nature of our political system. None of the democracies adequately prepared for war before it was unleashed on them in the 1940s. None was prepared for the terror assault of the 21st century. The nature of Western politics makes it very difficult for national leaders – even those rare men and women who see what is happening and want to act – to take timely, prudent measures before war is upon them. Leaders like Winston Churchill are relegated to the opposition until the battle is unavoidable. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to fight desperately to win Congressional approval for a national military draft a few months before Pearl Harbor.

Then, as now, the initiative lies with the enemies of the West. Even today, when we are engaged on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, there is little apparent recognition that we are under attack by a familiar sort of enemy, and great reluctance to act accordingly. This time, ignorance cannot be claimed as an excuse. If we are defeated, it will be because of failure of will, not lack of understanding. As, indeed, was almost the case with our near-defeat in the 1940s.

 

WHY THE IRAN ENGAGEMENT DEBATE MATTERS

Talking Iran. Why The Iran Engagement Debate Matters
By Jonathan Schanzer
Weekly Standard Online
June 5, 2008

The debate continues over the benefits of engaging with the Islamic Republic of Iran, a state that has been dedicated to Islamist terrorism since 1979. The notion of a productive meeting with Iranian leaders is fantasy. However, the debate is important because it reveals how the proponents of engagement fail to understand the realities in Iran.

Among those who advocate engagement with Iran, the prevailing argument is that a meeting with Iran would not necessarily have to include Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, insists that a meeting should take place with “the appropriate Iranian leaders.” She suggests that Ahmadinejad may be “long gone” before such a meeting ever takes place.

This assumes that Ahmadinejad is the primary problem, and ignores the fact that the last four presidents of Iran have supported the revolutionary goals of the Islamic Republic:

Ali Khameini was president from 1981 to 1989 then succeeded Khomeini as supreme leader. He delivered fiery anti-West sermons before large crowds that famously interrupted him chanting “death to America.” As the New York Times notes, “he usually spoke with a rifle in his hand, jabbing its muzzle into the air to make his points as he castigated ‘the Great Satan, America.’”

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, president from 1989 to 1997, a man seen by some as a reformer, was indicted along with the Hezbollah chief Imad Mughniyah by an Argentine judge for the bombing of a Jewish community center that killed 85 people.

Ali Khatami, also hailed as a reformer during his tenure (1997-2005), ran a regime with numerous financial ties to Hezbollah and Hamas, conducted surveillance of U.S. military and diplomatic installations abroad, and developed South America’s tri-border area into a terrorist haven.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now under fire for his determination to move forward with Iran’s nuclear program, not to mention remarks he made denying the holocaust and calling for Israel to be wiped from the map. But is he that much worse than his predecessors?

Susan Rice and others who advocate negotiations with Iran ignore the immutable fact that Iranian presidents are chosen by the Iranian political system because of their anti-Western principles. Of course, other engagement advocates argue that America should conduct a dialogue with Iran, but not with its president. Their point is that Ahmadinejad is not the most powerful person in Iran.

This is correct. Ahmadinejad may be the most powerful elected official, but the supreme guide, a position currently held by the aforementioned Ali Khameini, is typically seen as Iran’s most powerful person. Another important position is the chairman of the Expediency Council, currently held by the aforementioned Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

In 2001, Rafsanjani stated that the Muslim world should use nuclear weapons against the Jewish state. And Khameini calls Israel a “cancerous tumor of a state that should be removed.” The notion that one could reason with any of these leaders ignores the reality that the Iranian regime must first reform if we are ever to find suitable interlocutors.

Finally, although meeting with U.S. officials would provide a measure of unearned legitimacy, it is doubtful that Iranian leaders would seek to meet with Americans unless they believed U.S. policies would change for their benefit.

Broadly speaking, Iran wants one of three things: a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, a draw-down in support for Israel, and/or the cessation of sanctions against Iran, put in place because of Tehran’s support to terrorist groups and weapons of mass destruction programs. Do we want Iran’s leaders to believe that any of these issues are on the table for negotiation?

The majority of Americans do not wish to end a just war before it is won. Nor do they seek to turn its back on long-standing allies in a strategically important region. Nor, for that matter, would Americans agree to lift sanctions without first receiving important concessions (think Libya’s termination of its WMD program in 2003).

Thus, unlike other hair-splitting political debates, the debate over whether there should be direct meetings with Iranian leaders is important. It exposes the flawed arguments of those who insist that dialogue would bear fruit.

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THE WORST PLACES TO BE A TERRORIST

The list: The worst places to be a terrorist
By the staff
Foreign Policy magazine
May 2008

Fighting transnational terrorism often involves making unsavory choices between protecting civil rights and providing security. The following regimes have opted for the latter and are definitely not the kind of places you want to get caught if you’re plotting some terrorist mayhem.

FRANCE

Key tactics: Though many Americans view them as softies when it comes to the war on terror, the French actually have some of the world’s toughest and arguably most effective antiterrorism laws. In France, terrorist investigations are overseen by a special unit of magistrates with unprecedented powers to monitor suspects, enlist the help of other branches of law enforcement, and detain suspects for days without charges. Additionally, prosecutors have a mandate to pursue terrorists abroad if the suspect or victim is French. France is also not shy about deporting Muslim clerics it views as threatening. It shouldn’t be surprising that French law enforcement is well set up for counterterrorism: France was the first European country to fall victim to Middle Eastern terrorism during the Algerian war in the 1950s.

In action: France has not had a terrorist attack on its soil since 9/11, but it claims to have foiled several, including a chemical attack planned by Chechen operatives against Russian targets in Paris, a planned bombing of one of Paris’s airports, and a 9/11-like airline plot against the Eiffel Tower.

Concerns: French civil libertarians have raised concerns about detentions that, in some cases, can last for years without trials. Allegations of police brutality are also common in France’s predominantly Muslim suburbs.

JORDAN

Key tactics: Since the November 2005 hotel bombings carried out by al Qaeda in Amman, Jordan’s King Abdullah II has made it a priority to stop the infiltration of terrorists from neighboring Iraq and Syria. Jordan’s intelligence service, the General Intelligence Department, has exploited close ties with Sunni tribes in Iraq’s Anbar province to provide its U.S. and Israeli counterparts with valuable intelligence about the structure and financing on terrorist organizations. Jordan also takes pride in the prowess of its Special Forces units and has opened a special operations training center to teach counterterrorism tactics to elite military units from around the world.

In action: It’s widely suspected that Jordanian spies tipped off the U.S. military to the location of al Qaeda in Iraq’s Jordanian-born leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leading to the U.S.-Iraqi military raid that killed him.

Concerns: Jordan has been criticized by human rights groups for its alleged participation in the “rendition” of U.S. terrorist suspects for torture.

EGYPT

Key tactics: No less an authority than al Qaeda’s No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri recently said of Egypt’s State Security, “They know more about the Islamic movements than many of those movements’ members know about them.” Zawahiri’s followers have good reason to worry. After a wave of terrorist attacks and political victories for the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1990s, Hosni Mubarak’s government opted for a strategy of ruthless repression in combating the threat from terrorism and political Islam. The state’s strategy is to inhibit the Brotherhood from participating in the political process while carrying out wide-ranging arrests of militants and routinely using torture on prisoners.

In action: During the 1990s, the Egyptian regime essentially eliminated the domestic threat of groups such as the Islamic Group and Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad, largely by attacking their bases of operations and blocking their ability to transform into legitimate political movements. Overreaches by the groups themselves contributed greatly to their downfall.

Concerns: Human Rights Watch has complained that the Egyptian regime’s liberal use of torture simply leads prisoners to “confess to crimes real or imagined.” Analysts also question the strategy of repressing the Brotherhood, which they say only strengthens the group’s appeal.

SINGAPORE

Key tactics: Singapore, which is 15 percent Muslim, has had enormous success in combating regional terrorist groups such as the al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah through a combination of tough Special Forces tactics and savvy rehabilitation programs. After 9/11, the island country strengthened its crackdown on terrorist funding, and it recently passed legislation giving the Army wide-ranging powers to pursue terrorists domestically. But Singapore’s approach goes beyond enforcement. Since 2003, a landmark government program has aimed to rehabilitate arrested militants. The state employs volunteer clerics who counsel detainees and rebut extremist arguments. The United States has studied the approach as a possible alternative to indefinite detention.

In action: A major operation in 2001 resulted in the arrest of 15 Jemaah Islamiyah operatives who were planning terrorist attacks within Singapore. Around 70 people have been detained since then, and about one third have been released after rehabilitation. Police continue monitoring those who are released.

Concerns: Democracy activists argue that the Singaporean government plays up the terrorist threat to justify its authoritarianism. The police also suffered a major embarrassment in February when a Jemaah Islamiyah militant escaped through the bathroom window of a detention center.

RUSSIA

Key tactics: In 1999, Boris Yeltsin elevated an obscure midlevel politician named Vladimir Putin to the rank of prime minister and entrusted him with putting down a raging insurgency in the breakaway region of Chechnya. Ever since, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism have been the hallmarks of Putin’s tenure, and he has largely built his popularity around his success in these areas. Russia has carried out a ruthless campaign of military suppression in Chechnya, and when it hasn’t been attacking militants, it has joined with them by elevating former rebel Ramzan Kadyrov to the presidency of the now largely peaceful region. Russian security forces were also willing to put down terrorist sieges by force even at the expense of high civilian casualties.

In action: After Chechen rebels took a Moscow theater hostage in 2002, Russian Special Forces pumped an unknown gas into the theater’s ventilation system and then stormed the building, killing nearly all the hostage-takers along with hundreds of hostages.

Concerns: Though Russia has largely succeeded in pacifying Chechnya; the neighboring regions of Dagestan and North Ossetia remain havens for militant groups. The government was widely criticized for the secrecy surrounding the Nord-Ost and Beslan school operations and the high number of hostages killed during the rescues.

 

ANOTHER OF THE MIDEAST’S FORGOTTEN CONFLICTS

Western Sahara’s conflict traps refugees in limbo
By Cara Buckley
The New York Times
June 4, 2008

www.nytimes.com/2008/06/04/world/africa/04sahara.html?pagewanted=print

The refugees’ eyes burned as they recounted terrible tales, culled, they said, from decades of hard living in camps in an unforgiving desert, half a world away.

One man told of a holding center for unwed mothers, cordoned off from relatives and friends. A woman said that a camp’s leaders smuggled away foreign aid, even as residents of the camp starved. Another man described escaping with his pregnant wife under the cover of night, fleeing toward the Moroccan border as the camp’s police chased them through a thicket of land mines.

But were the refugees’ depictions of life in the camps overstated, as some human rights workers wonder? And were they brought to the United States to advance a foreign country’s claim on their homeland?

The refugees are Sahrawis from Western Sahara, products of a tangled, nearly forgotten conflict between Morocco and a Sahrawi rebel group, the Polisario Front, that has dragged on for more than 30 years.

Western Sahara is a former Spanish colony wedged among Mauritania, Algeria, Morocco and the Atlantic Ocean, and it has been in political limbo since Spain withdrew in 1976.

After Spain’s departure, Morocco annexed most of the land, an action that no other country recognized, and the Polisario Front waged a bitter battle for independence that led to a cease-fire in 1991. There has been a political impasse over its status ever since.

In the course of the conflict, many of the Sahrawi people fled to western Algeria to live in camps administered by the Polisario Front and paid for by international and humanitarian aid. An estimated 90,000 to 160,000 Sahrawis currently live in these camps.

A delegation of six Sahrawi refugees – four women wrapped in brilliantly hued abayas and two men with somber stares – recently visited New York and Washington to talk about their suffering under the Polisario Front. In doing so, they also reflected the highly politicized tug of war over the sovereignty of Western Sahara.

They all once lived in refugee camps run by the Polisario Front in Algeria, but are now based in Western Sahara, subsisting in part on Moroccan aid. Their trip was sponsored by a lobbying group for Morocco, and they met with officials and reporters, to whom they described the camps, through an interpreter, as corruption-riddled prisons that they were not allowed to leave.

“The Polisario people to us just look like the Mafia people,” said Said Abderahman, 28, who said he left a camp with his pregnant wife, Salma Essalek, 25, last fall in what both described as a treacherous escape. “The international agencies are giving plenty of food, and the local population is not getting it.”

Another Sahrawi refugee, Brahim al-Selem, 34, said he was a policeman in the camps but had to pay a smuggler last August to flee after being imprisoned for speaking out against the Polisario Front.

But representatives of Human Rights Watch and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said they did not know of any refugees who had been prevented from leaving the camps.

Mouloud Said, who represents the Polisario Front in Washington, went further, denouncing the refugees’ statements as hyperbole and contending that they were being used for political purposes by Morocco.

“These people are brought by the Moroccan public relations companies here, so they have to mislead,” he said.

There have been various efforts over the years to resolve the Western Sahara question. After the cease-fire was brokered in 1991, a United Nations mission was set up to organize a referendum in the territory to determine Western Sahara’s future, but Morocco and the Polisario Front could not agree on who was eligible to vote.

Eric Goldstein, a research director for the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, said Morocco had encouraged non-Sahrawis to settle in Western Sahara, because of what Morocco views as their historic ties to the land. Sahrawis now form a minority there.

Two years ago, Morocco proposed allowing the region a measure of autonomy, under the purview of Morocco, a proposal that France and the United States backed. But the Polisario Front rejected it.

Morocco also began accusing the Polisario Front of human rights abuses in its camps in Algeria. Some critics say this was largely to distract attention from violations that Morocco itself was accused of inflicting on Sahrawis.

In a May 2008 report, Freedom House, a human rights group based in the United States, described Morocco’s treatment of the Sahrawis in Western Sahara as highly repressive and only slightly better than “the worst of the worst.”

All of which, some say, casts doubt on some aspects of the accounts provided by the delegation of Sahrawi refugees, who have since returned to Morocco-controlled Western Sahara. Mr. Goldstein and Sergio Calle-Norena, who works with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Morocco, said that while leaving the camps was logistically difficult, freedom of movement was allowed.

“I’m not doubting their individual stories, but it has to be seen in context,” Mr. Goldstein said. “The reason Morocco is funding their trip is to try to discredit the Polisario at a moment when they hope that its own proposal for autonomy will prevail.”

Interviewed in a stately conference room in Morocco’s permanent mission to the United Nations in New York, the refugees were passionate in telling their stories. But most, when asked, refused to say what should become of their homeland.

“We came here for humanitarian reasons, not to discuss politics,” said Naba Deddah el-Meki, 42, who now lives with her eldest daughter in Western Sahara. She described widespread theft in the camps of aid supplied to the Polisario Front.

The former Polisario police officer, Mr. Selem, was more direct: “We would like the Western Sahara to remain part of Morocco, of course.”

Robert M. Holley, the executive director of the Moroccan American Center for Policy, the lobbying group that organized the trip, said he selected the delegation from hundreds of refugees who flooded into Morocco from Algeria. Nearly all of them, he said, spoke of repression and corruption in the camps, and of imprisonment for those who tried to leave.

Mr. Holley insisted that his group’s decision to bring the delegation to the United States was separate from Morocco’s effort to realize its plan for autonomy in Western Sahara. The goal, he said, was simply to expose what he described as severe restrictions and harsh conditions in the camps.

“People can argue about politics, but we want people to understand the human costs,” Mr. Holley said. “The lives of these people, daily, are being destroyed.”

“These people aren’t telling lies,” he said, “they’re telling their lives.”

 

“THE FIRST TIME I TOOK A NEO-NAZI TO AUSCHWITZ, I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT”

Former Swedish neo-Nazis become Holocaust commemorators
The Associated Press
June 3, 2008

www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3551214,00.html

They used to paint swastika graffiti, get into street fights with immigrants, and distribute anti-Semitic propaganda. But after studying the cases of a few of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II, some former Swedish neo-Nazi teenagers came to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial to underline their new attitudes.

The kids, some of whom were active members of neo-Nazi groups, came to the memorial on Monday to present the findings of their research into the stories of 16 Holocaust victims from their hometown of Karlstad, and add pages of testimony for the previously unknown dead.

The project, named Combatting Social Unrest, is the initiative of Swedish Holocaust educator Christer Mattsson. The concept is to take troubled youths off the street, confront their prejudices and ignorance and slowly convert them into Holocaust educators themselves.

“The first time I took a neo-Nazi to Auschwitz, I didn’t know what to expect,” he said. “But after seeing it, after seeing where Jews used to live, he said: “I can no longer deny it happened, or salute what happened.”

The journey has been an arduous one. Of the 100 teenagers in his program, Mattsson said about five to eight are “hard-core neo-Nazis” – some completely reformed, others not. Those, some sporting Nazi tattoos, did not make the trip to Israel, either for fear of offending survivors or to remain anonymous for their own safety.

The only former active member who arrived, 17-year-old Joar, refused to be photographed and would be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution from his former friends.

The shy, blond Joar hid behind a baseball cap and a large pair of sunglasses. He would only say that he used to have “different opinions.”

“I didn’t know so much. I’ve learned a lot about the Holocaust,” he said, through a translator. “I have a different perspective on life now.”

“IN OUR OWN BACKYARD”

Sweden remained neutral during World War II. It had a very small Jewish population and closed its gates to refugees. That policy began to change as the horrors of the Holocaust became apparent and Sweden began to lean toward the allies.

In 1944, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg began handing out papers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps. After the war, some 27,000 survivors arrived in Sweden.

In Karlstad, 16 Jewish women died shortly afterward, most from illness, and were buried in a Jewish cemetery. Mattsson took his students there to ask them if they still believed the Holocaust to be a myth. They, in turn, decided to investigate the women’s stories. The result is a 100-page book that details their stories.

On Monday, they presented their findings to Israel’s official Holocaust museum and memorial.

Yad Vashem spokeswoman Estee Yaari said it probably marked the first time it had ever dealt directly with neo-Nazis.

The teenagers toured the museum and met with Mirjam Akavia, a Holocaust survivor who fled to Sweden after the war.

She vividly described her childhood and how she was yanked out of school and sent to the camps, where only she and sister emerged while the rest of her family perished.

“When I was 12, it was the end of my beautiful childhood. It was the end of everything,” she said.

The Swedish teenagers were not much older when they encountered their own local brand of anti-Semitism.

“The headmaster of my former school, who is here today, was beaten up by people I knew three years ago,” said 17-year-old Jennifer Lindstrom, who said she joined Mattsson’s group so she could have the tools to battle her classmates’ rhetoric and actions.

“Maybe because I have been studying about the Holocaust and Nazism, maybe because I have been to Auschwitz and the empty shtetels (Jewish villages) in Poland or maybe because I got sick and fed up with racism and neo-Nazis – I could not remain silent.”

Lindstrom’s principal was assaulted because he tried to keep the neo-Nazi students out of his school. The two other teenagers in the group were Johanna Karlsson and Deken Izat, a Kurdish immigrant to Sweden who used to belong to a rival gang that battled with Joar’s.

Lindstrom said that finding out what happened in her own backyard proved to be the best way for her and her new friends to counter racism.

“It is slightly unreal to be here today and handing over material that we have worked with for so long, knowing that it will be here at Yad Vashem for always,” Lindstrom said.

 

A JOINT MASSACRE BY HAMAS AND FATAH

De facto government: Both police and Fatah to blame for Yasser Arafat commemoration massacre
Palestinian Maan News agency
June 2, 2008

www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=29667

Gaza – Ma’an – The Hamas-affiliated police force and Fatah members were both responsible for the massacre that took place at a rally on the third anniversary of the death Yasser Arafat in Gaza City last November, the Gaza-based de facto Palestinian government announced on Monday.

Seven people were killed in clashes with Hamas-affiliated police during a rally by Fatah members to commemorate Arafat’s death.

At a press conference in Gaza City, the spokesperson of the de facto government, Tahir An-Nunu, read a report from the committee set up to investigate the incident. According to the report, the blame lies with both Hamas’ police officers and Fatah members, specifically the leaders who delivered speeches during the commemoration rally.

The report blames police for allowing the rally to take place in an area close to universities, ministries and security headquarters at a time when Hamas-Fatah relations were very fragile. Errors in the orders issued by the central and the subsidiary monitoring rooms also confused police officers, the report said. The orders were misunderstood by the police and some field officers ignored previous directives. This resulted in skirmishes between police and the crowds.

Some police officers were not sufficiently qualified to keep order and deal with riots. They failed to use the riot equipment they had been issued and chose to discharge gunfire into the air instead, the committee revealed.

The committee also found that the organizers of the rally “did not follow the necessary procedures when they arranged for the commemoration. They did not coordinate with the security services to secure safety of the area and the routes to it.”

Furthermore, the speeches delivered during the rally by some Fatah leaders played a role in inciting the crowds who began to hurl fireworks and homemade bombs as well as shouting anti-Hamas slogans, the report said.

“Some eyewitnesses and some of the injured said in their testimonies that the de facto government’s police came under fire from the direction of Al-Azhar University,” the report read.

The investigation committee added that based on police reports, there were large numbers of Fatah-affiliated gunmen on the tops of buildings close to the rally. There were also large numbers of booby-trapped pens as well as other kinds of explosives.

The committee also found that Fatah members removed corpses from the morgues before post mortems could be completed. The report said this indicated they were trying to thwart any investigations. Furthermore, Fatah leaders did not cooperate with the investigation committee which further aroused suspicion that they were deliberately trying to conceal evidence.

An-Nunu affirmed that as a result of the committee’s recommendations, nine top police officers and 20 security members were punished. The punishments included being demoted, deprivation of salary increase and dismissal.

The report and the committee’s recommendations were submitted to de facto Prime Minister Isma’il Haniyeh on 20 December 2007.

 

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY IS NOW LED BY SERVANTS OF DICTATORSHIPS

Your U.N. at Work
The General Assembly is now led by servants of dictatorships
The Wall Street Journal (Editorial)
June 7, 2008

The General Assembly of the United Nations voted this week to elect Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann as its new president. Readers with a long memory will recall Father D’Escoto (he’s a Catholic priest) as Nicaragua’s foreign minister during the Sandinista regime of the 1980s. He’s also the winner of the 1985 Lenin Prize. Only at the U.N. does that count as a recommendation.

The U.N. also voted to name the government of Burma – which otherwise has been busy preventing humanitarian assistance from reaching hundreds of thousands of its own needy victims of last month’s devastating cyclone – as one of the Assembly’s vice presidents. Only at the U.N. is this not considered an embarrassment.

If that weren’t enough, a U.S. official was present for the vote – which was by acclamation – when the U.S. could have at least protested the choice with an empty seat. Nor did the State Department make any effort to offer an alternative to Father d’Escoto, who ran unopposed. Somehow, we don’t think this would have happened had John Bolton still been ambassador.

Speaking after his election, Father d’Escoto called for greater “democracy” at the U.N. – an odd remark coming from a former servant of a communist dictatorship. He also called for the U.N. to take a stand against “acts of aggression, such as those occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan.” That would be American aggression, not the Taliban’s, the Mahdi Army’s or al Qaeda’s.

A former Lenin Prize winner as General Assembly president and cruel Burma as vice president – another sick joke from the U.N.

 

HATRED