Tom Gross Mideast Media Analysis

A Jewish tune with a universal appeal (From the Beatles to Bollywood to the Starship Enterprise)

August 26, 2009

* From Texas to Russia, from Iran to India to Egypt, performed by the Beatles and by the crew of the Starship Enterprise… and on ice!

* I hope this dispatch is lively and entertaining, with a genuine feel-good factor: a summer respite from the usual seriousness of my dispatches.

 

CONTENTS

1. A little music to lighten your mood
2. Texas-style
3. Performed by Spock and Kirk and the happy crew
4. Performed with the help of Russian soldiers
5. A rendition by Dutch violinist and conductor Andre Rieu
6. A beautiful version from Iran
7. Hava Nagila on ice
8. Performed by former Miss Egypt, singing superstar Dalida
9. The Jewish Beatles
10. A Bollywood film version from India
11. Performed by members of the small Jewish community of Cuba
12. Hava Hagila (baby let’s dance)


A LITTLE MUSIC TO LIGHTEN YOUR MOOD

[Note by Tom Gross]

Because these dispatches often contain depressing news, and because it is summer, as a little change from usual, this dispatch is devoted to some musical videos of the classic song Hava Nagila – a rich series of multicultural variations on a Jewish theme.

Hava Nagila is a Hebrew folk song, the title of which means “let us rejoice”. It is a song of celebration, often performed at Jewish festivals (and also at some Roma ones).

The music originated among Ukrainian Jews and the most commonly used text of the song was composed by Abraham Zvi Idelsohn in 1918 to celebrate the 1917 Balfour Declaration which gave rise to the modern state of Israel. It was first recorded in Berlin in 1922.

But, as the videos I have gathered below demonstrate, while it remains part of Jewish and Israeli tradition, the song now has an attraction that transcends frontiers and appeals to all people of good will.

-- Tom Gross


HAVA NAGILA, TEXAS-STYLE

This version has some amusing local Texas lyrics in English thrown in (“A little bit of dog and a little bit of cat”) and is particularly dedicated to all those Texans who follow this website.

 

HAVA NAGILA PERFORMED BY SPOCK AND KIRK AND THE HAPPY CREW

William Shatner (Captain James T. Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock) and several other actors playing members of the crew of the Starship Enterprise are Jewish, so they may well approve of this video production.

 

HAVA NAGILA PERFORMED WITH THE HELP OF RUSSIAN SOLDIERS

 

A RENDITION BY DUTCH VIOLINIST AND CONDUCTOR ANDRE RIEU

This is a particularly good performance.

 

A BEAUTIFUL VERSION FROM IRAN

 

HAVA NAGILA ON ICE

A breathtaking version on ice from the 1999 World Ice-skating Championships, danced to by Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko, who went on to win the gold medal at the 2006 Winter Olympics and is a three-time world champion.

 

PERFORMED BY FORMER MISS EGYPT, SINGING SUPERSTAR DALIDA

 

THE JEWISH BEATLES

 

A BOLLYWOOD FILM VERSION FROM INDIA

 

PERFORMED BY MEMBERS OF THE SMALL JEWISH COMMUNITY OF CUBA

Click here to listen to the audio.

 

HAVA HAGILA (BABY LET’S DANCE)

A more modern version for younger people who follow this website.

[Videos above compiled by Tom Gross]


Dutch journalist: Flu pandemics are a Jewish conspiracy (& Swedish media blood libel)

August 19, 2009

* Holland’s largest daily paper, De Telegraaf: Jews are responsible for swine flu
* Sweden’s largest paper: IDF is abducting Palestinian children to steal their organs
* Rival Swedish paper says it is ashamed of Swedish media anti-Semitism
* Accusations of anti-Semitism, as Israelis expelled from International Federation of Journalists
* Western-funded Palestinian Authority TV: “In all of Europe there weren’t 6 million Jews”

* Don’t express yourself! Madonna urged to stay away
* “Sex and the City” star becomes victim of anti-Israel prejudice

* Detainees in Iran report being forced to go naked, with prison guards riding on their backs. Others were piled on top of each other, also naked. Contrast the almost complete lack of Western liberal media coverage of this compared to the storm of indignation over Abu Ghraib

 

CONTENTS

1. Dutch journalist: Flu pandemics are a Jewish conspiracy
2. Outrage after Israel accused of “harvesting Palestinian organs”
3. “Sex and the City” star becomes victim of anti-Israel prejudice
4. Palestinian Authority TV: “In all of Europe there weren’t 6 million Jews”

5. Italian journalists stand up for their ousted Israeli colleagues
6. Iranian swimmer withdraws from heat because of Israeli presence
7. Controversy over European envoy’s presence at Ahmadinejad inauguration
8. Ban Ki-moon congratulates Ahmadinejad, but won’t release remarks

9. Defeated presidential candidate: democracy activists being raped in prison
10. Khamenei advisor admits Iran fully supports Hizbullah
11. “UN watchdog hiding evidence on Iran nuclear program”
12. Australia grants broadcasting permission to Hizbullah TV channel

13. Don’t express yourself! Madonna urged to stay away
14. China launches an Arabic satellite channel
15. David Mamet to film The Diary of Anne Frank
16. Terror victims at the wall


[All notes below by Tom Gross]

DUTCH JOURNALIST: FLU PANDEMICS ARE A JEWISH CONSPIRACY

A journalist from Holland who said Jews were responsible for the recent outbreak of swine flu has been criticized by a Dutch Jewish organization for stirring up anti-Semitic blood libels.

Holland’s largest daily, De Telegraaf, last week printed an interview with Désirée Röver, 61, who said the ongoing global flu pandemic was part of an international Jewish conspiracy to reduce the world’s population, as were previous outbreaks of bird flu and other forms of flu.

De Telegraaf also quoted her as saying that Jews are now “praying to another god; Lucifer, Satan, or however you want to call him” and “are called Rockefeller, Rothschild, Brzezinski and Kissinger.” (Rockefeller and Brzezinski are not Jewish -- TG)

The interviewer from De Telegraaf, a paper which is generally sympathetic to Israel, had harsh words to say about Röver’s comments.

Tales of Jews spreading disease “are nothing new,” a Dutch Jewish leader told the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, “and stories of Jews poisoning the water wells are known from many centuries ago. Her words are giving rise to the same kind of anti-Semitism that such myths did in the past.”

Eight Israelis, including a 12-year-old-boy, have died of swine flu in the last two weeks, as has one Palestinian.

 

OUTRAGE AFTER IDF ACCUSED OF “HARVESTING PALESTINIAN ORGANS”

Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, Aftonbladet, this week ran a double page spread in its Culture Section full of ancient anti-Semitic blood libels about Jews killing and mutilating gentile children, this time disguised as a “news” piece about Israel. The headline of the article (which appeared on August 17) was “They plunder the organs of our sons”. It claimed that the Israeli army, in collusion with American rabbis, is secretly abducting Palestinian children and dissecting their bodies.

Aftonbladet, which claims 1.5 million readers, added that their report should form part of an international war crimes investigation against Israel. An alert Swedish blogger who subscribes to this email list tells me that the photograph of a dead Palestinian used to accompany the article actually dates from a 1992 photo archive.

The government of Sweden has been criticized for heavily funding a number of Palestinian and extremist European NGOs and “human rights” groups in recent years that have been helping to stir up such blood libels and other anti-Semitic lies against Israel.

Like the majority (though not all) of European papers stirring up anti-Semitism, Aftonbladet is supposedly a left-wing paper.

“WE HAVE HEARD THE STORY BEFORE”

Another Swedish paper, Sydsvenskan, ran an editorial yesterday under the headline “Antisemitbladet” (a play on the name Aftonbladet) criticizing Aftonbladet.

It said: “We have heard the story before, in one form or the other. It follows the traditional pattern of conspiracy theory about Jews. Whispers in the dark. Anonymous sources. Rumors. That is all it takes.

“After all we all know what the Jews are like, don’t we: inhuman, hardened. Capable of anything. Now all that remains is the defense, equally predictable: ‘Anti-Semitism’ No, no, just criticism of Israel.”

(The readers’ comments box for the Sydsvenskan article condemning Aftonbladet has been removed because it generated an onslaught of anti-Semitic abuse from Swedes.)

The latest lie about Israel in a respected European newspaper has caused outrage in Israel, even surpassing the fury at the recent anti-Semitic “news” report in The Independent of London, about Israel’s imaginary “secret uranium bombs” supposedly killing Palestinians.

Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon called the report in Aftonbladet an “outright blood libel.”

THE GUARDIAN TOO

It is no accident that neo-Nazi websites the world over are increasingly reproducing articles supposedly about Israel (but actually just a cover for pure anti-Semitism) from papers like The Independent and The Guardian.

Yesterday, The Guardian was again accused of stirring up anti-Semitism in Britain (where physical attacks on Jews are now running at their highest levels for half a century) after it ran a piece by the infamous far-left Professor Slavoj Zizek, a former candidate for Presidency of Slovenia, in which he used language adopted from Nazi Germany and applied it to modern Israel.

 

BACKGROUND ON SWEDISH PREJUDICE

* Aftonbladet has a track record of attacking Israel. The paper’s culture editor was asked in an interview in January about Swedish culture: “What do you wish for most in life right now?” She answered: “What a simple question. What I want is a free Palestine.”

* I mentioned another border-line anti-Semitic Aftonbladet headline, “The Crucifixion of Arafat,” in this article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2005.

* Among previous dispatches on Sweden on this list, please see: Pro-Palestinian suicide bomb posters removed from Swedish subway stations (Jan. 22, 2004)

* Please also see the item about Sweden and Iran further down this dispatch.

 

SEX AND THE CITY STAR BECOMES VICTIM OF ANTI-ISRAEL PREJUDICE

Sex and the City star Kristin Davis has inadvertently become a victim of anti-Israel prejudice. Davis had been serving as a goodwill ambassador for Oxfam International, one of many prominent European NGOs with a track record of singling out Israel for attack.

But in a letter Oxfam made public last week, it said it was suspending “publicity work” with Davis, because it had discovered that in 2007 she signed on as a spokeswoman for Ahava cosmetics.

Ahava is the well-known manufacturer of moisturizers and a complete line of skincare products using Dead Sea minerals. Its factory is visible to those driving south on Israel’s Route 90 towards Eilat, between Jericho and Ein Gedi. Some of that road runs through disputed territory.

 

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY TV: “IN ALL OF EUROPE THERE WEREN’T 6 MILLION JEWS”

In the latest example of official Palestinian Holocaust denial, Abd Al-Rahman Abbad, the (Fatah-backed) Secretary General of the Palestinian Organization of Clerics and Disseminators of Islam said on official (and Westenr-funded) Palestinian Authority TV:

“Since it is known that in all of Europe there weren’t 6 million Jews, the Holocaust should be seen as one more example of Jews’ exaggeration of their sufferings.”

In the same interview, he then added that Jews had never been forcibly placed in ghettos in Europe and that the Jews had made this up.

Western media outlets such as The New York Times and The Times of London consistently fail to report on official Palestinian Holocaust denial.

Reminder: U.S. President Barak Obama sees a direct connection between Holocaust denial and Israel’s security: “I will never compromise when it comes to Israel’s security. Not when there are still voices that deny the Holocaust. Not when there are terrorist groups and political leaders committed to Israel’s destruction.” (AIPAC Conference, June 4, 2008)

 

ITALIAN JOURNALISTS STAND UP FOR THEIR OUSTED ISRAELI COLLEAGUES

Following the expulsion of The National Federation of Israeli Journalists (NFIJ) from the International Federation of journalists last month, which caused outrage and accusations of anti-Semitism in Israel (no other country’s journalists have been expelled from the federation), the Italian National Press Federation (NFSI) has said it will campaign vigorously to have the Israeli journalists reinstated.

Initially the IFJ Secretary General Aidan White claimed the NFIJ was expelled from the International Federation “for financial reasons”. But then he admitted “that the problems between us are more than just financial.”

Israeli journalists admit they stopped paying their fees after the IFJ consistently discriminated against them, for example barring them from meetings because of “what your government is doing”.

In a scathing letter sent to Aidan White on Monday, Yossi Bar Moha, secretary general of the Tel Aviv Journalists Union, wrote: “We fail to see why we should be turned into a frequent punching bag during international gatherings of the IFJ. For example, you continue to sharply criticize the Israeli media for failing to condemn the Israel Air Force attack on the Al-Manar television station in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. This is a station which is anything but a media outlet – openly calling for the destruction of Israel and serving as a propaganda arm of Hizbullah and Iran.”

“Did you expel Britain for attacking a German TV station during the Second World War?” he asked.

He pointed out the IFJ’s bias in failing to condemn the Lebanese and Palestinian news media for their silence “when missiles fired from these territories injured Israeli journalists in northern Israel and around the Gaza Strip in 2006 and 2009.”

“Israelis live in a society where journalism is vibrant, free and open, and one of the rare countries where media can and does counterbalance political power,” he added.

Some journalists from Denmark, Holland, the U.S. and Australia said they will support the Italian stand on behalf of the Israeli journalists.

But if anyone still needed evidence that there is widespread prejudice against Israel among other international journalists, this is it.

 

IRANIAN SWIMMER WITHDRAWS FROM HEAT BECAUSE OF ISRAELI PRESENCE

An Iranian swimmer has refused to compete against an Israeli participant at the World Championships in Rome. Mohammad Alirezaei did not compete in his heat of the men’s 50-meter breaststroke since it would have meant getting in the pool with Israeli Jewish swimmer Mickey Malul, Iranian media reported.

In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Alirezaei withdrew from the men’s 100-meter breaststroke event rather than compete against Israeli swimmer Tom Beeri, who finished fourth. Alirezai’s lane was left empty during the heat.

Last week, Israeli Itai Chammah swam the 100-meter backstroke alongside the Iraqi swimmer Saif Alaslam Saeed al-Saadi. The Israeli tabloid Yediot Ahronot reports that al-Saadi was not aware he would be competing in the same heat as the Israeli because of Chammah’s late registration.

 

CONTROVERSY OVER EUROPEAN ENVOY’S PRESENCE AT AHMADINEJAD INAUGURATION

The Swedish government, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, has defended its decision to send its ambassador in Tehran to the swearing-in of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month.

While most other EU countries were represented by lower-ranking diplomats at the special session of the Iranian parliament, Sweden was represented by Ambassador Magnus Wernstedt. “We always have our ambassador on site in every possible country, regardless of the regime in question,” said Foreign Minister Carl Bildt. “As observers, they are better when they are present than when they are absent.”

Britain’s deputy ambassador to Iran, Patrick Davies, also attended the ceremony whereas the defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and many Iranian parliamentarians boycotted it. In his inauguration speech, Ahmadinejad attacked Western countries for allegedly interfering in the Iranian elections.

Police broke up demonstrators chanting “Death to the dictator” outside the Iranian parliament as Ahmadinejad was inaugurated.

 

BAN KI-MOON CONGRATULATES AHMADINEJAD, BUT WON’T RELEASE REMARKS

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has congratulated Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his (disputed) re-election, but will not release the text of his congratulatory remarks as is customary.

A UN spokesman defended Ban’s congratulations as normal procedure when a government head is inaugurated, but western leaders including President Obama, President Sarkozy, Prime Minister Brown and Chancellor Merkel all refused to extend congratulations of their own.

 

DEFEATED CANDIDATE: DEMOCRACY ACTIVISTS BEING RAPED IN PRISON

One of Iran’s three defeated presidential candidates, Mehdi Karoubi, said on his website that some of those arrested after the June presidential election were tortured to death, and other detained protesters, both men and women, had been raped at Tehran’s Kahrizak prison.

Karoubi adds that detainees had reported being forced to go naked, with prison guards riding on their backs. Others were piled on top of each other, also naked, he said. (Contrast the almost complete lack of Western liberal media coverage of this compared to the storm of indignation over the Abu Ghraib scandal.)

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Iranian judiciary told a Tehran news conference last week that at least 4,000 people were arrested during demonstrations that followed last June’s presidential election. That number is more than the government has admitted previously.

***

Among those beaten at another anti-regime demonstration last week was the 56-year-old daughter of well-known journalist and campaigner Ezatollah Sahabi. Witnesses said police sprayed tear gas in the faces of people who tried to prevent her arrest. “Witnesses saw that Sahabi’s head was bloody in the car, which took her to an unknown place,” reports Radio Farda.

 

“UN WATCHDOG HIDING EVIDENCE ON IRAN NUCLEAR PROGRAM”

The world’s nuclear weapons watchdog is hiding data on Iran’s drive to obtain nuclear arms, senior Western diplomats and Israeli officials have told Ha’aretz.

The officials and diplomats said that the International Atomic Energy Agency under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei was refraining from publishing evidence obtained by its inspectors over the past few months that indicate Iran has speeded up its nuclear weaponization efforts.

A senior Western diplomatic told Ha'aretz that the details were censored by senior officials of the IAEA in the organization’s Vienna headquarters.

American, French, British and German senior officials are calling on ElBaradei to publish the information next month in a report due to be released at the organization’s general conference on September 14. On September 24, the UN Security Council will meet for a special discussion of weapon control and nuclear weapons proliferation.

 

KHAMENEI ADVISOR ADMITS IRAN FULLY SUPPORTS HIZBULLAH

In a rare public admission by a senior member of the Iranian regime, Ali Akbar Velayati, chief advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei, has admitted Hizbullah derives all its support from Iran, including the rockets it has used to deliberately kill Israeli civilians.

Speaking on Al-Jazeera TV, Ali Akbar Velayati added that Hizbullah would not have “won” the 2006 Lebanon war had Iran not supported Hizbullah militarily and in other ways.

 

AUSTRALIA GRANTS BROADCASTING PERMISSION TO HIZBULLAH TV CHANNEL

Hizbullah’s Lebanese TV station Al-Manar has been granted a license to broadcast in Australia. Previously, it had twice been banned in Australia for supporting terrorism. Al-Manar programs have endorsed suicide bombers, called for Israel’s destruction, and referred to Jews as the offspring of pigs and apes.

But the Australian Communication and Media Authority has now ruled, on the basis of a single week of monitoring Al-Manar, that it did not breach the anti-terrorism laws. The authority said it would investigate any further complaints should they arise.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Robert Goot said the decision did not address Jewish concerns and he would take it up with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. He said Al-Manar was “viciously anti-Semitic and interlaced anti-Israel and anti-U.S. rhetoric with medieval anti-Semitic stereotypes, including the infamous blood libel.”

 

DON’T EXPRESS YOURSELF! MADONNA URGED TO STAY AWAY

More than 100 Jews and Arabs are calling on pop star Madonna to call off her Tel Aviv concerts, scheduled for September 1 and 2. They have formed an organization called Israeli Support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, and on Sunday sent a letter to Madonna asking her not to perform at the Tel Aviv Fairgrounds.

Tel Aviv University Prof. Rachel Giora, a spokesperson for the group, wrote in the letter to Madonna: “A performance here would imply support for the illegal and inhumane policies [of Israel], described by many as war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

The organization also sent a similar letter to Leonard Cohen, asking him to boycott Israel. However, Cohen has confirmed his appearance at Ramat Gan Stadium (near Tel Aviv) on September 24. (Leonard Cohen’s planned concert in Ramallah in the West Bank has been cancelled by Fatah because he refused to cancel his Israeli appearance.)

Madonna has ignored the letter. Although Madonna is not Jewish, she is known for her strong sympathy with Israel, and her appreciation of Kabbala. This month, Madonna is taking her children to Poland, where they will visit Auschwitz. She said she wanted her children to understand the horrors of the Holocaust

The organization also sent a similar letter to Leonard Cohen, asking him to boycott Israel. However, Cohen has confirmed his appearance at Ramat Gan Stadium (near Tel Aviv) on September 24.

When asked by The Jerusalem Post why she didn’t leave Israel and participate in a personal boycott, Giora said, “I strongly object to Israeli policies, but Israel is my home, so why should I leave.”

***

Madonna’s concert in Poland on August 15 went ahead despite threats to cancel it. Authorities in the staunchly Catholic country say they feared that her singing the hit “Like a Virgin” on the feast day of the Virgin Mary, which is a national holiday and a major event in Poland, could cause problems.

Poland’s ombudsman, Janusz Kochanowski, asked Warsaw city officials to explain why the singer was being allowed to perform on a date bound to provoke and offend. Even former President Lech Walesa, a Catholic and father of eight, said he would have liked the concert to have been rescheduled.

 

CHINA LAUNCHES AN ARABIC SATELLITE CHANNEL

China Central Television (CCTV) has launched an Arabic international satellite channel. Vice President of CCTV Zhang Changming said that the channel will provide coverage of the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia-Pacific through 3 telstar satellites, and it would be accessible for nearly 300 million people in 22 Arabic-speaking countries.

The new channel will broadcast news, entertainment and cultural programs 24 hours a day “to present the world with the real China,” including programs such as Dialogue, Window on China, Documentary Films, and Chinese Arts. It will have an initial staff of about 80, and it may increase to 150 in 3 years.

Other governments, including those of Britain and France, already fund 24-hour Arab language TV stations.

 

DAVID MAMET TO FILM THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK

The Diary of Anne Frank is to be turned into a movie, American director David Mamet has announced. He will depict the true story of the Jewish girl who hid in an Amsterdam attic before being deported to her death in Bergen Belsen where she died, aged 16.

Anne Frank’s memory has increasingly been abused in recent years. For example, see: Does Oxford think it ok to honor a man who calls Anne Frank a “Holo-porn” star
And: Belgian and Dutch Muslims circulate cartoon of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler
And: Sharon and Hitler share space at Anne Frank house in Amsterdam

But for a real account, see the third note (“My mother remembers the day she saw through the camp wire that her school friend from Amsterdam, Anne Frank, had arrived”) in this dispatch.

 

TERROR VICTIMS AT THE WALL

A special collective bar and bat-mitzvah took place at the Western Wall in Jerusalem last week. Some 70 young people who have been victims of terrorist attacks and their parents gathered to celebrate their religious coming of age.


Israel criticizes Human Rights Watch for its fundraising from Saudi regime

August 17, 2009

* Saudi women’s campaigner: “We live in the world’s largest women’s prison”
* New York-based group Human Rights Watch forced to admit it solicited funds from members of the Saudi regime at a fundraising dinner in Riyadh in May during which it bashed Israel
* Human Rights Watch found that as it increasingly demonized Israel, its worldwide annual income “grew as fast as Bernie Madoff’s balance sheets”
* Arab terrorists and their supporters recruit “human rights” organizations to their side
* Saudi Arabia closes TV station after on-air sex talk; interviewee faces death

* The Wall Street Journal: “A delegation from Human Rights Watch was recently in Saudi Arabia. To investigate the mistreatment of women under Saudi Law? To campaign for the rights of homosexuals, subject to the death penalty in Saudi Arabia? To protest the lack of religious freedom in the Saudi Kingdom? To issue a report on Saudi political prisoners? No, no, no, and no. The delegation arrived to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW’s demonization of Israel.”

* Ma’ariv: Supporter of Munich Olympics massacre employed by Human Rights Watch wrote last week’s outrageously biased HRW report on Israel

(This dispatch mainly concerns Saudi Arabia, and the so-called human rights organization Human Rights Watch.)

 

CONTENTS

1. Saudi Arabia: “The world’s largest women’s prison”
2. “From the day they are born until the day they die”
3. Israel criticizes Human Rights Watch for its fundraising from Saudi regime
4. Some of HRW’s founders distance themselves from the organization and its leader Ken Roth
5. Israel: we will fight back against the slander of so-called human rights organizations

6. Saudi Arabia closes TV station after on-air sex talk
7. Saudis crown “Miss Morality” – without showing her face or body
8. Saudi Arabia bans the opening of public cinemas
9. First few Saudi women become maids
10. Iran decries conduct of Saudi morality police

11. Iran bans Ramadan pilgrimage to Mecca over swine flu
12. Another $200 million pledged to Fatah by Saudis
13. Saudi military buys three more A330s from France
14. Saudi attitudes to Israel: then and now

15. “HRW: From Gulag liberators to Saudi retainers” (By Gerald Steinberg, National Review)
16. “Human Rights Watch goes to Saudi Arabia” (By David Bernstein, Wall Street Journal)
17. “Author of HRW report on Israel supported Munich Massacre” (By Ben-Dror Yemini, Ma’ariv)


[All notes below by Tom Gross]

SAUDI ARABIA: “THE WORLD’S LARGEST WOMEN’S PRISON”

In a bold article on the liberal website Minbar Al-Hiwar Wal-Ibra (www.menber-alhewar1.info), reformist Saudi journalist and human rights campaigner Wajeha Al-Huweidar has described Saudi Arabia as “the world’s largest women’s prison.”

But she added that unlike real prisoners, Saudi women have no prospect of ever being released, since throughout their lives, they are under the control of a male guardian – their husband, father, grandfather, brother or son.

In an article titled “Prisoners can be released from prison, but Saudi women can’t,” she wrote: “As is customary in prisons throughout the world, inmates are stripped of all authority and sponsorship over their lives. All their movements are monitored and controlled by the jailor. The prison authorities decide their fate and see to their needs, until the day of their release. This is also the usual situation of the Saudi woman. She has no right to make decisions, and may not take a single step without the permission of her jailor, namely her guardian. But in her case the term of imprisonment is unlimited.”

“FROM THE DAY THEY ARE BORN UNTIL THE DAY THEY DIE”

She continues: “The Saudi Mahram Law turns women into prisoners from the day they are born until the day they die. They cannot leave their cells, namely their homes, or the larger prison, namely the state, without signed permission...

“Although Saudi women are deprived of freedom and dignity more than any other women in the world, they suffer all these forms of oppression and injustice in bitter silence, and with an air of suppressed anger and death-like dejection. Saudi women are peaceful in the full sense of the word, but so far the Saudi state has not appreciated their noble souls, their patience, and their quiet resistance...”

“The clerics… suffocate the women in all areas of life by means of oppressive laws enforced by the religious police, who follow them everywhere as if they were fugitives from justice. The laws pertaining to women have turned them into objects on which sick men can release their violent and sexual urges.”

(Translation courtesy of MEMRI, whose senior staff subscribe to this list.)

Huweidar and other women activists recently launched a campaign against the Saudi Mahram Law, which forbids women to leave their home without a male guardian.

She told the Kuwaiti daily Awan that the campaign, whose slogan is “treat us like adult citizens or we leave the country,” was officially launched at the King Fahd Bridge, connecting Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which the women taking part threatened to cross in future without a male guardian.

 

ISRAEL CRITICIZES HRW FOR ITS FUNDRAISING FROM SAUDI REGIME

The once respected New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch has become notorious for its invective and bias against Israel, criticizing the Jewish state (and only the Jewish state) out of all proportion for any misdeeds it might have committed. Now it has been revealed that some of its funding comes from official Saudi circles.

HRW, whose campaigns against Israel have become as nasty as those of its London-based counterpart Amnesty International, acknowledged its representatives visited Saudi Arabia in May this year and attended two private receptions, whose 50 guests included people “with governmental affiliations.”

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said that what it characterized as HRW’s recent “fundraising activities” in Saudi Arabia “in tandem with the kingdom’s authoritarian government” raised questions as to the organization’s credibility.

Media organizations like the BBC regularly give great prominence in their news broadcasts to the attacks on Israel by groups like HRW, without (of course) including the Israeli side.

For example, last week the BBC highlighted the latest (completely unsubstantiated) HRW allegations about Israel murdering children in Gaza in January as the main story on the BBC website. The HRW report uses the term Israeli “war crimes” 15 times.

In an official response to the Israeli government on Friday, instead of attempting to offer any explanation as to why they went to Saudi Arabia to attack Israel, Human Rights Watch accused the Israeli government of waging “a propaganda war”.

HRW’s attempt to keep information about its Saudi fundraisers out of the American press was foiled when it was mentioned in the Saudi newspaper The Arab News. The National Review and The Wall Street Journal then reported on it last month, and then last week Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic Monthly asked HRW’s executive director Ken Roth in an e-mail exchange if this was indeed what the group did in Riyadh in May.

“Did your staff person attempt to raise funds in Saudi Arabia by advertising your organization’s opposition to the pro-Israel lobby?” Goldberg asked Roth, in the exchange that he posted on his blog last Wednesday. “That’s certainly part of the story,” Roth responded.

According to The Arab News, a delegation of senior members of HRW who traveled to Saudi Arabia were welcomed at a dinner attended by prominent members of the Saudi regime, for their work attacking Israel.

The Arab News added: “The group is facing a shortage of funds because of the global financial crisis and the work on Israel and Gaza, which depleted HRW's budget for the region”.

Roth admitted to Goldberg that various government officials and “someone from the Shura Council” were at the dinner.

The Shura Council is Saudi Arabia’s state-appointed religious leadership, which oversees, on behalf of the monarchy, the imposition in the kingdom of the strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islamic law. (See more on the Wahhabi interpretation further down this dispatch.)

 

SOME OF HRW’S FOUNDERS DISTANCE THEMSELVES FROM THE ORGANIZATION AND ITS LEADER KEN ROTH

As Prof. Gerald Steinberg, the executive director of NGO Monitor, points out in an article below (“From Gulag Liberators to Saudi Retainers: Human Rights Watch has betrayed its original mission”), Human Rights Watch, which was originally founded in 1978 in New York (as Helsinki Watch) with the goal of using public demonstrations and other forms of “naming and shaming” to free prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, has now lost its moral compass and become an organization committed to bashing Israel and America while downplaying human rights abuses all around the world.

Those who helped establish HRW, including its founder, the veteran human rights campaigner American Robert Bernstein (who was also former editorial head at the publishers Random House), and former Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharansky, have now voiced strong disagreement with HRW’s current direction.

One of the most depressing aspects of current world politics, in my opinion, is that Western human rights organizations have increasingly come to serve as a major propaganda tool for Arab terrorists and their supporters. Many ill-informed people who think of themselves as neutral (including news editors in New York, Paris and London) actually believe that groups like Amnesty International and HRW are reliable purveyors of news which present objective facts in a balanced way. As a result the mainstream media regularly cite them as a source of supposedly impartial data, as though what they said were self-evidently fair and true.

For much more on Human Rights Watch and other groups, please see NGO Monitor: www.ngo-monitor.org. (I am on NGO Monitor’s International Advisory Board.)

(UPDATE: In reaction to all the criticism, Human Rights Watch hurried out a report on August 11, accusing Saudi Arabia of holding thousands of people in prison with no proof of their guilt.)

 

ISRAEL: WE WILL FINALLY FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE SLANDER OF SO-CALLED HUMAN RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS

Last week, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said Jerusalem would begin waging a more aggressive battle against NGOs it deems biased against Israel.

Israel also criticized a number of European governments for funding the extreme left-wing Israeli group “Breaking the Silence,” which Israel said has made totally unsubstantiated claims about alleged Israeli policies of using chemicals against civilians or deliberately killing them.

The Dutch government has now acknowledged that “Breaking the Silence” is not a reliable human rights group and says it will cease funding them.

Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said last week that he had not known that the Dutch embassy in Tel Aviv was funding a radical group like Breaking the Silence; he instructed the Dutch Foreign Ministry to launch an internal investigation on how this came about. It revealed that the embassy in Israel gave Breaking the Silence 19,995 euros to help put together its 2009 report, which accuses Israel of various crimes and was released earlier this month. Had this figure been five euros higher, it would have required approval from The Hague.

But there has been no word yet about Breaking the Silence’s biggest funders – the British Embassy in Tel Aviv (which gave them the equivalent of about $60,000), the European Union (which donated Euro 43,514 towards its latest report), and the supremely naïve diaspora Jewish organization the New Israel Fund which gave them about $50,000. (The Israeli government has protested to the British ambassador to Tel Aviv and he justified his funding of such an organization.)

The Spanish Foreign Ministry has also given over 180,000 Euro to anti-Israeli NGOs.

How would Spain like it if Israel funded supporters of ETA? And what would Britain think if Israel funded an IRA support group?)

 

SAUDI ARABIA CLOSES TV STATION AFTER ON-AIR SEX TALK

The Saudi authorities have closed all the offices of an Arab TV station in the kingdom after it broadcast an interview with a Saudi man speaking frankly about sex.

Abdul-Rahman al-Hazza, the spokesman of the Ministry of Culture and Information, told The Associated Press that all Saudi offices of LBC, a Lebanese-based satellite TV station, were closed August 12 because of the program. LBC is part-owned by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a Saudi billionaire reformist tycoon.

The Saudi man, Mazen Abdul-Jawad, has been in detention since last Friday. Abdul-Jawad, 32, a Saudi Airlines employee, has begged forgiveness from Saudi society for appearing on LBC’s Bold Red Line program, in which he appeared to be talking about his sexual exploits.

His television appearance shocked many in Saudi Arabia, which enforces strict segregation of the sexes. For example, an unrelated couple can be detained for being in the same car or having a cup of coffee in public. Saudis observe such segregation even at home, where they have separate living rooms for male and female guests.

Sulaiman al-Jumeii, Abdul-Jawad’s lawyer, insists the interview was manipulated, and his client was not aware in many instances that he was being recorded.

If he is “lucky,” Abdul-Jawad faces many years in prison plus excruciatingly painful lashes with a whip. If he is unlucky, he will be charged with Hiraba, a class of crime known as hadd, “whose punishment is specifically prescribed in the Holy Koran as death,” according to Saudi media reports.

 

SAUDIS CROWN “MISS MORALITY” – WITHOUT SHOWING HER FACE OR BODY

A Saudi woman has won a beauty competition without showing her face or body.

Saudi Arabia’s “Queen of beautiful morals” competition has been won by Aya Ali Al-Mulla, 18. She beat 274 other competitors to win the crown by proving her moral virtues. Her face and body were completely covered during the competition. Among the tests she had to undergo was proving her dutifulness to her parents, family and society.

As reward for the title, she was given cash, jewelry and a trip to Muslim Malaysia. Beauty contests which focus on physical attributes, of the kind held in much of the rest of the world, are strictly prohibited in Saudi Arabia. Women in the kingdom must be covered when in public and cannot socialize with men to whom they are not related.

 

SAUDI ARABIA BANS THE OPENING OF PUBLIC CINEMAS

The Saudi government has officially banned public cinemas from opening in the kingdom. This followed protests by Islamists after a debate was initiated by reformists over whether the government should issue licenses for the country’s first movie theaters. The proponents say the debate revealed that most Saudis want to listen to music and watch movies, like the rest of the world, despite opposition from Muslim clerics

Saudi Interior Minister Prince Naif bin Abdulaziz made his decision following pressure from Saudi Mufti Sheikh Abd Al-Aziz Al-Sheikh. Several leading Wahhabi clerics said that films were “evil” and had the potential to debase the Islamic fabric of Saudi society.

The setback was a stark reminder of the difference between Saudi Arabia and most other countries in the Arab world, where movies and concerts for the most part take place freely – with travelling Saudis often in the audience.

Saudi Arabia’s most famous entertainer Mohammed Abdo plays the oud, sings, and recites classical poetry in sold-out concerts around the Arab world, but he cannot give a normal public performance in Saudi Arabia.

Despite the restrictions on showing films in Saudi Arabia, a number of films continue to be made by Saudi filmmakers, and they are screened elsewhere in the Middle East.

Last month the Jeddah Film Festival was canceled by the government at the last moment without explanation, even after all the tickets had been sold. (The festival started in 2006, but was always cautious about what kind of films it dared show.)

In May a French embassy-sponsored concert by operatic soprano Isabelle Poulenard, performing with a female accompanist to a women-only audience in Riyadh, was forbidden just two days before it was scheduled to take place, even though a permit had previously been granted.

 

FIRST FEW SAUDI WOMEN BECOME MAIDS

Saudis are infamous for the number of non-Arab servants they employ, many of whom are treated as virtual house slaves. The number of people working as maids and servants in Saudi Arabia, from countries like Indonesia, the Philippines and Nepal, exceeds 1.2 million.

Now a trial project has been inaugurated in an attempt to train and employ some of Saudi Arabia’s woefully underemployed women as maids and as a result the first 30 Saudi women have started to work in the profession. According to Saudi media reports, native Saudis are in high demand due to the widespread fear that foreigners “practice magic.”

However, there are notable differences in salaries and working conditions for Saudi and foreign maids. The Saudi women are only permitted to work eight hours per day, whereas foreign women in Saudi Arabia work 18 hours per day. The Saudis are paid much more generously than the foreign servants and are forbidden to work while the male head of the family is at home.

 

IRAN DECRIES CONDUCT OF SAUDI MORALITY POLICE

The official Iranian Fars news agency has run the following report: (http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=8805080578):

TEHRAN (FNA) - Iran objected to the government of Saudi Arabia over the mistreatment of Iranian pilgrims at the hands of the country’s “morality police”.

“The inappropriate behavior of Saudi morality forces towards Iranian pilgrims has increased,” said Hassan Saqaie, the head of Iran’s pilgrimage office in Saudi Arabia, in an official statement sent to relevant Saudi authorities.

“Not only do they limit the religious activities of clerics, but they make false accusations against pilgrims and ask them to sign papers stating that they would not repeat the so called offenses,” he said.

Saqaei said the behavior of the morality police undermines Saudi Arabia’s stance in the Muslim world and contradicts both countries’ desire to remain committed to a policy of avoiding tensions.

Reports of the Saudi morality force’s mistreatment of Shiite pilgrims, particularly Iranians, increased in 2007 when Saudi police started fingerprinting Iranian citizens who entered the country for the Hajj rituals.

According to international laws, authorities can only fingerprint travelers suspected of being criminals or terrorists.

 

IRAN BANS RAMADAN PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA OVER SWINE FLU

Iran has banned Iranians from performing the umra pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia during the “holy” month of Ramadan because of fears about the spread of swine flu. The umra can be performed at any time but is popular during Ramadan, which this year starts next Friday.

The ban was announced on Iranian state television. Around 3 million Muslim pilgrims from over 160 countries head for Mecca in western Saudi Arabia each year in one of the world’s biggest religious gatherings. The main hajj pilgrimage will take place this year in November.

Iran’s first official death as a result of H1N1 swine flu was announced by Iranian media on August 5. It took place in the southern Island of Qeshm. There have been several swine flu deaths elsewhere in the Middle East. Eight Israelis have died of the virus in the last two weeks.

 

ANOTHER $200 MILLION PLEDGED TO FATAH BY SAUDIS

Saudi Arabia will deliver $200 million to the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has announced at a press conference in Ramallah. The funds are to be transferred to the PA treasury over the coming days, he said.

For more on Fatah, please see last week’s dispatch titled The truth about Fatah – revealed by Fatah itself (& Fatah’s general secretary claims that Abbas helped “murder” Arafat).

 

SAUDI MILITARY BUYS THREE MORE A330S FROM FRANCE

Saudi Arabia has bought three more military Airbus A330 in-flight refueling aircraft for an undisclosed amount, boosting its planned air tanking fleet, the French defense ministry has announced.

“Defense minister Hervé Morin signed last week a government-to-government contract with his counterpart in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz, crown prince and minister for defense and aviation,” the ministry said in a statement. “This contract negotiated by the French state concerns the acquisition by the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) for three additional A330 MRTT (MultiRole Tanker Transport),” the ministry said.

 

SAUDI ATTITUDES TO ISRAEL: THEN AND NOW

The Israeli daily Yisrael Hayom notes in an editorial that U.S. President Barack Obama was unable to persuade Saudi King Abdullah, at their recent meeting, to show even the slightest flexibility on recognizing Israel’s right to exist and reminds its readers that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was – in February 1945 – similarly unable to persuade King Abdullah’s father, King Ibn Saud, to show any flexibility towards Jewish national aspirations.

“Things have hardly changed,” the paper writes. “Then, American Jews were divided, the President’s admirers refused to see the naked truth, the State Department favored the Arabs and was against the Jews, oil was more important than anything and Congress was more attentive to the needs of Israel’s Jews than the administration. If you thought that there was anything new under the sun, you were wrong.”

***

I attach three important articles below, which I recommend you read in full.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]


FULL ARTICLES

HRW’S SEE-NO-EVIL TREATMENT

From Gulag Liberators to Saudi Retainers
Human Rights Watch has betrayed its original mission
By Gerald M. Steinberg
National Review Online
July 21, 2009

Human Rights Watch was founded in 1978 in New York (as Helsinki Watch) with the mission of using public demonstrations and other forms of “naming and shaming” to free prisoners of conscience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Many Gulag denizens, including Anatoly (now Natan) Sharansky, later recognized HRW’s role in gaining their freedom. Shortly thereafter HRW began advocating on behalf of political prisoners and torture victims in other totalitarian regimes, including in Chile, Argentina, and Greece.

But since then, HRW has lost its moral compass, and the organization is using its substantial budget ($42 million in 2008) to repeatedly attack Israel by exploiting the language of human rights and international law. Tendentious reports and press conferences, using distorted legal rhetoric in place of credible evidence, target Israeli responses to terror attacks from Arafat, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

My organization, NGO Monitor, annually releases a systematic analysis of HRW’s agenda, and our reports clearly show that HRW singles out Israel in the Middle East. For years, this arbiter of international morality and human rights had very little to say about Libya, Saudi Arabia, or Palestinian terrorists. HRW’s recent cautious criticism of Saudi policy came only after a reorganization of the organization’s board – and then only after receiving unwelcome attention for its see-no-evil treatment of the Kingdom. In May 2009, Arab News reported that HRW officials went to Saudi Arabia to raise funds, advertising the numerous condemnations and pseudo-research reports against Israel in the Gaza war. Some of the founders, including Robert Bernstein, are in strong disagreement with the organization they built.

How and why did this human-rights superpower turn into a major Israel-basher, along with London-based Amnesty International (which began with a similar mission at about the same time)? And why do such groups appear to be credible and moral – if not as vocal – only when it comes to human-rights violations outside the Middle East, such as those in China?

Part of the answer is the addiction to the influence, power, and money that lies just below the moral façade. The collapse of the Soviet empire forced groups like HRW to create new objectives if they wanted to keep the donations coming (and they succeeded; HRW executive director Ken Roth has a $350,000 salary package). The struggle against South African apartheid was but a short-lived substitute.

HRW and Amnesty transformed from human rights groups to “research organizations,” claiming expertise in the complexities of international law and armed conflict. They added a few self-proclaimed experts in these fields, and began producing impressive-looking battlefield reports based on unverifiable “eyewitness testimony” and emotive graphics. The Arab-Israeli conflict was a prime target – and HRW’s agenda fit directly into the Palestinian political strategy of isolating and demonizing Israel through the vocabulary of human rights.

The campaign to label Zionism as racism, endorsed by the U.N. in the mid-1970s, returned in the late 1990s as the Oslo process exploded, giving the NGO network a powerful platform. For the Arabs and Iran, anti-Israel NGO activists who labeled Zionism as “neo-colonialism” and the “new apartheid” became convenient allies. Double standards promoting anti-Israel positions provided direct access to the United Nations Human Rights Commission (now Council), led by moral stalwarts such as Iran, Libya, Pakistan, and Cuba. In every round of violence, including the 2002 Jenin “massacre” myth, the 2006 Lebanon war, and numerous others, HRW officials called for international investigations of Israeli “war crimes” and “violations of international law.” Meanwhile, HRW’s annual income grew as fast as Bernie Madoff’s balance sheets.

Most recently, during the Gaza war, the U.N. Human Rights Council appointed HRW board member Richard Goldstone to head the inquisition. This highlighted the symbiotic relationship between powerful political NGOs and the anti-Western and anti-Israel regimes that control the relevant U.N. frameworks. And as a U.S.-based NGO with many Jewish donors, HRW was a welcome ally in Israel-bashing. (Goldstone resigned from HRW, and his name was quickly removed from the website, after NGO Monitor highlighted the conflict of interest.)

Because the U.N. amplifies the role of NGOs, these organizations receive enhanced media coverage and exercise “soft power.” Journalists usually accept and repeat the obsessions and automatic condemnations published by human-rights superpowers, without bothering to check the “evidence” presented. And this media attention, in turn, helps the top NGOs get more money from foundations promoting radical agendas (like George Soros’s Open Society Institute, and the Ford Foundation), naïve donors, and now, perhaps, the Saudis. (HRW has also established a relationship with Qaddafi in Libya, praising the “spirit of reform.”)

But power and money are only part of the explanation for the radical political agenda. HRW, like other once-liberal organizations, has been captured by activists with anti-democratic ideologies, strong egos, and major chips on their shoulders. Following Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Joseph Massad, and others, the NGO world is filled with anti-nationalists and anarchists who define military power as inherently evil and victimhood as moral, regardless of context or behavior. Thus, an Israel that can defend itself is on the bad side of the moral ledger, along with the United States; Palestinians – the world’s most successful victims – are patronizingly excused from all responsibility to act morally.

Another factor in HRW’s disproportionate emphasis on Israel is the number of anti-Israel Jews among its top officials, beginning with Executive Director Kenneth Roth. Roth has often held press conferences in Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel, home base for the pro-Palestinian media, in order to attack Israel. As suicide bombers were slaughtering hundreds of Israelis, Roth’s solution was to call for sending police into Gaza’s slums to arrest the perpetrators and bring them to trial. In 2006, Roth condemned Israel’s response to Hezbollah rocket attacks and kidnapping of soldiers as an “eye for an eye” approach resulting from “the morality of some more primitive moment.”

Reed Brody, another Jew, led the HRW delegation to the infamous 2001 NGO Forum of the U.N. Durban Conference, which labeled Israel “an apartheid state.” Brody was also active in the case brought against Prime Minister Sharon in a Belgium court while hundreds of Israelis were being killed in Arafat’s terror campaign.

For many years, HRW’s founders and board members paid little attention to these dimensions, relying instead on Roth’s cool assurances, stage presence from the NPR studios to the salons of Davos, and unprecedented fundraising success. Some minor obsessions over Israel could be overlooked when measured against HRW’s status as an NGO superpower and moral arbiter.

But now the façade is thinning, and HRW has become a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia, one of the top human-rights abusers in the world. According to Arab News, Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa (MENA) division, and Hassan Elmasry, a member of both the HRW Board of Directors and the MENA advisory committee, attended a “welcoming dinner” and encouraged “prominent members of Saudi society” to make up the “shortage of funds” due to the global financial crisis “and the work on Israel and Gaza, which depleted HRW’s budget for the region.” Whitson has reportedly sought to reel in the Saudis by touting HRW’s (invented) “evidence of Israel using white phosphorus and launching systematic destructive attacks on civilian targets,” and by invoking the “pro-Israel pressure groups” that “strongly resisted the report and tried to discredit it.”

In response to extensive ridicule, Whitson and Roth lashed out at their critics (they accused NGO Monitor of lying), but they have not offered any details to contradict this version of events or the systematic analysis exposing HRW’s targeting of Israel. They have also tried to sell a distinction between soliciting the Saudi regime for money, and wooing wealthy private individuals and Wahhabi religious officials in Saudi Arabia who, we are assured, are genuinely concerned about human rights. Right.

In terms of its budget and ideological agenda, HRW’s embrace of the Saudis makes sense, because it can compensate for the group’s loss of support from liberal Jews. In addition, this new partnership is based on a shared agenda of attacking Israel and the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state – while more than 50 officially Islamic countries are universally accepted.

But as a result, HRW’s halo has been tarnished, perhaps beyond repair. The long history of cynical manipulation of moral rhetoric notwithstanding, the absurdity of a Saudi-supported human-rights organization that targets Israel may be a step too far. For the first time, Roth and Whitson find themselves being held accountable and answering charges, rather than playing prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. If this also becomes true of Amnesty International and the other human-rights superpowers that have gone bad, this will mark a major step in restoring the moral foundation of universal human rights.

(Prof. Gerald Steinberg is executive director of NGO Monitor and chair of political science at Bar Ilan University.)

 

HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH GOES TO SAUDI ARABIA

Human Rights Watch goes to Saudi Arabia
Seeking Saudi Money to Counterbalance “Pro-Israel Pressure Groups”
By David Bernstein
The Wall Street Journal
July 15, 2009

A delegation from Human Rights Watch was recently in Saudi Arabia. To investigate the mistreatment of women under Saudi Law? To campaign for the rights of homosexuals, subject to the death penalty in Saudi Arabia? To protest the lack of religious freedom in the Saudi Kingdom? To issue a report on Saudi political prisoners?

No, no, no, and no. The delegation arrived to raise money from wealthy Saudis by highlighting HRW’s demonization of Israel. An HRW spokesperson, Sarah Leah Whitson, highlighted HRW’s battles with “pro-Israel pressure groups in the US, the European Union and the United Nations.” (Was Ms. Whitson required to wear a burkha, or are exceptions made for visiting anti-Israel “human rights” activists”? Driving a car, no doubt, was out of the question.)

Apparently, Ms. Whitson found no time to criticize Saudi Arabia’s abysmal human rights record. But never fear, HRW “recently called on the Kingdom to do more to protect the human rights of domestic workers.

There is nothing wrong with a human rights organization worrying about maltreatment of domestic workers. But there is something wrong when a human rights organization goes to one of the worst countries in the world for human rights to raise money to wage lawfare against Israel, and says not a word during the trip about the status of human rights in that country. In fact, it’s a virtual certainty that everyone in Whitson’s audience employs domestic servants, giving her a perfect, untaken opportunity to boast about HRW’s work in improving the servants’ status. But Whitson wasn’t raising money for human rights, she was raising money for HRW’s propaganda campaign against Israel.

Someone who claims to have worked for HRW wrote to me, “I can tell you that the people on the research and policy side of the organization have little, if any, contacts with people on the donor side.” If that’s true, apparently this is yet another exception HRW makes for Israel: Ms. Whitson, who gave the presentation to potential Saudi donors, is director of HRW’s Middle East and North Africa Division.

Also, as a Nathan Wagner comments at Opinio Juris: “Surely there is a moral difference between raising funds in free nations through appeals to ideals of universal human rights and raising money in repressive nations through appeals highlighting pressure brought against their enemies. [Moreover], the former type of fundraising does not imperil the organization’s mission, but the fundraising Bernstein highlights does, since any significant reliance on such funds will necessarily mute criticism of the repressive government.”

Finally, some would defend HRW by pointing it that it has criticized Saudi Arabia’s human rights record rather severely in the past. The point of my post, though, is not that HRW is pro-Saudi, but that it is maniacally anti-Israel. The most recent manifestation is that its officers see nothing unseemly about raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth, with a pitch about how the money is needed to fight “pro-Israel forces,” without the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis’ manifold human rights violations, and without apparent concern that becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds, if you don’t “behave.”

(Mr. Bernstein is a professor of law at George Mason University.)

 

AUTHOR OF HRW REPORT ON ISRAEL SUPPORTED MUNICH MASSACRE

Author of HRW report on Israel supported Munich Olympics Massacre
By Ben-Dror Yemini
Ma’ariv
August 16, 2009

Joe Stork, a senior official in Human Rights Watch, which accuses the IDF of killing Palestinians who waved white flags, is a fanatical supporter of the elimination of Israel. He was a friend of Saddam, ruled out negotiations and supported the Munich Massacre, which “provided an important boost in morale among Palestinians.”

Last Thursday, many world media outlets covered the press conference in which a senior Human Rights Watch official, Joe Stork, presented the report accusing Israel of killing twelve Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who waved white flags during Operation Cast Lead. Stork, the person identified with the report, has a unique history of Israel-hating: He supported the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich, was an avid supporter of Saddam Hussein and more.

Several times in the past, Stork has called for the destruction of Israel and is a veteran supporter of Palestinian terrorism. Already as a student, Stork was amongst the founders of a new radical leftist group, which was formed based on the claim that other leftist groups were not sufficiently critical of Israel and of the United States’ support of it. Already in 1976, Stork participated in a conference organized by Saddam Hussein which celebrated the first anniversary of the UN decision that equated Zionism with racism. Stork, needless to say, arrived at the conference as a prominent supporter of Palestinian terrorism and as an opponent to the existence of the State of Israel. He also labeled Palestinian violence against Israel as “revolutionary potential of the Palestinian masses” – language that was typical of fanatical Marxists.

In articles which he authored during the 1970’s, Stork stated that he was against the very existence of Israel as an “imperialistic entity” and, to this end, provided counsel to Arab regimes on how to eliminate the Zionist regime. He also was opposed to any negotiations since this meant recognizing its existence: “Zionism may be defeated only by fighting imperialism,” wrote Stork, “and not through deals with Kissingers.”

On other occasions, Stork expressed his position that the global Left must subordinate itself to the PLO in order to strengthen elements that opposed any accord with Israel. It would seem that he has not changed his ways since then. He is still conceptually subordinate to those who have maintained their opposition to the existence of the State of Israel. Once the world’s radical left supported the PLO. Today, part of the global Left supports Hamas.

Stork, of course, is not alone. The hate ships that arrive from time to time, or attempt to arrive, to the shores of Gaza, are full of radicals of his ilk. They do not identify with efforts towards compromise or peace. On the contrary, they identify with those who are continuing the old line that supports the elimination of Israel. And what would happen if the PLO should decide to enter the negotiations track? Stork already recommended years ago that the Palestinian left splinter in order to continue the resistance. Hamas obeyed. It is possible to guess where Stork’s heart lays.

Where does Stork stand regarding matters of objectivity and neutrality? He criticized Professor Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, himself a PLO figure, because he edited an anthology which tried, at least seemingly, to produce a balanced presentation. “Academic neutrality is deceitful,” wrote Stork. And what about factual accuracy? Stork claimed that Menachem Begin said that, ‘The Palestinians are two-legged animals.” In fact, Begin said that those who come to kill children are “two-legged animals.” The difference is, of course, huge. Stork, time after time, justifies his high standing in the industry of hate and lies against Israel.

Stork reached his peak in a statement published by the Middle East Research and Information Project, which dealt with gathering information on the Middle East conflict, and in which Stork was a leading figure. This was a statement that included explicit support for the murder of the eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics: “Munich and similar actions cannot create or substitute for a mass revolutionary movement,” the statement said, “But we should comprehend the achievement of the Munich action…It has provided an important boost in morale among Palestinians in the camps.” Murder and terrorism, if so, are a matter of morale.

This is the man. A radical Marxist whose positions have not changed over the years. On the contrary. Objectivity, neutrality or sticking to the facts are not Stork’s strong suit. He even proudly exclaims that there is no need for neutrality.

Is it possible to relate seriously to a report against Israel which this man stands behind? Both Camera and Professor Gerald Steinberg have revealed worrying data on the leaders of Human Rights Watch and on the two people who head its Middle East Department – Sarah Leah Whitson and Joe Stork – even before its latest report and unconnected to it. The organization, as part of its false presentation, issued polite condemnations of Hamas rocket fire. But it seems that such blatant anti-Israel bias leaves room for doubt. A Stork produced report on Israel is about as objective as a report by Baruch Marzel on Hebron.

Israel is called upon to provide explanations in the wake of Human Rights Watch reports. It is about time that Israel publicly exposed the ideological roots of several of this organization’s leaders and demands the dismissal of these supporters of terrorism and haters of Israel. Until then, Israel, justifiably, cannot seriously comment on criticism from such a body.

(More on Joe Stork here from NGO Monitor.)


How many degrees does Gilad Shalit have? (& Facebook closes Hamas leader’s fan page)

August 16, 2009

* Hamas kill 28 Palestinians yesterday, including a nine-year-old girl
* Former Palestinian PM: “The forgery in Iran’s recent presidential election was nothing compared to the corruption in Fatah’s elections last week”
* Hamas terrorists given Israeli university degrees, Cable TV, IPods and dental treatment as Gilad Shalit rots (but the international human rights groups criticize Israel)
* Facebook closes down fan page for Hamas leader but “fans of Adolf Hitler” page remains
* Canadian commentator Robert Fulford: “In my personal observation, enemies of Israel often turn out to be anti-Semites as well”

* Ha’aretz headline today: 20 civilians killed during missile test in Syria. Another failure for joint project with North Korea: Missile landed on a crowded market near Turkish border.

 

CONTENTS

1. Hamas kills another 28 Palestinians
2. Jewish delegate wins place on Fatah Revolutionary Council
3. Widespread allegations within Fatah of vote fraud
4. Bedouin sheikh urges Gilad Shalit’s release
5. Hamas terrorists celebrate their 100th Israeli university degree
6. Hamas stages play for children reenacting Gilad Shalit’s abduction
7. Hamas seizes 3 UNRWA ambulances
8. Facebook closes down fan page for Hamas leader
9. Hebrew University marks 7th anniversary of terrorist attack
10. Number of Druze and Arabs in Israel’s civil service on the rise
11. Saddam’s family: Let us keep Saddam’s stolen fortune
12. “When criticizing Israel becomes ritual” (National Post, Canada, Aug. 15, 2009)


[All notes below by Tom Gross]

HAMAS KILLS ANOTHER 28 PALESTINIANS

Hamas security forces killed the leader of an al-Qaeda-inspired group, many of his followers, and several civilians, including a nine-year-old girl, in a shootout in Gaza over the weekend.

If you didn’t see the death of so many Palestinians prominently reported in your newspaper, that is because the news editors couldn’t point the finger of blame at Israel.

Hamas forces also stormed a mosque in Rafah on the Egyptian border, where about 100 members of Jund Ansar Allah, or “The Soldiers of the Companions of God,” were holed up. At least 150 Palestinians were injured.

Hamas, which regularly cons Western human rights groups into believing it doesn’t have any money, used a considerable array of weapons, including rocket propelled grenades, to attack the mosque. The militants inside the structure returned fire with automatic weapons and grenades of their own.

According to the Palestinian Ma’an news agency, an Egyptian child was hit by a stray bullet fired during the exchange, and ten artillery shells also landed on the southern side of the Gaza-Egypt border, five of which exploded (though no casualties were reported from the shells).

This news is of considerable political significance because it shows that Hamas is determined to maintain absolute control over Gaza and allow no dissent whatever (thereby reducing the prospects of reconciliation with Fatah and the possibility that the Palestinians might be unified enough to form an independent state). It also shows that although Hamas is hardline, there are limits to their extremism and they don’t wish to create a purely Islamic sharia-based society of the kind advocated by Jund Ansar Allah.

The group’s website vowed vengeance against Hamas, saying “we swear to God to avenge the martyrs’ blood and we will turn their women to widows.”

 

JEWISH DELEGATE WINS PLACE ON FATAH REVOLUTIONARY COUNCIL

The independent Palestinian news agency Ma’an reports from Bethlehem today that “Loud applause broke out yesterday (Saturday) evening as it was announced that ‘brother’ Dr Uri Davis had been elected to the Fatah movement’s largest governing body.

“Fatah conference spokesman Fawzi Salamah announced the Jewish delegate’s victory at the meeting’s headquarters in the central West Bank city’s Terra Sancta school.”

For more on the participation in Fatah by Davis, whose parents escaped the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia, but is no longer Jewish having converted to Islam, please see the note in this dispatch. (That dispatch also contains background relating to the item below.)

 

WIDESPREAD ALLEGATIONS WITHIN FATAH OF VOTE FRAUD

Meanwhile, accusations of widespread election improprieties and corruption within Fatah continue to be raised. Angry delegates said they would submit a memorandum to Abbas stating their rejection of the Fatah elections, which took place in Bethlehem from 4 - 13 August.

All Fatah’s Gaza leaders have resigned in protest at what they say were “rigged” elections held last week for Fatah’s Central Committee.

And former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala) (who is based in the West Bank) announced that “the forgery in Iran’s recent presidential election was nothing compared to what happened in Fatah.”

Qurei, who failed to be reelected to the Central Committee, said that there was growing discontent in Fatah over the alleged fraud.

“There are many big question marks about the election, the way it was conducted and the way the votes were counted,” Qurei told the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi newspaper. “There were behind-the-scenes arrangements that removed some names and added others to the winning list.”

Qurei said that PA President Mahmoud Abbas and some of his loyalists had intervened to secure spots for their supporters in the Central Committee. For example, many Fatah members said they were shocked when they discovered that one of Abbas’s old-time colleagues, Tayeb Abdel Rahim, was added to the list of winners at the last minute.

 

BEDOUIN SHEIKH URGES GILAD SHALIT’S RELEASE

Sheikh Salam al-Hoziel, an Israeli Arab Bedouin tribal leader, has begun a campaign for the release of kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Among other things, he now regularly stands outside Beersheba’s Central Bus Station collecting signatures for a petition on his small plastic table. “Sometimes I get over 1,000 signatures a day,” he said. “And I stand out here from seven in the morning until ten at night.”

It is very rare for Israeli Arabs to campaign for Israeli Jews in this way.

Al-Hoziel said responses to his campaign have ranged from hugs and compliments from Jews to curses and death threats from some Israeli Islamic leaders. Last month, al-Hoziel and his wife were sitting outside in their garden when a car pulled up around midnight and the passengers inside opened fire on his house. No one was injured.

Al-Hoziel has also traveled to Jerusalem where he met Gilad’s father, Noam Shalit. Shalit has been held captive by Hamas for almost 1,150 days and denied all visitation and other rights contrary to international law.

Last week Gilad turned 23. He has been a Hamas prisoner for over three years, and has had no visits or letters from anybody. In fact, nobody can really confirm if he is even alive.

 

HAMAS TERRORISTS CELEBRATE THEIR 100TH ISRAELI UNIVERSITY DEGREE

Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper noted in an article last week that “As Gilad Shalit rots in captivity, Palestinian prisoners convicted of terrorist offenses enjoy generous benefits, including hot water all day long, library books, ventilators and cable television with all Arab channels”

In addition, the one hundredth Palestinian Hamas security prisoner jailed in Israel received a university degree last week from the Open University, Israel’s correspondence college, which is recognized by Israel’s Council for Higher Education. Some 250 additional security prisoners are currently studying at the Open University.

The website of Hamas’s so-called armed wing, the “Al Qassam” brigades, proudly noted last week that the one hundredth terrorist affiliated with the group earned an academic diploma at Israel’s expense.

The milestone was achieved by Mahmoud Abu-Sarur, of Bethlehem, who is serving a life sentence for terrorism-related crimes. Sarur received an MA in political science.

The Hamas terrorists’ studies are paid for by Israeli taxpayers, as academic studies are a standard benefit for prisoners in Israel’s jails.

Among other leading terrorists who have received a degree while jailed in Israel is Samir Kuntar, the Lebanese terrorist convicted of murdering several Israelis, including a four-year-old girl. Kuntar completed a bachelor’s degree in social studies and humanities while in jail. He was released to Lebanon last year as part of a highly controversial prisoner exchange deal for the bodies of two Israelis murdered by Hizbullah.

CABLE TV AND IPODS

Yediot Ahronot notes that in addition to benefitting from air conditioning and cable TV and access to a wide selection of library books, each security prisoner jailed in Israel is given a walkman, a radio and a budget for the jail’s canteen. They also receive regular medical treatments, dental care and a visit by an optician.

The security prisoners are allowed to send and receive an unlimited number of letters, and are entitled to a family visit every two weeks.

Gilad Shalit, by contrast, who has never committed any crime, has been denied any contact with the outside world and is believed to be sitting in an underground cell with no natural air or light. Shalit, then a teenager, was kidnapped from inside Israel in 2006. The lack of proper concern by international human rights groups towards Shalit’s fate has been disgraceful.

And it is Israel that is accused by papers like The Guardian of being an “apartheid state”.

 

HAMAS STAGES PLAY FOR CHILDREN REENACTING GILAD SHALIT’S ABDUCTION

Despite a recent charm offensive by Hamas to prominent English-language media that has even seen Hamas supreme leader Khaled Meshaal grant an interview to The Wall Street Journal (July 31), and Hamas “deputy foreign minister” Ahmed Yousef give an interview to Britain’s Economist magazine (July 30)*, Hamas continues not only to round up and execute political opponents in Gaza but has also stepped up its campaign of radicalization among Palestinian children.

This summer, more than 120,000 Palestinian children attended Hamas-run summer camps that focused not only on Islamic teachings, but also on “semi-military training.”

In their final ceremony of this year’s Hamas summer camps children reenacted the abduction of Gilad Shalit before an audience that included top Hamas officials Osama Mazini and Sheikh Ahmad Bahar, the acting speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council. After the abduction ceremony, Bahar distributed copies of the Koran to the camp counselors.

While Hamas whines to gullible reporters from certain Western news outlets that there is a “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, it continues to spend vast sums of money on summer camps educating the next generation to become militants.

(These Hamas camps are not the same summer camps as the ones run this summer in Gaza by UNRWA. Last week, senior Hamas official Dr. Younes al-Istal told Al-Arabiya TV that the UNRWA summer camps were part of a plan to corrupt the younger generation and prepare it for normalization with Israel. UNRWA camps included inflatable swimming pools, toys, spray paint and musical instruments.)

***

FOOTNOTE: “Clarifying” his remarks for Palestinians in Arabic following the publication of his interview in The Economist, Ahmed Yousef denied having said that Hamas was close to recognizing Israel. He said that The Economist had either not understood what he said or had misquoted him when the interview was translated into English. He added that the Palestinians would never recognize Israel (Hamas’s Palestine-Info website, August 2, 2009).

 

HAMAS SEIZES 3 UNRWA AMBULANCES

The IDF has harshly criticized the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) after three ambulances that Israel transferred to the organization two weeks ago were seized by Hamas.

Hamas gunmen overpowered the UNRWA drivers and took control of the vehicles. The IDF noted that UNRWA failed to condemn the incident, “again proving the UN’s double standard toward Hamas, and towards Israel, whom it is constantly criticizing.”

“When Israel deviates a little from procedures in Gaza, there is a massive world outcry, but when Hamas intimidate and shoot at UN staff, the world doesn’t even open its mouth,” an IDF spokeswoman said.

Israel fears Hamas will use the ambulances to carry out terror attacks against Israel, as it has done in the past. It is an extremely sensitive matter for Israel to monitor ambulances and therefore Hamas makes full use of them to mount attacks.

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness, a former BBC news presenter, is notorious for giving interviews on international TV networks slandering Israel. For more on Gunness and his links with the BBC’s biased Middle East correspondent Jeremy Bowen, see this dispatch.

 

FACEBOOK CLOSES DOWN FAN PAGE FOR HAMAS LEADER

The social networking website Facebook has removed a user group dedicated to supporting Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. The group had more than 10,000 confirmed “friends”, according to the London-based newspaper Al-Hayat. However, four other, less popular pages dedicated to Haniyeh remain online.

Facebook also hosts a range of other controversial fan pages and user groups, including one dedicated to all “fans of Adolf Hitler” and several promoting admiration for the accused Nazi war criminal Ivan Demjanjuk.

 

HEBREW UNIVERSITY MARKS 7TH ANNIVERSARY OF TERRORIST ATTACK

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem has marked the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attack on the university with a memorial ceremony at the scene of the attack on the Nancy Reagan Plaza at the university’s Mount Scopus campus.

Nine students and university staff were killed: Benjamin Blutstein, Marla Bennett, Revital Barashi, David Gritz, David Diego Ladowski, Janis Ruth Coulter, Dina Carter, Levina Shapira and Daphna Spruch. Almost a hundred students and others were wounded.

To my knowledge not a single academic institution from outside Israel expressed any solidarity at last week’s ceremony with the Hebrew University, one of the leading universities in the world, and whose student body is one quarter Arab. At the same time many academic bodies in Europe and North America continue to campaign for a boycott of Israeli (and only Israeli) academics.

 

NUMBER OF DRUZE AND ARABS IN ISRAEL’S CIVIL SERVICE ON THE RISE

Israel’s Civil Service Commission (CSC) said the number of Druze and Arabs employed in the ranks of the civil service has increased from 193 to 578 over the past six years.

According to the CSC, while in 2003 only 4.2% of its employees were Druze or Arabs, they now constitute 11.6% of civil service personnel.

Also, the number of Druze and Arab women now employed by the various government bureaus rose from 66 in 2003, to 282 in 2008.

The data further revealed that that 70.9% of all Druze and Arab workers have an academic education, 11.4% of them have PhDs and 9.2% have a Master’s degree.

36% of Druze and Arab workers were employed by the Interior Ministry, 16% by the Science and Technology Ministry, 8.5% by the Ministry of Social Affairs, 8% by the Health Ministry and 7% are employed by the Education Ministry.

 

SADDAM’S FAMILY: LET US KEEP SADDAM’S STOLEN FORTUNE

Relatives of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein are protesting a decision by the Iraqi government to confiscate possessions belonging to the late dictator and mass murderer.

The government passed a bill last month approving the confiscation of property, both movables and real estate, belonging to Saddam and to other high-ranking figures in the former regime.

The Saddam family said it will file a lawsuit in international and Iraqi courts against the confiscation bill. Two of Saddam’s daughters, Raghad and Rana, have been living in Amman since July 2003, while their mother and younger sister Hala now live in Qatar.

Saddam’s two sons, Uday and Qusay, known for their high-living and their pathological cruelty, were killed by U.S. forces in Mosul in 2003.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]


FULL ARTICLE

“IN MY PERSONAL OBSERVATION, ENEMIES OF ISRAEL OFTEN TURN OUT TO BE ANTI-SEMITES AS WELL”

When criticizing Israel becomes ritual
By Robert Fulford
National Post (Canada)
August 15, 2009

It begins, reasonably, as a response to apparently unnecessary violence by Israel. Then it moves on to accuse Israel of expanding on land the Arabs insist is theirs. Nothing wrong with criticizing that, surely. Israel, a state, deserves to be judged like any other.

Even those friendly toward Israel have often felt duty bound to point out its mistakes. In more innocent times, I imagined that intellectuals in the West paid careful attention to Israel’s faults because they expected it to set a high standard. Who would worry about the moral status of, say, Bolivia? No one except Bolivians. Jews, however, live with the injunction to be (as Isaiah quotes God) “A light unto the nations.”

But now everything has changed. Opposing Israel has become an institutionalized ritual. It’s now a movement across Europe and North America. It has its traditions, like Israel Apartheid Week, celebrated every spring in universities, often the cause of riots and an occasion to intimidate Jewish students. Vehement opposition to Israel appears to be the major interest of thousands of people all over the world. Many are Muslims, sympathizing with the Palestinians, but many are not. This week, attacks on Israel once more appeared on the agenda of the general council meeting of the United Church of Canada, a critic of Israel for generations.

What are reasonable people to think about these relentless campaigns in the universities, churches and unions?

Those involved often insist that it’s not a matter of anti-Semitism. They like to say, “I’m anti-Israel, not anti-Semitic. A different thing entirely.”

After decades of use, this declaration of innocence has ceased to be credible. In my personal observation, enemies of Israel often turn out to be anti-Semites as well. The true agenda of anti-Israel activists often is reflected in their style of propaganda, and in the exclusive attention they give to one particular country.

The style of the protests goes far beyond “criticism,” that benign noun implying civil disputes. Often, anti-Israel propaganda distributed on campuses and elsewhere borrows the style of Nazi cartoons. As Craig Offman reported in the Post, last winter students at the University of Manitoba found themselves confronted by posters near a campus bookshop depicting, among other things, a hooked-nosed Hasidic Jew with a star of David pointing a bazooka at the nose of an Arab carrying a slingshot; and an Israeli helicopter with a swastika on top, bombing a baby bottle.

Moreover, the word “apartheid,” now a favourite of the anti-Israel movement, carries intentionally vicious overtones of racism. It’s a way of setting the final terms of an issue before it can be discussed.

The most distressing quality of the attacks, however, is their singularity. They leave us with the impression that Israel deserves more censure than any other country on Earth — in fact, more than all other countries combined. Enemies of Israel may sometimes claim that they have also passed resolutions deploring genocide in Africa or dictatorship in Burma. But these views are expressed in comparative privacy. No widespread, long-running movements accompany them.

Does York University in Toronto, so dedicated to justice for Palestinians, also devote a week every year to the fate of the Falun Gong in China? Do Concordia University students in Montreal demonstrate against the mass rapes in the Congo? Does the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), which favours boycotting Israeli universities, have anything to say about Tibetan freedom? Have any of them heard of the World Uighur Congress’s defence of oppressed Muslims in the Xinjiang province of western China? And when dealing with the Gaza conflict, not one campus group anywhere (so far as I know) mounted a campaign against Hamas killings of fellow Palestinians. They also avoid mentioning the Hamas policy of using women and children as human shields.

So far as we can learn from how they act in public, these organizations appear to have a foreign policy with only one item on its agenda, the same one they would have if they were in fact motivated fundamentally by anti-Semitism.

Howard Jacobson, a British novelist and journalist, calls this phenomenon “Jew-hating pure and simple, the Jew-hating which many of us have always suspected was the only explanation for the disgust that contorts and disfigures faces when the mere word Israel crops up in conversation.”

Those who oppose Israel’s policies have a right to their opinions and their anger, however unreasonable. And those, like me, who are infuriated by the relentless and totally selective drumbeat, also have a right to our grave suspicions.


Lockerbie: Has an innocent man been locked up?

August 13, 2009

WAS A PLO SPLINTER GROUP, ACTING ON IRAN’S ORDERS, ACTUALLY BEHIND THE LOCKERBIE ATTACK?

[Note by Tom Gross]

As many of you may have heard, rumors are swirling around the international media this morning that the Libyan man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing is likely to be freed by the British government on “compassionate grounds” next week in time for him to be home with his family in Libya by Ramadan, which starts next Friday.

Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, is serving life for murdering 270 people when Pan Am flight 103 exploded above the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. This was Britain’s worst terror attack.

Some relatives of the victims have naturally expressed outrage that he may be released. For example, American Susan Cohen, whose 20-year-old daughter Theodora died in the attack, told the BBC: “Any letting out of Megrahi would be a disgrace. It makes me sick, and if there is a compassionate release then I think that is vile.”

However, as al-Megrahi has repeatedly claimed, there are serious concerns that he is innocent. Indeed there are those in Israeli intelligence and the CIA who have long believed that Libya was not behind the attack, and it was actually carried out by the PLO splinter group the PFLP-GC, acting on Iran’s orders. They believe that the Lockerbie bomb timing devices were manufactured in a PFLP-GC workshop on the outskirts of Damascus.

IS THERE IS A COVER OF SYRIAN AND IRANIAN INVOLVEMENT – AND WHY?

Dr. Jim Swire, a leading spokesman for British victims of the attack, whose daughter Flora was killed on Flight 103, has thoroughly investigated the case and believes the Israeli assessment is correct.

In October 2007, I posted a dispatch exploring these claims, and I attach it again below for those of you who are interested.

If al-Megrahi is indeed guilty, then one can understand the outrage at his early release.

However, if he is innocent and the British authorities (with the possible connivance of the American administration) are letting him out on compassionate grounds in order not to let his appeal proceed, this raises questions as to whether there is cover of Syrian and Iranian involvement – and why.

-- Tom Gross


Repeat Mideast Dispatch from October 17, 2007

LOCKERBIE: HAS AN INNOCENT MAN BEEN LOCKED UP?

* Appeal of Libyan convicted of deadliest terrorist act in U.K. history begins
* Dr. Jim Swire, the longtime victims’ spokesman, whose daughter Flora was killed on Flight 103: Megrahi is almost certainly innocent
* Swire: Ariel Sharon was correct when he claimed that PLO splinter group PFLP-GC, acting on Iran’s orders, was behind the attack
* Scottish law professor agrees: evidence strongly suggests Lockerbie was a PFLP-GC operation, financed by Iran
* Swire and others: Libya was forced by the British and American authorities to take responsibility for a crime it didn’t commit
* Accusation: U.K. and U.S. wanted Syria and Iran on their side when coalition took on Saddam in 1990-1, therefore blamed Libya
* Experts: Lockerbie bomb timing devices were manufactured in PFLP-GC workshop on the outskirts of Damascus

 

CONTENTS

1. Is Megrahi innocent?
2. Lockerbie killed more American civilians than any terror attack other than 9/11
3. Dr. Jim Swire: This is “one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in history”
4. Scottish law professor Robert Black: the wrong man is in jail
5. “Ariel Sharon was right”
6. Top CIA agent Robert Baer: Palestinian group was behind Lockerbie
7. “West needed Syrian, Iranian support to take on Saddam”
8. Israeli-Palestinian peace concert cancelled following death threats
9. “Lockerbie – a miscarriage of justice?” (Jerusalem Post, Oct. 11, 2007)

 

IS MEGRAHI INNOCENT?

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach a lengthy investigative piece by David Horovitz, the editor of The Jerusalem Post, on the appeal that began last Thursday in Scotland by former Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi against his conviction for murder in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie in Scotland on December 21, 1988.

If the accusations raised in Horovitz’s article prove correct, the Lockerbie conviction may turn out to be Britain’s gravest miscarriage of justice. (Horovitz is a longtime subscriber to this email list.)

For those who don’t have time to read the article in full (it runs close to 4,800 words), here is a summary I have prepared of some of its key points.

 

LOCKERBIE KILLED MORE AMERICAN CIVILIANS THAN ANY TERROR ATTACK OTHER THAN 9/11

Lockerbie is the deadliest terrorist action ever to hit Great Britain. All passengers and crew on the plane, en route from London to New York, were killed as well as 11 Scottish civilians on the ground. In total, the victims came from 21 different nations.

188 of the 270 victims were Americans. Lockerbie saw the killing of more American civilians than any terrorist attack other than those on 9/11.

It prompted the most expensive criminal investigation in British history.

Were the American and British authorities involved in a cover-up which enabled the guilty state sponsors to evade punishment and, emboldened, to commission further murderous attacks?

DR. JIM SWIRE: THIS IS “ONE OF THE GRAVEST MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE IN HISTORY”

Dr. Jim Swire, the longtime spokesman for the U.K. victims’ families, whose daughter Flora was killed on Flight 103, has branded Megrahi’s conviction “one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in history.”

The decision by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to finally grant Megrahi his appeal, announced in an 800-page report after a nearly four-year study, was based on six possible grounds for a miscarriage of justice.

Libya gave up Megrahi for trial after years of resistance and consequent UN sanctions, and then paid compensation to the Lockerbie victims’ families as a condition for the lifting of those sanctions (which had cost it an estimated $30 billion).

But Gaddafi savaged the Scottish judges when they found Megrahi guilty, Libya has never formally accepted specific responsibility for the bombing, and in 2004, its prime minister told the BBC that it had capitulated only because “we thought it was easier for us to buy peace.” (It should be noted that Libya definitely was behind various other terrorist actions in that period.)

SCOTTISH LAW PROFESSOR ROBERT BLACK: THE WRONG MAN IS IN JAIL

Hans Koechler, appointed by the UN Security Council on the nomination of secretary-general Kofi Annan to serve as an observer throughout the Lockerbie legal proceedings, said last week he was certain the conviction would be overturned.

Robert Black, the professor emeritus of law at the University of Edinburgh who formulated the legal mechanism that facilitated the 2001 trial held before a panel of three Scottish judges in The Netherlands, said this week: “Megrahi will go free. He should never have been convicted. The evidence does not show him to have had anything to do with the Lockerbie bombing.”

“ARIEL SHARON WAS RIGHT”

When Ariel Sharon, who was then Israel’s trade and industry minister, was asked in a press conference who was responsible for Lockerbie, Sharon said: “Israel believes it was Ahmed Jibril.” Jim Swire, who has closely followed the case for two decades, says evidence suggests that Sharon was correct.

On February 7, 1989, just a few weeks after the Lockerbie explosion, a device similar to the one that blew up the plane over Lockerbie was found in Frankfurt in the possession of members of Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which was said to have been planning attacks on airplanes heading to the U.S. and Israel.

The man behind the Lockerbie attack was likely PFLP-GC cell leader Hafez Dalkamouni.

TOP CIA AGENT BAER: PALESTINIAN GROUP WAS BEHIND LOCKERBIE

Robert Baer, formerly the CIA’s top agent in the Middle East, who worked on the Lockerbie case, reiterated this week: Pan Am 103 was blown up by one of Dalkamouni’s bombs.

American intelligence had originally established that the Syrian-hosted PFLP-GC had been paid to carry out the Lockerbie bombing by Iran, presumably to avenge the downing by the U.S. Navy’s guided-missile carrier USS Vincennes of an Iran Air Airbus in the Persian Gulf five months before Lockerbie. All 290 passengers and crew were killed in that attack. The U.S. said it had mistaken the civilian airliner for a fighter jet; Iran said the attack was deliberate and vowed revenge; Ayatollah Khomeini promised the skies would “rain blood.”

For the first year, the investigation focused on Iran, Syria and the PFLP-GC. But the investigation was skewed in the run-up to the first Gulf War, when the U.S.-led coalition, gearing up to take on Saddam Hussein, needed Syria to stay out of the conflict and did not want to face (in the words of Swire) “hordes of Iranian foot soldiers swarming across the border to attack it. So it was not worth irritating Iran and Syria.”

“WEST NEEDED SYRIAN, IRANIAN SUPPORT TO TAKE ON SADDAM”

U.S. officials first publicly tied Libya to Lockerbie in October 1990, two months after Saddam had invaded Kuwait. Swire: Libya was “the perfect scapegoat.” It could not affect the Gulf War. And its name had already been blackened for other terrorist acts it had carried out.

According to the Jerusalem Post article, Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister at the time of Lockerbie, implicitly seems to rule Libya out when writing about the country in her memoirs, The Downing Street Years.

The UN’s Koechler added: “If you want to be credible in combating terror, you must look for those responsible for terrorist attacks.”

-- Tom Gross

 

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN PEACE CONCERT CANCELLED FOLLOWING DEATH THREATS

One further note (Oct. 17, 2007): Tomorrow’s scheduled Israeli-Palestinian peace concert in Tel Aviv and Jericho featuring Canadian rock star Bryan Adams and others, promoting a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which I referred to in a recent dispatch, has been called off. The organizers said this is because of death threats made by Hamas and others to Palestinians planning to sing with Adams.

It has also been reported that other forms of intimidation were directed against the participating Palestinians by the U.K.-based group “Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott.”


FULL ARTICLE

(The sub-headings in the article below are mine, not the Post’s.)

LOCKERBIE: THE APPEAL BEGINS

Lockerbie – a miscarriage of justice?
By David Horovitz
The Jerusalem Post
October 11, 2007

To this day, it stands as the deadliest terrorist action ever to hit Great Britain. It saw the killing of more American civilians than any terrorist attack with the exception of 9/11. It prompted the most expensive criminal investigation in British history.

And it may now turn out to be Britain’s gravest miscarriage of justice.

Nineteen years after Pan Am Flight 103, en route from London to New York, was blown up over Lockerbie in Scotland with the loss of all its passengers and crew, the perennial suspicion that the investigation was skewed and the wrong parties held responsible is hardening. If so, the implications are horrific, potentially implicating the American and British authorities in a cover-up which enabled the guilty state sponsors to evade punishment and, emboldened, to commission further murderous attacks.

On Thursday, a minor procedural hearing in an Edinburgh court marked the beginning of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi’s appeal against his conviction for murder in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. A Libyan intelligence officer and head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines, Megrahi is one of only two people ever prosecuted in the case. He was indicted in 1991 along with Lamin Khalifah Fhimah, Libyan airlines’ station manager at Malta’s Luqa Airport, where the prosecution alleged that the suitcase containing the Lockerbie bomb began its journey.

Ten years later, a panel of three Scottish judges acquitted Fhimah but convicted Megrahi; he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a stipulation that he serve a minimum of 20 years in jail, later increased to 27 years - a curiously light term for mass murder. His first appeal was dismissed in 2002. Earlier this summer, after repeated rejections, he finally won leave to mount his second.

Libya’s purported culpability is generally presented in the context of its various mid-1980s confrontations with the United States - notably Libya’s bombing of a Berlin nightclub used by US troops, and US air attacks on targets in Benghazi and Tripoli in 1986, including a strike on the personal quarters of Col. Muammar Gaddafi in which his adopted daughter was killed.

Libya gave up Megrahi and Fhimah for trial after years of resistance and consequent UN sanctions, and then paid compensation to the Lockerbie victims’ families as a condition for the lifting of those sanctions (which had cost it an estimated $30 billion). But Gaddafi savaged the Scottish judges when they found Megrahi guilty, Libya has never formally accepted specific responsibility for the bombing, and in 2004, its prime minister told the BBC that it had capitulated only because “we thought it was easier for us to buy peace.”

The decision by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission to finally grant Megrahi his appeal, announced in an 800-page report after a nearly four-year study, was based on six possible grounds for a miscarriage of justice. Crucially, the commission found problems with the testimony of a Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci, the central witness tying Megrahi to the bombing.

Gauci had identified Megrahi as the man who bought clothing and other items from his store in the Maltese resort of Sliema two weeks before the Lockerbie blast - the very items whose charred remains, it was established, were packed into the brown Samsonite suitcase in which the bomb was hidden.

But now the commission has established that four days before he picked out Megrahi in a line-up, Gauci had been shown a photograph of the suspect in an article about the bombing - rendering the identification profoundly flawed. Moreover, the commission cited documents indicating that Gauci had been paid up to $2 million by American intelligence agencies for his testimony. He had changed that testimony repeatedly over the years, including on what emerged as the significant matter of whether Christmas lights were on in the street outside his shop, “Mary’s House,” when Megrahi purportedly came shopping.

Gauci was also strikingly described by the former top Scottish law officer who issued the warrant for Megrahi’s arrest, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, as being a “slightly simple fellow... not quite the full shilling... an apple short of a picnic,” who might have been “easily led.” Fraser, two years ago, actually urged that Megrahi be sent home to a Libyan jail for the remainder of his sentence.

The commission was reportedly troubled, too, by the existence of a classified report relating to the timing device by which the Semtex plastic-explosive bomb was purportedly detonated – a document which was not disclosed at the trial. The chain of evidence by which Megrahi was convicted involved the sale of this particular Swiss-manufactured timing device, a MeBo MST-13, to a Libyan military unit of which he was a member. Now, that chain of evidence has apparently been weakened.

Megrahi did not attend Thursday’s procedural hearing, but is expected to soon seek a conditional release ahead of the full appeal – so called “interim liberation.” If his lawyers can persuade the Scottish judges that he will not flee, the sole Lockerbie convict could be only weeks away from freedom. But it is more likely that he will have to wait a little longer, until the completion of the appeals process next year.

NO SMOKING GUN

The prosecution’s case was acknowledged by the judges themselves in their 2001 verdict to have been beset by “uncertainties and qualifications.” Key witnesses had lied, the CIA’s Libyan insider agent was discredited, and they lamented that they had been given no “explanation of the method by which the primary suitcase” was smuggled aboard. There was certainly no smoking gun: No witnesses or forensic evidence tying Megrahi to the bomb itself.

Dr. Jim Swire, the longtime spokesman for the UK victims’ families, whose daughter Flora was killed on Flight 103, has branded Megrahi’s conviction “one of the gravest miscarriages of justice in history.” In a phone interview on Tuesday, he expressed the conviction that the new information that has emerged since the trial would now see Megrahi freed.

Hans Koechler, appointed by the UN Security Council on the nomination of secretary-general Kofi Annan to serve as an observer throughout the Lockerbie legal proceedings, also told me this week he was certain the conviction would be overturned.

“They’ll cancel the judgment,” Koechler said flatly down the phone from Austria. “The appeal court will decide that a miscarriage of justice has occurred, because of the unreliability of Tony Gauci’s evidence.”

Robert Black, the professor emeritus of law at the University of Edinburgh who formulated the legal mechanism that facilitated the 2001 trial, held before a panel of three Scottish judges in The Netherlands, said the same thing.

“Megrahi will go free,” Black told me by phone. “He should never have been convicted. The evidence does not show him to have had anything to do with [the Lockerbie bombing].”

THE ORIGINAL THESIS

But if they are right, who did orchestrate and carry out the bombing of Pan Am’s Boeing 747 over Lockerbie, and why were those responsible not held to account?

It is here that the Lockerbie case lurches from a grave potential miscarriage of justice, based on flawed evidence, to still more sinister territory.

Throughout the close to 20 years since the bombing, “conspiracy theories” have ebbed and flowed, with fingers pointed in all directions based on all manner of supposed evidence. Such theorizing, of course, is a familiar feature of numerous terrorist investigations, no matter how unambiguous the trail of evidence may seem.

With Lockerbie, however, the dominant “conspiracy theory” constantly proposed by the skeptics is a little different. For it is the theory that the investigators themselves advanced and followed for the first weeks and months of their investigation. It is the theory that senior politicians in various governments privately, and in some cases publicly, endorsed. It is a logical explanation for both the motivation and the logistics of Lockerbie. And it has nothing to do with Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi.

On February 7, 1989, just a few weeks after the Lockerbie explosion, I reported in The Jerusalem Post that the bomb that destroyed Pan Am Flight 103 had been concealed in a radio-cassette recorder. I further reported that the crash investigators had established that the device was similar to devices found in the possession of members of Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, 17 of whose alleged members had been arrested in a Frankfurt suburb a few weeks before the bombing. I wrote that article on the basis of official documentation that I personally saw in London.

That same February 7, 1989, edition of the Post, coincidentally, carried a report from a news conference Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s trade and industry minister, had held the day before during a visit to Madrid. Asked who was responsible for Lockerbie, Sharon said: “Israel believes it was Ahmed Jibril.”

In the subsequent days and weeks, the evidence for this claim mounted: The bombing investigators confirmed that the bomb had indeed been hidden in a radio-cassette player, a model known, with murderous irony, as the “Toshiba Bombeat.”

It was reported that four similar devices had been found in the possession of the arrested PFLP-GC cell in Germany, which was said to have been planning attacks on airplanes heading to the US and Israel; these devices were detonated by a barometric pressure device and timer, designed to activate when a plane reached a certain altitude.

One of the devices seized by German police exploded when it was being examined by a bomb-disposal expert in a Frankfurt police station, killing him. It was reported that a fifth bomb had been built and had disappeared - presumably the bomb that blew up Flight 103.

Among those arrested in the PFLP-GC cell was its leader, Hafez Dalkamouni, and the Toshiba bomb-maker, Marwan Khreesat. (Khreesat, who was quickly released, later turned out to be a Jordanian intelligence agent and the reported source of the German police information on the cell, which he said had been checking Pan Am flight schedules, casing Frankfurt airport, and also contemplating an attack on an Iberia plane from Madrid to Tel Aviv. He is also said to have reported that the missing fifth bomb had been taken away by Dalkamouni before the arrests.)

Next, Sweden arrested several alleged PFLP-GC members and contacts on terrorism charges relating to Lockerbie, including Mohammed Abu Talb. Talb is still serving a life term in Sweden, having been convicted in 1989 for involvement in a 1980s European bombing campaign that featured attacks on the Amsterdam office of El Al and a synagogue in Copenhagen. Talb has steadfastly maintained that he had nothing to do with Lockerbie, even being brought from jail to testify to this effect as a prosecution witness at the Lockerbie trial... and being rewarded with immunity from prosecution.

(Conspiracy theorists have a field day with Talb, a former Egyptian army officer who has been reported to have also been clothes shopping in Malta in the weeks before Lockerbie, to have met Dalkamouni there and in Cyprus, to have also been cautiously identified by Gauci in a photograph at some point, and to have circled the December 21 date on his calendar at home in Sweden.)

It was also reported that American intelligence had established that the Syrian-hosted PFLP-GC had been paid to carry out the Lockerbie bombing. By Iran. To the tune of $10m., part or all of which was said to have been paid into a Swiss bank account whose number was found in Dalkamouni’s possession immediately after the bombing.

Iran’s presumed motive: to avenge the downing, by the US Navy’s guided-missile carrier USS Vincennes, of an Iran Air Airbus in the Persian Gulf five months before Lockerbie, in which all 290 passengers and crew were killed. The US said it had mistaken the civilian airliner for a fighter jet; Iran said the attack was deliberate and vowed revenge; Ayatollah Khomeini promised the skies would “rain blood.”

Lockerbie also occurred amid the crisis over American hostages being held by the Iranian-sponsored Hizbullah in Lebanon. Indeed an American intelligence team was killed on Flight 103. It included Maj. Charles McKee, who was on secondment to the Defense Intelligence Agency in Beirut and had left the Middle East that morning having apparently been trying to track down the hostages. Noted Swire: “They had bought their tickets in Beirut. It may be that the terrorists knew this flight was a particularly juicy target.”

In April 1989, CBS News reported that Khalid Jaafar, a 21-year-old Lebanese-American who died on the plane, had been tentatively identified by US Federal investigators as the unwitting bomb carrier, and that the device had been planted in his suitcase by a relative of the man who “set up the network which carried out the attack” - Hafez Dalkamouni.

More arrests were said to be imminent. The net appeared to be closing.

Prof. Black told me this week that he has been shown “the official minutes of the investigation. They were on the verge of announcing who’d done it, and it wasn’t Libya. They were within days of saying that it was the PFLP-GC and Iran.” And he added with dry understatement: “Those involved were very annoyed when the climate of the investigation changed.”

NEW DIRECTION

AMONG THE factors that gradually changed that climate was the reported emergence of CIA information on the meeting where Libya intelligence purportedly decided to commission the attack. There was the now queried identification of Megrahi by shopkeeper Gauci. A CIA informant in Libya was also said to have named Megrahi and Fhimah as the bombers.

And there was the news that a tiny piece of charred material discovered at the crash site, ostensibly found in a remnant of clothing from the “Megrahi” suitcase, was a fragment of a Swiss-made digital electronic timing device. Now it seemed the bomb couldn’t have been Dalkamouni’s missing fifth device after all, because the fragment had apparently been traced to a consignment of such timers purchased by Libya. Identical timers had been seized from two Libyan terrorists arrested 10 months before Lockerbie, in Senegal.

The evidence relating to the discovery of this timer and its provenance has long been contested. While it made plain that it had “serious misgivings” about assertions from an unnamed former senior Scottish police officer that he planted the incriminating fragment at the crash site by order of the CIA, found no basis for claims of fabricated evidence and rejected the notion of malevolent involvement by the CIA, the Scottish review commission is nonetheless now apparently troubled by aspects of the crucial Swiss timer evidence, as well.

38 MINUTES

SWIRE IS adamant that the principle established by the 14th century English friar and logician William of Ockham – that the simplest explanation that fits all known facts is usually the right one – applies to the Lockerbie bomb that killed his daughter and 269 others.

“The Iranians had told the world that they would seek revenge for the Vincennes attack,” he began, checking off what he sees as the simplest sequence of events. “They had colluded in the past with the PFLP-GC under Jibril, and now they colluded again. The PFLP-GC was the ‘sensible choice’ because, as has been established, it maintained a workshop on the outskirts of Damascus that manufactured timing devices” involving an air-pressure switch for bombs to detonate aboard airplanes.

The German authorities, having found several such devices built into domestic objects when they arrested members of the PFLP-GC in October 1988, Swire went on, alerted the international authorities to the danger. “Germany had warned the UK and US about the PFLP-GC devices well in advance of Lockerbie,” he noted.

The Germans also tested one of them by taking it up in a 747, “and they established that a bomb detonated by these timers would go off between 32 and 42 minutes after take-off.

“Flight 103 was in the air for 38 minutes [before it blew up],” he pointed out, “right in the middle of the time frame.”

In contrast to the narrative that led to Megrahi’s conviction, which requires the incendiary suitcase to have begun its journey in Malta, and other theories which hold that the case began its journey in Frankfurt, Swire’s personal conviction is that it was loaded at Heathrow. He noted that the first appeal court, in 2002, heard that there had been a break-in at Heathrow the night before the bombing, and that the Iranian Air facility was immediately adjacent to the baggage assembly area where transit luggage for Flight 103 was loaded.

The suitcase was smuggled into Heathrow at night, Swire believes, and then brought from the Iranian facility to the unsecured baggage assembly point and placed in the clearly marked (with a big Pan Am logo) Flight 103 container on the day of the bombing.

He recalled that the chief baggage handler, John Bedford, testified that he saw two additional suitcases had been loaded into the relevant container for Flight 103 when he returned from a coffee break that day. The crash investigators, Swire went on, established that the explosion occurred precisely where those cases had been placed, above a single layer of baggage that Bedford had already packed into the container.

Swire contrasted that simple sequence with the official narrative, under which the terrorists immensely complicate their mission by sending their bomb on two flights before it reaches Heathrow, with all the attendant security and timing complexities. Planes often run late; indeed, Flight 103 was late taking off. And yet, in the official narrative, the purported Libyan timing device, which did not feature an air-pressure switch, made its convoluted journey to Heathrow and then detonated successfully soon after the Pan Am flight’s delayed take off.

Which is more plausible, Swire asked, a bomb with a conventional timer making a Malta-Frankfurt-Heathrow journey and detonating 38 minutes into the third of its flights, or a bomb with an air-pressure switch, proven to detonate 32-42 minutes into a flight, doing precisely that? A bomb, moreover, of a kind known to have been in the possession of the PFLP-GC... one of whose bombs had gone missing.

Of course, the counter-argument is that had Flight 103 departed on schedule, and the bomb been detonated by an electronic timer set for that schedule, it would have been over the Atlantic when the bomb exploded, and the orchestrators would likely have been untraceable...

FABRICATION OF EVIDENCE?

FOR THE first year or so, Swire noted, the investigation did rightly focus on Iran, Syria and the PFLP-GC.

But the investigation was skewed in the run-up to the first Gulf War, he claims. The US-led coalition, gearing up to take on Saddam Hussein, needed Syria to stay out of the conflict and did not want to face “hordes of Iranian foot soldiers swarming across the border to attack it. So it was not worth irritating Iran and Syria.”

In fact, US officials first publicly tied Libya to Lockerbie in October 1990, two months after Saddam had invaded Kuwait.

Libya, Swire went on, was “the perfect scapegoat.” It could not affect the Gulf War. And its name had already been blackened.

Swire believes it will be convenient for the appeals court to free Megrahi on a “semi-technical” count – “something along the lines of the prosecution having failed to give the defense access to all the evidence,” without the truth ever coming out.

And that truth, he said carefully, involves what “I fear was the deliberate fabrication of evidence” that enabled Megrahi to be charged and Libya to be framed. By this he means the fragment of the purported timer, which he says he fears was planted, and the identification of Megrahi, which he says may have been achieved as a consequence of the large sums of reward money made available by US intelligence for information in the Lockerbie case.

“Intelligence services act in the perceived best interests of their own countries,” Swire said in a bitter reference to the alleged skewing of the case. “That is not the same as getting to the truth... The Scottish justice system never had a chance.

“I didn’t used to believe that our governments would do this,” he concluded. He recalled that he met with Gaddafi to encourage him to give up Megrahi for trial, “because I believed Scottish justice was the best in the world. I feel guilty for [Megrahi] now, because I worked so hard to get him put on trial... The deceit needs to be brought to light.”

A DUBIOUS JUDGMENT

UN OBSERVER Hans Koechler was far more circumspect at first when asked who blew up Flight 103 and why the investigation may have been skewed. “I am definite on only one matter,” he told me. “The decision of the courts in 2001 and [in the appeal of] 2002 made no sense. It was not consistent. The indictment charged that the two Libyans had acted together. The court’s judgment said they did not coordinate and that one [Fhimah] was innocent.

Yet Koechler ultimately made plain his conviction that the case was fatally compromised. “My personal impression is that the authorities in the UK, in Scotland, didn’t want a full investigation. Only a child could believe that a lone intelligence officer could have planned and carried out Lockerbie. Yet they have not looked for others. If Scotland is serious about the rule of law, it should investigate until all the culprits are found... What they have produced is a very dubious judgment – one person, only one person, and he may not even have done it!”

And Koechler added that he had no other explanation for Britain’s determined refusal to order further investigation of the case, or for the lack of pressure from the US. “Most of the dead” - 188 of the 270 victims – “were Americans,” he stressed.

Black was more outspoken. Like Swire, he is adamant that Lockerbie was a PFLP-GC operation, financed by Iran to avenge the Vincennes attack, and he is “scandalized” by the cover-up. It’s terrible that “national governments would get up to this kind of thing,” he said. But as a “parochial Scottish lawyer,” he went on, he was most pained “that the criminal justice system in my country lent itself to this.”

He too speculated that the timing of the Lockerbie affair, coinciding with the first Gulf war, explained the skewing of the investigation. “The PFLP-GC was funded and protected by Syria,” he noted. “And with the unfolding of Operation Desert Storm... the coalition needed at least the benevolent neutrality of Syria.”

Black added that “it was never anticipated that Libya would surrender the two suspects for trial. The thinking was, ‘We’ll just generally blame the Libyans.’”

Koechler, by contrast, said he could not advance an alternate theory, “because I do not have the access [to evidence] of British, German and American officials.” Then he added dryly: “I must assume they do know what happened.”

MINEFIELD OF THEORIES

THE LOCKERBIE affair is immensely complex, a minefield of conflicting theories, from highly credible to thoroughly implausible. It does seem curious, but not out of the question, that terrorists would have loaded a bomb intended for Pan Am flight 103 onto a feeder flight two stops away. Such complexity. Such risk of flight delays foiling their bomb plot. Such danger of the unaccompanied luggage alerting security suspicions.

It seems strange, too, but far from impossible, that the very kind of device found with the PFLP-GC in Germany, set to detonate precisely as the Lockerbie bomb detonated, was not the bomb on the plane.

Iran’s motivation seems persuasive, too, the more so given its track-record, notably in Argentina, for orchestrating massive “revenge” terror attacks. Indeed, a prime concern if Lockerbie was an Iranian operation is that, having never been exposed, Teheran was both underestimated by the counterterrorism community and emboldened to strike again, with the consequent loss of other innocent lives.

Yet to muddy the picture still further, some theorists have speculated that the PFLP-GC cell did carry out the bombing, but on behalf of Libya, not Iran. They are persuaded by the Swiss timer’s provenance, and reinforced by Gaddafi’s known supply of Semtex to the IRA and his close ties to the PFLP-GC, which he funded heavily in the 1980s.

HALEVY AND THATCHER

HERE IN Israel, the former Mossad officer and eventual chief Efraim Halevy told me this week that, although he didn’t recall all the details, “to the best of my knowledge the Libyans were the perpetrators. I don’t know if it was in conjunction with others.”

Nahum Admoni, who headed the Mossad at the time of the bombing, said he was not prepared to comment on the case.

And his successor, Shabtai Shavit, who took over the Mossad at the height of the Lockerbie investigation in the UK, said the matter was “ancient history” and that he only remembered vaguely “all sorts of speculation about Syria, Jibril, the Libyans... I was dealing with unrelated matters.”

By contrast, Robert Baer, the CIA’s former top agent in the Middle East, who worked on the Lockerbie case, told me flatly last week that Pan Am 103 was blown up by one of Dalkamouni’s bombs.

Margaret Thatcher, British prime minister at the time of Lockerbie, for her part, implicitly seemed to rule Libya out, writing in her memoirs, The Downing Street Years, that the 1986 US air strikes on Tripoli and Benghazi did not prompt a feared Libyan revenge attack. “There were revenge killings of British hostages organized by Libya,” she wrote, “but the much-vaunted Libyan counterattack did not and could not take place.”

It is hard to imagine that Thatcher, if she was persuaded that Libya was responsible for the deadliest attack on Britain since World War II, would have written, as she then went on to specify, that in the wake of the 1986 US air strikes, “There was a marked decline in Libyan-sponsored terrorism in succeeding years.”

Remarkably, Thatcher does not mention Lockerbie at all in her book, which was published in 1993. The gravest terrorist outrage ever perpetrated in her country, ignored in a comprehensive work of 862 pages, except for the four-word reference in the “Chronology” for 1988 on page 871: “December 21: Lockerbie bombing!”

Definitive answers, of course, should rightly have been supplied by that most costly criminal investigation in British history. Instead, the case against the only man ever convicted for Lockerbie is collapsing, and the governments whose citizens figured most prominently among the dead seem unconscionably unwilling to dig relentlessly for the truth, having repeatedly resisted calls for a wider public inquiry.

Would the British and American governments be prepared to mount so extensive a cover-up for the expediency of keeping Syria onside during the first Gulf War and avoiding irritating Iran? It seems inconceivable. Yet the official explanation – the narrative that ought to be marshaled to swat away so unthinkable an accusation – is now being questioned more pointedly than ever.

COMBATING TERROR

BLACK AND Koechler are both grimly convinced that the truth about Lockerbie will never come out.

Koechler is renewing calls for a new, independent investigation, without the participation of the US, UK or Libya. But in the next breath he said, “It will not happen.”

In a follow-up e-mail, Koechler added that “criminal justice cannot be conducted under circumstances in which intelligence services are allowed to decide what, and to what extent, evidence is made available in a court of law and where ‘national interests’ are used as an excuse for not disclosing relevant information.”

Black said Megrahi will be released, the British government will “stonewall” and the American government will deride the incompetence of “what they’ll call the ‘Mickey Mouse’ Scottish courts for letting him go. ‘The guilty man would never have gone free in America,’ they’ll say.”

But if Black is most aggrieved by the alleged subversion of the Scottish legal apparatus, Koechler is concerned, too, for the battle against terrorism. “If you want to be credible in combating terror, you must look for those responsible for terrorist attacks,” he said simply. “And if you are not seeking all the culprits in this case, you have no credibility in other cases. You cannot apply double standards. The rule of law must be upheld. The victims’ families have the right to justice. And so does the wider public.”

IN FACT, the public has the right not only to justice but to protection. For if, as a consequence of incompetence or cynical realpolitik, the true culprits are not tracked down and prosecuted, they and their government sponsors are free to orchestrate further murderous outrages. And experience shows that this is precisely what they do.


The truth about Fatah – revealed by Fatah itself (& Fatah’s general secretary claims that Abbas helped “murder” Arafat)

August 11, 2009

* If you thought Fatah was a moderate organization, think again
* Fatah’s veteran General Secretary: PA President Abbas helped “murder” Yasser Arafat
* Abbas wins re-election in one-candidate race at Fatah conference
* Fatah declare Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (terrorist group) its official armed wing
* Saudi King: Palestinian disunity more dangerous than Israel
* Palestinian Authority bans Al-Jazeera TV
* Fatah leader admits: Fatah is full of thieves
* Gaza militants fire at Palestinian patients heading into Israel
* With 90% of the votes counted as this dispatch is being posted, the so-called “young guard” appear to have made advances within Fatah
* Jewish Fatah member seeks key position on Fatah Revolutionary Council

* In a lead editorial, The Washington Post writes: “One of the more striking results of the Obama administration’s first six months is that only one country has worse relations with the United States than it did in January: Israel. The new administration has pushed a reset button with Russia and sent new ambassadors to Syria and Venezuela; it has offered olive branches to Cuba and Burma. But for nearly three months it has been locked in a public confrontation with Israel… The tensions persist, and public opinion is following: The Pew Global Attitudes Project reported last week that Israel was the only country surveyed where the public’s image of the United States was getting worse rather than better… If he is to be effective in brokering a peace deal, Mr. Obama must be tough on more than one country, or one party to the conflict.”

 

ADDITIONAL NOTE

Although this dispatch is fairly long, I would urge subscribers to this list, particularly those who work in the media as news and comment editors, and those who work at foreign ministries in various countries, to read it in full.

It concerns the Fatah General Assembly which has been continuing for the past week in Bethlehem, and is central to understanding why Israeli-Palestinian peace remains so elusive. All this has been woefully underreported in the Western media. Instead, the BBC, for example, has been running yet more distorted reports about Israel last week, deluding themselves and their viewers that Fatah is a moderate party committed to compromise -- Tom Gross

 

CONTENTS

1. Fatah convenes for first time in 20 years
2. As Fatah radicalizes, peace prospects dim
3. Abbas wins re-election in one-candidate race
4. Delegates arrive from around the Arab world, while Hamas blocks many
5. Al-Aqsa terrorists appointed to Fatah Security Force

6. The “armed wing” of Fatah
7. Israel allows wanted men to participate at Fatah conference
8. Fatah delegates ask party leadership: “Where’s the money”?
9. Fatah leader admits: Fatah is full of thieves
10. Update: Upsets in Fatah election: Quriea out, Barghouthi in

11. Washington Post editorial: Obama’s over-pressuring of Israel is proving counterproductive
12. Fatah calls Qaddoumi “deranged” after he says Abbas helped kill Arafat
13. Palestinian Authority bans Al-Jazeera TV
14. Fatah: We’ll “sacrifice victims” until Jerusalem is ours
15. Tirawi: Fatah and the PA should be separate entities

16. Jewish Fatah member seeks key position on Fatah Revolutionary Council
17. Israeli MK Ahmed Tibi: Israeli Arabs are Palestinians
18. Former PA minister: Fatah should ally with Iran
19. Saudi King: Palestinian disunity more dangerous than Israel
20. Jordan and Kuwait join Saudis in Obama rebuff
21. Once vaunted, Marwan Barghouthi is rarely mentioned at Fatah congress
22. Gaza militants fire at Palestinian patients heading into Israel


[All notes below by Tom Gross]

FATAH CONVENES FOR FIRST TIME IN 20 YEARS

Some 2,260 delegates from Fatah, the largest Palestinian political party, are in the West Bank town of Bethlehem for their first conference in over two decades. Fatah’s last conference was held in 1989 in Tunis, under Yasser Arafat’s leadership.

The conference opened last Tuesday and was supposed to continue for three days. But it has since been extended and is still in progress. About half the delegates are from West Bank and the others have come from as far away as Yemen and the United States.

They include figures as diverse as Sari Nusseibeh, an intellectual from Jerusalem who has said that the Palestinians should not carry out suicide bombings on Israeli civilians, and Khaled Abu Asba, who took part in a notorious attack in 1978 in which an Israeli commuter bus was hijacked and 37 Israeli civilians were killed, including 12 children.

(Abu Asba was arrested by Israel and sentenced to 12 life sentences, but was released after seven years as part of a (horrendous) prisoner exchange agreement. During the Fatah conference, former PA Prime Minister Abu Ala welcomed Abu Asba and referred to him as one of the heroes of the Palestinian people. Click below to view the Fatah conference applaud Abu Asba.)

Though delegates unanimously endorsed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as the party leader, the conference has been extended several days beyond the scheduled finish on because of delegates’ inability to resolve disputes.

Since they are using European and American taxpayers’ money to pay for the conference, and are enjoying plush accommodation and fancy meals, they are in no particular hurry to go home.

Like Soviet communist party meetings of old, the greeting rituals among the more than 2,000 Fatah delegates who came to Bethlehem for the convention lasted for hours. Sometimes they gave each other three kisses on the cheek, sometimes more.

In scenes reminiscent of the last Fatah conference 20 years ago, old slogans such as “Revolution until victory,” “Long live Palestine” and “Fatah will liberate Palestine” were parroted by almost all the speakers who took to the podium.

A huge banner in the conference hall showed a boy in a military uniform, toting a Kalashnikov assault rifle, with the slogan, “Resistance [i.e. terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians] is a legitimate right of our people.” A leaflet passed out among delegates was headlined: “Until the Zionist entity is wiped out”.

The decision to hold the conference in Bethlehem came after many Arab countries, including Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, turned down requests by the Fatah leadership to host the gathering.

 

AS FATAH RADICALIZES, PEACE PROSPECTS DIM

Of great concern for those of us who would like to see the emergence of a responsible Palestinian party that could form an independent Palestinian state that would live in peace with Israel, the extremely hardline pronouncements and resolutions adopted by Fatah over the last week show that it has still not made the transition from a guerrilla movement in exile bent on destroying Israel to a political party charged with establishing Palestinian self-rule.

Among its resolutions of recent days, the Fatah assembly on Sunday approved a political platform that emphasized the Palestinians’ right “to resist occupation in all forms including armed struggle” (i.e. suicide bombings). A report by Reuters added that President Abbas personally insisted on this.

Another resolution stated that Fatah will not give up the armed struggle until all the descendants of those claiming to be of Palestinian Arab origin can live inside Israel (which would essentially mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state). A further resolution explicitly said Fatah would oppose recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

In other words, in spite of misreports by apologists for Fatah in the Western media, Fatah made it clear it is still not willing to accept the principle of two states for two peoples: a predominantly Jewish state and a predominantly Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace.

The concessions Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made since taking office (which Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair last month praised as substantial*) and the pressure U.S. President Barack Obama has been placing on Israel appear merely to have further radicalized Fatah, rather than make them willing to countenance compromise, as Obama had hoped. As outlined further down in this dispatch, there have instead been growing calls in Fatah for a return to terrorism and the forging of a “strategic alliance” with Iran’s dictatorial regime.

(* Blair also said that Israel was not receiving sufficient credit in the international community for its many recent measures to ease conditions for the Palestinian population in the West Bank, such as the removal of roadblocks and checkpoints. U.S. Special Envoy Senator George Mitchell also praised the other “meaningful and positive measures” Israel has taken to improve the quality of life for Palestinians in the West Bank.)

Furthermore the Fatah General Assembly decreed on Saturday that the placing of both east and west Jerusalem under Palestinian control is a “red line” that is non-negotiable.

In addition to showing no signs of moderation toward Israel, the Fatah conference disappointed many Palestinians by failing to implement reforms to root out the corruption and cronyism which are rife in the movement. It seems Fatah remains part of the problem, not part of the solution.

***

FATAH: ISRAELI CITIES ARE PALESTINE

In a program on Palestinian Authority TV in the run up to the conference, high school graduates at an official Fatah ceremony were shown chanting “Haifa and Jaffa are Palestine”. (Haifa is Israel’s third biggest city and Jaffa is a suburb of Tel Aviv.)

The sign on stage behind the children read: “Tribute to high school graduates under the auspices of Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah.” The ceremony ended with the children chanting: “We are all seekers of martyrdom”. (i.e. potential suicide bombers).

 

ABBAS WINS RE-ELECTION IN ONE-CANDIDATE RACE

Mahmoud Abbas was unanimously re-elected to his position as head of the Fatah movement at the group’s congress in Bethlehem on Saturday. There was no vote taken because no other Fatah member dared challenge Abbas’ five-year rule of the party.

Hundreds of delegates cheered and clapped as the conference chairman announced that Abbas was chosen to lead the party. Technically Abbas can only lead the party for five years, until a new conference is announced, but this is the first time Fatah members have met in 20 years, so it isn’t clear how long his mandate will last.

In remarks which are of concern to Israel, and ought to be of concern to the Obama administration and all those European governments that delude themselves that Abbas is a moderate, Abbas refused to denounce violence and told delegates that Fatah may again engage in “armed resistance,” a euphemism for suicide bombs against Israeli buses, shopping centers, cafes and movie theaters.

The New York Times (on Sunday August 9, 2009) ran a fairly short item at the bottom of page 8 headed “Palestinians Elect Leader, Unopposed, as Party Chief”. Other papers virtually ignored the conference altogether, as did BBC World News, which wouldn’t want to give the impression that “moderate” Fatah might not actually believe in peace with Israel.

 

DELEGATES ARRIVE FROM ARAB WORLD, WHILE HAMAS BLOCKS MANY

646 members competed for seats on the 120-seat Revolutionary Council, while another 150 ran for the 21-seat Central Committee, Fatah’s two most important decision-making bodies.

Hundreds of Fatah officials from different Arab countries, including Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt, arrived in Bethlehem to attend the long-delayed convention.

A handful of Fatah members from the Gaza Strip also arrived in the city, saying they managed to avoid Hamas checkpoints and slip out of Gaza disguised as laborers and women. Ghalia Abu Sitta, a veteran member of Fatah, said she fled the Gaza Strip on a donkey cart.

Hamas refused to allow most Fatah members to leave Gaza, placing many Fatah convention delegates under house arrest. Some Fatah delegates complained that Hamas had also confiscated their cell phones and personal computers to prevent them from casting their ballots online.

 

AL-AQSA TERRORISTS APPOINTED TO FATAH SECURITY FORCE

In a move of great concern to Israel (and one which should be of great concern to all those who oppose terrorism), the conference also endorsed the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as Fatah’s official armed wing.

The endorsement of the group as Fatah’s official armed wing contradicts repeated promises made by the Fatah leadership under various agreements it has signed with Israel and the U.S. to dismantle the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

Zakariya Zubeidi, one of the commanders of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades hailed the decision at a speech at the conference over the weekend. He called on Fatah to resume its “program of resistance” (i.e. suicide bombings) against Israel. Zubeidi previously headed the Jenin branch of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, responsible for sending dozens of suicide bombers into Israel.

It seems that all those efforts by U.S. General Dayton to arm and train the “moderate” gunmen that were ostensibly going to clean up the PA’s security forces are now in jeopardy.

Asked by a Palestinian journalist for his views on the continuing security and military training the U.S. is supplying to the PA, Zubeidi smiled and said: “I am happy. In case there is a future war, we will have some people who will be well trained.”

Fatah spokesman Fahmi Al-Za’arir stated: “It is not possible to rule out or to marginalize the military option. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades are the jewel in Fatah’s crown. We must strengthen their status ... [and] maintain them in a state of alert.

“We know that every warrior has a period of rest – and also we know that this does not mean the end of the national battle, but only a wait to obtain the goals, and to give the leadership sufficient opportunity for political activity.”

And in an interview, another Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades activist, Kifah Radaydeh, said the PA would resume violence against Israel when Fatah is “capable,” and “according to what seems right... It has been said that we are negotiating for peace, but our goal has never been peace. Peace is a means; the goal is Palestine.”

 

THE “ARMED WING” OF FATAH

Among the dozens of deadly terror attacks carried out in recent years by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Israeli civilians, including many children, are:

The Yeshivat Beit Yisrael massacre (which killed 10 Israelis), the King George Street bombing in Jerusalem, the Jerusalem supermarket bombing in Kiryat Yovel, the Allenby Street coffee shop bombing in Tel Aviv (see my Wall Street Journal article for more on this), the Ben Yehuda Market bombing in Jerusalem, the Petah Tikva shopping mall massacre, the French Hill Junction massacre, the Tel Aviv central bus station massacre (in which several African and Filipino migrants were among the 23 killed), the Kfar Sava train station bombing, the Mike’s Place suicide bombing in Tel Aviv (carried out jointly with British terrorists of Pakistani origin), the Rehavia Jerusalem bus massacre, the Liberty Bell Garden bombing, the Ashdod Port massacre, the Tel Aviv sea promenade bombing, the Beersheba Central Bus Station bombing, the Kdumim bombing, the Tel Aviv Old Central Bus Station bombing, the Eilat bakery bombing, and last year’s Dimona suicide bombing.

Are Fatah really “moderates” as many international news organizations and U.S. State Department officials claim?

 

ISRAEL ALLOWS WANTED MEN TO PARTICIPATE AT FATAH CONFERENCE

Israel has permitted scores of Fatah operatives who participated in terror attacks against Israeli civilians to enter the West Bank to attend the conference.

Speaking at the Knesset in Jerusalem last week, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Israel was not interfering with the Fatah convention and that it had facilitated the arrival of as many delegates as it could to the convention because it was important that the platform produced by the delegates be representative of a wide range of views. Yesterday, however, Barak said that “the rhetoric coming from Fatah and the positions being expressed are grave and unacceptable to us.”

And in remarks delivered elsewhere, Israeli President Shimon Peres said that even though the Fatah convention speakers were “competing to see who makes the most extremist statements,” the Palestinians must remember that like Israel, “they must stay committed to the Road Map and the path of negotiations.”

Using harsher language, Israel’s Information Minister Yuli Edelstein (Likud) said the resolutions passed at the Fatah congress in Bethlehem amounted to “a declaration of war.”

“We must not act as if we haven’t heard,” he said. “We must emerge from the circle of illusions that these are moderates who want peace. They explicitly say that they support continuing the armed struggle.”

“Our main task is to act in the international arena and explain the difference between dreams and reality,” he added. “This is Fatah we are talking about, those who the international community is allegedly pushing us to trust with our security.”

Edelstein’s remarks followed a warning issued by former Shin Bet chief, Knesset Member Avi Dichter (of the center-left Kadima party), who said that the radical calls made at the Fatah conference could lead to a third intifada.

 

FATAH DELEGATES ASK PARTY LEADERSHIP: “WHERE’S THE MONEY”?

The second day of the Fatah conference was marked by a stormy debate on the financial status of the organization. Delegates said they were alarmed to find that there were no financial reports prepared by party leaders. Fatah Chairman Mahmoud Abbas had to leave meetings he was holding on the sidelines of the main assembly to quell quarrels between the delegates and the party’s central committee.

Some members accuse Abbas of protecting members of the central committee who have been accused of corruption, fraud and mismanagement. The Palestinians have received more foreign aid per capita than any other people in the world. Billions of dollars of European and American taxpayers’ money have been siphoned off to Swiss banks by Fatah leaders over the years.

Hatem Abdel Kader, a senior Fatah official who represents the party’s “young guard,” said he and many of his colleagues had determined that it was almost impossible to run for places on the 120-seat Revolutionary Council against veteran officials who have “unlimited resources and funding.”

In any case, days before the conference was opened, Fatah’s Young Guard were surprised to discover that Mahmoud Abbas and his old guard colleagues had already selected more than half of the delegates who were invited to the meeting, to ensure Abbas loyalists maintained control.

Taisir Nasrallah, a delegate from the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, said he felt “overwhelming anger” among the younger members against the traditional leadership.

“We are led by 75-year-olds, and their experience is the experience of the Cold War,” said Muhueeb Awwad, a 45-year-old parliament member from Fatah. “We are post-Arafat and post-liberation movement.”

 

FATAH LEADER ADMITS: FATAH IS FULL OF THIEVES

Nabil Amr, the Palestinian ambassador to Egypt, made a remarkably frank acknowledgement about the Fatah leadership during a visit to the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya last month. “Fatah is full of thieves, spies and corrupt people, enough to destroy any country,” said Amr, 61.

 

UPDATE: UPSETS IN FATAH ELECTION: QURIEA OUT, BARGHOUTHI IN

With 90 percent of the votes counted as I post this dispatch, preliminary results released this morning (Tuesday, August 11) seem to show that Fatah’s “old guard” may have suffered upsets in the election for the movement’s highest decision-making body, the Central Committee.

According to Palestine TV, only four of eight incumbents have a good chance of keeping their seats: Abu Maher Ghneim, Salim Za’noun, Tayyib Abdul Rahim, and Nabil Sha’ath.

Several of the so-called “young guard” (who are aged about 50, so they are in fact not that young) appear to be set to replace several “old guard” Fatah members, most of whom are in their 70s.

Highlighting tensions between Fatah and their Hamas rivals, a Hamas loyalist was found tortured to death yesterday evening in a prison run by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank city of Nablus.

 

WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL: OBAMA’S OVER-PRESSURING OF ISRAEL IS PROVING COUNTERPRODUCTIVE

In a lead editorial last week (titled “Tough on Israel”), The Washington Post wrote:

“One of the more striking results of the Obama administration’s first six months is that only one country has worse relations with the United States than it did in January: Israel. The new administration has pushed a reset button with Russia and sent new ambassadors to Syria and Venezuela; it has offered olive branches to Cuba and Burma. But for nearly three months it has been locked in a public confrontation with Israel over Jewish housing construction in Jerusalem… and [over] Iran [policy].

“… The tensions persist, and public opinion is following: The Pew Global Attitudes Project reported last week that Israel was the only country among 25 surveyed where the public’s image of the United States was getting worse rather than better.

“… The administration also is guilty of missteps. Rather than pocketing Mr. Netanyahu’s initial concessions … Mr. Obama [ratched up the pressure and] Palestinian and Arab leaders who had accepted previous compromises immediately hardened their positions; they also balked at delivering the “confidence-building” concessions to Israel that the administration seeks. Israeli public opinion has [now] rallied behind Mr. Netanyahu. And Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, which were active during the Bush administration’s final year, have yet to resume.

“… If he is to be effective in brokering a peace deal, Mr. Obama will need to show both sides that they can trust him – and he must be tough on more than one country.”

 

FATAH CALLS QADDOUMI “DERANGED” AFTER HE SAYS ABBAS HELPED KILL ARAFAT

Fatah’s veteran General Secretary, Farouk Qaddoumi, has accused PA President Mahmoud Abbas and former PA security chief Mohammed Dahlan of being accomplices in the “assassination” of Yasser Arafat.

In response, Fatah condemned Qaddoumi as “deranged” and “hysterical” and vowed to expel him from the organization. Qaddoumi is not attending the conference and has not been nominated for a place on the Central Committee or the Fatah Revolutionary Council.

The committee said that Qaddoumi was a man suffering from a “sick mind” and was renowned for his “fabrications” and “hallucinations.”

Qaddoumi, who is refusing to attend the Fatah conference, made his remarks at a news conference in the Jordanian capital of Amman shortly before the Fatah conference began. He said Abbas had worked in collusion with U.S. intelligence to assassinate Arafat.

Lashing out at Abbas, Qaddoumi accused him of stealing some of Arafat’s titles and of establishing an autocratic regime in the Palestinian territories.

“The man (Abbas) has fallen in love with titles used by President Arafat,” Qaddoumi said. “First he asked to be named overall commander of the Palestinian revolution and then the exiled president of Palestine.”

Arafat died in a Paris hospital in 2004, as a result of illness. The BBC’s then Middle East correspondent Barbra Plett infamously admitting crying on air so upset was she by Arafat’s passing.

For more on Arafat’s life and legacy, please see these articles and photo collages:
* www.tomgrossmedia.com/ArafatEducation.htm
* www.tomgrossmedia.com/ArafatAllies.htm
* www.tomgrossmedia.com/ArafatArticles.html

 

PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY BANS AL-JAZEERA TV

The Palestinian Authority banned Al-Jazeera from operating in its territories after the Qatari-based satellite channel repeatedly aired the accusations by Farouk Qaddoumi that Abbas had helped “murder” Arafat. (See the item above.)

The Palestinian Information Ministry also ordered Al-Jazeera’s West Bank offices closed, accusing them of “incitement and false information.”

The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority is engaged in a running feud with Al-Jazeera, accusing it of biased reporting in favor of its Islamist rivals Hamas.

Al-Jazeera is the news network of choice for Palestinians according to the independent Palestinian Ma’an news agency.

Meanwhile, Israel, which provides one of the most open environments in the world for journalists to operate in, continues to afford Al-Jazeera and other Arab satellite networks full operational access. (Incidentally, I watched Al-Jazeera’s English network every day last week, and it continues to be far more balanced in its coverage of Israel than the BBC, whose distortion of events concerning Israel is becoming worse and worse. Al-Jazeera’s Arab-language network on the other hand, is as bad as the BBC.)

 

FATAH: WE’LL “SACRIFICE VICTIMS” UNTIL JERUSALEM IS OURS

The status of Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state is a red line that no Palestinian leader is permitted to cross, Fatah declared at the conference on Saturday.

The conference also adopted a position paper which states that the Palestinian national enterprise will not reach fruition until all of Jerusalem, including the outlying villages, comes under Palestinian sovereignty.

“Fatah will continue to sacrifice victims until Jerusalem will be in Palestinian hands, clean of [Jews],” the paper states.

The paper does not make a distinction between the eastern and western halves of Israel’s capital, nor does it distinguish between the territories within the Israeli side of the Green Line and the areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.

 

TIRAWI: FATAH AND THE PA SHOULD BE SEPARATE ENTITIES

Tawfiq Tirawi, a delegate to Fatah’s conference in Bethlehem, said in an interview with the independent Palestinian Ma’an news agency that Fatah and the Palestinian Authority ought to operate as separate entities.

“It’s essential that we separate the [Palestinian] Authority and the Fatah movement,” Tirawi said, adding, “Fatah has never had contact with the [Israeli] occupation. Negotiations have been between the PA and Israel.”

It is unclear whether Tirawi is proposing the revolutionary idea that a future Palestine should not be yet another one party Arab state, or whether his remarks were merely a ruse designed to allow Fatah to continue a campaign of incitement and violence against Israel while the PA negotiates with it.

In separate remarks during an interview on Al-Filistiniya TV, Tirawi, who is a security advisor to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, said that “thousands of martyrs are needed to capture Jerusalem.”

 

JEWISH FATAH MEMBER SEEKS KEY POSITION ON FATAH REVOLUTIONARY COUNCIL

The Associated Press put out a story yesterday titled “Jewish Fatah member seeks key position,” about Israeli professor Uri Davis, who on Sunday presented his candidacy for Fatah’s Revolutionary Council at the group’s conference in Bethlehem.

The 66-year-old Israeli academic is an outspoken critic of his country and identifies himself as a Palestinian citizen of what he calls “the apartheid state of Israel.”

In fact, though the AP says Davis is Jewish, news reports indicate Davis recently converted* to Islam and married Fatah campaigner Miyassar Abu-Ali. As Jerusalem Post columnist Sarah Honig put it, “Thus someone who couldn’t abide religion, especially Jewish, swore allegiance to Allah as his God and to Muhammad as his prophet.”

Davis, who was born to Jewish parents in Jerusalem, has long been one of the most active campaigners among far-left Israeli academics against the existence of Israel. He is a regular source of information for a number of anti-Israeli NGOs in Europe.

He already serves as a Fatah-affiliated observer member of the Palestinian National Council, to which he was appointed by the late Yasser Arafat in 1984.

***

UPDATE:

* In August 2008 the editor of www.israel-academia-monitor.com, who subscribes to this email list, tells me she received the following note from Dr. Uri Davis:

On 6.11.2007 I officially assumed the religion of Islam by citing the two required SHAHADAs (La Illah Illa Allah wa-Muhammad Rasul Allah) before the SHARI’A Court in the city of Baqa al-Gharbiyya, as a measure of defense of my relationship with the FATAH activist who was to become my wife. Sincerely, Uri Davis (Dr), P O Box 99, Sakhnin 20173, Israel.

 

ISRAELI MK AHMED TIBI: ISRAELI ARABS ARE PALESTINIANS

Speaking at Fatah’s general assembly in Bethlehem, Ahmed Tibi, an Arab-Israeli Member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) made flagrantly anti-Israeli remarks and also said that Israeli Arabs were an “inseparable” part of the Palestinian people.

Tibi is an MK for the UAL-Ta’al party. Another UAL-Ta’al MK Taleb A-Sanaa as well as MK Muhammad Barakei from the Hadash party attended the Fatah conference. Some in the international media like to avoid reporting that there are Arab and Druze MKs in many Israeli parties, including the Likud, since it would put paid to the lie they propagate about “apartheid Israel”.

 

FORMER PA MINISTER: FATAH SHOULD ALLY WITH IRAN

The time has come for Fatah to seek a strategic alliance with Iran just as Hamas has done, the movement’s Jerusalem affairs liaison Hatim Abdul Qader told Ma’an at the Fatah conference on Saturday.

The more secular Fatah downgraded relations with Iran after its Islamic Revolution in 1979. Qader said it was clear Iran was the rising power in the region as American, Israeli and Egyptian influence declined and it was of “strategic importance” for Fatah to ally itself with Iran, which “will soon have nuclear weapons”.

Abdul Qader also claimed that former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami was one of the few leaders in the region who supported former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s rejection of Israeli peace proposals at Camp David in 2000, unlike many other Arab regimes.

Last month, the PLO’s top negotiator, Saeb Erekat, met with Iran’s foreign minister for the first time in Egypt. Erekat told Ma’an he spoke with Manouchehr Mottaki about reconciliation talks, national unity, and other regional and Palestinian issues.

 

SAUDI KING: PALESTINIAN DISUNITY MORE DANGEROUS THAN ISRAEL

Saudi King Abdullah has sent a letter to Palestinian President Abbas warning that disunity was a greater danger to the Palestinian people than the Israeli “enemy.” He wrote that the Hamas-Fatah split was “more detrimental not only to Palestinians themselves, but to the potential of creating a Palestinian state than anything [Israel] has done.”

“The arrogant and criminal enemy was not able, during years of continued aggression, to hurt the Palestinian cause as much as the Palestinians hurt their cause themselves in the past few months,” Abdullah said in the letter, published by the Saudi Press Agency last week.

Saudi Arabia has been criticized by the U.S. recently for “failing to adequately cooperate in restarting peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.” In a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton earlier this month, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal rejected U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell’s plan for “incrementalist peace.” Mitchell has proposed gradual confidence-building measures from Arab countries, not only one-sided concessions by Israel.

 

JORDAN AND KUWAIT JOIN SAUDIS IN OBAMA REBUFF

Both Jordan and Kuwait have joined Saudi Arabia in rejecting calls for any moves towards “normalizing” ties with Israel. The Kuwaiti emir and Jordanian foreign minister both dismissed calls by Obama’s Special Middle East Envoy George Mitchell for confidence-building actions with Israel ahead of peace negotiations. The rebuffs follows last week’s statement by the Saudi foreign minister that only when a Palestinian state has been formed would the Saudis be interested in engaging in normalization talks.

The UAE, Syria and Egypt had already rejected Mitchell’s request that they too show some goodwill towards Israel. Since Benjamin Netanyahu assumed the Israeli premiership in April, his government has made substantive concessions to the Palestinians, removing many roadblocks at which would-be Palestinian terrorists had previously been caught en route to Israel, destroying Jewish settlement outposts, recognizing the right of the Palestinians to have an independent state, and helping to plan a new Palestinian city near Ramallah.

The idea of gestures of normalization from Arab states to Israel is a central component in the Obama administration’s plan for reviving the Mideast peace process. It is thought that confidence-building measures would create a climate conducive to the successful outcome of Israeli-Arab peace talks. While both Israeli President Shimon Peres and Netanyahu consistently offer to meet Arab leaders, most Arab leaders refuse.

Many analysts (though not the ones regularly invited as studio guests by CNN) believe that the Obama administration’s pressure on Israel is merely leading to a hardening of Arab positions, not the gestures of compromise Obama had hoped for.

Sources in Washington tell me that Obama officials are now (finally) beginning to appreciate that Israel is not the party to blame for the lack of progress towards Middle East peace. They are disappointed that the administration’s intensive work over the last few months has essentially gotten nowhere.

“It is clear that Israel’s ability to move forward in the peace process will be more limited if the Arab world takes a decision to remain aloof,” one source said.

 

ONCE VAUNTED, MARWAN BARGHOUTHI IS RARELY MENTIONED AT FATAH CONGRESS

Ma’an reports from Bethlehem: “The name of Marwan Barghouthi, the Fatah leader jailed by Israel for his actions during the second Palestinian Intifada, is rarely heard at the Fatah congress in Bethlehem. It was expected that the charismatic Barghouthi, once mentioned as a possible successor to President Abbas, would be the subject of much discussion in the proceedings.

“Instead, when Barghouthi released a lengthy statement to Palestinian newspapers this morning, the document was not even circulated in the conference hall in Bethlehem.

“Barghouthi plans to enter his name as a candidate for Fatah’s highest decision-making body, the Central Committee. His wife, the lawyer Fadwa Barghouthi, is running for the second highest body, the Revolutionary Council.”

Tom Gross adds: Barghouthi is serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli jail for the murders of Israeli men, women and children, and for the shooting of a black-clad Greek orthodox priest who he mistook for an orthodox Jew.

UPDATE: Marwan Barghouthi was elected to a top post in Fatah’s Central Committee, initial results showed on Tuesday morning (August 11, 2009).

 

GAZA MILITANTS FIRE AT PALESTINIAN PATIENTS HEADING INTO ISRAEL

The Associated Press reported yesterday:

Gaza militants fired mortars at a crossing into Israel just as Palestinian patients were being transferred for treatment on Sunday, a Palestinian official said. “It’s a miracle nobody was hurt,” Health Ministry official Dr. Moaiya Hassanain said.

Two radical Palestinian groups, the Popular Front and the Democratic Front, said they fired 12 mortars at the Erez crossing. The Israel Defense Forces said about six shells exploded near the Erez crossing as the transfer was in progress.

During the afternoon, Israeli forces also uncovered an improvised explosive device (IED) in the belongings of a Palestinian boy at the Awarta crossing, south of Nablus in the West Bank. The IED was detonated in a controlled manner by Israeli sappers.

[All notes above by Tom Gross]