January 2007 Archives

The interview was published just days before the visit of Canadian Foreign Minister Peter Mackay to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, in which Mackay refused to meet with Hamas leaders or with A-Zahar.

A-Zahar warned in the interview that Canada was endangering itself. In his words, Canada is liable to turn into an enemy of the Palestinian nation and the Islamic Movement as a result of its insistence on shunning Hamas and supporting Israel.

"What is Israel giving you? Nothing," he said in the interview.

"Is it that you want to be the tail of the American dog—this is your business—or do you want to be a national leader?"

The Palestinian minister then addressed his Canadian counterpart and asked, "Why do you refuse to meet with us? We are not man-eaters."

He then added that Hamas-members are not terrorists, but rather, freedom fighters, saying:"There is no difference between us and the French resistance to Nazi occupation during the second world war."

Like the item found at the Sullivan Square station, the BU package was attached to the underpinnings of the bridge.

"It was not an explosive device," she said of the suspicious item found on the BU Bridge.

[VIDEO: Suspicious package detonated in Boston]

Mieth said State Police bomb experts are now examining a another suspicious item -- similar in construction to the items found at Sullivan station and on the BU Bridge -- that has been discovered attached to the Longfellow Bridge, which spans the Charles River from Boston to Cambridge.

Boston police are separately investigating suspicious items at Columbus and Stuart streets and near the New England Medical Center, Boston police said.

Storrow drive has been is closed, and traffic on the Longfellow Bridge has been cut down to one lane, according to Boston police. Charles Street in downtown Boston is also closed while several agencies investigate suspicious packages discovered there this afternoon.

Storrow drive was closed at 2 p.m., according to State Police. Thirty minutes later police opened one eastbound lane to traffic.

According to Boston police, Charles Street is also closed while several agencies investigate suspicious packages discovered there this afternoon.

"Never accept any eatables from a stranger or co-passenger whom you have never met before. They could be drugged," read security tip number 6, to the left of which appeared a diagram of two religious Jews.

The sign was spotted and photographed by an Israeli tourist two months ago during a journey from Goa to Mumbai.

"This sign is without any doubt racist," said Iris Alon, "it clearly says that Jews can poison you by giving you food that contains poison."

"It is very irritating to see a sign like this in India. In general there are good relations between Indians and Israeli tourists, and I never thought that such racism existed in the country, and certainly not in a railway operator," she said.

"What's worse is that many tourists are exposed to this sign, which makes it more intense," said Alon, adding that railway operator is one of the biggest in India.

Alon wrote the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Israeli Embassy in India asking that they file a complaint with Indian authorities and demand that the sign be removed.

When asked about why he supported giving $2 million in taxpayer-owned land to the terror-friendly folks running the Islamic Society of Boston for a mere $175k, Menino denied that he was even mayor when the deal went down. "That happened before me," Boston's four-term mayor told E&B. He claimed to know virtually nothing about the subject at all...

...Lessee....According to his official biography, Mayor Tom "Pimp My Ride" Menin-yo was elected to his first term on November 2, 1993. He spent nine years on the city council before that. The ISB groundbreaking was 2002, the transfer of city land, 2003. Then there's the ongoing lawsuit trying to uncover the facts of the ISB funding that his administration is fighting. In fact, city officials were in court trying to keep the lid on this story LAST week!

Anybody else see a problem here?...

...And so it is that as statesmen and activists worldwide loudly proclaim their commitment to establishing the sovereign State of Palestine, they miss the fact that Palestine exists. And it is a nightmare.

In the State of Palestine 88 percent of the public feels insecure. Perhaps the other 12 percent are members of the multitude of regular and irregular militias. For in the State of Palestine the ratio of police/militiamen/men-under-arms to civilians is higher than in any other country on earth.

In the State of Palestine, two-year-olds are killed and no one cares. Children are woken up in the middle of the night and murdered in front of their parents. Worshipers in mosques are gunned down by terrorists who attend competing mosques. And no one cares. No international human rights groups publish reports calling for an end to the slaughter. No UN body condemns anyone or sends a fact-finding mission to investigate the murders...

...FOR THE past 13 years, since the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, the contours of the State of Palestine have taken form in front of our eyes. Starting with Yasser Arafat's abrogation of the rule of law and murderous campaign against land dealers and journalists, with each passing year and with each move to further empower the PA, the situation has only grown worse. And yet, international pressure on Israel from Arabs, Europeans and the US to surrender more territory, curtail its authority, abrogate its claims to the areas set for Palestine, and finance the Fatah terror group have only grown in intensity.

And with each passing year, as the reality of Palestine has become clearer, the Israeli leadership's will to resist this pressure is increasingly eroded...

...Palestine is a terror state and an economic basket case fully funded by the international community. Indeed, over the past year since Hamas won the Palestinian elections, international assistance to the Palestinians has increased dramatically.

As Ibrahim Gambari, the UN under-secretary-general for political affairs, noted last Thursday, official Western aid to the Palestinians, not including Arab and Iranian support for Hamas and Fatah, increased by 10 percent in 2006 over 2005, and stood at $1.2 billion.

The Palestinians, who receive more aid per capita than any people on earth, are needy not because they lack funds. They are poor because they prefer poverty, violence and war to prosperity, peace and moderation. So it is that 57 percent of Palestinians support terror attacks against Israel.

The multitude of protesters worldwide who demand an end to the so-called "occupation" and the establishment of Palestine should be made aware of the fact that Palestine already exists. The hordes of political leaders mindlessly squawking about "visions" and "two-state solutions" should know: This is Palestine. Enter at your own risk.

The following are excerpts from the article: [1]

"If the U.N. General Assembly's resolution of Friday was not the last nail in the coffin of this organization, then it [at least] drove one in, and it is preparing the U.N.'s corpse for burial in the graveyard of history… The draft of this resolution, which is clearly opposed to the most basic recognized principles of human rights, was brought before the U.N. General Assembly by the U.S. on Tuesday, January 23, 2007, and that same day it received the agreement of the majority of the countries, including Russia and China.

"The Holocaust, or the slaughter of Jews during of WWII by German Nazis, is a myth and a contrived story. Up until now, many well-known European and American historians have denied that it occurred, by presenting irrefutable historical documents and records...

In addressing Iran, Romney focused on a potential challenge for the next president: the threat of a nuclear power next to Iraq.

Romney said economic sanctions should be tightened.

"Our model should be at least as severe to the sanctions imposed on Apartheid South Africa. We should demand no less from the international community today," he said...

He is Navy Cmdr. Peter Mongilardi Jr., of Haledon, N.J. He will be buried on April 11 at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington D.C.

On June 25, 1965, Mongilardi departed the USS Coral Sea in his A-4C Skyhawk on an armed reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam. His flight encountered bad weather and enemy fire over Thanh Hoa Province, causing the wingman to lose visual and radio contact with Mongilardi. Contact was never re-established and the aircraft failed to return to the carrier.

In 1993, a joint U.S.-Socialist Republic of Vietnam (S.R.V.) archival team, led by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), obtained information concerning the crash while researching documents, artifacts and photographs at the Central Army Museum in Hanoi. Later that year, another joint U.S./S.R.V. team conducted an investigation in Thanh Hoa Province. The team interviewed two local Vietnamese citizens who recalled the crash and said the pilot died in the impact. The men then led the team to the crash site.

In 1994, another joint team excavated the crash site and recovered human remains and pilot-related items, including a belt tip, boot heel, pieces of flight boot and other items worn by the pilot...

In an annual press conference, the forum explained that 2006 was characterized by escalation in the number and violent nature of attacks on Jews, proliferation of Holocaust denial and increased comparison of Israel to the Nazi regime.

The Global Forum - a joint effort of the Jewish Agency, the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister's Office - counted 360 anti-Semitic incidents in France in 2006, compared to 300 in 2005. In the United Kingdom, the report listed a yearly decrease from 321 incidents in 2005 to 312 incidents in 2006. Russia recorded 300 incidents in 2006 compared to 250 the preceding year, and Austria saw a jump from 50 incidents to 83 last year. The Scandinavian countries saw 53 incidents in 2006, substantially more than the previous year's 35. The report cited a 60-percent rise in incidents in the Berlin area, although it did not include figures for all of Germany...

PA TV has broadcast many programs and videos that promote hatred of Israel through libelous accusations and depictions of Israelis as cold-blooded murderers.

To see this video click here.

In stark contrast with their parents, growing numbers sympathise with extreme teachings of Islam, with almost four in ten wanting to live under Sharia law in Britain.

The study identifies significant support for wearing the veil in public, Islamic schools and even punishment by death for Muslims who convert to another religion.

Most alarmingly, 13 per cent of young Muslims said they "admired" organisations such as Al Qaeda which are prepared to "fight the West".

The poll exposes a fracture between the attitudes of Muslims aged 16 to 24, most of whom were born in Britain, and those of their parents’ generation, who are more likely to have been immigrants...

...The poll of 1,000 Muslims, weighted to represent the population across the UK, found that a growing minority of youngsters felt they had less in common with non-Muslims than their parents did.

While only 17 per cent of over-55s said they would prefer to live under Sharia law, that increased to 37 per cent of those aged 16 to 24...

Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association, is telling Muslims that almost all vaccines contain products derived from animal and human tissue, which make them “haram”, or unlawful for Muslims to take.

Islam permits only the consumption of halal products, where the animal has had its throat cut and bled to death while God’s name is invoked.

Islam also forbids the eating of any pig meat, which Katme says is another reason why vaccines should be avoided, as some contain or have been made using pork-based gelatine.

His warning has been criticised by the Department of Health and the British Medical Association, who said Katme risked increasing infections ranging from flu and measles to polio and diphtheria in Muslim communities.

Fawzi Barhoum called the attack a "natural response" to Israeli military policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as its ongoing boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian government. "So long as there is occupation, resistance is legitimate," he said.

He also said attacks on Israel were preferable to the recent bout of Palestinian infighting in Gaza. "The right thing is for Fatah weapons to be directed toward the occupation not toward Hamas," he said...

“The growing acceptance of anti-Semitic rhetoric is so commonplace it is not even recognized as anti-Semitism,” wrote the activist, who went on to list a number of anti-Semitic incidents in her community that had left her rattled.

Despite her opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq, the woman had not attended a recent anti-war rally due to her reluctance to support the group organizing the protest.

“We’ve gotten calls for help like that almost weekly here for the last three years,” said Bernstein, director of the Anti-Defamation League office in San Francisco. “With each case we’ve helped put out fires by trying to get the right person to speak out about whatever the issue is.”

On Jan. 28 the ADL will try to do more than just douse fires when it convenes Finding Our Voice, a daylong conference in San Francisco aimed at empowering Jewish progressives to respond to anti-Semitism on the left.

Co-sponsored by more than 50 Jewish organizations from across the political spectrum — including the ADL, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, Americans for Peace Now and the Jewish Labor Committee — the conference aims to empower participants to respond to what organizers describe as an alarming trend...

“We’ve all had to break out of our comfort zones to put this together, including myself,” Bernstein said.

But for some, the ADL hasn’t broken out enough.

Two prominent Bay Area Jewish organizations active in the progressive movement — Tikkun and Jewish Voice for Peace — were not invited to co-sponsor the conference. Two others were invited to participate but declined, citing concerns about the agenda.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, the founder of Tikkun and perhaps the most well-known Jewish progressive in the country, will be in Washington on the day of the conference protesting the Iraq war.

A spokesperson for Jewish Voice for Peace, a liberal advocacy group working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, said: “From our perspective, you cannot get to the roots of anti-Semitism in the progressive movement without honestly addressing the severe human-rights violations that Israel engages in every day. Judging by the lineup, that kind of honest examination is not likely to happen at this conference.”

A source involved in planning the conference told JTA that it was precisely that type of discussion that organizers wanted to avoid out of concern that it would distract from the primary focus on Jewish oppression...

MJT: A periscope like something they use in a submarine?

Eli: Yeah, a periscope. You know, you can be underground and see above. It was a pipe that had mirrors that were reflecting up. And a small kind of detonator. Our team checked it out. There were 500 kilos of explosives under the road waiting for Israeli tanks. There were really ready. They built these houses for that purpose because they knew this was going to happen some day. They were just waiting for the tanks to roll in...

“Despite impressive efforts on our part to bring Professor Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University… to lecture yesterday evening [Jan. 23] following speeches by former President [Jimmy] Carter and Professor [Alan] Dershowitz,” wrote Kevin Conway ’09 in a Jan. 24 e-mail to the group, “we were ultimately denied because of the last minute nature of our proposal.”

Conway added in his e-mail that despite these setbacks, Finkelstein, a “world-renowned expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” had agreed to speak on a date “tentatively scheduled for” Feb. 3 at 7pm. The event, according to the e-mail, would be co-sponsored by the RSA, the Arab Culture Club (ACC), and a possible third sponsor.

“Finkelstein is probably regarded as one of the most internationally acknowledged experts in regards to life on the ground in the occupied territories,” said Conway...

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have secretly detained dozens of suspected Iranian agents, holding them for three to four days at a time. The "catch and release" policy was designed to avoid escalating tensions with Iran and yet intimidate its emissaries. U.S. forces collected DNA samples from some of the Iranians without their knowledge, subjected others to retina scans, and fingerprinted and photographed all of them before letting them go.

Last summer, however, senior administration officials decided that a more confrontational approach was necessary, as Iran's regional influence grew and U.S. efforts to isolate Tehran appeared to be failing. The country's nuclear work was advancing, U.S. allies were resisting robust sanctions against the Tehran government, and Iran was aggravating sectarian violence in Iraq.

"There were no costs for the Iranians," said one senior administration official. "They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back."

Three officials said that about 150 Iranian intelligence officers, plus members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Command, are believed to be active inside Iraq at any given time. There is no evidence the Iranians have directly attacked U.S. troops in Iraq, intelligence officials said.

But, for three years, the Iranians have operated an embedding program there, offering operational training, intelligence and weaponry to several Shiite militias connected to the Iraqi government, to the insurgency and to the violence against Sunni factions. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the CIA, told the Senate recently that the amount of Iranian-supplied materiel used against U.S. troops in Iraq "has been quite striking."

"Iran seems to be conducting a foreign policy with a sense of dangerous triumphalism," Hayden said...

...The ICC is a pro-Israel umbrella group whose mission is to "foster support for Israel on campus," promote "Israel advocacy," and "counter the worrisome rise of anti-Israel activities on college campuses." In December 2006, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), a member of the ICC, expressed concern that the Union of Progressive Zionists (UPZ), another ICC member, has been sponsoring a program on campuses that harshly and falsely criticizes Israel for human rights abuses against the Palestinian Arabs. The UPZ-sponsored program - called "Breaking the Silence" - omits historical facts, provides no balance or context, and promotes outright falsehoods about Israel. The ZOA acknowledged the UPZ's general right to promote this hateful program, but not as a member of the ICC, which was set up to build support for Israel and reduce anti-Israel intimidation and harassment on college campuses...

...During the difficult negotiations between Egypt and Israel, Carter and his advisers tried to get Sadat to engage in a collusive scheme: They would encourage Sadat to make "deliberately exaggerated" demands. The White House would then intervene to "compel" Cairo to scale back its demands in exchange for Israeli concessions. Then-national security advisor Brzezinski explained that Washington would "apply maximum leverage on Israel to accommodate,"[14] by keeping the West Bank's political future on the table for future negotiations. That Carter risked possible Israeli-Egyptian peace in an effort to extract greater concessions from Begin underscores the tension in their relationship...

The move comes as a result of increased attacks on Christians by Muslims over the past few months. The families said they wrote letters to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the Vatican, Church leaders and European governments complaining about the attacks, but their appeals have fallen on deaf ears.

According to the families, many Christians have long been afraid to complain in public about the campaign of "intimidation" for fear of retaliation by their Muslim neighbors and being branded "collaborators" with Israel.

But following an increase in attacks on Christian-owned property in the city over the past few months, some Christians are no longer afraid to talk about the ultra-sensitive issue. And they are talking openly about leaving the city.

"The situation is very dangerous," said Samir Qumsiyeh, owner of the Beit Sahur-based private Al-Mahd (Nativity) TV station. "I believe that 15 years from now there will be no Christians left in Bethlehem. Then you will need a torch to find a Christian here. This is a very sad situation."

Qumsiyeh, one of the few Christians willing to speak about the harsh conditions of their community, has been the subject of numerous death threats. His house was recently attacked with fire-bombs, but no one was hurt...

The technology is supposed to be harmless -- a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons.

Military officials say it could save the lives of civilians and service members in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010, but all branches of the military have expressed interest in it, officials said.

During the first media demonstration of the weapon Wednesday, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted atop a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios U.S. troops might encounter.

The crew fired beams from more than 500 yards (455 meters) away, nearly 17 times the range of existing non-lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets.

While the sudden, 130-degree Fahrenheit (54.44 Celsius) heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make participants think their clothes were about to ignite...

Hafiz_saeed "NEW DELHI: Even as the Hurriyat team visiting Pakistan met president Pervez Musharraf and made appropriate 'peace noises', the main driver of terror in Jammu & Kashmir, Lashkar-e-Taiba (pictured at left), made it clear that it was not prepared to buy the argument that dialogue could replace guns."...

However, this latest item goes a step farther in its sheer mendacity...

"We are engaged in a war against an axis of Islamists, extremists, and terrorists. It is an axis of evil. It has headquarters in Tehran and Waziristan. But because of the unconventional nature of this war, it also has headquarters in cities throughout Europe and Asia and Africa and the United States of America, in cells that operate in the shadows but are prepared to strike us again as they did on September 11th, 2001.

"The enemy we are fighting is . . . totalitarian. It is inhumane. It has a violent ideology and a goal of expansionism and totalitarianism. It threatens our security, our values, our way of life as seriously, in my opinion, as fascism and communism did in the last century."

Can't match that assessment of the global jihad with the Democratic candidate who uttered it? Don't feel bad; it was a trick question. Those words were actually spoken by Senator Joseph Lieberman at a forum on Iraq this month. Lieberman shared the podium with GOP colleague John McCain, who was no less blunt in his evaluation of the war and its stakes...

...The Democratic candidates, by contrast, are virtually silent on the subject...

When was the last time a PBS program advanced the idea that anti-immigration groups in the American southwest aren’t racist but are simply expressing an “understandable” regret in regard to the change in the local ethnic balance and life style that are caused by illegal Hispanic immigration. Did any commentator on PBS ever speculate that the white people of South Boston, Little Rock, Alabama or Mississippi were not really racist when they resisted school integration? Was there ever a film on PBS that theorized that school segregation, redlining and blockbusting were artifacts of simple, innocent resistance to change?...

..."The military option remains on the table," said a text of the remarks Romney delivered Tuesday at the seventh annual Herzliya Conference in Herzliya, Israel.

He added: "Arab states must join this effort to prevent a nuclear Iran. These states can do much more than wring their hands and urge America to act. They should support Iraq's nascent government. They can help America focus on Iran by quickly turning down the temperature of the Arab-Israeli conflict -- stopping the financial and weapons flows to Hamas and Hezbollah, thawing relations with Israel and telling the Palestinians they must drop terrorism and recognize Israel's right to exist."...

This will occur, he believes, as the blueprint developed at the Durban Conference on Racism in 2001 is implemented by anti-Israel activists in America...

...The process Hoenlein sees happening in America is similar to what occurred in Britain, he said, "where the elite in society were turned against Israel...

..."What was once acceptable on the fringes is now acceptable in the mainstream," he said, concluding that "at times, the American Jewish community has to [exercise] greater assertiveness."

The cost was "definitely in line" with what the school pays for other speakers, Principal Peter Anderson said. The money did not come from taxpayers; Anderson said he took the money from one of "a number of accounts that have been sitting around for years, with small amounts of money in them."

The school reimbursed speaker Mazin Qumsiyeh $138 in mileage for driving between his Connecticut home and Andover and paid speaker Joe Carr $211 for a plane ticket, Anderson said. Anderson did not know where Carr flew from.

Andover High School typically pays speakers an honorarium and, if they decline, offers to pay their travel expenses instead, Anderson said.

The Jan. 5 presentations by Wheels of Justice, an activist group that opponents say is extremist and anti-Israel, came at the end of a two-month controversy at the school. Anderson canceled the speakers' first planned visit in October but reversed his decision after teachers union President Tom Meyers threatened a First Amendment lawsuit.

The school hosted separate presentations for students during the day and for the general public that night. Anderson cut the public forum short after many adults in the crowd taunted and yelled at the speakers.

The School Department also paid its lawyers for consultations during the controversy. The cost of those services was not available yesterday, Superintendent Claudia Bach said.

The suspect, Abdellatif Nekkavi, was under investigation for allegedly raising funds to support anti-Western Islamic militants in Iraq and for allegedly obtaining forged documents for Islamic radicals traveling to Iraq, the spokesman said.

Police arrested Nekkavi at his home in Badalona, a suburb of Barcelona, at 6:40 a.m. local time, and he was to be taken to Madrid to appear before a magistrate at the National Court, which investigates terrorism.

Spanish media quoted a sister of Nekkavi as saying he had lived in Spain for five years and was a "normal person" who worked and spent time with family and friends.

Only some 50 Jewish families remain in virulently anti-Israel Yemen, but after years of being largely ignored by the local population and authorities, they have now been targeted by Moslem extremists.

Some of the families, in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, were confronted by masked men who told them that if they do not leave within ten days, "things will be bad for you." Other Jews were told that the Moslems don't want to see even one Jew left in the region.

Reports of Killings

In a phone call engineered by Voice of Israel Radio on Monday, a Jewish woman living in Yemen said that the Moslems "have already killed the wise men." No confirmation of this has been received from other quarters - though news from Yemen does not flow freely...

In 2006, Norwegian firms imported Israeli goods worth NOK 650 million.

This is an increase by NOK 80 million, or 15 per cent from the year before, the strongest increase in many years.

This is shown by figures from Statistics Norway (SSB).

SV party secretary Edle Daasvand, who has led the campaign, says to the newspaper Vaart Land that it is not pleasant for the party to note that the import from Israel is increasing.

Talabani was a Kurdish guerrilla leader when the recording allegedly was made of al-Majeed, who also is known as known as "Chemical Ali" for allegedly using chemical weapons against Kurds during the 1980s.

Hussein suspected the Kurds, a non-Arab ethnic group in northern Iraq, of siding with Iran during the 1980-88 war between Baghdad and Tehran.

Al-Majeed later told the court that he used such language as "psychological and propaganda" tools against the Kurds, to frighten them into not fighting government forces.

"All the words used by me, such as 'deport them' or 'wipe them out,' were only for psychological effect," al-Majeed said, as the so-called Anfal case continued before the Iraqi High Tribunal...

On January 17, 2007, a Texas Federal Court judge dismissed as “wholly frivolous” and “baseless” Palestine Children’s Welfare Fund (PCWF) Riad ElSolh Hamad’s defamation suit against NGO Monitor, Frontpage Jerusalem, the Center for Study of Popular Culture and others. Hamad charged the organizations had defamed him and violated his constitutional and civil rights linking him and his charity in newspaper and Internet articles to Islamic fundamentalist terror.

In addition to dismissing Hamad's claims as “groundless”, United States District Court Judge, Sam Sparks, leveled Rule 11 sanctions against Hamad and ordered him to pay defendants’ attorney’s fees and costs totaling almost $60,000 as well as a $1000 fine to each defendant for Hamad’s repeated violation of court orders.

NGO Monitor Executive Director Professor Gerald Steinberg noted: “This was a clear attempt to use the courts and intimidation to prevent independent analysis and exposure of the incitement by anti-Israel NGOs. This strategy has now been rejected.”

In his ruling, the judge called Hamad‘s complaint “an intelligible morass of vitriolic accusations” that had “no basis in law.”

NGO Monitor analysis shows Gaza-based PCWF openly exploits children’s issues for radical politicized agendas that promote the conflict. These activities are entirely inconsistent with its claims to be a humanitarian organization. Among PCWF’s activities, documented in NGO Monitor’s report, is a children's drawing contest. The judges rewarded, almost without exception, entries that featured fierce and violent hatred of Israel. The winning picture features a fire, in the shape of a map of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, consuming the Star of David with the word “Israel” written inside the flag. Another entry depicted a Palestinian flag dropping flames on an Israeli flag and burning Israelis standing next to it. Such activities serve only to advance a culture of violence and hatred.

The use of the courts in the attempt to prevent debate and the exposure of the highly politicized activity taking place under the guise of promoting human rights is widespread. The judge in this case rejected the effort to silence NGO Monitor’s analyses of such activities.

Lawyers for the city's most powerful agency argued in Suffolk Superior Court that critics of the mosque project at Roxbury Crossing had no right to depose the BRA officials about the project or obtain more documents than those already provided to the David Project, a nonprofit Jewish advocacy group.

Leaders of the David Project have questioned the BRA's deal with the Islamic Society of Boston, under which the society is building the mosque. They have also suggested the BRA is trying to keep details of the arrangement secret by blocking the release of public information.

BRA attorneys said the David Project has not agreed to pay for searching for the requested documents, including e-mails, and for copying those documents, a cost that could range from about $50,000 to $85,000.

David Project lawyers said that they have clearly stated they would pay all reasonable search and duplication costs but that the BRA had "wildly inflated" cost estimates in a continuing effort to withhold thousands of public records.

"The BRA has made a series of institutional decisions to make its public documents difficult to access," Scott P. Lewis, a lawyer representing the David Project, said at yesterday's 30-minute hearing on the BRA's motion to block his subpoenas of BRA officials and on a countermotion asking that the officials be compelled to appear for questioning...

...Lewis said the BRA has thousands of documents stored "willy-nilly" in boxes that are not labeled, a storage method he said was intended to keep the documents from being easily accessible and to increase the costs of access.

He said the questioning of the subpoenaed BRA officials will enable the David Project to understand what documents are available, and in what form, without going through massive and expensive searches of what the BRA says are more than 2,000 boxes of unindexed documents and thousands of e-mails the BRA says cannot be searched easily.

The subpoenaed BRA officials include Robert Tumposky, deputy director for management information systems; Muhammad Ali-Salaam, deputy director for special projects; Patraap Patrose, deputy director for urban design; and Kevin Morrison, the agency's general counsel.

Ali-Salaam is a central figure in the battle over the mosque because of his long association with the project and his trip to the Middle East with members of the Islamic Society leadership in 2000, during which, according to an Islamic Society publication, he helped raise funds for the project.

He also has been subpoenaed to give a deposition on Feb. 7 in a suit brought against the mosque deal by Boston resident James C. Policastro, who asserts that the arrangement between the BRA and the society violates the constitutional separation of church and state...

Norman B. Anderson, PhD
Chief Executive Officer,
American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington DC 20002-4242

Dear Dr. Anderson,

On Sunday, August 21, at the American Psychological Association Annual Convention, we attended the Invited Panel Discussion: Different Type of Dialogue-The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict sponsored by Division 48 [Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence: Peace Psychology Division].

The “Different Type of Dialogue” offered was, essentially, a “monologue” in which only the Palestinian viewpoint was presented. The miniscule amount of psychological knowledge, theory or scientific learning to be applied to this important topic was largely confined to Dr. Krippner’s comments concluding the presentation. Given that the “The purpose of the division is to increase and apply psychological knowledge in the pursuit of peace,”[1] we expected to be informed, perhaps even enlightened, regarding psychological contributions to the aforementioned phenomena. Instead, we were served up a warmed-over ideological [anti-Israeli] diatribe apparently sponsored and condoned by an Association of which we have each been dues paying members for over 30 years. We are writing to make APA aware of what occurred at this meeting in hope that you will take action to assure it does not recur.

To begin with, the titles of some of the participants’ talks did not at all reflect their actual content. For example, Donna Nassur’s topic was “End to the Violence: A Restorative Approach,” however no approach, restorative or otherwise, to the end of violence was offered. Ms Nassur showed pictures of the security barrier Israel has been erecting which, in some places, bisects Arab villages and streets, saying in dismay, “We all cried it was so disturbing”. We all know that the occupants of these villages are hurting. However, the topic of the panel, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, by definition implies a duality. There are two sides to this conflict.

Palestinian street named for Saddam Hussein was paved with USAID money
by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook

After Saddam Hussein's execution, the Palestinian Municipality of Yaabid decided to name both a school and its main street after the Iraqi dictator. It appears that the same street was paved 18 months ago using grants from USAID.

This is not the first time that US money has gone to build Palestinian infrastructures that are named to glorify terrorists and enemies of the US. Three examples:

1. After the US gave the Jenin municipality money for road works in the city, a block in the center of Jenin was named for the first Iraqi suicide terrorist who killed four American soldiers in Fallujah. The mayor of Jenin participated in the anti-American rally and the speakers blessed the “resistance of the residents of Fallujah” [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, April 4, 2004].

2. USAID funded the building of the Salaf Khalef Sports Center. Salef Khalef (Abu Iyad) the head of the Black September terror organization, was behind the killing of two US diplomats in Sudan and the 11 Israeli Olympic athletes. [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, May, 30, 2004]

3. USAID funded renovations of the Dalal Mughrabi School named in honor of Dalal Mughrabi and her terror group, who killed American photographer Gail Rubin and 36 Israelis. [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, December 14, 2004]

The following is the article on the naming of Saddam Hussein Street:

“In the Yaabid Municipality… thousands of citizens held a requiem for the soul of Saddam in the mosque. Following that, a march began in the streets of the municipality, that ended at the offices of the Yaabid Municipality, where a mourners’ tent was opened in his memory. Public figures and the [Armed] Factions in Yaabid decided to name one of the schools in the municipality and its most important street after Saddam to immortalize his memory and to emphasize the values of Arabness and Jihad, which he represented…” [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, January 4, 2007]

The following is from the PMW archives on the USAID funding:

“The Yaabid Municipality in the Jenin area held a ceremony yesterday for the inauguration of a project of the paving of the main street of the municipality, funded by the United Stated Agency for International Development (USAID)… The project of paving and renovating the main entrance to the municipality and some of the inner streets is three kilometers long and cost $402,000.” [Al-Ayyam, July 14, 2005]

Iran now seeks to dominate the world’s richest oil-producing region with terrorism, nuclear weapons and the manipulation of puppet states. An overt declaration of war against Iran could be warranted. But it would be window dressing, and Congress shows no inclination to pursue the vital interests of this nation. That leaves the president, in lonely leadership, to act as the found fathers envisioned he might have to. Alone, without interference...

I’m so happy to admit that I could not have been more wrong. Pipes was magnificent at the Conference. Daniel went into the lion’s den and not only did he survive, he pulverised the lion.

Moreover, he (and his co-speaker, Douglas Murray) got just as much applause as Ken and his co-speaker, Councillor Salma Yaqoob. This was quite remarkable, given the timing of the Conference, which meant that many in the Jewish community missed the daytime programme. And yet more – Israel was not even mentioned in any of the four principal morning speeches on the main topic...

...The Attar (literally, essence) of Resistance comes in jasmine, gardenia, and tea rose (the latter, because it supposedly found favor with Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, is rumored to be Nasrallah's personal pick). The slender vials are packaged in little laminated folders with excerpts from Nasrallah's speeches printed inside. On the front, Nasrallah waves a hortatory hand, with Lebanese and Hezbollah flags fluttering behind him, while a missile sinks an Israeli gunboat. On the back, there's a photo collage of lilies and rocket launchers. All this for $1? Who could resist?...

...In Lebanon, the word "resistance" often denotes Hezbollah's rockets, missiles, and machine guns, which the United States and Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's government want to take away. But it also has a broader meaning: of popular struggle against Israel, the United States, or Western powers. For Khalil--who is also a poet, prisoners' rights activist, and occasional independent political candidate--the resistance doesn't have to be violent. "I don't believe in weapons or arms," says Khalil, who deplores the September 11 attacks on the United States. "There are many ways of resisting. Resistance can be a word; it can take many forms." Like perfume.

Khalil's inspiration came on September 22, 2006, five weeks after the end of last summer's war, when Hezbollah staged an enormous rally in the bombed-out ruins of the Shia neighborhoods where its offices used to be. As hundreds of thousands packed into the newly cleared square to celebrate the "divine victory," Khalil looked around and saw a sea of trinkets bearing pictures of Nasrallah. "I decided that I wanted people to have something more enduring," says Khalil. "I wanted people to know the essence of the resistance."...

As Egypt begins its first prosecution of a blogger, Washington is backing away from pressuring its Mideast ally to improve its human rights record and bring democratic reform.

Abdel Kareem Nabil often denounced Islamic authorities on his Arabic-language blog, and criticized President Hosni Mubarak. Nabil has been in detention since November and faces up to nine years in prison if convicted.

Egypt has arrested a string of pro democracy bloggers over the past year, sparking condemnation from human rights groups...

The test of anti satellite technology is believed to be the first of its kind in two decades by any nation and raised concerns about the vulnerability of US satellites and a possible arms race in space.

China's action drew sharp protests from other nations with satellite programs -- a predictable response that experts said dramatically illustrates Chinese willingness to face broad international criticism when it comes to space, which Beijing considers a key part of the push to modernize its military and increase its ability to compete in high-tech warfare...

With help from doctoral student Oren Caspi and master's degree student Ayelet Lassman, the Technion researchers said that without the new blood vessels, the tissue would be likely to die quickly. "In our work," said Levenberg, "we showed the importance of endothelial cells (from which coronary vessels are composed) that induce the differentiation of stem cells into heart cells and their organization as tissue and encourage their multiplication. That is, it's important to create cardiac tissue with all the cells that compose them. In this case, it is endothelial cells, cardiac cells and cells that support blood vessels."...

Brought forward as a single motion by two Toronto-area teachers and split into two motions during debate last night, the issue sparked the wrath of several Jewish lobby groups.

B'nai Brith and the Jewish Defence League had described an earlier motion as propaganda and said it could easily morph into racism. The teachers' union shot back that the lobby groups were engaging in what amounted to a bullying campaign aimed at stifling free speech...

It also turns out that the other arrested imam, Hafiz Muhammad Hannan of the Islamic Society of Lowell, is Saeed's brother-in-law. And Hafiz Mahmood Hamid, the imam of the Islamic Society of Greater Worcester, is Saeed's brother. What a curious family affair we have going on here in Massachusetts! What are the chances?...

The directors of the Islamic Center have given the Imam Muhammed Masood and his family notice to leave their residence on the grounds of the Sharon mosque.

Brookline attorney George Garfinkle, representing the board, said last night the Pakistani cleric has been asked to leave ‘‘sometime soon,’’ though not by a specific date...

...Garfinkle also confirmed that some former Islamic Center board members have been called before a federal grand jury in Boston over the past month in connection with the investigation of Imam Masood’s alleged visa violations.

He did not identify who was called. Board president Rashid Noor of Norton declined comment about the grand jury appearances.

Imam Masood is expected to have a visa hearing within the next few months. He could be deported at that time...

Genetically based claims to sovereignty are the newest tactics employed in old struggles over national sovereignty and borders.3 They are used to support assertions of historical primacy, the principle that the first of the nations still existing to have established collective life on a specific territory has a right to statehood there. The desire to claim historical primacy is so strong that national groups of recent origin and nations that arrived comparatively recently to the territory where they now demand sovereignty are inclined to invent histories alleging ancient roots...

The following are excerpts from the interview. [1]

Hizbullah is an Integral Part of the Iranian Intelligence Apparatus

Question: "You were formerly Hizbullah secretary-general. Is the [situation in Lebanon] within the strategic framework of Hizbullah? Does Hizbullah have an outlined and prepared plan that is being implemented today? Why do you think Hizbullah has become a source of anxiety for the Lebanese? "

Al-Tufeili: "It wasn't like this in the beginning. Hizbullah's activity was limited to resistance [operations]... But, unfortunately, the problem has developed today to the point where they have succeeded in changing Hizbullah from a resistance force into a tool to be used in [whatever] direction they want."

Question: "Does this mean that Hizbullah does not make its own decisions, and that its orders come from outside [Lebanon]?"

Al-Tufeili: "Yes, Hizbullah is a tool, and it is an integral part of the Iranian intelligence apparatus. Unfortunately, all the elements in the [Lebanese] arena have become tools, and take orders from outside [Lebanon]..."...

..."Iran is the Main Nerve in the Activity Today in Lebanon"

Referring to Syria's role in the events in Lebanon, Al-Tufeili said: "Syria is undoubtedly Iran's ally. It has undoubtedly been harmed by the March 14 Forces, and by the establishment of the [international] court. Thus, it is part of this battle; but it is not the most influential factor...

"Iran is the main nerve in the activity today in Lebanon. All Hizbullah activity [is financed] by Iranian funds. Syria has an important role, but Iran is the main and primary support of [the Lebanese opposition]. On the other side, the U.S. is supporting the March 14 Forces."

...around that time, in the spring of 1987, we deported a series of SS guards from concentration camps, whose names nobody would know. One such character we sent back to Austria was a man named Martin Bartesch.”

Bartesch, who had immigrated to the U.S. and lived in Chicago, admitted to Sher’s office and the court that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS and had served in the notorious SS Death’s Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp where, at the hands of Bartesch and his cohorts, many thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. He also confessed to having concealed his service at the infamous camp from U.S. immigration officials.

“We had an extraordinary piece of evidence against him – a book that was kept by the SS and captured by the American armed forces when they liberated Mauthausen,” Sher said. “We called it the death book. It was a roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners.”

An entry in the book for October 10, 1943 registered the shooting death of Max Oschorn, a French Jewish prisoner. His murderer was also recorded: SS guard Martin Bartesch. “It was a most chilling document,” Sher recalled...

...“We kicked him out and he went back to Austria. In the meantime, his family – he had adult kids – went on a campaign, also supported by his church, to try to get special treatment. In so doing they attacked the activities of our office and me personally. They claimed we used phony evidence from the Soviet Union – which was nonsense. They claimed he was a young man of only 17 or 18 when he joined the Nazi forces, asking for some sympathetic treatment and defense from our office, which they claimed was just after vengeance.”

The family approached several members of Congress. “The congressmen would, very understandably, forward their claims over to our office and when they learned the facts they would invariably drop the case,” Sher recalled.

But there was one politician who accepted the claims without asking for any further information.

“One day, in the fall of ’87, my secretary walks in and gives me a letter with a Georgia return address reading ‘Jimmy Carter.’ I assumed it was a prank from some old college buddies, but it wasn’t. It was the original copy of the letter Bartesch’s daughter sent to Carter, after Bartesch had already been deported.

“In the letter, she claimed we were un-American, only after vengeance, and persecuting a man for what he did when he was only 17 and 18 years old.

“I couldn’t help thinking of my own father who returned home with shrapnel wounds after he joined the U.S. Army as a teenager to fight the Nazis and hit the beaches at Normandy at that same age on D-day.

“On the upper corner of the letter was a note signed by Jimmy Carter saying that in cases such as this, he wanted ‘special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons.’

“I didn’t respond to the letter – the case was already over and he was out of the country – but it always stuck in my craw. A former president who didn’t do what I would expect him to do - with a full staff at his disposal – to find out the facts before he took up the side of this person. But I wasn’t going to pick a fight with a former president. We had enough on our plate.”

Now, following Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Sher has decided to go public...

The boy decided to copy the former Iraq leader's execution while playing with his younger sister at their home in Khemisset, 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of the capital of Rabat, newspaper Al Ahdat al-Maghrebia reported.

"The girl then went to school and left her brother playing his deadly game," it said, adding that local officials had opened an inquiry into the death...

...Since then, several stories have emerged of children dying or being injured after being captivated by the manner of Hussein's death or by family conversations about the execution.

One 12-year-old Saudi boy died after using a chair and a metal wire to hang himself from a door frame, while another in Algeria was found hanging from a tree, papers reported.

Two boys in different regions of Azerbaijan hanged themselves at the weekend and may have been influenced by Hussein's execution, a security source in the country said.

The death of a 15-year-old boy last week in the Moroccan coastal city of Casablanca was also suspected of being the result of another re-enactment...

..."It is a characteristic of the Muslim world that we have an over-politicized society. Everyone's into politics, discussing events in Palestine and Iraq and hooked on Al-Jazeera."...

Among those recognizing the new reality are Laura Bier, who teaches at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In April 2006, she penned pseudonymous essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education lamenting an article written by a Tech student that criticized Bier's talk at a pro-Palestinian event on campus. Eschewing such a dramatic gesture this round, Bier's name appears as one of the co-authors of the handbook. For good measure, the document is endorsed by such MES luminaries as Rashid Khalidi of Columbia and Zachary Lockman of New York University.

If one emotion pervades the handbook, it is alarm: The field is presented as embattled, in crisis, and on the run. Professors who a few years ago were confident enough to wear their politics on their sleeves by bullying students (as Joseph Massad did at Columbia) or assuming that activism could substitute for scholarly accomplishment in their climb up the academic ladder (as Juan Cole tried at Yale) have discovered to their chagrin that their actions are now deemed newsworthy.

Indeed, a more accurate subtitle might have been, "How Do We Fix this Mess?"...

The Wheels of Justice brings eyewitness accounts to occupations in Iraq and Palestine. Our speakers come from various political backgrounds; the only requirement is that they support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and support nonviolence as an alternative to war and injustice. We also recognize that to achieve peace anywhere in the world, the root causes of injustice, racism and oppression must be addressed. We also have speakers who are Jewish and even Holocaust survivors (e.g. 80 year-old Hedy Epstein)...

For the rest, Mr. Qumsiyyeh’s piece is redolent with the usual hackneyed anti-Semitic screed that hardly merits the 1000-word column-space in the Tribune, let alone the virtue of a response.

Michael had a surprisingly upbeat assessment of what's he's seen in the three weeks since he returned to Iraq as an embed. This was a much different view than what he shared with us last spring when he gave us a rather grim assessment. Michael discussed the improvement in the spirit and capabilities of the Iraqi security forces. He talked about the stark difference between the high spirits of the military men and women in Iraq with those who they are serving back at home. It is nothing short of amazing. He also laid to rest on of the most bothersome, dangerous myths of this war, that the people of Iraq "aren't doing enough". Finally, he told us about the type of man Gen. Petraeus is and we discussed the so-called surge plan...

"Together, the two prevented the driver from detonating his explosives after they failed to explode during the crash. With the assistance of the U.S. security forces, they dragged the terrorist from the vehicle, where U.S. security force soldiers then detained him," she explained.

The area was immediately evacuated, and an explosive ordnance disposal team was called to the scene.

Afghan security force soldiers, with assistance from the Afghan National Police and U.S. soldiers, immediately cordoned off the area and waited for the EOD team to disarm the bomb.

"If it wasn't for the quick actions of the local nationals working for the U.S. forces, several lives would have been lost," Army Col. David B. Enyeart, the deputy task force commander, said.

During an attempt to disarm the explosives, the device detonated, but no U.S. or coalition soldiers were injured, Fraker said.

"We are grateful for the bravery and the continued diligence of our Afghan partners and the security force soldiers and who protect this base," Enyeart said.

My translator Henry informed me that Lebanese journalists are no longer allowed to publish or interview Sayyed Husseini. Dissent from the likes of this man is intolerable and has to be smashed. Hezbollah issued its threats. After the two-year spree of car-bombs against journalists, threats from Nasrallah pack weight.

Foreign journalists, though, are allowed to meet with Husseini. Foreign journalists can’t be managed and bullied the same way local journalists can. Foreigners like me are, so far anyway, outside the bounds of car-bombs and murders.

I met with Husseini in his modest apartment in the dahiyeh, within walking distance of the rubble that recently was Hezbollah’s “Security Square.”...

A few months later, Tayseer was invited into an orange grove for sex by an undercover police agent of the Palestinian Authority, and subsequently arrested. Police told Tayseer that the only way for him to avoid prison was to become a Judas goat, to lure other gay men into sex so that they, too, could be arrested.

When he refused to be police bait in this entrapment scheme, Tayseer was hung by his arms from the ceiling. "A high-ranking officer he didn't know arranged for his release-and then demanded sex as payback."

When Tayseer fled Gaza for Tulkarem, he was eventually re-arrested, and forced to stand in neck-high sewage water with his head covered by a feces-filled sack. During one police interrogation, Tayseer was stripped and forced to sit on a Coke bottle...

In concluding his rebuttal of Massad, Whitaker writes that the Columbia academic and his acolytes present the debate "as a choice between cultural authenticity on the one hand and the adoption of all things Western on the other. In fact, neither is a realistic proposition...

No reasonable person can dispute therefore that Jimmy Carter has been and remains dependent on Arab oil money, particularly from Saudi Arabia. Does this mean that Carter has necessarily been influenced in his thinking about the Middle East by receipt of such enormous amounts of money? Ask Carter. The entire premise of his criticism of Jewish influence on American foreign policy is that money talks. It is Carter—not me—who has made the point that if politicians receive money from Jewish sources, then they are not free to decide issues regarding the Middle East for themselves. It is Carter, not me, who has argued that distinguished reporters cannot honestly report on the Middle East because they are being paid by Jewish money. So, by Carter’s own standards, it would be almost economically “suicidal” for Carter “to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine.”...

The Egyptstat 1, which weighs just under 100 kilograms, will circle the earth at an altitude of 668 kilometers. Using a high-powered multi-spectrum telescopic camera, it will be capable of transmitting black-and-white, color and infrared images. The camera can spot objects on the ground as small as four meters across.

Egypt hopes to launch another satellite - called Desertstat - by the end of the year, currently under construction in Italy...

Haifa-based A.F.S.K Hom Tov recently demonstrated its patented method of extracting high quality oil and natural gas from a mixture of bitumen and oil shale rock. Bitumen - or asphalt - is the residue obtained by distillation of crude oil.

Experts predict the process will return oil at just $25 dollars a barrel and the additional natural gas produced would further boost the financial feasibility. With crude oil prices currently floating over the $50 a barrel mark, this proposed method is generating interest around the world.

"The world is looking for a replacement for oil supplies," says attorney Moshe Shahal, a former Israeli energy minister and today the legal representative for Hom Tov.

The Hom-Tov process uses oil shale as a catalyst to extract combustible organic material from the residual bitumen byproduct of crude oil refineries. The end product from the process can easily be refined into high-grade petroleum and other fuels.

At present, oil refineries produce countless tons of bitumen residue every year that have little practical use or economic benefit and are an environmental hazard.

As a further bonus, the process converts the oil shale rock into a dry fuel in which the inorganic rock structure traps dangerous gases, such as sulfurous materials, preventing pollutant emissions to the atmosphere. The dry fuel byproduct could be burnt to power the Hom-Tov process itself as well provide additional electricity for the national grid...

The build-up to the second Holocaust (which, incidentally, in the end, will probably claim roughly the same number of lives as did the first) has seen an international community fragmented and driven by separate, selfish appetites - Russia and China obsessed with Muslim markets; France, with Arab oil - and the United States driven by the debacle in Iraq into a deep isolationism. Iran has been left free to pursue its nuclear destiny and Israel and Iran, to face off alone...

Interviewer: How can the Iraqi public, which is anti-American, and which believes the U.S. is the Great Satan, support people who talk the way you do?

Iyad Jamal Al-Din: Whoever believes America is the Great Satan should not shake its hand. I do not consider the U.S. to be the Great Satan. I view it as the sponsor and founder of the project of democracy, and the defender of democracy in Iraq. You can be sure that if America were to withdraw today, there would be Shiite massacres of Shiites, Sunni massacres of Sunnis, and Kurdish massacres of Kurds. The strong would again devour the weak until somebody would be back the next day – there's no doubt about it. We are still far from democracy.

Interviewer: On what do you base your trust of the U.S. and its plans for the region?

Iyad Jamal Al-Din: Democracy is the religion of the dollar and serves its global interests. This dollar has a spirited life – it is dear, honorable, and loveable. It gets vexed real quickly, get it? Dollar has a religion. The religion of the dollar is democracy. This applies to the entire world, because the dollar cannot thrive in dictatorial countries, but only in democracies. For the sake of their global economy, [the Americans] establish democracy. We, the oppressed and slaughtered peoples, have seen nothing but stupid dictators or wise dictators. It's one of the two. Wise dictators pave roads and build houses, but they are still dictators. On the other hand, there are stupid dictators, like our friend who has gone. We are very far from democracy. It is inconceivable that we endured this humiliation and tyranny for 1,400 years, yet we are unable to create a democracy. Even after 1,400 years, our culture is still...

Interviewer: Democracy has resulted in what is now happening in Iraq.

Iyad Jamal Al-Din: The result of democracy... We don't know... We are very far from liberty. Do we even know what to do with the values of liberty? The moment Saddam's club was lifted from over our heads, each and every one of us wanted to assume Saddam's personality. We had one Saddam, and now we have six, seven, ten, or fifteen Saddams. We now have local mini-Saddams. I said this before the war. I said that America would do us a favor by ridding us of Saddam the dictator, but that this favor would be incomplete unless it rids us of the opposition parties. But this did not happen during the war. These people are photo-copies of Saddam. Saddam was in power for 35 years, and so was the leader of this or that opposition party - not only in Iraq, but in all Arab and Islamic countries. The opposition is the mirror image of the regime. If we want to simplify matters, how come Hosni Mubarak has ruled for 23 power? I want to rule in his place, not because I want to change the nature of the regime, to make it a democracy, which respects human beings and private property... We are still far from all this. Therefore, in my opinion, democracy can be established in our region only through force. Democracy must be established by force, and only America can do it.

It's like Hitler saying "the German people have existed for 2000 years",
or whatever. It is worse than lie -- a delusion.

There is no "Jewish people." It does not exist. It is a fiction, like
that of the "German Volk (= people)", or the "Aryan race."

If it were just a delusion, it would not be so bad. But it is a
nationalist, racist delusion exactly like that of Hitler's "German people."

It is used as an excuse for exploitation, murder, and eternal war.

Zionism is a filthy ideology, it's true. But it is one that exists to
justify mass murder, just like Naziism.

It'll go the same way Naziism went, too.

Were Dr. King’s comments to Held intended only to soothe a miffed supporter? Hardly. In a March 25, 1968 speech to the Rabbinical Assembly, Dr. King said: “peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.” Less than two weeks later, on April 4, Dr. King was murdered while organizing support for striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee...

Stand out for Human Rights in Palestine and Massachusetts and against Deval Patrick, Zionism and the police state

Tomorrow Friday January 12, Deval Patrick will be speaking at the "MLK Shabbat" at Temple Israel at 477 Longwood Ave (corner of Longwood Ave & the Riverway, near Longwood Green Line T Stop). Temple Israel is an institution that has long and ardently opposed civil rights and human rights in Palestine. Temple Israel supports the Zionist genocidal project against the Arab people of Palestine and other countries in the Middle East, and specifically supported the Zionist attacks against the people of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip this year. It is obscene for this institution to have an event ostensibly honoring Martin Luther King Jr., a man who was murdered and martyred for his work for civil rights and against war...

Oh, brother. This wreck of a thesis emerged early in the documentary as fact and fiction collided, mangling cause and effect. According to the show, Jews basically caused anti-Semitism in the Arab-Muslim region around them by first building the tiny modern state of Israel (500 times smaller than that Arab Muslim region), and then actually trying to defend it against a host of Muslim armies and terror groups. As PBS tells it, it isn't the genocidal proclivities of surrounding Muslim nations that have caused war unending on the Jewish state; it's the continued existence of the Jewish state that has caused the genocidal proclivities. The show practically begs a viewer to ask, Well, what else could you expect?...

...The notion that Christians introduced Muslims to anti-Semitism may well be the conventional wisdom -- indeed, it may even be that nonagenarian Lewis is the source of that conventional wisdom -- but just as surely as anti-Semitism historically existed in Christianity, it also historically existed in Islam. And I can actually footnote that statement because, quite by chance, the same week the documentary aired, I happened to read the first chapter of a forthcoming book called "The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism" by Andrew G. Bostom, author of "The Legacy of Jihad."

Bostom examines the origins of anti-Semitism in the Koran (such as in 2:61, which decrees an eternal curse of humiliation and wretchedness on Jews, repeated in 3:112), in the canonical commentaries on the Koran, and in the historical record. And it all begins practically 1,000 years before, say, Queen Victoria made herself an empress. The question is, does anti-Semitism's origin in Islam, whether Christian or Islamic, become a chicken-egg question for scholars, or does it actually matter?

It matters a great deal, and here's why. The conventional wisdom, as expressed on PBS, does two things. It blames Christianity and the West for introducing anti-Semitism to a practically Edenic Islamic world, and it minimizes Islam's non-original sin of partaking of it. Indeed, this same conventional wisdom suggests that anti-Semitism is the natural, if unfortunate, response of "unempowered" Muslims to contemporary political events beyond their control -- namely, the essentially Christian/Western-sponsored establishment of the modern state of Israel.

If we bothered -- if we dared -- to examine anti-Semitism in its historical Islamic context (just as we have examined anti-Semitism in its historical Christian context), we would better understand Islam's hysterical rejection of Israel, which, in Islamic terms, is a state of "dhimmi" inferiors restored to equality, if not economic and military superiority, its very existence a violation of traditional Islamic code...

...“Did anybody who lives here try to get Hezbollah to leave the village?” I said.

“We don’t have any arms,” Jad said. “Hezbollah has arms. But there was this incident that happened. Next to a guy’s place they were firing Katyushas – you know, missiles. They were firing from the house. This guy went out and said Please, do not fire from our home, from in front of our house. My father is very ill and there are some children in the house. They came to him and said Shut up, go in your house, this is none of your business.”...

...He told me that 18 days after the start of the war a large group of civilians decided it was time to leave Ain Ebel and flee to the north. They were no longer willing to stay while Israel fired back at Hezbollah’s rocket launchers. It was too dangerous, and Hezbollah insisted on staying and endangering those who lived there.

So they fled the area in a convoy of civilian vehicles. It was safer, they figured, to travel in a group than alone.

On their way out of the village, Hezbollah fighters stood on the side of the road and opened fire with machine guns on the fleeing civilians.

I was shocked, and I asked Alan to confirm this. Was it really true? Hezbollah opened fire on Lebanese civilians with machine guns? Alan confirmed this was true.

"Why?" I had an idea, but I wanted a local person to say it.

Because, Alan said, Hezbollah wanted to use the civilians of Ain Ebel as “human shields.” I did not use the phrase “human shields.” These were Alan’s own words...

In fact, the referenced segment of Carr's presentation was the only time that the hecklers were silent. Perhaps this is because Joe Carr, in powerfully reciting his poem, brought transparency to the issue...

The appointment of Labor MK Majadele as Minister of Science was decided upon Wednesday evening by Defense Minister Amir Peretz (pictured). As head of the Labor Party, Peretz has the right to choose his party's ministers - though of course Prime Minister Ehud Olmert makes the official appointment. This will probably happen on Sunday.

The decision to appoint an Arab to the Cabinet was received cynically within the political establishment. Ex-Minister Pines, who finds himself upstaged - an Arab is willing to sit with a minister who Pines said was too anti-Arab - said that Peretz is merely trying to win over the Arab sector in the coming Labor Party primaries. "This is a Peretz-Majadele machination that is a new record in cynicism and insult to the voters' intelligence," Pines said...

...Though Majadele is the first Arab to serve in the Israeli government, he is not the first non-Jew to do so. Salah Tarif, of the Druze community, served as a Minister Without Portfolio for ten months in 2001. Tarif resigned because of a criminal investigation against him that led to his conviction on charges of bribing an Interior Ministry official to obtain citizenship for a friend of his from the Palestinian Authority...

The PA routinely names youth sporting events after terrorists, including a soccer tournament the PA named for the Passover eve suicide terrorist who killed 31 Israelis, and summer camps for girls were named after Wafa Idris, the first woman suicide terrorist, and Ayaat al Akhras a 17 year old, the youngest girl suicide terrorist. [Al Hayat Al Jadida, Jan. 21, 2003; Al-Ayyam, July 18, 2003; Al Quds, Aug. 14, 2003]

In addition, Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement announced that a double memorial stone has been erected honoring both Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat. The glorification of Saddam as a Shahid [Martyr for Allah] follows years of mutual support between Saddam Hussein and Yasser Arafat.

The following are the new articles:

“The sports department in the youth community center in Tulkarm is organizing the first soccer tournament named after the Shahid [Martyr] and leader, Saddam Hussein.” [Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, January 10, 2007]

“The Fatah movement in the Deheishe camp south of Bethlehem erected yesterday two memorial stones in the memory of two shahids, Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein. This took place during a ceremony of the movement for the commemoration of 42 years to its establishment, with the presence of the delegate of the Fatah movement, Muhammad Al-Laham… Al-Laham:'The erecting of the two memorial stones comes from a positive recognition of the immense sacrifice that the two shahids realized for the sake of their nation. Both went without renouncing their national principles.'”
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, January 8, 2007]

Last month, the Forward has learned, leaders of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, a 1,500-member group representing Reform rabbis, called off a scheduled tour of the Carter Center after the public reaction to Carter’s book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” reached a fevered pitch, and an interdenominational group of rabbis expressed disappointment over a meeting with the former president...

It’s all too predictable. The "fragmentation" of Palestinian society has, in Mr Bowen’s view, nothing to do with the Palestinians and everything to do with Israel (“the death of hope, caused by a cocktail of Israel's military activities, land expropriation and settlement building – and the financial sanctions imposed on the Hamas led government”). Indeed, Israel is to blame for almost everything. The Palestinians are not responsible for anything; Israel is the culpable party.

He has contempt for every Israeli politician he mentions; Ehud Barak, for instance, is described as having killed "various Palestinians", written as if he did so for the sake of it.

If this is what passes for high-level analysis at the BBC, is it any wonder its reporting is so poisonous?

What I was doing is showing how the characteristics of a Palestine ballot question allow the GRP to distinguish itself clearly ... and that's because it strikes straight to the core of the Democrats complicity with elites.

But since you mentioned it !,... I will say that doing a foriegn policy issue next to the poverty related issue that I proposed could be acceptable and Palestine would be a good candidate...

...I disagree that Palestine is a divisive issue [Yeah, right.]. It's the Democrats in Somerville and elsewhere who kept saying "Palestine is divisive". What they really meant is that they wanted to shield zionists inside of progressive circles from stinging criticism from the "left" (social justice workers)...

You said "But it is politically divisive and could be a waste of time for a state political party at best, or a disaster at worst. What's the goal here? To show the public that we can stick our finger in the eye of zionism"

The answer to your question is yes. The goal is to show that the GRP is a party that is anti-racist (anti-zionists) and draw support from that as was done in Somerville...

I inserted myself at the point when Mr. Anderson first was debating about this group coming and I urged him to postpone the event, which he initially did. I had...was part of those discussions with the lawyers and what it seems to me we were hearing pretty unambiguously that if we denied them coming back, we would probably be losing the case, and so we would be having the group back later, like it or not, and we'd be having them back at great cost to the community. I mention cost as a secondary factor because basically what it seemed to me what the lawyers were saying is you can have them now or you can have them later, and if you have them later it will be more money but you WILL have them back.

My issue with that and a lot of us around the table in those days really did a lot of arguing and debating with the lawyers. Because at this point, whether I had political feelings about the group coming back or not, I would choose tonight to keep those feelings to myself because I think in fact those should not be publicly related. My political views are not to be part of my public life. But I was concerned about quality of the group because I went on the internet and I looked at them and I asked them questions, and in my mind it seemed absolutely amazing that we would be bringing in a group about a topic that could not be more important today by a group we knew very little about when we lived in a world here in New England of some of the finest experts imaginable. So my concern from the beginning in addition to other concerns I had, but my concern was really the academic qualities and credentials to speak about an important issue and to take the time of our students. I will tell you that when I observed this group, I was one of the observers in the classroom, and I knew that in the evening there would be concern, and I heard it expressed that night, that in fact my worst fears came to be true, that the group was not particularly qualified to speak about these issues. Their presentation was poor. They were factually incorrect. They were obviously biased. I think we knew they were going to be but I found them not worthy of our students' time, and I will say that publicly over again.

My actions going forward: There's a policy going before the school committee tonight that I fully support because I think it puts into place some some discussions that I believe were denied to our principal and myself that I think we need to have some authority. When that policy if it's passed is passed, I will work with the principals on procedures to implement that policy so that we can prevent what has happened and brought you here tonight. I will work with the teachers as well because I think that this whole question of what we bring in to our students, the quality, the excellence, the academic excellence which I think is absolutely crucial in the issue. I will work with teachers at the curriculum councils as well as at the high school and other schools to have people really be very very scrutinizing and diligent about what we bring. When we bring speakers, when Marcia O'Neil and I bring speakers before the teachers, we don't bring a speaker in we haven't first heard and that we don't have a lot of information about. And I think we learn from this criteria. I will also work with the educators on internet literacy because I think just looking up on the internet a website and googling somebody is not good enough. We have to do much more than that. I won't hesitate to take any action when people say, "Well, have you done anything?" If complaints are brought forward to me, I will and will continue to do so in this case and all cases to investigate thoroughly. You will not know about those investigations because you can't know. But I will be as I always have and I have a reputation for following through with that. So you need to know I will do it.

Finally, I want to offer my apology, and I truly regret that this whole thing has occurred that has caused so much pain in this room...and it's been genuine pain.

Issues like this deserve serious debate and I hope that in fact what we can do is move forward with serious debate on these issues. I would hate in the future to imagine that the schoolhouse could not be a place for discussions such as was the intention, because the schoolhouse, as somebody said to me the other day, is expected to address these issues, address issues that society hasn't figured out yet and so we always will have the obligation and should bringing those forward. But we have to do it in the right way. For some to see what has happened as a victory in this and not see the pain is incomprehensible to me. If the objective was to enlighten and to bring further understanding to Andover of this enormously important issue - then that failed. So there has been no victory, only deep sorrow in a community that needs healing and I hope you will join with me to do that, because we need to move forward. We need to be healed. And we need to continue to bring educational excellence to our students.

• Adopt a Zero Tolerance policy against any form of hate speech or environment that creates a hostile or tense atmosphere in the Andover Schools
• Work directly with the Teachers’ Union to adopt a policy that prevents teachers or administrators from using school property, time or resources for the purpose of extending their religious, political or social ideologies unless it is in direct correlation with their department curriculum and approved by the Office of the Superintendent.
• Full accountability of school administrators, including and especially the Superintendent of Schools and High School Principal who have both shown an inability to exercise good judgment as it relates to protecting our kids

My name is XXXX and I moved to Andover 1 ½ years ago with my wife and two school age children. Our primary reason for moving to the town was to have our children in a top ranked school system. I can assure you that if I had seen the article in yesterday’s Boston Globe “Conflict Besets Andover High”, we would NOT have moved to Andover.

Today I am embarrassed of the decisions made at the high school and deeply disappointed in the school administration for putting our children in danger by allowing Wheels of Justice to speak, virtually unrestrained, last Friday at the High School.

There is no way that Dr. Bach and Mr. Anderson can deny that they created a safety risk by allowing the following:

1. Creating a hostile and tense environment for the students of Andover High ( these are the students’ and teachers’ words, not mine )
2. “ Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress “ caused by, as an example, the photos and discourse that caused at least one student to leave Friday’s assembly in tears.
3. Showing pictures that with their depiction of violence would likely earn at least an “ R “ rating as a parental advisory to children under the age of 17
4. Allowing children as young as the age of 14 to be in the library and within earshot of the speakers, with no access to any alternative view
5. Petition intimidation by the teachers and fellow students, who by their own admission, did not realize what they were signing and in some cases felt pressured by their peers to sign
6. A video created at the Friday night session, that includes the students and can be accessed and viewed with little or no restriction
7. One of the most shocking safety risks was created by Dr. Bach and Peter Anderson in allowing WOJ to obtain from the students a list of personal information including eMail addresses. It is important to note that Joe Carr -A/K/A Joe Smith- one of the invited speakers, is directly affiliated with a group called “ ISM “ or International Solidarity Movement. This group is profoundly violent and Pro-PLO, and actively recruits students and puts them in situations where they are killed or injured. It is also important to note that Joe Carr is actively followed by Homeland Security and his visit to your High School was paid for by discretionary funds including his plane ticket- approved by Tom Meyers the president of the teacher’s union and Peter Anderson your principal. No attempt was made to stop this list from being created and a copy was retrieved from the possession of Tom Meyers at his home – why would Tom Meyers have this list and what copies were made ???

It would be easy for the administration to say they did not know they were creating a hostile, tense or unsafe environment, but then we would demand they answer why they realized they needed to have an Andover Police Officer in the school starting at 6 AM on Friday. How many other invited speakers to our High School require an armed police presence ?

This is, above all, a management issue. This is not a situation where the administration and the board can simply put in new rules and say “ problem solved “. Life does not work that way and we all have to be held accountable for our actions – it is a lesson that we owe to our children.

We live in an age where students walk into high schools and kill and maim their fellow students for little recognizable or known reasons and our administrators have seen fit to put a match to gasoline and potentially ignite a flame that would make yesterday’s Globe Headline look like good news.

It is against this background that the $24 million mosque and cultural center being built by the Islamic Society of Boston has generated such controversy.

Questions have been raised about the Islamic Society's past and present leaders, some of whom have supported Islamist terrorism or indulged in virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic rhetoric. There are concerns about the sweetheart deal in which the land for the mosque was acquired from the City of Boston for a fraction of its value. Especially disturbing has been the Islamic Society's response to its diverse critics: a lawsuit accusing them of anti-Muslim conspiracy and libel.

That libel, the lawsuit charges, included claims that the "ISB receives funds from Wahhabis and/or Muslim Brotherhood and/or other Saudi/Middle Eastern sources" and that "the ISB Project was supported financially by donors from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states 'with known connections to radical Islamists.' " Given the Saudi role in disseminating jihadist fanaticism, it might indeed be defamatory to falsely accuse the ISB of financial ties to Saudi Arabia.

But such ties are quite real.

According to financial documents supplied to The Boston Globe, major funding for the mosque is being provided by the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In December 2005, two payments of approximately $250,000 each were wired from Jeddah to the Citizens Bank account of the mosque's general contractor in Boston. Messages confirming the payments were faxed from Jeddah to the Islamic Society of Boston on Dec. 19; these refer to the payments as "USA-52" and "USA-53." Other documents suggest that subsequent payments have been made as well.

The Islamic Development Bank is a subsidiary of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and each of the conference's 56 member nations are shareholders. But the largest shares are owned by Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iran, which together control 48 percent of the bank's stock. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Iran are also three of the world's foremost sponsors or incubators of terrorism. It is perhaps not surprising that the Islamic Development Bank, through its Al-Quds and Al-Aqsa funds, has become a leading funder of Palestinian suicide bombing, paying large financial subsidies to the families of terrorists.

The Islamic Society of Boston didn't return my calls, but its website notes that all donors are cross-checked against the government's terrorist watch list, and that funding is accepted only "with no strings attached." It notes too that it "rejects any interpretation of Islam that is considered fundamentalist, oppressive, radical, anti-Western, or anti-Semitic."

But questions remain. More questions will come. Suing the good people who ask them won't make the questions go away. Answering them candidly, on the other hand, just might.

The Islamic society acknowledged yesterday receiving a $1 million loan from the Islamic Development Bank in late 2005 -- principal owners of which are Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iran, and Egypt -- after opponents of the mosque project provided the Globe with documents showing that the bank paid about $500,000 in mosque construction bills late in 2005.

Work on the mosque, which is being built at Roxbury Crossing, ground to a halt last autumn due to lack of funds. But work restarted this week using the unexpended portion of the loan, $1 million in donations raised locally during last year's Ramadan holiday, and $1,352,500 from the sale of Islamic society property in Cambridge, society spokeswoman Jessica Masse said.

Backers of the mosque say the bank is a legitimate financial institution that supports important projects in the Islamic world.

The 56 members of the Organization of Islamic Conference contribute in varying degrees to the Islamic Development Bank, which uses their money to finance a broad range of agricultural, industrial, and infrastructure projects in the Islamic world. But Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iran, and Egypt provide a majority of the funds. The bank also supervises and disburses money from special funds created to support Palestinian families, including the families of suicide bombers. Saudi Arabia is a major contributor to those special funds...

...The mosque project was originally budgeted at about $20 million. During early fund-raising efforts, according to the Islamic society, all donations came from individuals: about 40 percent from Massachusetts donors, 30 percent from Saudis, 12 percent from other Middle Easterners and 15 percent from Western Europeans.

Donations from these sources dried up, Islamic society officials say, because of what they allege was a conspiracy involving the Boston Herald, WFXT-TV (Channel 25), and individual activists, most of them Jewish, to block the project by accusing the society's leaders of terrorist associations. The alleged conspirators are now defendants in a defamation suit brought by the Islamic society...

Indeed, since the talks fell apart, there has emerged a mythology that seeks to defend Mr. Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton ideas by suggesting they weren’t real or they were too vague or that Palestinians would have received far less than what had been advertised. Mr. Arafat himself tried to defend his rejection of the Clinton proposals by later saying he was not offered even 90 percent of the West Bank or any of East Jerusalem. But that was myth, not reality.

Why is it important to set the record straight? Nothing has done more to perpetuate the conflict between Arabs and Israelis than the mythologies on each side. The mythologies about who is responsible for the conflict (and about its core issues) have taken on a life of their own. They shape perception. They allow each side to blame the other while avoiding the need to face up to its own mistakes. So long as myths are perpetuated, no one will have to face reality.

And yet peace can never be built on these myths. Instead it can come only once the two sides accept and adjust to reality. Perpetuating a myth about what was offered to justify the Arafat rejection serves neither Palestinian interests nor the cause of peace...

...“What do you think about Israel in general?” I said. “Aside from the war in July?”

“I have nothing against Israel,” Henry said. “They are good people and they do good for themselves. We need to make peace with everyone. They are open-minded people, but we have no way to communicate with them since the Syrians came.”

“I would love to visit the Holy Land,” Said said. “My mother went there when the border was open before 2000. It is a good place. If you want to make peace with people, you can make peace, especially with the Israelis. They just want to live in their country, so it is no problem.”...

..."Can we get out and talk to people around here?”

“I do not recommend it,” Said said. “They cannot talk freely. These watchers will come up to us if we get out of the car, and they will make sure anyone who talks to us only tells us what they are supposed to say.”...

...Porvoo District Court fines newspaper reps. in racism trial. Both the Uusimaa and Leftist paper Kansan Uutiset (The Peoples Paper) received fines for publishing the racist op-ed.

"The writer, who had defended the Nazi holocaust in the letter, was also fined for incitement against an ethnic group. The prosecutor in the case said that the article constituted veiled incitement in favour of violence against an ethnic group.The writer had submitted the letter to a number of newspapers. It was published in the two newspapers last summer." More here...

With both the Yankee's help and blessing, God's chosen people have begun a new round of murder and destruction. I had wrote here a year or so ago about similar acts by the chosen people. They are surely a badly chosen people, killing all kinds of innocent civilians while claiming the right to self defense.

This wouldn't be possible without the Yankee's support through money and weapons. It's not enough for Bush that a hundred people a day are being killed in Iraq with the majority being innocent civilian victims. All of what's happening in Israel and in Iraq is with Bush's permission, as long as he keeps the oil billions tightly sewed in the ass of his pant's pocket. It is very clear to all here, that Israel's murder and destruction operation is meant to turn the world's attention away from the murdering of his own in Iraq.

Bush could care less, what kind of mental cripple will return from Iraq, if even they come back at all.They're no longer able to live a normal life, ever. This is the kind of Hitler, Europe and the world's leaders are bowing to with brown tongues. Even though Hitler was such a beast, one would have wished that there would have been enough time and gas to complete the final solution in order for the chosen people to be finished once and for all.

Israelis have never been ready to give the Palestinians any kind of livelihood or right to self determination. Forgetting the support itself has received from other nations. The world bows only to the world policeman, Bush, and to the owners of the world's mammon. Europe's great leaders bow while the whirlpool of insane crude oil prices create even worse trouble ahead. What in the hell is the UN or the EU for?

"How can you talk about bombing a country when you won't even talk to them?" said Clark. "It's outrageous. We're the United States of America; we don't do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the military option is off the table - but diplomacy is not what Jim Baker says it is. It's not, 'what will it take for you boys to support us on Iraq?' It's sitting down for a couple of days and talking about our families and our hopes, and building relationships."

When we asked him what made him so sure the Bush administration was headed in this direction, he replied: "You just have to read what's in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided, but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office seekers."

4. Gee, what can he possibly mean by "pressure being channeled from the New York money people"?

5. Two aspects of these ramblings I find worthy of comment. First: how and why has it become so easy to speak in this about the Jews? Second: What does it mean politically?...

Sadeq Al-Musawi: You are a thief... You are a thief. You've been convicted for theft..

Mish'an Al-Jabouri : Get out. Saddam Hussein is your master and the master of your parents...

Mish'an Al-Jabouri: These are your documents. You are an Iranian citizen. You are Persian... You are an Iranian citizen... Saddam Hussein is your master and the master of people like you... (throwing the pages at Al-Musawi) These are your documents...

Sadeq Al-Musawi: Your father killed Kurds...

Mish'an Al-Jabouri: These are your Iranian documents... You are Iranian. These documents show that he applied for Iraqi citizenship in May 2004.

Sadeq Al-Musawi: We will settle accounts with all of you...

Mish'an Al-Jabouri: To hell with you and your accounts...

Host: Sir, I beg you to sit down...

Mish'an Al-Jabouri: You Persian shoe...

The Hebrew Bible is a fairy tale. Ancient Israel is a fiction. All the shards of pottery, the houses, the stone walls, terraces, grain storage silos and tombs in the hill country, forget about them. None of them speak, and none can be clearly linked to the Jewish people. Moreover, the Jews of modern-day Israel have no genetic or other real connection to the land they have illegitimately occupied in the modern age.

Or so Nadia Abu El-Haj would have you suspect. In her 2001 book, "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society," published by the University of Chicago Press, the Barnard assistant professor of anthropology accused Israeli archaeology of making it all up simply to justify the existence of the Jewish state.

Five years later, this book is back in the news. That’s because El-Haj is up for tenure, and a number of Barnard alumnae are not pleased...

...El-Haj is not a practicing archaeologist. She hardly knows the Hebrew in which many Israeli archaeological debates are conducted. She has taken part in very few actual digs. Yet she confidently condemns Israeli archaeology as a tool of the Zionists. With only gossip to go on, she accuses one archaeologist of bulldozing non-Jewish strata to get to the levels that might offer details about ancient Israel. Bizarrely, she then concludes her book by reversing herself on such desecration, asking us to "understand" sympathetically the Palestinian mob that destroyed Joseph’s Tomb on October 8, 2000. I guess it all depends on whose narrative is being bulldozed...

...Lately, she has also embarked on genetic ancestry testing among Israel’s Jews in order to explore "race, diaspora and kinship." Will she seek to prove that Israelis today have no genetic link to the ancient Israelites and therefore no claim to their Jewish homeland?

If this is her intent, I have a personal reaction. My forebears came to America in the 1890s from Latvia and Poland. The Declaration of Independence, however, was written by upper crust WASPS. Nevertheless, it is still every bit as much a part of my proud identity and heritage as anyone else’s. So also are the lands of Israel and the Hebrew Bible. For hoping to erase the Jewish historical presence in Israel, for embracing a genetic concept of Jewish identity, and for further turning Palestinian and Jew against one another, Nadia Abu El-Haj’s book is a pure polemic. If Barnard grants her tenure, it will be rewarding a polemic, not scholarship.

Heaps of the baggage are being sent to cheap sub-contractors in Italy to be sorted - and some of the luggage despatched there is then being sent on to its owners' destinations after the passengers have finished their trips and returned home.

BA also admitted the true scale of the baggage shambles last night, saying that an astonishing 28,000 customers had lost luggage over the last three weeks. The crisis began when a baggage belt broke at Heathrow in mid-December, was compounded by fog problems, and another baggage belt broke on December 29.

And the arline was forced into an embarrassing climbdown yesterday after the Daily Mail revealed BA was profiting from every call made to its baggage helpline, with some customers holding for ten hours and paying 3p a minute for the privilege. The company belatedly introduced a free phone number yesterday afternoon...

So I've sent in a claim for the silk shirt, the dry cleaning and the calls I made from the Daniel Hotel. I think it's probably wise to try to avoid flights that connect in Heathrow. I did a lot of reading about it over the holidays and it seems it's kind of straining at the seams with overcrowding--too many flights coming through...

One of our engineers had been assigned to an offshore facility in Egyptian waters, near Saudi Arabia. Because of hostilities during the Yom Kippur War, all of our personnel were ordered to vacate the drilling facilities, and leave the area. He was among the last to leave, as his team was in charge of shutting the rigs down. He was booked on a British Airways (then known as BOAC) flight back to London, and from there, an American carrier back to the U.S. He was very surprised to find that he was the only passenger on a 747 from Riyadh to Cairo to Heathrow. This was due primarily to the Yom Kippur War, as passenger traffic was restricted.

A flight crew of 5 or 6, and a total of twelve cabin attendants gave him what he described as the most personal service he had ever received an any flight. He said he felt like royalty, and was almost disappointed when he arrived in England, and went back to being treated like any other commoner. This feeling was was reinforced when he was informed at Heathrow that his luggage had been 'mishandled', and could not be located. He told me that it took three additional days for his bags to catch up to him in New York. We could never figure out how the luggage could be lost, as he was the only passenger, and his were the only bags in luggage compartment...

Bahraini runner Mushir Salem Jawher competed and won the Tiberias Marathon in Israel on Thursday, ending the race in just over 2 hours and 13 minutes.

Most Arab states do not recognize Israel, and the Jerusalem Post newspaper said Jawher was the first athlete from an Arab country to compete in an Israeli marathon. Jawher was born in Kenya in 1978 and moved to Bahrain in 2003, according to the International Association of Athletics Federation.

The Jerusalem Post cited Jawher as saying he was "very proud" to have run in Israel. Even though Bahrain has no official ties with the Jewish state, "It is a free country," the athlete was quoted as saying.

Bahrain's Athletic Union said in a statement Saturday that it had received the news that a Bahraini national competed in Israel with "shock and regret."

"The union deeply regrets what the athlete has done," the statement said. A comity of sport and government authorities decided to strike Jawher's name off the sport union records and strip off his Bahraini nationality, the statement said...

Dear Upper School Parents,

I am writing to let you know about an assembly we have planned for Thursday, February 23rd. We have invited Professor Muhammed Muslih of Long Island University and Associate Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh of Yale to speak to the Upper School students and faculty about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both Professor Muslih and Associate Professor Qumsiyeh are Palestinians. Professor Muslih will speak for 10 minutes in favor of a two-state solution, and Professor Qumsiyeh will speak for 10 minutes in favor of a one-state solution, and for the balance of the assembly they will entertain questions from the audience.

Several days later another letter followed. It read:

Dear Upper School Parents:

I am writing to inform you that we have decided not to go forward with the February 23rd assembly on the Israeli-Palestine question. As important as we all believe this issue is and as much as we hoped for from the assembly and the accompanying activities, the events of the last several days have persuaded me that the assembly forum we chose to launch this discussion was not appropriate given the sensitivity and complexity of the issue.

I appreciate the many thoughtful phone calls and e-mails I received in response to my recent letter. Many of you who were most concerned about our plan framed your concerns in the most positive and constructive terms, and I deeply regret the unhappiness that my letter and support for this project has caused you.

Sincerely,
John Love
Upper School Principal

What caused Fieldston to reverse engines so dramatically? “Their complacency got punctured,” says a Fieldston parent. “This is a school that distributed condoms to 15-year-olds without much protest from parents, and had a Transgender Day with no ruckus at all. So they must have thought they could get by with Dr. Qumsiyeh. Wrong.”

Very wrong, in fact. Not long after the announcement reached the upper school parents, Love began to receive phone calls and e-mails protesting Fieldston’s decision. A letter from Jerome Gordon, a retired banker and Jewish activist, was one of the most acute. He noted that Qumsiyeh, a geneticist, hadn’t been at Yale for more than a year—and that he wasn’t a professor when he was there. The doctor was, however, very active as a Palestinian extremist with a gift for invective. Indeed, one of his articles, distributed at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland, wound up getting withdrawn following protests about his arguments for divestment from companies doing business with Israel...

"I am an anarchist; I seek to tear down hierarchies in my personal interactions, organizing structures, & society at large. I am a revolutionary; this US-dominated global capitalist system is inherently flawed & I aim to help accelerate its inevitable collapse & create a truly sustainable & egalitarian society. I work for peace in my personal interactions and I oppose all wars waged by governments to ensure their dominance, but I am NOT a pacifist; I find nonviolent tactics powerful and effective, but violence & property destruction have always been an essential part of revolutionary movements & I support everyone's right to self defense." –ISM activist Joseph Smith

The above quote is a self-description posted on the website of International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist Joseph Smith. (The ISM is a smokescreen for various PLO anti-Israel and pro-Ba'ath Party groups in Iraq and relies on a few non-profits in the US like the Middle East Children's Alliance in California and Brecht Forum in New York to launder and disperse funds to its subgroups.) The Zelig of revolutionary pilgrims, Smith has been a prominent member of the anti-Israel campaign waged by radical agitators...

The never-ending anti-Zionist attacks on Israel have produced more than their fair share of deluded hope. The only real path to peace between Israel and its neighbours is a two- state solution, acceptance of the existence of Israel and creation of a separate Palestinian state beside Israel. But it is a solution that anti-Zionists constantly spurn. They want the destruction of Israel and its absorption into a larger Arab Muslim state, what is euphemistically called the one-state solution.

Anti-Zionists promote their cause by propagating phony charges against Israel to discredit and delegitimize the Jewish state. Wishful thinkers ignore the anti-Semitism at the core of anti-Zionist criticism and fantasize that, if only Israel avoided this or that behaviour that anti-Zionists decry, the two-state solution would be at hand.

This fantasy world has many imaginary constructions. One of these is that Palestinians who support anti-Zionists do not want to destroy Israel. Mary Corkery of KAIROS and Etienne De Jonghe of Pax Christi International asserted this remarkable proposition in a letter to the editor published in The Globe and Mail on Dec. 22. They wrote that Palestinians who voted for the anti-Zionist terrorist organization Hamas in last January's Palestinian election "did not vote to destroy Israel, nor do they want this." The authors do not explain how they know that Palestinians wanted something different from the platform of the party for which they voted...

Like Hamas and Hezbolah, Wheels of Justice advocates want the State of Israel wiped off the map. Sound familiar? This is also the viewpoint of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, whose most recent accomplishment is sponsoring an international conference denying the Holocaust.

Neither Wheels of Justice nor its local supporters accepts the right of the democratic State of Israel to exist, and argues that the sole cause of the Middle East conflict is the presence in the region of a Jewish state. Both refuse to acknowledge that any Palestinians engage in terrorism and equate Israel alternately with apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany.

These extreme views ought to have raised red flags for the school. The right of Israel to exist is not up for debate. Moderates on all sides of the Middle East conflict long ago recognized the necessity of a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. High schools hardly have enough time to teach the fundamentals of the conflict and struggle for peace and security in the Middle East. Indulging the fantasies of anti-Israel extremists undermines real efforts at education on this complex topic...

Pam Lebowitz has organized about 100 parents and residents who are demanding that the high school invite other guests to oppose Wheels of Justice, which they say is an extremist, anti-Israel group. Middle East scholars are coming to the school next week to give a different perspective, but that is not the same as having the two sides present at the same time, Lebowitz said.

"We don't understand why we can't have a more balanced forum," she said.

Lebowitz and some of her colleagues planned to plead their case to Superintendent Claudia Bach this morning, during her monthly coffee hour at Starbucks on Main Street. If Bach and Principal Peter Anderson do not make any changes, Lebowitz's group will help about 50 students who want to stage a walkout or picket in front of the school tomorrow, Lebowitz said.

Lebowitz, whose nephews attend the high school, may also seek an injunction to prevent Wheels of Justice from coming to the school, she said.

While she and some parents planned their strategy at Memorial Hall Library last night, others - along with students, teachers and community members - attended a forum at Temple Emanuel with David Cohen, the associate director of the Anti-Defamation League of New England.

The purpose of the forum was to give students a "deeper understanding" of the Wheels of Justice, Rabbi Robert Goldstein said. About 20 students attended, and they said that most of their discussions in school have been about whether the group has a right to speak there.

"We haven't really talked about what the group is," senior Jillian Bargar said.

Cohen told the audience that Wheels of Justice has a "destructive" and "frighteningly anti-Semitic" message, and he distributed a double-sided sheet of paper about Joe Carr and Mazin Qumsiyeh, the two members of the group who will speak to students tomorrow.

Carr's Web site says it is "dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S.-led global capitalist oppression" and displays the symbol for anarchy. In a recent article on the Palestine Chronicle's Web site, Qumsiyeh says "ethnic cleansing" is happening to Palestinians in Israel...

Sheik Fayyadh Al-Akhdhar: The Hamas of the Revolution of the Mosques, of the War of the Knives, of the car bombs, of the great martyrdom-seekers, of the Al-Qassam missiles, of the Zionists' death tunnels, of the kidnapping of the soldiers and the setters is the same Hamas of the government, of the Legislative Council, and of the ministries. It has not changed, and it will not change, and it will continue to march along the path of the martyrs, and to follow in their footsteps, until the liberation of the Al-Aqsa Mosque from the filth of the aggressive oppressors.

...I asked Francis about the Andover ordeal, at which point he and John [Spritzler] gleamed and thanked me for the free publicity... many students are approaching him and are asking about Palestinians and why there was all this hoopla...

"So now I get to talk to them about Palestinians and they trust me because I am their favorite teacher. They know I would not lie. As a physicist, I can talk to them scientifically."...

...When Francis was thanking me for the free publicity he and the WoJ got in the media, he lost his cool, and started bragging about his indoctrination of the students at AHS, saying that it would have been better for our side to just let the WoJ in, and be done with it. Because now, he said, there are enough students and teachers who are outraged and want to know "the truth" -- and guess who is going to deliver "the truth" to them? You guessed it -- the virtuous, righteous Dr. Francis, of course...

BEIRUT – After Hezbollah mounted a protest aimed at bringing down Lebanon’s elected government, several thousand demonstrators remained downtown and camped out in tents, effectively occupying the center of the city. They first tried to seize and occupy Prime Minister Fouad Seniora’s office in the Ottoman-era Serail. But Seniora warned Hezbollah that if his office were taken he could not control his “street.” Translation: If you seize the state’s institutions, the Sunni Muslims of Lebanon are going to kill you. Hezbollah knew this was true, and so they backed off. It didn’t hurt that the government of Saudi Arabia backed up Seniora on this point. But Hezbollah’s occupation of the neutral parts of downtown continues even into 2007.

I ventured downtown myself the day after the made-for-TV protest was over, when Hezbollah and friends no longer wanted attention from foreign media. Their lack of interest, if I could call it that, was instantly obvious. Ubiquitous security agents with the tell-tale sunglasses and earpieces stared at me coldly and turned their heads as I walked past.

Hundreds of tents were set up in parks, parking lots, and squares downtown, most of them made of white canvass. I snapped a few pictures, and nobody stepped in to stop me.

One group of tents in a parking lot across from the Hariri mosque were all made of black canvas. What’s up with the black tents, I wondered. So I walked over and lifted my camera to my face.

Five ear-pieced Hezbollah agents aggressively pounced on me at once. They surrounded me and screamed “No!” Then they physically pushed me away from the tents and got in my face so I could not see behind them...

The following are excerpts from the interview: [3]

Adolf Hitler... Developed an Aversion to Judaism Because His Mother Was a Jewish Whore

"The Bolshevik Soviet government in Lenin's time, and later, in Stalin's - both of whom were Jewish, though they presented themselves as Marxists and atheists... - was one of the forces that, until the Second World War, cooperated with Hitler in promoting the idea of establishing the State of Israel. A book that was published about this... - titled Adolf Hitler, Founder of Israel by Hennecke Kardel, a German born in 1922 - proves that Hitler was Jewish, and that his grandmother was a Jewish prostitute. [Hitler's] father went by his mother's Jewish name until he was 40, and later changed his surname to Hitler.

"Adolf Hitler himself developed an aversion to Judaism because his mother was a Jewish whore. He first received [negative] information about the Jews in an Austrian monastery, (the book presents details and pictures of it), and from then on, he [tried] to escape his Judaism.

"Thus... Hitler simultaneously developed both feelings of solidarity with Judaism and feelings of hatred towards it, and this emotional ambivalence shaped his behavior towards the Jews. On the one hand, his entire family, the people who shared his views, and his associates who brought him into power and stood by him to the last - including his lovers and his personal doctor - were [all] Jewish...

...In ‘Mein Kampf’, the only Jews admired were the Zionists. Hitler called it a "great movement out of Vienna" that helped him dispel the doubts he had as to whether Judaism simply represented another religion or was a nationality (and thus did not belong in Europe). After the 1935 Nazi racial laws were introduced, the Zionist Federation of Germany was the only Jewish group allowed to function, with offices open in Berlin until 1942. This is not surprising, considering that they (ZFG) wrote to the new Nazi regime that “Zionism believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group”...

...The horrors of what happened in Europe as a result of 19th century nationalism fed the ethnocentric nationalism known as Zionism, and was used to justify the ethnic cleansing and destruction of Palestinian society. It is now destabilizing Western Asia and encouraging other narrow chauvinistic ideologies (e.g. Bin Laden's Pan-Islamic nationalism mirroring Zionism by claiming to represent members of a particular religion wherever they live)...

However, a police spokesman said there were fewer problems than in 2005, when youths attacked trains in the Paris region and southeast of the country...

In 2004, DeLong-Bas published her doctoral dissertation in book form under the title Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad. This book, published by the Oxford University Press, has been highly recommended by the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C. [2]

According to the book's jacket, "Ibn al-Wahhab was not the godfather of contemporary terrorist movements. Rather, he was a voice of reform, reflecting mainstream eighteenth-century Islamic thought. His vision of Islamic society was based upon monotheism in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews were to enjoy peaceful co-existence and cooperative commercial treaty relations."

Dr. Natana DeLong-Bas is a contributor to The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, The Encyclopedia of the Qur'an, and The Encyclopedia of the Islamic World.

The following are excerpts from the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat interview...

Gal is Shimon and Rikki's daughter. She is a lovely fifteen-year-old with a sweet smile and a wonderful command of English. If you ran into her on any street in the US, at first glance, she would be indistinguishable from any other smart, well-brought-up youngster over here. She gave up her bedroom for me to sleep in for the night – graciously insisting over my objections. She was just as welcoming and generous as her parents and all of the other Israelis I met over there. As I bent down to put my bags on the bed in her room, I glanced out the window and saw those two towers silhouetted against the darkening evening sky. Just a few hundred yards up the slope, the Hizbollah Tower seemed to be craning its neck past the Israeli tower to get a better look at me.

At one point during our dinner together, Rikki and Shimon got up to get (even more) food while Gal and I kept chatting. At one point she looked at me very seriously and said, "You were not afraid to come?" I smiled. Here was a young woman who woke up every morning literally under the guns of a group who, if not for the Israelis in the other tower, would gladly murder her just for the sake of the political statement. I suddenly felt like laughing. I truthfully hadn't given the dangers much of a thought until I had seen the tower through her bedroom window. Now she watched me as I framed my answer and I could see that she had a maturity and judgment impossible (and, thankfully, unnecessary) for most American teens...

Nazareth, considered one of the holiest cities for Christians, is described in the New Testament as the childhood home of Jesus. It contains multiple important shrines and churches, including the famous Church of the Basilica of the Annunciation, the site at which many Christians believe the Virgin Mary was visited by the Archangel Gabriel and told that she had been selected as the mother of Jesus.

The Islamic Movement, the main Muslim political party in Nazareth, said it organized yesterday's march to celebrate Eid ul-Adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice, which commemorates the Muslim belief Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son Ishmael for Allah.

Christian and Jewish faith dictates it was Isaac, not Ishmael, whom Abraham almost sacrificed.

Islamic Movement leaders paraded down Nazareth's main thoroughfare brandishing their party's green flag. Young Muslim men in battle gear marched and beat drums as a man on loudspeaker repeatedly exclaimed in Arabic, "Allah is great."

Hundreds of activists strutted screaming Islamist epithets, including "Islam is the only truth" and "Islam shall rule all."...

...While the march was billed as a celebration, it's militant virtues were clearly visible. The event seemed more a show of force than a street party.

"The march is meant to intimidate Christians," said Saleem, a Nazareth Christian resident who asked that his last name be withheld for fear of what he said was "Muslim retaliation" for speaking out.

"It's part of the methods used by the Muslims in very obvious ways to create an atmosphere where the Christians should know the Muslims are the main power and we are not welcome anymore," Saleem said.

...Like Bethlehem's Christians, those in Nazareth spoke of attacks against Christian-owned shops and told stories of Christian women being raped by Muslim men. They noted several instances of interreligious violence and Muslim riots they said began when Muslims attacked Christian worshippers. The Muslims claimed Christians started the violence.

Israeli security officials say the majority of anti-Christian violence in Nazareth goes unreported because local Christians are too afraid to report crimes.

One Christian resident said violence and intimidation tend to increase around the time of local elections. The Islamic parties, once in the minority, are now one seat away from dominating Nazareth's city council.

"During the last elections, Muslims on the streets were openly threatening the Christians. They tried to stop some of the Christian cars from voting," said Saleem.

In October 2000, the Arab Christian mayor of Nazareth, Ramiz Jaraisy, was reportedly beaten by members of the opposing Islamist party.

Nazareth's Christian population, at times the majority during the city's long history, is now at about 37 percent, according to the Israeli Bureau of Statistics, which notes a regular downward trend.

The situation mirrors similar trends in West Bank and Gaza cities controlled or dominated by Muslim Arabs.

Siham el-Fahum, a Muslim Nazareth municipality member and a local historian, admits Christians are fleeing her city because of Christian-Muslim tension.

"There is no doubt the situation for Christians in Nazareth is bad," el-Fahum told WND.

"Christians like to live where life can be good for them, whereas Muslims are more attached to the community and will stay through tough times. Muslims in the city want more dominance and the only way to achieve that, logically, is at the expense of Christians. It's a delicate balancing act that is having negative consequences for Christians."...

Like many Muslims here, el-Fahum claimed Christians several times "instigated" Muslim riots. But she said in the struggle for power, "the Muslims are definitely on the rise."

She said the core of the conflict began in 1998, when Israel approved a local Muslim request to build a mosque in front of the Church of the Annunciation...

...Muslims hold regular prayer services at the site neighboring the Annunciation church throughout the week, usually drawing large numbers of worshippers on Fridays.

Yesterday's afternoon service, attended by WND, was preceded by a sermon delivered by a prominent local sheik, who shouted into a loudspeaker, "Islam will dominate the world."