Who Is Really Betraying Us And Who Really Are The Traitors

By: Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
[..] We’re in the middle of the greatest threat to our safety and survival in history, and we have the Democratic Party, the mainstream media, and many of our universities and colleges in the forefront of anti-Americanism, advocating a policy in Iraq and elsewhere of retreat, appease, defeat and surrender and doing everything they can to smear not only Bush and the generals but America itself.

This anti-Americanism becomes more dangerous when there is a worldwide movement - especially in Western Europe, but even in the U.S. - to appease and slowly surrender to the threat of Islamic extremism and terrorism. This has been well documented by a great trilogy of books, which I have often mentioned in this column: Londonistan by Melanie Phillips, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer.

You would think the calls to violence and aggression and actual bombings brought on by the Islamic extremists and terrorists would have brought on a great awakening. But it has not. It has not in Europe and it has not in America, as the antics of the Democrats demonstrate. It is as though we are sleeping through a 21st-century Pearl Harbor.

The continuation of the world’s policy of appeasing and surrendering to Islamic extremism and terrorism, despite all the warnings, has been documented in a new edition of Bruce Bawer’s book. In a new afterword to the paperback edition, he argues that both the U.S. and Europe are still asleep in the face of the clear and present threat to our safety and survival: “Since this book appeared, European freedoms have faced a series of aggressive challenges by radical Muslims - challenges that have been met mostly with appeasement and apologies, censorship, and self-censorship. During this time efforts have intensified across Europe to ban ‘Islamophobia’ - a word that has been employed with increasing frequency in attempts to silence criticism of anything whatever relating to Islam.” Bawer sees the same trend of creeping appeasement and surrender in the U.S.

He gives chapter and verse of the slow surrender of Europe. When Paris suburbs were being terrorized nightly by Muslim rioters shouting, “Allahu Akbar,” most of the media portrayed that as just a response to poverty and oppression. Bawer notes that the Christian Science Monitor reported that in many European cities Muslims had already claimed jurisdiction over many neighborhoods. Bawer says the French police “have effectively ceded control of hundreds of neighborhoods to Muslim residents.” This, he writes, is the beginning of a continent-wide turf war.

Then there was the Danish cartoon incident, involving what Bawer calls “innocuous cartoons.” But the Muslims went ballistic, and as a result there were 100 murders in the Muslim world.

The prime minister of Denmark defended the cartoons as an expression of freedom of speech and the principles on which Danish society was based. What did he get for standing up to this attempt to deny basic freedom of speech in Denmark? He was greeted with a torrent of international criticism from such bodies as the U.N. and the European Union.

Bawer writes: “For many, the Jyllands-Posten cartoons represented the powerful mocking the faith of the weak. No: what was happening was that a gang of bullies - led by a country, Saudi Arabia, where Bibles are forbidden, Christians tortured, women oppressed, Jews labeled ‘apes and pigs’ in the state-controlled media, and apostasy from Islam punished by death - was trying to compel a tiny democracy to follow theocratic rules. To succumb to this pressure would simply be to invite further pressure, and would lead to further concessions - not just by Denmark but by the entire West. The list of democratic phenomena that offend the sensibilities of many Muslims is, after all, a long one - ranging from religious liberty, sexual equality and tolerance of gay people to music, alcohol, dogs, and pork. After a few cartoons, what would be next?”

This was not an isolated incident but part of a massive trend suffocating and transforming European society for the worse and reaching our shores as well. Almost no major newspapers even in the U.S. printed the cartoons (the Philadelphia Inquirer was one rare exception), and they were not defended but were in fact denounced by Bill Clinton. The media contribution is exemplified by a 60 Minutes report painting Danish Muslims as “frightened, innocent victims of a viciously racist majority” (Bawer’s words).

The surrender to Muslim violence relating to the cartoons or to any even mild criticism of Islam was the standard reaction all over Europe. Bawer recites the case of Ayan Hirsi Ali in Holland. She was under threat of death from terrorists for criticizing terrorism and Islamic extremism. So what did the Dutch do? Her neighbors claimed that, because she was under threat, she was a danger to the neighborhood and won a court case to make her move. Then the Dutch phonied up charges against her to try to have her deported and to try to rescind her citizenship. She finally resigned from the Dutch Parliament and moved to the U.S., where she works for the American Enterprise Institute.

Even the Pope came under attack, writes Bawer, “for quoting a fourteenth-century Byzantine Emperor’s criticism of Islam.” Immediately, the Muslims erupted with rage along with the New York Times and much of the academic, media and political elite of the West. The critics at the Times and elsewhere seemed to think, writes Bawer, that “it’s foolish and immoral not to let yourself be silenced by the possibility of violence.”

No one, including the Pope, is immune from the threat of violence from Muslims and their supporters in the media, the academic world, and the political elite.
Bawer goes on documenting the surrender of the West to threats of violence and intimidation for anyone who insists on exercising the right to free speech or any other rights that should be honored and guaranteed. You have to read Bawer’s book, along with those of Steyn and Phillips, to get the full flavor and appreciate the total dimensions of what is happening to the world as we know it and want it to continue.

Bawer concludes with these words: “It is true that in the last year or two, more and more Europeans seem to recognize that Europe is self-destructing. Some have spoken up. But not enough. The process continues. And the atmosphere is increasingly ominous. I’ve grown used to seeing the truth turned on its head - the vicious aggressors depicted as innocent victims, the defenders of freedom represented as hateful and inflammatory. I’ve long argued that if we don’t cherish our liberties as passionately as the jihadists treasure their faith, we’ll lose. Benjamin Franklin’s words seem more apropos than ever: ‘Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.’ Alas, in Europe today millions have been brought up to prize safety and appear never to have learned what liberty means.”

If you read Bawer’s book (or those of Steyn and Phillips), you will see that the U.S. is going the way of Europe, only more slowly. And if you study the pronouncements and actions of the Democratic Party, you will see that if it attains power, especially by capturing the White House, it will accelerate the same kind of surrender to violence, intimidation, terrorism and extremism that is already far advanced in Europe.
Herb Denenberg, a former Pennsylvania insurance commissioner and professor at the Wharton School, is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, advisers to the Nation on Science, Engineering and Medicine. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.

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IDF demands uncut al-Dura tape

The IDF has abandoned its official silence in a seven-year-old case that has been characterized as a "blood libel" against the IDF and the State of Israel. On September 10, the deputy commander of the IDF's Spokesman's Office, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom, submitted a letter to the France 2 television network's permanent correspondent in Israel, Charles Enderlin, regarding Enderlin's story from September 30, 2000, in which he televised 55 seconds of edited footage from the Netzarim junction in the central Gaza Strip purporting to show IDF forces shooting and killing 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura.

After its exclusive broadcast that day, France 2 offered the edited film free of charge to all media outlets. The footage, and the story of the purported IDF killing of al-Dura, was quickly rebroadcast around the world.

Within days, al-Dura became a symbol of the Palestinian war against Israel. His name has been repeatedly invoked by terrorists and their supporters as a justification for killing Israelis, Jews and their Western supporters.

In his letter, Am-Shalom asked for the entire unedited 27-minute film that was shot by France 2's Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu-Rahma that day, as well as the footage filmed by Abu-Rahma on October 1, 2000. Am-Shalom requested that the broadcast-quality films be sent to his office no later than September 15. France 2 has yet to hand over the requested film.

The IDF's move came against the backdrop of French media watchdog Philippe Karsenty's legal battle with France 2 regarding the network's coverage of the al-Dura affair.
Last year, France 2 and Enderlin sued Karsenty, who runs the Internet media watchdog Web site Media Ratings, for defamation for a letter he sent out in 2004 accusing France 2 of staging the al-Dura story.

Karsenty also called for the resignations of Enderlin and of France 2's news director, Arlette Chabot, for their roles in promulgating the alleged hoax.
In October 2006 a French court decided in favor of France 2 and Enderlin, and against Karsenty.

The court acknowledged that Karsenty had submitted significant evidence indicating that the event had been staged. Still, in ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, the judges said Karsenty's accusations lacked credibility because, it claimed, he had based his accusations on a single source.

The court also stressed that "no Israeli authority, neither the army - which is nonetheless most affected, nor the Justice [Ministry] has ever accorded the slightest credit to [Karsenty's] allegations" regarding the authenticity of the France 2 report.

In his letter to Enderlin, Am-Shalom disputes the judges' assertion. "It is my duty to note," he wrote, "[that their claim] does not correspond to repeated attempts made by the IDF to receive the filmed materials, and with the conclusions of the IDF's committee of inquiry [into the purported shooting] that were widely publicized in the international and French media."

Am-Shalom has discussed at length the findings of the IDF's probe into the incident. That inquiry was ordered by then-OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Yom Tov Samia.
Citing Samia, Am-Shalom wrote, "The general has made clear that from an analysis of all the data from the scene, including the location of the IDF position, the trajectory of the bullets, the location of the father [Jamal al-Dura] and the son behind an obstacle, the cadence of the bullet fire, the angle at which the bullets penetrated the wall behind the father and his son, and the hours of the events, we can rule out with the greatest certainty the possibility that the gunfire that apparently harmed the boy and his father was fired by IDF soldiers, who were at the time located only inside their fixed position [at the junction]."

Am-Shalom further notes that "Gen. Samia emphasized to me that all his attempts to receive the filmed material for the purpose of his inquiry were rejected."
The IDF is in urgent need of the footage, Am-Shalom said, because "it has been asked to comment on the ruling [against Karsenty] from October 19, 2006, on this issue, which is scheduled to be discussed in a French appellate court on September 19."
"Since we are cognizant of the fact that there have been attempts to stage media events, and since doubt has been raised along these lines regarding the story under discussion, we asked to receive the aforementioned materials in order to conclude this episode and to get to the truth," Am-Shalom said.

In the past, the IDF shied away from taking a strong public position on the al-Dura affair. At the time of the incident, then-chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz and then-prime minister and defense minister Ehud Barak did not openly support Samia's inquiry or its findings.

As late as June 23, 2006, then-IDF Spokesperson Brig.-Gen. Miri Regev told Haaretz, "I cannot determine whether the IDF is or is not responsible for the killing of al-Dura."

In the aftermath of Karsenty's civil trial last year, the IDF came under considerable criticism both in Israel and from Jewish groups abroad for its silence on the issue.
While the IDF maintained official silence, independent probes by various foreign media organizations and Internet activists over the past several years have called the veracity of the France 2 report into serious question.

Those investigations demonstrated that purported IDF "attacks" against Palestinian civilians were being openly staged by Palestinian cameramen and locals at the Netzarim junction throughout the day of the alleged shooting of al-Dura.
Am-Shalom sent copies of his letter to Samia, incoming IDF Deputy Chief of General Staff Maj.-Gen. Dan Harel, the France 2 representative in Israel, the president of the network in France, and Philippe Karsenty.

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Kouchner: Prepare for war over Iran crisis

French foreign minister says 'world should prepare for the worst' over Iranian nuclear crisis but stresses efforts to negotiate should be pursued 'right to the end' The world should "prepare for the worst ... (which) is war" over the Iranian nuclear crisis, but seeking a solution through talks should take priority, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said on Sunday.

"We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war," he said in an interview broadcast on television and radio.

"We must negotiate right to the end," with Iran, he said, but underlined that if Tehran possessed an atomic weapon, it would represent "a real danger for the whole world."

Kouchner added France had advised its large companies not to respond to tenders in Iran and repeated a call for greater pressure on Tehran over its nuclear program.

Kouchner said the companies that had been contacted were free to decide what to do.

"We have already asked a certain number of our large companies to not respond to tenders, and it is a way of signaling that we are serious," Kouchner said.

"We are not banning French companies from submitting. We have advised them not to. These are private companies. But I think that it has been heard and we are not the only ones to have done this."

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Keeping quiet in order to prevent war

The foreign media continued on Sunday to reveal exciting new details of the alleged covert Israeli air strike in Syria earlier this month. AEach report added its own piece to the puzzle. One paper claimed eight jets, backed by a high-altitude intelligence-gathering plane, participated in the foray. Another said the target was an underground bunker containing radioactive nuclear materials. None of these reports were enough, however, to break Israel's vow of silence.
Since the alleged flyover, Israeli and Syrian leaders have kept mum as to what really happened over the skies of northern Syria on September 6, when Syrian air defenses allegedly opened fire on a group of Israeli F-15I bombers.

While the picture is still not completely clear, and has certainly not been confirmed by official Israeli or Syrian authorities, the story that is emerging in the foreign press is the stuff of legends.

Fighter jets, coming under air defense missiles, infiltrate an enemy country and bomb a nuclear facility that is being "lit up" for them by an elite commando unit operating behind enemy lines.
If the foreign news reports are true
, Israel has a lot to be concerned about - not only is Iran racing towards nuclear power but so is Syria.

Syria is known to have a large stockpile of chemical and biological warheads and, according to the news reports, it has forged a partnership with North Korea to possibly develop a nuclear capability as well. For years now, the Israeli public has heard that one of the consequences of Iran's success in defying the world and developing nuclear power was that other Middle Eastern countries would follow suit. This is a case example.

Syria's relationship with North Korea is nothing new. According to foreign reports, Syria possesses some 100 Scud-C missiles that it has bought from North Korea over the last 15 years.

Some Syrian and Hizbullah reports have claimed that the alleged air foray was actually a test run by Israel for the real show - Iran. While the foreign media reports clearly dismiss that possibility - pointing out that the IAF bombed a Syrian target - if the reports are true then the alleged incident does send a clear message to Iran that Israel will not hesitate to use force to stop its enemies from obtaining nuclear power. The precedent Menachem Begin set with the bombing of the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981 is still in effect.

Assad has his own interests in keeping quiet. While Syria was the one to reveal the alleged IAF infiltration, the country has held back from giving any additional details of what happened over its skies that night. Assad might have had to reveal that there was an infiltration due to the large number of eyewitness accounts. No more details are being provided, however, since while Assad has struck a strategic alliance with pariah states like Iran and North Korea, he misses the days when he enjoyed close ties with France and other Western countries.

Official confirmation of the alleged bombing of a nuclear site and the partnership with North Korea would ruin the chances of those days from returning for a long, long time.

Comment: My sources indicate we did it!

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Has the U.S.-Arab Marriage Gone Sour?

Some would describe the relationship between the United States and the Arab world as a marriage of convenience gone sour. Some would describe the relationship between the United States and the Arab world as a marriage of convenience gone sour. In the past both sides were happy to put up with the other’s antics. But then came September 11, the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. It looked as if things would never be the same again. The events of 9/11 and its aftermath have no doubt altered the bond between the Western superpower and countries in the Middle East. But can they rise above their differences and the growing popular opposition each population harbors towards the other? In the current circumstances, can the U.S. forge genuine alliances in the Middle East? The Gulf Energy Hub The Sunni Gulf countries still maintain good relations with the U.S. Bahrain hosts significant U.S. naval forces and the region has considerable energy resources to offer. But developments over the past six years cannot be overlooked. “The fact that 17 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were from the Gulf countries put a strain on these relations,” says Christian Koch, director of international studies at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. The U.S. became more aware of financial and ideological support for terrorism within the Gulf countries following the attacks. There was also a reassessment of these relations within the Gulf region, which became increasingly frustrated with the U.S.’s actions in Iraq and its tightening of immigration policies. “An event like 9/11 wasn’t going to cause a complete rift in the relationship because there are still a lot of mutual interests at play,” Koch says. “The Gulf states very much depend on U.S. military protection. It’s a very volatile region security-wise.” Paradoxically, relations between Bahrain and the U.S. are better now than they were before 9/11, says Jalal Fairooz, a Bahraini lawmaker and a member of the parliament’s Foreign Affairs, Defense and National Security Committee. The war on Iraq has affected the way the general public view the U.S., but it did not affect the official view, he says. Due to the volatility of the region, the Bahraini government feels that the American presence offers an assurance of stability to the regime, Fairooz says. Fairooz is satisfied with the degree of economic relations between Bahrain and the U.S., but feels there is room for improvement on the political level. “We think the U.S. can do more to encourage more democracy and human rights in Bahrain for the best of Washington’s national interests,” he says. The Gulf’s status as a dominant energy player means its stability is a top priority for the U.S. But the war in Iraq prompted states in the region to question the real motive of Washington’s policies. There is general agreement in Gulf capitals that Saddam Hussein was a dictator, but they also felt his regime was largely contained and posed no immediate threat to his neighbors, Koch says. “There’s a lot of skepticism about whether the U.S. can be trusted to do the right thing in Iraq and bring about stability,” he says. “At the same time there are concerns the U.S. will prematurely leave and then the region will be left to deal with the issue on its doorstep.” Gulf states feel the real threat is looming not from Iraq but from Iran. However, having the U.S. bogged down in Iraq makes it even more difficult to resolve the Iranian issue, since its military is stretched thin and its options are limited. “Iran has moved into this vacuum that the U.S. has created,” Koch says. The U.S. has rediscovered the value of the Gulf states over the past year or so, especially since the Iranian issue has become more acute. The most active player is Saudi Arabia, which has emerged as a major power broker in helping settle regional disputes. These states are also developing strategic economic and defense relations with other states and are not maintaining an exclusive reliance on the U.S. as they cannot be sure that such a dependence will guarantee the security they seek. However, it is clear that the U.S. will continue to play a dominant role in the region’s security. The Power Brokers – Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are often referred to as the moderate players in the Arab world. The U.S. is keen to maintain good relations with them because of their key mediation roles in regional conflicts. If U.S. President George W. Bush wants to leave a legacy of peace in the Middle East, he will have to rely heavily on these local brokers to pave the way. Saudi Arabia felt the heat after 9/11 as most of the perpetrators of the attacks were from the Saudi kingdom. “However, that was eased when Saudi Arabia itself was targeted several times by Al-Qa’ida,” says Dr. Muhammad Al-Ma’sri, a political scientist at the Center for Strategic Studies in Jordan. All three have aligned themselves with the U.S. in the fight against terrorism, not only because they feel it to be an advantageous strategy, but also due to their becoming targets of Jihadi terrorism themselves. They have strengthened their ties with the U.S. since 9/11, but continue to draw criticism regarding sluggishness on domestic reform. Al-Qa’ida attacks in Jordan, Egypt and the Saudi kingdom made it easier for the regimes to appeal to their people after 9/11 and persuade them that joining the American strategy was right. “In many ways I think the relationship is better,” says Robert W. Jordan, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Jordan began his term just one month after 9/11, and found his Saudi peers in a state of shock. Six years later, he feels they have made considerable steps in Washington’s direction. “I think there is more of an attitude of a common goal to defeat Al-Qa’ida, to defeat extremism and to defeat terrorism, which we frankly didn’t have in 2001,” he says. There are still tensions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia regarding the Palestinians and Iraq, but the former ambassador maintains there are still enough common interests to preserve an alliance. When the war in Iraq began, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan did not overtly oppose the invasion, but they are now unable to support the new order in Iraq because it is so unstable. “They have a dilemma,” Al-Ma’sri explains. “On the one hand they are trying to legitimize their position in the eyes of the Americans, but they can’t defend this position as well as they could in 2003 and 2004, when the situation in Iraq was more promising than it is today.” On the other hand, the failure of the U.S. to set up a democratic model in Iraq has also proven useful for these countries. When confronted by the Americans to incorporate more reforms or democratization, they can use the failure in Iraq as ammunition to defend their position, claiming it did not work in Iraq and, therefore, there is no reason to think it would work in their own countries. “They are exploiting the American failure in Iraq to push their own agendas,” Al-Ma’sri says. The reliance of the U.S. on Saudi Arabia is noticeable in the $20-billion arms deal the U.S. has proposed to ink with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and its continuing aid to Egypt. The U.S. is keen on seeing Saudi participation in the American Middle East conference in Washington scheduled for this November. It has been suggested that the package was meant as an incentive to ensure Saudi attendance, which is critical for the Bush administration. Syria - Axis of Evil or Desired Partner? Relations between the U.S. and Syria deteriorated rapidly after the war in Iraq. The U.S. accused Damascus of supporting terrorism and helping groups infiltrate through its borders into Iraq to fight U.S. forces. Damascus has also been implicated in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Al-Hariri in February 2005. But even in the current tense climate, the two parties recognize it is not in their best interests to be on bad terms. “The U.S. still has a very tense relationship with Syria on the administration level but on other levels things are going in a different direction,” says Nadim Shehadi, a researcher at London’s Chatham House. “It’s practically only George Bush who wants to boycott Syria. There are lots of moves in the U.S. from politicians and media people to engage with Syria.” Shehadi says relations with Syria are not inherently important to the U.S. However, their significance lies in the fact that Syria has a part to play in every conflict in the region. “It has influence in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Palestine and in Iran,” Shehadi says, “So it puts itself in a pivotal role.” “I think these relations are going through a grey period where lots of things are undecided,” says Dr. Samir Al-Taqi, director of the Damascus-based Orient Center for Studies who is considered to be close to the Syrian government. “The main issue here is that the U.S. administration is crippled. It can no longer pursue its old approach to the problems in the region,” Al-Taqi says. “But we understand the necessity of having common interests.” “Syria is extremely interested in a rapprochement with the U.S. but in the context of a conciliatory approach to the problems in the region,” he says. It is worth noting that Syria does not hold vast resources of energy. Economically, the U.S. does not have the same energy interests in Syria as it has in the Gulf, so it is less reliant on Syria. However, this could prove to be a double-edged sword, because any future U.S. sanctions on Damascus will not bite hard. The Iranian Factor The standoff with Iran is becoming a determining factor in the U.S.’s relations with countries in the Middle East. Western countries, and especially the U.S., are just as concerned that Iran’s controversial nuclear program is being used to covertly manufacture nuclear weapons, a claim that Tehran denies. Tension is mounting in the Persian Gulf, where U.S. forces are accumulating, giving rise to speculation of a possible military showdown to paralyze Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Sunni Muslim countries, and especially Iran’s neighbors in the Gulf, are as concerned as the West about the ascension of a nuclear-capable Shi’ite superpower in the region. “The Saudis are definitely afraid of a military strike on Iran,” former ambassador Jordan says. “They believe they will be the first in the line of fire if there were retaliation. And they would be right.” This is an issue that places many of these countries on the side of the U.S. However, an alliance with Washington against Iran is not a given. Koch says the prevailing feeling among Gulf officialdom is that the U.S. has a one-dimensional mindset, that it has abandoned diplomatic strategies and has resolved to use muscle to pursue its interests in the region. They feel that if the U.S. pursues a strategy similar to its actions in Iraq, it will prove to be more damaging than beneficial. “The main stand of the government and the people of Bahrain is that any military action against Iran can result in a dangerous situation in the region,” Bahraini MP Fairooz says. “All the governments here in the region, including Bahrain, are trying to push for a peaceful dialogue and a resolution that will avoid military action.” With regard to the relations between the Jordanian-Saudi-Egyptian axis and the U.S., Al-Ma’sri maintains the future of these ties depends heavily on how things play out with Iran and with the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Al-Ma’sri sees a direct relationship between these two processes. “If the Americans pressure the Israelis for more compromise, these three countries will do more to support American policies in Iran or even in Iraq,” he says. “There is a correlation and it is expressed repeatedly by these countries. If the Americans don’t do more to get rewards from the Israelis concerning the Palestinian issue, they will tell the Americans they won’t go full board with them.” Dr. Samer Shehata, an assistant professor of Arab politics at the Center for Contemporary Studies at Georgetown University, notes a discrepancy in the attitudes of officialdom and that of the man in the Arab street with regards to Iran. While local regimes are not interested in a nuclear powerful Iran, Arab public opinion views the U.S. as holding a double standard with regard to the nuclear issue, because it is common knowledge that Israel has a nuclear program, but the U.S. is focusing its pressure on Iran. With American troops lining Iran’s borders in Afghanistan and in Iraq, Iran is viewed as being under the threat of a Western bully. “Many people in the Arab world have sympathy towards Iran precisely because it has an antagonistic relationship with the United States,” Shehata says. Straddling a Fine Line – Terrorism and Reform The U.S. is currently walking a fine line between its willingness to promote democracy and broker peace in the Middle East, on the one hand, and to continue its relentless fight against terror. This has brought about some curious policies in the Middle East as it tries to straddle this line and maintain both objectives. Washington needs the help of Arab countries to fight terrorists seeking a safe haven on their soil, while at the same time criticizes these countries’ sluggish pace of domestic reform, their poor performance on human rights and lack of democratic procedures. This paradox is evident in the U.S.’s relations with Sudan, where more than 200,000 people have been killed in the Darfur region over the past four years. The Sudanese government is being accused of backing violent armed organizations to carry out what the U.S. has itself described as genocide. But news reports indicate there is still a close alliance between Washington and Khartoum. “We see a far closer working relationship between the two than what we perhaps would assume from the megaphone diplomacy that’s coming out of the Darfur crisis,” says Maryam Bibi Jooma, a researcher on Sudan at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria. The Sudanese security services are providing the U.S. with information to help with the war on terror, and in a way is allowing protection of the Darfur crisis, she says. “We have a strange situation where Sudan is both a sponsor of terrorism, according to the U.S., and also a key ally against terrorism.” “The U.S.’s entire foreign policy in the Horn of Africa is being motivated by its domestic concern over the war on terror and very little to do with the internal contradiction of democratic transformation.” But are these contradictory policies successful in bettering relations with the Arab world? Many think not. “I think when it comes to actual policies there is a grand discrepancy between America’s claim to want better relations with the Arab world and the actual policies that it implements,” Georgetown University’s Shehata says. Washington, he maintains, is not doing enough to safeguard these ties. “I think the administration is misguided on a number of issues and this has disastrous consequences for U.S.-Arab relations.” Former ambassador Jordan says the U.S. has not emphasized its relationships with the Arab world over the past five or six years in a way that it could have. “There’s a sense that Washington has simply not had relations with the Arab world on its agenda,” he says. However, he believes there will be more efforts on the part of Bush and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to make a mark and set an agenda before Bush’s current term of office is up. Whether the relations of the U.S. with the Arab world can remain strong depends on many factors. The repercussions of the confrontation with Iran, the U.S.’s achievements on the Israeli-Palestinian front, developments in the energy market and the outcome of the Al-Hariri trial are some of the events that will shape these relations.

Copyright © 2007 The Media Line. All Rights Reserved.

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Which version did you read?

IDF troops kill 16-year-old Palestinian DF troops shot to death a 16-year-old Palestinian in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Monday. Palestinian Authority security officials and the Israeli army offered conflicting versions of the circumstances behind the incident.

Security officials said Mohammed Jabbarin was unarmed, and was shot after he hurled rocks at patrolling troops. The IDF said troops operating in Ramallah shot an armed man laying a roadside bomb aimed at soldiers. An explosive device was found at the scene, the army said.

In other violence, Palestinians fired three mortars from the Gaza Strip at southern Israel, the army said. No injuries or damage were reported.

Late Sunday, IDF troops prevented a Palestinian terrorist from infiltrating the settlement Shavei Shomron in the West Bank, Israel Radio reported Sunday evening.

Soldiers spotted the man trying to enter the settlement and as he realized he was discovered he opened fire on them. No troops were wounded in the exchange of fire that ensued.

The army reported that the offender was also apparently unhurt and were conducting searches in the area.

In related news, IDF troops arrested 13 Palestinian fugitives in the West Bank overnight Sunday.

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Looking for Scapegoat, World Again Turns to Jews

By Victor Davis Hanson

Who recently said: "These Jews started 19 Crusades. The 19th was World War (1). Why? Only to build Israel."

Some holdover Nazi? Hardly. It was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as "bacteria" — controlled China, India, and Japan, and ran the United States.

Who alleged: "The Arabs who were involved in 9/11 cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a cooperation. They gave them the perfect excuse to denounce all Arabs."

A conspiracy nut?

Actually, it was former Democratic U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. He denounced Israel on a Hezbollah-owned television station, adding: "I marveled at the Hezbollah resistance to Israel. . . . It was a marvel of organization, of courage and bravery."

And finally, who claimed at a United Nations-sponsored conference that democratic Israel was "much worse" than the former apartheid South Africa, and that it "undermines the international community's reaction to global warming"?

A radical environmentalist wacko?

Again, no. It was Clare Short, a member of the British parliament. She was a secretary for international development under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

A new virulent strain of the old anti-Semitism is spreading worldwide. This hate — of a magnitude not seen in over 70 years — is not just espoused by Iran's loony president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or radical jihadists.

The latest anti-Semitism is also now mouthed by world leaders and sophisticated politicians and academics. Their loathing often masquerades as "anti-Zionism" or "legitimate" criticism of Israel. But the venom exclusively reserved for the Jewish state betrays their existential hatred.

Israel is always lambasted for entering homes in the West Bank to look for Hamas terrorists and using too much force . But last week the world snoozed when the Lebanese army bombarded and then crushed the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, which harbored Islamic terrorists.

The world has long objected to Jewish settlers buying up land in the West Bank. Yet Hezbollah, flush with Iranian money, is now purchasing large tracts in southern Lebanon for military purposes and purging them of non-Shiites.

Here at home, "neoconservative" has become synonymous with a supposed Jewish cabal of Washington insiders who hijacked U.S. policy to take us to war for Israel's interest. That our state department is at the mercy of a Jewish lobby is the theme of a recent high-profile book by professors at Harvard University and the University of Chicago.

Yet when the United States bombed European and Christian Serbia to help Balkan Muslims, few critics alleged that American Muslims had unduly swayed President Clinton. And such charges of improper ethnic influence are rarely leveled to explain the billions in American aid given to non-democratic Egypt, Jordan, or the Palestinians — or the Saudi oil money that pours into American universities.

The world likewise displays such a double standard. It seems to care little about the principle of so-called occupied land — whether in Cyprus or Tibet — unless Israel is the accused. Mass murdering in Cambodia, the Congo, Rwanda, and Darfur has earned far fewer United Nations' resolutions of condemnation than supposed atrocities committed by Israel. A number of British academics are sponsoring a boycott of Israeli scholars but leave alone those from autocratic Iran, China, and Cuba.

There are various explanations for the new anti-Semitism. For many abroad, attacking Jews and Israel is an indirect way of damning its main ally, the United States — by implying that Americans are not entirely evil, just hoodwinked by those sneaky and far more evil Jews.

At home, there are obvious pragmatic considerations. Some Americans may find it makes more sense to damn a few million Israelis without oil than it does to offend Israel's adversaries in the Middle East, who number in the hundreds of millions and control nearly half the world's petroleum reserves.

Cowardice explains a lot. Libeling Israel won't earn someone a fatwa or a death sentence in the manner comparable criticism of Islam might. There are no Jewish suicide bombers in London, Madrid, or Bali.

This new face of anti-Semitism is so insidious because it is so well disguised, advanced by self-proclaimed diplomats and academics — and now embraced by the supposedly sophisticated left on university campuses.

When national, collective or personal aspirations are not met, it is far easier to blame someone or something rather than to look within for the source of the failure and frustration. More recently, someone must be blamed for getting terrorists (with oil and its profits behind them) mad at us.

That someone is — no surprise — once again Jews.

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Resolution 242 (land for peace) and British security interests: Setting the record straight

· By Eran Benedek

Time for all to understand UN 242-I know, so much has been written-why is it that it is ignored, forgotten or intentionally misinterpreted? Your answer speaks volumes. The following should be considered as a primer for all activists! EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:· The Middle East's geopolitical destiny is uncertain, with the Arab-Israeli conflict being but one of many factors that will determine this.
· June 2007 marked the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War, and November 2007 will commemorate 40 years since the adoption of United Nations (UN) Security Council Resolution 242.
· Confusion remains over the proper interpretation of Resolution 242. The resolution's primary components are often misunderstood or distorted
. For example, many assume that Resolutions 242 and 338 call for a full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-Six-Day War lines (the lines of June 4, 1967) and establish the principle of land-for-peace to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. Both assumptions are incorrect.
· The essence of Resolution 242 is that Israel is allowed to remain in the territories it captured in 1967 until such a time as "a just and lasting peace in the Middle East" is achieved. The authors of the resolution emphasised time and again that Israel was not required to retreat to the pre-war lines.
· For these and other reasons, the Saudi Initiative/Arab Peace Plan twists the intent and meaning of Resolution 242: it demands a full Israeli withdrawal and implies that Arab refugees could settle anywhere west of the Jordan River. It is also unclear how this plan serves British interests, given that its full implementation would weaken Israel and thus jeopardise stability in the eastern Mediterranean .

Comment: The remaining support documentation is lengthy-I shall post it tomorrow-all the best, don

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Tested strategy in Europe-name calling/avoid the facts

Comment: The following is Iranian source-notice that we, in the west, are to blame-total abdication of responsibility on their part-this is the strategy that resonates in Europe-become guilty and wake up in 5 years to a strange new world and wonder how we arrived here!
Islamaphobia Rising in Europe GENEVA, Sept. 15--The United Nations investigator on racism condemned a rising trend of Islamaphobia, especially in Europe, where he said it was being exploited by some rightwing political parties.

Doudou Diene, UN special rapporteur on racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related forms of intolerance, also accused Switzerland’s most popular party, the rightwing Swiss People’s Party (SVP/UDC), of inciting hatred, Reuters reported.
He urged the withdrawal of the party’s controversial campaign poster calling for expulsion of foreigners who commit serous crimes, depicting three white sheep booting out a black sheep under the headline “For the Security of All“.


“In the current context, Islamaphobia constitutes the most serious form of religious defamation,“ Diene said in a speech and report to the UN Human Rights Council, whose 47 member-states were holding a debate on religious defamation.

More and more political leaders and influential media and intellectuals were “equating Islam with violence and terrorism,“ and some were seeking to “silence religious practices by banning the construction of mosques“, Diene said.
Pakistan, speaking for the Organization of Islamic Conference, called the rise of Islamaphobia ’alarming’.

“Recent acts of defamation in the shape of blasphemous sketches in Sweden and posters in Switzerland reinforce this conclusion. Such blasphemy should not be encouraged in the name of freedom of expression,“ Pakistan’s envoy Masood Khan said.
He said the 57-nation OIC, which represents 1.3 billion Muslims, condemned terrorism in all its forms.

“The international media continues to use the misguided actions of a small extremist minority as an excuse to malign the entire Muslim world, as well as the religion of Islam,“ he said.

Diene, a Senegalese lawyer, said in his 21-page report to the Council that Islamaphobia had grown since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
Worldwide, an increasing number of traditional democratic parties were “resorting to the language of fear and exclusion, scapegoating and targeting ethnic or religious minorities in general, and immigrants and refugees in particular“, he said.
In Europe, Muslims faced growing difficulties to establish places of worship and carry out their religious practices such as dietary regimens and burials, according to the UN envoy.

“Political parties with open anti-Islamic platforms have joined governmental coalitions in several countries and started to put in place their political agendas. In sum, Islamophobia is in the process of permeating all facets of social life.“
The Swiss SVP/UDC has launched a referendum to ban construction of minarets in the Alpine country, home to 350,000 Muslims. A similar move is underway in Cologne, Germany.

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"peace-loving" Islam:Al-Qaeda: Bounty on Swedish cartoonist's head

Iraq's al-Qaeda offers $150,000 prize for the killing of Swedish cartoonist, editor who published cartoon depicting Prophet Muhammad as dog The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq offered money for the murder of a Swedish cartoonist and his editor, who recently produced images deemed insulting to Islam, according to a statement carried by Islamist websites Saturday.

"We are calling for the assassination of cartoonist Lars Vilks who dared insult our Prophet, peace be upon him, and we announce a reward during this generous month of Ramadan of $100,000 for the one who kills this criminal," the transcript on the website said.

In a half-hour audio file entitled "They plotted yet God too was plotting," Abu Omar al-Baghdadi also named rival insurgent groups in Iraq and promised new attacks, particularly against the minority Yazidi sect.


Blown out of proportion
The al-Qaeda leader upped the reward for Vilks' death to $150,000 if he was "slaughtered like a lamb" and offered $50,000 for the killing of the editor of Nerikes Allehanda, the Swedish paper that printed Vilks' cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad with a dog's body on August 19th.

Vilks said from Sweden he believed the matter of his cartoons had been blown out of proportion.
"We have a real problem here…we can only hope that Muslims in Europe and in the Western world choose to distance themselves from this and support the idea of freedom of expression."

Ulf Johansson, editor in chief of Nerikes Allehanda, said he took the bounty "more seriously" than other threats he had received. "This is more explicit. It's not every day somebody puts a price on your head."

Johansson said he had contacted the police and that they had already started work on the threat.

Aside from a few scattered protests and condemnations by Muslim countries, the reaction to the cartoon has been muted, in contrast to last year's fiery protests that erupted in several Muslim countries after a Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons of Muhammad that were reprinted in a range of Western media.

Freedom of the press
In an attempt to defuse the tensions caused by the cartoon in both Sweden and abroad, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt invited 22 Sweden-based ambassadors from Muslim countries to talk about the sketch last week.

Reinfeldt expressed regret at the hurt it may have caused, but said that according to Swedish law it is not up to politicians to punish the free press.

Al-Baghdadi added in his message that if the "crusader state of Sweden" didn't apologize, his organization would also attack major companies.

"We know how to force you to retreat and apologize and if you don't, wait for us to strike the economy of your giant companies including Ericsson, Scania, Volvo, Ikea, and Electrolux," he said.

No photo has ever appeared of al-Baghdadi, whom the US describes as a fictitious character used to give an Iraqi face to an organization dominated by foreigners. The US has said that, under interrogation, a top al-Qaeda member revealed that al-Baghdadi's speeches are read by an actor.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq in the past has carried out operations in Jordan and may have links to militant groups in Lebanon, but is not known to have any kind of presence in Europe.

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UN, what will you do with this information?

Experts Syria may have violated non-proliferation treaty "Syria is party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and as such, is barred from receiving any aid that may be used in the manufacturing of nuclear weapons," said Dr. Robbie Sabel, an expert on international law from the Hebrew University, to Ynet this weekend.

If Syria did indeed receive such aid, said Dr. Sabel, "then it is in blatant violation of the treaty. If that is what has transpired, then Syria may be sanctioned to prevent any further development of weapons, as was done with Iraq and as may be done with Iran."

Syria is also a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors.

The possible sanctions Syria may be facing are primarily economical, said Dr. Sabel. "Theoretically
however, the UN Security Council may also resort to military sanctions," he said.

North Korea, which is suspecting of aiding Syria, withdrew from the treaty in 2003 and is not bound to its terms.

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Americas Allies Sending Terrorists to Iraq

Comment: The following from an Iranian news source-they now use words they think resonate with Americans-what gall!
Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Larijani said on Saturday some US allies in the Middle East have dispatched terrorists to Iraq. Speaking in an exclusive interview with the Doha-based Al-Jazeera television, Larijani asked, “Why doesn’t the US confront these terrorists? I have confirmed information that the US Central Intelligence Agency and some regional intelligence agencies support these terrorists. Of course, we have done our best to calm the situation in Iraq.“

Commenting on political conditions in Iraq, Larijani pointed out that the Iraqi strategy is based on democracy, but some countries do not care about Iraq’s democracy.

He conceded that some mistakes might be made in using democratic tactics.
“An Arab leader said the present Iraqi leaders are US stooges, while he himself has close relations with American officials,“ he said.
Larijani pointed out that calling Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki a US mercenary is wrong.

“Al-Maliki’s past is a clear indication of what he really is,“ he added.
Commenting on claims that Iraq’s incumbent leaders are affiliated to Iran, he said none of them is close to Iran.

“The point is that when the executed Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, killed the Iraqi people and the West provided him with chemical weapons, these people did not have any other place to go other than Iran and Syria. Al-Maliki was not in Iran at that time, as he was in Syria,“ he said.

Asked whether Iran’s reaction to an anti-Iran resolution will be to quit the Non-Proliferation Treaty, he denied by saying other options are available for confronting such a resolution.

On the West’s concern about Iran continuing its uranium enrichment activities, Larijani said as long as Iran’s nuclear activities are supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency, no one should be concerned about them.
“I think the Americans are troublemakers and if they have a problem with Iran’s nuclear activities, we have offered them the option of dialogue,“ he said.

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Syria won't go to war with Israel, Kassem says

Hizbullah deputy chief says conditions not ripe for war between Syria, Israel. Adds that Hizbullah will not undertake attack against Israel as Syrian proxy Syria will not likely go to war with Israel, Hizbullah's deputy chief Sheikh Naim Kassem said in a Saturday interview to a website affiliated with his organization.

"I do not believe the conditions are ripe for a war between Israel and Lebanon or Israel and Syria. It's possible that aberrant developments in general, or events in Iraq, Iran or Palestine in particular, will occur that will effect the atmosphere and cause the conditions to become ripe for war. But it's too early to predict this now," he said.

In response to a question regarding Israel's incursion into Syrian airspace, Kassem responded that he did not possess the necessary information to answer.

"We don't have special information regarding the Israeli incursion into Syrian skies, but we can determine what happened in a certain context: Israel did not report this incursion, rather Syria did.

"In other words, it's possible that Israel wanted to conduct a covert intellgence-gathering mission, perhaps in order to learn more of the nature of Syrian readiness. The Syrian publication embarrassed Israel and demonstrated a high level of preparedness and ability to respond if the Israeli enemy attacks.

"At any rate, this action is considered to be true aggression and demands harsh condemnation from the United Nations Security Council, as well as sanctions against Israel. But, in our opinion, the Security Council will react lightly to this incident," he said.

When asked whether Syria might respond by proxy, using Palestinian groups or the organization in southern Lebanon, Kassem said that "Hizbullah does not intend to open a front against Israel in Lebanon. Rather, they are in a defensive mode.

"Hizbullah never initiated opening a front against Israel and, in this case, such an option is not on the table. Suggestions to this end are merely unsubstantiated commentary by the media. If Syria wants to respond, it has the means to do so," he added.

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Belgian FM Arrives-In Iran-So much Fro Western Support of Sanctions

TEHRAN, Sept. 15--Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht arrived in Tehran late Saturday. He is expected to hold talks with Iranian officials on ways of upgrading Tehran-Brussels economic cooperation and the Iranian nuclear program, IRNA reported.

De Gucht will also thank the Iranian officials for helping release the Belgian hostages and exchange views with Iranian officials on avenues for bolstering Iranian relations with the European Union.

The Islamic Republic of Iran Police secured the release of two Belgian nationals Stefaan Boeve, 28, and Carla Van Den Eeckhoudt, 37, who were abducted to Pakistan by bandits in Sistan-Baluchestan province


Comment: So, now you understand what happened?

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And Shariah For All?

By Diana West
The story of the week wasn't Gen. David Petraeus' testimony on Iraq, although it dominated the headlinesThe story of the week wasn't the sixth return of Sept. 11 since the jihad atrocity of 2001, although it inspired many public statements and ceremonies. The week's biggest story garnered little press and few comments. But, in a significant way, this overlooked story -- an outrageous display of police force in Brussels on Sept. 11, 2007 -- symbolizes the missing link in our flawed comprehension of both Iraq and Sept. 11.

There, in the so-called capital of Europe, 200 people marked the day with a protest against the Islamization of Europe -- a civilizational shift which, as Europe increasingly accommodates Shariah (Islamic law), is shockingly advanced. Indeed, Middle East expert Bernard Lewis has already predicted Europe will become Islamic by century's end. Absent a reversal of Islamization (which remains possible) I'm guessing sooner than that.

The assembly, sponsored by Stop the Islamization of Europe (SIOE), was wholly peaceful -- at least until Belgian police showed up. With a chopper above, water cannon nearby, they didn't break heads, exactly -- nothing so kind as that. In a photo that should be titled The New Face of Fascism (see it at www.brusselsjournal.com/node/2441), we see black-clad Belgian policemen brutalizing a man in a light-colored suit and tie. His hands are cuffed behind his back, his right elbow is clasped in what is known as an arm-bar hold, and he is also being subjected to a genital hold -- a vicious grip that, a retired cop friend of mine tells me, would get any American policeman thrown off the force.

The man under arrest was Frank Vanhecke, president of the Flemish secessionist party Vlaams Belang and a member of European Parliament. Also arrested and beaten was Filip Dewinter, who, as the leading politician of Vlaams Belang, Belgium's largest opposition party, has personally garnered 25 percent of the electorate. (You can find a picture of Belgian police forcing Dewinter to the ground online at kleinverzet.blogspot.com.)

These men are invariably described as "far-right" politicians, as though "far-right"-ness alone (whatever that means when totalitarian police tactics are considered tolerant left) is rationale enough for harsh treatment. I've met both men and know them as free-market, small-government conservatives who deeply believe Western civilization is worth defending against the Islamization that occurs with the entrenchment of Shariah. Indeed, they are bravely trying to prevent Europe's Islamization, practically by themselves. I say "bravely" because in Europe these days, as we know from the Islam-motivated murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, such beliefs can get you killed.

Maybe so, a reader might say. But what does protesting Shariah in Europe have to do with either American policy in Iraq or Sept. 11?

The answer is everything. What were the attacks of Sept. 11 all about? Al Qaeda's terrorist plot was designed not only to strike at the United States, but also to advance the cause of establishing an Islamic caliphate -- a world government ruled according to Shariah, which, among other things, forbids criticism of Islam. Polls indicate that sizable numbers of Muslims (solid majorities in key countries), regardless of their opinion of Al Qaeda, share this same goal of a Shariat-based, Islamic caliphate. This is a highly significant overlap between the goals of Islamic terrorism and what we think of as mainstream Islam.

Meanwhile, though, in our childish, PC wisdom (accepted across the political spectrum), we have let Islam off the hook when it comes to terrorism, sticking to the story that our whole problem is with a Tiny Band of Extremists That Hijacked Islam, not the jihadist teachings of Islam itself. To make the story stick, we also seem to ignore the impetus behind Islamic terrorism -- the imposition of Shariah, what with its ultimate institutional denigrations of non-Muslims and women, and its denial of freedom of conscience and expression.

This blinkered view of Islam explains how even in our commemorations of Sept. 11 we ignore the ongoing threat to liberty posed by the spread of Shariah across the West, which the SIOE was trying to protest. It even helps explain our confusion over Iraq, where, ignoring the formative influence of Shariah on the native culture, we are stumped by our failures to remake Iraq in our own Western image.

There is another consequence of our blindness: a terrible indifference to cultural allies in Europe who are fighting its Islamization -- a cataclysm for the liberty-based West.
We ignore them at our peril.

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Enemies Inciting Rift Among Muslims

TEHRAN, Sept. 15--President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz discussed regional developments, especially Tehran-Riyadh ties. In a telephone conversation on Saturday, Ahmadinejad felicitated King Abdullah on the advent of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, ISNA reported.
The chief executive noted that since the enemies of Islam cannot harm nations, they try to sow seeds of discord among Muslim countries, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia.
“While Muslim countries are working to forge unity among Muslim states, the enemies are doing their best to create a rift among nations,“ he said.
Ahmadinejad thanked King Abdullah for providing Iranian Haj pilgrims with suitable services.


“The Islamic Republic of Iran is confident that the Saudi officials, particularly King Abdullah, pursue Muslim unity,“ he said.
Referring to the enemies’ efforts to impede Iran’s nuclear progress, Ahmadinejad pointed out that Iran’s conditions in the International Atomic Energy Agency at the international level is satisfactory and Iran’s nuclear rights have been restored.
In response, King Abdullah congratulated Ahmadinejad and prayed to God that the holy month will have blessings for both the Iranian and Saudi nations.

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Our new best friend-France

France backs new sanctions on Iran over nuclear program France said on Friday it wanted to reach a deal on new sanctions against Iran at the United Nations Security Council but indicated it might also push for separate European Union measures against Tehran.

The shift signals France's impatience with Iran, and its desire that the five permanent Security Council members plus Germany agree quickly on a third round of UN sanctions against Tehran over its nuclear program.

France also struck a more hawkish tone than Germany, which diplomats say believes new sanctions may not be necessary if Iran cooperates with the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

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New Options for Middle East Peace: A Plan to Extend Israel’s Democracy to the West Bank

Bennett Zimmerman and Michael L. Wise with Roberta Seid

The separation of Gaza and the West Bank provides the greatest opportunity since 1967 to resolve the status of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Policy-makers have been wedded to the vision of a two state concept and have not entertained alternative solutions.
Without a solution, Oslo adopted a two-state framework that left unresolved borders, limited defense rights and a "chutes and ladders" division of Jerusalem that has left chaos on the ground where Jewish and Arab populations live intertwined with the other.

West Bank Arabs have been voting with their feet for Israel, as they flee life under the PA. Israeli ID cards have become the most sought after commodity in the West Bank today, especially in the Jerusalem area.
The ability to attract the constituency of a rival is a political victory of the highest order. With Israel able to bypass external players, negotiation occurs at the individual, family or local level.

How Israel handles its political attractiveness will determine if it can use the opportunity to resolve the conflict.

"The Fourth Way: A New Demographic, Electoral and Political Paradigm for Israel's Extension of Democracy to the West Bank" provides the first integrated demographic and electoral analysis of the combined areas.

In Israel and the West Bank, 67 percent of the population is Jewish, 14 percent are Israeli Arab citizens fully enfranchised within pre-1967 Israel and 3 percent are permanent Jerusalem residents with rights to apply for Israeli citizenship. West Bank Arabs, who are currently outside of Israel's political system, make up only 16 percent of the combined populations.
In addition, Israel has been considering reform of its electoral system. Its current proportional-representation electoral system resembles that of Italy, and encourages small parties, giving them a disproportionate "spoiler" role. If a new districting system is adopted, many options open up for Israel to resolve the conflict unilaterally.

The American-Israel Strategic Planning Group proposes 21 Districts that maintain natural groupings of people: Pre-1967 Israel and Jerusalem include 17 electoral districts: 15 with Jewish majorities and two with small Arab majorities. The West Bank includes 4 electoral districts: two mixed-Arab-majority regions and two with 100 percent Arab majorities.

For the first time since 1967, Israel can extend its democracy to the West Bank without compromising either Israel's Jewish majority or its democratic principles. Here are several models explored:
AISPG "United Kingdom" Regional Government Model: As in Britain, Israel and the West Bank districts would govern all local and regional affairs while the national government manages immigration, security and national defense, and foreign affairs. Just as Scotland has turned over key functions to the government of the United Kingdom, so has England. The model allows equality and dignity while providing de facto control on key issues to the Jewish majority.

AISPG "Israel Extension Plan": Israel and the West Bank merge with a national government in Jerusalem. Governmental reform mechanisms including referendum, a Senate, or new Upper House Chamber, would be added to support consensus rule. West Bank areas would be folded into Israel's most densely populated Districts to be used for key elections, including a possible presidential system.

Civil rights and individual liberties would be guaranteed in all scenarios. Both approaches include partial and full absorption schedules.

AIDRG "Realistic Border Initiative" (RBI): Highly strategic zones in the Jordan Valley and around Jerusalem and other areas of the West Bank have been slated for priority absorption into Israel. There are 400,000 Arab residents living in the areas Israel most wishes to retain. Stability would be added to Israel's electoral system as these zones gain Jewish residents and as Arab residents mix with predominately Jewish Districts.

However, the most heavily populated Arab zones are straddled by the zones Israel wishes to retain. In order to separate populations living intertwined with the other, Israel has had to construct a demographic barrier and a series of checkpoints bringing charges of occupation. And a security threat which had been held at the border has now shifted to a locally based terror threat only moments from Israel's population centers.

The success of partial absorption plans depend on implementation of credible local governance for Arab majority districts outside initially absorbed districts. Israel can provide a framework to facilitate later separation, merger with Israel or continued self-governing status.

Israel's 2 to 1 Jewish majority is secure based on a wide range of fertility scenarios with Israel's control of borders into the combined areas. In the past two years, Israeli Arab and Jewish fertility rates have rapidly converged while West Bank fertility is vulnerable to modernization and integration with Israel. By offering a political solution for all inhabitants in the area, Israel might be on the verge of locking in an overwhelming Jewish majority within borders the country believes necessary for its defense.

Democracy offers the best solutions for an ethnically mixed region. Israel's demographic advantage, if used wisely, will allow the country to lead the region to a permanent peace. This strength should be realized before implementing panacea solutions involving Jordan or other parties that create long-term political instability.
The American-Israel Strategic Planning Group (AISPG) is led by Bennett Zimmerman, Michael L. Wise, and Roberta Seid. The authors have written ‘Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza: The Million Person Gap’, ‘Forecast for Israel and West Bank 2025’, ‘Realities on the Ground: Jerusalem 2007-2025’. Their findings have been presented before the US Congress at the House International Relations Committee, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. www.aispg.com

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How Female Illegals Abuse the System

Every year thousands of Americans are victimized by a swindle known as the “immigrant abuse scam.” What’s amazing is this shake-down is paid for by the U.S. taxpayer under the guise of stopping domestic violence.
One of those persons was Roger Knudson, 64, of Arizona. When he discovered his wife was having an affair, he filed for divorce. Fearing the judge would learn her visa had expired and order her back to Mexico, she fell into a rage and attacked him.
But the DA refused to prosecute the assault. Then the illegal went to a local woman’s shelter that provided her pro bono legal services and told her to accuse her husband of the very crime that she herself had committed. “I have spent thousands of dollars since 2002 clearing myself of the accusations,” Knudson wrote sadly.
So here’s how the scam works: a woman makes an accusation of abuse. The laws define domestic violence so loosely that she doesn’t need to provide a scrap of evidence -- she only needs to scream “abuse!” So the judge issues a let’s-play-it-safe order.
That restraining order becomes the gold-plated meal ticket that entitles her to preferential treatment by immigration authorities, free legal services, and a generous helping of welfare services. And anyone who questions the swindle is accused of being “soft on domestic violence.”
Elizabeth Howard of Arizona recounts how the wife of her father trapped him in the bedroom and threatened to kill him. When he called for help, the police arrested both of them. As soon as she got out of jail, she marched over to the domestic violence shelter to have him kicked out of his home. Then she began to hold yard sales to sell his car and tools.
“A friend at work whose family migrated here from Mexico told me it’s common knowledge that if a woman marries a U.S. citizen and it doesn’t work out, she can claim abuse and get the resources she needs,” Howard sadly explains. “I believe the Violence Against Women Act should be called the ‘Women Get What They Want Act.’”
In two cases, the extortion tactics continue to this day, forcing my informants to protect their identities.
One woman’s close friend was falsely accused of abuse by his immigrant wife. The courtroom hearing resembled a kangaroo court more than the even-handed administration of justice: “We were not allowed to present a case, ask questions, look at the evidence that the accusing party submitted, two of our witnesses were cut off after two minutes, and the third was not allowed to testify at all,” she revealed.
“As a victim of abuse previously myself, I am sensitive to real victims of abuse. But those who commit fraud and claim abuse where none exists endanger us all,” the woman confides.
In 2001, Bob planned to marry a woman from the Caribbean. Shortly before the ceremony, she informed him she was an illegal alien. But he loved her so he went ahead with the wedding, knowing he could sponsor her for a work permit.
Then the relationship went sour and she threatened to abduct their newborn daughter if he didn’t accede to her demands. One day she surprised him with this news: “I have my baby – I don’t need you anymore!” Bob grew fearful of the intimidation tactics, so he filed for divorce and withdrew her work permit application, believing the immigration service would protect his daughter, a newborn U.S. citizen.
Turning the tables, she requested amnesty under the Violence Against Women Act, even though she didn’t produce an iota of police or medical proof of violence. This filing prohibited him from submitting any evidence of immigration fraud or even appearing in the courtroom during her hearing.
“In the end, she got everything she could have hoped for: A work permit, VAWA amnesty, $750 tax-free dollars per month, and bragging rights on her cleverness on screwing over a stupid American fool in his own stupid country,” Bob bitterly notes.
The abuse rip-off has become so accepted that its proponents openly instruct women how to fleece their boyfriends and husbands. One group instructs gold diggers to view restraining orders “as a tool for economic justice.” Simply accuse your man of violence, and you can force him to pay your attorney’s fees, medical expenses, punitive damages, use of his house and car, and much, much more. It’s really that simple!
That advice comes to us from the Washington, DC-based Center for Survivor Agency and Justice, which receives generous support from the U.S. taxpayer by way of the Department of Justice. The Center offers no advice to help American taxpayers deal with false accusations of domestic violence by immigrant women.

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Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

Religion of Peace? is a comparison and contrast of certain aspects of Islam and Christianity, an attempt to refute the common claim that each is equally likely to incite its adherents to violence, and a means to rally those who enjoy the fruits of Judeo-Christian civilization Robert Spencer is one of the nation’s foremost experts on Islamic affairs. He is the editor of the website, Jihad Watch, and the author of two recent books, The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). The former holds the particular distinction of being banned by the government of Pakistan. His latest effort, Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't, analyses and contrasts the world’s most popular belief systems. Mr. Spencer’s articles can be regularly read on frontpagemag.com.
BC: Congratulations, Mr. Spencer, on your recently released, Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't. Tell us the main theme that you focused in on.

Spencer: Thank you. Religion of Peace? is a comparison and contrast of certain aspects of Islam and Christianity, an attempt to refute the common claim that each is equally likely to incite its adherents to violence, and a means to rally those who enjoy the fruits of Judeo-Christian civilization, whether or not they are Jews and Christians, to an awareness of how seriously that civilization is threatened by the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. I hope that awareness will lead to a stronger defense of that civilization.
BC: Over the course of the past two years you have also published The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World's Most Intolerant Religion and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). What are you saying in your new book that has not been said previously?
Spencer: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) is a general overview of the elements of Islam that jihadists are using to recruit and motivate terrorists today. The Truth of Muhammad is a biography of the founder of Islam. Religion of Peace? is neither of those things. It is an evaluation of the Christian theocracy scare (as enunciated by bestselling books such as American Fascists by Chris Hedges) and a comparison of various aspects of Christian and Islamic Scripture and history in order to demonstrate what the real threat is, and to resist the moral equivalence that blankets the popular culture today.
BC: How virulent has been the reaction to your work in Islamic quarters? Have you had a fatwa declared against you? Any good stories to share?
Spencer: Well, I always hope that there will be a reasoned response to the points I raise, and a genuine dialogue between people who disagree, but I’m still waiting. Invariably reactions from Muslims feature denial of the points I make about Islam, despite the fact that I work exclusively from Islamic sources and the words of Islamic spokesmen, plus personal abuse. I haven’t received a formal fatwa, but many death threats, including one from a man who was determined to kill me because Islam is a religion of peace. One of his messages read in part: “I will be violent against anyone who hurts muslim feelings about Prophet. It is a religion of peace for everyone until some duckhead sprews out his damn saliva on a senstive topic as this. Spencer will be delivered.”
BC: If you had to estimate, across the world, what percentage of the Muslim population is radicalized?
Spencer: In the sense of actively pursuing jihad violence, only a tiny minority. In the sense of supporting those who perpetrate violence, a considerably higher percentage. Note, for example, that on September 11, 2006, Al-Jazeera asked Muslims, “Do you support Osama bin Laden?” 49.9% of respondents said that yes, they did.
BC: Considering your area of concentration, what positive impact do you think that your scholarship, along with your website Jihadwatch.org, has had upon western readers? Have you had any effect on our policy makers?
Spencer: I would like to think that I have made some people more aware of the nature and magnitude of the global jihad threat than they were previously. I’ve had positive meetings with several congressmen on jihad-related issues.
BC: I saw clips of a debate between yourself and Dinesh D’Souza which was held at the Conservative Political Action Conference. What do you have to say to critics who imply that pointing out the deficiencies of Islam actually serves to harm relations between Muslims and westerners?
Spencer: D’Souza claims that criticism of Islam breeds jihadists. But if peaceful Muslims really abhor jihadism, they should have no reason to object to critical presentations of the elements of Islam that foster jihadism. In fact, they should welcome them. You can’t reform what you won’t admit needs reforming. If identifying the elements of Islam that jihadists use to justify their actions will be enough to drive peaceful Muslims into the arms of the jihadists, then how committed could they really have been to peace and moderation in the first place? Pretending that the jihadists aren’t using Islamic teachings in this way will do nothing to stop them from doing so.
BC: What of the allegation that you have ignored many of the positive passages in the Koran as a means to present a distorted picture of the Muslim world?
Spencer: This is wholly false, as anyone who read my books will know. In Religion of Peace? I discuss at length the passages of the Qur’an that enjoin tolerance of unbelievers, and explain how mainstream Muslim exegetes understand those passages in light of passages that enjoin violence. Also, I am now Blogging the Qur’an weekly at HotAir.com (archive here), going through the text cover to cover – no one can say I am ignoring any passage at all in this endeavor.
BC: What do you make of the idea that it is possible for conservatives and Muslims to find common political ground in America? Do you think that D’Souza had some valid points in The Enemy at Home?
Spencer: I’m sorry to say that The Enemy At Home is one of the most poorly reasoned books I have ever read. Nowhere in it does D’Souza identify even one of the Muslims with whom he recommends conservatives ally. When I pressed him on this point, he named Ali Gomaa, the Mufti of Egypt. Yet Ali Gomaa has been identified by the New York Times as a supporter of the terrorist group Hizballah, and has reaffirmed that those who leave Islam should be punished. He has also declared statues un-Islamic – a point that D’Souza scorns as insignificant. But what if supporters of this view came to power in Europe, which is not a remote possibility, and destroyed the artistic and cultural heritage of Judeo-Christian civilization? I am not convinced that that prospect is something about which we should be sanguine; nor am I convinced that supporters of a terror group will make reliable allies for conservatives. Until D’Souza can come up with any more compelling examples of those with whom he recommends we ally, I suggest we approach his recommendations with extreme reserve.
BC: I’ve heard different estimates, ranging from 30 to 60 percent, of how many European Muslims wish to live in a country ruled by Sharia law, but how popular do you think the idea of Sharia is with Muslims in our country?
Spencer: CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper has said that he would like to see the U.S. government become Islamic. Other Muslim leaders in the U.S. have expressed similar sentiments. Sharia law is integral to Islam. It would be extremely surprising to find a large population of Muslims that rejected and opposed it – although on the other hand, it was Muslim women who defeated the recent Sharia initiative in Canada.
BC: I suspect that I am not the only westerner completely dumbfounded by Sharia’s appeal within the Islamic community. What in this practice so appeals to them?
Spencer: It is regarded as the law of Allah, and encompasses every aspect of human behavior. Such a totalitarian comprehensiveness appeals to many, Muslim and non-Muslim.

Bernard Chapin is a writer and school psychologist living in Chicago. His first book, Napalm is the Scent of Justice, was a fictional account of a radical feminist United States; his latest book concerns the implosion of a school he worked at and loved: Escape from Gangsta Island: A School's Progressive Decline.

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What isn't media reporting this? Fear of being called Islamophobic?

In 1991!! It details a plan by the extremist Muslim Brotherhood to “conquer the U.S.” from within, overturn our Constitution, and replace it with Muslim Sharia law. .For the past few years, evidence has been mounting regarding efforts by Islamists to infiltrate America in order to pave the way for jihad. Unfortunately, most of the media and far too many in government have ignored this mounting evidence. As a result, most Americans are unaware of the insidious Islamofascist threat that is growing within our borders.

On Sunday, September 9th, Rod Dreher, Dallas Morning News editorial writer and columnist who is following the Holyland Foundation trial in Dallas, penned a column focusing on a revealing, shocking memorandum that was entered into evidence by the Justice Department.

The document, described as an “explanatory memorandum,” was seized during a federal raid of an Islamic extremist’s home in Virginia – in 1991!! It details a plan by the extremist Muslim Brotherhood to “conquer the U.S.” from within, overturn our Constitution, and replace it with Muslim Sharia law.

Think this is over the top? Read Dreher’s column. Below are some excerpts from his riveting commentary, which can be read in its entirety at http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/columnists/rdreher/stories/DN-dreher_09edi.ART.State.Edition1.4235f88.html
I urge you to forward this information to everyone in your email address book, and encourage them to visit our website at www.americancongressfortruth.com. America must wake up!

Rising in Defense of America,
Brigitte Gabriel
P.S. Once you’ve read Dreher’s column, if you are sufficiently concerned and outraged, contact your U.S. Representative (http://www.house.gov/writerep/) or your U.S. Senators (http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm) and demand a congressional and Justice Department investigation of organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).


Below are excerpts from:
“What the Muslim Brotherhood Means for the U.S.” by Rod Dreher
…“This 'explanatory memorandum,’ as it's titled, outlines the 'strategic goal’ for the North American operation of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Here's the key paragraph:
The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.

“The entire 18-page platform outlines a plan for the long haul. It prescribes the Muslim Brotherhood's comprehensive plan to set down roots in civil society. It begins by both founding and taking control of American Muslim organizations, for the sake of unifying and educating the U.S. Muslim community – this to prepare it for the establishment of a global Islamic state governed by sharia…

“…The HLF trial is exposing for the first time how the international Muslim Brotherhood – whose Palestinian division is Hamas – operates as a self-conscious revolutionary vanguard in the United States. The court documents indicate that many leading Muslim-American organizations – including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim American Society – are an integral part of the Brotherhood's efforts to wage jihad against America by nonviolent means.

“The Muslim Brotherhood is an affiliation of at least 70 Islamist organizations around the world, all tracing their heritage to the original cell, founded in Egypt in 1928. Its credo: 'Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope…’
“…According to a 2004 Chicago Tribune investigation, establishing the Brotherhood in the United States has been a 40-year project that has worked mostly underground – even beneath the notice of many Muslims…

“…Is this just alarmist paranoia? Not at all.

“This matters because high-profile organizations with roots explicitly in the Muslim Brotherhood have successfully established themselves in a paramount position to define Islam in America according to a radical politicized model. And they've done so without the American public having the slightest idea about their real agenda. Indeed, the Bush administration is unwittingly helping the Islamist cause by including their leaders in public events, thus conferring them legitimacy. On Labor Day weekend, the same Department of Justice that's presenting evidence of the ISNA's involvement with radical Islam at the Dallas trial sponsored a booth at – wait for it – ISNA's national convention in suburban Chicago…

“…Courageous Muslims like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy are sounding the alarm about radical Islam's stealth takeover of U.S. Muslim institutions. Why are the news media ignoring this? Fear of being called Islamophobic?

“This has got to stop. Six years after 9/11, we're still asleep. Islamic radicals have declared war on us – and some are fighting here in what looks like a fifth column. Read their strategy document. It's there in black and white, for those with eyes to see."

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'Islamophobia'-Example of Irresponsible Behavior (revisited)

GS Don Morris
June 1, 2007 (original post date)

The process of turning a myth into reality is quite an interesting behavioral phenomenon.

This occurs when one group of people wants to challenge, infuriate, demand, dictate, and control the ideas and beliefs of another group of people. The motivation is direct and to the point. The outcome is usually for political and/or social engineering reasons to determine for others how they should act, speak, and behave. One of the best examples of this is the application of the term 'Islamophobia' directed to those of us who challenge or question practices of Islam within the Western culture. Islamic organizations regularly accuse non-Muslims of 'Islamophobia' - a fear and disdain for everything Islamic. As recently as May 17 this accusation bubbled up again as foreign ministers from the Organization of the Islamic Conference called Islamophobia "the worst form of terrorism." Ministers from multiple countries attending the conference 'warned'- according to the Arab News - that this form of discrimination would cause millions of Muslims in Western countries, "many of whom were already underprivileged," to be "further alienated."1 How does something like this come to be?

Let us examine Islamophobia from a different perspective. Allow me to submit that a formula or a blueprint exists for those people who want to marginalize and/or invalidate someone or something. It consists of the following steps - not necessarily exactly in the order presented:
· Create a new term that describes a new behavioral phenomenon
· Within the term use descriptors that sound plausible yet are also familiar to the general population
· Ensure that identifiable behaviors are described and shroud them in a negative bent
· Enroll experts in supporting this phenomena such as university academics, psychologists, human peace activists, human watch groups, and governmental agencies along with the popular media
· Develop strategies to identify individuals who display this 'terrible human behavior' and condemn them for displaying it
· As often as is possible, in public settings, use the term as a means to alienate people from one another-begin a 'name-calling' campaign
· Use this phenomena to discredit anyone who may challenge your point of view-never respond directly to the charge, rather, reverse the situation and 'attack' the individual taking issue with your point of view
· Move to make this display of behavior illegal; pass local/regional and national legislation that criminalizes the behavior
· Threaten legal action and/or actually take such action even though you know you do not have a case; it puts your antagonist on the defensive- right where you plan to keep him/her

This is a reasonable list of descriptors involved in the process. When one applies the preceding criteria steps to the development and implementation of Islamophobia you find it to accurately describes what has occurred particularly in the West during the last 5-10 years. Values Contrary (VC) Islamists and their non-Islamic supporters have used this to deflect criticism, deny facts, to divert attention, to defame, invalidate, and condemn anyone who challenges the practice of VC Islam2.

In order for Islamophobia to be effective the society upon which it has been thrust must operate within a 'makes me - believe' communication construct3. Without this operational construct in play, Islamophobia would have no impact upon the general population. It is because we actually believe that we can make someone feel or think something and/or that someone or something can do the same to us, the 'communication table' has been set. Afraid that one might OFFEND another person or cause someone to feel insulted or uneasy, we refrain from speaking/arguing or even questioning our antagonists. The West enemies know this and use it as a weapon against us.

We have become afraid to speak up and to challenge VC Islam and their followers. In the process we are afraid to stand for our own values, grounded within another set of beliefs. We do not defend our way of life; we acquiesce to a behavioral set that we do not belief in nor do we want to have as the basis for our social milieu. Said another way, We stand down on our long held values and meekly go forward into the future.

Allow me to provide some examples of the preceding process. Aside from the previously mentioned May 17 activity, In America, perhaps the most conspicuous organization to persistently accuse opponents of Islamophobia is the Council of American Islamic Relations. CAIR has taken up the legal case of the "Flying Imams," the six individuals who were pulled from a US Airways flight in Minneapolis this past November after engaging in suspicious behavior before takeoff. Not long ago, CAIR filed a "John Doe" lawsuit that would have made passengers liable for 'malicious' complaints about suspicious Muslim passengers. In an interview at the time, CAIR spokesman Nihad Awad accused Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) of being an 'extremist' who 'encourages Islamophobia' for pointing out what most people would think is obvious, that such a lawsuit would have a chilling effect on passengers who witnessed alarming activity and wished to report it4.

An Islamist group named Hizb ut-Tahrir seeks to bring the world under Islamic law and advocates suicide attacks against Israelis. Facing proscription in Great Britain, it opened a clandestine front operation at British universities called "Stop Islamophobia," as reported by the Sunday Times and presented by Daniel Pipes5.
Accusations of Islamophobia, Mr. Malik adds, are intended "to silence critics of Islam, or even Muslims fighting for reform of their communities." Another British Muslim, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, discerns an even more ambitious goal: "all too often Islamophobia is used to blackmail society."5

In Great Britain this term is used as a weapon. Hizb ut-Tahrir's manipulation of "Stop Islamophobia" betrays the fraudulence of this word. As the Sunday Times article explains, "Ostensibly the campaign's goal is to fight anti-Muslim prejudice in the wake of the London bombings," but it quotes Anthony Glees of London's Brunel University to the effect that the real agenda is to spread anti-Semitic, anti-Hindu, anti-Sikh, anti-homosexual, and anti-female attitudes, as well as to foment resentment of Western influence.5

For many people immediate credibility exists if the United Nations supports a position, term, or behavioral action. Within this international organization the term has achieved a degree of linguistic and political acceptance, to the point that the Secretary-General of the United Nations presided over a December, 2004 conference titled "Confronting Islamophobia" and in May a Council of Europe summit condemned "Islamophobia."

There are literally thousands of examples available to demonstrate the points I have presented. Does this mean that Islamophbia exists? I offer to you now that it does not-it is not real. You cannot see, touch, breathe or hold onto it. Any thinking, caring person knows that this is simply a humankind term used to describe a behavioral phenomenon that only exists because we allow it to exist. The degree to which we submit to its implementation will adversely impact the values of Western civilization and allow the emergence of a fifth column within our society whose ultimate intention is to replace our way of life with one our enemies cherish.

End Notes
1. Tawfik Hamid, How to End 'Islamophobia', posted OpinionJournal from the WSJ May 25, 2007
2. GS Don Morris, Political Correctness-It is Killing Us, May, 2007, http://writingtw.blogspot.com/
3. GS Don Morris, Political Correctness-It is Killing Us-Part One, April, 2007, http://writingtw.blogspot.com/
4. Tawfik Hamid, ibid
5. Daniel Pipes, Islamophobia? NY Sun, October 25, 2005

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UN racism expert brands defamation of religions threat to world peace

A UN expert on racism on Friday branded the defamation of religions - in particular critical portrayals of Islam in the West - a threat to world peace.

"Islamophobia today is the most serious form of religious defamation," "Islamophobia today is the most serious form of religious defamation," Doudou Diene told the UN Human Rights Council, which is currently holding a three-week session in Geneva.

Diene cited a caricature of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad in a Swedish newspaper, a protest by far-right groups in Belgium Tuesday against the "Islamization of Europe," and campaigns against the construction of mosques in Germany and Switzerland as evidence of an "ever increasing trend" toward anti-Islamic actions in Europe.
"We see the initiatives and activities of many groups and organizations which are working hard to bring about a war of civilizations," he said, adding that right-wing groups were trying to equate Islam with violence and terrorism.

Comment:Another example of media abuse and poor reporting. The headline suggests that you are going to read something about racism as it relates to Islam. Of course, Islam is not a race and thus it is incorrect, improper and misleading to suggest such linkage. However, the story is really bout "Islamophobia" and right wing individuals use of the term and this is linked directly to a threat to world peace.Aside from an enormous jump in logic and truth, this article only exacerbates the problem.Those who use the "I" term are only those who revert to name calling when we attempt to present data about international terror. Great tactic, name call and dismiss the accusation, divert attention away from the issue and invalidate the messenger.

The greatest danger to world peace are those world leaders, those religious leaders who have indicated an entire nation of people should be wiped out and those groups who have doctrines of hatred and have for years acted out that doctrine by murdering others simply because they were not of the same mindset and behavior. As soon as one dares criticize Islam or engages in free speech using academic inquiry and challenges Islam, people like Doudou Diene use their UN platform to denigrate the message and the messenger. well, no longer are we allowing such people to subvert the necessary discussion-we are bringing to the publics' attention another point of view. I ask my readers to read the piece that posts immediately after this one-said another way, it is located on top of this post.

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Coming Soon to America

Japan Sweats for Global Warming By Steven Milloy

Japanese office workers are being forced to sweat in the name of global warming. But before Americans consume too much "Green" Kool-Aid and suffer a similar fate, they may want to consider this week’s global warming developments.
The Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page story (Sep. 11) that Japanese offices are keeping summertime office temperatures at a "steamy 82 degrees Fahrenheit" to help Japan use less energy and reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.
Offices are now so uncomfortable that the traditional suit-and-tie dress code has been abandoned even though "82 degrees can only be comfortable if you’re thin, naked and stay still," according to a Japanese physiology professor.
There is growing pressure not to complain about sweltering office environments as the proud but dutiful Japanese public is being conditioned to perceive air conditioning as "shameful," according to the report.
Who should be sweating instead, however, are the climate alarmists, as the purported scientific basis of their campaign continues to melt from underneath them. A new study published in the journal Nature (Sep. 13) crafted to support the notion that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide drive increases in global temperature actually, if read carefully, casts further doubt on that idea.
The story begins in 2000 when the University of Ottawa’s Jan Veizer and others published a study in Nature reporting that their reconstruction (via fossil shells) of tropical sea surface temperatures for that last 550 million years only made sense if carbon dioxide were not the principle driver of climate variability on a geological timescale.
Veizer, along with Nir Shaviv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, followed up the 2000 paper with a July 2003 study in GSA Today (a journal published by the Geological Society of America). That report said at least 66 percent and perhaps as much as 75 percent of the variance in the Earth’s temperature over the past 500 million years may be due to cosmic ray flux.
Obviously, none of this was good for ever-fragile climate hysteria and the alarmists struck back with the new Nature study, which, surprisingly, includes Veizer as a co-author.
The new study that uses a different method to reconstruct sea surface temperatures from fossil shells claims to report results that "are consistent with the proposal that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations drive or amplify increased global temperatures."
So has Veizer participated in the debunking of his own work as the new study seems to imply? Hardly.
First, Veizer reluctantly told me the "text" of the Nature study, that is, the above-quoted conclusion, represented a "compromise" between the study’s disagreeing authors where Veizer’s side apparently did all the compromising for reasons that had little to do with the science.
While Veizer didn’t want to elaborate on the politics of the Nature study, he told me "not to take the tone of the paper as the definitive last word."
Veizer went on to say that the new Nature study has not refuted his original study. The new study, in fact, appears to have confirmed the original study with respect to its most important point that the historical sea surface temperature data indicate atmospheric carbon dioxide does not drive global temperature.
Even if the new study proves to be valid, Veizer says, at most it reduces the statistical variation in sea surface temperature estimated by the original study. This correction, however, has little bearing on the nature of the carbon dioxide-temperature relationship.
Veizer says the basic pattern of reconstructed sea surface temperatures in both his original study and the new study remain inconsistent with notion that atmospheric carbon dioxide drives global temperatures.
If it turns out that the new study reconstructs historical sea surface temperatures more accurately than his original study, Veizer added, it would only represent an increase in the impact of cosmic rays on the climate that was reported in the 2003 GSA Today paper.
There’s another point worth spotlighting in all this. It seems that the politics of global warming including the multibillion-dollar-funding of global warming research resulted in the publication in a prestigious science journal of a "compromise" conclusion that is not supported by the study’s own data.
"Science should never be adjusted to fit policy," was the reprimand the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency received from its own Science Advisory Board in 1992. But that’s exactly what seems to be happening to climate science. It’s a situation reminiscent of George Orwell’s "1984," in which Ministry of Truth worker Winston Smith wonders if the State could get away with declaring that "two and two made five."
Who’s wondering now? A recent series of reports from the Science and Public Policy Institute spotlights problems with the peer review process of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and efforts to create the illusion of scientific consensus on global warming.
Perhaps Japanese workers don’t mind sweating and stinking their way through the workday because of politicized science, but it remains to be seen whether American workers will be willing to suffer the same discomfort and degradation for the same bogus reasons.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, an advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

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High oil prices put Kuwait on verge of record surplus

KUWAIT: The wealthy Gulf emirate of Kuwait appears headed for a record budget surplus this year thanks to oil prices which cruised to a new all-time high.

Comment:This is the profit this tiny country made-multiply this figure by 10-25 times and you can better understand our enemies' motivation and ABILITY to wear the West down economically. They know they cannot beat us militarily BUT they do believe they can persevere better than the West. They are doing to us what we did to the Soviet Union.We must remain viligent AND we must take away their weapon called oil revenue. As world oil prices topped $80 a barrel for the first time Wednesday, the price of Kuwaiti oil, mostly medium and heavy crude, also hit a new record high of $71.72 a barrel.

National Bank of Kuwait (NBK) said the average price for Kuwaiti oil would range from $63 to $67.6 a barrel for the 2007/2008 fiscal year which began April 1, against a budget price of just $36.

Accordingly, revenues will range from $57 billion to $62 billion, compared to the budget projections of $28.9 billion, the report said.
The budget projects expenditures at $39.2 billion, but NBK said actual spending will be about 8 percent lower.

This would leave a budget surplus of between $19 billion and $25.2 billion, depending on oil prices, compared to a projected deficit of $10.33 billion.The largest surplus boasted by Kuwait was $24 billion in the 2005/2006 fiscal year.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb

In the past year, the surplus dropped to $18.5 billion despite posting record revenues of $55.2 billion, because of a one-time payment of arrears to the state-funded pension agency.

This would be the emirate's ninth straight year of budget windfalls because of strong world oil prices.

During the previous eight fiscal years, the emirate posted surpluses totaling around $72.5 billion.

By law, 10 percent of total revenues is placed in the Kuwait Fund for Future Generations, which has assets of some $174 billion.

Kuwait also has $39 billion in its public reserve, putting its total financial surplus at $213 billion, the highest in its history.

Returns on the fund's assets, estimated at well over $10 billion a year, do not appear in the regular budget.

Kuwait, which holds about 10 percent of global crude reserves, pumps around 2.4 million barrels a day. - AFP

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Well one congressman has courage and "gets it"

Floor Remarks by Congressman Zach Wamp, September 10, 2007 It's a privilege and an honor to come back down to the floor tonight. I want to talk on two fronts, really. The first one is about Iraq and the other is the threat of radical Islam, Islamofascism, as some people call it; but I think it's important here right on the cusp of the sixth anniversary, tomorrow of 9/11, to remind our colleagues and our fellow countrymen that we are not only not out of the woods, but that these threats are grave. They are grave this week.
It's easy for everyone in this country to get lulled back into complacency or look for the comforts of our living room and shopping malls, but we face a huge growing and imminent threat from the terror itself here on our homeland.
We come, as members of the Republican Policy Committee tonight, we just left a briefing downstairs from a Lebanese Christian named Brigitte Gabriel, who wrote a book called "Because They Hate." Some would ignore her, but, frankly, coming from that world and being able to go on Internet chat rooms and read Arabic and know what's going on out there, we should listen. We should listen very carefully to what's happening in the world of radical Islam…
…Let me give you an example. Mark Steyn just tells us recently of a book that was published called "Alms for Jihad; Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World." A guy named Jay Millard Burr wrote it. Great research in Saudi Arabia where all this oil money, and we heard this downstairs from Brigitte as well, using the Saudi Arabian oil money to promote terrorists around the world, period. It's happening…
Let me tell you, folks, in this country, from Dearborn, Michigan to right here in Virginia, Falls Church, Virginia, oil money from the wahabis in Saudi Arabia training up young people in this country, under a global Shari'ah, Islamic law, bringing them up against America in this country today. Listen, this, to me, at the sixth anniversary of 9/11, is a call to action for Americans who've been lulled into complacency thinking that somehow this conflict is about Iraq. If we would just leave Iraq, all of our problems go away.
I'll say to you tonight, Mr. Speaker, this is not about Iraq. Iraq is the venue, it's the theater, it's where al Sadr is, it's where the Iranians and the Syrians have come, it's where they've recruited, it's where the fight is, but it's not about Iraq. It's about us and radical Islam at war. That's the theater. But let me tell you, it could just as easily be here tomorrow. God forbid it, but it could be just as easily here.
They have virtually taken some parts of Europe in terms of public opinion. They've challenged laws of countries and states in their courts, challenging Islamic law should take precedence, and that's what they would like to see here.
You may say, oh, he's wild; he's off the reservation. Not true. This is the way it is. They're using our very porous borders to come at us. And we're not secure. We're ignoring the threat…
And let me tell you, this threat we face, nobody wants to hear this, is greater than the threat of Nazi Germany…
This is not George Bush's war. This is America's fight. We committed it together. Some people would like to blame it on others now and not accept the responsibility. But this is America's fight against radical Islam, and it will go on for years to come, even when Iraq is over. And there'll be a time where Iraq is not the central theater. I'm concerned we're going to be fighting radical Islam all the days of my life.
The question is, are we going to stand up, as generations before us have, and defend freedom. And don't think for a second that it's all about Iraq. Some people dressed in pink would have you believe that. It's not true. And I'll tell you, what some of them are doing is downright un-American, and 50 years ago they'd have run them out of here on a rail.

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Iran Spy Post Heightens Gulf Tension With US

Iran has established a sophisticated spying operation at the head of the Arabian Gulf in a move which has significantly heightened tensions in its standoff with the United States. The operation, masterminded by the country’s elite Revolutionary Guard, includes the construction of a high-tech spying post close to the point where Iranian forces kidnapped 15 British naval personnel in March.
The move has forced British and American commanders to divert resources away from protecting oil platforms in the Gulf from terrorist attack and into countering the new Iranian threat.
The US military says that the spying post, build on the foundations of a crane platform sunk during the Iran-Iraq war, is equipped with radar, cameras and forward facing infra-red devices to track the movement of coalition naval forces and commercial shipping in the northern Arabian Gulf.
Commanders fear that one of the main purposes of the Iranian operation is to enable the Revolutionary Guard to intercept more coalition vessels moving through the disputed waters near the mouth of the Shatt al Arab waterway south of the Iraqi city of Basra.
The disastrous British handling of the hostage crisis has convinced some in the Iranian regime that there is mileage in further such attempts.
But the US military believes the listening post could also be used to help Iranian forces target commercial shipping in response to any US air strikes on its nuclear facilities.
Such operations would form part of their threat to launch guerrilla or asymmetric attacks on western interests if Iran is attacked.
US forces have responded by establishing their own listening post, positioning it on an oil platform just across the maritime border between Iraq and Iran from the Iranian position. The two spying posts are now monitoring each other’s activity.
British naval personnel who have recently served in the Gulf have told The Sunday Telegraph that tensions between the Americans and the Iranians have soared, with both sides heavily involved in espionage and counter-espionage operations.
British forces are also on high alert in an attempt to prevent any repeat of the March incident. “The Revolutionary Guard navy comes out every day to cruise around on their side of the line in their fast patrol boats and drop of supplies at their surveillance base,” one said.
“Every one is being very careful. The last thing anyone wants is for things to get out of control by mistake.
“The northern Gulf continues to be tense with the Americans and Iranians keeping a close eye on each other. Both sides sends out patrol boats to watch the other side and they have both set up bases packed with spy gear – loads of radars and cameras.”
British personnel said that Iranian activity had forced them to rethink their priorities in the Gulf: “Up to March, when our sailors were captured by the Iranians, coalition patrols concentrated on protecting Iraq’s oil export terminals from al-Qaeda suicide bombers.
“Now watching the Iranians is our top priority. We don’t want to be taken by surprise again and we need to keep know what they are doing in case things kick off if the Yanks bomb the Iranian nuclear sites.”
The Iranian spying post is located in shallow waters southeast of the tip of the Al Faw peninsular. It is located in water claimed by Iran, although the maritime boundary in the area is disputed by the Iraqi government.
In March 15 British sailors and marines - 14 men and one woman - were captured when their small craft were ambushed by a larger Iranian force of gunboats during a boarding operation at the mouth of the Shatt al Arab.
They were held for almost two weeks and accused of spying before being pardoned by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and deported back to the UK.
The subsequent fiasco over media deals to pay some of the sailors for their stories handed the Iranians a propaganda coup. British forces say the presence of the spying post has made it even more difficult to operate in the area.
“The Iranian surveillance base has been set up in a large naval crane that was sunk during the Iran-Iraq war. It is just across the boundary line and has a radar and night vision cameras to keep us under surveillance 24 hours a day.
“On our side of the line the Yanks have set up their surveillance base on a charted barge moored along side the Khawr Al Amaya oil terminal.
“The boundary line between Iraqi and Iranian waters runs only few hundred yards from the exclusion zone set up around the terminal and we have little choice but to send our people out close to Iranian waters.
“We are toe to toe with the Iranians here.
“The US Navy and the allies don’t venture out there unless they are all tooled up and have loads of boats in support. We are not taking any chances any more.”
The development is the latest sign of the growing tensions between the US and Iran, which Washington has accused of supporting attacks on its forces in Iraq.
With Iran last week announcing that it had achieved its goal of 3,000 centrifuges to enrich uranium for its nuclear programme, the prospect of US military action has increased.
Despite Iranian assurances that it is only seeking to develop a peacesful nuclear programme to meet its future power needs, the US believes it is intent on developing nuclear weapons.
Iran has warned that it will hit back if the US launches air strikes against its nuclear facilities and shipping in the Gulf would be expected to be high on its list of targets.
Iran has three submarines stationed at the Bandar Abbas naval base on the northern shore of the strategically crucial Strait of Hormuz, where the Gulf is at its narrowest, and these would be expected to play a significant role in any campaign against shipping.
A report in the respected Janes Defence Weekly magazine, published tomorrow, quotes coalition naval personnel in the region reporting regular patrols by Iranian Revolutionary Guards - the same force responsible for the capture of the British service personnel in March.
The Guards are reported to conduct regular patrols in small patrol craft and speed boats along the boundary of their territorial waters.
Regular Iranian naval forces, which include frigates and corvettes moored at Bandar Abbas, are considered more vulnerable to pre-emptive US strikes and there is less reliance on them n the northern Arabian Gulf.

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Still believe Islam is a faith of peace?

Young Muslims begin dangerous fight for the right to abandon faith David Charter in The Hague
A group of young Muslim apostates launches a campaign today, the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, to make it easier to renounce Islam.
The provocative move reflects a growing rift between traditionalists and a younger generation raised on a diet of Dutch tolerance.
The Committee for Ex-Muslims promises to campaign for freedom of religion but has already upset the Islamic and political Establishments for stirring tensions among the million-strong Muslim community in the Netherlands.
Ehsan Jami, the committee’s founder, who rejected Islam after the attack on the twin towers in 2001, has become the most talked-about public figure in the Netherlands. He has been forced into hiding after a series of death threats and a recent attack.
The threats are taken seriously after the murder in 2002 of Pim Fortuyn, an antiimmigration politician, and in 2004 of Theo Van Gogh, an antiIslam film-maker.
Speaking to The Times at a secret location before the committee’s launch today, the Labour Party councillor said that the movement would declare war on radical Islam. Similar organisations campaigning for reform of the religion have sprung up across Europe and representatives from Britain and Germany will join the launch in The Hague today.
“Sharia schools say that they will kill the ones who leave Islam. In the West people get threatened, thrown out of their family, beaten up,” Mr Jami said. “In Islam you are born Muslim. You do not even choose to be Muslim. We want that to change, so that people are free to choose who they want to be and what they want to believe in.”
Mr Jami, 22, who has abandoned his studies as his political career has taken off, denied that the choice of September 11 was deliberately provocative towards the Islamic Establishment. “We chose the date because we want to make a clear statement that we no longer tolerate the intolerence of Islam, the terrorist attacks,” he said.
“In 1965 the Church in Holland made a declaration that freedom of conscience is above hanging on to religion, so you can choose whether you are going to be a Christian or not. What we are seeking is the same thing for Islam.”

Mr Jami, who has compared the rise of radical Islam to the threat from Nazism in the 1930s, is receiving only lukewarm support from his party which traditionally relies upon Muslim votes. His outspoken attack on radical Islam has led to a prelaunch walk-out from fellow committee founder Loubna Berrada, who herself rejected Islam.
She said: “I don’t wish to confront Islam itself. I only want to spread the message that Muslims should be allowed to leave Islam behind without being threatened.”
There have been suggestions that Mr Jami might defect to the right-wing Freedom Party, led by Geert Wilders, the most outspoken politician in the Netherlands, who has called for the Koran to be banned. But Mr Jami said: “I have respect for Wilders but we do not have the same ideology. I am for the freedom of religion.

“Banning something is not going to help. I am the opposite – everyone should read the Koran.” Mr Jami is being compared to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali refugee who became a prominent Dutch politician campaigning for the reform of Islam but who left eventually for an academic career in the United States.

Jannie Groen, a writer for De Volksrant newspaper, said: “[Among Muslims] he is getting the same reaction as Ayaan Hirsi Ali that he is too confrontational but you are seeing other former Muslims now coming forward. So he has been able to put this issue of apostasy on the agenda, even though they do not want to be in the same room as him and he has had to pay a price.”
By the Book
— 14 passages in the Koran refer to apostasy
— According to Baidhawi’s commentary, Sura 4: 88-89 reads: “Whosoever turns back from his belief, openly or secretly, take him and kill him wheresoever ye find him, like any other infidel. Separate yourself from him altogether. Do not accept intercession in his regard.”
— The hadith, tradition and legend about Muhammad and his followers used as a basis of Sharia, tells of some atheists who were brought to “’Ali and he burnt them. The news of this reached Ibn Abbas who said: ‘If I had been in his place, I would not have burnt them, as Allah’s Apostate forbade it . . . I would have killed them according to the statement of Allah’s Apostate, ‘Whoever changed his [Islamic] religion, then kill him’.”
— According to hadith, a special reward in Paradise is reserved for the killer of apostates
Source: Times archives; Barnabas Fund

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Scholars Justifies International Jihad and Killing

One of the world’s most respected Deobandi scholars believes that aggressive military jihad should be waged by Muslims “to establish the supremacy of Islam” worldwide. Andrew Norfolk
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2409833.ece Times Online One of the world’s most respected Deobandi scholars believes that aggressive military jihad should be waged by Muslims “to establish the supremacy of Islam” worldwide.

Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani argues that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practise Islam, only until they gain enough power to engage in battle.His views explode the myth that the creed of offensive, expansionist jihad represents a distortion of traditional Islamic thinking.Mr Usmani, 64, sat for 20 years as a Sharia judge in Pakistan’s Supreme Court. He is an adviser to several global financial institutions and a regular visitor to Britain. Polite and softly spoken, he revealed to The Times a detailed knowledge of world events and his words, for the most part, were balanced and considered.He agreed that it was wrong to suggest that the entire nonMuslim world was intent on destroying Islam. Yet this is a man who, in his published work, argues the case for Muslims to wage an expansionist war against nonMuslim lands.Mr Usmani’s justification for aggressive military jihad as a means of establishing global Islamic supremacy is revealed at the climax of his book, Islam and Modernism.

The work is a polemic against Islamic modernists who seek to convert the entire Koran into “a poetic and metaphorical book” because, he says, they have been bewitched by Western culture and ideology.The final chapter delivers a rebuke to those who believe that only defensive jihad (fighting to defend a Muslim land that is under attack or occupation) is permissible in Islam. He refutes the suggestion that jihad is unlawful against a nonMuslim state that freely permits the preaching of Islam.For Mr Usmani, “the question is whether aggressive battle is by itself commendable or not”. “If it is, why should the Muslims stop simply because territorial expansion in these days is regarded as bad? And if it is not commendable, but deplorable, why did Islam not stop it in the past?”He answers his own question thus: “Even in those days . . . aggressive jihads were waged . . . because it was truly commendable for establishing the grandeur of the religion of Allah.”These words are not the product of a radical extremist.

They come from the pen of one of the most acclaimed scholars in the Deobandi tradition.Mr Usmani told The Times that Islam and Modernism was an English translation of his original Urdu book, “which at times gives a connotation different from the original”.
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Achievement for Fuad Siniora’s government: victory over Fatah al-Islam

On September 2, 2007, three and a half months of battles between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam (which began on May 20) came to an end. 1. On September 2, 2007, three and a half months of battles between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam (which began on May 20) came to an end. Fatah al-Islam, a terrorist organization which is Al-Qaeda's branch in Lebanon , had several hundred operatives. Most of them settled in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in north Lebanon during 2006 and some in other locations, especially in the Palestinian refugee camps. The battles were the fiercest in a series of local confrontations which took place during the last year between Lebanese security forces and global jihad groups, which are making an effort to gain a foothold in Lebanon.1
2. There were a number of cease-fires which were violated after a short time by both sides. The Lebanese army showed itself to be determined and persistent , but could not rapidly overcome the Fatah al-Islam operatives, who fought stubbornly against superior forces and succeeded in holding out for several months.
3. The fighting took place in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (population 40,000) north of Tripoli . Most of the camp's inhabitants fled when the fighting broke out. As the fighting continued, the Lebanese army allowed other inhabitants, including family members of Fatah al-Islam operatives, to leave, in order to reduce the number of casualties and to make it easier to focus on fighting Fatah al-Islam strongholds.
4. During the first week of battles the Lebanese army increased its forces in Tripoli , encircled Nahr al-Bared, took positions in commanding areas and shelled the refugee camp with artillery and tank fire. At the beginning of June, after ten days of encirclement, the Lebanese army attacked the Fatah al-Islam strongholds inside the refugee camp and waged street fighting in the alleys. Fatah al-Islam operatives returned mortar and rocket fire . To reduce Lebanese army pressure within the camp, on June 17 global jihad elements launched rockets at Kiryat Shemona 2 and harmed UNIFIL forces. The attacks did not influence Lebanese army pressure in Nahr al-Bared.
5. The battles ended on September 2 when several dozen Fatah al-Islam operatives who had remained in the camp tried to break through the Lebanese army encirclement. Most of them were killed and Lebanese soldiers, with backup from the air and the sea, began searching the area for operatives who had escaped. The Lebanese soldiers killed 30 of them and completed their takeover of the camp. Several Fatah al-Islam operatives were killed by armed civilians who had accompanied the Lebanese soldiers in pursuing them (Al-Akhbar, September 3). In the days after the final battle, the Lebanese army finished the search for escaped operatives and forces which had participated in the battles returned to their bases in Beirut and other locations in Lebanon .
The fighting in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp

A Lebanese army roadblock on the outskirts of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp at the beginning of the battles (alwatanvoice.com, May 21). The Lebanese army firing at the Nahar al-Bared refugee camp (psp.org.il, June 8)

Lebanese army soldiers on patrol in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (Al-Sharq al-Awsat, August 11). Smoke fills the sky over the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (Al-Nahar, August 14).
6. After the battles, Brigadier General François al-Hajj, head of the operations division for the Lebanese army, reported the following (Al-Hayat, September 5):
A. Fatah al-Islam was directly linked to Al - Qaeda . In 2006 its leader, Shaker al-Abassi, recruited 400 operatives for the organization. 3
B. Some of the operatives entered the country through official border crossings, including the Beirut airport. Others infiltrated by other means .
C. Most of those who were killed were Palestinians from refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon . Some of them were Syrian and others held various nationalities.
D. The Lebanese government and UNRWA have prepared a program for the rehabilitation of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, which was almost completely reduced to rubble. UNWRA has purchased lands near the camp to build temporary dwellings for the refugees and temporary schools for the camp's children.
Results of the battles
7. According to Elias al-Murr , the Lebanese minister of defense, at least 222 Fatah al-Islam operatives were killed (including organization leader Shaker al-Abassi and other members of the leadership) and 202 were captured by the Lebanese army . In addition, 163 Lebanese soldiers and at least 42 civilians were also killed (Reuters, September 4).
8. Shaker al-Abassi, who was Jordanian, held several important posts in Al-Qaeda in Iraq and was involved in terrorist activity in Jordan . 4 His wife and two operatives identified his body in the hospital (AP, September 3). 5 Many operatives who were killed were foreign nationals, and came from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, the Palestinian Authority and even Serbia and Chechnya (Al-Hayat, September 3).

The last day of battle: Lebanese army soldiers looking for Fatah al-Islam operatives who fled from the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (Al-Jazeera TV, September 2).

An ambulance evacuating the body of Shaker al- Abassi, Fatah al-Islam leader (Al-Jazeera TV, September 3). The terrible destruction of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (assafir.com, September 6)
Conclusion and evaluations
9. The Lebanese army's conquest of the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp and overpowering of the Fatah al-Islam strongholds is an exceptional event, the first of its kind . In the past the Lebanese army either operated on the outskirts of the Palestinian refugee camps or shelled them from a distance, but refrained from entering and taking them over . For the first time since the rehabilitation of the Lebanese army after the civil war, it fought actively, for a relatively long period of time in a densely built-up area, combining tanks, infantry and artillery.
10. The Lebanese army's victory will most likely strengthen it and improve its motivation, its self confidence and its prestige. It will also improve the prestige of its commander, General Michel Suleiman (which may also improve his chances in the coming Lebanese presidential race… 6)

Michel Suleiman, commander of the Lebanese armed forces
(Al-Safir, September 4).
11. The victory in Nahr al-Bared was an achievement for Fuad Siniora's government and has strengthened it in its struggle against its rivals during the sensitive period before presidential elections . It was an unprecedented decision to send the army into a Palestinian refugee camp to overthrow entrenched terrorists. There were a number of factors behind the decision: the Lebanese government's understanding of t he dimensions of the threat to Lebanon posed by the global jihad and the need to take strong measures against it, the broad internal support for steps taken against the global jihad, and the external political support (along with military aid) it received from the United States and the pro-Western Arab countries .
Appendix
Reactions in Lebanon to the victory over Fatah al-Islam in Nahr al-Bared

Victory celebrations after the Lebanese army took over the
Nahr al-Bared refugee camp (Al-Mustaqbal, September 4, 2007).
The Lebanese government and the anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian camp
(The March 14 Alliance)
1. Lebanese president Fuad Siniora proclaimed the Lebanese army victorious. He congratulated the army and boasted that it was a huge achievement, parallel to that of Hezbollah over Israel . He said that the victory proved that the country and its legitimate forces were able to protect Lebanon and stressed the important of deploying the army throughout country (Lebanese News Agency, September 2). His statements provide an indirect response to Hezbollah , which represents itself as “ Lebanon 's shield,” using the claim to justify its refusal to disarm.
2. Other highly-placed individuals in the Lebanese government and the commander of the army praised the Lebanese army's victory:
A. Sa'ad al-Hariri , Fuad Siniora's political ally, stated that the Lebanese army takeover of Nahr al-Bared meant the end of the “al-Abassi gang,” which had hidden behind the name of Islam and tried to destabilize Lebanon and cause a civil war. He noted that it was a glorious day for the Lebanese army “which enjoys a very high status alongside the resistance [i.e., Hezbollah] in south Lebanon ” (Al-Mustaqbal, September 3).
B. Elias al-Murr , the Lebanese defense minister, said that the victory had rooted out a terrorist organization which had threatened the Lebanese people and spread throughout Lebanon like a cancerous growth (Reuters, September 4).
C. General Michel Suleiman , Lebanese army commander, sent an order of the day praising the soldiers of the Lebanese army for their courage and willingness to sacrifice their lives for the sovereignty of Lebanon and national honor. He called upon them to keep their rifles aimed at “ the Israeli enemy ” and “the evil terrorism lying in ambush for the homeland” (Lebanese News Agency, September 3).
Lebanese government opponents
(The pro-Syrian, pro-Iranian camp)
3. Hezbollah, which kept a low profile during the months of battle in Nahr al-Bared refrained from praising the Lebanese government for its achievement. The organization was motivated by the fear lest the victory strengthen Fuad Siniora's government, harm Hezbollah's image as “ Lebanon 's shield” and renew the demand that it disarm.
4. Hezbollah attacked Elias al-Murr, called by Al-Manar TV the minister of defense of the illegitimate government because of what he said when the battle ended. The Hezbollah commentator was furious with Elias al-Murr because he did not thank Syria for having provided the Lebanese army with weapons and ammunition, he supported the United States' war on terrorism and because the government, Al-Manar TV claimed, had exploited an event with national import for Lebanon for its own political needs, while harming the Lebanese army's neutrality (Al-Manar TV, September 4).
5. On the other hand, Nabih Berri , head of the Lebanese parliament, leader of the Amal movement and a Hezbollah ally, congratulated the Lebanese army commander. He said that it was a glorious day for the Lebanese army, however, he added that the army enjoyed a firm status alongside the “resistance” [i.e., Hezbollah] in south Lebanon (Al-Mustaqbal, September 3).
6. Michel Awn , a Christian ally of Hezbollah, who doesn't miss an opportunity to attack the Lebanese government, demanded an inquiry committee be established to investigate the failures of the Lebanese government and of military intelligence which led to a campaign of 106 days between the army and a terrorist organization and to the death of 154 soldiers and officers . The main point of his claim was that “the Lebanese army was neglected for many years and did not receive either the equipment it needed or proper training to fight a war against terrorism” (Lebanese News Agency, September 2).
Syria
7. While visiting Tehran , Walid al-Muallem , Syrian foreign minister, congratulated the Lebanese army on its victory. He called Fatah al-Islam “a group of terrorists” and denied any connection between it and Syria (Agence France Presse, September 2). He also said that Syria had 26 members of the Fatah al-Islam leadership in custody (Al-Akhbar, September 4).

1 For further information see our May 31, 2007 Bulletin entitled “The confrontation in northern Lebanon between the Lebanese army and Fath al-Islam, the Al-Qaeda offshoot in Lebanon” .
2 For further information see our June 26, 2007 Bulletin entitled “Rockets fired on Kiryat Shmona for the first time since the second Lebanon war” .
3 François al-Haj did not mention the terrorist attacks planned by Fatah al-Islam. However, according to Lebanese sources the organization was planning to assassinate a series of Christian leaders, including Nasrallah Sfeir, the Patriarch, and to attack Lebanese government institutions in the north of the country. The high point was to have been the declaration of an Islamic emirate in north Lebanon (Al-Safir, September 4, 2007).
4 The Jordanian authorities allowed al-Abassi's family to erect a mourning tent near Jabel al-Zuhour in the heart of Amman . Hundreds of people came to offer their condolences (Al-Arab al-Yawm, September 6).
5 According to unconfirmed reports, DNA tests showed that the body was that of Shaker al-Abassi (AP September 10).
6 That would also entail a one-time change in the Lebanese constitution, which requires a cooling-off period of two years between government offices. The daily newspaper Al-Hayat , referring to the lessons to be learned from the battles at Nahr al-Bared, noted that the importance of the victory is in its political implications, particularly the beginning of a dialogue regarding the next Lebanese president (Al-Hayat , September 6).

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Abbas's armed militias inaugurate Ramadhan with more assaults on local mosques

PA security apparatuses and Fatah armed militias under the command of PA chieftain Mahmoud Abbas have assaulted a number of local mosques and arrested more Hamas cadres in the West Bank without paying respect to sanctity of the occasion. NABLUS, (PIC)-- Marring the tranquility of the Muslims' holy month of Ramadhan, PA security apparatuses and Fatah armed militias under the command of PA chieftain Mahmoud Abbas have assaulted a number of local mosques and arrested more Hamas cadres in the West Bank without paying respect to sanctity of the occasion.
Local eyewitnesses affirmed that at least nine Hamas supporters were rounded up at the hands of the PA armed militias in different parts of the West Bank, including Nablus, Ramallah, and Jenin.
At least four local mosques, including women "Musalla" (specified place for women to pray inside the mosque" were also desecrated by those militias that raided and savagely ransacked those mosques.
On Wednesday, the PA intelligence department alleged they discovered "big" firearms cache inside Al-Natoor mosque in Nabkus city, but Hamas Movement and local residents affirmed that the PA story was untrue.
The PA security elements' defilement of the mosques was unacceptable to the Palestinian people as it generated wide-scale condemnation among them, urging the immediate halt of such sacrilegious practices.
In Gaza Strip, the legitimate PA premier Ismael Haneyya ordered the release of tens of Palestinian prisoners detained in Gaza jail for security and vandalism charges on bail as a gesture of goodwill for the start of the holy month. Haneyya's step was widely welcomed in the Palestinian street.
Smearing media campaign against Hamas unearthed:
Meanwhile, PA security sources in Gaza Strip uncovered a plan prepared by the director of the Fatah-affiliated Palestine TV Mohammed Hussein Al-Dawoodi with the aim to unleash a smearing media campaign against Hamas Movement with full financial support from Ramallah
According to the security sources, Dawoodi was dismissed by Abbas's "unconstitutional" government in Ramallah and his salary was held after he was accused of "grave default" in "confronting Hamas Movement and tarnishing its image in the Palestinian street".
The accusation prompted Dawoodi to travel to the West Bank and asks for "forgiveness", promising he will arrange for an "unprecedented" black propaganda campaign against Hamas Movement upon his return to the Strip, the sources added.
Upon his return to the Strip, Dawoodi started contacting a number of Palestinian journalists working for the TV, and urged them to gear up for damaging Hamas's reputation in the Palestinian street. He also threatened the journalists of reporting them to Ramallah's government to sever their remunerations if the refused the order.
One of Dawoodi's tasks, the sources unveiled, was to photo offices of the PA interior ministry's executive force, and to give them to certain Fatah cadres in Gaza Strip who will bomb them in a bid to spark violence again in Gaza after Hamas Movement succeeded in controlling the security situation there and ending internecine fighting in the Palestinian street.

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A Sunni Arab tribal leader instrumental in driving Al Qaeda out of Iraq’s Anbar province was killed

Abdul Sattar Abu Risha was killed near his home in Ramadi, capital of Anbar. A Sunni Arab tribal leader instrumental in driving Al Qaeda out of Iraq’s Anbar province was killed by a bomb on Thursday, less than two weeks after he met US President George W. Bush in the desert region.
Abdul Sattar Abu Risha was killed near his home in Ramadi, capital of Anbar. He was the leader of an alliance of Sunni Arab tribes called the Anbar Salvation Council that joined forces with US troops to push Al Qaeda from much of the western area.
The bombing will serve as a stark warning to other tribal leaders and those cooperating with US forces in Iraq, especially given Abu Risha was so heavily guarded.
Iraq’s national security adviser Mowaffaq Rubaie condemned the attack and blamed Al Qaeda.
The US military commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, called the killing of Abu Risha “a terrible loss for Anbar province and all of Iraq”.
“It shows how significant his importance was and it shows Al Qaeda in Iraq remains a very dangerous and barbaric enemy,” Petraeus said in an interview with The Washington Post that was published on its website.
Two bodyguards and an aide to Abu Risha were also killed in the attack on the tribal leader’s car on the day Iraq’s Sunni Muslims marked the start of the fasting month of Ramadan. “The sheikh’s car was totally destroyed by the explosion. Abu Risha was killed,” Ramadi police officer Ahmed Mahmoud Alwani told Reuters.
Bush met Abu Risha and other tribal leaders during a highly symbolic trip to Anbar on September 3, where the American leader declared that improved security in the vast desert province was an example of what could happen elsewhere in Iraq.
The president is expected, in a televised address later on Thursday, to endorse plans for limited cuts in US troop levels in Iraq. He will likely refer to better security in Anbar to support his argument, but offer little else to Americans looking for a change of course in the unpopular conflict.
Police sources said Abu Risha was killed by a roadside bomb that targeted his armour-plated car. But one bodyguard who was not with Abu Risha said a bomb had been planted in his car, suggesting someone close to Abu Risha may have been involved.
Residents said a state of emergency had been declared in Ramadi. They said American and Iraqi troops had poured into the streets in a heavy show of force.
“We believe Abu Risha was one of the most important security personnel in Iraq,” said Brigadier General Abdul-Kareem Khalaf, spokesman for the interior ministry in Baghdad.
“The minister of interior has made an order that a statue be erected where he was killed or in any other place that the people of Anbar select.”
Success story
Abu Risha, who was believed to be in his early 40s, set up the Anbar Salvation Council last year to fight al Qaeda, an effort which has been held up by US leaders as one of the biggest success stories in improving security after more than four years of conflict.
His brother, Ahmed Abu Risha, would take over as head of the council, a source in the body said.
Bush’s trip last week to Anbar would have been unthinkable just months ago when it was the most dangerous province in Iraq for US troops and the heart of the Sunni Arab insurgency.
“It was once written off as lost. It is now one of the safest places in Iraq,” Bush had said.
In Washington, Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell called Abu Risha “a brave warrior”.
“It’s certainly our hope and our belief that he has spawned a movement that will outlive him,” Morrell said.
Al Qaeda once controlled large swathes of Anbar but the network angered local tribal leaders with its indiscriminate killing of civilians and harsh interpretation of Islam.
Abu Risha was instrumental in getting young men to start joining local police forces, a development that has sharply reduced levels of violence and forced many Al Qaeda fighters to flee to other provinces.
It was one of the first examples of the US military working with tribal leaders in Iraq to develop local police to secure their own communities.

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Israeli Capitulation

By David Bedein
FrontPageMagazine.com

On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met in his office with Machmud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, the PLO and Fatah, along with the new Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salman Fayad.

The media was not informed about what was discussed. To make sure the press would not ask too many questions at this time, Olmert took an unprecedented step and cancelled the traditional news interview that Israeli prime ministers always provided to the media on the eve of the Jewish New Year commencing on Wednesday night.

However, the usually reliable Palestinian Ma'an News Agency published the Hebrew document presented by the government of Israel to Abbas, which summarizes the “declaration of principles,” or “DOP”, between Israel and the PLO to be presented at the autumn summit expected to be held in November in Washington.

What follows is an analysis of each clause of the DOP, now offered by Israel to the PLO:

1. "Israel will end the occupation of the West Bank within an agreed period of time. The withdrawal and evacuation of settlements will be carried out gradually and in several stages. Each evacuated area will be turned over to the Palestinian Authority which will then enforce law and order in these areas."

Analysis: This would mean that Israel formally relinquishes sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and the areas acquired by Israel after the 1967 war, after Jordan’s attack on Israel was repulsed. This withdrawal would place Palestinian armed forces within rocket range of almost all of Israel, transforming the reality of “life under kassam rockets” for the city of Sderot inside Israel into a similar nightmare that almost all of Israel would experience too. This would ignore the warnings of a special study conducted by the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Israel Defense Ministry that was issued on August 15th, 2006 which concluded that Israel cannot defend areas against rocket attacks from within the 1967 lines, if Israel were to pull back from Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Moreover, this would mean that Israel accepts the Arab narrative of the “occupation” of the West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria, instead of recognizing the right of Jews to settle anywhere west of the Jordan River as guaranteed by the San Remo treaty and approved by the League of Nations in 1924 and reconfirmed when ratified by the United Nations in 1945. Meanwhile, this would mean that Israel suddenly expects the Palestinian Authority to enforce law and order, while the dominant faction in the PA, the terrorist group Fatah, the Arabic term for “conquest,” remains in a state of war with Israel.

2. “An unarmed Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. The specific
details of the borders will be determined according to security needs,
demographic developments and humanitarian requirements. This will pave the way to an equal territorial exchange. Israel will keep some settlement blocs and maintain geographic contiguity in Palestine and horizons for economic prosperity.”

Analysis: Unarmed Palestinian State? There is no provision for arms collection of the Palestinian armed forces that are now under the control of the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, the term “geographic contiguity in Palestine” is a code word for cutting Israel into two, by allowing a passage between Gaza and Judea that would allow hostile forces to cross Israel at will, cutting off the Negev region of southern Israel from the rest of the Jewish state.

3. There will be two capitals in Jerusalem, one for Israel and one for
Palestine. The Israeli neighborhoods will be under Israeli sovereignty and the Arab neighborhoods under Palestinian sovereignty. There will be
cooperation between both authorities that will allow for better
administration of people's lives.

Analysis: Arab and Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem intertwine with one another. Recognition of Palestinian Sovereignty would allow Fatah armed forces to patrol Arab neighborhoods and stockpile weapons there. To travel from one Jewish neighborhood to another Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, if you to traverse an Arab neighborhood, you would be forced to travel through areas controlled by Fatah armed forces. Meanwhile, the Palestinians define at least 12 Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem as Arab neighborhoods because of the fact that they were once Arab neighborhoods before 1948.

4. Special arrangements will be prepared to secure access to Holy places for all religions. A special administrative authority will be established to organize access of both people to Holy places in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Analysis: Free access to the “holy places” in Jerusalem has existed only since 1967. Between 1949 and 1967, although the UN guaranteed free access of all religions to all parts of Jerusalem, the Arab Moslems who then ruled Jerusalem would not allow access of any Jew to the Old City of Jerusalem. What Palestinian Arabs now demand is that Jews would not have access to the Temple Mount.

5. "Palestine is to be declared a national homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel is to be declared a national homeland for the Jewish people."

Analysis: This declaration would allow millions of Arabs to flood Judea and Samaria in a strategic mountainous region that overlooks and threatens Israel, which would be forced back to the coastal plain.

6. “A just solution is to be agreed on for the problem of the Palestinian
refugees with recognition of their suffering and understanding of their
individual right within the framework of a comprehensive solution.”

Analysis: From an international perspective, such a "just solution" means the fulfillment of UN resolution 194, which is approved every year with the support of all nations, except for Israel. UN resolution 194 recognizes the right of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendents to return to the homes and villages that they left in 1948. “Individual right” is also a code word for allowing Arab refugees and their descendents to return to homes that their grandparents left as a result of the 1948 war.
7. “Both sides to declare the end of conflict and endeavor to gain public
support as much as possible and both sides to do their best to cooperate against any aspect of terrorism and violence from either of the two states against the other.”

Analysis: The PLO has never defined their attacks on Israelis as acts of terror. At no time has the Palestinian Authority worked to curb the actions of the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade of the Fatah, which is defined by both the United States and Israel as an illegal terrorist organization. Since the outbreak of hostilities in 2000, Fatah has taken credit for the cold blooded murder of 328 people in Israel. Meanwhile, the language of this clause strangely equates “terrorism and violence” as emanating from both sides.

8. “Both sides to consider this agreement as being in accordance with the principles of the peace initiative proposed by the Arab League. Both will call the Arab League to positive steps towards full implementation of that initiative. They will also call on the international community and the
International Quartet to intervene and provide aid in different ways to push the agreement forward. This declaration must be agreed on by both the Israeli and Palestinian sides before the US-sponsored autumn peace summit. It will then be proposed and documented as international resolutions. Immediately after the autumn peace summit, in tandem with negotiations to reach a detailed agreement, Israel will start the withdrawal of forces and evacuation of settlements in the West Bank. The completion of the stages of the evacuation will take place in tandem with the completion of the negotiations."

Analysis: The Arab league remains at war with Israel and is not being asked to cancel its war against Israel nor its very charter, which states that the purpose of the formation of the Arab league is to eradicate the Zionist entity. At the same time, there is a seeming prejudgment as to the outcome of these negotiations. The government of Israel agrees ahead of negotiations that it will decimate thriving Jewish communities.

EPILOGUE: All this is reminiscent of negotiations that occurred between Israel and the PLO during the summer of 1993 that led to the signing of the first “declaration of principles,” the original DOP, which was known as the Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accord was signed on the White House lawn on September 13th, 1993 between two delegations representing Israel and the PLO respectively: Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on one side, while PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat and PLO Deputy Chairman Machmud Abbas were on the other side. Peres is now the President of Israel, while Abbas succeeded Arafat.

The Israeli Knesset ratified the Oslo “DOP” on September 25th, 1993 by a vote of 61 to 50. The PLO executive, however, scheduled a special session on October 6th, 1993 to ratify the DOP. At that meeting, Arafat and Abbas claimed that the PLO could not get a quorum at its office in Tunis, so the DOP was never ratified by the PLO.
That the PLO never ratified the DOP in 1993 was reported by the Israeli left-wing newspaper Al HaMishmar, whose correspondent, Pinchas Inbari, was practically the only Israel reporter then in Tunisia. However, no other mainstream Israeli newspaper has ever reported that the PLO never even ratified the original DOP, known as the Oslo Accords, while the Israeli government acted as if the PLO had done so.

The lesson to be learned from 1993 is that no matter what form the DOP enacted, the PLO would probably not ratify it, because of growing Hamas influence.
The question remains, nevertheless, if worldwide mainstream media would ever publicize any PLO non-approval of the DOP.

David Bedein is the bureau chief of the Israel Resource News Agency, located at the Beit Agron International Press Center in Jerusalem.

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Sanctions Must Obviously Be Working For Such an Iranian Response

Sanctions Will Harm Iranian Cooperation

Comment:This is what we know:when Iran publicly expresses complaints about sanctions and then indicates it will no longer "cooperate" ,the sanctions are working. Additionally, the EU must be held accountable for sending our enemies mixed messages-by stating that Iran has the right to ...our enemy uses this for propaganda externally and as a recruitment tool internally. Iran interprets these kind of statements as weakness on the part of the West and believes it is only a matter of time before they win.
EU Reaffirms Iran’s Nuclear Right
VIENNA, Austria,
Sept. 12--Iran warned on Wednesday that political interference, a clear reference to UN Security Council action, would jeopardize its new round of cooperation with international nuclear inspectors.

“Let the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) do its job,“ Iranian Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh told reporters after an IAEA Board of Governors meeting had reviewed the Iranian nuclear file, AFP reported.

“Any interference or politically motivated interference will definitely jeopardize the new constructive trend,“ of an agreed timetable for answering IAEA questions, Soltanieh said.

The UN Security Council has already imposed two sets of sanctions on Iran.
Soltanieh stressed that he wants the Iranian issue handled at the Vienna-based IAEA, which reviews compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), rather than at the Security Council, which can impose sanctions.

“Iran expects certain states to reciprocally support Iran’s initiative in full and timely manner, and return to the negotiating table for the peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue through dialogue and technical elaboration within the framework of the IAEA,“ Soltanieh said in comments to the agency’s 35-nation board.

Meanwhile, the European Union reaffirmed “the inalienable right of Iran to the peaceful use of nuclear energy“, during the meeting of the IAEA board, which concluded here Tuesday.

In a statement read by Portuguese ambassador to the board, the EU reiterated its support for finding a “negotiated long-term solution“ to Iran’s nuclear issue, stressing that the door to negotiation remains open.

As for the EU’s last-year package of proposals to Iran, which included its support to build a light water power reactor, the statement said that the union “will carefully follow the implementation of the work plan agreed by the (IAEA) secretariat and Iran.“

The EU noted that as it was said by the IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei in his latest report on Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities, “full and timely implementation of the work plan,“ previously agreed by Iran and the IAEA, would be a significant step forward.

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Wonderful Slideshow on Mideast History

Everyone who wants to be honest and knowledgeable needs to see this...and probably more than once.
Please share this masterful, succinct work.
Really worth watching ==> http://tinyurl.com/2jzuwd

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Where America and Iraq converge

Caroline Glick
THE JERUSALEM POST

Gen. David Petreaus and US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker's long-anticipated Congressional testimonies this week were edifying on two levels.

First, they told us a lot about the complex and challenging nature of the war in Iraq today. In their presentations, the two men did not simply inform the Congress of the estimable, indeed amazing progress that coalition and Iraqi forces have made over the past several months since the new counterinsurgency surge strategy was adopted. They also highlighted the enormity of the challenges facing the US and their coalition and Iraqi allies as they look to the future of the country.

The two men did not deliver their remarks in isolation. Their appearances on Capitol Hill came against the backdrop of shrill denunciations of Petreaus specifically and the war in Iraq in general. Those denunciations were orchestrated by deep-pocketed left-wing anti-war activists, and by Democratic politicians who apparently march to the beat of the activists' drummers (and bankrollers).

The Left's preemptive condemnations of Petreaus, and the Democratic politicians' continuation of the Left's attacks inside the committee chambers exposed the troubling direction that American politics have taken in the six years that have passed since legislators from both parties stood shoulder to should outside the Capitol building on September 11, 2001, and sang "God Bless America." And as Petreaus and Crocker's reports on the situation in Iraq today and the prospects for Iraq in the future make clear, the Democratic Party's embrace of radicalism has strategic repercussions for the prospects of the war in Iraq and for the future of global security as a whole.

As Ambassador Crocker explained, after 40 years of Ba'athist tyranny, Iraq emerged in 2003 as a traumatized and fractured society that today is still grappling with basic questions regarding its identity and its aspirations. Its ability to come up with reasonable answers to these existential questions is limited by the war now besetting it. The forces battling in Iraq of course seek through force to provide answers to those basic questions - and their answers obviously will not be good ones for Iraq, for the Middle East or for the world.

Petreaus and Crocker explained that in general, the US and its allies face two distinct enemy forces in Iraq today - al-Qaida in Iraq and Iranianbacked Shi'ite forces. As the stunning reversal of the security situation in the al-Qaida infested Anbar province over the past several months shows, US forces have made great progress against the first enemy.

The US wisely capitalized on tribal leaders' disaffection with al-Qaida barbarism and worked with them to launch an offensive against al-Qaida forces and to bring the Sunni tribes into the political processes in Iraq. As a result of this cooperation, terror and insurgent attacks in Anbar, which as recently as last December was considered "lost," have gone down some 80 percent. Tribal warriors have joined the Iraqi security forces by the thousands. And for its part, the Shi'ite-dominated central government in Iraq has embraced the Sunni reversal and is providing monetary and other assistance to the Sunni leaders in Anbar province.

On the other hand, there has been no decrease, indeed according to Crocker and Petreaus there has been an increase in Iraniandirected attacks in recent months. Characterizing Iran's role Petreaus said, "It is increasingly apparent to both Coalition and Iraqi leaders that Iran, through the use of the Quds Force, seeks to turn the Iraqi Special Groups [Shi'ite militias] into a Hizbullah-like force to serve its interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalitions forces in Iraq."

The disparity between al-Qaida's defeats and Iran's Shi'ite countersurge tells us something important about the difference between statecontrolled operations and operations by nonstate belligerents. It is true that al-Qaida in Iraq has direct ties to Syria and Iran. Its leaders have ties to Syrian intelligence; its commanders in Iraq are largely directed by al-Qaida's Shura Council in Iran; and it receives arms and funding from Teheran and Damascus.

But still there is a major difference between Iranian and Syrian sponsorship of al-Qaida in Iraq and Iranian support for the Shi'ite militias there. Iran and Syria view al-Qaida as a proxy of convenience. Although its war in Iraq serves their goal of preventing a post-Saddam Iraq from developing into a coherent, multi-ethnic, stable state governed by the rule of law, al-Qaida is not an Iranian (or Syrian) organization. From their perspective, its contribution to the war effort against the US and its Iraqi allies is good for as long as it lasts.

In contrast, Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, the Dawa Party and the Badr Brigades are agents of the Iranian regime, as are Hizbullah and the Iraqi Special Groups.
Petreaus noted that both the US and the Iraqis were surprised by the depth of Iran's involvement in the war. But they needn't have been. Iraq and Iran, with their historic competition for primacy in the Persian Gulf and within Shi'ite Islam, have always been integrally and competitively linked. In the 1980s, recognizing the hostility of both countries to US national security interests, the Reagan administration wisely adopted a policy of dual containment toward them.

Unfortunately, in 2003, the US ignored the interconnectedness of the two countries' fates, and so it adopted divergent policies toward them. While Iraq was confronted, Iran was ignored. Over time, the US policy of neglecting Iran was eventually replaced by a policy of appeasement. This divergence in US policy toward the two countries enabled Iran to renew its traditional bid for control over Iraq just as it was making moves toward regional domination through its nuclear weapons program, its cooptation of the Syrian regime, the expansion of its military and political influence over Lebanon through Hizbullah, and its sponsorship of the Palestinian war against Israel.
Iran's offensive moves in Iraq point to one of the most basic strategic complexities of the entire battle in Iraq. Iraq does not exist in isolation. It is part of the Arab and Islamic worlds. The pathologies plaguing post-Saddam Iraq are not merely the consequence of his brutal totalitarianism. There are also consequences of the pathologies that have taken hold of the Arab and Muslim world since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire 90 years ago. As a result, the American goal of shepherding the development of a democratic, stable post-Saddam Iraq governed by the rule of law, while the rule of the jackboot, the mullah and the imam remain the order of the day in neighboring countries, has always been problematic.

With Petreaus and Crocker's openness in acknowledging Iran's central role in the war in Iraq, we are seeing for the first time an admission that it is counterproductive to view Iraq in isolation from its neighbors. And this acceptance of the regional nature of the war exposes one of the central risks inherent in the US's current counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.

Perhaps the central component of the US strategy for stabilizing Iraq is the organization and training of the Iraqi army and police forces. While the majority of Iraq's security forces are loyal to their commanders and to the central government, and support the coalition forces they fight alongside, many Iraqi units have been infiltrated by enemy forces - most prominently, by members of Iranian-sponsored Shi'ite militias.

As Petreaus and Crocker warned this week, if the US Congress or the next administration decides to pull the plug on American-led efforts in Iraq, the results will be horrendous. Both men warned that a rapid withdrawal of US forces would likely cause the disintegration of the country, and Iran can be trusted to snatch key pieces of Iraq for itself. But beyond that, a US withdrawal would set adrift nearly half a million US-trained and armed forces who will undoubtedly seek out new sponsors.
The implications of the disintegration of the Iraqi forces for regional and indeed for global security are terrifying to imagine, and the policy ramifications of such an eventuality are clear. If the US plans on a quick exit from the country, the best thing it could do is to stop training and arming the Iraqi army.

This brings us to the strategic danger implicit in the raw hostility and irrationality of the American Left toward everything related to the Iraq campaign, which was expressed so openly in Congress and in the liberal US media this week. When a formerly responsible Congressional leader like the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee Tom Lantos prefers belittling Petreaus and to calling for speedy withdrawal of US forces and a "diplomatic surge" involving negotiations with Syria and Iran over accepting the responsibilities of US global leadership in time of global war, it is clear that something horrible has happened to the Democratic Party.
As The Wall Street Journal put it on Tuesday, the hard Left, which seems to have been catapulted to the leadership of the Democratic Party, "sees politics as not so much an ongoing struggle but a final competition."

The Journal continued, "Under these new terms, public policy is no longer subject to debate, discussion and disagreement over competing views and interpretations. Instead, the opposition is reduced to the status of liar. Now the opposition is not merely wrong, but lacks legitimacy and political standing. The goal here is not to debate, but to destroy."

Much criticism has properly been heaped on the lap of the Maliki government in Iraq for failing to make critical political progress that could improve the long-term prospects for post-Saddam Iraq. Governmental competence is imperative because as Petreaus explained, "the fundamental source of the conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power at resources."
Petreaus continued, "The question is whether the competition takes place more - or less - violently."

What is notable about Petreaus's statement is that it can be equally applied to all countries. Politics and warfare are both about the relative distribution of power. What separates democracies from tyrannies and failed states is that democracies determine power's distribution through deliberation and debate while tyrannies and failed states are governed by the rule of the gun and the laws of the jungle.
That the political party now in control of both houses of Congress, and well-positioned to form the next administration seems to have discarded this basic truth is far more dangerous for Iraq, the Middle East and indeed the entire world, than the chronic weakness, incompetence, double dealing and corruption of the Maliki government or of any successor government.

The strategy that the US has adopted in Iraq, which has met with such success in the brief time it has been operative, is a long-term strategy. Unless the Democrats regain their senses, it will be difficult for anyone to trust that the US won't simply abandon Iraq, and with it, its responsibility as the leader of the Free World in the midst of a global war.

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Israeli 'Occupation' versus Palestinian Self-Rule

By David Meir-Levi
FrontPageMagazine.com

Arab propagandists, and many Westerners all too willing to take at face value their lies, blame the sufferings of the Palestinians on the Jews, specifically on Israel's supposedly "brutal occupation" of Gaza and the West Bank. But do the facts justify this claim? Israel occupied these territories in 1967, as a result of Israel's defeat of the aggression launched by Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq. (Egypt finally signed one in 1979 in exchange for the entire Sinai peninsula, and Jordan did the same in 1994 in exchange for thousands of acres of formerly Israeli land east of the Jordan River).

Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip lasted until 1994, when the Oslo peace accord brought Arafat and his terrorist army back from Tunis and established him as the head of the Palestinian Authority over Gaza and the West Bank. A brief review of neutral third-party analyses of Israel's twenty-seven years of rule creates quite a different picture than the one presented by Arab propaganda, and establishes beyond reasonable doubt that under Israel's rule, the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoyed more political freedom, were provided more educational opportunities, and experienced greater economic well-being than at any time in their history before or since.

It is, in fact, the governments of the Palestinian Authority, and now of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which have imposed a brutal, graft-ridden, dictatorship over the Palestinian people, destroying their economy and terrorizing their society, killing or imprisoning thousands of their own people, and crushing all the democratic freedoms that the Oslo Accords demanded. It is they, not Israel, who have shut down every opportunity to create a state for the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Contrary to the Arab propaganda myth that Israel is a colonizing state that sought to expand its territories at the Palestinian's expense, Israel extended its sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip only reluctantly, and did so in the process of defending itself against Arab aggression in the 6-Day War. As soon as Israel had defeated the Arab armies, it offered to cede the captured territories in exchange for peace. Arab leadership uniformly rejected this offer. Israel was forced to retain sovereignty over these captured territories because the Arab policy had only in one objective—the obliteration of Israel.

Within a few days of the June 10, 1967 cease-fire, Israel's Ambassador to the UN, Abba Eban, made his famous speech offering to negotiate the return of captured territories in exchange for three Arab concessions: diplomatic recognition of Israel; negotiations to decide on universally recognized borders and on other outstanding issues; and peace. World opinion was amazed that the victor was offering to negotiate with the vanquished and was willing to make substantial concessions (return of territories) in exchange for symbolic and diplomatic ones (recognition, negotiations, peace agreements). To formulate a response to this unexpected new reality, the Arab states called a summit meeting in Khartoum (capitol of Sudan) in August, 1967. The result was the now infamous three Khartoum NOs: no recognition, no negotiations, no peace.

The Benefits of Israeli Occupation

Despite being forced by Arab intransigence to maintain its sovereignty over the newly captured territories, and to maintain a state of war with the entire Arab world, Israel undertook the economic, agrarian, medical, and infrastructural development of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, for the benefit of the Arab population, in the expectation that such development would yield what the Israeli government called a "peace dividend."

This Israeli "mini-Marshall plan" for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip involved investment of hundreds of millions of dollars to bring these territories into the 20th century with regard to infrastructure, roads, sewerage, sewage treatment, electricity, phones, radio and TV broadcasting, water purification and water supply. World Bank records indicate that the GDP of the West Bank grew between 7% and 13% per year between 1967 and 1994. Tourism skyrocketed, unemployment almost disappeared as hundreds of thousands of Arabs worked in Israel's economy earning far more than their counterparts in other Arab countries. Seven universities, funded in part by Israeli and private Jewish money, grew up on the West Bank in place of the three teachers training schools that existed there before 1967.

During the decades of Israeli sovereignty, there was almost complete freedom of movement throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israelis shopped in East Jerusalem and in Bethlehem and in Ramallah, while Arabs shopped in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Arab students from the West Bank attended Haifa University's Arab Studies department; and Arab Israelis could re-unite with relatives among the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Although Jordan was still de iure at war with Israel, Israel permitted West Bank Arabs to retain their Jordanian citizenship, in the expectation that Israel and Jordan would reach a peace agreement and most (although probably not all) of the West Bank would revert to Jordan, and even allowed West Bank Arabs to cross freely over the Jordan River in to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Thus, West Bank Arabs on Jordanian passports could travel anywhere from Israel. And, perhaps most significant of all, free and unencumbered access to Israel's medical infrastructure resulted in a precipitous decline in infant mortality and a rise in longevity. The infant mortality rate was reduced from 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000. Under Israel's systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases in the Palestinian population, such as polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles, were eradicated. A significant percentage of today's Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are alive and well only because they had the good fortune of growing up under Israeli sovereignty.

During the two decades preceding the First Intifada, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102%, and the number of classes by 99%. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14% of adults over age 15 (compared with 61% in Egypt, 45% in Tunisia, and 44% in Syria). The rapid growth in population as a result of access to Israeli medicine, in addition to Arab immigration into the territories from "Diaspora Palestinians" all over the Arab world, resulted in a tripling of the Arab population from around 950,000 in 1967 to more than 3,000,000 in 1994.[6]

All this time the Arab nations remained formally at war with Israel. In 1979, Egypt, alone among the Arab states, agreed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. In response to Egypt's willingness to sign the peace, Israel withdrew its forces and civilian population from the Sinai.

Prime Minister Menahem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar es-Sadat invited Arafat to their peace table, but Arafat refused, and thus squandered what could have been yet another opportunity for Palestinian statehood. Sadat was then assassinated by Muslim radicals for making peace with the Jews.

In sum, there was not only no "brutal occupation," there was a very fast paced, broadly implemented, and extremely successful economic and educational and medical and professional development of the Arab populations of both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under very salutary Israeli rule, all initiated by the Israeli government, as part of Israel's vain quest for peace with its Arab neighbors. Under Israeli sovereignty, the Arabs of these territories experienced greater personal and political freedom, and greater prosperity, than ever in their entire history.

But all of this came to a grinding halt when Arafat took over.

Arafat Takes Over and Destroys Palestinian Prosperity and Peace

When the 1993 Oslo Accords allowed Yasir Arafat to set up shop in the West Bank as the head of the newly created Palestinian Authority, the robust economy created in partnership with Israel began to grind to a halt, and then went into a steep reverse. By 2002, the West Bank's GDP was one-tenth of what it was in 1993. Israel has been blamed worldwide for the economic plight of the Palestinians even though it was entirely the responsibility of Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. Yet, the record, as registered in annual UN Human Development Reports, clearly shows that the Palestinian people were much better off under Israeli occupation than under the Palestine Authority's control.

Data provided by the UN Human Development program of 2005 [7] indicate that the economic difficulties experienced by the Palestinian Arabs were largely the result of policies of the Arafat regime and not from any oppression by the State of Israel. Looking at what it calls "The Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)," the UN report cites many examples of how positive trends in human development, initiated by Israel decades before, were reversed under Arafat. For instance, the second Intifada beginning in Sept. 2000 resulted "…in a sharp deterioration in living standards and life chances." The poverty rate nearly tripled from 20% in 1999 to 55% in 2003. The report notes that because of the Intifada, the town of Nablus, for instance, a prosperous commercial hub prior to September 2000, became an economic basket case. Shops were closed; to survive, workers had to sell their tools, and farmers were forced to sell their land. It was Arafat's war, not Israeli rule, which destroyed Palestinian prosperity and bled its people.[8]

A cruel irony, seemingly lost on western leadership and the media, is the fact that while the Palestinians receive more aid per capita than any nation in the world except Cape Verde (Africa), the Palestinian people have experienced a severe decline in economic well-being; because of Arafat's terror war and his embezzlement of billions of dollars of this money for himself and his terror armies. The UN report suggests that Arafat diverted almost all of the aid money to his personal accounts and to his various terrorist militias. So the aid money, rather than helping the economy and thus creating conditions that would end violence, actually promoted violence .[9] The picture that arises from the UN 2005 report is a clear continuation of trends documented in the 2004 report.[10]

CONCLUSION

The anti Israel propaganda directed at the West cannot obscure the facts: the brutal oppression and economic deprivation from which Palestinians are suffering is the direct result of Palestinian misrule, and not Israeli occupation. From 1967 to 1994, under Israel's sovereignty, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoyed the highest standard of living and freedom (economic, personal, and political) in their entire history.

The anti-Israel diatribes of Arab propagandists and the Western "progressives" seek to deceive the uninformed by conflating Israel's defensive actions today, which do indeed prevent freedom of movement as a way of preventing suicide attacks, with the entire 40 years of Israeli rule since the 6-day war. This is a lie of monstrous proportions, blaming the victim – Israel – for defending itself.

Equally reprehensible is the utter silence of Arab spokesmen and Western leftists about the crimes committed against the Palestinian people by their own leaders and by the leaders of neighboring Arab states.

Who is responsible for the plight of the Palestinians? From the data presented above, the answer is obvious. Their own leaders, both local and external, who have betrayed, cheated, intimidated, and oppressed them . Every opportunity for Palestinian statehood was rejected by leaders who chose war over peace, because their agenda was never peace but the elimination of the Jewish state.

NOTES:

References are to sources in the bibliography, listed by author. Where pages are not noted, the information has been summarized from broad segments of the authors' works.

Much of the data and analysis for this article is taken from Meir-Levi, David, "Who is Really Oppressing the Palestinians?" Front Page Magazine, 2.3.06.

[1] Abu-Marzouk, Mousa, "Hamas' Stand," Los Angeles Times, July 10, 2007 http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-marzook10jul10,0,1675308.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail (Marzouk is the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement)

[2] Note the Walt-Mearsheimer Report, President Carter's recent book, and the Baker-Hamilton report -- all concluding that the "road to Baghdad is through Jerusalem." In other words, if only we could solve the Israel-Arab conflict and end Israel's "brutal occupation," then we could finally have peace throughout the Middle East. As though it could be rationally argued that the barbaric internecine terror war in Iraq, Syria's 32-year occupation of Lebanon, Sudan's 24-year civil war in which Arab Muslim Sudanese have slaughtered nearly 2,000,000 black African Christian and Animist Sudanese and nearly another million black African Muslims, Algeria's 10-year civil war in which more than 100,000 have been killed and nearly 2,000,000 rendered homeless, Mauritanian semi-legal slavery, Somalia's endless chaos of warlords against warlords, el-Qaeda's barbaric terrorism against the West, and even Iran's threatening quests for WMDs in order to create a new world order in a world without America (and without Israel)…..would all somehow disappear if only Israel would make peace with the Palestinians.

[3] According to the 2003 UN Arab Human Development Report, "…the Israeli occupation of Palestine constitutes a severe impediment to human development. This occupation distorts policy priorities, retards human development and freezes opportunities for growth, prosperity and freedom across the region, and not in the Occupied Palestinian Territories alone. The harsh indignities arising from occupation extend to all the Arab people….The occupation of Palestinian and other Arab lands exerts a direct and continuous burden on the economies of affected countries and diverts resources from development to military and security objectives. The threat of Israeli domination also creates a pretext for deferring political and economic reforms in Arab countries in the name of national solidarity against a formidably armed external aggressor." (emphasis mine). Source: The United Nations Development Programme, Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, The Arab Human Development Report, 2003: Building a Knowledge Society. Web: www.un.org/Publications , and Web: www.undp.org/rbas . And cf. pp. 57 ff.

[4] Gilbert "History", Idem "Routlege Atlas", O'Brien, Oren.

[5] Oren, Sachar, and for an analysis of the legality of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip, cf. Meir-Levi, David, Remembering The Six-Day War, Front Page Magazine, June 05, 2007

[6] Summarized from articles listed in "Economy of West Bank and Gaza Strip"(see below)

[7] UN Arab Human Development Program 2005

[8] Ibid, pp. 281 ff

[9] Ibid, pp. 312, ff

[10] UN Arab Human Development Program 2004

[11] Brown; Meir-Levi, "The Missing Piece is missing pieces", "Left Wing Monsters", "Islamokaze war and Palestinian poverty"; and Walsh, Elsa, "The Prince," New Yorker Magazine, March 24, 2003, pp. 49ff.

[12] Erlanger, Steven and Kershner, Isabel, "With Pressure put on Hamas, Gaza is cut off," NY Times, July 10, 2007; and cf a variety of other news sources for Hamas' threatening military attacks on Israeli trucks bringing produce in to the Gaza Strip.

[13] For the most recent details of the chaos in Gaza under Hamas, cf. Erlanger, Steven, "A Life of Unrest," New York Times, July 15, 2007, New York Times

[14] Mahmoud az-Zahar, a high level leader of Hamas, was interviewed frequently after Hamas came to power in the Gaza Strip. Summaries of his interviews on el-Jazeera and 'Ilaf (an Egyptian on-line news website), from which the comments above have been drawn, can be found at Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies ( C.S.S), 10.09, 2005 (and cf. http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/html/final/eng/eng_n/hamastan_e.htm), in a Newsweek news summary of August 30, 2005, ( "The Last Word: Mahmoud Zahar:In Praise of 'Hamastan,'" Newsweek International, Sept. 5, 2005 issue ), and in Front Page Magazine ("The Nightmare of Hamastan," by Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen, FrontPageMagazine.com, 10.31.2005). Osama Hamdan, an official Hamas spokesperson, stated Hamas' goal in similarly stark terms in a recent interview on Lebanese TV (MEMRI Special Dispatch Series - No. 1682 August 16, 2007, excerpted from an interview on Al-Kawthar TV on August 6, 2007. And cf. http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1527.htm. "The Final Goal of the Resistance is to Wipe This Entity [Israel] Off the Face of the Earth").

Bibliography:

Bard, Mitchell The Complete Idiot's Guide to Middle East Conflict

Idem Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Brown, Nathan Palestinian Politics

Gilbert, Martin The Arab-Israel Conflict in Maps (1977)

The Routlege Atlas of the Arab Israel Conflict: 2002

History of Israel

Hart, Alan Arafat: Terrorist or Peace Maker (Authorized biography)

Karsh, E Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians" 1997

Arafat's War (2003)

"Arafat's Grand Strategy", Middle East Quarterly, 8.3.04

Meir-Levi, David Big Lies (2005)

Idem articles in Front Page Magazine

"Islamikaze War and Palestinian Poverty," 9/15/04

"The Missing Peace is missing pieces", 11/24/04

"Left Wing Monsters: Arafat" Front Page Magazine, 9/23/05

"Occupation and Settlement", 6/24/05

"The Big Arab Lie", 5/15/05

"Who is Really Oppressing the Palestinians?" 2/3/06

"Remembering the Six-Day War", 6/5/07 .

O'Brien, Conor Cruise The Siege

Oren, Michael. Six Days of War

PBS. 50-year war: Israel and the Arabs (DVD 1993, 2000)

Sachar, Howard. A History of Israel: Rise of Zionism to our time (2003)

UN Arab Human Development Program 2003, www.undp.org (2004).

UN Arab Human Development Program 2004, www.undp.org (2005).

Walsh, Elsa. "The Prince", New Yorker Magazine, 3.24.03

Bibliography for the economy of West Bank & Gaza Strip,

Under Israel,1967-1994, and under the Palestinian Authority, 1994 to 2004

Abu Toameh, Khaled & Derfner, Larry, "A state of Corruption", Nation and World, 7/1/02

Clawson, Patrick "The Palestinians' Lost Marshall Plans", deputy director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy

Doron, Daniel, "The Way forward for the Palestinians", Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, 7/1/02, vol 7, #41

Ehrenfeld, Dr. D., "Where does the money go? A study of the Palestinian Authority", Testimony before the US Congress and the House Armed Services Committee.

Eidelberg, Dr. Paul, "Occupied Territories" eidelberg@foundation1.org, 7/18/03

Karsch, Efraim, "What Occupation", Commentary, 7/2002

"Who Ruined Gaza?" National Post, 9/16/05

Mannes, Aaron, "Strategy for Israel: A real peace plan," NRO (National Review on Line, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-mannesprint120401.html), Dec. 4, 2001

Marsden, Keith, "Another View: the Viability of Palestine," Wall Street Journal, Europe, 4.28.02

MEMI special dispatch Series #390, A Kuwaiti Daily Reports "Arafat Deposited $5.1 Million from Arab Funds into His Personal Account."

Pipes, Daniel, "Anti-Israel Terror Backfires", New York Sun, 4/20/04

Wall Street Journal, Economy summary, 4.28.02 (Under the Israeli military occupation from 1967 to 1990, Gaza and the West Bank made enormous economic progress as a result of Israeli investment).

Zwick, Israel. "New UN Document Refutes Palestinian Claims", TheRaphi.com in www.americancongressfortruth.com .
David Meir-Levi lectures in English, Hebrew, and Spanish and is a contributor to Frontpagemag.com.

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Update on Angry Advertisers re CNN's "God's Warriors"

Thanks to all of you who have been calling and writing advertisers as a result of our recent alerts about CNN's "God's Warriors." The list of companies that have contacted CNN to fault them for placing their commercials in such a biased, controversial program is growing. Brinks Security and Centrum Silver (Wyeth) have joined Intel, Orkin Pest Control, and Raymond James Financial Services in requesting that their commercials never be placed on any repeats of "God's Warriors," or any similarly biased or offensive program. And, following Intel's lead, they have also asked CNN for free advertising on another program to compensate for those that ran during "God's Jewish Warriors." Keep up the good work, team!

Despite disgruntled advertisers and lost revenue, CNN is insisting publicly in conversations and self-congratulatory newspaper ads that the network series was a success, citing several TV critics (who know little or nothing about Israel, Muslim supremacists or international law) who praised the show.

Let's keep up the pressure! Regardless of CNN's claims to be satisfied with the Amanpour series, she's cost CNN ad dollars and executives will likely think twice in the future about broadcasting such blatantly biased and distorted news specials.

Here are CAMERA's reviews of all three programs in the series:
God's Jewish Warriors God's Muslim Warriors God's Christian Warriors

Be sure to watch CAMERA's one-minute video highlighting Amanpour's prejudicial use of language in the program. Click here.

ACTION ITEMS

If you haven't done so already, CONTACT A COMPANY whose ad ran during the "God's Jewish Warriors" program on August 21. In the second sentence of your letter or phonecall, urge them to follow the example of Intel, whose representative complained to CNN about airing Intel's advertisement during the controversial and biased show, and asked for free advertising on a different program to make up for CNN's wrongful placement of their commercial.

Tell the company that you are disappointed that their product or service was associated with "God's Jewish Warriors," a program that implied a moral equation between religious Christians/Jews using democratic means to work for change in various policies and Islamist terrorists working to create a theocracy through violence and intimidation. Express concern that their company's advertisement airing on such an offensive program tarnished their reputation for integrity. Since they likely did not authorize CNN to place their commercial on such a shoddy, controversial program, encourage them to ask CNN to give them free advertising elsewhere.

ADVERTISERS:

The following is a partial list of companies whose commercials ran during CNN's "God's Jewish Warriors," August 21, 9pm - 11pm eastern time:

Calling is very easy, especially since you are informing them of an easy way for their company to get free advertising on CNN.

Anheuser-Busch
August Busch IV, CEO
Phone: 314-577-2000
(Can't hurt to try to speak to CEO Busch, but they will likely send you to Consumer Relations. Leave a detailed message with them.)

You can also contact Consumer Relations directly: 800-342-5283

Sales Genie
a division of InfoUSA
Vin Gupta, CEO of InfoUSA
402-596-8900 (Ask for Vin Gupta. If you get his assistant, leave a detailed message with her)

Verizon Wireless
Corporate Communications: 908-559-7528

Nasonex
made by Schering-Plough
Phone: 908-298-4000 (ask for advertising dept for Nasonex)
Fax: 908-298-7653

Let CAMERA know if you made a call or sent a comment: letters@camera.org If you get a noteworthy response from the company, please let us know.

CAMERA WISHES YOU A GOOD NEWS YEAR!

Warmest regards,

Lee Green
Director, National Letter-Writing Group
www.camera.org

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'IAF attacked missile batteries; Assad advisors pushing for retaliation'

Advisors to Syrian President Bashar Assad are pressuring him to respond to the alleged IAF attack by "landing a blow to an Israeli target," The Kuwaiti daily Al-Jareeda reported Wednesday.

According to the report, Israel targeted long-range missile batteries that were brought to Syria from Iran.

The report said that five IAF fighter jets carried out the attack.

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The Paradox here in Israel

GS Don Morris, Ph.D.

It is the eve of Rosh Hashana here in Israel. I am so fortunate to sit outside over looking the beautiful deep blue Mediterranean Sea. A gentle sea breeze is blowing the warm and dry air onto our balcony, it is tranquil and families are scurrying about these last few hours before settling in for the start of the holiday celebrations. Secular, religious and people of all persuasions are anticipating these next few days. Each has his/her own set of commitments, you can literally “feel the changes” coming over this land and I have a few moments for reflections.

To read the news is a study in contrasts. Someone like me within a matter of minutes goes through a range of emotions that align with my thoughts. Unfortunately what may be broadcast to you is but a snapshot of what truly exists here.

Permit me to share what one reads today just to demonstrate the dynamic pace of events, people, situations and circumstances I define as Israel. A major news story is the attack by Hamas upon our army camp replete with horrific details of the injuries our soldiers sustained. This is followed by the cries for reprisal and of course the government’s desire to calm the public. Everyone reading this today has a point of view and the contradictions in views are enormous. A story that may never reach the West begins with a young man who has been invited to study at UCLA this year. He was to begin his doctoral studies but decided he needed to serve his country. He is a man of character, determination and by all accounts a most decent human being. However, in a world so often described as one that fosters only self-serving beings, this man chose to act upon his sense of duty. He gave up one dream to honor another. This morning he is fighting for his life!

Our eastern neighbor Syria has been rattling its sabers for quite some time. Last summer it helped Hizzbollah –it provided arms, rockets and munitions that were thrust upon our civilian population. You know the outcome of last year’s “war”. Since last September, it has continued to re-arm our enemy and has done nothing to stop the flow of arms or Iranian “advisors” into Lebanon, our northern neighbor. Additionally Syria has served as a pipeline for foreign terrorists into Iraq that are the primary actors currently causing the ongoing havoc in that country. All of this while their government leaders are under investigation for the murder of Lebanon’s former prime minister. I’d say the Syrians have been most provocative with respect to the stability of the local region.

Thus, it is the Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan proclaiming “outrage’ with Israel’s alleged IAF flyover of Syria. It is CNN’s upset with Israel because we may have violated Syrian air space, never mind the justification. It is CNN’s “reporting” scoop that draws the prime time air space without nary a mention of Syria’s provocative ongoing war behavior.

“All countries in the region must show respect to all countries’ sovereignty and carefully avoid acts that lead to tensions,” Babacan said during a joint news conference with his Syrian counterpart, Wallid Moallen.

Meanwhile, almost all other Arab regimes and their media have ignored the Syrian claims of the IAF flyover. Neither the governments nor their media have rushed to side with Syria. Of course Syria claims the Arab countries have once again turned their backs on an Arab country.

Ah, the gentle breeze continues to remind me of this kind of “normality” we all have come to live with here in the Middle East. The morning is rapidly moving to noontime. My thoughts turn to the reports of our government actions and once again a sublime sense engulfs me.

New reports of 7 more Kassam rockets falling on us this morning; State Attorney Shendar indicated that our state Attorney-General Mazuz should order two more criminal investigations on Prime Minister Olmert (how many is this now?); and more details are coming forward about the “secret” meetings he has had with Abbas. You know, the creation of the “document of principles” that basically is described by some as the “Israeli Liquidation sale”. While this is making big news today the headlines we read give us the customary holiday warnings (sample from one news source):

“The security establishment has announced Tuesday the highest state of alert throughout Israel over Rosh Hashana. Military sources told Ynet that the security establishment had eight specific indications of potential terror attacks over the holiday, as well as dozens of general indications of possible shooting and rocket attacks, suicide bombings and kidnapping attempts.”

Isn’t this wonderful holiday cheer? Wait, the best is yet to come. We have also been told that Syria, nervous that we are going to attack them, have in their possession stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. We are told there are mounting war tensions. Now where did I put my gas mask? Oh, that’s right we all turned them in last year after the last “war”. No, we have not received them back-why? Mr. Defense Minister Barak, you remember him-our former Prime Minister? The PM who had us run away in the dead of night from Lebanon with no agreement in place; this action created a power vacuum filled by you know who-Hizzbollah! Mr. Barak is in charge of re-distributing the masks but today we are told:

“There was a fear that if gas masks were distributed, the move would be interpreted as Israeli preparations for war and that Syria would, as a result, decide to attack.” This is one of those “huh, you must be joking” moments we face regularly here in Israel. The caveat tossed to us today is that “anyway, we only have enough masks for 1.5 million citizens.” Nothing like telling your enemy your vulnerabilities!

Now I must tell you that my mood at this point is not high even though the beautiful sea is before my eyes and the scent of gorgeous garden flowers surrounds me. How to get beyond this, after all the holiday is soon upon us.

Like most of my Israeli friends, colleagues and people, I allowed myself to reflect upon some of our finer moments, people and accomplishments. Look what Israelis have accomplished in less than 60 years. From ashes they created vibrant towns, villages and cities; an infrastructure that is the envy of not only its Arab neighbors but also of countries worldwide. We are exporting our hydro-business to serve other countries that also face water shortages. I sit now with pride as I remember the following:
Israeli-developed auditory device makes walking easier for MS patients
BioPetroClean has developed an innovative technique to clean up oil spills - natural microorganisms that consume and destroy the oil

A team of Israeli scientists has developed a new method to produce hydrogen fuel cheaply

A new movement in Israel is bringing together Jewish and Arab children in the most natural of ways - they are learning together in a school environment that joins both languages and both cultures

An Israeli company has developed a hand-held device that digitally mimics the human nose to sniff out would-be terrorists trying to sneak through an airport or port with homemade explosive devices.

Soon, your note writing can go digital with The Scribbler - an electronic screen that sticks to your fridge door and connects you remotely to your PC.

A unique new Israeli-developed treatment that uses electrical fields to interfere with the cell division of cancerous cells, causing them to stop proliferating and die off

In the last five years, Israel's top 35 companies on NASDAQ have appreciated by 120%.

Two architects pursuing PhDs at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have devised a low-tech way to collect dew from the air and turn it into fresh water.

An Israeli company has developed a simple blood test that distinguishes between mild and more severe cases of Multiple Sclerosis.

The Movement Disorder Surgery program at Israel's Hadassah Medical Center has successfully eliminated the physical manifestations of Parkinson's disease in a select group of patients with a deep brain stimulation technique.

Israel is developing a nose drop that will provide a five-year flu vaccine.

Most of Windows operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel.
The Pentium NMX Chip technology was designed at Intel in Israel. Both the Pentium 4 microprocessor and the Centrum processor were entirely designed, developed, and produced in Israel.

Finally, today’s story about Hy Brown. He has made aliya. He has come to us, along with his delightful wife, to share his knowledge, skill and life with Israel. He has is bringing to us fully equipped solar homes, inexpensive homes ($50,000) complete with all of the modern appliances operating from solar energy. His dream is to open the Negev to current and future Israelis. At age 65, he starts life anew and as his wife says, “helping to develop the Negev is actually your purpose in life." This is the man who helped design and build Disney World in Florida. Instead of spending his years playing golf, he is determined to help those who were forced out of Gush Katif and build them a new community. The dream has become a reality.

The sun is moving closer to the western horizon, cars are moving more rapidly to get home to their families, to make sure they are home before the sun sets. The air is beginning its gentle evening cooling-should be quite a distinguished sunset today. A sense of peace settles over our area albeit 10 miles from our enemy. Netanya is a beautiful city, resting next to the sea. Our promenade is filled with people enjoying the last of today’s sun. We each will return to our homes no matter where that neighborhood may be. We shall rejoice tonight each in our own way; we come from so many different countries and honor so many different cultures the celebration will be unified. For some moments in time we come together as one, simply desiring some time to enjoy life’s joys.

Shana Tova to all-we wish you peace and a renewed enthusiasm for living!

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What the Muslim Brotherhood means for the U.S.

He was talking about jihadists, of course. And Mr. Bush is behind the curve The president apparently missed the smoking-gun 1991 document his own Justice Department introduced into evidence at the Holy Land Foundation trial in Dallas. The FBI captured it in a raid on a Muslim suspect's home in Virginia.

This "explanatory memorandum," as it's titled, outlines the "strategic goal" for the North American operation of the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan). Here's the key paragraph:

The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a "Civilization-Jihadist" process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.

The entire 18-page platform outlines a plan for the long haul. It prescribes the Muslim Brotherhood's comprehensive plan to set down roots in civil society. It begins by both founding and taking control of American Muslim organizations, for the sake of unifying and educating the U.S. Muslim community – this to prepare it for the establishment of a global Islamic state governed by sharia.

It sounds like a conspiracy theory out of a bad Hollywood movie – but it's real. Husain Haqqani, head of Boston University's Center for International Relations and a former Islamic radical, confirms that the Brotherhood "has run most significant Muslim organizations in the U.S." as part of the plan outlined in the strategy paper.

The HLF trial is exposing for the first time how the international Muslim Brotherhood – whose Palestinian division is Hamas – operates as a self-conscious revolutionary vanguard in the United States. The court documents indicate that many leading Muslim-American organizations – including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim American Society – are an integral part of the Brotherhood's efforts to wage jihad against America by nonviolent means.

The Muslim Brotherhood is an affiliation of at least 70 Islamist organizations around the world, all tracing their heritage to the original cell, founded in Egypt in 1928. Its credo: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." Sayyid Qutb, hanged by the Egyptian government in 1966 as a revolutionary, remains its ideological godfather. His best-known work, Milestones, calls for Muslims to wage violent holy war until Islamic law governs the entire world.

According to a 2004 Chicago Tribune investigation, establishing the Brotherhood in the United States has been a 40-year project that has worked mostly underground – even beneath the notice of many Muslims. Richard Clarke, the former top U.S. national security official, told the Senate in 2003 that the Muslim Brotherhood is the common thread linking terrorist fundraising schemes in the United States – which likely explains why so many mainstream American Muslim organizations were named by the feds as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the HLF trial.

Is this just alarmist paranoia? Not at all.

This matters because high-profile organizations with roots explicitly in the Muslim Brotherhood have successfully established themselves in a paramount position to define Islam in America according to a radical politicized model. And they've done so without the American public having the slightest idea about their real agenda. Indeed, the Bush administration is unwittingly helping the Islamist cause by including their leaders in public events, thus conferring them legitimacy. On Labor Day weekend, the same Department of Justice that's presenting evidence of the ISNA's involvement with radical Islam at the Dallas trial sponsored a booth at – wait for it – ISNA's national convention in suburban Chicago.
Look, no rational person believes America is going to exchange the Constitution for a caliphate.

Rational people aren't the point. As the London subway bombings showed, even a tiny cell of committed radicals can kill a lot of people. Mustafa Saied, an American Muslim who left the Brotherhood, told the Tribune that he worried about the radicalism the Brotherhood inculcated in its membership here. "With the extreme element," he said, "you never know when that ticking time bomb will go off."

As long as they commit no crimes, CAIR, ISNA and the other Brotherhood-related groups have the right to advocate for their beliefs. But they don't have the right to escape critical scrutiny, and they deserve informed opposition. Courageous Muslims like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy are sounding the alarm about radical Islam's stealth takeover of U.S. Muslim institutions. Why are the news media ignoring this? Fear of being called Islamophobic?

This has got to stop. Six years after 9/11, we're still asleep. Islamic radicals have declared war on us – and some are fighting here in what looks like a fifth column. Read their strategy document. It's there in black and white, for those with eyes to see.


The Investigative Project on Terrorism
202-363-8602
202-966-5191 - fax
articles@ctnews.org

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This explains the previous post-King Abdullah, please, the truth!

King Abdullah: Tehran-Riyadh Ties Strong Saudi Arabian King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz termed Tehran-Riyadh relations as unbreakable, noting that the ties between the two major Muslim nations have a firm basis.

The Saudi king made the remarks during a meeting with Iran’s Intelligence Minister Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei on Tuesday, who was in Riyadh to deliver President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s message to King Abdullah.

During the meeting, the Saudi king referred to brotherly relations with the Islamic Republic, stressing that the two states are influential nations in the Muslim world, IRNA reported.

King Abdullah reiterated the necessity of Iranian and Saudi officials discussing important regional developments.

The Saudi king said the two nations have a grave responsibility in the Muslim world and stressed his country’s strong will and determination to cement ties with the Islamic Republic.

Mohseni-Ejei, for his part, reiterated Iran’s desire for expansion of ties and called for continuation of negotiations between Iranian and Saudi officials over regional issues, including the ongoing situation in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.
Ejei also urged regional states to play a more effective role in reducing Iraq’s problems.

The minister also called for the Saudi officials’ serious action against those who insulted Iranian pilgrims.

Earlier, Hamid Habibi, the head of Iran’s Haj & Pilgrimage Organization’s Representative Office in Saudi Arabia, said the abusive behavior of some Saudi police forces at the holy shrines, particularly those at the Baqi Cemetery, was a relatively new problem with which the Iranian pilgrims were grappling during this year’s minor pilgrimage.

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Except your other Palestinians-come on King,tell the truth

Jordan is for all citizens, regardless of their political or tribal affiliations ... Following is the transcript of His Majesty King Abdullah’s interview with JTV on Friday:

JTV: Your Majesty, in your last interview with JTV, you spoke about holding municipal and legislative elections during this year regardless of the difficult regional situation. Municipal elections were held and now we have parliamentary elections. What does Your Majesty hope for these elections and what do you say to your people in this regard?

King: These good, giving people deserve from us a lot of hard work for their sake, and for a better future for the coming generations. We should continue our efforts to enhance democracy in the country and provide an atmosphere of freedom and openness that enables our citizens to participate in decision-making.

We are committed to holding, this year, fair parliamentary elections, in which all participate, because Jordan is for all citizens, regardless of their political or tribal affiliations.

We hope that elections will return a strong Parliament that will meet the expectations and challenges facing our country.

Neither the security situation nor the most recent dangerous developments in the region will stop our modernisation and development. I have confidence that people are capable of surmounting all of these challenges and of holding parliamentary elections. We are counting on people’s awareness and ability to choose whoever is the best, the most efficient and the most capable of representing them and serving the homeland’s interests.

JTV: Your Majesty, regarding difficult economic conditions, how do you foresee future economic developments in the country?

King: I am personally aware of the citizens’ daily concerns about the difficult economic conditions. These conditions are the result of several domestic and regional factors. We cannot control the regional factors, but preparation and readiness to meet these conditions are better than wasting time in complaining and regretting that such conditions exist.

In order to face up to these conditions, an integrated social safety net must be established that guarantees for Jordanian citizens basic health and comprehensive social services, housing and a decent life for every citizen.

JTV: Your Majesty, what about the long-term or strategic plans which have been made to improve the people’s livelihood?

King: Definitely there are. The aforementioned thoughts are part of the efforts exerted to improve the citizens’ livelihood and economic situation. There are plans and efforts to deal with several economic problems; primary among them is the public debt.

The largest part of our international effort aims to reduce this debt and attract more investment. My recent visit to Kazakhstan and other states could be categorised in this direction. The debt issue was also discussed recently with some major donor states and organisations, primary among them the countries of the G-8. We are encouraging them to buy these debts or exchange them for developmental investments that would contribute to job creation and poverty alleviation.

I discussed this issue with the German chancellor, the French president, the American president and the Canadian prime minister. Soon we will have continuous communications with Japanese officials, including the Japanese prime minister. We hope that all these efforts will lead to a positive outcome and reduce the debt burden.

JTV: Your Majesty, despite achievements and high growth rates, some believe that citizens are shouldering additional burdens. When will people start feeling economic benefits?

King: Any process meant to improve the existing economic situation needs time and understanding by our people of thenature of this process. It needs sincere hard work from the ministers and responsible officials in follow-up and implementation of the economic initiatives that have been launched, and in launching other new initiatives.

Objectively speaking, Jordan has already realised several achievements in the spheres of economic development, growth rates and enhancing market capacity to absorb the labour force. This has happened in spite of regional conditions surrounding us and the increasing price of oil.

On the other hand, future economic plans and projects, a great number of which are still in the implementation phase, aim in the first place, to fairly redistribute development returns to all the Kingdom’s regions. In this context, we established special economic and development zones in different areas, such as Mafraq and Irbid, and, God willing, we will establish such zones in Maan and Azraq. Through these zones we seek to create projects that would employ the workforce in these areas. Industrial cities and zones have also been established in most of the Kingdom’s governorates.
Talking about this matter reminds us of the support to Jordan by the Arab states. We convey our sincere thanks to the leaders of these states, primary among them the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah Ben Abdul Aziz and the government of Saudi Arabia for their support for Jordan. We appreciate the recent Saudi initiative to contribute to the construction of a new housing city in Zarqa that aims at improving the economic and living conditions of a wide sector of our people.

JTV: Your Majesty, on the peace process, sometimes there is optimism that it is moving forward... and at other moments, developments occur that take the whole process back to square one. How does Your Majesty see the future?

King: In spite of the stumbling of the peace process, and in spite of all the events and recent developments that are taking place in Palestine and Iraq, we are still optimistic regarding the future. We are working to achieve a just and comprehensive peace that provides security and stability to the region.

The American president’s invitation for holding an international peace conference this autumn was the result of Jordan’s numerous efforts with Arab states and other friendly states, especially following the Arab summit held in Riyadh, to put the peace process back on the right track.

We consider this conference, in which Jordan will participate, a positive step towards realising the peace to which we aspire, and we hope that the conference will be a significant opportunity to resolve the core conflict in the region between Israelis and Palestinians, in accordance with international resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative.

JTV: Your Majesty, now the Palestinian discord presents another threatening dimension to the peace process. How do you view this situation?

King: Definitely… and our Palestinian brothers should benefit from this opportunity to unify their efforts and stances. The separation of Gaza from the West Bank is unacceptable at both the Palestinian and Arab levels.

When we talk about a Palestinian state, we mean a state that is established on Palestinian lands in Gaza and the West Bank. So we call upon all our Palestinian brothers to let sound judgment and reason prevail, and to unify their ranks to surmount their suffering and realise their legitimate national goals and ambitions.

JTV: Your Majesty, the extremists from both sides try to undermine the progress achieved in the peace process. What can we do to stop these people? And what is specifically required from Israel?

King: We in Jordan are aware of all these attempts that seek to preserve the state of instability in the region. It is regrettable that there are states and other actors that prefer to maintain the status quo. Since the reign of my great grandfather, there have been several initiatives to find a solution to the conflict in Palestine; had the political forces in the Arab-Islamic world and the international community accepted these initiatives, things would not be as they are today.

Regrettably, some people opposed these initiatives - including the 1947 Palestine partition plan which guaranteed the establishment of a Palestinian state.
It is time to translate the efforts that have been exerted into real actions on the ground. It is time for Israel to recognise the rights of the Palestinian people and to realise that if it wants to be recognised by Arab and Islamic states and to have a future in this region, it should act and cooperate for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on Palestinian land.

JTV: Your Majesty, while there are parties that seek to obstruct the peace process, others are targeting Jordan by bringing up the issues of federation and confederation. What do these people want from Jordan?

King: Confederation with whom? And on what basis? Is it a confederation with the Palestinian people? Or with the PLO? Or with any other Palestinian organisation? I want answers to these questions. I would like also to inquire about the reason for asking this question always at certain moments, especially when the international community has intensified its call on Israel to abide by resolutions of international legitimacy and the establishment of the Palestinian state.

What we all know is that confederation is a relation between two states that enjoy complete independence, sovereignty over territory with clearly defined geographic borders. Our stance on this matter is clear, and we have declared that stance on several occasions, but it appears that some media personalities and some politicians - and it is regrettable to say that a number of them are in Jordan - do not want to listen and instead wish to continue with this suspicious role, fishing in stagnant waters. So any talk about federation or confederation before the establishment of an independent Palestinian state is suspect, unreasonable and intended to stir discord. It is completely unacceptable.

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How UN Politics Stop Sanctions

IAEA Members Critical of US Pressure On ElBaradei --Cuba lashed out Tuesday at countries that ’interfere’ in Iran’s nuclear case--an allusion to US criticism about the International Atomic Energy Agency’s newest Tehran probe.
Beyond her comments as Cuba’s chief IAEA delegate, Norma Miguelina Goicochea Estenoz also expressed support for the work of the agency and its head, Mohamed ElBaradei in her separate capacity as head of the agency’s nonaligned board members, AP reported.
Her statements outside the agency’s 35-nation board meeting reflected the main dispute at the gathering: whether a pact committing Iran to cooperate with an agency probe of past nuclear activities will blunt attempts to pressure Tehran to scrap uranium enrichmentÑtechnology that could be used to make a bomb.

A diplomat attending the closed meeting told The Associated Press that Goicochea Estenoz told delegates that, if Iran answered all questions to the satisfaction of the IAEA, the country should no longer be treated as a special case.
That would mean an end to UN sanctions and the threat of new ones for Iran’s refusal to end uranium enrichment--a position strongly opposed by the United States and some other Western countries.

Before the start of the board meeting, Goicochea Estenoz called for “noninterference in the work of the agency,“ adding that nonaligned countries offered “full support for the professionalism of“ ElBaradei.

She was even more direct as Cuba’s chief delegate, criticizing countries “that always want to interfere“ with ElBaradei and his staff and speaking of a “real feeling among many member states“ that the West was exerting undue pressure on the IAEA chief.
Despite their reservations about the plan, Washington and other nations backing new UN sanctions against Tehran have toned down initial criticism because they have realized that opposition could backfire.

Too much criticism could leave the impression that the US, France and Britain, the most vocal backers of new UN sanctions, did not care about resolving the issue that had sent Iran’s nuclear file to the Security Council in the first place.

Cuba and the majority of the other nonaligned nations, which make up about a third of the board, insist the last month’s pact represents a potential breakthrough in more than four years of diplomatic maneuvering meant to reduce any nuclear threat from Iran.

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Reinharzs Problem with Radical Islam

University President Jehuda Reinharz has a problem with Islam. Given that Brandeis is the pride of America's Jewish community, and I am a Muslim, one might expect me to condemn Reinharz for supporting Israel and criticizing radical Muslims.
But Reinharz's problem with Islam is the opposite of what one might imagine: He has shown himself to be soft on Islamists. What's more, when attacked by a Muslim opponent of radical Islamists (me), he has resorted to Muslim-baiting.
I wrote an op-ed in the New York Post last January criticizing Brandeis for hiring Natana DeLong-Bas to lecture on Islamic studies. Soon after discussion began spreading in the United States about Wahhabism and its link to the atrocities of 9/11, DeLong-Bas emerged as a leading defender of the Wahhabi sect.
In Wahhabi Islam, DeLong-Bas's polemic on behalf of the Wahhabis and their Saudi patrons, she acknowledged financial support for her research from Fahd as-Semmari, director of the King Abd al-Aziz Foundation for Research and Archives. She even told the leading Arabic daily, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat: "I know of no convincing evidence that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center. All we know about him is that he praised and commended those who did it. Radicals in Saudi Arabia are not influenced by Islam, as so many people think. ... The main factors are political: the Palestinian problem, … Iraq … and U.S. support for Israel."
I criticized DeLong-Bas for her presentation of Wahhabism-the most intolerant and violent fundamentalist interpretation of Sunnism in recent history-as benevolent, peaceful, respectful of other religion, and even feminist. A number of Brandeis supporters expressed their shock and concern to President Reinharz about the hiring of DeLong-Bas.
In response to critical letters, Reinharz sent a form reply that included this statement about me: "Mr. Schwartz also identifies himself as Suleyman Ahmad, a member of Jews for Allah. He writes under both names, depending on his audience."
Reinharz's message is that as a Muslim critical of Islamist ideology, I should not be trusted. But who better than a Muslim can judge the Islamist discourse? In his view DeLong-Bas, who serves as an advocate for the most backward elements of the Saudi order-the Wahhabi clerics-is above reproach, even though Reinharz admitted in his letter that he had not read her book.
Let me clarify some points. I am not Jewish by birth (my father was Jewish but my mother was Christian), and I had no Jewish upbringing. I had no religion before becoming Muslim; further, I have never been a "member of Jews for Allah." I have a Muslim name, Suleyman Ahmad Schwartz, but use it infrequently in public, since I am established as an author and journalist under my born name.
I serve as the executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism. In addition, my 2002 book, The Two Faces of Islam, was the first study that exposed in detail the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, its links to the Saudi monarchy and its role as the inspirer of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.
Reinharz's intent was multi-prejudicial: to dismiss my opposition to the views of DeLong-Bas by profiling me as a Muslim while implying that I am an apostate from Judaism. This private and unethical disparagement of a public and legitimate inquiry tries to replace a serious effort to assess the issues present in the employment of a Wahhabi apologist with an attack on my religious adherence.
A Brandeis president who denigrates a Muslim opponent of extremism and defends a proponent of Wahhabism is dangerously ignorant of today's internal conflicts in the community of Muhammad and is in no position to contribute positively to the defeat of Islamist terrorism and the survival of global civilization.
The struggle against al-Qaida and its supporters will not be won by flattering the academic accomplices of Saudi extremism. It will be won, however, when Americans of all faiths learn that moderate, anti-extremist Muslims are trustworthy and critical allies.
The writer is executive director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism (islamicpluralism.org). He writes for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

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The following has been attributed to State Representative Mitchell

"We the sensible people of the United States, in an attempt to help
everyone get along, restore some semblance of justice, avoid more riots,
keep our nation safe, promote positive behavior,
and secure the blessings
of debt-free liberty to ourselves and our great-great-great-grandchildren,
hereby try one more time to ordain and establish some common sense
guidelines for the terminally whiny, guilt ridden, delusional, and other
bed-wetters.

We hold these truths to be self evident: that a whole lot of people are
confused by the Bill of Rights and are so dim they require a Bill of
NON-Rights."

ARTICLE I:
You Do Not have the right to a new car, big screen TV, or any other form
of wealth. More power to you if you can legally acquire them, but No one
is guaranteeing anything.

ARTICLE II:
You Do Not have the right to never be offended. This country is Based on
freedom, and that means freedom for everyone -- not just you! You may
leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion, etc.; But
the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be.

ARTICLE III:
You Do Not have the right to be free from harm. If you stick a screwdriver
in your eye, learn to be more careful, do not expect the tool Manufacturer
to make you and all your relatives independently wealthy.

ARTICLE IV:
You Do Not have the right to free food and housing. Americans are the most
charitable people to be found, and will gladly help anyone in need, but we
are quickly growing weary of subsidizing generation after generation of
professional couch potatoes who achieve nothing more than the Creation of
another generation of professional couch potatoes. (This one is my pet
peeve...get an education and go to work . don't expect everyone else to
take care of you!)

ARTICLE V:
You Do Not have the right to free health care. That would be nice, but
from the looks of public housing, we're just not interested in public
health care.

ARTICLE VI:
You Do Not have the right to physically harm other people. If you kidnap,
rape, intentionally maim, or kill someone, don't be surprised if the rest
of us want to see you fry in the electric chair.

ARTICLE VII:
You Do Not have the right to the possessions of others. If you rob, cheat,
or coerce away the goods or services of other citizens, don't be surprised
if the rest of us get together and lock you away in a place where you
still won't have the right to a big screen color TV or a life of leisure.

ARTICLE VIII:
You Do Not have the right to a job. All of us sure want you to have a job,
and will gladly help you along in hard times, but we expect you to take
advantage of the opportunities of education and vocational training laid
before you to make yourself useful. (AMEN!)

ARTICLE IX:
You Do Not have the right to happiness. Being an American means that you
have the right to PURSUE happiness, which by the way, is a lot easier if
you are unencumbered by an over abundance of idiotic laws created by those
of you who were confused by the Bill of Rights.

ARTICLE X:
This is an English speaking country. We don't care where you are from,
English is our language. Learn it or go back to wherever you came from!




(lastly....)

ARTICLE XI:
You Do Not have the right to change our country's history or heritage..
This country was founded on the belief in God. And yet, you are given the
freedom to believe in any religion, any faith, or no faith at all; with no
fear of persecution. The phrase IN GOD WE TRUST is part of our heritage
and history, and if you are uncomfortable with it, TOUGH!!!!

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Just stop the road critism-NOW-know the facts!

'IDF removed most W. Bank roadblocks' In the past year Israel has dismantled most of the roadblocks and barriers in the West Bank, a senior officer in the IDF's central command said Tuesday.

"In most of the area Palestinian traffic is flowing and there is an improvement in the economy," he said, adding that the remaining roadblocks were "critical for security needs."

Israel Radio quoted the officer as saying that the IDF was still surveilling Fatah terror suspects who relinquished their weapons in exchange for an amnesty granted by the Israeli government. The officer said surveillance showed that many of them had indeed ceased terrorist activities even if most of them had not actually laid down their weapons.

Also according to the officer, Palestinian security forces were not targeting Hamas terror activists in the West Bank - as per Israel's request - but rather focusing solely on institutions such as charities and summer camps that are affiliated with the organization.

Meanwhile, a report cited by Israel Radio said Monday's meeting between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was "tense" due to a refusal on Olmert's part to draw up, ahead of the regional peace summit, a detailed timeframe for the resolution of the conflict .

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Ma'an Exclusive - 8 point declaration of principles being thrashed out by Israelis and Palestinians before autumn summit

Developing story-no confirmation yet:

Bethlehem – Ma'an – Exclusive – Ma'an News Agency has received from an Israeli source exclusive copy, written in Hebrew, of the points which are being crystallized as a declaration of principles between Israel and the PLO before the autumn summit, expected to be held in November in Washington.
Copy in Hebrew;of the document (Ma'an Images)

Bethlehem – Ma'an – Exclusive – Ma'an News Agency has received from an Israeli source exclusive copy, written in Hebrew, of the points which are being crystallized as a declaration of principles between Israel and the PLO before the autumn summit, expected to be held in November in Washington.The following is an exact translation of the 1 page document:"The Israeli leadership and the PLO leadership must immediately get involved in an operation which once completed will lead to the establishment of two states – Israel and Palestine. Relying on a basic declaration of principles and understandings as follows:

1. Israel to ends its occupation of the West Bank in a given period of time. Gradual withdrawal and evacuation of Israeli settlements. Each evacuated area will be turned over to the Palestinian Authority where law and order will prevail. And law and order will be established in Gaza as part of the process which will enable Israel to see the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as one political entity.
2. An unarmed Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. The specific details of the borders will be determined according to security needs, demographic developments and humanitarian requirements. This will pave the way to for an equal territorial exchange. Israel will keep some settlement blocs and maintain geographic contiguity in Palestine and horizons for economic prosperity.
3. There will be two capitals in Jerusalem, one for Israel and one for Palestine. The Israeli neighbourhoods will be under Israeli sovereignty and the Arab neighbourhoods under Palestinian sovereignty. There will be cooperation between both authorities which will allow for better administration of people's lives.
4. Special arrangements will be prepared to secure access to Holy places for all religions. A special administrative authority will be established to organise access of both people to Holy places in the Old City of Jerusalem.
5. Palestine to be declared a national homeland for the Palestinian people and Israel to be declared a national homeland for the Jewish people.
6. A just solution to be agreed on for the problem of the Palestinian refugees with recognition of their suffering and understanding of their individual right within the framework of a comprehensive solution.
7. Both sides to declare the end of conflict and endeavour to gain public support as much as possible and both sides to do their best to cooperate against any aspect of terrorism and violence from either of the two states against the other.
8. Both sides to consider this agreement as being in accordance with the principles of the peace initiative proposed by the Arab League. Both will call the Arab League to positive steps towards full implementation of that initiative. They will also call on the international community and the International Quartet to intervene and provide aid in different ways to push the agreement forward.

This agreement which is based on the 8 principles must be reached before the US-sponsored autumn peace summit. It will then be proposed and documented as international resolutions, the statement read.Immediately after the international summit and simultaneously with ongoing negotiations to reach a detailed agreement, Israel will start to withdraw its forces and evacuate settlements from territories in the West Bank. Completion of the stages of evacuation will be done in tandem with the completion of the negotiations, the statement added.

Comment: Many red lines here-first 1967 border-dangerous and unacceptable; This is based upon Arab League proposal-best every one re-read it-dangerous for Israel; the rush to put in writing is a ploy to be used against us in the future-more on this later; Olmert's government may fold son, yet if on paper we usually use this as a starting point in the future. you will now also begin to hear a "ratcheted" up rhetoric re: how bad Hamas is and how good Fatah is-be aware, they are not different but this serves the left wing Israeli politicians -this is becoming even more disturbing.

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Shas Will Quit Coalition Over Land Concessions To Arabs

Minister of Industry and Trade Eli Yishai said this week that the party he represents, Shas, will not be able to remain in the coalition if the government promotes further Israeli withdrawals from Judea and Samaria. In an interview published in a Shas party publication, Minister Yishai said, "We have seen how Gaza, which we left, became a missile base. We cannot allow such a base in the
Minister Yishai added that he doesn't think coalition partner Yisrael Beiteinu will be able to remain.
middle of the country."

Plans for withdrawal from most or all of Judea and Samaria have reportedly been under discussion at meetings between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. The plans, published in the media but not confirmed or denied, include withdrawal to Israel's pre-1967 border and Arab control over parts of Jerusalem. Abbas and Olmert have been meeting every few weeks to work out details of collaboration and coordination ahead of a multinational Middle East summit in November, which is being organized by the United States.

In July, newly-installed President Shimon Peres quietly promoted a draft plan for the Jewish State to evacuate and transfer to the PA nearly the entire area of Judea and Samaria, along with several Arab-Israeli cities located within pre-1967 Israel. Peres presented his initiative to Prime Minister Olmert and to top Abbas aides soon after he took office as President. Prime Minister Olmert was said to be considering the plan and "agrees with much of its contents," diplomatic sources said.

In the Shas newspaper interview, Minister Yishai added that he doesn't think coalition partner Yisrael Beiteinu will be able to remain in the government either if Prime Minister Olmert presents the nation with a withdrawal scheme such as that attributed to him in the media.

The Prime Minister is already facing challenges to his diplomatic moves in the counter-terrorism arena from Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu.

On Monday, ministers from Shas said they would vote against a planned mass release of terrorist prisoners. According to a spokeswoman for the Prime Minister, Miri Eisin, Olmert offered to release certain PA prisoners during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins on Wednesday.

Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) said that he and fellow Yisrael Beiteinu Minister Yitzchak Aharonovitch would oppose the measure. "It's time... for the Palestinians to make gestures," Lieberman said, "and arrest wanted terrorists, confiscate weapons, and stop their violence."

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If this is the Islamic God, I want NO part of it!

Comment:No one and I mean no one tell me from this moment forward that the Islamic interpretation of their God and their "religion" is peace or peaceful. Those of you who still make excuses for them, who try to tell us this is but a handful of individuals who have hijacked a religion, I say to you-bah!

Hamas: Kassam attack on IDF training base 'a victory from God' A Hamas spokesman praised Tuesday's rocket attack on an Israeli army base, calling it a "victory from God."

"We consider this a victory from God for the resistance," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said on Hamas radio. "We consider the resistance as the legitimate right of the Palestinians to defend themselves and restore their rights."

The rocket strike, which wounded 69 IDF soldiers, was followed by a mortar barrage on the Gaza border. The Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees claimed responsibility for the attacks, and the Islamic Jihad later posted a video on its website purportedly showing the Kassam rocket launch.

Although Hamas was not directly involved, Israel has said it holds the group responsible for attacks out of Gaza because it rules the area.
Although nobody was wounded in the mortar attack, the incident will undoubtedly add to the calls for action, which reached a fever pitch following the earlier Kassam strike.

Yet despite these calls, predictions are that the IDF will still hold back from launching a large-scale operation in the Gaza Strip. According to reports, the hesitancy is in large part due to the upcoming peace summit in Washington, mounting tensions along the northern border, and the fact that Sderot remains largely unprotected.

Defense officials are, however, calling on the political echelon to allow the IDF to deepen their operations in Gaza. At the moment the army is allowed to penetrate up to 2 km into Palestinian territory from the security fence.

Dozens of parents to soldiers serving at the Zikim base arrived there on Thursday to demand that their children be removed from the site. Israel Radio reported a heated exchange between the parents and the commanding officers of the base.
Early Thursday afternoon the IDF was posting a number of portable Kassam shelters in the base, Israel Radio reported.

Tuesday's Kassam attack was not the first in Zikim. Already in December of 2005, parents voiced protest over the level of safety of the base after it was hit by a Kassam.

Five soldiers was lightly wounded by shrapnel in that attack, including Lt.-Col. Yossi Drori, the commander of the base at the time.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi were meeting late Tuesday morning to discuss possible military responses to the attacks.

Sixty-nine soldiers were wounded, one of them critically and three more seriously, after one of two Kassam rockets fired by Palestinians on Monday night landed in an IDF basic training camp. On Tuesday morning, another rocket was fired into Israel, landing in a Sha'ar Hanegev Council community causing no casualties.

Monday night's rocket struck inside the Zikim military base, located one kilometer north of the Gaza Strip, at approximately 1:30 a.m. The Kassam landed next to a tent in which a group of soldiers were sleeping. Another rocket, which landed in an open area in the western Negev, caused no casualties.

The severity of wounds received by the troops varied, with one suffering from critical wounds, three listed as seriously wounded, seven in moderate condition and the rest lightly wounded. The injuries were mostly caused by shrapnel and concrete that was kicked up following the explosion. The victims include both male and female soldiers.

All of the wounded were evacuated to Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, Soroka Hospital in Beersheba and Sheba Hospital in Tel Hashomer. By 9:45 a.m., 28 of the soldiers evacuated to hospital overnight were discharged.
Barzilai Hospital opened a hotline following the attack. The public is invited to call 1255171 for information.

Thirty ambulances were alerted to the scene, south of Ashkelon, where they were accompanied by two helicopters responsible for evacuating the wounded.
Two Palestinian groups claimed responsibility for the attack - the Nasr Salah al-Din Brigades, the Palestinian Resistance Committee's armed wing, and the Islamic Jihad. A spokesman for the Islamic Jihad said the firing of the Kassam rockets was a response to IDF action in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of late.

The IDF, who confirmed the attack, said that the rockets were fired from Beit Hanun.

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Europe: It is one minute before Midnight-Are you Going to Act?

Muslim group behind ‘mega-mosque’ seeks to convert all Britain Tablighi Jamaat sets out to clear up misconceptions about Islam. By Andrew Norfolk in the TimesOnline (thanks to Kemaste):
A Muslim group that wants to open a giant £100 million mosque in London has set its sights on “winning the whole of Britain to Islam”.

Tablighi Jamaat aims to build an Islamic complex near to the site of the 2012 Olympic stadium, with a mosque for 12,000 people, by far the largest religious building in Britain.

The organisation, which has millions of followers worldwide, insists that it is a peaceful, apolitical revivalist movement that promotes Islamic consciousness among individual Muslims. However, intelligence agencies have cautioned that the group’s ability to fire young men with a zeal for Islam acts as a staging post, for some, along a path that leads to jihadist terrorism.

Kafeel Ahmed, the Indian doctor who died from burns last month after trying to set off a car bomb at Glasgow Airport, is the latest in a line of terrorists for whose initial radicalisation Tablighi Jamaat has been blamed. The group (literally, the preaching party) belongs to the ultra-conservative Deobandi school of thought within Sunni Islam, whose adherents run more than 600 of Britain’s 1,350 mosques.

In recent days The Times has exposed the virulently anti-Western creed of some British Deobandis who preach that non-Muslims are an evil and corrupting influence. Their defensive, isolationist approach to life in Britain is shared by many British supporters of Tablighi Jamaat.

One leading advocate, Ebrahim Rangooni, has said that the movement seeks to “rescue the ummah [the global Muslim community] from the culture and civilisation of the Jews, the Christians and [other] enemies of Islam”. Its aim, he wrote, is to “create such hatred for their ways as human beings have for urine and excreta”.
Mr Rangooni has also given warning to parents that non-Muslim schools “turn humans into animals” and that sending a Muslim child to a British college “is as dangerous as throwing them into hell with your own hands”.

Representatives of Tablighi Jamaat refused to attend a public meeting on Friday to discuss plans for the “mega mosque” in West Ham, even though the debate was organised by a Muslim group.

Tablighi Jamaat was founded in 1926, in India, by a Deobandi scholar, Muhammad Ilyas, who wanted to raise Islamic awareness among rural Muslims in south Asia. He promised them that by obeying Islamic laws and following the example of the Prophet Muhammad in their personal lives they would one day “dominate over non-believers” and become “masters of everything on this earth”.

Ishaq Patel, Tablighi Jamaat’s first amir (leader) in Britain, is said to have been on pilgrimage in Mecca when Ilyas’s successor gave him a long-term mission to win “the whole of Britain to Islam”.

Yoginder Sikand, a Muslim expert on the movement, says that its ethos of “social and cultural separatism and insularity” seeks “to minimise contacts with people of other faiths”.

The self-segregation that this encourages is evident in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, where the group has its European headquarters. The Tablighi Jamaat complex – housing its large Markazi mosque and a Deobandi seminary called the Islamic Institute of Education - is based in the Savile Town area, which has an 88 per cent Asian population. The overwhelming majority of its 5,000 residents are Muslims from Pakistan or the Gujarat region of India and some, at home and at work, have little contact with nonMuslims.

It was on the advice of a Tablighi Jamaat scholar that Aishah Azmi, a Dewsbury teaching assistant, refused to remove her full-face veil in the class-room while helping young children who were learning to speak English.
Mr Sikand says: “There is little doubt that the sense of cultural separatism and heightened [Islamic] identity consciousness fostered by Tablighi Jamaat can be taken advantage of by more assertive Islamist groups that have a more explicit political agenda.”

One of the suicide bombers who attacked London in July 2005, Shehzad Tanweer, studied at the Deobandi seminary in Dewsbury and Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7/7 terror plot, was a regular worshipper at the adjoining mosque. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was said to have been influenced by Tablighi Jamaat, several of whose adherents were also among those arrested last year over an alleged plot to blow up transatlantic airliners.

Shabbir Daji, a trustee and secretary of the Tablighi Jamaat mosque in Dewsbury, told The Times that the movement’s aim was “unity among all humanity”. He said that it had no hidden agenda. “We never come out on demonstrations against the Government,” he said. “Our aim is to make each and everyone . . . a better Muslim.”

Including you and me, whether we like it or not.

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Implications for ME Future if ...

by Barry Rubin

The Region Influence in the Mideast The big picture can be seen in the small details. Here's a great example. Iran recently held a summit meeting bringing together Palestinian leaders. Hamas was there, of course, and Islamic Jihad too. No surprise that. But there was someone else participating in the gathering: Farouk Kaddoumi.

Kaddoumi is a veteran Fatah and PLO bureaucrat who now heads the former group. He is one of three men - the other two were Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas - who represented Fatah on the PLO Executive Committee. He has never accepted even the 1993 Oslo Accords. In most ways, he is more representative of the Fatah leadership than the Palestinian Authority's relatively moderate two heads, Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayad.

What was Kaddoumi doing in Teheran? Well, he has long been an ally of Syria which is Teheran's closest ally. But there is something else going on here which is of historic importance and which shows the difference between reality and what is said in the Western media or governments. Not Egypt, not Saudi Arabia, but Iran is now the mediator between Hamas and Fatah.

The Egyptians spent a lot of time negotiating with the two groups but never pushed very hard or achieved anything. The Saudis thought they had ensured cooperation with the recent Medina agreement. But Hamas, another ally of Iran, used the deal to seize full power in the Gaza Strip and kick out Fatah altogether.

So it makes perfect sense for Palestinian leaders to see Iran holding the cards. If anyone is going to persuade Hamas to make up with Fatah it would be Teheran, the Islamist group's sponsor. Of course, Iran is not going to do it, but it can play games with Fatah, perhaps find Fatah people who, in exchange for power and money, might accept second place as a junior Palestinian partner of Hamas and Teheran.
PERHAPS YOU thought the United States is now Fatah's sponsor and good buddy. Well, Fatah is an equal-opportunity embezzler. Again, let me make clear my support for a strategy of talking with Fatah and helping it survive in the West Bank in exchange for its clamping down on terrorism and incitement. Fatah is preferable to Hamas. But a strong dose of cynicism and some tough bargaining is needed in this policy, which has been adopted by the United States, Israel, and - with a bit more ambiguity, yearning for the chance to appease Hamas - Europe.

As so often happens, however, the debate jumps out of one fire and into another. Now that US policy has abandoned democracy as the magic incantation to solve the Middle East's problems it simply has a new mantra, economic development. The argument is that if America funnels money to Fatah, the group will use the funds to benefit the people on the West Bank. And, in the best tradition of the American big city political boss, the Palestinians will reciprocate by cheering Fatah and booing Hamas.
But the American method is up against the Iranian method. Iran employs the appeal of intoxicating revolutionary rhetoric, a seductive use of Islam (the divine will wants you to do what we say), a cathartic orgy of hatred, an appeal to macho heroism, money into one's pocket (to buy guns or live "high on the non-hog"), direct provision of social services to supporters, and encouraging macho and supposedly heroic violence.
If people were saints, the US approach would be better. Given the reality of the Middle East, a combination of rewards (only in return for actual deeds) and punishments would be more effective. This is called power diplomacy and politicians or diplomats seem to understand it perfectly well except when it comes to the Middle East.

Instead, the American debate is largely over who to reward and to whom United States should prove itself nice and friendly. Consider the two camps furiously contending today.

The White House strategy is: We'll be good to moderates so they'll work with us against the bad guys. The label "moderate" was first bestowed on the masses; helping them as meaning urging more democracy. Now moderate allies are defined in the old-fashioned way as the regimes: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Fatah. In Iraq, the strategy is to keep fighting to show the United States helps the Shi'ites stay in power and protects the Sunnis by pushing for compromise. The implication is that if America just gives everyone enough they will stand alongside it.

In contrast, the Democratic opposition's general approach is: We'll be nice to the radicals so they will become moderates. We will prove our willingness to compromise with Iran, Syria, and the Islamists, convincing them that we are not their enemy. We will get out of Iraq, too. Sometimes they argue that being more distant to Israel and a stronger advocate of the Palestinian cause (whatever and whoever that is nowadays) will prove that America is ok.

"Oh, we get it," one imagines the leaders of Syria, Iran, Hamas, and Hizbullah saying, "we thought the Americans were our enemies but now we understand that they have our best interests at heart."

THE PROBLEM with both approaches is that they insist on expecting Middle Easterners to act like Americans. I can't help but recall several true anecdotes about this kind of mistake:
· How secretary of state John Foster Dulles, in the mid-1950s, urged the two sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict two behave more like "Christian gentlemen."
· Jordan's King Hussein explaining to an interviewer that he would rule his country like Switzerland when his people began behaving like Swiss.
· An Iranian journalist explaining in the late 1940s, when asked why he condemned America but never the USSR, that the Russians killed people who criticized them (as Syria and Islamists do today).

POLICY MUST be tough, cynical, and involve equal trade-offs, rather than proofs of good will or flattery designed to win friends. Iran knows that; America often does, and Europe usually doesn't. That's why flattering Mahmoud Abbas, showering money and arms on Fatah, and thinking one can turn the West Bank into a showcase of economic progress isn't going to work. Nor will persuading the Arab world that America and Europe care about the Palestinians, want to give them a state, and don't like Israel.

A reasonable strategy requires showing how unprofitable it is to be an enemy while helping those on the other side only to the extent that they cooperate. It means not having to apologize but getting those who ignore your interests to apologize to you. It requires taking into account regional realities rather than sentimentalizing them into morality plays. It includes not expecting to solve neatly problems which have no solution.

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A peace agreement in Israel would be irrelevant in Iraq

By Ted Belman

General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker today drove a stake through the heart of the Democratic opposition to the war in Iraq. Here is what they reported
- the surge is working, deaths are down and al Qaeda is on the run
- the political aspects are taking time because they are so difficult but there are signs of progress.
- Iranians aren’t attempting to solve any problems in joint discussions, they just want to benefit from the appearance of being included in discussions
- Iranians continue on many levels to fuel the violence
- the Iraq violence cannot be stopped without addressing it in a regional context.
- fighting al Qaeda in Iraq is part of the war on terror, they must be defeated everywhere.
- Saudi Arabia provides the most fighters from outside
- al Qaeda gets money and manpower and arms from outside Iraq
- a long term agreement has been signed by Iraq and the US for US to remain in Iraq and help on security.
- if the US pulled out, all hell would break out with much killing and Iran and al Qaeda would take over and the region would be disabled
- when asked what to do about Iran, he begged the issue by saying his job was to interdict only.
IT WAS APPARENT TO ME THAT FIGHTING THIS WAR IS LIKE FIGHTING CRIME, IT WILL NEVER ENDS.
NOBODY ASKED IF SOLVING THE ARAB/iSRAELI WAR WILL MAKE THINGS BETTER. THE REASON IS THAT NO ONE THOUGHT SO.
NOW IF ONLY CONGRESS HELD HEARINGS ON THE PEACE PROCESS IN ISRAEL

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Assad, Assad, Assad!

DAMASCUS,(SANA)_ President Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to the American TV station CBS. The full text of the interview:

Journalist: Mr. President, first of all, I would like to thank you very much for sitting down with us. We are very appreciative. We as you know, are focusing on Iraq this week in advance of a major report that will be delivered to Congress. US officials have said 80 percent of al-Qaeda suicide bombers in Iraq have entered through Syria at a rate of 60-80 every month. What have you done to crack down on this problem?

President Assad: There are all false allegations. Who are those people? What are their names r links with any Syrian? There where you should cooperate on fighting al-Qaeda and the terrorists. All these allegations are jut to divert the attention of the people that the problem is related to al-Qaeda and not political problem. While the fact of the matter is that it is a political problem in Iraq.

Journalist: So, you are denying that any suicide bombers or terrorists in Iraq are coming through your country?

President Assad: No, this is not the issue, because no country in the world can seal its borders and the example is your borders with Mexico. Nobody can seal their borders, but there is a difference between saying 80 percent and having some smuggling. Some smuggling is possible on any border as you can not have one hundred percent control!!.

Journalist : We are not talking about smuggling, Mr. President; we are talking about terrorists crossing the border into Iraq and killing many people.

President Assad: Exactly, it is smuggling because they have to cross the borders illegally, so it is smuggling. They have to cross the borders illegally not legally unless they have a normal ID, and nobody can know them so they can cross it normally. But this is not the issue; the issue is related to the cooperation between the intelligence in the two countries. They said they have 80 percent and this means that they know the numbers, the names and who they are! So why do not they send us the information to know if those people cross our borders or not! Otherwise, nobody can tell if they cross our borders or not!

Journalist: General Petraeus told me that you have taken steps to control the borders more carefully, so clearly you acknowledge this is
a problem . What steps have you taken?

President Assad: It is an old problem. It ahs been thirty years since Saddam was Vice President; and we had this army because there was smuggling of terrorists toward Syria in the seventies! We had an army to foster the borders but we took other steps to strengthen our presence and control the border. The other side of the story is what do those terrorists do in Iraq? They kill civilians and create chaos. But what interest does Syria have in chaos in Iraq? Chaos is contagious and if we cause chaos in Iraq, then it means we are working against our interests! That is why we do our best to control our borders, first of all for the Syrians, second for the Iraqis and third for the whole region. But to talk about 80 percent this is just general words and has no concrete evidence!

Journalist: While US officials and US intelligence have determined that you are saying they are wrong!

President Assad: They have to send us the names. This how we say they are right!

Journalist: you say that chaos does not work to Syria's advantage; does that means you support a stable and democratic Iraq?

President Assad: Definitely, and for our interests in the first degree and for Iraq's interest secondly; otherwise the whole region and later maybe the rest of the world will be indirectly suffering but we will be the first to pay the price and we are paying the price of chaos in Iraq today. So why not work if it is for our own interest?! This is definite and this is the public position of Syrian policy.

Journalist: So you support the US efforts to help establish democracy in Iraq?

President Assad: If they do, but they do not do it. If there are efforts, but they only talk about the military side in terms of the number of soldiers and raising up the number of the forces on the ground. That is all what they are talking about. There is not serious political process supported by the Americans so far.

Journalist: When I was in Iraq, President Bus and his other top officials were meeting with Prime Minister, Maliki and his top leaders trying to move democracy forward; why are you saying that there is no political process going on?

President Assad: We are talking about the results. It is getting worse every day and nothing is better. Sometimes it gets better but it is like a flash in the pan that immediately disappears and it is transitory. If we talk about the results, the killing is worse than before. Over a million Iraqis have been killed . What about orphans and widows. and amputees, and what about the millions of people who are suffering? So the what is better? We have to be realistic and talk about the results. We do not have to talk about photo opportunity meetings.

Journalist: Let me ask you about the Damascus Airport. It is considered a major point of entry for terrorists going into Iraq and you been highly criticized, Mr. President, for not taking greater action to stop this from happening !Why are not you having control of your airport?

President Assad: It is not related to the airport. This is again another false allegation . They have been harboring this bogus claim for years but actually if the terrorists want to come they do not have to come to the airport as they can cross any border by any means to go to Iraq. They do not have to come through the airport! We do not have any evidence that he terrorists came through borders and if we have any information about a terrorist coming through the legal borders or the airport, we will catch him right away!
Journalist: You are telling me that you have no evidence and no knowledge that terrorists are using Damascus international airport as an entry point and then going to Iraq?

President Assad: No, I did not say that. I wanted to elaborate saying we caught many coming through the airport but most of them do no come through the airport but through illegal borders and we caught them!

Journalists: Why do not you require visas for Arab men coming to Damascus?
President Assad: This is the Syrian policy for decades.
Journalist: But if it is a problem why do not change this Syrian policy?

President Assad: No, because most of the terrorists have regular ID and they will come legally. They will not cross the border illegally. Most of them have their ID but we do not know they are terrorists. How do you know that someone is a terrorist? For example, the 11th of September terrorists used to live in the United States; why did not you catch them? Because you did not know they were terrorists! The same is true for us. We have sleeping cells like many other countries and people who can help them. Even if you want to ask for a visa and you do not know them, you will give him the visa. That is why the visa is not the solution!

Journalist: Let me read an excerpt from an op-Ed that was recently published by Senator Joe Lieberman, " Syrian President Assad can not seriously claim that he is incapable of exercising effective control over the main airport in his capital city. Syria is a police state , with sprawling domestic intelligence and security services. The notion that al-Qaeda recruits are slipping into and through the Damascus Airport unbeknownst to you and others is totally unbelievable. It is therefore time to demand that he Syrian regime stop playing travel agency for al-Qaeda in Iraq.

President Assad: All that is nonsense. Everybody in this world knows that we have been fighting extremists for thirty years when the United States leaders used to cal them holy fighters; we fought them for decades so we will never be their friends for any reason. But again, they have to concentrate on the core issue. The core issue is the war on Iraq. The false decisions, the false allegations , the deception and the wrong policies inside Iraq. This is the reason behind what is going on . Your generals said they expect the number to be 1000-3000 terrorists; but in Iraq you have 26 million Iraqis. How could 1000-3000 create this chaos ? Nobody can believe it! There are other reasons and so this is not the issue. They only concentrate on the trivial issues blaming others, they want to look for escape goats or
for whipping boys. This is their policy. They do not want to confess that they took the wrong decision.

Journalist: I think US military leaders would say the numbers are much higher tan ones you quoted.

President Assad: May be recently, but before it was said it is 1000-3000 and this was in the media . But the number doesn't matter. The issue is different. We have been living here forever and we know the region. The issue is political , the is no political process Iraq and you have to talk about the mistakes the American Administration committed in Iraq before the war, during the war and after the war till today.

Journalist: Let us look forward , do you believe that US troops should withdraw from Iraq?

President Assad: Definitely yes as a principle. As for how and when this is an Iraqi issue; we can not decide it as Syria.

Journalist: Are you concerned Mr. President, that if the US troops do withdraw and do it too precipitously, the country will break out in civil war?

President Assad: We have to take the context of the events ;since the war and after four yeas and a half today every day is getting worse that before. So I can say that the US forces will bring stability to Iraq. This is for sure. Maybe if they leave some day it will get worse but not the debate. As a principle they have to leave.

Journalist: Well if it is worse, I is no good for you!

President Assad: That is what I am going to answer. The main issue is what political process you have in parallel. You have to say that I am going to withdraw and o put a timetable for the withdrawal. In parallel you have to have a political process going with the withdrawal in order not to have this chaos getting worse and getting Iraq stable again. That depends on the political process.

Journalist: Do you not support Prime Minister Maliki?

President Assad: We support any prime minister who works for his country. We have good relations with him. He came to Syria a few weeks ago and we had a very good meeting , but we do not interfere in Iraqi matters.

Journalist: Do you think his government has the potential to be successful?

President Assad : We have to ask the question firs, Do they have the authority to be successful? Do the Americans allow them to do what they have to do? As far as we know according to many Iraqi officials, they do not have the authority. The American lead everything in Iraq so why do they blame any government whether al-Maliki or others?

Journalist: You are saying the prime minister is a puppet of the United States?
President Assad: No, I do not say that but they do no have the full authority, maybe they have been given more authority than before but they are not responsible for the chaos. They are dealing with the results. They did not cause the chaos .That is the difference.

Journalist: Prime Minister Maliki, recently visited Damascus and asked you to arrest a number of prominent members of the former Saddam regime now involved in the insurgency out of Syria and even involved to throw the regime of the prime minister, according to military sources with whom I spoke. Will you arrest them?

President Assad: Of course . Anyone who is involved in a crime in Iraq, we will definitely arrest him.

Journalist: What kind of measures are you taking to do that ?

President Assad : We have our law, but handing over any person to Iraq require that Iraq is independent and not occupied.

Journalist : why can not just arrest them in Syria ?

President Assad: That is what we do of course and they know that we arrested many, we have thousands!

Journalist: you mean insurgents who tried to do things against Prime Minister Malki?
President Assad : it depends on the definition of "insurgents". The Americans call anyone who works against them insurgents. We have a different definition but of course whoever works against Iraqi people is arrested in Syria without any doubt.

Journalist: Do you want to see America succeed in Iraq?

President Assad: That depends once again on the definition. " Succeeding" for us means Iraq is stable. My priority now is stability in Iraq; it does not matter if the United States leaves today or tomorrow. My priority is the Iraqi people and my country. Of course if being successful means political stability we do not have any problem, because we support any country in the world including the United States in succeeding in Iraq.

Journalist: there are more than Iraqi refugees who leave in Syria. What has been the impact of that?

President Assad: Strong impact: on the economy, the infrastructure in Syria and on the mood of the people, which is normal. But the issue in not humanitarian but political. Without the refugees you can not solve the problem inside Iraq. When we embrace them is not from a humanitarian point of view only but from a political point of view.

Journalist: What is gong to happen to them?

President Assad: They have to go back some day to their country and that is why we have to work for the stability. If Iraq is stable they will go back to their country definitely. That is why I said we have an interest in a stable Iraq.

Journalist : Would you welcome them her indefinitely is Iraq is unstable for the years to come?

President Assad : Not indefinitely because we are going to suffer and they are going to suffer. If they come to Syria and Syria is not able to embrace them, they will suffer again. So they will not get any benefit coming from Iraq to Syria.

Journalist : Your government supports a number of militant groups providing them with support or safe havens! Many of these groups such as Hizbollah are considered terrorist organizations, as you know, by the United States. Why do you support them, Mr. President?

President Assad We do not provide safe haven to any one. They have their safe haven among the Lebanese as they are part and parcel of the Lebanese society and Lebanese fabric. So without this society they can not have a safe heaven. This is their strength. As for the support, we have good relations and we support them politically because they have a joust cause.

Journalist : Financially ?

President Assad: No, financially they do not need our help; they can have money from a lot of people from around the Arab and Moslem world and they have extensive support around the region. That is why we support them because they have a just cause as I said.

Journalist : Why? Can you just explain to me why an organization considered a terrorist organization by many people has you support?

President Assad: Yes, but if you want to look at the picture, you have to see it as a whole without taking a small part and say this is the picture. The picture is that the Israelis are attacking the Lebanese on a daily basis, where they have incessant encroachment of the air space every day. Is not that terrorism? They attacked Lebanon last year and killed 1400 Lebanese civilians with no reason. Is not it terrorism? Therefore, if you want to talk about the definitions again or labels, I do not think that we have to talk about them because it is just a waste of time; let us talk about reality. You have people supporting organizations, governments or policies, and we have to deal with these policies, governments and organizations.

Journalists: do you agree with the Iranian President, Ahmadi Najjad that Israel does not have the right to exist?

President Assad: This is freedom of expression; everyone in the world has freedom to express whatever he wants. This is only an expression, but did he take any act? He did not. So, we have to talk about the acts if we want to judge somebody, otherwise he has the right to believe in whatever he wants. But again many Israelis said in the past few years that " we have to wipe out Arabs", and many said that " Arabs are snakes and have to be demolished". So, it is the same; an action and reaction. Therefore, we have to blame Israelis as much we blame others.

Journalist: Having said that, do you agree with President Ahmadi Najjad's statement?

President Assad: We have been asking for peace negotiations for the last fifteen years. So, how do you define that? We have been working for peace with Israel. We have different positions, we have an occupied land and we need the peace with the Israelis to restore our land.

Journalist: The United States and other Arab nations are concerned about the rise of Iran and about that country's capacity to make nuclear weapons, is that something that concerns you?

President Assad: No, Because any country in every place in the world has the right to rise and has the right to play a role regarding the stability, and I think that Iran is very important for the stability of the region and without it there is no stability. But if we talk about the nuclear weapons as peaceful power as they mentioned many time, and according to the international law, then any country in the world has this right to have peaceful nuclear reactors or energy. Therefore, we are not worried about it as long as it is peaceful. On the other hand and from another point of view, we are against any WMD in the Middle East; we had a proposal in the United Nations sine 2003 to make the Middle East a zone free of WMDs, but the United States of America stood against that proposal. Our position is that we are against any WMD in the Middle East.

Journalist: Why do you allowed Iran to supply weapons to Hezbollah through Syria? Are you concerned that as a result of your policies you have become isolated and your only strategic partner in the region is now Iraq?

President Assad: No, this is not true. We never allow Iran to bring armaments or missiles to Hezbollah. What is the evidence? They have been talking about that for the last year, and you know there are a lot of Israeli drones over the Lebanese territory and all the intelligence; may be the entire world, on the Syrian-Lebanese borders and they have been talking about that, so I asked them to bring me only one evidence that we sent a single missile to Hezbollah; this is just a false allegation.

Journalist : As you know, a major report will be delivered to the Congress next weak about the state of the surge and the future of the United States in Iraq. If you have an opportunity to testify in front of the United States Congress, what would you say about the situation?

President Assad: of course our position about the war is known, that we were against the war and I told every American official who came to Syria at that time that you are going to win the war, but you are going to fail after the war because you do not know this region. But they turned deaf ears to everything we have said. They committed a lot of political mistakes in addition to the security mistakes, and now they have to announce the withdrawal, to put a timetable and work for the political process. This political process should include the Iraqi national conference not an international one, but with regional and international support including, of course, the United States. Working in Iraq without the help of the regional countries will lead them nowhere, and this is what the Iraqi officials believe in; they believe that they need the help of the regional countries. So, the United States, so far, do not work with even their closest allies. That is why they are not going to succeed. But if they want to succeed, they have to work with others and first of all with the Iraqis.

Journalist : Mr. President, Thank you very much for your time.

President Assad : Thank you for coming.


Ghossoun / A.N. Idelbi
















DAMASCUS,(SANA)_ President Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to the American TV station CBS.
The full text of the interview:

Journalist: Mr. President, first of all, I would like to thank you very much for sitting down with us. We are very appreciative. We as you know, are focusing on Iraq this week in advance of a major report that will be delivered to Congress. US officials have said 80 percent of al-Qaeda suicide bombers in Iraq have entered through Syria at a rate of 60-80 every month. What have you done to crack down on this problem?

President Assad: There are all false allegations. Who are those people? What are their names r links with any Syrian? There where you should cooperate on fighting al-Qaeda and the terrorists. All these allegations are jut to divert the attention of the people that the problem is related to al-Qaeda and not political problem. While the fact of the matter is that it is a political problem in Iraq.

Journalist: So, you are denying that any suicide bombers or terrorists in Iraq are coming through your country?

President Assad: No, this is not the issue, because no country in the world can seal its borders and the example is your borders with Mexico. Nobody can seal their borders, but there is a difference between saying 80 percent and having some smuggling. Some smuggling is possible on any border as you can not have one hundred percent control!!.

Journalist : We are not talking about smuggling, Mr. President; we are talking about terrorists crossing the border into Iraq and killing many people.

President Assad: Exactly, it is smuggling because they have to cross the borders illegally, so it is smuggling. They have to cross the borders illegally not legally unless they have a normal ID, and nobody can know them so they can cross it normally. But this is not the issue; the issue is related to the cooperation between the intelligence in the two countries. They said they have 80 percent and this means that they know the numbers, the names and who they are! So why do not they send us the information to know if those people cross our borders or not! Otherwise, nobody can tell if they cross our borders or not!

Journalist: General Petraeus told me that you have taken steps to control the borders more carefully, so clearly you acknowledge this is
a problem . What steps have you taken?

President Assad: It is an old problem. It ahs been thirty years since Saddam was Vice President; and we had this army because there was smuggling of terrorists toward Syria in the seventies! We had an army to foster the borders but we took other steps to strengthen our presence and control the border. The other side of the story is what do those terrorists do in Iraq? They kill civilians and create chaos. But what interest does Syria have in chaos in Iraq? Chaos is contagious and if we cause chaos in Iraq, then it means we are working against our interests! That is why we do our best to control our borders, first of all for the Syrians, second for the Iraqis and third for the whole region. But to talk about 80 percent this is just general words and has no concrete evidence!

Journalist: While US officials and US intelligence have determined that you are saying they are wrong!

President Assad: They have to send us the names. This how we say they are right!

Journalist: you say that chaos does not work to Syria's advantage; does that means you support a stable and democratic Iraq?

President Assad: Definitely, and for our interests in the first degree and for Iraq's interest secondly; otherwise the whole region and later maybe the rest of the world will be indirectly suffering but we will be the first to pay the price and we are paying the price of chaos in Iraq today. So why not work if it is for our own interest?! This is definite and this is the public position of Syrian policy.

Journalist: So you support the US efforts to help establish democracy in Iraq?

President Assad: If they do, but they do not do it. If there are efforts, but they only talk about the military side in terms of the number of soldiers and raising up the number of the forces on the ground. That is all what they are talking about. There is not serious political process supported by the Americans so far.

Journalist: When I was in Iraq, President Bus and his other top officials were meeting with Prime Minister, Maliki and his top leaders trying to move democracy forward; why are you saying that there is no political process going on?

President Assad: We are talking about the results. It is getting worse every day and nothing is better. Sometimes it gets better but it is like a flash in the pan that immediately disappears and it is transitory. If we talk about the results, the killing is worse than before. Over a million Iraqis have been killed . What about orphans and widows. and amputees, and what about the millions of people who are suffering? So the what is better? We have to be realistic and talk about the results. We do not have to talk about photo opportunity meetings.

Journalist: Let me ask you about the Damascus Airport. It is considered a major point of entry for terrorists going into Iraq and you been highly criticized, Mr. President, for not taking greater action to stop this from happening !Why are not you having control of your airport?

President Assad: It is not related to the airport. This is again another false allegation . They have been harboring this bogus claim for years but actually if the terrorists want to come they do not have to come to the airport as they can cross any border by any means to go to Iraq. They do not have to come through the airport! We do not have any evidence that he terrorists came through borders and if we have any information about a terrorist coming through the legal borders or the airport, we will catch him right away!
Journalist: You are telling me that you have no evidence and no knowledge that terrorists are using Damascus international airport as an entry point and then going to Iraq?

President Assad: No, I did not say that. I wanted to elaborate saying we caught many coming through the airport but most of them do no come through the airport but through illegal borders and we caught them!

Journalists: Why do not you require visas for Arab men coming to Damascus?
President Assad: This is the Syrian policy for decades.
Journalist: But if it is a problem why do not change this Syrian policy?

President Assad: No, because most of the terrorists have regular ID and they will come legally. They will not cross the border illegally. Most of them have their ID but we do not know they are terrorists. How do you know that someone is a terrorist? For example, the 11th of September terrorists used to live in the United States; why did not you catch them? Because you did not know they were terrorists! The same is true for us. We have sleeping cells like many other countries and people who can help them. Even if you want to ask for a visa and you do not know them, you will give him the visa. That is why the visa is not the solution!

Journalist: Let me read an excerpt from an op-Ed that was recently published by Senator Joe Lieberman, " Syrian President Assad can not seriously claim that he is incapable of exercising effective control over the main airport in his capital city. Syria is a police state , with sprawling domestic intelligence and security services. The notion that al-Qaeda recruits are slipping into and through the Damascus Airport unbeknownst to you and others is totally unbelievable. It is therefore time to demand that he Syrian regime stop playing travel agency for al-Qaeda in Iraq.

President Assad: All that is nonsense. Everybody in this world knows that we have been fighting extremists for thirty years when the United States leaders used to cal them holy fighters; we fought them for decades so we will never be their friends for any reason. But again, they have to concentrate on the core issue. The core issue is the war on Iraq. The false decisions, the false allegations , the deception and the wrong policies inside Iraq. This is the reason behind what is going on . Your generals said they expect the number to be 1000-3000 terrorists; but in Iraq you have 26 million Iraqis. How could 1000-3000 create this chaos ? Nobody can believe it! There are other reasons and so this is not the issue. They only concentrate on the trivial issues blaming others, they want to look for escape goats or
for whipping boys. This is their policy. They do not want to confess that they took the wrong decision.

Journalist: I think US military leaders would say the numbers are much higher tan ones you quoted.

President Assad: May be recently, but before it was said it is 1000-3000 and this was in the media . But the number doesn't matter. The issue is different. We have been living here forever and we know the region. The issue is political , the is no political process Iraq and you have to talk about the mistakes the American Administration committed in Iraq before the war, during the war and after the war till today.

Journalist: Let us look forward , do you believe that US troops should withdraw from Iraq?

President Assad: Definitely yes as a principle. As for how and when this is an Iraqi issue; we can not decide it as Syria.

Journalist: Are you concerned Mr. President, that if the US troops do withdraw and do it too precipitously, the country will break out in civil war?

President Assad: We have to take the context of the events ;since the war and after four yeas and a half today every day is getting worse that before. So I can say that the US forces will bring stability to Iraq. This is for sure. Maybe if they leave some day it will get worse but not the debate. As a principle they have to leave.

Journalist: Well if it is worse, I is no good for you!

President Assad: That is what I am going to answer. The main issue is what political process you have in parallel. You have to say that I am going to withdraw and o put a timetable for the withdrawal. In parallel you have to have a political process going with the withdrawal in order not to have this chaos getting worse and getting Iraq stable again. That depends on the political process.

Journalist: Do you not support Prime Minister Maliki?

President Assad: We support any prime minister who works for his country. We have good relations with him. He came to Syria a few weeks ago and we had a very good meeting , but we do not interfere in Iraqi matters.

Journalist: Do you think his government has the potential to be successful?

President Assad : We have to ask the question firs, Do they have the authority to be successful? Do the Americans allow them to do what they have to do? As far as we know according to many Iraqi officials, they do not have the authority. The American lead everything in Iraq so why do they blame any government whether al-Maliki or others?

Journalist: You are saying the prime minister is a puppet of the United States?
President Assad: No, I do not say that but they do no have the full authority, maybe they have been given more authority than before but they are not responsible for the chaos. They are dealing with the results. They did not cause the chaos .That is the difference.

Journalist: Prime Minister Maliki, recently visited Damascus and asked you to arrest a number of prominent members of the former Saddam regime now involved in the insurgency out of Syria and even involved to throw the regime of the prime minister, according to military sources with whom I spoke. Will you arrest them?

President Assad: Of course . Anyone who is involved in a crime in Iraq, we will definitely arrest him.

Journalist: What kind of measures are you taking to do that ?

President Assad : We have our law, but handing over any person to Iraq require that Iraq is independent and not occupied.

Journalist : why can not just arrest them in Syria ?

President Assad: That is what we do of course and they know that we arrested many, we have thousands!

Journalist: you mean insurgents who tried to do things against Prime Minister Malki?
President Assad : it depends on the definition of "insurgents". The Americans call anyone who works against them insurgents. We have a different definition but of course whoever works against Iraqi people is arrested in Syria without any doubt.

Journalist: Do you want to see America succeed in Iraq?

President Assad: That depends once again on the definition. " Succeeding" for us means Iraq is stable. My priority now is stability in Iraq; it does not matter if the United States leaves today or tomorrow. My priority is the Iraqi people and my country. Of course if being successful means political stability we do not have any problem, because we support any country in the world including the United States in succeeding in Iraq.

Journalist: there are more than Iraqi refugees who leave in Syria. What has been the impact of that?

President Assad: Strong impact: on the economy, the infrastructure in Syria and on the mood of the people, which is normal. But the issue in not humanitarian but political. Without the refugees you can not solve the problem inside Iraq. When we embrace them is not from a humanitarian point of view only but from a political point of view.

Journalist: What is gong to happen to them?

President Assad: They have to go back some day to their country and that is why we have to work for the stability. If Iraq is stable they will go back to their country definitely. That is why I said we have an interest in a stable Iraq.

Journalist : Would you welcome them her indefinitely is Iraq is unstable for the years to come?

President Assad : Not indefinitely because we are going to suffer and they are going to suffer. If they come to Syria and Syria is not able to embrace them, they will suffer again. So they will not get any benefit coming from Iraq to Syria.

Journalist : Your government supports a number of militant groups providing them with support or safe havens! Many of these groups such as Hizbollah are considered terrorist organizations, as you know, by the United States. Why do you support them, Mr. President?

President Assad We do not provide safe haven to any one. They have their safe haven among the Lebanese as they are part and parcel of the Lebanese society and Lebanese fabric. So without this society they can not have a safe heaven. This is their strength. As for the support, we have good relations and we support them politically because they have a joust cause.

Journalist : Financially ?

President Assad: No, financially they do not need our help; they can have money from a lot of people from around the Arab and Moslem world and they have extensive support around the region. That is why we support them because they have a just cause as I said.

Journalist : Why? Can you just explain to me why an organization considered a terrorist organization by many people has you support?

President Assad: Yes, but if you want to look at the picture, you have to see it as a whole without taking a small part and say this is the picture. The picture is that the Israelis are attacking the Lebanese on a daily basis, where they have incessant encroachment of the air space every day. Is not that terrorism? They attacked Lebanon last year and killed 1400 Lebanese civilians with no reason. Is not it terrorism? Therefore, if you want to talk about the definitions again or labels, I do not think that we have to talk about them because it is just a waste of time; let us talk about reality. You have people supporting organizations, governments or policies, and we have to deal with these policies, governments and organizations.

Journalists: do you agree with the Iranian President, Ahmadi Najjad that Israel does not have the right to exist?

President Assad: This is freedom of expression; everyone in the world has freedom to express whatever he wants. This is only an expression, but did he take any act? He did not. So, we have to talk about the acts if we want to judge somebody, otherwise he has the right to believe in whatever he wants. But again many Israelis said in the past few years that " we have to wipe out Arabs", and many said that " Arabs are snakes and have to be demolished". So, it is the same; an action and reaction. Therefore, we have to blame Israelis as much we blame others.

Journalist: Having said that, do you agree with President Ahmadi Najjad's statement?

President Assad: We have been asking for peace negotiations for the last fifteen years. So, how do you define that? We have been working for peace with Israel. We have different positions, we have an occupied land and we need the peace with the Israelis to restore our land.

Journalist: The United States and other Arab nations are concerned about the rise of Iran and about that country's capacity to make nuclear weapons, is that something that concerns you?

President Assad: No, Because any country in every place in the world has the right to rise and has the right to play a role regarding the stability, and I think that Iran is very important for the stability of the region and without it there is no stability. But if we talk about the nuclear weapons as peaceful power as they mentioned many time, and according to the international law, then any country in the world has this right to have peaceful nuclear reactors or energy. Therefore, we are not worried about it as long as it is peaceful. On the other hand and from another point of view, we are against any WMD in the Middle East; we had a proposal in the United Nations sine 2003 to make the Middle East a zone free of WMDs, but the United States of America stood against that proposal. Our position is that we are against any WMD in the Middle East.

Journalist: Why do you allowed Iran to supply weapons to Hezbollah through Syria? Are you concerned that as a result of your policies you have become isolated and your only strategic partner in the region is now Iraq?

President Assad: No, this is not true. We never allow Iran to bring armaments or missiles to Hezbollah. What is the evidence? They have been talking about that for the last year, and you know there are a lot of Israeli drones over the Lebanese territory and all the intelligence; may be the entire world, on the Syrian-Lebanese borders and they have been talking about that, so I asked them to bring me only one evidence that we sent a single missile to Hezbollah; this is just a false allegation.

Journalist : As you know, a major report will be delivered to the Congress next weak about the state of the surge and the future of the United States in Iraq. If you have an opportunity to testify in front of the United States Congress, what would you say about the situation?

President Assad: of course our position about the war is known, that we were against the war and I told every American official who came to Syria at that time that you are going to win the war, but you are going to fail after the war because you do not know this region. But they turned deaf ears to everything we have said. They committed a lot of political mistakes in addition to the security mistakes, and now they have to announce the withdrawal, to put a timetable and work for the political process. This political process should include the Iraqi national conference not an international one, but with regional and international support including, of course, the United States. Working in Iraq without the help of the regional countries will lead them nowhere, and this is what the Iraqi officials believe in; they believe that they need the help of the regional countries. So, the United States, so far, do not work with even their closest allies. That is why they are not going to succeed. But if they want to succeed, they have to work with others and first of all with the Iraqis.

Journalist : Mr. President, Thank you very much for your time.

President Assad : Thank you for coming.


Ghossoun / A.N. Idelbi

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A rotten state of affairs

Caroline Glick
THE JERUSALEM POST
Sep. 10, 2007

Something is rotten in the British Jewish community. In recent years anti-Jewish violence and the social ostracism of Jews and Israel have reached new heights in the United Kingdom. Yet rather than confront their bigoted detractors, the British Jewish establishment seems to be surrendering to them. Two recent episodes are notable in this regard.

One of the mainstays of the British Jewish calendar is the annual Limmud Conference, sponsored by the United Jewish Israel Appeal. The conference, which takes place each year during Christmas week, has been heralded by the British Jewish Chronicle as "The jewel in our community's crown."

This year, the organizers invited former Knesset speaker Avrum Burg to be the conference's keynote speaker.

It would be an understatement to refer to Burg as a fringe figure in Israel. Over the past several years, Burg has written in sympathy and support of Palestinian suicide bombers. This year, Burg published an anti-Zionist and arguably anti-Semitic book entitled Defeating Hitler, in which he compared Israel to Nazi Germany and described Zionism as a racist colonialist movement that has poisoned the soul of Jewry.

Burg, who recently received French citizenship, has called for his fellow Israelis to follow his lead and seek foreign passports. While even the Israeli Zionist Left has denounced him, "the jewel" of the British Jewish community has decided to honor him.
The Limmud Conference's move goes hand in hand with the British Jewish establishment's confrontation last week with Britain's Zionist Federation over the ZF's decision to cancel Haaretz reporter Danny Rubinstein's scheduled appearance at its annual conference.

THE ZF became uncomfortable with Rubinstein after it learned that on August 30, while participating in the anti-Israel conference at the European Parliament sponsored by the virulently anti-Israel UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, Rubinstein referred to Israel as an "apartheid state."
When Rubinstein arrived in London the next day, he met with the ZF's leaders at the home of the organization's chairman, Andrew Balcombe. There, Rubinstein suggested that he not speak at the ZF's conference that weekend. Although they initially rejected the suggestion, Balcombe and his colleagues eventually agreed to cancel his speech.

The same weekend, Rubinstein spoke before British Jews at an event sponsored by the leftist New Israel Fund. There he castigated the ZF, saying that at the meeting at Balcombe's home he felt he was standing before a "court martial." He accused the ZF of leaving him penniless on the streets of London even though its leaders booked him a hotel room and offered to pay for it.

Rather than challenge Rubinstein on his defamatory attacks against Israel and against the ZF - attacks which abet the bigoted voices within Britain calling for boycotts of Israel and sanctioning attacks on British Jewry - the New Israel Fund, and the Jewish Chronicle, upheld Rubinstein as merely "controversial" and attacked the ZF for supposedly silencing free speech and debate.

WHILE MEN like Rubinstein and Burg are given places of honor among Britain's Jewish establishment, the ZF is having trouble finding a security company willing to protect its offices. Moreover, increasingly, British Jewish organizations express unwillingness to co-sponsor events with the ZF due to their unease at being identified with Zionists.

Although British Jewry's unwillingness to defend itself and Israel from defamatory attacks is disturbing, it is hard to judge British Jewish leaders too harshly given that their tendency to seek acceptance from their detractors and give voice to their opponents while blackballing their supporters isn't very different from the policies being promoted by Israel's Foreign Ministry. In fact, it is safe to say that while something is rotten in the British Jewish community, something is even rottener in the State of Israel's Foreign Ministry.

Danny Rubinstein told the ZF's leaders that he began openly referring to Israel as an apartheid state after former US president Jimmy Carter published his anti-Israel libel Palestine: Peace not Apartheid last autumn. Yet this fact didn't stop the Foreign Ministry from using Israeli taxpayers' money to send Rubinstein to India to given speeches at Foreign Ministry-sponsored events on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in February.

The Foreign Ministry's embrace of Rubinstein is noteworthy particularly when it is contrasted with the Foreign Ministry's contemptuous treatment of French Jewish activist Philippe Karsenty, who is being hounded by the French media giant France 2 television network for his dogged defense of Israel and the IDF.

ON NOVEMBER 24, 2004, Karsenty, who runs a media watchdog Web site called Media Matters, sent out an email to his subscribers in which he accused the France 2 television network of staging the purported IDF killing of the Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Dura at Netzarim junction in Gaza on September 30, 2000.

Karsenty called for the resignation of France 2's permanent correspondent in Israel, Charles Enderlin, and of France 2's News Director, Arlette Chabot, for their role in promulgating the alleged hoax. France 2 and Enderlin sued Karsenty for defamation. They won their lawsuit last October. Next week, Karsenty's appeal of the verdict is set to open.

It will be recalled that on September 30, 2000, France 2 ran 55 seconds of footage from the Netzarim junction filmed by its Gaza cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma. The footage showed Muhammad al-Dura and his father, Jamal al-Dura, crouching behind a barrel beneath a concrete wall. Shots were fired and Muhammad lay down in his father's lap, and then moved his leg and arm. In his narration of the edited, blurry footage, Enderlin announced that the IDF had killed the boy. France 2 offered its edited video free of charge to anyone who wished to broadcast it.

In the days, weeks and months that followed, the al-Dura tape became the iconic image of the Palestinian war against Israel and, indeed, of the general global jihad against the West. It was invoked by the Palestinian mob in Ramallah that lynched IDF reservists Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Novesche on October 12, 2000. It was invoked by mobs of Israeli Arabs as they opened their violent riots on October 1, 2000.

THE IMAGE of al-Dura has been used in Hamas and Fatah terror recruitment videos, television shows and educational materials as a means to encourage Palestinian children to become suicide bombers. The al-Dura tape was used repeatedly in al-Qaida's videotape of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's execution in February 2002 and in other al-Qaida recruitment videos. His image was published in Iraqi Republican Guards newsletters and indoctrination materials before the 2003 US-led invasion. His name has been invoked repeatedly at Islamist and leftist anti-Israel demonstrations throughout the Western world.

Yet the IDF could not have killed the boy. An IDF investigation of the event in late 2000 showed that it was physically impossible for the IDF forces to have either seen or shot at the al-Duras from their position at the junction that day. Aside from that, independent investigations of the events of the day, carried out most notably by Prof. Richard Landes and shown at his Augean Stables Web site, and by Metula News Agency, showed that the event was likely staged. As investigators showed, throughout the day, Palestinian cameramen openly staged scenes of "carnage" performed by amateur Palestinian actors and Red Crescent ambulance drivers.

At one point, a cameraman from Reuters and another man crouched behind the al-Duras, filming staged scenes while the two were supposedly under fire, and in imminent peril.

A DOCUMENTARY by German filmmaker Ester Schapira, Three Bullets and a Dead Child: Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?, was released in late 2002. The documentary, like later investigations by the Atlantic Monthly and other publications, concluded that the IDF could not have killed the boy.

Since the controversy first arose, independent investigators have repeatedly asked France 2 to release the 29-minute unedited version of Rahma's film. The requests have been refused.

During his trial last summer, Karsenty presented all the investigative evidence that had been accumulated to that point. The prosecution brought no witnesses, and challenged none of his evidence - sufficing with a letter of support for Enderlin written by then French president Jacques Chirac.

In his ruling last October, the presiding judge argued that although his evidence of the hoax was substantial, Karsenty's allegations could not be credible since "no Israeli authority… has ever accorded the slightest credit to these allegations."
For the past year, Karsenty and his supporters have repeatedly begged the IDF and the Foreign Ministry to support him in his appeal. They have repeatedly appealed to the IDF and the Foreign Ministry to request the unedited France 2 footage. Although various promises of assistance have been made, a week before his appeal, Karsenty has yet to receive any letters of support that he could introduce at his appeal from the Foreign Ministry. According to people close to the trial, Israel's ambassador in France, Danny Shek, enjoys warm relations with Enderlin.

FOLLOWING the Israeli government's lead, most major Jewish organizations in the Diaspora have refused to support Karsenty or to demand the release of the unedited footage of the 2000 film that has served to justify and incite murder and hatred of Jews in Israel and throughout the world ever since. Among American Jewish organizations, the Zionist Organization of America is the only major group that has come out strongly in support of Karsenty.

It is hard to know what to make of this rotten situation. As Jews begin our new year on Wednesday evening, it can only be hoped that with the new year will come a new understanding of our rights and responsibilities.

After seven years of the Palestinian jihad, and six years of the global jihad, it is high time we understood that if we do not defend ourselves and oppose our enemies and detractors, no one will do so for us.

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67 wounded in Qassam attack

About 67 Israeli soldiers were wounded after a Qassam rocket launched from northern Gaza landed on a military base in the western Negev early Tuesday morning Nine Four soldiers were seriously injured in the attack, seven sustained moderate wounds, about 20 were lightly hurt and the rest were treated for shock. This is the largest number of casualties to date resulting from a single Qassam attack.

Three rockets were launched at around 1:30 am, from the area of the Palestinian town of Beit Hanoun. Two of the rockets landed in open areas, but one landed in the Zikim base, about 1 kilometer north of the Gaza Strip, next to a tent containing several soldiers from a battalion in basic training.



The wounded, along with their battalion members, were scheduled to complete basic training mere hours after the attack took place.

DF sources told Ynet that there were serious consequences as a result of a direct hit. "Sometimes there are direct hits, and then there are many casualties. That's what happened this time."



The tent that sustained the direct hit served as a makeshift meal tent and contained a number of soldiers at the time of impact. Several soldiers in an adjacent sleeping tent were injured from shrapnel and the force of the blast. Despite the rocket threat on the region, it had been decided at the beginning of training that the new recruits would continue sleeping in tents.



The attack on Zikim was claimed by the Salah a-Din Brigades - the military arm of the Public Resistance Committees. Abu Mujahad, the organization's spokesman, told Ynet that the brigades had launched two rockets into Israel.



Shortly afterwards, the al-Quds Brigades – Islamic Jihad's military wing – also claimed responsibility for the lethal rocket and said they would release further details during a celebratory press conference later in the day.



Islamic Jihad operatives celebrated the attack in their mosques in Gaza later Tuesday morning, using loud speakers to announce the number of casualties. The operatives promised to continue similar activities.



Partial fortifications

IDF forces in the area identified only one rocket when it was launched, which landed in a Gaza vicinity community near the base. The area where the rockets landed has formerly been the target of several rocket attacks and, consequently, fortification projects were being undertaken in the region.



In December 2005, the Zikim base itself sustained a rocket attack. As a result of intense parental pressure, the military decided to build fortifications on base, including cement walls surrounding the tent compound.



While it was decided not to fully fortify each tent, military sources stated they believe the structures prevented a much larger catastrophe from occurring.

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Ehud's Ongoing nonsense

Following his meeting with the Palestinian president, PM Ehud Olmert committed to submit to for the approval of the government the release of Palestinian prisoners, as a goodwill gesture for Ramadan. And here is the rest of it.

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One of the advisors of Ismail Haniyeh, the former Hamas PM said during an interview on the Al Arabiya network that "the Israeli soldier held by the Pa

Palestinian opposition, the corporal Gilad Shalit, is in good health". Ahmed Youssef added that several intermediaries are trying to advance the negotiations between Hamas and Israel for his liberation. And here is the rest of it.

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At the end of the day whose values do you want to live by?

GS Don Morris, Ph.D.

Without a clear set of values identified, one wanders aimlessly-becomes a person motivated by feelings, the latest trends or the current important people in one’s life. Additionally, most secular people, when push comes to shove, are unwilling to stay the course-they do not persevere as do those with religious values. The definition of secular I am using can best be defined in the following:

1. pertaining to worldly things or to things that are not regarded as religious, spiritual, or sacred
2. not pertaining to or connected with religion
3. education, a school concerned with nonreligious subjects.

This is not a “versus” piece by any means nor is it a treatise on values. It is useful to be clear when discussing the concept of values and their importance upon the formation of beliefs and thus the predictor of behavior. Nor do I suggest that secular believers cannot operate from a firm belief set. Rather, I want to present the notion that any long-term group behavior that is consistent in its behavioral application is primarily found among those individuals possessing a committed belief system usually grounded in religious teachings.

Why is any of this discussion remotely important in today’s world? I believe that our way of life in the West is being challenged if not threatened by a group that possesses another set of life values and they seek to initially import it to our culture and over time make it the determinant set of values all peoples must live under. Furthermore, all of this is transparent-we not only “sense it”, we can observe it occurring daily.

My premise is as follows: The United States of America was created upon Judeo-Christian beliefs and values. Our legal system was based ethically and morally upon these same values. The design and structure of our operating and administrative systems follows a set of values that reflect these ideas. Our social systems, education programs and to a large degree our economic systems fall in line with the groups’ interpretations of these values. Specific individual and group behaviors have been created and infused within our American population. Up until the late 20th century, a large part of America’s success was the ability of all people identifying themselves as Americans to adapt, adjust and assimilate into the “American Culture”.

Europe is discovering today what it took for America to accomplish over 200 years ago and we still are a work in progress. They are attempting to form a European Union aka United States comprised of former European countries. Frankly, they have much to do and much to learn from us. Consider for a moment that our USA is comprised of 50 different state entities, diverse in geography, politics, peoples and behavior. Yet, we function reasonably well, all 300 million plus of us because through most of the 20th century we believed it was important to continue the assimilation process. We are in fact an amazing social experiment. However, this process so crucial for a country attempting to create daily living standards and opportunities for all of its emerging diverse populations is no longer functioning well. Like the metaphor or not, we are a country that must be a melting pot of some sort or we shall fall asunder.

On a micro level, let us examine a functioning family. Common to most families that “get along well” are the following:
· Understanding the family rules and agree to honor them
· Acknowledge and appreciate the worth of each family member
· Willingness to do one’s part within the family daily activities coupled with expectations they will be accomplished
· Speak a common “family” language; parents, you know what I mean
· Tolerate occasional language, behavior and activities that are contrary to agreed upon family rules
HOWEVER
· Sense of responsibility to intervene, without any fears, when a family member or the “family’ goes “astray”
· Do the right thing on behalf of the family in spite of what others might say, think or express behaviorally to the family members or leaders
· Act courageously and consistently even when tired and when one does not “feel like it”
· Acknowledge differences, appreciate the similarities and unconditionally love everyone

Extrapolate the preceding to our United States of America. These nine attributes are part and parcel of the assimilation process and represent outcomes that are necessary if numerically large numbers of diverse cultural groups are to successfully co-exist. When anyone of the preceding 9 attributes ceases to function, upset, anger and the act of disconnection begins. It seems to me that an erosion of more than one of these attributes began toward the latter part of the 20th century and it has carried over into our present time.

It is past time for us as a nation to acknowledge what has happened and identify what needs ‘tweaking” or if necessary, what needs to be fixed. We know what it takes for families to work well, let us apply these same attributes to our country.
· We have agreed upon rules grounded in Judeo-Christian values-accept them and do not try to impose others
· Invite everyone who wants to contribute to an American lifestyle to join us-we cherish the differences
· Understand the behaviors of a civically minded citizen and act accordingly
· English is the official language-we expect this to be ‘common” to all who want to positively contribute to our society
· We all have different feelings, thoughts and sometimes express these with different words and behaviors-this we understand and acknowledge

HOWEVER
· We each accept the responsibility to inform you and hold you accountable
· We are willing to act when necessary-we do not allow “political correctness” to guide our actions-we honor our core beliefs
· Even though against “all odds”, even when we are tired and would rather take the ‘easy path” we tirelessly do the right thing-we are courageous on a daily basis particularly when no one is watching
· Welcome to all who want to be part of our country-we are still the most sought after destination country in the world; peoples before you from all walks of life have come to participate in this assimilation process-this has made America great!

This is what we have historically valued. It has produced in less than 280 years, the most robust way of life known to humankind. Imagine this, in such a short period of time we Americans have created a way of life that so many others flock to participate in-every day more and more join us. However, we have become complacent and have developed an entitlement mentality. We even, when challenged appear to feel guilty –some of us seem to be ashamed of what we have and what has been created for us by so many previous hard working generations. So many now do not appreciate what it took to create what we get to enjoy every day. Many are willing to invalidate what America has accomplished and for what it stands. For reasons known only to themselves, people are now investing time, money and energy to eradicate what we, our parents, grand parents and all previous generations have built.

Not only is this unfortunate, it is dangerous for the well being of our country and way of life. When challenged most Americans will not stand up for what they think is important. When queried about one’s values, we shrink from such discussions. We acquiesce to other’s demands lest we offend them. America’s enemies know this and are counting us to shirk our civic duty.

Those who are firm in their beliefs do stand up. Human behavior has taught us that once you honestly have confirmed beliefs, your human actions and behaviors are usually congruent with them. You act as a human being with integrity. Secular and religious individuals alike are capable of behaving in this manner. Mainstream America is not standing up, not yet. Unlike our enemies, I believe that Americans will soon stand tall and proudly announce and then defend those values that have made us proud to be an American. Our enemies should not underestimate the power of our beliefs!

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Neo-Nazi Gangs Malignant New Growth in the Jewish State

Authorities are hoping to throw the proverbial book at eight members of a neo-Nazi gang Monday, indicting them on charges of causing grievous bodily harm and Holocaust denial, But they won’t be charged for the one crime which eclipses all others in its implications: neo-Nazi activity.

Reason: Neo-Nazism is not against the law in the State of Israel.
Legislators in the Jewish State never created a law specifically outlawing anti-Semitic hate crimes. Clearly, no one ever thought there could come a day when such a law would be needed.

Israel Police Inspector-General David Cohen said Monday there are dozens of neo-Nazis in Israel. He added that a number of neo-Nazi web sites have been operating in Israel for years and although it is not yet a widespread problem, the phenomenon is growing. Police are working on tracking them down, Cohen emphasized.

Nonetheless ministers were stunned, during their weekly Sunday morning cabinet meeting, when they viewed footage of the teenagers’ activities.
Police superintendent Yigal Ben Shalom, who headed the year-long investigation into the gang, said the videos were indeed shocking. “The materials we found were difficult to watch,” he said.

The videos were found on computers seized from the two primary suspects in the case, 21-year-old Ilya Bondenko of Petach Tikva and Arik Bunyatov, who is suspected of being the leader of the teenage wannabe Nazis.

One of the videos showed the gang members punching a foreign worker in the face and busting a bottle on his head as he spoke on a public telephone.
Another showed members of the group surrounding a Russian heroin addict and, after the man admits he is Jewish, beating him mercilessly, along with another man who tries to assist him.

The teens and other people in the clips were wearing skinhead, neo-Nazi clothes, with several actual uniforms found during searches of the suspects’ homes. The footage was accompanied by a blaring music bed and shots of swastikas and other Nazi symbols flashing between segments.

The detectives also found photos of the group giving the "Heil Hitler" salute in front of a synagogue in Tel Aviv as well as an M-16 assault rifle, a cache of explosives, Nazi uniforms, posters of Hitler, and knives.

Other materials on the computers led detectives to conclude that suspects planned to celebrate the birthday of Nazi mastermind Adolph Hitler at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum.

Parents of several of the gang members denied their sons had any connection with neo-Nazism and blamed Israeli society for the teenagers’ behavior.
The father of Vladimir Tronorotsky, for example, said his son wore a swastika tattoo as a way to get out of the army. “After being screwed over all the time, he had finally had it. He came home and showed me his arms and said ‘Now they’re sure to take me out of the army, the Jews can’t stand that.’”

The elder Tronorotsky, Alex, said he was horrified, telling his son that his grandfather Yaakov had fought the Nazis while serving in the Red Army. Vladimir’s mother Yvetta is Christian.

Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said all the suspects were immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and seven out of eight of them were not Jewish according to Jewish law. He said the group had carried out at least 15 attacks, many against religious Jews.

In the 1990's, the Jewish Agency brought into Israel some one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union, of which an estimated 250,000 to 330,000 are not Jewish. The endeavor was funded largely by funds donated by Jews and funneled through the United Israel Appeal.

Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Weisenthal Center said that the neo-Nazi cell was the result of lax laws granting Israeli citizenship to people "with little connection to Jewish history, the Jewish people, the Jewish religion and Jewish culture."
Although the arrests were made a month ago, a gag order prevented coverage of the matter. Police had been investigating over 20 people involved with the group ever since the vandalizing of a large synagogue in Petach Tikvah over a year ago. The neo-Nazis had painted swastikas and other Nazi symbols on the walls,and the insides of prayer books.

Comment: People can be defined by their actions when facing critical moments. Mr. Olmert clearly defined himself today. In response to this horrific behavior, Mr. Olmert most important attempt was to "calm the population" and make sure we knew this was not demonstrative of all former Soviet immigrants and we should not blame them. He could have said: "No excuse will be accepted for this kind of behavior. It is not the fault of anyone but each family must be willing to introspectively analyze what went wrong. Do not blame or shirk from your responsibilities-take control of the situation now. We are ready to assist those willing to face the problems; for those who abdicate any accountability, we will provide the necessary consequences." Yes, he could have said this-BUT he did not!

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This is why we need Checkpoints!

Tel Aviv Suicide Bombing Thwarted at Shechem Checkpoint A teenage Arab was intercepted at an IDF checkpoint 30 miles northeast of Tel Aviv Sunday afternoon transporting bombs to be used in a suicide attack in Tel Aviv in the next 24 hours.

Border Police manning the Beit Ibba checkpoint west of Shechem (Nablus) apprehended a PA Arab youth carrying three bombs. The bombs were supposed to be transferred to a terrorist on the other side for use in an attack in the Tel Aviv area. The explosives were detonated by IDF sappers and the terrorist was handed over for interrogation.

The IDF is on its highest alert, reporting that Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the rest of the terror groups operating in Judea and Samaria are all trying their hardest to carry out a fatal attack ahead of the High Holidays.

Mortars and Kassam Rockets
Terrorists from Gaza launched a barrage of mortar shells at the Kerem Shalom Crossing and nearby Kibbutz by the same name Sunday morning. The crossing is used to transfer food and humanitarian aid to Hamas-ruled Gaza. Ten mortar shells were also fired over the Sabbath. No injuries were reported, though a water pipe was damaged by one of the explosions.

Terrorists also fired a Kassam rocket at the western Negev. The Kassam landed near a Kibbutz in the Shaar HaNegev region. No injuries or damage were reported.

Shootings and Bombs
In Samaria, Arab terrorists opened fire on an Israeli motorist driving north of Ramallah. No injuries were reported, though the vehicle was badly damaged.

South of Ramallah, IDF soldiers arrested a wanted terrorist Sunday morning.

Two bombs were thrown at IDF soldiers operating in Kabatiya, south of Jenin, early Sunday morning. Saturday night, Arab terror gang members threw a bomb at a group of IDF soldiers operating in Shechem. No injuries were reported in either attack.

Arabs Uproot Jewish Vineyard Again
An IDF patrol spotted five Arabs uprooting and destroying about 180 vine seedlings Saturday afternoon between Neria and Nachliel, in the Binyamin region. The Arabs, realizing they were caught in the act, escaped into the nearby Arab village of A-Kabila.

This is the second major vineyard attack in recent weeks. In a previous incident, Arabs and radical leftists destroyed some 5,000 plants in the same area.

In both cases, the seedlings had been planted in order to ensure that they begin growing before the Shemitta year begins with the advent of Rosh Hashana.

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Kurds Launch Secret War In Iran

Kurdish guerrillas have launched a clandestine war in northwestern Iran, ambushing troops as they seek Western backing to secure an ethnic homeland. In retaliation, the Iranian army has carried out a series of counterattacks in the mountains, which span the border with Iraq.

Murat Karayilan, a Kurdish guerrilla commander, told the Daily Telegraph that Tehran had originally tried to recruit the outlawed groups to fight coalition troops in Iraq.

"The U.S. and Britain came to Iraq to establish a democratic system, but this scared the Iranians, so they negotiated with us and offered many things to attack the coalition," he said under a canopy of trees near his headquarters on Iraqi territory in the Qandil Mountains.

Iranian newspapers have reported the deaths of seven soldiers in recent clashes with Kurdish guerrillas. Last month, the rebels claimed responsibility for shooting down an Iranian helicopter.

A loose alliance of guerrillas, styling itself the Kurdistan Democratic Federation, is fighting for an independent state which would cover the Kurdish-majority areas of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.

Mr. Karayilan, who is from the PKK guerrilla group, said Iran and Turkey were acting in tandem to repress their Kurdish regions. But, he added, the Kurds have been inspired by the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, which has been relatively secure since Saddam Hussein's downfall in 2003. "The regional government in Iraqi Kurdistan has increased the national feeling of Kurds everywhere," he said.

Iran believes that the U.S. and Britain are now arming and training the Kurdish guerrillas to strike its territory from bases inside Iraq. Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, accused America of supporting terrorism inside the Islamic Republic.

"America wants to carry out actions such as blowing up the country's oil pipelines by supporting bandits and small groups of Kurdish rebels," he told the Iranian press.

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The Return of Rafsanjani

Comment: Keep your eyes and ears open-this is an important player on the Iran stage.

It is evident that the election of Iranian political leader Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to head the Assembly of Experts that is responsible for selecting the Supreme Guide is an important event for the Islamic Republic. This event is exceptional on two levels: firstly, the man's nature, political heritage and experience in public affairs and, secondly, the nature of domestic and regional circumstances that have transformed Iran to be atop of current international interests.

Rafsanjani is known as a unique foundation in the structure of the Iranian political field. He descended from a wealthy family of agricultural landowners and is known as a sophisticated politician who, in his country, is nicknamed “the fox” in reference to his shrewdness. He managed to combine being close to the leader of the Iranian revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, and his successor, the current leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with an open pragmatic sense that is adaptable to any information and recent developments.

Rafsanjani was the youngest member of Iran's Revolutionary Council appointed by Imam Khomeini after the revolution had succeeded in 1979, along with symbols of the new regime such as Ayatollah [Mohammed Hosseini] Beheshti, Ayatollah [Murtaza] Mutahhari and Hojjatoleslam Khamenei.

What is interesting, however, is that Rafsanjani could shy away from the direct physical and political liquidations that synchronized with the early events of the revolution. Although he was the spokesman for the new republic, he cleverly stayed away from the conflict between the clashing parties over the positions of influence in the new governance, even if he didn’t conceal his conservative dispositions and keenness on approaching Imam Khomeini who supported electing him in parliament and appointed him as a supreme commander of the Iranian armed forces.

It is noticeable that the elegant cleric, who was an apprentice of Imam Khomeini, did not embrace his inclination to the abstract philosophical topics, asceticism or his abstention to money. Rather he built and consolidated solid relations with the financial and commercial institution (bazaar) from the early days of the revolution, which became his support in the election. In Iran, there is a widespread impression that Rafsanjani is one of the richest people in the country and is embroiled in financial corruption although his close aides deny this accusation, acknowledging that many of his sons and other family members are businessmen and have close ties to the Iranian bazaar.

Although Rafsanjani's name was not present in the agenda of Khomeini's succession, who passed away in 1989, he was undoubtedly the architect of the strategy that led to the accession of Ayatollah Khamenei to leadership, for which he was not eligible according to the prevailing opinion among senior scholars and imams of the religious Hawza in view of his scientific status and juristic degree.

At that time, many members of the Assembly of Experts adopted the option of the (collective) joint leadership versus the individual leadership, regarding the case of Imam Khomeini as an exceptional and nonrecurring one in all measures. In addition, Rafsanjani has played a central role in imposing the option of individual leadership in favor of Imam Khamenei in a lucrative deal in which he assumed the presidency from 1989 to 1997.

In fact, presidency has become an important center of decision-making in the era of Rafsanjani after being in a semi-honorary position that lacks the actual executive powers.

The strong coalition between the Supreme Guide and the president has maintained Iranian political stability in the aftermath of the long war with Iraq. Furthermore, many quiet reforms began in the era of Rafsanjani. At that time, it became clear that Rafsanjani had approached the growing reformist trend from a realistic and pragmatic perspective. Although he did not support the dynamism of openness and renovation that was established by his successor reformist Mohammad Khatami, he did not stand against this dynamism and was keen to crystallize a third option that replaces the two conflicting reformist and conservative approaches. Thus he had prepared himself for the 2005 elections, which he thought had been settled for him in advance. Yet the surprise to come caught the sophisticated, shrewd Rafsanjani unawares. The desperate uprising amongst the youth took the adverse picture of Rafsanjani to the seat of power; the rebellious popular face that is reminiscent of the early stage, innocence and spontaneous activity of the revolution. Meanwhile the quarrelsome Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not the man of transition as conceived by the Iranian people. The country has become immersed in a grinding economic crisis.
Oil production is in decline and fuel has become subject to rationing. Meanwhile, experts have predicted that Iran will have to import oil in approximately ten years if the present situation prevails. The diplomatic blockade is intensifying, international sanctions are in succession and the crisis of the nuclear issue may lead to a new war in the region.

Rafsanjani has returned to the decision-making process in these gloomy circumstances by presiding over the Assembly of Experts, after passing through all the other gates, namely the leadership of parliament and the Expediency Discernment Council. Rafsanjani has not become a leading imam; rather he has gotten closer to the supreme post of the Iranian regime. As Tehran’s sources report that Khamenei's health is in decline and he is increasingly unable to carry out his responsibilities, it seems that Rafsanjani's influence will be bolstered and his presence in the decision-making pyramid will be consolidated especially in the two biggest issues: the nuclear issue and Iraq. Recently, he has made several moderate statements that heed in the direction of appeasing the situation with the West and demonstrating readiness to contribute to putting an end to the Iraqi turmoil.

Internally, he is known for his pragmatic sense and tendency to cooperate with the bazaar in an attempt to activate the Iranian economy through openness to external markets and attracting foreign investments in the vital areas of production.
It is believed that Rafsanjani is adopting a similar model to that of the Chinese with its three pillars: economic openness, political centralization and pragmatism in international relations. Rafsanjani may become the man of center stage for the surrounding reformists and moderate clerics who have become aware of the need to let go gradually of the concept of Waliyat al Faqih [Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists] that was determined according to the standards of Imam Khomeini and is no longer suitable for the transformations of the Iranian experience.

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Iran is nothing like the image presented in US narratives

Arab news perspective:

American pundits and policymakers tend to betray a stunning level of ignorance about Iran. Scores of them have made doomsday predictions about what is likely happen if President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "gets his hands on a nuclear weapon." Statements such as these reveal an obliviousness about the power structure in Iran, including the fact that the armed forces fall under the command of the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has issued a fatwa banning the production of nuclear arms and who reiterated on Sunday that his country "has no plans to create this deadly weapon."
The pundits often demonstrate a lack of understanding or appreciation of the complexity and dynamism of Iran's system of governance, which has evolved considerably since the days of the Islamic Revolution. Interestingly, Iran could be on the brink of yet another transformation, given the recent election of Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a conservative pragmatist, as head of the Assembly of Experts, a powerful body that has the authority to appoint and remove the supreme leader. Rafsanjani has hinted that under his leadership, the assembly will play a more active oversight role, and perhaps even introduce key reforms such as term limits on the supreme leader.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
Iranians are unlikely to abandon their system of Islamic rule. However, the Iranian public has over the past few years demonstrated an unquenchable thirst for change. Both Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were elected to the presidency on campaign promises to deliver something new, whether in the form of political or economic progress. The parties of both leaders have been punished at the ballot box for failing to deliver on their pledges. And there is every reason to believe that the Iranian people will continue to hold their leaders increasingly accountable.

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Iraq: Reality and Obligations

There is a reality in Iraq and the areas surrounding it that cannot be ignored ... especially in light of the withdrawal of British forces from Basra. The danger of the fighting between the Shia militias and their rivals is a clear and present one, particularly between the Sadrists and the supporters of Abdulaziz al Hakim.

Another reality is the handing over of security responsibilities by multinational forces in Diyala to Iraqi security forces.

Furthermore, it is important to note that both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have dispatched diplomatic missions assigned with the task of finding a location for their embassy headquarters in Baghdad. This denotes an Arab mobility that is accompanied by an awareness of the severity of the situation in Iraq.
An equally important development that cannot be overlooked in Iraq’s vicinity is Hashemi Rafsanjani’s appointment as head of the Assembly of Experts, which is a powerful clerical body that plays a crucial role in the Iranian arena.

Two days ago, I was on the phone with one of Iraq’s leadership figures whom I trust.
His voice sounded uneasy, so I asked him about the situation in Iraq and how he was faring. He replied, “The situation in Iraq sickens me… Iran is tampering with my country in an unimaginable way!”

Based on that (and if Iran is not subjected to a military strike from abroad first), with the impending presidential elections, Mr. Hashemi Rasfanjani should not only oust Ahmadinejad from his seat – but rather hurl him from it.

Mr. Rafsanjani is not ‘Hashemi Jefferson’ so do not expect him to dream of a free Iraq independent of Iranian influence, however he is a veteran and a rational politician who has previously proven his evaluative powers. Undoubtedly, he is more competent in dealing with sensitive issues than Ahmedinejad and his aides are.
Rafsanjani’s victory is as impossible to overlook as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) pre-emptive move [to appoint a new commander, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari], which appears to be a swift maneuver to save its last line of defense on the chessboard.

Added to the mix is the US President’s visit to Anbar and his meeting with the Sunni tribal sheikhs, which is an important shift if indeed the Sunni leadership deals with it in an appropriate manner. However, Nuri al Maliki is right to have reservations regarding arming the Sunnis in Iraq – based upon the consideration that that they would pose a threat that could lead to an armed conflict between the Sunnis and Shia.

And yet, arming these tribes to confront Al Qaeda could present an opportunity to unify the ranks ¬– if the Iraqi Prime Minister is capable of exploiting the situation well. This includes avoiding the exclusion of some Iraqis, in addition to decreeing and implementing a system to dissolve the Shia militias, and the Sunnis likewise, so that the authority could belong to the Iraqi state – not the militias.
These are realities that have come into actualization over the past two days, and all of which can be considered signs of hope portending that Iraq could be redeemed from the mire it is sinking into. But in order to achieve that, this next stage requires an Arab effort that stems from an awareness of the danger that the situation in present-day Iraq poses to the future of the region.

Likewise, it is equally critical to prevent Iraq from becoming a ball that is tossed between the Democrats and Republicans, between those of them who understand the region’s problems and those who don’t. However, this can only be achieved through an Iraqi effort that prioritizes national interests, which is a matter that cannot be accomplished without Arab action to support all Iraqi parties. It must be a move that does not neglect the tribes or the militias nor ignore the impending battle over the fate of Kirkuk – an ugly battle if it were to erupt.

What I want to say is that there is a glimmer of hope, but the real question is: Are there politicians who are capable of this responsibility? That is the question!

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Iran Muscle Power vs. Brain Power

What are the duties of a true believer on the first night of his burial? How did Ayatollah Dast-Ghayb achieve martyrdom? What was the name of the lion who cried over Imam Hussein's martyred corpse in the desert of Karbala?
These are some of the questions that young Iranians must answer before gaining admission to higher education.

The new interview system is part of a project designed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to "cleanse" Iranian higher education from what he regards as "the polluting influence of the Infidel".

He says he wants to create "a truly Islamic university."
One may wonder why the Islamic Republic, established 28 years ago, has not already done so.

During the past quarter of a century an estimated 10 million Iranians, including Ahmadinejad, have graduated from the nation's 170 universities and centres of higher education. Should we regard them as products of the "satanic culture of the West"?
The radical president refers to his "academic cleansing" policy as " The Second Islamic Cultural Revolution."

The first "Islamic Cultural Revolution" was launched in 1980 by Khomeini who closed all centres of higher education for two years. A committee was created to "cleanse" the universities. Its members included the current "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenehi, and former presidents Hashemi-Rafsanjani and Muhammad Khatami. Its secretary-general was one Abdul-Karim Sorush, subsequently recast as the" Martin Luther of Islam".
The committee purged over 6000 university professors and lecturers, virtually destroying the Iranian academia. Dozens of academics were executed as hundreds fled into exile. The committee also expelled thousands of students on charges of monarchist or Marxist tendencies. It also censored or totally re-wrote dozens of textbooks to conform to the Khomeinist ideology.

When the universities were reopened two years later, the committee tried to fill them with students and teachers sympathetic to Khomeinism. The trick was to allocate special places for members of The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and children of families believed to be loyal to the regime.

Further, it established a black list of authors and writings that has since become longer each year, reminding one of the worst days of the Inquisition in medieval Europe. The madness of censorship, supervised by the so-called Ministry of Islamic Orientation and Culture, reached a new peak this week when a new volume of Rafsanjai's memoirs was banned! The lesson is simple: if you ban someone, someone will ban you! (I must acknowledge a personal interest: my name and all my books are on the black list!)

However, more than two decades of purges and "cultural cleansing" did not prevent Iranian universities from becoming major bastions of opposition to the Khomeinist ideology.

Under Khatami's presidency, Iran experienced the largest and longest student revolt in its history. Khatami crushed the revolt through the IRGC with mass arrests and the expulsion of thousands of students.

Ahmadinejad launched his second "Islamic Cultural Revolution" last year by appointing a semi-literate mullah as Chancellor of Tehran University, the first time that a cleric was put in charge of the nation's oldest and largest centre of higher education.

According to Ghulam-Hussein Hadad-Adel, Speaker of the Islamic Majlis, Iran's ersatz parliament, "the enemies of Islam are targeting the universities" with a view to encouraging reform.

The ruling establishment is clearly nervous about what would happen at universities when the academic year begins this month.

The purge ordered by Ahmadinejad started last July with the replacement of over 20 college deans. In almost every case, a bona fide academic was pushed out in favour of an IRGC member.

According to reports, scores of professors and lecturers have been told that their services are no longer required. The purged teachers include individuals who had previously served as members of the Islamic Majlis or, in two cases, as ministers in pre-Ahmadinejad Cabinets.

At the same time, dozens of academics have been arrested, including some returning from scientific conferences abroad. Among the latter are professors Hussein Bashiriyeh, Saeed Shahandeh and Hadi Samati.

An unknown number of students have been arrested throughout the country. In Tabriz, capital of the East Azerbaijan province, all seven members of the students union were picked up and taken to an unknown destination last month. The families of two of them Goshtasp Vaseqi and Muhammad Aslani claim that they may have died under torture. In Tehran over 150 student activists have been "disappeared" in recent weeks.

As part of the purge, 30 privately owned colleges have been shut and their assets seized. Thirteen others are under investigation. The moves could affect some 100,000 students whose studies will be interrupted.

Serving notice that any protest on the campus will be crushed, a special force, known as the Ashura Brigade, commanded by IRGC veteran General Qassem Kargar, has been assigned the task of "ensuring a peaceful atmosphere" at centres of higher education.

Ostensibly mandated to enforce the Islamic Dress Code, enacted in May 2006, armed guards are posted at all centres of higher education to prevent anti-regime demonstrations.

"Cleansing" the universities through expulsions and arrests may be easy for a government prepared to use force against un-armed civilians. However, when it comes to the content of education, things are not as easy as the Tehran radicals might wish.

A report prepared for Ahmadinejad claims that at least 40 per cent of the textbooks in use in Iranian universities do not conform to Khomeinist dogma. The problem for the authorities is that it has alienated the Iranian intellectual elite.
No Iranian author, academic or scientist of note would be prepared to participate in the so-called "Islamic Cultural Revolution." Efforts to find somebody to prepare a cursus on Khomeini's supposed "philosophy" have provoked only derision among intellectuals approached to assume the task. After months of efforts to prepare a special course on Ahmadnejad's denial of the Holocaust, the committee charged with the task has produced nothing but a slim pamphlet that consists almost entirely of translations from Western "negationist" writers.

Iran today is a society whose "muscle" power is at war against its "brain" power.
Hadad-Adel says the Islamic Republic must prevent "dangerous thoughts and ideas".
But, who decides what is dangerous?

In fact, the central role of the university is to allow dangerous thoughts and ideas to be expressed and measured against other thoughts and ideas. The imposition of a uniform mode of thought and prefabricated ideas is better suited to a concentration camp than a university campus.
The first "Islamic Cultural Revo
lution" failed to subject generations of Iranians to mass brainwashing in the name of education. The second one will also fail. One national characteristic of Iranians is curiosity, and a taste for different and dangerous thoughts and ideas.

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A partial call-up of reserves is reported in Syria by Western sources in Lebanon

Those sources say Syria has mobilized armored, missile, air crews and air defense units - partly in readiness for repeats of alleged Israeli incursions of Syrian airspace and partly in response to the partial call-up in Israel which began beginning last Thursday, Sept 6. The Syrian armed forces are on full alert.
DEBKAfile’s sources report that the silent war of nerves, started after the first Syrian allegation that Israeli bombers had violated of its airspace Thursday, continues.
Jerusalem and Damascus are straining to hold back from an open clash, but voices are rising in the Syrian army urging President Bashar Assad to retaliate militarily to the purported Israeli infringement and come out of his passivity in the face of Israeli incursions. Assaf Shawqat, Syrian military intelligence chief and the president’s brother-in-law, is the most insistent. According to Western sources, he has begun mobilizing his loyalists in the military officers’ corps.
Israeli ministers and spokesmen are under strict orders not to utter a word about the episode. Prime minister Ehud Olmert opened the weekly cabinet session in Jerusalem Sunday, Sept.9, with the remark: “It is not always possible to show one’s cards.” Journalists were kept away from the ministers.
DEBKAfile’s sources doubt whether this silent poker game can be sustained either by Jerusalem or Damascus in the present state of suspense. Since the “no comments” stratagem serve Israel’s interests most, Syria is likely to make the first move; its call-up of reserves may be a straw in the wind.
In an interview with the American CBS network recorded Saturday, Assad dismissed Israel’s charges that Syria was funneling arms to Hizballah, including consignments from Iran.
He said: “Intelligence services, probably from all over the world, operate on the Lebanese side of the border with Syria and the Israelis fly over Lebanon … I told them provide us with a single evidence that we have sent one missile to Hizballah. These are fake claims."
Syria, Assad said, supports Hizballah politically.
Assad also denied that Damascus airport is being used by terrorists as a springboard to fight the U.S. forces in Iraq. "They enter illegally across the border and we've managed to arrest them," Assad stressed.
Asked to comment on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenjad's call to wipe Israel off the map, Assad said: "This is freedom of speech. Any person in the world has the right to express himself freely. This is just an expression."
In Rome, meanwhile, Syria’s vice president Farouk a-Shara issued an angry statement Saturday. He said his government is considering responses to Israeli jet flights over Syria and the results will not be long coming.

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Liberals: Funding Our Destruction

By Kevin McCullough
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Though they have a hard time recognizing it or even admitting it, liberals in America, are sowing the seeds for the future annihilation of America as we know it.
I say they have a hard time recognizing it, because when conservatives validate such theories, liberals like Los Angeles based talk show host Stephanie Miller makes a joke of it when opposing me on CNN. She said that she "like most Democrats, want to be killed by a terrorist." They're dismissive, derisive, and instead of answering the substance - they resort to snorting at those of us who make the observation. They go to great lengths to defend the New York Times, who told Al Qaeda of our counter terrorism methods regarding the listening in on their phone calls, and the sniffing out and freezing of their money supplies.
The liberals in my city - New York - are at it again, but what you do not realize is that this time, they are forcing us to not only tolerate the scheme but forcing you to cough open your wallet to help fund it.
How?
By using federal as well as municipal tax-dollars to open, operate, and secure an Islamic Madrassa in Brooklyn cleverly disguised as a public school.
New York City has whined and complained about Homeland Security funds, but who in Washington D.C. could really justify putting two vans worth of extra police on security detail for a school this small?
The great con is that liberal Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Democratic lackey NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein are out spreading the lie that their is no religious influence or indoctrination occurring at the school. So the tax-payers held their breath to see if Klein and Bloomberg were telling the truth.
They weren't!
The first lesson on the first day, of the first week of the new school year for the fifty-seven students that are attending the madrassa was a guest lecture by Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem.
No religious instruction? But the first lesson is by an Islamic religious leader?
And the subject of his first lesson: "Jihad!"
So you have a religious leader, teaching on one of the most controversial doctrines of the Islamic faith on the very first day, who could have guessed?
But this wasn't the first sign of trouble.
Midway through the summer the woman tapped to be principal of the tax-payer funded madrassa, Debbie Almontaser, suggested that perhaps the way the school could raise funds to help with additional programs (you know the junior suicide bombers of America) could be to sell t-shirts that announced an "Intifada" in New York. Thinking we were all as daft as Democratic Congressional delegations she explained that it did not mean what we think it means. Within a day or so my listeners had delivered thousands of phone calls to the city council, most were rebuffed. It was only after Almontaser was discovered to have direct ties to members of Hamas and Hezbollah that she was finally relieved of her duties.
Considering that one of the doctrines of Islam allows Muslims to lie to anybody and everyone we should not be surprised that they would say one thing to our face and then flip into Arabic and begin the brainwashing cycle of the next generation. Islamic scholar Robert Spencer indicated on my show a week ago that Muslims who claim not to practice jihad fall in one of two categories. 1)They are bad muslims not as fully committed to their faith as they should be, or 2)They are practicing Islam as it is allowed when Islam is the minority in the nation. They are allowed to lie to, and even cooperate with, the culture long enough for Islam to take root and then spring to fundamentalism when the numbers are in their favor.
Daniel Pipes in writing for the New York Sun this week also outlined the troubling scenario of previous Muslim school settings on American soil being used to advance radical Islam and pan-Arab nationalism.
Why Bloomberg, Klien, and liberals in general are such stooges for the Islamic shuck and jive is little beyond comprehension.
Islamic scholars like Spencer, and Dr. Ergun Canor, have long pointed out that the Islamic experience is, not akin to, nor compatible with the American mainstream. In Arabic society and culture there is no distinction between the mosque, the school, the house of government, the home, or the courts - it is all Islamic. All of the systems are centered around the teachings of the religion. And when the religion is as big of a fraud as Islam is, tight control must be maintained over every aspect of life.
So when liberals speak of tolerance for Islamic instruction, what they mean is, "let's let them convert the mind, bodies, and souls of the next generation." No wonder Osama spoke with such high praise for the Democrats in his video this week.
I would like to see every American that reads this column to dial this number 202.224.3121 next week and demand that Congress rescind all federal education dollars alotted to the New York City public schools until this madrassa is closed. Call several times a day. Call several days this next week. Call your Congressional House members and your United States Senators.
Britain is presently looking to expand the number of Muslim schools its tax-payers will fund. The foolish thinking there is like those of the American left, "give them what they want and they will be nice to us."
100% WRONG!
It is the goal of Islamic society, faith, education, and law to convert the world to Sharia rule and it is their commitment to wage jihad until such occurs.
In light of this I find it repulsive that liberals can be so naive so as to insist that we pay for that coming destruction out of our pocketbooks today...
And its time to say so!


Kevin McCullough's first hardback title "The MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking" is now available. Kevin McCullough is heard daily in New York City, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware on WMCA 570 at 2pm.

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Syria Threatens, Israeli-Arab Gov't Minister Chimes In

Syrian Vice President Farouk a-Shara announced Saturday night that Syria plans to respond to Israel’s alleged entry into its airspace. A-Shara said that Syria’s military is still examining potential responses, but promised “the results will come soon enough.”

Meanwhile, Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper published photos over the weekend of fuel tanks that it alleged Israeli F-151s jettisoned along the Syrian-Turkish border to evade Syrian anti-aircraft fire Wednesday night.

Israel’s Air Force regularly does drills over Turkey, with the Turkish government’s consent.

The US State Department uncharacteristically declined to condemn the alleged Israeli infraction. "I'd leave it up to the parties to describe what happened," deputy State Department Spokesman Tom Casey told reporters Thursday. “We'll leave it to them to try and sort this out.”

The state-regulated Syrian newspaper Tishrin accused the US, in a front-page editorial, of coordinating “this new Israeli hostile operation.” It said US silence on the matter constitutes “overt and scandalous encouragement of Israel.” Referring to the upcoming diplomatic conference on the establishment of a Palestinian state set for November, the Tishrin editorial asked: "How could a superpower call for the establishment of peace and send invitations to some countries to convene a peace conference at a time when it maintains silence over a clear violation of the simplest laws and international norms?”

Israeli-Arab Minister Accuses Israel
MK Raleb Majadle (Labor), appointed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as Minister of Culture, Science and Sports, broke the government’s policy of silence on the incident over the weekend. Majadle said that Israeli planes enter Syrian airspace “all the time.” He also speculated that the planes entered Syrian airspace “either to take photographs or by mistake.”

Majadle’s statement,