Saturday, June 30, 2007

Another Tack: Gaza's merciless mirror

Sarah Honig, THE JERUSALEM POST
Jun. 28, 2007

Gaza's pugnacious plug-ugly features reflect with the most unassailable accuracy more than the current cheerless situation. Gaza is a mirror-cum-crystal ball. Not only does it reveal the gruesome image of Palestinian self-rule, but its stomach-churning credibility also crucially provides the most incisive, if chilling, insight into what's to come.

The macabre looking-glass may be unsettling, yet with piercing realism it alerts us to what the future holds. Hotshots, who obstinately overlook repulsive eye-openers, willfully jeopardize our continued physical survival.

Even those who until recently distorted what Gaza betokened and focused on its self-imposed misery - by way of accounting for its volatile caprices - at last disgustedly turn up their noses at it.

Nevertheless, they now energetically compensate for Gaza's ghastliness by dispensing optimistic kitsch about its Ramallah rival. Just as Gazans have come to embody "bad Palestinians," so Mahmoud Abbas's Ramallah gangsters - those who couldn't/wouldn't control Gaza - are suddenly extolled as "good Palestinians."

All-bad Gaza has become "our new opportunity," to borrow Ehud Olmert's phrase, to kid ourselves that Ramallah is home to real Oslo-issue "peace-partners," to whom we can cede more land - strategically far more vital than the Gaza we surrendered to this very bunch. Renascent "New Middle East" visions radiate from Ramallah (where two Israeli reservists, who took the wrong turn, were butchered and mutilated as their murderers dunked their hands ecstatically in the freshly spilled blood).

Kadima and Labor, eager to seize on any far-fetched excuse to salvage Oslo and its disengagement derivative, now concoct new giveaway schemes. First, however, they must convince memory-deficient Israelis that the folks in Ramallah are better-behaved and that, to keep Ramallah sweet, Abbas must be rewarded. Concessions will enhance his standing and prevent a Gaza-like debacle in Judea and Samaria.

The minor omitted detail is that Hamas didn't govern pre-disengagement Gaza. Abbas did. Land relinquished during his tenure, rather than strengthen him, boosted Hamas. Appeasement didn't secure moderation - it fortified the fanatics.
The one real difference between Gaza and Ramallah is that there's no Israeli presence in Gaza, while Israel still maintains some access to Ramallah. The only guarantor against an outbreak of savagery is Israeli control.

Israeli retreats - both in Lebanon and Gaza - emboldened Iranian-backed Islamofascists - as forecast by withdrawal-opponents (dubbed "enemies of peace" by Osloite dream-merchants). Instead of admitting that these prescient critics were right, self-appointed diagnosticians of national sanity now advise we "try" in Judea and Samaria what failed in Gaza. "In the new circumstances," Olmert announced, "we can take more risks than in the past."

IF ANYTHING, disengagement's fiasco and subsequent Gazan bedlam should rule out any more gambling, certainly not encourage gambling for higher stakes. Yet not only doesn't our egocentric leadership learn from its own spectacular mistakes, it plans mega-scale reruns of its previous horror extravaganzas.

After the Gaza model is extended into the fully independent Palestine in Judea and Samaria, no Israeli city would escape missile monsoons. Terror tunnels breaching Gaza's perimeter security fence will be replicated with a vengeance along its convoluted counterpart on Israel's elongated super-vulnerable eastern flank.
The Green Line will be challenged by inflamed multitudes of "returning refugees" merely agitating to "go home" (i.e. inundate and eliminate the Jewish state). The already seditious ferment among Israel's own Arab minority will be colossally magnified by a sovereign Palestine.

Palestine, moreover, possesses growth potential - from a mini-monster to a giant ogre. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan - an artificial entity occupying 80% of original Palestine - mightn't survive. Greater Palestine will stretch all the way to the Iraq the Americans cannot control. Palestine's irredentist appetite for the leftover slivers of Israel will swell as it expands.

Wan overseas reaction to Gaza's present aggression is but a faint preview of what's in store from the spineless world community. The delegitimization of Israel's very existence will intensify.

Those who now promote the foreign-troops panacea for the Philadelphi Corridor will campaign for the same elsewhere, until the IDF is incurably crippled and the country is indefensible. At best we'd hope for temporary relief as a lowly UN protectorate - and anyone who still trusts the UN needs his/her head urgently examined.

THE SAME goes for those who, despite the Gazan example, keep on trusting Palestinian goodwill and inclination to do the right thing. The unchecked gunrunning that made Hamas a formidable force in Gaza predetermines the pattern along the Jordanian frontier. If Egypt and assorted international meddlers couldn't keep Gaza demilitarized, they surely wouldn't prevent the Islamic Arab Republic of Palestine from arming itself to the teeth.

Complex and thorny deals can be struck only with a partner predisposed to adhere to each letter of the small print. Never mind how Arafat and his successors treacherously welshed on everything they conned the pliable Yitzhak Rabin to fall for.

Gaza's mirror pitilessly reflects how undertakings are valued in the Palestinian milieu. After all, Gaza's internecine slaughter followed fraternal agreement on a national unity coalition!

Non-democratic societies are unlikely to honor commitments. Upper-crust Palestinians, boasting the gift of English gab, may be toasted by the elite of supercilious bon-ton abroad and stay sought-after guests in the halls of liberal academe. They may make mincemeat of Israel's pathetic PR, but they're hardly harbingers of change. They represent nobody. The mobs don't back them. As in Gaza, there are no sophisticated moderates in Ramallah.

It's not that we don't know this. It's just that we serially - over and over again - avoid the unsightly portents glaring at us through Gaza's merciless mirror. Albert Einstein once defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results."

Thursday, June 28, 2007

'Bosnian' in Palestine mosque

Personal experience shows Hamas has no problem bending truth in order to achieve its goals
Yehuda Litani


During the first intifada at the end of the '80s, I was invited by a group of Hamas leaders to attend a meeting in Gaza. A representative on their behalf met me at the Erez crossing and accompanied me to the movement's offices located in the center of the city.

I was probably the only Israeli in the area at the time. The meeting took place on a Friday before noon and after about 20 minutes, during which I heard some very moderate statements regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the muezzin calls announced that it was time for prayers. My hosts – including some who have meanwhile been killed by Israel – apologized and said they would return at the end of the prayer service in about two hours; they asked me to wait for them in their offices.

I responded by saying I was not prepared to wait alone in the office as I feared for my life. "If you don’t mind, I will accompany you to the prayers" I said. They were somewhat confounded - how would they explain bringing an Israeli journalist to the Hamas movement's main prayer service at the Palestine mosque?

They held a short discussion between them and then informed me: During the prayer service you will be a Bosnian, a hero from the war against the Christian Serbs, and you are visiting us in Gaza (I later discovered that I was given this identity since the Bosnians are known for not particularly adhering to religion – therefore, if people noticed I was unfamiliar with the prayer verses or special customs, they would explain this by saying I was Bosnian).

Words of hatred
Outside, the July sun was beating down. We all squeezed into a single car, and when we reached the mosque it was already filled with thousands of worshipers while hundreds of women waited outside. The prayer service went by with no hitches. The difficulty arose when one of the mosque's best-known preachers took to the podium and proceeded to utter harsh words of incitement against Israel and the Jews.

"All the Jews in the world should be killed," he began, and from that moment on he didn't cease his poisonous ranting against Jews and Christians – once the Jews were modest and took the path of righteousness, but they were influenced by the Christians who made them digress, he said.

He mentioned verses from the Koran that said Jews originated from the apes, and quoted a "hadith" – one of the sayings attributed to the prophet Mohammed – claiming that on the day of judgment, even if a Jew escapes to the desert and hides under a rock or a tree, the rock will begin to speak and the tree will open its mouth and they will say: "Yah Muslim, a Jew is hiding in my midst, let's kill him!"

When we returned from the prayers, my hosts told me that the preacher sought to raise the spirits of the congregation and didn't really mean what he said. I was shocked, scared and agitated, and refused to go up to their offices to resume our meeting – I got into the car and made my way to the Erez crossing.

'Ideological flexibility'
At the parking lot of the Yad Mordechai cafeteria I met one of the military administration officers andI recounted what I had just been through.

"What do you want?" the officer responded. "They did show 'ideological flexibility' after all, and without hesitation bent the truth, both with regards to your identity as well as towards their ideology. They have no qualms in doing so in favor of what they deem a more important goal, such as changing their image in the eyes of the Israeli public."

I recalled this story on the release of the Glad Shalit audiotape – release of information regarding the kidnapped soldier without remuneration, in favor of a more important goal in the eyes of the Hamas leadership: To improve their image in the eyes of residents after the possible release of hundreds of Hamas prisoners jailed in Israel, which may stabilize their flaccid rule there and ease the economic and diplomatic closure.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

27 June 2007
'DON'T GO THERE': BUSH WRONG TO CELEBRATE FIFTY YEARS OF WAHHABI PENETRATION
OF AMERICA


(Washington, D.C.): This morning, President George Bush will visit the WashingtonIslamic Center to mark its fiftieth anniversary - an important moment in Saudi Arabia's effort to promote dawa in America: the inculcation of Islam in this

The Saudi Agenda: 'Dissociation' from the 'Unbelievers'



The true face of the Saudi agenda was laid bare in January 2005 when the Center for Religious Freedom, at the time associated with Freedom House and currently housed at the Hudson Institute, published a report on hate literature distributed to mosques all over America by the embassy of Saudi Arabia and its agents. One of several collected from the Washington Islamic Center was entitled, Loyalty and Dissociation in Islam (http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/SaudiPropoganda.pdf) had the
following illuminating quotes:



*"To be dissociated from the infidels is to hate them for their religion, to leave them, never to rely on them for support, not to admire them, to be on one's guard against them, never to imitate them, and to always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law."



*"Those who reside in the land of unbelief [i.e., non-Muslim societies]
out of their own choice and desire to be with the people of that land, accepting the way they are regarding their faith, or giving compliments to them, or pleasing them by pointing out something wrong with the Muslims, they become unbelievers and enemies to Allah and his messenger."

*"There is consensus on this matter, that whoever helps unbelievers against Muslims, regardless of what type of support he lends to them, he is an unbeliever himself."

According to the Center for Religious Freedom study, Loyalty and Dissociation in Islam was not only "published by the Ibn Taymiya Library in Riyadh." It was "distributed by the King Fahd-supported Islamic Center of Washington, D.C."



Very Different Feelings



The last time Mr. Bush visited Washington's Islamic Center, he felt moved to declare, "It is my honor to be meeting with leaders who feel just the same way I do. They're outraged, they're sad. They love America just as much as I do."


In fact, organizations like those whose leaders he met on that occasion typically have received money from, or are otherwise tied to, Saudi Arabia. Groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the Muslim Students Association (MSA), the Islamic Free Market Institute (II) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) have, nonetheless, been afforded opportunities at such settings to: obtain legitimacy by meeting with the President and/or other senior officials; secure access to and influence with various U.S. government agencies; and achieve strategic penetrations by securing employment for their associates and/or the implicit, if not explicit, endorsement of their agendas.


Embracing the Brotherhood?


At the moment, the Bush Administration is reportedly poised greatly to compound this ominous behavior by formally embracing the entity behind much of the Islamist ideological infrastructure now operating in the West: the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The Brotherhood represents a classic totalitarian bait-and-switch. By virtue of its avowed renunciation of violence, State Department bureaucrats, think tank denizens (e.g., the Nixon Center's Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke, authors of "The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood" in the March/April edition of Foreign Affairs) and some politicians (notably,Rep. Steny Hoyer who met last April with MB parliamentarians in Egypt) think the Brotherhood are people with whom we can do business against the
"terrorists."


This is a wholly unwarranted leap of faith, taken at our extreme peril. As Zeyno Baran pointed out in an article entitled "O Brotherhood, What Art Thou? Don't Mistake Islamic Extremists for Moderates" in the April 23, 2007 edition of the Weekly Standard


(http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/524odzuf.
asp), the MB's motto is: "Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader,
the Koran is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our
highest hope." So much for moderation. So much for an authentic
alternative - let alone an antidote - to the Saudis' other variant of
Islamofascism: Wahhabism.


Meanwhile, Elsewhere in Washington



Two other events suggest how successful the Muslim Brotherhood
bait-and-switch is becoming:



First, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations/Council on
Global Affairs unveiled yesterday at a Woodrow Wilson Center-sponsored event
the report of what amounts to a Brotherhood-dominated Task Force on the Political and Civic Integration of Muslims-Americans. Led by Farooq Kathwari, chairman of Ethan Allen Interiors Inc., and former Secretary of Labor and congresswoman, Lynn Martin, this group of thirty-two Muslim and non-Muslim "leaders" published a study (http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/taskforce_details.php?taskforce_id=8) that suggests that there is simply no connection between terror and tyranny, on the one hand, and Islam as practiced by the Saudis and other Islamofascists, on the other. It is all a misperception.



More insidious is the fact that this transparent whitewash of Islamists in America makes no mention of the fact that many of the groups and individuals listed as reliable go-to sources on Muslim-related matters seek to apply Islamic law in America. Strikingly, the word Shari'a - the Islamist religious code whose ruthlessly repressive nature has been the hallmark of Saudi, Iranian and Taliban mullahocracies - is entirely absent from the Task Force report. In fact, "Islamic law" appears to have been mentioned just once, and in a way that can only be described as disinformation:



Muslim leaders and organizations can also underscore their commitment to the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, a bedrock principle of American democracy. Some Americans are concerned that some Muslims seek to undermine this principle by advocating the application of Islamic law in American society. It is important to reassure Americans that Muslim Americans do not aspire to this.


Second, the leaders of this Task Force, Mr. Kathwari and Secretary Martin, will be given an opportunity to provide such disinformation to the Congress when they testify this morning before Senate homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.


Calibrating the American-Muslim 'Leadership'


It behooves members of the Committee and, for that matter, President Bush to make the following points in their interactions with interlocutors who appear to be spokespeople and/or apologists for the Muslim Brotherhood, if not the Wahhabis. To be considered - let alone treated as, "mainstream" - American Muslims must:



*Explicitly and without reservation reject the goals and actions of terrorist groups, not just generically but by name. This would include such organizations as Hamas and Hezbollah and the legitimacy of suicide bombing.



*Support efforts by the United States government to detect, monitor and counteract domestic financing of terrorists, as opposed to the reflexive criticism to which they are routinely subjected by most of the Muslim-American "establishment."



*Embrace America as a pluralistic, democratic society in which the separation of church and state is a founding principle.



*Cease claims to the effect that there is an American "war against Islam," widespread "Islamophobia" and other assertions that encourage a sense of victimization and grievance among Muslims, here and abroad.



*Recognize that there are, in fact, grounds to describe "Islamic extremism" as a threat, that some Islamic mosques, madrassas and centers in this country and overseas have been sources of terrorist activity and that acknowledging these realities is neither a racist or bigoted act.



*Stop abetting or otherwise legitimating those who demonize Israel and depict it as a cancer that must be eradicated.



*Desist from the practice of discouraging their followers not to cooperate with the FBI, and, instead, to cooperate fully with law enforcement authorities trying to keep us all safe.



*Reject the ideology and agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood - which is, after all, the antecedent of al Qaeda and Hamas - on the grounds that it embraces a form of totalitarian Islamist ideology that must be condemned, defeated and deligitimized.


The Bottom Line


Should the President and the Congress insist upon such steps, a failure by American Muslims to adopt them will clarify the situation significantly. The conclusion will be unmistakable: Those who refuse to embrace these principles are part of the problem, not the solution, in this War for the Free World. They must be eschewed hereafter in favor of dealings with truly moderate Muslims who are with us and against the Islamists in that struggle - be they of the Wahhabi or Muslim Brotherhood varieties.
Iranian Revolutionary Guards suicide unit’s incursion of S. Iraq is another step in undeclared war

June 27, 2007

Early this week, Tehran deployed in southern Iraq and southern Iran contingents of Revolutionary Guards Corps of suicide fighters in anticipation of an American attack on Iranian soil.

Those units were posted to fight off a possible US Marines landing in southern Iran. Tehran believes the American force will be assigned with destroying RG bases and infrastructure in the south and sabotaging the oil wells and installations of Iranian province of Khuzestan.

The RG fighters were dropped by helicopter in southern Iraq on June 24 and 25. Their task will be to launch suicide attacks on US and British bases and command posts in the region the moment Iran comes under American attack.

Also in anticipation of a showdown, Tehran announced Tuesday at only two hours notice the rationing of gas for Iran’s private motorists to 100 liters per month. Protesters started torching gas stations Wednesday.

For lack of refining capacity, the oil-rich country imports 40% of its gasoline needs and oil products. Tehran sharply reined in private consumption to free up reserves for the armed forces in case of war and keep power stations and water supplies running in an emergency.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that these two steps in three days attest to the certainty of Iran’s government and military that a military confrontation with the US is around the corner.

The British Sun newspaper first disclosed the Iranian troop thrust into southern Iraq Monday, June 25, reporting: “It is an extremely alarming development and raises the stakes considerably. In effect, it means we are in a full war with Iran – but nobody has officially declared it.”

DEBKAfile’s military experts add: In effect, the Iranian military incursion of Iraq is the fourth military invasion of foreign territory underway in the Middle East at this very moment. None are officially admitted.

ls in Iraqi Kurdistan on the other side of their border. Almost daily, Turkish units backed by tanks, fighter planes and helicopters cross into northern Iraq and battle with the rebels. Washington, Ankara, Baghdad and Irbil blandly ignore this ongoing war.
2. In the second week of the six-week long confrontation between the Lebanese army and the pro-Damascus radical Palestinian Fatah al-Islam near Tripoli, the Syrian army and security service began pushing into the embattled camp reinforcements of hundreds Palestinian fighters, members of groups under their control. These fighters, an estimated 1,600-strong, have since fanned out in clusters in northern Lebanon, the Beqaa Valley, the mountains north of Tripoli and south of Beirut. The Syrian army keeps them well supplied with ammunition, food and fuel.
3. Israeli tank and armored infantry forces conduct ongoing counter-terror operations against Hamas, Jihad Islami and allied Palestinian terrorist groups in southern and northern Gaza. Since the Palestinian Islamist Hamas takeover of Gaza last week, Israeli tanks supported by helicopter and pilot-less aircraft are engaged in ongoing firefights with Palestinian anti-tank units.


Reported by Debka.com
Bolton: I'm 'very worried' for Israel
David Horovitz, THE JERUSALEM POST
Jun. 27, 2007

Sanctions and diplomacy have failed and it may be too late for internal opposition to oust the Islamist regime, leaving only military intervention to stop Iran's drive to nuclear weapons, the US's former ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.

Worse still, according to Ambassador Bolton, the Bush administration does not recognize the urgency of the hour and that the options are now limited to only the possibility of regime change from within or a last-resort military intervention, and it is still clinging to the dangerous and misguided belief that sanctions can be effective.

As a consequence, Bolton said he was "very worried" about the well-being of Israel. If he were in Israel's predicament, he said, "I'd be pushing the US very hard. I am pushing the US [administration] very hard, from the outside, in Washington."

# Opinion: An easy step toward tightening sanctions
# For a nuclear-free world, by UK FM Beckett

Bolton, interviewed by telephone from Washington, was speaking a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency announced it would send a team to Teheran, at Iran's request, to work jointly on a plan ostensibly meant to clear up suspicions about the nuclear program. Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani had met on Sunday with IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei, and a day earlier with top EU foreign policy envoy Javier Solana.

Bolton, however, was witheringly critical of the ongoing diplomatic contacts with Teheran, which he said were merely playing into the hands of the regime.

"The current approach of the Europeans and the Americans is not just doomed to failure, but dangerous," he said. "Dealing with [the Iranians] just gives them what they want, which is more time...

"We have fiddled away four years, in which Europe tried to persuade Iran to give up voluntarily," he complained. "Iran in those four years mastered uranium conversion from solid to gas and now enrichment to weapons grade... We lost four years to feckless European diplomacy and our options are very limited."

Bolton said flatly that "diplomacy and sanctions have failed... [So] we have to look at: 1, overthrowing the regime and getting in a new one that won't pursue nuclear weapons; 2, a last-resort use of force."

However, he added a caution as to the viability of the first of those remaining options: While "the regime is more susceptible to overthrow from within than people think," he said, such a process "may take more time than we have."

Overall, said Bolton, it was clear that Iran had surmounted "all the technical problems of uranium enrichment," and it "may well be that we have passed the point of Iran mastering the nuclear fuel cycle." If so, it was now merely a matter of time before Iran reached a bomb-making capability - "a matter of resources and available equipment," he said - and it was solely up to Iran to set the pace.

To his dismay, however, the Bush administration was still clinging to the empty notion that the sanctions route could work, "even though [the UN's sanction] Resolutions 1737 and 1747 were full of loopholes. The US is still seeking another sanctions resolution and Solana is still pursuing diplomacy," he said bitterly.

Bolton lamented that the Bush administration today was "not the same" as a presumably more robust incarnation three years ago, because of what he said was now the State Department's overwhelming dominance of foreign policy. "The State Department has adopted the European view [on how to deal with Iran] and other voices have been sidelined," he said. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "is overwhelmingly predominant on foreign policy."

Asked where this left Israel, Bolton said simply: "Israel's options are as limited as those of the US, except that you are in more danger in that you are closer. I hate to say that."

Bolton, who served as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security from 2001 to 2005, before taking the ambassadorial posting to the UN from August 2005 to December 2006, said the failed handling of the Iran nuclear crisis was one of the reasons he had left the Bush administration. "I felt we were watching Europe fiddling while Rome burned," he said. "It's still fiddling."
PA journalist:
"A mother brushes her young son's hair
at 7:00, so that he will be killed at 7:30."


by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook

A Palestinian journalist has expressed despair about the society of death worship in Gaza. In so doing, he has corroborated PMW findings documenting the death culture promoted in Palestinian Authority education.

The journalist wrote:

“We knew that they would do it, especially in Gaza, where a mother brushes her young son's hair at 7:00, so that he will be killed at 7:30, and where the children learn that death is preferable to life! We knew that they would do this, it was clear to us: with language overflowing with the rhetoric of death and the norms of killing, in the religious rulings [Fatwas] and in Friday and holiday sermons.”
[Ghassan Zaqtan, Al-Ayyam, June18, 2007]

The journalist's critical mistake is that he seems to attribute the death culture only to Hamas, whereas it has been the Fatah leadership and education that initiated and still actively teach that death is preferable to life.

For example, a Palestinian Authority schoolbook written by Fatah educators teaches 13- and 14-year-olds literally to prefer death over life, while it is the "enemies" who cherish life:

“O heroes, Allah has promised you victory ... Do not talk yourselves into flight…Your enemies seek life while you seek death. They seek spoils to fill their empty stomachs while you seek a Garden [Paradise] as wide as are the heavens and the earth. Do not be anxious to meet them [enemies], for death is not bitter in the mouth of the believers. These drops of blood that gush from your bodies will be transformed tomorrow into blazing red meteors that will fall down upon the heads of your enemies." [Reading and Texts Part II, Grade 8 (2002), p. 16]

The words introducing this poem are: "Read and enjoy."

PMW has been alerting the world in numerous reports since November 2000 that the PA has been indoctrinating children to see death as preferable to life. Senator Hillary Clinton severely criticized this PA education when she introduced PMW's latest report on PA schoolbooks earlier this year:

"When we viewed this report [on PA textbooks] in combination with other media that these children are exposed to, it basically, profoundly poisons the minds of these children."
[Press conference introducing PMW report, US Senate, February 8, 2007]

The Director of the Palestinian Children’s Aid Association, Firial Hillis, explained that it was an integral part of the official educational policy to educate young children to aspire to Shahada – Martyr's death. These are her words:

“The concept of Shahada for him [the child] means belonging to the homeland, from a religious point of view. Sacrifice for his homeland. Achieving Shahada in order to reach Paradise and to meet his God. This is the best. We also teach our children to protect the homeland, belonging and to reach Shahada”. [PATV, May 4, 2003]

Click to view video on YouTube or PMW website

Music videos that have run thousands of times on PA TV have reinforced this message to children to aspire to Shahada.

The following are some examples:

1. In a video broadcast on Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority TV hundreds of times from 2001 to 2004, a young boy leaves a farewell letter to his parents and goes off to seek Shahada, describing the death he achieves as "sweet." This PA clip is designed to offset a child's natural fear of death by depicting Shahada as heroic and tranquil.

Click to view video on YouTube or PMW website

2. From 2000 to 2003, PA TV broadcast a music video depicting the delightful Shahid paradise of Muhammad Al-Dura, who died in a crossfire. The child actor is shown flying a kite, frolicking on the beach and even at an amusement park. The clip opens with an invitation to other children from Al-Dura to aspire to death: "I am waving to you not in parting, but to say 'follow me'." This video directing children to follow Al-Dura to paradise as Martyrs was suddenly broadcast again in June 2006, after Israeli troops had gathered at the border of the Gaza Strip after the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Click to view video on YouTube or PMW website

The result of such virulent PA indoctrination is apparent, when listening to the interview on PA TV with two 11-year-old Palestinian girls talking about Shahada and describing it as a primary ideal and personal goal. They explain that "all Palestinian children" view Shahada as more worthwhile than living, because of its promised grand Afterlife.

Click to view video on YouTube or PMW website

Thursday, June 21, 2007

Dark clouds on the European horizon



June 20, 2007


MALIBU, Calif.

Europe is on the verge of imploding: Radical Muslims are moving there in droves. Europeans have all but given up on their Christian roots. Moral absolutes are no longer relevant. National pride is a thing of the past.

The European economy is sluggish, but welfare entitlements continue to expand. Indigenous birthrates are plummeting, and immigration is supplying the continent's work force.

Those were some of reasons for "The Collapse of Europe," an academic conference held here last week. Participants said that unless Europe reverses course, it could be headed for a civil war, taken over by Islam's Shariah law or destroyed in some other way.

"Europe is facing tensions, which, unless are seriously addressed, will tear it apart," said Mark Steyn, author of "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It."

"Permanence is the illusion of every age," he said. "Today, Europeans find the idea that ... their European Union cannot endure inconceivable. ... We're not here celebrating the collapse of Europe. It's real, and it could hurtAmerica."

The conference was hosted by Pepperdine University and sponsored by the American Freedom Alliance, the Council for Democracy and Tolerance, and the university's school of public policy.

One of the main themes of the event was the Islamic stronghold Europe has become. Although the number of Muslims living in Europe was not available because of questionable census figures and poor data tracking in some countries, panelists estimated it at about 50 million.

"The European political class is not ready to confront the reality of this," Mr. Steyn said. "If they don't get serious about correcting their course, their next generation of Europeans — the last generation — will end their place in a very dark world."

He said one of the biggest problems is Europe's reliance on a largely Muslim immigrant work force.

"Demography, in the end, underpins everything," Mr. Steyn said. "The dependence of mass immigration is always a sign of weakness."

Philippe Karsenty, a French journalist who founded Media-Ratings, which often monitors the failure of the French press to document the rise of militant Islam in France, said his countrymen are in denial about their state of affairs.

"Europe is collapsing, but don't even think of telling anyone in Paris; they'll think you're a fool," he said.

Mr. Karsenty described a France in which many of its citizens are obsessed with the Palestinian cause, calling some of Frenchmen "more extremist than Arabs."

Europeans have lost their sense of nationalism, and thus care less about the large and growing number of devout Muslims who are slowly taking over their countries, the panelists said.

"Islam is a political project and a supremacist movement," said Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim, a former member of the Dutch parliament and author of "Infidel." "In order to expand, you need an enemy."

Author and filmmaker Greg Davis, who produced the documentary "Islam: What the West Needs to Know," compared Islam to the Cold War threat of communism.

Several panelists also noted the Shariah law of Islam, as far as most Muslims are concerned, trumps all civic laws. Some conference participants expressed concern that Islamic leaders intend to eventually take overEurope.

They noted, for example, that Muhammad is the second most common name for newborns in Britain, and that Muslim leaders are demanding that large mosques be built in the middle of major cities.

"The greatest factor in this equation is what Europe wants to do," Mr. Davis said. "What will its people fight and die and kill for? ... If Europe will not fight for its Christian heritage, will it fight for its secular heritage?"

Several panelists noted a so-called "white flight," saying Europeans are moving to places such as Canada andFlorida to avoid problems in their homeland.

"The talented folks want to get out," Mr. Steyn said, adding that these are the future bankers, politicians and business leaders.

Several Europeans at the conference weren't ready to concede Europe is doomed, or that its residents have given up all hope.

"We allow [Muslim immigrants] to go very far, and that is the problem," said Henryk Broder, a German journalist and author of "Hurray — We Surrender," which deals with European appeasement toward Islam. "What can we do? The number of people asking that question is rising."

His colleague, Dutch writer, filmmaker and producer Leon de Winter, agreed.

"There is a vast undercurrent among the general public of the feeling that we have had enough of it, we're fed up," said Mr. de Winter, a critic of what he calls Europe's appeasement of Muslim militancy.

Ms. Ali said Europe's strength and hope lie in its freedom and civil society.

She said Muslims who move to Europe may become aware of the opportunities afforded by a free and progressive society and turn their backs on what she describes as an oppressive religion. She and others already have, she said, but she is also the target of death threats.

Ms. Ali is quick to point out her concerns about Islam in Europe, noting that Islamic leaders are abusing Europe's welfare state and "justify bigoted sermons as freedom of religion."

"Muslim leadership understands it is more effective to exploit a system from within than to attack it from the outside," she said. "But it's not so much what a relatively small minority do or don't do; it's the Europeans who allow it."

Mr. de Winter also put the onus for change on Europeans, saying they must re-examine their priorities. He said Muslim immigration isn't Europe's biggest threat.

"It's a crisis of European civilization, of our identity," he said. "What is sacred in our lives? This is a crisis about values, ethics."

Mr. Davis said Europe needs to rediscover its core beliefs.

"Europe has stopped believing in stuff because if you believe in stuff it's dangerous," he said. "If you believe in stuff, you might disagree with someone. ... [America] is not as far down the slope as Europe, but we're getting there."

Phyllis Chesler, author and professor emeritus at City University of New York, said the embrace of secularism among Europeans is doing nothing to reverse the trend toward Islam. What's more, she said, America's role in educating people about the situation is falling short, that the radical professors who have taken over college campuses constantly side with Islam.

Panelists agreed the crisis in Europe has gone largely unnoticed by Americans. Talk of what Americans could do to help Europe get back on track rounded out the day's discussion.

Hugh Hewitt, the host of a syndicated radio talk show, a law professor and a contributor to Townhall.com, said a variety of steps need to be taken. Among them, Americans should support nonprofits working to alleviate problems in Europe, and Christians should think of the continent as a place where missionary work is needed, he said.

"We are going to end up exactly where Europe is if we don't defend what is sacred," he said.






____________________________________
Gregory Davis, President
Defend the West

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Radical Islam's 'End-Game'


A friend of mine said recently, "We shouldn't even be there. Let them kill each other. I mean, that would solve the problem. Right?"

I thought about that statement as I read the news coming out of the Gaza Strip. As Hamas and al-Fatah literally battle to the death for supremacy in their region, it is crucial that we take the time - right now - to understand what it is they're fighting about. The truth is our lives depend on it.

To look at the situations in Iraq and Gaza as separate conflicts is to view them in a naive and overly simplistic way. True, the battles taking place in Gaza are more akin to a civil war, if in fact a civil war can take place without a recognized country to govern. And the battles taking place in Iraq are almost completely instigated at the hands of al Qaeda terrorists hell-bent on creating chaos with violence while destroying any chance of democracy in that nation. But what the less visionary among us are deficient in understanding and neglectful or deceitful in not addressing is the reason they are fighting, their goal, their end-game.

Many anti-war activists and members of the American Fifth Column insist that the reason radical Islamist terrorists -- insurgents or militants as they like to call them -- have taken to jihad against the United States and the West is because of the encroachment of our culture into the 7th Century Middle Eastern culture in which they exist. They point to Osama bin Laden's 1996 fatwa against the US and the West citing the presence of Western military personnel and installations as the catalyst for al Qaeda's Islamofascist aggression.

While these points may very well be the justification used by the cadre of terrorist organizations originating throughout the Middle East for attacks against the West, it doesn't explain their propensity for Arab on Arab, Muslim on Muslim violence. It doesn't explain the original catalyst for the conflict between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims and it certainly doesn't address the Islamofascists' goals.

The specifics surrounding the original cause for conflict between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims are disputed by both camps. But both factions concede that it stems from a disagreement over the direct succession to Mohammed, to the Caliph. This subject requires more space than can be afforded here. What can be addressed here is the "end-game."

That Islamofascist aggression advanced through the use of terrorism is taking place around the world against members of every faith other than Islam is a testimony to the fact that radical fundamentalist Islamists are engaged in an intentional conflict of global conquest. Terrorist attacks in the name of Islam have taken place in Israel, Iraq, Lebanon, Spain, Britain, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Somalia, Algeria, Sudan, South America and the United States - to cite a short list - against, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus and even conformist and non-fundamentalist Islamists.

When one examines the facts and logistics of Islamofascist aggression - both in history and modern times - it is hard to argue that the basis for this aggression is Western influence on the Islamic culture. If this were the sole reason for Islamofascist aggression there would be no excuse for attacks in the name of Islam on the Hindus or Buddhists or in any nation that doesn't embrace Western values such as Thailand, Somalia or most of Indonesia. Yet, the slaughter of innocents in the name of Islam does take place against these people and in these non-Westernized regions.

By acknowledging these facts - and they are indisputable - we can dismiss the argument that the US and the West have brought the wrath of Islamofascism upon ourselves, which is the basis for the argument used by the anti-war movement, the American Fifth Column and disingenuous and opportunistic politicians.

What, then, is the catalyst for Islamofascist aggression and what could be so powerful as to produce legions of suicide bombers and those willing to die, without reservation, for their cause?

While the many elements of this subject are complex, together they indicate an overall agenda that is not.

In almost every declaration and action of the Islamofascist, from Osama bin Laden to Hassan Nasrallah, Ayman al Zawahri to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the goal is the same: the successful establishment of a global Islamic state - or caliphate - ruled under sharia law. This notion is not a supposition on my part. Rather, it is an accurate observation, based on understanding and acknowledging the actions taken and the words used by each of these fascist leaders (note the correct usage of the word fascist).

In his 1996 fatwa, Osama bin Laden proclaimed, "...O you horses (soldiers) of Allah ride and march on. This is the time of hardship so be tough. And know that your gathering and co-operation in order to liberate the sanctities of Islam is the right step toward unifying the word of the Ummah under the banner of 'No God but Allah'...Our Lord, shatter their gathering, divide them among themselves, shaken the earth under their feet and give us control over them..."

It should be noted that to bin Laden, the Ummah is considered a figurative nation comprised of all Muslims and all Islamic nations.

In 2000 bin Laden declared, "...Afghanistan is the only country in the world that has the Shari'ah. Therefore, it is compulsory upon Muslims all over the world to help Afghanistan. And to make hijra to this land, because it is from this land that we will dispatch our armies to smash all kuffar all over the world."

In October of 2005, during his address to the United Nations, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said, "From the beginning of time, humanity has longed for the day when justice, peace, equality and compassion envelop the world."

And in a speech to Friday prayer leaders he said, "Our revolution's main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the 12th Imam, the Mahdi."

It should be noted here that Ahmadinejad believes - as do most Shi'ites - that the 12th Imam (or Muhammad al-Mahdi), according to their interpretation of the Quran, will bring "peace and justice on earth" by establishing Islam throughout the world. This equivalent of the "second coming" would take place when the world has fallen into chaos and civil war emerges between the human race for no reason.

If we are to take the leaders of the Islamofascist movement at their word - and the leaders of the United States and the West have been delinquent in accepting the declarations of fascists in the past, so much so that world war has ensued - we can only surmise that the battles taking place between Sunni and Shi'ite factions in Iraq, Gaza and elsewhere in the world are for dominance in what they perceive as an inevitable global Islamic Caliphate.

It is crucial that the United States government - and all the governments of the West - dispense with the political infighting that currently holds hostage national unity and the collective will, so we can defend ourselves from the inevitable full-scale confrontation with an emboldened and strengthening Islamofascist movement. The first step to achieving this unity is an honest, comprehensive understanding of the enemy. The education to achieve that end must begin immediately.

Make no mistake. We are essentially re-visiting the ominous days of 1938. It took everything that the freedom loving people of the world could muster to vanquish evil then. This time we may not be so lucky. This time the forces of evil will have nuclear capability.

By Frank Salvato
cnsnews.com

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Our World: Grounded in fantasy


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST Jun. 19, 2007

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Iran and its client state Syria have a strategic vision for the Middle East. They wish to take over Lebanon. They wish to destroy Israel. They wish to defeat the US in Iraq. They wish to drive the US and NATO from Afghanistan. They wish to dominate the region by driving the rest of the Arab world to its jihad-supporting knees. Then they wish to apply their vision to the rest of the world.

Today, Syria and Iran are ardently advancing their strategic vision for the world through a deliberate strategy of victory by a thousand cuts. Last week's Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip; Sunday's reopening of the Lebanese front against Israel with the Syrian-ordered rocket attacks on Kiryat Shemona; the now five-week old Syrian ordered low-intensity warfare against Lebanon's pro-Western Siniora government; last week's attack on the al-Askariya mosque in Samarra; the recent intensification of terrorism in Afghanistan and Iran's move to further destabilize the country by violently deporting 100,000 Afghan refugees back to the war-torn country - all of these are moves to advance this clear Iranian-Syrian strategy.

And all these moves have taken place against the backdrop of Syria's refashioning of its military in the image of Hizbullah on steroids and Iran's relentless, unopposed progress in its nuclear weapons program.

For their part, both the US and Israel also have a strategic vision. Unfortunately, it is grounded in fantasy.

WASHINGTON and Jerusalem wish to solve all the problems of the region and the world by establishing a Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem. While Israel now faces Iranian proxies on two fronts, in their meeting at the White House today US President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will gush about their support for Palestinian statehood. Creepily echoing LSD king Timothy Leary, they will tune out this reality as they drone on about the opportunities that Gaza's transformation into a base for global jihad afford to the notion that promoting the Fatah terrorist organization's control over Judea and Samaria can make the world a better, safer, happier place.

Today Bush and Olmert will announce their full support for Fatah chief and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas's new government. The US will intensify General Keith Dayton's training and arming of Fatah forces. Israel will give Fatah $700 million. The Europeans and the rest of the international community will give the "moderate, secular" terror group still more money and guns and love. The US will likely also demand that Olmert order the IDF to give Fatah terrorists free reign in Judea and Samaria.

Olmert and Bush claim that by backing Abbas militarily, financially and politically they will be setting up an "alternative Palestine" which will rival Hamas's jihadist Palestine. As this notion has it, envious of the good fortune of their brethren in Judea and Samaria, Gazans will overthrow Hamas and the course will be set for peace - replete with the ethnic cleansing of Judea and Samaria and eastern Jerusalem of all Jewish presence.

FATAH FORCES barely raised a finger to prevent their defeat in Gaza in spite of the massive quantities of US arms they received and the military training they underwent at the hands of US General Keith Dayton. Bush, Olmert and all proponents of the notion of strengthening Fatah in Judea and Samaria refuse to answer one simple question: Why would a handover of Judea and Samaria to Abbas's Fatah produce a better outcome than Israel's 2005 handover of Gaza to Abbas's Fatah?

They refuse to answer this question because they know full well that the answer is that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the outcome can be better. They know full well that since replacing Yasser Arafat as head of the PA in 2004, Abbas refused to take any effective action against Hamas. They know that he refused to take action to prevent Hamas's rise to power in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. They know that the guns the US transferred to Fatah in Gaza were surrendered to Hamas without a fight last week. They know that the billions of dollars of international and Israeli assistance to Fatah over the past 14 years never were used to advance the cause of peace. They know that that money was diverted into the pockets of Fatah strongmen and utilized to build terror militias in which Hamas members were invited to serve. They know that Fatah built a terror superstructure in Judea, Samaria and Gaza which enabled operational cooperation between Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror cells.

SO WHY embrace the fantasy that things can be different now, in Judea and Samaria? Rather than provide rational arguments to defend their view that Hamas's takeover of Gaza is an opportunity for peace, proponents of peace fantasies as strategic wisdom explain vacuously that peace is the best alternative to jihad. They whine that those who point out that Israel now borders Iran in Lebanon and Gaza have nothing positive to say.

To meet the growing threat in Gaza, they argue that Europeans, or maybe Egyptians and Jordanians can be deployed at the international border with Egypt to stem the weapons and terror personnel flow into Gaza. To meet the growing threat in Lebanon, Olmert pleads for more UN troops.

Both views ignore the obvious: Gaza has been transformed into an Iranian-sponsored base for global jihad because Egypt has allowed it to be so transformed. Assisted by its Syrian-sponsored Palestinian allies, Hizbullah has rebuilt its arsenals and reasserted its control in southern Lebanon because UN forces in southern Lebanon have done nothing to prevent it from doing so.

No country on earth will volunteer to fight Hamas and its jihadist allies in Gaza. No government on earth will voluntarily deploy its forces to counter Hizbullah and Iran in south Lebanon. This is why - until they fled - European monitors at the Rafah terminal were a joke. This is why Spanish troops in UNIFIL devote their time in Lebanon to teaching villagers Spanish.

SO WHY are Bush and Olmert set to embrace Fatah and Abbas today? Why are they abjectly refusing to come to terms with the strategic reality of the Iranian-Syrian onslaught? Why are they insisting that the establishment of a Palestinian state is their strategic goal and doing everything they can to pretend that their goal has not been repeatedly proven absurd?

Well, why should they? As far as Bush is concerned, no American politician has ever paid a price for advancing the cause of peace processes that strengthen terrorists and hostile Arab states at Israel's expense. Bush's predecessor Bill Clinton had Arafat over to visit the White House more often than any other foreign leader and ignored global jihad even when its forces bombed US embassies and warships. And today Clinton receives plaudits for his efforts to bring peace to the Middle East.

By denying that the war against Israel is related to the war in Iraq; by ignoring the strategic links between all the Iranian and Syrian sponsored theaters of war, Bush views gambling with Israel's security as a win-win situation. He will be applauded as a champion of peace and if the chips go down on Israel, well, it won't be Americans being bombed.

OLMERT LOOKS to his left and sees president-elect Shimon Peres. Peres, the architect of the Oslo process which placed Israel's national security in the hands of the PLO, has been rewarded for his role in imperiling his country by his similarly morally challenged political colleagues who just bestowed him with Israel's highest office.

Olmert looks to his left and his sees incoming defense minister Ehud Barak. In 2000, then prime minister Barak withdrew Israeli forces from Lebanon, and enabled Iran's assertion of control over southern Lebanon through its Hizbullah proxy. In so doing, Barak set the conditions for last summer's war, and quite likely, for this summer's war.

By offering Arafat Gaza, 95 percent of Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem at Camp David, Barak showed such enormous weakness that he all but invited the Palestinian terror war which Arafat began planning the day he rejected Barak's offer.

For his failure, Barak has been rewarded by his Labor Party, which elected him its new chairman on the basis of his vast "experience," and by the media which has embraced him as a "professional" defense minister.

Olmert looks to his right and he sees how the media portrays Likud Chairman Binyamin Netanyahu and former IDF Chief of General Staff Moshe Ya'alon as alarmists for claiming that Israel cannot abide by an Iranian-proxy Hamas state on its border. He sees that Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu supported Peres's candidacy as president and have joined their fortunes to Olmert's in a bid to block elections which will bring the Right to power.

ISRAEL HAS arguably never faced a more dangerous strategic environment than it faces today. Yet it is not without good options. It can retake control over the Gaza-Sinai border. It can renew its previously successful tactic of killing Hamas terrorists. It can continue its successful campaign of keeping terrorists down in Judea and Samaria, and it can continue preparing for war in the north. All of these options can be sold to the Left.

But today both Bush and Olmert will reject these options in favor of mindless peace process prattle. They will reject reality as they uphold Abbas as a credible leader and shower him with praise, money and arms. Their political fortunes will be utmost in their minds as they do this. And they will be guaranteeing war that will claim the lives of an unknown number of Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Bush and Olmert should know that when the time for reckoning comes they will not be able to claim, along with Peres and Barak that their hands did not shed this blood. Reality has warned them of their folly. But in their low, dishonest opportunism, they have chosen to ignore reality and amuse themselves with fantasies and photo-ops.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Attention MY Friends,

The following news item demonstrates our enemies attempt to invalidate Israel's existence. It uses revionist history and it intentionally lies about the local history. This kind of "Christian" event is meant to discredit Israel's historical and legal rights-do not be fooled or mislead. By using "Christian" front agents, our enemies attempt to "legitimize" their arguments-share this message will your lists:

Church group urges end to 'occupation'


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Associated Press, THE JERUSALEM POST Jun. 18, 2007

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Geneva-based church body said Monday it would launch a global initiative to have churches worldwide rally for an end to Israel's "occupation" of Arab lands seized in the Six Day War.

The World Council of Churches said in a statement that it designated Jordan as a venue for its initiative, which would enlist support from ecclesiastical institutions worldwide.

"The initiative aims at calling on all churches to work seriously for putting an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands," the statement said.

Founded in 1948, the World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity. It groups 347 Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican and other churches representing over 560 million Christians in more than 110 countries.

The group's call came during the opening of a three-day meeting gathering 130 member churches and related organizations from the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America.

Rev. Samuel Kobia of Kenya, the council's secretary-general, said the meeting also planned to create an international forum for peace in the Middle East, mainly in the Palestinian Authority. He did not elaborate on what this forum would do.

Kobia said the meetings in Jordan aimed at seeing clergymen share lessons learned from conflicts in their countries, especially South Africa, Sudan, Columbia and Sri Lanka. He said the clergymen would also assess how they can assist in providing solutions, primarily to political and social crisis.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Right On! Hogwash history

Michael Freund, THE JERUSALEM POST Jun. 2007

It's that time of year again. Summer is here, the temperature outside is rising, and Israel's irresponsible critics are busy turning up the heat.

Deploying a potent mix of selective amnesia combined with some good ol' fashioned obfuscation, these "amnesiacs," as I call them, would have us all believe that nothing good ever came from the 1967 Six Day War.

Seizing upon this month's 40th anniversary of that heroic triumph, they are trying to rewrite the historical narrative, injecting as much gloom and doom as possible in order to push Israel into making still more concessions to the Arabs.

Occupation, occupation, occupation - that is all the "amnesiacs" seem capable of talking about. How bad it is, how damaging it has been, and how we must bring it all to an end.

What a bunch of hogwash.

Harping on Israel's myriad alleged sins, and repeating them ad nauseam, does not make them so, and we cannot allow those who distort history, or who choose to forget it, to cloud our perspective any longer.

The truth of the matter is that the core of the Middle East conflict is not the Israeli "occupation" of territory, but the Palestinian "preoccupation" with destroying the Jewish state.

It is that, and that alone, which has fueled this conflict since the start.
As the late Golda Meir once put it, "When Arab statesmen insist that Israel withdraw to the pre-June 1967 lines, one can only ask: if those lines are so sacred to the Arabs, why was the Six Day War launched to destroy them?"
Israel's survival was a miracle, and the Six Day War was a blessing from Heaven. Its outcome made this country safer, stronger and more secure, and we should be celebrating it effusively with each passing year.

Al Gore may disagree, but I am convinced that if there is global warming in the world today, it is because of all the hot air being released into the atmosphere by the media pundits and left-wing activists who bash the Jewish state with unrelenting ferocity.

Take, for example, Uri Avnery of the far-Left Gush Shalom organization: "40 bad years" is how he summed up in a recent article the intervening period since Israel was saved from annihilation.

With a seemingly endless supply of vitriol at his disposal, Avnery denounces the "rot" that has set in, blaming "the occupation" that resulted from the war for everything from "destroying the Israeli Army" to poisoning the Jewish religion.
Then there is the BBC's Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen, who posted an article last week on the broadcaster's Web site that could easily have been ghost-written by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas himself. Entitled "How 1967 Defined the Middle East," Bowen's screed asserts the legacy of the war to have been one thing, and one thing only: "Israel became an occupier."

Such third-grade level analysis, of course, ignores the various fruits of the 1967 conflict, many of which Israel continues to enjoy until today. It is not only bad history, but bad journalism, too, to provide such a biased and single-minded interpretation of such a momentous and noteworthy historical event.

Indeed, in just about every field imaginable, from economics to immigration to a national sense of purpose, the Six Day War yielded tremendous benefits for the Jewish state.

In the five years following the conflict, Israel's per capita GDP soared by more than 50 percent, exports nearly tripled, unemployment fell and the economy emerged from the painful recession of the mid-1960s. We surged past our neighbors, and Israel now finds itself on a par economically with various European countries.
The 1967 war also sparked a renewed wave of aliya from both East and West, igniting the Soviet Jewry movement and bringing a massive influx of Russian Jews to Israel.
As former refusenik Natan Sharansky wrote in his autobiography, Fear No Evil, "the Six Day War had made an indelible impression on me as it did on most Soviet Jews, for, in addition to fighting for her life, Israel was defending our dignity." This, he said, sparked Russian Jewry to embrace the "basic, eternal truth" that personal freedom "wasn't something you could achieve through assimilation. It was available only by reclaiming your historical roots."

As a result, over 1 million Jews from the former Soviet Union have moved to Israel in the past four decades since the war, jump-starting the economy and fueling unprecedented growth in areas such as computer science and biotechnology.
The war inspired many thousands of Western Jews to make aliya too, with the number of North American migrants soaring from just 739 in 1967 to more than 8,000 in 1971.
Israel's defeat of its foes also brought a renewed sense of pride to Jews everywhere, as they watched the tiny, vulnerable state emerge triumphant against its enemies.

And for the first time in 1,900 years, thanks to the Six Day War, we were once again able to caress the stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, and bathe them in our tears, as a free and sovereign people in our own land.

If that's not something to celebrate, then what is?

So to those who continue to carp on incessantly about the "disastrous results of the war" and the need to "end the occupation," all I can say is: Spare us your faulty hindsight.

If you really want to end the dispute with our neighbors, then tackle the Palestinian preoccupation with destroying Israel, and peace may just eventually come to pass.
You have exposed to the world who you really are-will the world believe you?
Posted on Debka.com

Thousands of Palestinian security officers loyal to Fatah are under Hamas siege at their last bastion – Gaza City’s presidential compound
June 13, 2007, 7:31 PM (GMT+02:00)

They are running out of food, water and ammunition. Hamas and its Executive Force have overrun some 80 percent of the Gaza Strip, while loyalists of Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah, including complete clans, are surrendering and turning in their weapons. Hamas has set up large prisoner camps, some in the rubble of the Gush Katif villages. Wednesday afternoon, a desperate Abbas appealed to Israel to permit arms and ammunition to be transferred from the West Bank. Israeli officers said it was too late. Fatah is a lost case and any arms crossing into Gaza will be seized at once by Hamas...

Palestinian security officers loyal to Fatah were fleeing Gaza for Egypt
By borrowing this Israeli tactic for bisecting the territory to contain terrorists, Hamas shut in Mahmoud Abbas’s Presidential Guard, which has not yet been thrown into battle, and choked off ammunition re-supply routes to Fatah fighters. To tighten their control, Hamas units also commandeered high rise rooftops.

Hamas then gave Fatah till Friday noon to surrender their arms or become wanted men under sentence of death.
Abbas called the situation “madness.”
Wednesday afternoon, Hamas used a tunnel to blow up Abbas’ Security Service HQ in Khan Younes, killing 10 members. UNWRA has cut down its personnel in Gaza after two aid workers were killed.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Hamas’ planning and combat tactics clear betray the professional hands of Syrian and Hizballah officers who have set up a command center in the Gaza Strip.

Tuesday, DEBKAfile reported: The brutal civil strife has brought the fragile Hamas-Fatah unity government to closure. The War Crimes Prosecution Watch has condemned rival Palestinian factions fighting in Gaza for attacking civilians, prisoners and hospitals...

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Hamas threw its entire 15,000-strong Executive Force armed with mortars, RPGs, heavy machine guns and grenades into the final bid to conquer the Gaza Strip, whereas Fatah commanders’ desperate appeals to Mahmoud Abbas for reinforcements drew nothing but a futile call for a ceasefire.
His Fatah earlier mounted an RPG attack on the Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya’s home in Gaza. No one was hurt. Hamas gunmen then shot dead the top Fatah commander in northern Gaza, his brother and cousin. Fatah then "executed" the senior Hamas commander in the North. Monday, Hamas bound a Fatah fighter hand and foot and hurled him from a 15-story building in Gaza to his death.

For two days, Hamas gunmen have been targeting injured Fatah fighters, killing them in ambulances and Beit Hanoun hospital beds. Fatah has retaliated with mortar and RPG attacks on the Hamas-controlled Shifa hospital.

Several attempts by the Egyptian mission in Gaza to arrange a ceasefire have been short-lived. In Cairo Tuesday, President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah discussed the Palestinian crisis.

Addendum: Doctors have been dragged out of their hospitals and shot multiple times in their legs; leaders of both groups have had their wives and children excecuted in front of them before they in turn were killed; bodies have been dragged through the streets and many more horrific sub-human behavior-this is the result of 3 generations of violence,hatred, victimization and revisionist historical facts being taught to the population. They are reaping what they sowed, there is no other honest explanation.The West has had a major role in creating the circumstances and the situations we now are witness to in Gaza. The West must be held repsonsible-to deny any culpability is either fabrication of the truth or an act of cowardice. The policies it has forced upon Israel, the Palestinians has helped produce this human tragedy. The United Nations is no better-to keep UNRWA in control of so many lives created a co-dependent Palestinian population-this is the only population so served by the UN-questions must be asked immediately!
Thanks to CAMERA.org


NPR's Six-Day War Series - Agenda-Driven and Biased

National Public Radio has done it again! A series ostensibly about the Six-Day War was, instead, a line-up of broadcasts largely denouncing Israel for occupation, settlements and allegedly wrongful house demolition and land seizure in the West Bank. It ran Monday, June 4, through Friday, June 8, on Morning Edition, "the most widely heard radio news program in the United States," according to NPR. The message of the series is that a powerful Israel vanquished its adversaries and went on to become an abusive occupier and exploiter of indigenous Palestinians.

This alert is focused on the Morning Edition series.

Day One - June 4, 2007 "Shaping the Modern Middle East"
This is the only series segment that actually presented any substantial formal history of the war. Those parts of the segment featuring Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War; June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, provided useful information about the war with Egypt, Syria and Jordan. However, the segment was framed - beginning and end - with editorial comment that contradicted Oren's own thesis about the "core issues" of the war and its aftermath.

*** NPR's Eric Westervelt says at the outset: "Israel no longer occupies the Sinai or Gaza, but its continued hold over other territories has stymied efforts to bring comprehensive peace to the Middle East." This is the NPR thesis reiterated during the week in one form or another - that Israeli "occupation" and its alleged abuses have "stymied efforts to bring comprehensive peace."

*** There is, of course, another view of what has "stymied efforts" to achieve peace and it is one Oren spelled out explicitly in a symposium just days earlier on May 28 at Jerusalem's Shalem Center. Listing issues of significance related to the war, he said: "But above all, [there is] that core issue: The refusal of the overwhelming majority of the peoples of this region to accept a permanent and legitimate Jewish state here. It is with a sense of both deja vu and horror that I see demonstrations in the streets of Amman, of Cairo and in Lebanon against Israel, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state."

Nowhere in NPR's one-dimensional, blame-Israel series is there a single reference to the idea of "deja vu and horror" with regard to the Six-Day War- the idea that the Arabs continue, as in 1967, to call for Israel's destruction.

*** Day one of the series concludes with Dror Etkes, director of "Settlement Watch" for Peace Now, saying:"It's tragic more than anything else because it's a story of waste of energy, of waste of life, waste of so much potential in both sides -Palestinian and Israeli. It's a story which cannot end well. Occupation cannot last."

Again, nowhere in the entire week with its explicit and implicit focus on "the occupation" is there any mention of the fact that barely seven years ago Israel's Ehud Barak offered to end the occupation-to cede all of Gaza and virtually all of the West Bank (with a land-swap making it 100%), to divide Jerusalem and so on.

Such information would undermine the message that Israel has been an obdurate occupier and the Palestinians blameless victims with no responsibility for their own difficulties.

Day Two -June 5, 2007 "The East Jerusalem Controversy"
This segment is another instance of the journalistically indefensible practice common on NPR of airing one-sided segments in which Israel stands accused but is given no right of response. Anecdotal charges are leveled by Arabs regarding land, housing, permits and house demolition, but not a single rejoinder to the charges is permitted by a mainstream Israeli spokesperson. The only Israeli heard is Gershom Gorenberg, a frequent critic of Israeli policy, who echos NPR's accusations of Israeli wrongdoing.

The message of the segment in which an Arab man's house is demolished by Israel because "the Daud's hadn't gotten the proper building permits" is that Israel ruthlessly destroys Arab housing. In fact, the opposite is true; Arab building in and around Jerusalem has boomed in recent years. Justus Reid Weiner, an International Human Rights Lawyer at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, authored a study on Arab building issues. Among his findings:

** Illegal construction has reached epidemic proportions. A senior Palestinian official boasted that they have built 6,000 homes without permits during the last 4 years, of which less than 200 were demolished by the city.

** This frantic pace of illegal construction continues despite the fact that the city has authorized more than 36,000 permits for new housing units in the Arab sector, more than enough to meet the needs of Arab residents through legal construction until 2020.

NPR listeners were prevented from hearing such essential information on the general construction issue, as well as specific counterpoint to the charges leveled against Israel.

Day Three - Wed June 6, 2007 "Jerusalem, United in Theory"
This segment is apparently supposed to be the counterpoint to the previous one - focusing on western Jerusalem. While it presents only Israelis - as Tuesday's presented Palestinians - the difference is these speakers are not accusing the other side. In fact, the main Israeli voices are each critical of Israel in some way.

They recall the brief euphoric days after the war and hopes for openness and coexistence, but deplore that Jerusalem is still divided. One Israeli declares: "40 years of unification [of Jerusalem] is a joke" and also laments that: "It's becoming more and more oppressive [because of the religious Jews]."

Another longtime resident says: "The gun is not the answer; we've tried it for a long time, so let's start something else" as though, once more, Israel hadn't tried in 2000-2001 at the Camp David/Taba talks and through all the years of the Oslo process to "start something else."

Day Four, Thurs June 7, 2007 "Land Ownership Disputes Arise"
This NPR segment supposedly focused on the Six-Day War is actually just another NPR critique of settlements, advancing uncritically the positions of Peace Now that Jewish settlements are built in substantial amount on private Palestinian land. NPR's Linda Gradstein interviews an Arab who claims his land was taken to build Shiloh. Once more, the segment relies on the anecdotal charges of an individual which are unanswered.

CAMERA exposed gross misinformation in the recent Peace Now study on this issue of private land versus state land. The group had claimed, for instance, that 86.4% of land in Maale Adumim, the largest West Bank settlement, was privately held Palestinian land. In fact, only .54% (that's point 54, less than 1%) of the land of the settlement had been privately owned - Peace Now was off by 15,900%.

Gradstein is apparently untroubled by the possibility of other gross errors in Peace Now's allegations.

Day Five, June 8, 2007 "Legality of Settlements Debated"
Amazingly, the fifth day of a series ostensibly devoted to the Six-Day War is yet another segment on settlements and the issue of building on private land. This time the emphasis is on settlement outposts. Once more Dror Etkes and Peace Now, along with Gershom Gorenberg, frame the issues for NPR's Eric Westervelt.

Summary

NPR's reprehensible bias has rarely been more on display than in this series supposedly about the Six-Day War but actually largely about the network's obsession - settlements. While it would have been reasonable to devote some time to the subject as part of the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the network reveals a distorted fixation with the subject. Inexcusably, there is no reference at all in the series to the vast hate-mongering against Israel and the Jewish people in a region intolerant of any non-Arab, non-Muslim nation, nor to the current calls for Israel's annihilation that, as Oren notes, echo 1967.
This sent to me today-thanks to Miriam Cope-note the date this was published-we had 6 month warning:


Friday January 5, 2007, 6 months' warning:

[From commentary by Ashraf al-Ajrami] "The Palestinians are proving to the world that they are a people incapable of ruling themselves and that any area evacuated by the occupation will soon turn into a hell burning their children... What is happening in the Gaza Strip is the result of an armed struggle over power... Only an end to political duplicity in the Palestinian Authority, a unified political programme and unifying the security agencies can solve the root causes of the problem."

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Finally, a European "gets it":

But one European observer denies that Gaza is headed towards a civil war. 'They are not `heading` towards a civil war. They are in the middle of one,' says Claude Moniquet, president of the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center. Moniquet says the Palestinians have been in the midst of a civil war 'for several weeks, if not months.'

The Belgian counter-terrorism specialist says that European 'political correctness, whereby one would like to present the Palestinians as eternal victims and never, in any case, as the actors (and the persons with primary responsibility) for their own failures,' is what has prevented the violence tearing apart the Palestinian territories from being labeled a civil war.
The Possible Threat from Latin America
Jun 07
Douglas Farah

Earlier this year I wrote a paper for the International Assessment and Strategy Center on the Islamist threat from Latin America. What I found, after spending decades in Latin America, was startling, because of the clear focus both Hezbollah and Sunni groups funded by Saudi Arabia have placed on the continent.

There are now mosques and multiple web sites in countries with virtually no Muslim population (Bolivia, Peru), and extremely active sites in countries with small populations (Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana). These are somewhat separate from the Sunni websites that operate in Brazil and Argentina, where there are significant Muslim populations.

Not only is there an extensive network of websites linking to Hezbollah-related groups around the continent for communication and reinforcement of the message, there are pockets of radicalization with members frequently linked to organized criminal structures that reach deep into the United States, Europe and Africa.

To me, the primary concern is a combination of factors, in part facilitated by the close ties of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua:
Plots such as that of bombing JFK airport can come to fruition because of the mixture of Hezbollah training and intelligence guidance under the protection of states; access to sophisticated weaponry from the FARC and other rebel groups in the northern tier of South America, again with the protection of states, primarily Venezuela; clear, easy access to our borders through the normal coyote routes through Central America; the ability to move people and materiel by the Central American maras, or gangs, that now have franchise operations in more than 30 states in the United States.

These gangs are particularly troublesome because they control the primary commodity Central America has to offer criminal and terrorist networks-the pipeline to move things (people, stolen cars, cocaine, weapons etc.). The pipeline is efficient and moves both ways, offering those who can pay entry and egress from the United States with ease.

Nicaragua and Venezuela can offer legitimate travel documents to whomever the government wants. If for some reason that is more difficult, Guyana, Surinam and many other countries offer their passports for a song. Guyana is especially notorious for this, and it is interesting to note that several of the West African criminal organizations I studied also did business in Guyana.

Some countries, like Liberia and Sierra Leone, offered criminal and terrorist organizations lucrative commodities such as diamonds and timber. Central American gangs, in alliance with drug traffickers, control an equally-lucrative but harder to quantify commodity, which is the route itself.

We are largely unused to looking at criminal and terrorist structures in this light. But to me the over-riding threat from Latin America is not just the few radicalized individuals or groups that may grow up. It is the possible alliance with the commodity brokers-the gangs and drug traffickers that control the movement of illicit goods-with radical groups to penetrate our borders.

Another part of this is the FARC’s widespread and easy access to the most sophisticated weaponry available. With hundreds of millions of dollars a year to spend on upgrading their arsenals in recent years-supplemented by the $4.3 billion Chavez has publicly acknowledged spending on weapons in the past two years (yes, that is a correct figure, more than China or India has spent), it is not hard to see where the capability of carrying out lethal attacks can come from.

We tend to look at numbers of potential radicalized Muslims as our favorite metric for judging a threat. I would argue that this is likely to leave us looking too long in the wrong places.

http://www.douglasfarah.com/article/209/the-possible-threat-from-latin-america.com

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Syria's Price Tag: Israel's Water Resources
By David Eshel

"Syria's president wants to resume peace negotiations with Israel", said U.S. Senator Arlen Specter last Tuesday, at a news conference at Damascus airport after meeting with Syrian president Bashar Assad. The Pennsylvania Republican senator, who visited Syria despite objections from the Bush administration, did not say what conditions Assad gave for resuming talks with the Israelis, which broke down in 2000. Still, Israeli intelligence sources regard a change in Bashar Assad's strategic attitude.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made it clear to the cabinet on Sunday that one reason Israel is not embracing recent overtures for negotiations from Syria is American opposition. An Israeli official stressed, that even if Bush was to give a green light for Israeli-Syrian negotiations, Israel would still have to decide whether the price which Syria demands - being the ultimate return of the entire Golan Heights, would be sufficient to pull Syria out of the "axis of evil" orbit with Iran.

Because half of Israel’s water demands are being met outside of its internationally recognised borders, water has become a major factor in all past disputes, especially over the Golan Heights. The Golan water-shed is the source for more than 55 percent of Israel’s fresh water needs and forms part of the main aquifer-system that supplies Israel with most of their water supply. Together with the Jordan river headwaters originating near the disputed "Sheeba Farms" in south Lebanon, Wazzani springs, the Hasbani and Banyas, are all receiving their main sources from the 2800m Hermon mountain massiv. It should be stressed that most of the tributary streams flowing into the Jordan and Lake Tiberias originate on the Golan slopes. As past history conflicts over these water disputes demonstrated, only an Israeli presence in the basins of these streams can assure their continued flow to Lake Tiberias.

In contrast to Israel's irreplaceable water lifeline from the Golan Heights basin to the river Jordan below, Syria obtains approximately 85 percent of the renewable water supplies from the huge Tigris and Euphrates rivers, as well as the Orontes, which also irrigates large parts of northern Syria.

Note: The Golan water-shed is the source for more than 55 percent of Israel’s fresh water supplies Israel with most of their water supply. needs and forms part of the ground water reserves that

A major element in any future peace negotiations between Syria and Israel will be the so-called " Line of 4 June 1967 " issue, which has become part of the Arab-Israeli peace process lexicon, for years. It encapsulates the extent of the withdrawal demanded of Israel by Syria in the context of any peace treaty. Conceptually, the line of 4 June 1967 was the confrontation line, on the day before the outbreak of the 5 June 1967 war.

Only along one 15-kilometer stretch did this dubious line correspond with the international boundary between Palestine and Syria instituted by Great Britain and France in 1923. Neither did it correspond to the mutually agreed UN brokered Armistice Demarcation Line agreed to by the parties in 1949, after the first Arab Israeli war. In fact, the root of the Arab-Israeli water issue can be traced back to 9 March 1916, when the Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed between the British and the French.

The Syria-Palestine boundary (later Israel) itself was a product of the post-World War I Anglo-French partition of Ottoman Syria. It was intentionally demarcated so that all of Lake Tiberias, including a ridiculous "ten-meter wide" strip of beach along its northeastern shore, would stay inside Palestine. Under the terms of an armistice signed on 20 July 1949, Syrian forces were to withdraw east of the old Palestine-Syria boundary. Israeli forces were to refrain from entering the evacuated areas, which would become a demilitarized zone. However, following incessant armed clashes over these territorial ambiguities, Israel, feeling constantly threatened by the dominating Golan Heights over the Jordan Valley rift, started a creeping annexation of the disputed territory, which ended only with the occupation of the entire Golan Heights after 1967. Israeli claimed sovereignty over Demilitarized military zone (DMZ), on the basis that, "it was always part and parcel of the British Mandated Territory". The conflict over the Golan waters culminated in 1964, when Syria decided, unilaterally to divert the Banyas and Hasbani and lead their waters to the Yarmouk river on the Jordan border, thus denying Israel its main water resources. Israel immediately retaliated sharply by armed force destroying the Syrian construction first by long-range precision tank fire and later, as the Syrians shifted their work further eastward, with massive air strikes. A few years later the Six Day War broke out, capturing the Golan Heights in June 1967.
One matter is crystal clear: from an international point of law: The "June 4 line" should be excluded in any Syrian demand. This line is not officially shown on any map. It is not even part of any agreement or treaty. Moreover,as it contains territories captured by the Syrian Army during the 1948/9 war and thus relate to the same clauses, as stipulated by Syria on the very claim to Israeli occupied Golan Heights-both being direct results of acts of war.

Serving an example that mutual solutions can be reached even the volatile Middle East, demonstrates the water agreement between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. On October 26 1994 Jordan and Israel signed a mutual peace treaty. Some specific articles of the agreement deal with the Jordan River. Israel and Jordan have agreed to share the river's waters. The parties agreed to provide water to one another and according to the treaty,both countries have established a joint water committee to oversee issues regarding the quality of the water.

If, through future peace negotiations, the Syrian border should come closer to the 4 June1967 border rather than the internationally acknowledged 1923 border, and all of Golan Heights should be handed over to Damascus' demand, chances are high that Israel would have to surrender its claim to over a third of its fresh water supplies- the Jordan river tributaries, not to mention losing full control of its sole national water reservoir-Lake Tiberias.

A report prepared by Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, which remained classified for some time, shows the maximum limit of any Israeli withdrawal from the Golan to be such, that Arab water sources remain fully under Israeli control. Peace with Syria is a strategic goal toward which Israel must work, a goal that inevitably entails withdrawal from at least a large part of the Golan Heights. In spite of all pessimism regarding a settlement between the two hostile nations, peace between Israel and Syria is still possible. The two have concluded agreements in the past, which were scrupulously mutually observed. The first Israel-Syria agreement was the Armistice Agreement of 1949. In 1974, following the Yom Kippur War, the "Separation of Forces Agreement on the Golan Heights" was reached with the United States acting as an intermediary. A third agreement, in 1976, also reached through American mediation, was a tacit understanding between Damascus and Jerusalem, the so-called "Red Lines" agreement, in which Israel and Syria recognized each other's security interests in Lebanon. Israel even silently accepted a Syrian military presence in parts of Lebanon, with limitations on surface-to-air missiles, while Syria accepted Israel's security interests in southern Lebanon.

But Israel’s main objective remains imperative to control its vital Arab water resources. All else is secondary. It is believed that Syria will never surrender its rights as a riparian state to the river Jordan and lake Tiberias and may ask for compensation for its diverted resources in the last 50 years. Both Israel and Syria still have a long way to go, until, if at all, an acceptable solution can be reached over such vital strategic issues. Only time will show if peace or war are in the in the cards over the Golan Heights.

Monday, June 11, 2007

The Guidebook for Taking a Life
By MICHAEL MOSS and SOUAD MEKHENNET
Published: June 10, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/weekinreview/10moss.html?_r=1&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fM%2fMoss%2c%20Michael&oref=slogin

We were in a small house in Zarqa, Jordan, trying to interview two heavily bearded Islamic militants about their distribution of recruitment videos when one of us asked one too many questions.


Amid the chaos of car bombings, like this one in Baghdad in 2005, some can discern rules.

"He's American?" one of the militants growled. "Let's kidnap and kill him."

The room fell silent. But before anyone could act on this impulse, the rules of jihadi etiquette kicked in. You can't just slaughter a visitor, militants are taught by sympathetic Islamic scholars. You need permission from whoever arranges the meeting. And in this case, the arranger who helped us to meet this pair declined to sign off.

"He's my guest," Marwan Shehadeh, a Jordanian researcher, told the bearded men.

With Islamist violence brewing in various parts of the world, the set of rules that seek to guide and justify the killing that militants do is growing more complex.

This jihad etiquette is not written down, and for good reason. It varies as much in interpretation and practice as extremist groups vary in their goals. But the rules have some general themes that underlie actions ranging from the recent rash of suicide bombings in Algeria and Somalia, to the surge in beheadings and bombings by separatist Muslims in Thailand.

Some of these rules have deep roots in the Middle East, where, for example, the Egyptian Islamic scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi has argued it is fine to kill Israeli citizens because their compulsory military service means they are not truly civilians .

The war in Iraq is reshaping the etiquette, too. Suicide bombers from radical Sunni and Shiite Muslim groups have long been called martyrs, a locution that avoids the Koran's ban on killing oneself in favor of the honor it accords death in battle against infidels. Now some Sunni militants are urging the killing of Shiites, alleging that they are not true Muslims. If there seems to be no published playbook, there are informal rules, and these were gathered by interviewing militants and their leaders, Islamic clerics and scholars in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and England, along with government intelligence officials in the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

Islamic militants who embrace violence may account for a minuscule fraction of Muslims in the world, but they lay claim to the breadth of Islamic teachings in their efforts to justify their actions. "No jihadi will do any action until he is certain this action is morally acceptable," says Dr. Mohammad al-Massari, a Saudi dissident who runs a leading jihad Internet forum, Tajdeed.net, in London, where he now lives.

Here are six of the more striking jihadi tenets, as militant Islamists describe them:


Rule No. 1: You can kill bystanders without feeling a lot of guilt.

The Koran, as translated by the University of Southern California Muslim Student Association's Compendium of Muslim Texts, generally prohibits the slaying of innocents, as in Verse 33 in Chapter 17 (Isra', The Night Journey, Children of Israel): "Nor take life, which Allah has made sacred, except for just cause."

But the Koran also orders Muslims to resist oppression, as verses 190 and 191 of Chapter 2 (The Cow) instruct: "Fight in the cause of Allah with those who fight with you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors. And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out, for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter. ..."

In the typical car bombing, some Islamists say, God will identify those who deserve to die — for example, anyone helping the enemy — and send them to hell. The other victims will go to paradise. "The innocent who is hurt, he won't suffer," Dr. Massari says. "He becomes a martyr himself."

There is one gray area. If you are a Muslim who has sinned, getting killed by a suicide bomber will clean some of your slate for Judgment Day, but precisely where God draws the line between those who go to heaven or hell is not spelled out.


Rule No. 2: You can kill children, too, without needing to feel distress.

True, Islamic texts say it is unlawful to kill children, women, the old and the infirm. In the Sahih Bukhari, a respected collection of sermons and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, verse 4:52:257 refers to Ghazawat, a battle in which Muhammad took part. "Narrated Abdullah: During some of the Ghazawat of the Prophet a woman was found killed. Allah's Apostle disapproved the killing of women and children."

But militant Islamists including extremists in Jordan who embrace Al Qaeda's ideology teach recruits that children receive special consideration in death. They are not held accountable for any sins until puberty, and if they are killed in a jihad operation they will go straight to heaven. There, they will instantly age to their late 20s, and enjoy the same access to virgins and other benefits as martyrs receive.

Islamic militants are hardly alone in seeking to rationalize innocent deaths, says John O. Voll, a professor of Islamic history at Georgetown University. "Whether you are talking about leftist radicals here in the 1960s, or the apologies for civilian collateral damage in Iraq that you get from the Pentagon, the argument is that if the action is just, the collateral damage is justifiable," he says.


Rule No. 3: Sometimes, you can single out civilians for killing; bankers are an example.

In principle, nonfighters cannot be targeted in a militant operation, Islamist scholars say. But the list of exceptions is long and growing.

Civilians can be killed in retribution for an enemy attack on Muslim civilians, argue some scholars like the Saudi cleric Abdullah bin Nasser al-Rashid, whose writings and those of other prominent Islamic scholars have been analyzed by the Combating Terrorism Center, a research group at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

Shakir al-Abssi, whose Qaeda-minded group, Fatah Al Islam, has been fighting Lebanese soldiers since May 20, says some government officials are fair game. He was sentenced to death in Jordan for helping to organize the slaying of the American diplomat Laurence Foley in 2002, and said in an interview with The New York Times that while he did not specifically choose Mr. Foley to be killed, "Any person that comes to our region with a military, security or political aim, then he is a legitimate target."

Others like Atilla Ahmet, a 42-year-old Briton of Cypriot descent who is awaiting trial in England on terrorism charges, take a broader view. "It would be legitimate to attack banks because they charge interest, and this is in violation of Islamic law," Mr. Ahmet said last year.


Rule No. 4: You cannot kill in the country where you reside unless you were born there.

Militants living in a country that respects the rights of Muslims have something like a peace contract with the country, says Omar Bakri, a radical sheik who moved from London to Lebanon two years ago under pressure from British authorities.

Militants who go to Iraq get a pass as expeditionary warriors. And the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks did not violate this rule since the hijackers came from outside the United States, Mr. Bakri said.

"When I heard about the London bombings, I prayed that no bombers from Britain were involved," he said, fearing immigrants were responsible. As it turned out, the July 7, 2005, attack largely complied with this rule. Three of the four men who set off the bombs had been born in Britain; the fourth moved there from Jamaica as an infant.

Mr. Bakri says he does not condone violence against innocent people anywhere. But some of the several hundred young men who studied Islam with him say they have no such qualms.

"We have a voting system here in Britain, so anyone who is voting for Tony Blair is not a civilian and therefore would be a legitimate target," says Khalid Kelly, an Irish-born Islamic convert who says he studied with Mr. Bakri in London.


Rule No. 5: You can lie or hide your religion if you do this for jihad.

Muslims are instructed by the Koran to be true to their religion. "Therefore stand firm (in the straight Path) as thou art commanded, thou and those who with thee turn (unto Allah), and transgress not (from the Path), for He seeth well all that you do," says verse 112 of Chapter 11 (Hud). Lying is allowed only when it is deemed a necessity, for example when being tortured, or when an innocuous deception serves a good purpose, scholars say.

But some militants appear to shirk this rule to blend in with non-Muslim surroundings or deflect suspicion, says Maj. Gen. Achraf Rifi, the general director of Lebanon's internal security force who oversaw a surveillance last year of a Lebanese man suspected of plotting to blow up the PATH train under the Hudson River.

"We thought the story couldn't be true, especially when we followed this young man," General Rifi said. "He was going out, drinking, chasing girls, drove a red MG." But he says the man, who is now awaiting trial in Lebanon, confessed, and Mr. Rifi recalled that the Sept. 11 hijacker who came from Lebanon frequented discos in Beirut.

Mr. Voll takes a different view of the playboy-turned-militant phenomenon. He says the Sept. 11 hijackers might simply have been "guys who enjoyed a good drink" and that militant leaders may be seeking to do a "post facto scrubbing up of their image" by portraying sins as a ruse.


Rule No. 6. You may need to ask your parents for their consent.

Militant Islamists interpret the Koran and the separate teachings of Muhammad that are known as the Sunna as laying out five criteria to be met by people wanting to be jihadis. They must be Muslim, at least 15 and mature, of sound mind, debt free and have parental permission.

The parental rule is currently waived inside Iraq, where Islamists say it is every Muslim's duty to fight the Americans, Dr. Massari says. It is optional for residents of nearby countries, like Jordan.

In Zarqa, Jordan, the 24-year-old Abu Ibrahim says he is waiting for another chance to be a jihadi after Syrian officials caught him in the fall heading to Iraq. He is taking the parental rule one step further, he said. His family is arranging for him to marry, and he feels obligated to disclose his jihad plans to any potential bride.

"I will inform my future wife of course about my plans, and I hope that, God willing, she might join me," he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/weekinreview/10moss.html?_r=1&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fM%2fMoss%2c%20Michael&oref=slogin

Commentary: This is absurd behavior-it is contrary to every value we in the West hold to be true-I am speaking out against it and ask that others join me-it is past time to stand up! If you do not, you give them permission!