DAILY SCORECARD

BUCHANAN CUI BONO A PATHETIC BROKEN RECORD

2006-11-27T19:44:00.000-08:00

Pat Buchanan is at it again and I ask Cui Bono? Who benefits from Pat's insinuative rants? Well, that's hard to say but if you're a Pat fan, I'm sure you can guess who the bad guys typically are?

Zionists
Neo Cons
Jooos?
Israel

TODAY -

The murder of Buchanan: Is Putin Being Set Up?

In an assassination, one must ask: Cui bono? To whose benefit? Who would gain from the poisoning of Litvinenko?
Indeed, no sooner had Litvinenko expired than his collaborator in anti-Putin politics, Alex Goldfarb, was in front of the television cameras reading Litvinenko's deathbed statement charging Putin with murder[.....]
Litvinenko's statement is awfully coherent and eloquent for a man writhing in a death agony. But if he did not write it, who did? All of which leads me to conclude Putin is being set up, framed for a crime he did not commit. But then, if Putin did not order the killing, who did? Who else could have acquired the polonium 210? Who else would kill Litvinenko to make Putin a pariah? These are the questions Scotland Yard, which also seems skeptical that Putin had a hand in this bizarre business, has begun to ask.
Certainly, the oligarchs and robber barons like Berezovsky—many of them now dispossessed of the wealth they amassed in a collapsing Soviet Union, and all of whom have been run out of the country or imprisoned—have the most powerful of motives. They hate Putin and seek to bring him down. And Goldfarb and Litvinenko both enjoyed the patronage of the billionaire Berezovsky.
America has a vital interest in this Scotland Yard investigation. What it discovers may tell us more about the character of the man into whose eyes George Bush claimed to have stared, and seen his soul, (Putin) or it may tell us who the real enemies of this country are, who are out to restart the Cold War, and perhaps another hot one.

Both cases have similarities -

Syria killed multiple people in Lebanon opposed to them, journalists, politicians etc.. showing their brazen arrogance and in Tony's words, taking the way they communicate.
Russia has killed multiple people, journalists, ex pats and likely politicians as well.
In both cases Pat insinuates someone is trying to goad the 'gullible' GW and the US into a war or conflict, because why would Assad or Putin be so stupid as to murder in public?? (keep a straight face at this point)
In both cases Neocons, Zionists and/or Israel is the "real enemy" setting a trap for the US in a false flag operation.

In December 2005 in my post Is Lebanon being left to hang? I referenced my May 2005 post - Pat Buchanan can't help himself. ('Baiting a Trap for Bush') Both concern the murder of Rafiq Harriri in Lebanon very likely by Syrian agents within Lebanon. Pat asked then, but who benefits from this? ISRAEL ie... they laid the trap for Bush and were actually behind it. Pat was likely dissapointed by the Mehlis UN Report which directly implicated several high level Syrian officials. But Pat isn't as blatant as Syrian/Arab media, which stated that "Mehlis is the son of a Jew", which explains his biased/incorrect conclusions.

Ironically, "the realists" who Pat recommends sold out Lebanon in 1993 (Bush I and Baker) to get them to back the Kuwait liberation from Saddam. Michael Young, Tony Badran and many others have presently stated as well as in Dec 2005 that what scares most in Lebanon the most, is the fear that W worn down from Iraq will fall for a false fig leaf and allow Syria to reoccupy, control and continue raping Lebanon again.

Funnier still the day the 2nd Mehlis progress report (which described Syrian reluctance to cooperate) another murder was committed in Beirut -- that of journalist Gebran Tueni, a critic of Syria. Mehlis ironically opposed widening the investigation (despite Lebanon's gov't request) to other political assassinations which Mehlis agreed Syria was likely involved in - Tueni, Samir Kassir and George Hawi - to name a few.

Pat's like a 0ld broken down record at this point. Any situation the same theme - "the tricky Joos trying to get the US involved in wars". Simply put, a slyer version of Mel Gibson's outburst.

Ari Fleischer Writes to Jimmy Carter on Israel / Hezbollah

2006-08-24T19:38:00.000-07:00

Jimmy Carter gave an interview in DerSpiegel, a German newspaper, where he blasted Israel for its "unjustified" war in Lebanon and "targeting of civilians"..... The US and Israel Stand Alone

Now Ari Fleischer has written a respectful letter to Jimmy C politely criticizing him.

NOTE - Almost all ex-Presidents are very reserved in ever critiquing or criticizing a sitting President. Bush I, Reagan, Nixon and Ford all complied with this respectful tradition. Clinton has somewhat drifted from that. However, Carter can never get enough attention and even individually takes it upon himself to inject himself into foreign policy situations.

Example: Remember when Jimmy Carter personally called other countries to tell them to vote against UN Ambassador John Bolton's proposed model to rework/improve the makeup of the UN "~~Human Rights~~ Sadist Commission". He told them it was not fair to other countries and decided it was his right/duty to lobby them to reject it. This from someone who is no longer an elected official of the US but is personally obstructing administration policy with foreign countries? Here is the result by the way.

A Letter to JIMMY CARTER from ARI FLEISCHER re. Carter Interview

The Honorable Jimmy Carter
The Carter Center
453 Freedom Parkway
Atlanta, Georgia 30307

Dear Mr. President:
I just read the transcript of your interview with the German magazine, Der Spiegel, in which you accuse Israel of launching an “unjustified attack on Lebanon.”

Even after the interviewer reminded you that Israel was the first to get attacked, you charged Israel with lacking “any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.”

As someone who served in the White House as a spokesman for a President, I am reluctant to criticize another President, but in this instance my conscience compels me to do so.

Mr. President, your words are music to Hezbollah’s ears and your message is a blow to long-term peace.

Just as you underestimated the threat of the Soviet Union in the 1970s, you underestimate the threat of radical Islam today. Your condemnation of Israel, the victim, only encourages Hezbollah, the attacker, to bide its time and attack again.

Ahmed Barakat, a member of Hezbollah’s central council, last week told the Qatari newspaper as-Watan that

“Today Arab and Muslim society is reasonably certain that the defeat of Israel is possible and that the countdown to the disappearance of the Zionist entity in the region has begun. The triumph of the resistance is the beginning of the death of the Israeli enemy.”

I was raised a Democrat but I changed parties in 1982 because I believed your policies and the nuclear freeze movement invited increased Soviet militarism and adventurism. President Reagan’s military build-up and credible threat of the use of force helped bring about the demise of Communism and brought freedom and a better life to hundreds of millions in Central and Eastern Europe. It also secured a lasting peace.

I’m sorry to see you articulate about Hezbollah and its aggression the same weak world-view that encouraged Soviet aggression. As Ronald Reagan showed us, peace through strength is the only formulation understood by those bent on destruction.

I understand your longing for peace and your fond hope that Hezbollah can be reasoned with. However, when you call Israel’s defense “an attack”, when you call what is justified “unjustified”, and when you call morality immoral, I conclude that the pro-defense, strong foreign policy lessons of the 70s and 80s remain unacceptable to you. Also, when you criticize Israel for targeting so-called “civilian” areas in Beirut and other areas where Hezbollah hides its operations, the result would be – if Israel listened to you – the creation of safe havens from which more violence and rocket attacks would be planned and launched.

Sadly, Hezbollah today is planning its next war. For the sake of peace, Israel deserves your praise, not your condemnation.

Sincerely,
L. Ari Fleischer

Jewish Man Brutally Murdered By Mob in Australia

2006-08-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

Charles first pointed out this story however I want to comment on the way the story is described in the foreign (Australian in this case) press.
Australian Press carried this story -

Two wanted after Israeli fatally stabbed
By Paul Mulvey
August 06, 2006 06:41pm
Article from: AAP

TWO men are wanted by police over the stabbing murder of a former Israeli soldier outside a Bondi shop, in an attack which lasted only seconds. (bolded in the actual article note)

Notice this is the first sentence... a subtle and (bolded in the actual article) direct attempt to let you know this guy is Israeli and an "ex soldier" so that may "explain and/or justify" it at least.... even though the assailants are NOT ONCE referred to as being suspected of or being Muslim.

Note, that EVERY Israeli is an "ex soldier" as they are all obligated to some sort of service. Imagine if a 9-11 victim of terror was referred to as an "ex soldier" who maybe even served in Lebanon or Afghanistan!!

The victim was attacked by at least two men whom witnesses say jumped out of a car, bashed him with a pole or similar object, and left him with multiple stab wounds to the back and stomach.
Witnesses said a carload of men bashed the 36-year-old victim, named by Channel 10 as Arnon Gelman, at about 9.45pm (AEST) yesterday, although police were uncertain how many were involved.
When police arrived at the scene, outside the Glenayr Convenience Store at the intersection of Glenayr Avenue and Curlewis Street, Mr Gelman was slumped on the footpath in deep pools of blood.
Police are trying to contact Mr Gelman's family in Israel.
It is believed he had lived in Australia for three years and had applied for permanent residency.
"He was a very, very nice guy, he was a bit of a go-getter, he knew what he wanted," friend Gary Levine told Ten News.
"I think he was going to go far, this is a total shock." Witnesses say they heard shouting on the footpath before the attack. Superintendent Mark Walton said detectives were trying to establish a motive but said it was not connected with the conflict in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah. Supt Walton said the attack would have been over in an instant. "These attacks last seconds rather than minutes," he said.

How does the guy definitively know how long it lasted? He can't assume (see bottom) anything about the attackers or the attack relating to the victim's religion or nationality playing any part in the attack nor is the assailant's potential status as Muslims and likely Lebanese as many Muslim immigrants there are - nor is it ever even brought up - but he's "sure" the attack only lasted seconds?

One of the men wanted by police is described as 178cm tall, of medium build with shoulder length dark hair and clean shaven, wearing jeans and a black top. A second man is 170cm tall, of medium build with short, dark hair. "We are trying to determine how many people were involved but at this stage we are focused on those two men," Supt Walton said outside Bondi Police Station.
"We have neither recovered or have a good description of the weapon." Detectives are hunting for a green Mitsubishi Pajero with New South Wales registration SVJ 201 that was seen driving in Glenayr Avenue immediately after the attack.
"The motivation in relation to this incident is unknown at this stage," Supt Walton said. "We are very open-minded but there is nothing in relation to information or evidence that it is connected to this man's nationality or religious background."
The attack comes six months after six people were taken to hospital after being stabbed in Bondi.
"There are always grave concerns about incidents like this but I don't believe it's indicative of what happens in Bondi on a weekend," Supt Walton said.

Experience at Union Square "Peace Rally" - "Support Lebanon/Palestine/UN"

2006-07-29T16:09:00.000-07:00

Emailed In -
................................................................
Yesterday on my way out of the city I drove by Union Square (downtown Manhattan/NY...) It was nice there were lots of people just hanging out.

On one corner of the square there was a "Pro-Lebanon/Pro-Palestine/Pro-UN" rally with speakers and pamphlets etc... a mixed crowd but mainly but mainly left wing hippies and Americans with lots of time on their hands. About 50-100 people checking it out at that area.

By the time I parked and walked over the rally was over and the cops removed the barricades etc.. but there was still people around passing out materials sponsored by the "Int'l Answer Coalition"

The main pamphlet spoke about how Israel (of course only) murdered UN workers. And support "Palestine and Lebanon" and anti US and Israeli "Colonialist" Message..

I walked around and there was a few Israeli supporters discussing what had happened yesterday with 1 of the guys passing out papers. Then I walked up to the main area and noticed 3 people with signs and pamphlets. I started reading their signs from a distance just minding my own business.

One was a waspy looking middle aged woman wearing a Dennis Kucinich for President poster - an older hippy guy -and- a what I thought was an Hispanic middle aged guy. The lady then asked me if I wanted to take one, and I said no thanks.

The woman then said to me - "Those Israeli laser guided bombs are really accurate, they're really good at killing innocent (UN) people"

I said - "You know Hezbollah murdered 2 UN observers a week or so ago and noone said much about it"......

Then the Arabic or Hispanic guy got loud and upset and said - "You are a liar and a criminal and a thief. People fight and die for you!"

I said - "What are you talking abou and don't insult me you don't even know me."

He began rambling on automatically about Jews.. and said - "You are a criminal and a thief you are a Jew, you should be locked up, etc.. etc...!"
then made more ranting about Jews and that people fight and die for me, etc..

I said - "Who said anything about me being Jewish, do you have a problem with Jewish people? .... No wonder nobody listens to you guys because you're lunatics."

The lady then actually said - "OH right you're Italian Catholic, I know"

So I said - "Actually I'm Italian and Jewish. Do you have a problem with that?"

And then the guy said - "Oh! so you're half Jewish!"

The guy I believe was Arabic not Hispanic for what it's worth. It's a common thing in the Middle East to call anyone a "criminal and thief", ie... "You are a criminal and a thief" - Baghdad Bob

If you don't think there is blatant anti-semitism in the so-called "Peace Movements" think again they are rife with it. This small rally as well as the one they were promoting on August 24th in Manhattan was sponsored by the International Answer Coalition.

Imagine you said to an Arab person - "Those Muslims they really lust for murder and martyrdom huh?"
And they said politely back - "The Palestinians have suffered a lot though"
And then you said - "You are an Arab and a Muslim aren't you - you are a terrorist, murderer and criminal, you should be locked up"

CAN YOU IMAGINE? And the woman then made the additional anti-semitic comment meaning I must be a Joooo!

I should have gotten more in their face and given it back to them but I didn't. There were a few people there debating with 1 guy who was not violent and hateful and actually reasonable but he was the exception.

The amazing thing is not just the nastiness but the arrogance and self righteousness........ they're not there to talk to people politely and make their point and if you have the "nerve" to discuss or make a counter point to anything they say the hate and smite comes pouring out... and they're allowed to hate and smite anyone they think they are because anyone who doesn't agree with everything they say is "obviously" the "bad guy"

The cops that were there were really friendly and basically said they can't understand how people have any time to "protest".... ie.., paraphrasing -

"Where do they get all their time from, after work, family etc.. we don't have anytime to waste on anything like making signs etc.."

They pretty much couldn't stand the "Peacenicks"

Maybe memories of the "Anti-war/Peace rallies" a few years back where the "peacenicks" smashed in store windows and punched and kicked cops... very "peaceful"
................................................................
UPDATE: Here are links to Hezbollah attacks on UNIFIL referred to in the conversation which merited the emailer being called a "Liar/criminal/thief/Joooo/" etc..

Hezbollah Attacked UN Workers Twice Last Week - Prior to the Fatal Israeli Mortar Fire that hit a UNIFIL Post

UN Observer fired on by Hezbollah Life Saved by Israelis

Canadian General says Canadian killed at UNIFIL Post hit by Israeli Mortar fire emailed him days earlier and said Hezbollah was using their post as cover to fire on Israelis

More Hizballah Firing from UN Positions
From today’s United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon press release, more reports of Hizballah using UN positions as cover.

Lebanese Christian Alternative Views

2006-07-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

From Brigitte Gabriel who grew up in Lebanon during the Civil War and lived in a bomb shelter as Hezbollah and the PLO lobbed Katsushas into her town, the last remaining Christian town in South Lebanon not taken over by the guerilla groups at the time. She now lives in the USA with her family.

Brigitte_Gabriel_Discusses_Lebanon - Israel and Hezbollah on CNN_07-19-06
I received a telephone call immediately after the interview telling me that my Lebanese citizenship will be revoked. (They can have it.)
Here are some of the letters I received from people in support of my message. For their security and protection, I will only use first names.

Hello, I'm a Maronite girl and I want to thank you for talking in the name of the Christian people whom they need someone like you to show and make the world give them some attention and to know what the Christian people are going through for almost 30 years since the war started in 1975, the Palestinian people with the help of Syria and the help of all Arab world drag us to this war and turned to a civil war between the Lebanese people even between Christian themselves.
We wish to hear more from your messages to the world specially to the American government and how much we need their support and help to get Lebanon out of this fundamentalist Islam, and most of all to stop Syria from helping these organization as Syria is the head of the snake as they say, we need your help in the United State and as an American myself I wish to see my country go back to the way it used to be before the war the way our parents used to tell us about, ....
All what the Christian want is to live in peace, and have a good relation with our neighbor, wish you luck and progress with your mission....
Thank you,
Fadia
................................................................................
My name is Lina. I am a Lebanese American. I was so glad to hear you on CNN. You said what so many of us Lebanese Christians want to say. We need a strong voice like yours to represent us and show the world that we are peace lovers and do not support terrorists, but actually, we ourselves were and still are victims of the terrorists. I pray that this battle will be the end of Hezbollah, but I am afraid this will not happen as long as the present regimes in Iran and Syria are still in existence.
May God bless you and bless our dear Lebanon. Keep the good work.
Lina
................................................................................
Thank you for your message Ms. Gabriel.
I watched your interview this morning on CNN and was extremely moved and equally impressed.
I am a 32 year old Christian Lebanese professional woman and I am one of the fortunate ones whose family was able to move out of Lebanon in the mid-80s providing us with a more secure life in Montreal, Canada. I now live in the US and work in the defense/pharmaceutical industry and I like to believe that, through my work, I'm helping make the world a slightly better and safer place.
During your brief statement on CNN this morning, you pretty much described my life and my feelings - my home in Achrafieh was also bombed by Muslim animals when I was 10. I can only imagine how difficult it must be to stand up in front of the entire world and state that the Lebanese Government and its leaders are nothing more than puppets to Syria; you did so knowing fully well what the implications to your personal security could be. You are right: now is the time to stand up and tell the world what is really happening in Lebanon and how further terrorist acts are only around the corner here in the US and around the world.
To hear you say that the extremist Muslims have multiple marriages and pro-create fast enough to produce generations of extremists is commendable. It seams that people in our beloved Lebanon are too afraid to state this painful truth from fear of retaliation and us, "Westerners", are too afraid to be labeled as politically incorrect!
God bless you and give you strength. I am so proud to see an intelligent Lebanese woman make the statements you're making and I look forward to reading your book "Because They Hate" very soon.
Thank you for the goose-bumps you gave me this morning!
Nayla
................................................................................
I am a Christian Lebanese-Canadian living in Montreal. I just watched your interview with Miles O'Brien on CNN and was not surprised to see that we share the same opinion about Hezbollah and Muslim extremism. I feel that most Christians like us in Lebanon feel the same but are unable to air their opinion. The sad reality is that Hezbollah has proven once again to be in charge of the destiny of Lebanon, which means that they are the undeclared authority and not the shadow government in place there.
We simply cannot cohabitate with Muslims. It is a shame but that is the fact of matter. Bashir Gemanyel's cooperation with Israel was the only way to get Lebanon out of the claws of Muslims' influence of Syria and Iran. In my opinion the only way for the Christians to survive in the Lebanon is by dividing the country. In such a case it would be in out best interest, as a Christian community in the middle east, to make Israel our first and foremost ally. We both are civilized, westernized minorities surrounded by a sea of Muslims.
I have always said that Israel and Israelis are a blessing to the West because they are the only people fighting the Islamists tidal wave. They deserve all our support and admiration.I still have family in Lebanon, therefore I won't disclose my identity by fear of reprisal.
Johnny
................................................................................
I hear you this morning say 10x to Israel and maybe I agree with you , coz since it is begin the war and nobody was waiting it , and after all the destroy of Lebanon, I think Israel should not stop, till they end the Islamic movement...
Am not with Israel against Lebanon, but with them against the terrorism Islamic. I wish to live in peace in Lebanon, like Bachir wanted it, right now we need someone like Bachir to get us out of this situation.
Thank you,
Geo
................................................................................
What an outstanding report on CNN this morning. I am a Lebanese Christian, from Zahle, left Lebanon after Bashir Jamail was assassinated, also was a member OUR Lebanese forces in Zahle. You fought them in South Lebanon, and we fought them in Zahle. You were isolated in the south, and as you know we were isolated, surrounded, and at the Syrian mercy for YEARS!!!
You have represented extremely well the struggle of every Lebanese Christian of our past, and current era. No one in this country will ever understand, or comprehend what we have gone through, and the scars of war we will carry in our hearts, and souls forever. The American foreign policy, thinking, and approach is WEAK, and Illiterate at best.
Because of this weak and ignorant approach, the RADICAL Muslims are making a mockery of this SUPER POWER all over the world. Everyone must understand that these RADICAL Muslims do not understand civilization, and you cannot treat them softly. I always referred to them as wild barking dogs, where these dogs will shut up, and run away if you attack them, and hit them HARD...
All of us Lebanese Christians wish to have hundreds as your here, in order to turn the tide in ALL the TRUE Lebanese favor.
Million thanks for your talk this morning brought me back to 1982's happiness when our beloved Bashir was elected as a president.
Have a great week.
Marcel
................................................................................
I was delighted and thrilled to see you on CNN this morning, it is high time the truth is told, and we as free Lebanese are always willing to go the extra mile to tell it. I wish you all the best of luck and please continue to raise the heads of all Lebanese and tell the world that not all of us subscribe to the extremism of Hezbollah.

Yours truly,
Selim
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I am Lebanese Christian, and am horrified by what appears to be overwhelming support of the terrorists by people of Middle Eastern ancestry. Your web site is a necessary counterpoint to these terribly naïve and dangerous people. Good luck on your web site and with your work.

Mike
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I saw your interview on CNN. I was very impressed with what you said. I agree with you 100%. Can I add the following:
The Lebanese politicians are all responsible for what is happening in Lebanon between Hezbollah & Israel because none of the politicians did what they promised in their election campaign pledges to the Lebanese people & to the UN & USA. They promised to fulfill UN resolution 1559 but when Syria left Lebanon none of them ever mentioned the disarming of Hezbollah. They are all hypocrites & they possess double standards.IMPORTANT:
I ASK YOU PLEASE NOT TO MENTION OR STATE MY NAME OR EMAIL ADDRESS IN YOUR WEBSITE AS I DO NOT WANT TO BE ASSASINATED WHEN I RETURN TO LEBANON.
Best regards, P........
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I just saw your interview with Miles O'Brien on CNN. Thank you for finally bringing to light the facts of this war that most people refuse to speak about.

Most Americans believe that all Lebanese are in favor of Hizbullah and what they do. Thank you for speaking clearly about the Christian history of this country and how it developed into a country of bedlame due to the violent hatred of some Muslims who are now the majority in Lebanon.
Barbara
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Just today I saw the interview of Ms Bridget and I am so glad that there is one Lady who has the integrity and intellectual honesty to speak out the truth even at the cost of her own life. I think she is the Man of our times, when so many politicians play the game of political correctness and shy away from the truth. She has also intellectually gifted to understand the intricate politics of radical Islam and articulate the same in simple words for the benefit of the people all around the world where many innocent people are hoodwinked into believing the Islamic propaganda. I am so glad that I came to know of your organization. I would do my best to do whatever I could do to support your organization.

God bless you! Please keep up the good work.

Hsp

Hezbollah Uses and Targets Own Civilians

2006-07-20T16:43:00.000-07:00

(Side note) Quick note video of my (hot) Lebanese friend interviewed on CNN.
Lebanese Brigitte Gabriel Discusses Lebanon and Israel on CNN (VIDEO) VIDEO.WMV or VIDEO.MOV

Hiding in and using Civilians as a base and for cover - you will not see any condemnation or even mention of concern regarding this from Coffee Annan. You will only see condemnation of Israel if/when there are civilian casualties as a result. Terrorist groups are professionals at playing the modern day War/UN blame game using civilians. It's a win/win situation for them no matter what. The UN and Western help fight the war for them and barely mention that specifically using civilian areas to launch military attacks and hide weapons is a war crime.
Of course the results are stunning just note a few of the anti-Israel (anti-semitic you be the judge?) hate filled cartoons below -

Left wing Guardian of Britain disgusting cartoon
Norwegian cartoon comparing Israelis to the Nazis (again)
Quatari (moderate Quatar?) cartoon of hook nosed driveling Jew drinking blood from a mug

When your human shields won’t voluntarily provide cover what do you do to prevent them from escaping? Hizbullah preventing civilians from leaving villages in southern Lebanon

The IDF has found that Hizbullah is preventing civilians from leaving villages in southern Lebanon. Roadblocks have been set up outside some of the villages to prevent residents from leaving, while in other villages Hizbullah is preventing UN representatives from entering, who are trying to help residents leave. In two villages, exchanges of fire between residents and Hizbullah have broken out.

Belmont Club writes this interesting post -

There's an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal which quotes a UN source who describes some of the difficulties an IDF ground force will have in neutralizing Hezbollah rockets.

... unlike conventional armies, Hezbollah doesn't keep its weapons in armories. It hides them in the homes of supporters, in remote valleys and caves, and in small factories and industrial workshops scattered across Lebanon, according to Israeli and Lebanese military experts and the group itself. Ardent members willing to die for the movement are assigned to protect these sites, many of which are said to be booby-trapped.

"There are no Hezbollah bases anywhere. So the only way to find the weapons is to go on foot and look for them," said Timur Goksel, a former United Nations official who lives in Beirut and has tracked Hezbollah's military capabilities for two decades.

That reality underscores the core conundrum Israel now faces: Defeating Hezbollah means tracking down and destroying its enormous supply of rockets and missiles, estimated at roughly 13,000 in all. Yet to do so Israeli soldiers would likely need to search house-by-house and cave-by-cave throughout the hostile territory of southern Lebanon, many military officials and analysts here say.

And this type of house-to-house campaign is precisely what Bill Roggio thinks has been ruled out, based on an analysis of Israeli call-ups. (Hat tip: Chester)

While there is always the possibility the Israeli government and military officials are conducting a sophisticated information operations campaign, the military is not mobilizing for a large scale invasion of Lebanon. Only three battalions (about 300 troops per battalion) have been mobilized over the past few days. With Israel being a small nation, a large scale call up of troops could not be hidden from public view.

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, in his analysis of the strategic considerations notes "if Israel were interested in a long-term occupation, it would have had to call up far more reserves than it did." This also applies to a large military operation designed to destroy Hezbollah and pursue them into their rear bases in the Bekaa Valley, where they are supported by elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Syrian military. The Beirut-Damascus Road is 35 miles from the Israeli border, Baalbeck and Hermel, two Hezbollah headquarters are 60 and 90 miles from the Israeli border respectively.

So that dilemma creates the obvious incentive for Israel to escalate the war unless another method is found to rein in Hezbollah. The WSJ article continues:

One risk in the coming days is that the sides will remain locked in a series of escalating strikes. If so, some observers here worry Israel may decide that the only way to rein in Hezbollah is to attack Syria and possibly even Iran. Those two countries have long been Hezbollah's primary supporters, providing the group with the bulk of its weapons and aid.

A senior Israeli politician suggested Hezbollah's main foreign sponsors may not be beyond Israel's reach. "We place full responsibility for this crisis on Syria and Iran," said Isaac Herzog, a member of Israel's security cabinet. "We are not ruling out any operation and we will not forget who is responsible."

International and US policy so far has been to acknowledge the premises of the problem without accepting the conclusion. It is the equivalent of saying, "yes you have cancer, but don't operate".

At the Group of Eight meeting in St. Petersburg, key European allies joined the U.S. in beating back a Russian attempt to have the G-8 formally lay the blame on Israel for its assault of Lebanon. What emerged was an American-crafted compromise by the industrialized nations blaming "extremist elements" for triggering the violence and issuing a call for Israel to exercise "utmost restraint."
The communique demanded that the militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas return a total of three abducted Israeli soldiers and halt their rocket attacks into Israel.

SYRIA IRAN ON TOP AFTER Their Agent - Hezbollah - Ignited War in Lebanon

2006-07-20T15:12:00.000-07:00

Lebanese Political Journal with 2 posts highlighted below
[....]There is a massive anti-US and Israel demonstration going on in Damascus, right now. They are waving Syrian, Palestian, and Hezbollah flags. They are holding up pictures of Syrian President Bashar al Assad and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Not a Lebanese flag in sight. No mention of Lebanon's legitimate government.

And Syria is being asked to solve the crisis in Lebanon. Thank you, Western nations...

It's Hard Being A Refugee
I will not sleep again tonight. I'm getting out of Syria, but the paths out are jammed with people, and everything available is available at awkward times.
[....]
We called friends in Lebanon. They were cracking jokes and keeping their humanity alive, even as bombs fell on the city. Their apartments were packed with internal refugees from South Lebanon and the southern suburbs. But they kept their heads up. Every bomb brought a moment of silence, but people are keeping their heads up.
[....]
The Syrians have made our stay wonderful. But of course they should be welcoming. We're reviving their distraught economy. Nothing could be better for Syria and Iran right now. Iranian President Ahmadinejad is in Damascus having meetings with President Assad. Contrary to international opinion, they have come out on top.

The war against Hezbollah has destroyed the Middle East's most pro-Western country, (Lebanon) while empowering the nations that work against Western interests.
Now, President Bush is asking Secretary General Annan to ask Syria for help resolving the crisis. The Syrians are in a power position.
Iran's nuclear program goes on.
Lebanon crumbles.

It's very awkward for Lebanese to be relying on Syria right now. This is the regime we tried to overthrow last year. This is the regime many Lebanese blame for Hezbollah's arms. This is the regime that is profiting from us.

The world made the wrong move. Taking out Hezbollah will not make Israel safer. It will not weaken Hamas or the Syrian regime. It will not stop the war in Iraq. It will not stop Iran from building nuclear weapons. In fact, the opposite is probably true.

Hezbollah's supporters are more supportive than ever.
Hamas' support amongst Palestinians and Arabs will most likely grow.
Syria is being placed in a power position.
The UN investigation against Syria's involvement in the Hariri assassination is off the table.
The Iranians now have ever more impetus to quicken their nuclear research.

My head is still fuzzy. I won't get any sleep tonight. Very sad. Very sad.

The Feeling in Syria

2006-07-20T14:55:00.000-07:00

Lebanon Profile reports from Syria, after he fled Lebanon. The highlights are mine. Very interesting material. His opinions have now calmed since fleeing and appear more measured.
highlights are mine.

The Feeling in Syria

The Syrian people and government fully support Hezbollah.

In fact, Syrians of every stripe support the campaign against Israel: rich and poor, educated and illiterate, Western educated and Syrian educated, multilingual and monolingual, Christian, Muslim, Druze, Allawi, and Shia. It really is incredible to see uninanimous support that was not government created.

In fact, the Syrian people seem unhappy that their government has not joined the fight. They are calling this, "The Final Battle." It's rather apocalyptic.

There are Hezbollah, Syrian, and Palestinian flags flying all over Damascus. In the old city, there are large Israeli flags taped to the narrow walkways forcing all pedestrians to trample on it. The Syrian people want the destruction of Israel and see now as the time to do it.

One political analyst says the regime is doing everything it can not to go to war. She says, "Bashar is too smart." It seems the United States now believes it has some leverage over the Syrian regime, but also believes that the Syrian regime is in a position to help.

In the battle between Iran, Syria, Hamas, and Hezbollah, Hezbollah is the weakest link. Lebanese political analysts for months have been arguing that Syria was weakest and connected all of the above named factions to one another. This was the thinking in mid-2005.

The Syrians were smart. They waited it out. They made it impossible for a coup. But the West must still do something.

The relationship between the Israelis and Hamas is long standing. The Palestinians are integrated into the Israeli system. They rely on the Israelis for bare essentials. Israeli troops move freely in Palestinian areas. Hamas is not as easy a problem to do deal with.

Taking out a regime, especially given that the US is engaged in Iraq and is in the middle of a campaign year, is not an option. The case for war against either Syria or Iran would be difficult to put forward. American allies would become further enraged just as President Bush is trying to rebuild international consensus.

Hezbollah stupidly carried out an attack. The Lebanese leadership brought Hezbollah into the government worried that not doing so would start a civil war and continue the campaign of assassinations against Lebanese political leaders.

No one thought that Israel would take this kind of action. Once it began, though, the US saw an opportunity to take advantage of the situation.

Why wait for the Brammertz Report to isolate the Syria regime? Why fight tooth and nail with the international community for ineffective sanctions against the Iranian regime that would still leave it capable of building nuclear weapons? Hezbollah provided the international community with an option.

I hate to say this, but Israel has been surprisingly restrained given the leeway they have been given by the international community. Lebanon does not deserve to be destroyed in this way, but the world sees this as an opportunity to isolate Iran and Syria, and Israel has a case for war. This war is ridiculous because it isn't one. Israel is at war. Hezbollah is doing little damage to Israel. Lebanon is being destroyed.

The irony is that the Lebanese people, by and large, support the Western agenda. There is little positive sentiment for the Iranian or Syrian regimes and for Hamas. This is the diametric opposite of the Syrian people who fully support the destruction of Israel.

The Lebanese were trying to get rid of Hezbollah. They were not given the time it takes in this region to get anything done. Sadly, the West does not have time to wait. Iran refuses to cooperate, and Lebanon suffers.

AFTER THE AWE IT'S SAD THE EVIL WINS THE GOOD LEAVE

2006-07-17T15:58:00.000-07:00

A lot to read but after the all the awe of the Israeli might, you see the Islamists and extremists win if they win and win if they lose or tie............ Syria and Iran rejoice as Israel is forced to inflict damage and death onto the 1 Arab country that is a fledgling/struggling Democracy and better yet has a powerful Liberal/Secular and Christian community in Government and Business sectors.

Israel needs to defeat Hezbollah - Get their soldiers back - get some security and quiet on their Northern Border - and not turn the average Lebanese Christian and Secularist who does not like Hezbollah against them........... ie............. IMPOSSIBLE.

Hezbollah and Syria want the other liberal and progressive communities in Lebanon to be hurt economically, financially and with their lives by Israel. So they position their fight in civilian neighborhoods and relentlessly shoot rockets into Israel.

Here are a few posts I've read.

Sandmonkey (Sam) from Egypt
The Difference between our (Egyptian) Left and their (Israeli) Left

But then I rememebrd that we- the majority of us (Egyptians and Arabs) anyway- don't want peace with Israel, and are not interested in any real dialogue with them. We weren't then and we are not now. The Entire peace process has always been about getting the land back, not establishing better relations. Even when we do get the land back, it's not enough.
People in Egypt lament daily the Camp David treaty that prevents us from fighting. In Gaza they never stopped trying to attack Israel. In Lebanon Hezbollah continued attacking even after the Israeli withdrawal. And the people- the majority of the arab population- support it. Very few of us are really interested in having any lasting Peace or co-existance. I mean, if our left is asking for war, what do you think the rest of the population is thinking?
I think that the Israeli want peace with us because they don't want their lives disrupted. They don't want to have the IDF soldiers fighting in Gaza, rockets coming into their towns from Hamas or having to go to wars against Hezbollah to get their soldiers back. I think they want peace because they want their peace of mind. They view us as if we were a headache. We view them as if they are a cancer.
And this is why there will never really be any peace in the middle-east.

Background from Totten on Israel and Lebanon

Israel has a right - nay, a moral obligation - to defend itself and rescue the kidnapped. But what kind of down-the-rabbit-hole war is this, where the guilty parties - the Baath regime in Syria and the Jihad regime in Iran - sleep warm in their beds while Beirut, a libertine city they hate, takes the punishment for them?
The dictators in the region have always been happy to fight the Israelis to the last Palestinian. Now it looks like they're happy to fight the Israelis to the last Lebanese, too. And why not? Lebanon is a relatively liberal and almost half Christian sort-of democracy. Can't have any of that in the region if you're a totalitarian mullah. It suits Tehran just fine if the Jews slug it out with such people.
Bashar al-Assad promised to make Lebanon burn if his Syrian occupation soldiers were forced out of the country. No doubt he is ecstatic at this latest turn of events. His principal enemies are killing each other instead of teaming up against him like they would in a better and more intelligent world.
Israel and Lebanon are the two freest countries in the Middle East. They are the only countries, aside from tortured Iraq, that hold unrigged elections for parliaments and heads of state. The tyrants to their east have pulled quite a coup, haven't they? The two countries friendliest to America and to liberal Western values are now shooting each other. (The Lebanese army, which has cooperated with Israel in the past behind the scenes, is now firing anti-aircraft guns at Israeli planes.)

Michael Totten is sad and critical of the Israeli campaign and the destruction of Lebanon

What should the Israelis have done instead? They should have treated Hezbollahland as a country, which it basically is, and attacked it. They should have treated Lebanon as a separate country, which it basically is, and left it alone. Mainstream Lebanese have no problem when Israel hammers Hezbollah in its little enclave. Somebody has to do it, and it cannot be them. If you want to embolden Lebanese to work with Israelis against Hezbollah, or at least move in to Hezbollah's bombed out positions, don't attack all of Lebanon.
Israel should not have bombed Central Beirut, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed my old neighborhood, which was almost monolithically anti-Hezbollah. They should not have bombed the Maronite city of Jounieh, which was not merely anti-Hezbollah but also somewhat pro-Israel.
Israelis thinks everyone hates them. It isn't true, especially not in Lebanon. But they will make it so if they do not pay more attention to the internal characteristics of neighboring countries. "The Arabs" do not exist as a bloc except in the feverish dreams of the Nasserists and the Baath.

Lebanon Profile laments losing his country (again the extremists are stronger than the moderates in the Middle East)

You've made this country unliveable for the people fighting to disarm Hezbollah.
Guess what? I'm leaving. Yep. Me.
Where am I going? Syria. Didn't want to, but I have to. The people we marched against are the ones you sent us begging to. The people who assassinated our leaders, (Syria) kept us from having an operating democracy, and who armed Hezbollah are laughing it up because they've won the game because of you.
Bashar Assad said Lebanon would be destroyed if he left. I didn't know the Israelis would play into his game. It's not surprising that Syrian-allied Hezbollah started the mess, but you guys are just vicious.
All my Hezbollah supporting friends are sticking around. They call the rest of us cowards. I guess we are. We want to do scientific research. We want our children to learn how to play the piano. We want to watch our stock porfolios burgeon. We can't do that here any more.
I tried to sympathize with you. I didn't support Hezbollah, and if you look at the posts before this conflict began, I was maligning the political parties that oppose Hezbollah for not doing enough.
I even gave you guys the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of this, as did most Lebanese. Even the Shia, Christians, and Druze in South Lebanon understood your position. Not any more. Everyone Who Thinks Israel's Campaign is Just Fine and Dandy

Big Pharaoh weighs in from Egypt

Just as we point out how stupid Hezbollah is, we also have to mention how stupid some of Israel's actions are.
Today the Israeli air force bombed the port of Abdeh near Tripoli in North Lebanon. At least 14 people were killed including 8 Lebanese soldiers. The same soldiers Israel wishes to see on its borders with Lebanon. How ironic right?!
In addition to that, in case Israel's military commanders don't know, the north of Lebanon has no hezbollah. Zero Hezbollah. This area is inhabited by Sunnis and Christians, many of them do not even like Hezbollah and its God like status in Lebanon.
Well, Israel bombed the port so Hezbollah won't receive shipments from Iran and Syria. Crap! Israeli ships are patrolling the sea, how on earth will a ship carrying missiles and rockets pass through them?? (Good point I would like to know the answer here)
Collective punishment of all Lebanese is wrong, stupid, and very counterproductive.
The mood is changing in the region. Arab governments for the first time are starting to criticize Hezbollah. The Lebanese government for the very first time said something about extending its authority over the south. Please Israel, pleaaaase, don't screw up that. Don't act like Hezbollah.

Arab world fed up with Hizbullah?

With the exception of the Palestinians, the Arab world appears to be united in blaming Iran and Syria for the fighting in Lebanon. Until last week, Arab political analysts and government officials were reluctant to criticize Hizbullah in public. But now that Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and his top aides are in hiding, an anti-Hizbullah coalition is emerging not only in Lebanon, but in several other Arab countries as well.
The Palestinians and Hizbullah feel that their Arab brethren have once again turned their backs on them. On Monday, hundreds of Palestinians who marched in downtown Ramallah in support of Hizbullah chanted: “Hassan Nasrallah is our hero, the rest of the Arab leaders are cowards” and “O beloved Abu Hadi [Nasrallah’s nickname], bomb, bomb Tel Aviv.”
The second battle cry is reminiscent of the famous slogan the Palestinians used during the first Gulf War: “O beloved Saddam, bomb, bomb Tel Aviv.”
Hizbullah and their supporters were hoping that the massive Israeli military operation in Lebanon would trigger large-scale protests throughout the Arab world, creating instability and threatening to bring down some of the Arab regimes.
But the response on the Arab street has been so disappointing for Hizbullah that its leaders are now openly talking about an Arab “conspiracy” to liquidate the Shi’ite organization. The few Hizbullah supporters in Ramallah, the Gaza Strip and some Arab capitals have therefore been directing most of their criticism against the Arab presidents and monarchs, accusing them of serving the interests of the US and Israel.
The anti-Hizbullah coalition, which appears to be growing with every Israeli missile that drops on the heads of Hizbullah leaders and headquarters, is spearheaded by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. These three countries, together with many Arab commentators and political analysts, are convinced that the leaders of Teheran and Damascus are using Hizbullah to divert attention from Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.

THIS IS THE CLASSLESS JUAN COLE A PATHETIC HUMAN BEING BY ANY STANDARD

2006-05-14T17:38:00.000-07:00

Mary Madigan at Dean Esmay Posts on Juan Cole

On his site, Informed Comment, Arabist Juan Cole has responded to Steven Vincent's widow's criticism.

In his response he displays the intellectual weight and the personal dignity of a tantrum-spewing five year old. He calls people names, he shows his contempt (and fear of?) women, he stomps his feet and he just doesn't understand why clueless Americans keep picking on him. AGAIN THIS IS SOMEONE YALE IS CONSIDERING for a PRESTIGIOUS PROFESORSHIP.

When you read this, remember that this is a college professor. This is a spokesman for the Left. This was a grown man. This is Juan Cole:

The wingnuts are going crazy over this contretemps, which is what is really interesting. I think it is because Vincent (murdered GI in Iraq) is a symbol for the pro-War American Right. He was inspired to his journalism in Iraq by September 11. That was his first mistake. The poor Iraqis had nothing to do with September 11...
..Everything I have said here is true. Clueless Americans don't understand the principle of gender segregation for the most part, and if they do understand it they are horrified by it...

Again, this is supposed to be someone of the left who is embraced by the left. He is lecturing to "clueless" Americans about the properness of gender separation.

.. But in large swathes of the world, it just is not considered right for a male to be in the company of an unrelated female. It isn't just a matter of sleeping around, as my wingnut correspondents assume.
Again, this is supposedly someone who is worthy of obtaining a prestigious position at the History Department at Yale?
Clueless Americans don't understand gender segregation, and they don't understand clan honor as practiced in most Arab societies.

And Western society also no longer understands the "value" of slavery as practiced in Islamist Sudan, Mauritania, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, to name a few. (Ok so maybe that's taking the comparison a little over the top even if true)

But is this not complement to Western society? To the left's progress on moving America forward?

If Western society did in fact understand more in depth the "clan" tradition as well as other things in the Middle East that might in fact prevent sycophants like Cole or slick Saudi foreign spokesmen from getting away with 'erroneous patronizing' (or lies) on Western television - spoken in English of course.

We American men aren't dishonored in particular if our sisters sleep around, though I suppose in high school it can't be pleasant for a guy to have everyone taunt him that his sister is a slut. But in Arab culture, a brother can't show his face in public if his sister is known to be a slut.

Again, this is a guy who is worshipped by the left? and worthy of a prestigious job at Yale? What kind of classless clown is this guy?

Lisa Ramaci-Vincent, the bereaved widow of Steven Vincent - (both of whom Professor Cole slandered like an Enquirer columnist) - said -

"whatever Cole's qualifications, they do not seem to include really important virtues, such as decency, humanity, kindness, compassion and charity", she was absolutely right.

More from Mrs. Vincent on Murdoc's page.

THE NEWLY REFORMED UN HUMAN RIGHTS SADISTS COMMISSION

2006-05-10T17:29:00.000-07:00

John Bolton has been pushing for a restructuring of the Orwellian nightmare named the "UN Human Right's Commission".... Jimmy Carter is seeking to protect the most eggregious Human Right's violators.

After a very watered down version for a new "UN Huamn Right's Council" the UN General Assembly, dominated by despotic and dictatorial and anti US nations voted for it's members.

Big Pharaoh notes the new makeup -

Bahraini blogger Mahmoud thinks that it is barely understandable that his country Bahrain got elected, but Saudi no way.

Bahrain, I can barely understand. We’re on the cusp of change which could go either way. We’ve had some strides with reparation and held international rapprochement conferences here, as well as those for transitional justice, so at least we’re going through the motions, hence our election into the Human Rights body of the United Nations is barely understandable...
But what the hell is the rationale of electing Saudi in there? Can someone please enlighten me, as I’m at a complete loss as to why the UN/international community consciously want to destroy what is left of the UN’s reputation in the word?
So is Saudi now going to allow some religious freedoms in the kingdom? And I’m talking about Muslim sects being able to perform their rights, let alone allowing Christians, Jews and Hindus have their own places of worship!
I wonder what the Relgious Policeman going to do with this one, it should be fun!

From the Al Jazeera Article -

Rights violators voted onto UN council
Tuesday 09 May 2006
The United Nations has elected 44 of the initial 47 members of its new human rights council including five nations named by rights groups as among the world's worst abusers. Russia, China, Cuba, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, identified by Human Rights Watch (HRW), based in New York, as unworthy of membership on the UN body, were among those winning seats in a first round of voting on Tuesday.
But two others on the group's list, Iran and Azerbaijan, failed to win membership in the initial round. Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW, said it was inevitable some rights foes would win seats. However, he said progress had been made over the discredited Human Rights Commission, shut down in March.
"It doesn't guarantee that the council will be a success, but it is a step in the right direction," he said.
Secret ballot
The council will be based in Geneva, like its predecessor, and its seats are being divided by regions, with eight set to go to Latin America and the Caribbean, 13 to Africa, 13 to Asia, six to eastern Europe and seven to western Europe and others, a grouping that includes the United States, Canada and Israel.
The 13 African seats went to Algeria, Cameroon, Djibouti, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tunisia and Zambia.
Asia's 13 seats were awarded to Bahrain, Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Sri Lanka.
The eight Latin American and Caribbean posts were granted to Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay.
the seven slots designated for western Europe and others were accorded to Britain, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The United States did not run for a post.
Voting for the seats was held by secret ballot among the 191-member General Assembly. Countries needed at least 96 votes to win a slot.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali Speaks at Harvard May 9th

2006-05-09T18:08:00.000-07:00

A video of her being interviewed prior click here. She is well spoken, elegant and attractive. More audio here

She spoke today (May 9th) at a public forum at the Center for Public Leadership :: John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Later she spoke here at Harvard (pictured). This event was only open to students and was sponsored by the - Harvard Dutch Cultural Society - A Discussion on Islam, Gender and Free Speech

AUDIO OF 2nd Event Here

UPDATE:
More video on Swedish TV here
At the AJC I Used to Hate You
November 2005 on Danish TV "Look at the Prophet's words and deeds"

Impression of the 2nd event
Another here
Another rap up here

Misskelly summarizes the speech -

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: "I Really Wonder What You Are Doing Here at Harvard"
After listening to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's talk at Harvard JFK's School of Government this afternoon, I went up to shake her hand and let her know much I admired her. She is physically a slight woman. How can it be that such a small woman is so feared? How can it be that men would kill her for her ideas?
The event was the JFK School's "Profiles in Public Leadership," moderated by Professor Barbara Kellerman. Ayaan spoke for about an hour (I missed the first half hour, dratted day job!), and fielded questions for another half hour. You needed prior permission to attend the event and a picture ID to get in. There were four strong-looking guys in suits in the room, posted up front and at the doors to (a familiar site at local lectures by critics of Islam). About 125 people were there, mostly grad students and professors.
Ayaan spoke of her evolution in thinking about Islam and becoming a politician and activist. She was raised Muslim, but at some point decided that there was no God. Once she was free of the fear of God, hell and damnation, she was able to critically look at Islam and ask questions. After 9/11, she asked, is terrorism linked to Islam or not? Can Islam be refomed? Her answer to the second question: Yes, but it must be reformed by Muslims. And it cannot be reformed without negating (not just ignoring) certain parts of the Koran. "We must leave in the past that which belongs in the past."
From her experiences as a social worker in Holland, she saw that many immigrant woman and girls were victims of violence, including being beaten, enduring FGM and forced marriages. Holland, caught up in multiculturalism, didn't protect these women but deferred to the immigrant men. The females were at the mercy of the religious and cultural practices of their immigrant "collective." And Holland, like other liberal European states, was sacrificing the individual rights of women and children for the collective rights of the religious minorities.
She also spoke about making the movie "Submission" with Theo van Gogh. She wanted to have a dialogue with Allah, instead of just submit to Allah, she was asking Allah if it was right, just and moral to inflict violence upon women as many do. There is clear justification in the Koran and hadiths for men ruling over women and even beating them, and she had the texts printed on womens bodies in the film. She spoke movingly of the murder of her friend Theo, and the guilt that she bears some responsibility for that. His death made her more radical and more committed to her work.
The Q&A afterwards demonstrated the forces that Ayaan is working against. Most questions were to her were fairly hostile: How can an atheist reform Islam? What is your agenda? Why are you speaking about Islam when you are not a theologian? Isn't what you're doing extreme and dangerous and how is it serving the cause? Why should a Muslim listen to you? Aren't you setting up a straw man argument, saying that Muslims are either good Muslims or they're Osama bin Laden? Why are you only harping about Islam? What about the Hindu texts?
Ayaan was unflappable and graceful in her responses."I speak about Islamic texts because that is what I know. Religion is public, ideas are public. It is necessary and urgent to review, revise, and discuss Islam as a body of ideas. It is time to examine the links between reliigon and values."
One business school student (Muslim male) asked "If Islam is so oppressive to women, how can you explain that Muslim countries like Pakistan and Indonesia have had women prime ministers?" Her response to that was deadly: "In some Muslim countries such as Iran and Afghanistan, under sharia, women are forced to wear hijab, adulters are stoned (mostly women, not the men), daughters get half the inheritance that sons do, and a man can easily get a divorce, while it's very difficult for women to get divorced. In secular Muslim countries like Turkey and Indonesia, fundamentalist Islam is on the rise. Twenty years ago, Indonesian women did not go around in hijab, now it is commonplace. There is an attitude of denial in the face of a great deal of empirical evidence about the oppression of women. Anyone who denies this evidence is personally contributing to the subjugation of women." (That means YOU, Dude).
The last questioner (Bangladeshi woman) asked "Do you identify yourself as a woman? If so, why aren't you concerned with domestic abuse? Why are you only harping about Islam?" Ayaan was amused. "Yes, I identify myself as a woman, I think that's self-evident."
She replied that much of her work is against violence and oppression of girls and women around the world, which is easily confimed by reading her books and lectures. At this point, given the overt hostility of the questioner, Ayaan noted that debate and criticism of Islam is not the same as attacking Islam. "I'm not attacking Islam, I want to reform Islam." Here Ayaan asked "I really wonder what you (referring to all the grad students) are doing here" It was along the lines of "What are they teaching you anyway? Do you not know how to debate or discuss an issue?"
In closing she said "We need to find a balance between faith and reason." Phenomenal and remarkable woman, I feel blessed to have seen her in person. Afterwards, I hopped over to the Coop and bought an autographed copy of her book The Caged Virgin - An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam. A very good day.

Michelle Malkin notes this review by an attendee who emailed -

[....]
The interview focused on the personal, biographical aspects of Hirsi Ali's life, deferring political issues to the Q&A and to another panel to be held tonight. It was interesting, especially in her description of the day that van Gogh was murdered. But I have little else to say about it.
The Q&A was marked by the number of Muslim students who objected to Hirsi Ali's criticism of Islam.
One student was strident, claiming that as a Muslim from Pakistan she knew nothing about the kind of Sharia Law, strict upbringing that Hirsi Ali claims to have had.
One was fairly polite, questioning why any Muslims should now listen to Hirsi Ali, who is now an avowed atheist, rather than to those who still follow Islam.
One was insistent, asking why Hirsi Ali did not criticize all violence against women (she did and referred to articles she had written about numerous cultures and the origins of repression of women in each of them).
But the questioner persisted. Why didn't she criticize Christianity and its sacred texts in the context of violence against women in America ? Why only Islam in that context?
How can I capture what it felt like? Hirsi Ali said things that you or I would take as the purest of common sense. For example, her film contains a scene of a battered woman, praying to God, tattooed across her broken body with the specific verses in the Koran that advocate that brutal kind of treatment by a man for his wife. It's wrong for a man to do that to his wife. It calls for the genius of Harvard graduate students of Political Science to somehow equivocate around that simple fact.
One telling moment came when an early questioner asked about the overall issue of assimilation versus cultural isolation in Europe. Hirsi Ali answered that she did not think in terms of assimilation and isolation but rather in terms of individualism and collectivism. The collectivist says that those people in this neighborhood all believe that a woman who is bad should be beaten by her husband. And those people are a valid collective.
Hirsi Ali contends that the collective ethos of any group is fine, but it ends when individual rights are violated. And she said in as many words that she is firmly in the camp of the indivualists.
Near the end, somewhat exasperated, it seems, by the wave of denial that Harvard's Muslim community had brought to the forum, she commented off handedly to her interviewer "what are they learning here ?" or something close to that.
It was depressing, Michelle. The Muslim elite of the elite (or a vocal part thereof) could not accept the simple empiricism of the case in war, the case in terror or the case in domestic brutality against Islam. They preferred, on the whole, to talk about something else.
But she was brilliant.

PBS Special on Hamas

2006-05-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

PBS Special Documents Hamas - Radical, Dangerous and Angry to its core

Looking Inside Hamas: Search for Martyrdom, Hatred of Israel

May 8 (Bloomberg) -- Anyone hoping that Hamas's parliamentary triumph will convert that martyr-making machine into a vehicle of peaceful democracy may be seriously dismayed by a new PBS special.

``Inside Hamas,'' which airs tomorrow night at 9 p.m. New York time, strongly suggests the buzzard, not the dove, will continue to rule the roost in the Holy Land.

Reporter Kate Seelye begins in Gaza, ``a 6-by-25-mile sandbox'' that doubles as a powder keg. The streets are teeming with angry young warriors bearing automatic weapons and deep grudges, all strutting their stuff beneath posters of martyrs.

``I've come to find out if Hamas will lay down their arms and transform themselves now that they're in power,'' Seelye says.

This is high idealism, we soon learn.

Gaza is a beehive of discontent. Supporters of the deposed Fatah regime complain that the new government isn't doling out the expected benefits. Israel has closed the border, creating food lines. No matter, grump Hamas officials, the people ``can survive on salt and olives.''

When Seelye presses on the sorest subject -- recognizing Israel's right to exist -- teeth bare. She asks Mahmoud Zahar, a founder of Hamas and foreign minister of the new government, if the group will change its charter and recognize Israel.

``Why?'' he responds. ``To satisfy you?''

Liquor Ban

Hamas's victory in January has brought several changes to the region. ``We are facing a lot of sanctions,'' admits Zahar, ``but believe me the Arab states are going to help us.'' There also has been a flowering of Islamic fundamentalism, including a total ban on alcohol and a return to the veil for increasing numbers of women.

While Hamas's green banners hang from every lamppost, producer Marcela Gaviria's use of file footage of suicide bombings indicates red might have been the better choice. Since September 2000, the show says, Hamas has carried out 58 suicide attacks in Israel, killing over 300.
For now, the organization says it is in cease-fire mode, even as other militias continue their endless war with Israel.

Radical Islam

Seelye and her crew come across a fresh assassination scene, where an Islamic Jihad leader has been killed in a car bombing. Though there is no sign of Israeli collusion, a local militant has already rounded up, in his mind, the usual suspect: ``We will target the heart of the Zionist entity.''

Seelye also travels to the West Bank, home of 2 million Palestinians, many of whom welcome Hamas's victory like an outbreak of plague.

In Ramallah there is much worry, especially about the rise of radical Islam. A businessman named Hani Kort says Hamas's victory was a ``shock'' that is polarizing the region. ``Now you have to be a religious person, a conservative person, a Muslim person in order to be with Hamas,'' he says.

As the show winds down, Seelye again asks Zahar about negotiating with Israel. ``Talking is not our intention,'' he smiles. The Palestinian Authority's dialogues brought nothing, he continues.

``Why should we deal with Israel? Why? Why?''

``Will you continue your armed resistance?'' Seelye asks.

``Give me an alternative option,'' Zahar replies. ``We are not surrendering.''

Martyred Sons

His views are shared by a handful of hard-liners Seelye visits in an Israeli prison. Hussan Baram, who financed several attacks, says this is his sixth prison term.

``My conviction remains the same,'' he says. ``Twenty or 30 years in prison doesn't change anything.''

Perhaps the most chilling -- and telling -- moment comes as a proud father discusses the loss of four sons in the conflict.

``After the first one was martyred, I lost two, but God gave me another one,'' he says. ``When this one was martyred, then God gave me another son. May God reward us.''

Such blessings continue to flow. A suicide attack in Tel Aviv on April 17 killed nine people. When asked to condemn the atrocity, which was carried out by Islamic Jihad, Hamas declined, calling it ``a legitimate act of self-defense.''

EHUD OLMERT CO-OPTS SHARON'S NAME AND LIES ABOUT SHARON'S PLAN/INTENTIONS?

2006-05-05T12:58:00.000-07:00

Ehud Olmert is about to lay out his "timetable plan" for nearly full unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank. He continues to repeat that "it is all in the name of Ariel Sharon and his plan." There is still a picture of his good friend Sharon hanging above his desk.

However, now there are a lot whispers in Israel that Olmert has co-opted Sharon's name and is NOT carrying out Sharon's game plan but his own. (Or his family's far left-wing beliefs)

Last night I was listening to Jennifer Griffin on the John Batchelor radio program. She has interviewed Sharon 5 times over the past few years. The last time was 6 months ago when Sharon said the generous offer made by Ehud Barak - which the PLO rejected - would never again be offered.

Griffin and Batchelor stated their contacts in Israel - most notably URI DAN - (famous writer/reporter and Arik's longtime best friend) have stated that Olmert is lying about carrying out Arik's vision. Olmert is co-opting Sharon's name while he institutes something far different than what Sharon envisioned. It is likely more in the line of Olmert's own family's far left wing views.

Ehud Olmert and his family basically being Meretz activists. Lynn pointed this out as well as noting that Israel now may have to re-enter and militarily occupy Gaza as the outgoing IDF General Bogey Yaalon predicted last year.

DAN states that Sharon only intended to build the fence and withdraw from the 4 outlaying settlements in the Upper West Bank (Samaria) and then wait for negotiations with the Palestinians. Another words - wait for the Palestinians meet the Roadmap's Requirements and demonstrate a will for peace before entering in a path of mutual concessions and 'painful' compromises, as Sharon called them.

THIS IS CRUCIAL CONSIDERING.........

Gaza has become Hamastan. Hamas has been accused by Jordan of trying to smuggle missiles and others weapons into that country as well as scouting for potential targets there. Hamas was previously kicked out of Jordan for trying to incite trouble there. NOTE - both the PLO and Hamas consider the Hashemite Kingdom illegitimate and view them as occupiers of "Palestine" or the next piece to "liberate" after Israel.

Then Hamas was caught smuggling in weapons from China into Gaza and then stating that Suicide Bombings are a natural right. Civil War Watch in the Territories.

Even putting a timetable unilateral withdrawal is incredibly dangerous and forces Israel to do it unilaterally no matter what the Palestinians do or don't do in regards to the Roadmap or ceasing incitement and violence.

AZNAR SAYS NATO SHOULD INCLUDE JAPAN, AUSTRALIA AND ISRAEL

2006-05-01T15:54:00.000-07:00

Aznar: 'NATO should invite Japan, Australia, and Israel to become full members'
and read this March 16, 2006:
Europe's Response to the Threat of Global Terror by Jose Maria Aznar, Former Prime Minister of Spain

If we trace the line between the West and the rest, Israel is on the same side as Europe, the U.S., Japan, and Australia. We defend the same values against the same enemies.
Now it is imperative to defend our values and way of life against a new threat: Islamic extremism and terrorism. The new mission of NATO should be clear: to combat jihadism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
If the Allies want to prevail collectively over the gathering threats, NATO must refocus itself on fighting terror, the major threat today. Indeed, this is an existential threat, if we bear in mind what Islamic terrorism plans for outsiders - "the crusaders and infidels" - and for Zionism, as well.
If defending our own values against the radical Islamists is the future of NATO, we must change the way the Alliance is conceived geographically and open its doors to those nations that share our values, that defend them on the ground, and that are willing to join in the fight against jihadism. Thus, NATO should invite Japan, Australia, and Israel to become full members.
Treating Israel as if it were not an integral part of the Western world is a big mistake that will affect our ability to prevail in this long war against jihadism. I think it is in our mutual interests to have Israel as a formal ally. The West cannot fight this radical tide without Israel.

The rest.

Meanwhile -

Volcanex 2006: If Israel is there, Sweden won't be
Haaretz: Israel summons Swedish envoy over NATO drill and granting visas to two Hamas Representatives.

Foreign Ministry Director-General Ron Prosor on Thursday summoned Swedish Ambassador to Israel Robert Rydberg to clarify Stockholm's decision to withdraw from a NATO international air force exercise because of Israel's participation, as well as reports that the Scandinavian country was planning to grant visas to two Hamas representatives.
Sweden called off its participation in the air force exercises to take place in Italy next month because of the involvement of the Israel Air Force in the drills.
While not mentioning Israel by name, Swedish Defense Minister Leni Bjorklund said that her country was withdrawing because "the Swedish Armed Forces were notified at a late stage that a state not belonging to the Partnership for Peace, and with which Sweden did not previously have bilateral military cooperation and which does not take part in international peacekeeping missions, was to take part in the air exercise."....
A Swedish Foreign Ministry official said, "The point of the operation is to prepare for international cooperation in preserving world peace. The participation of the Israeli air force changes the prerequisites of the drill."
Israeli officials have responded harshly to the decision. One government source said,
"The lack of sympathy for Israel in Sweden is out of proportion. Some government ministers spearhead the most anti-Israel approach in all of Europe, and particularly in Scandinavia. In meetings between senior Israelis and Swedish ministers, the Swedes refuse to listen to Israel's positions."...

'If one mentions Palestine in hate speeches and calls for massmurder against Jews, one risks nothing in Sweden. '

...It is a crime in Sweden to express derogatory statements about ethnic, racial, national, religious and sexual minorities or to incite hatred and violence against them. Simultaneously the limits of what one can express in Sweden against Jews are being expanded gradually. All Jewish institutions in Sweden are being continuously guarded because of threats directed to Jewish individuals as well as to Jewish institutions, and the Jewish communities spend 25% of their budget on security.
The hate website Radio Islam continues to spew forth its coarse Anti-Semitism, spread lists of Jews (real or imagined) and conspiracy theories on its site without the security police or the prosecuting authorities doing anything about it. When the radical right-wing party the Sweden Democrats on the other hand, had one of the Muhammed cartoons on its web-site, it was closed down after a quick and direct intervention by an official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
At the beginning of this year, the Chancellor of Justice*, Goran Lambertz, discontinued his preliminary investigation against the great mosque in Stockholm. Cassette tapes had been sold in the bookshop of the mosque with a violently Anti-Semitic contents. After a couple of broadcasts on the 26 and 27th November last year, the Stockholm mosque was reported to the police.
In his decision to discontinue the preliminary investigation Lambertz wrote that “the lecture at hand contains statements that are strongly degrading to Jews, among other things, they are throughout called brothers of apes and pigs.” Furthermore a curse is expressed over the Jews and “Jihad is called for, to kill the Jews, whereby suicide bombers - celebrated as martyrs - are the most effective weapon”.
The Chancellor raises the question whether the statements “should be judged differently, and be considered allowed, because they are used by one side in a continuing profound conflict, where battle cries and invectives are part of everyday occurrences in the rhetoric that surround the conflict.” Lambertz thought that the “recently mentioned statements in spite of their contents are not to be considered “incitement against an ethnic group according to Swedish law”. His conclusions were that the preliminary investigation should be discontinued because this case of incitement against Jews could be said to originate from the Middle East conflict. That is, in spite of the calls for ”killing the Jews”, these statements are not a crime in the legal sense in Sweden, because of the current conflict in the Middle East, according to the Chancellor of Justice. The logical conclusion is clear. If one mentions Palestine in hate speeches and calls for massmurder against Jews, one risks nothing in Sweden...

More here, along with a petition to sign

BOLTON - UN IS LIKE THE TWILIGHT ZONE

2006-05-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

Past posts on John Bolton and here Remember John Bolton

As Scott at Power Line puts it 'John Bolton is the best American ambassador to the United Nations since Jeane Kirkpatrick and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.'

I might add that Moynihan, a liberal, was one of the most respected Senators on both sides of the aisle. He was heavily critical of the UN and Human Rights organizations that he thought spent comparably an inordinate amount of time criticizing leading Western Democraices versus the real scourges from Dictatorships and Despotic regimes.

As Roger noted this is good for business. It garners more donations from the 'chic' Western liberals...

"UN is like the Twilight Zone, says Bolton."

Then m.oments after the document arrived, the session was adjourned as the representatives of the developing world retired to plot - successfully as it transpired - how to stymie a series of radical reforms.

South Africa's ambassador pledged that it would be for only a quarter of an hour. "I know those 15 minutes," said a deadpan Mr Bolton. "We have a bit longer than that, I think."

If ever a scene epitomised the notorious UN inefficiency, which Mr Bolton has spent so much of his life railing against, this was it.

"You had nearly 150 permanent representatives waiting around for an hour and a half," he said in one of many breaks in the key meeting on budget and reform at UN headquarters in New York. "With their aides, that is roughly 400 people waiting for one document and now we are waiting again.

"There is an inherent amount of slippage in a process like this, but this really is business as usual."

America's bantam cock of an ambassador is something of a cult figure at the UN.
When meetings end he is followed by a crowd of cameramen keen to capture that famous walrus moustache and his colourful asides. Rival ambassadors salute his skill as a communicator and his diligence.

[....]

Eight months after President George W Bush made his highly contentious appointment, no one could suggest he has "gone native".

A long-term conservative hawk, in 1994 he said the UN could easily do without the top 10 of its 39 floors. He also said there was no such thing as the UN, just an international community that can be led by the US.

His language is a little more circumspect now but only a little. Has his opinion changed?

"It's exactly what I expected ... an organisation that needs substantial reform,"..."This atmosphere is like a bubble. It is like a twilight zone. Things that happen here don't reflect the reality in the rest of the world.
"There are practices, attitudes and approaches here that were abandoned 30 years ago in much of the rest of the world. It's like a time warp. I think that's not useful for the organisation."

UN officials mutter that far from helping to push through much-needed reforms to ensure embarrassments such as the oil-for-food scandal are never repeated, his methods have impeded the chances of agreement.

In December, he forced a six-month limit on the UN budget, infuriating the developing world, by making further funding dependent on the passage of key reforms.

America's EU allies, especially Britain, had to negotiate a compromise - "they pulled his chest hairs from the fire" said a veteran UN observer.

Mr Bolton rolls his eyes when asked if he is combative because he is not really interested in reform. "That criticism is a complete non sequitur," he retorts. "My stance is not combative. I would describe it as assertive.

"We feel strongly that we need reform. Condoleezza Rice said last September we want a revolution of reform. It's not often an American secretary of state calls for revolutions."
The deadlocked meeting ended with the hopes of the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan - of streamlining its bureaucracy - left in tatters.

[....]

"I never thought of myself as a unilateralist or multi-lateralist one way or another. For most Americans it is a very pragmatic question to say what is the most effective tool to accomplish the goals of American foreign policy. They say, what is the way to advance our interest?"
When he leaves the post, he will have plenty more anecdotes to delight the Republican heartland - and all too few signs of change in his Twilight Zone.

"PROGRESSIVE" DEBATE ON ISRAELI PALESTINIAN CONFLICT WITH RICHARD SILVERSTEIN - IS HE SPREADING TIKUN OLAM or ACTING ARROGANTLY?

2006-05-01T11:59:00.000-07:00

Click HERE to see his full post without my comment he deleted.

BELOW IS COPIED THE COMMENT WHICH HE EVENTUALLY DELETED.

Was this post over the top or not 'relevant' -or- does Richard simply have to cut off any debate with him appearing to get the last word? Could he be this infantile? You decide and please be honest either way. Thanks.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MIKE NARGIZIAN

Benny Morris -
Yes the man Norm Finkelstein - the pre-eminent anti Israeli zealot - for years referred to as the pre-eminent historian on the topic. Paraphrasing here - "goes through the history in a dispassionate thorough fashion"?

Since you don't refute the fact that the Arab Palestinians often moved 30 miles to an almost exact culture and language versus the Sephards move to a foreign culture and language.... I'll assume you're granting that as well.

Since you do not have the answer to the question as to who was expelled by the Hagannah, who fled on their own before and after and who fled during either via "news" of the Zionists expulsions (more doubtful imo) or via "hyped propaganda" the Arab world was putting out......... (Of course, who could answer that) -

It seems rather arrogant to insinuate most fled due to the "Hagannah Aggressions".... while insinuating most Sephards left via a cute trick....

The latter seems rather silly to even strongly insinuate even if Ben Gurion did the above the charge is more valuable as a powerful piece of ‘emotional mud; for the jury - versus value as a measure of the main cause. Since you’re an academic I assume you realize this.

And things were so good for the Sephards that over 100,000 all who lived in Iraq for over 2500 years all got up and fled in a short period of time?
I guess the riots and mobs in Iraq and Egypt where Jews were lynched and murdered in public and the general atmosphere had nothing to do with it?

This is rather amazing since you imply that the Palestinians mainly fled due to "news" of the Zionist aggressions? How do you reconcile that apparent irony?

Oh, and for the record, how big were the Arab brother armies coming to fight the Zionists?
How big were the armies coming into Iraq or Egypt to help the Jews?
ANY LINKS FOR THOSE #’S?

You also insinuate that the Arabs fled solely bcs "they heard" of other expulsions by the Israelis... Yet, many many Israelis have stated that the propaganda coming out of the Arab side at the time of "horrible Zionist" crimes were a major factor in their flight. I’m not talking about the rebuffed radio transmissions so don’t even use that as a red herring either.

And many fled after the war simply because they assumed the Israelis would treat them as the Arabs would treat the Jews if they were the victors. My neighbor said his Arab friends in Haifa got up and gathered all their stuff and left.

But to discuss the complex situation outside of you simplified reductionist thought that the Zionists simply caused them to flee is somehow unthinkable?

And this from the same person who harshly criticizes Jewish groups for not discussing the Holocaust in a rational manner? Hypocrisies abound here.

You also commit the biggest crime of a historian.

You analyze and pre-suppose history looking back knowing the end result already. Another words, since Israel won they should have known they didn't have to fight so hard and “cause so much Arab flight”. That's kind of like the person who chastises someone who shoots someone who breaks into their house in the middle of the night with his family in the house.

Well you get the point.

Mike

WALT & MEARSHEIMER PAPER PART II

2006-04-30T00:23:00.000-07:00

I just read Meryl's post sumarizing Benny Morris's complete evisceration of Walt and Mearsheimer's ~~rejecting Israel's right to exist~~ Israel Lobby screed.

WAIT WHAT'S IT ABOUT?

You're the average person you want the conflict to go away and you want Israel to be fair to the Palestinians and the Palestinians to stop teaching sub human hate and trying to destroy Israel. Sound reasonable?
So........ you mosey down to Walt and Mearsheimer's piece... and read part of it thinking maybe the Israeli lobby has too much influence on Congress perhaps?

Or perhaps..... you're a "really smart Progressive". You read and pay attention and know a lot more than EVERYone else on the planet, especially right wingers. Your politics are refined and thus very left-wing/"Progressive" especially on regarding the Conflict. You don't like AIPAC or the Jewish Federations politics, too "right wing" for you and supportive of Israel. So you eagerly look up the piece and read it with great anticipation.

Or perhaps......... you're an anti-Israeli zealot... from let's see.... the far left, the Isolationist right, the white supremacist/neo nazi crowd, Arab and/or Muslim crowd, etc.... You hate Israel and love nothing more than to impugn and harm it. So you mosey on down the yellow brick road and check it this "fine" piece of writing.

Now if you fit category 3 you're expecially pleased. You get plenty to chew on - lots of words, pages, accusations, innuendo, and 1 impressive name on the cover. You even temporarily had the Kennedy School of Gov't included.

However, most except all of category 3 and part of category 2 are confused when reading it? The piece is long and ramlbing. It is embarrissingly un-scholarly and appears to be a 3rd rate copy of a typical state run Arab piece of propoganda.

But the most surprising thing is the piece is not about the 'grand' influence and power the lobby has. No instead you get a piece that tries to -

question the underdog role of Israel even in 1948
blame the Refugee problem solely on Israel
"teach" the history of Israel rejecting Partition in 48
portray the Palestinians as innocents who had no part in their destiny befre or after 48
besmirch Israel's name

Bascially, what the F does any of this have to do with whether or not AIPAC has too much influence on Congress and the US? These guys are supposed to be reasoned strong thinkers who would provde a powerful piece of researched shcolarship?

Well unfortunately for the two clowns Benny Morris whom they heavily cite to build their case read the piece and eviscerates the piece below... WELL..

Like many pro-Arab propagandists at work today, Mearsheimer and Walt often cite my own books, sometimes quoting directly from them, in apparent corroboration of their arguments. Yet their work is a travesty of the history that I have studied and written for the past two decades. Their work is riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity. Were “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” an actual person, I would have to say that he did not have a single honest bone in his body.

He then addresses W-M's lies about Israeli military superiority via numbers:

Mearsheimer and Walt write that “Israel is often portrayed as weak and besieged, a Jewish David surrounded by a hostile Arab Goliath … but the opposite image is closer to the truth.” For some reason, weakness is commonly seen as entailing moral superiority, an illogical proposition.
I would recommend that they take a look at any atlas and yearbook for the key years of the conflict–1948, 1956, 1967, 1973. Even a child would notice that the Arab world, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, does actually “surround” Israel and is infinitely larger than the eight-thousand-square-mile Jewish state (which is the size of New Hampshire). He would notice also that the population of the confrontation states–Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, who were often joined in their wars with Israel by expeditionary forces from Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Yemen–has always been at least twenty times greater than Israel’s; and in 1948 it was about fifty times greater. The material resources of the Arab world similarly have been (as they still are) infinitely larger than Israel’s.
It is true that Israel’s “organizational ability” has enabled it to concentrate and focus its resources where they count in wartime, on the successive battlefields, with far greater efficiency than the Arabs; and it is true that Israel’s troops, and especially its officer corps, have always been of a far higher caliber than the Arabs’ counterparts; and it is true that the motivation of Israel’s troops–often with their backs to the wall–has generally been superior to that of their Arab foes. But this is still a far cry from implying, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, regarding the war in 1947-1949, that Israel won its wars because “the Zionists had larger, better-equipped” forces than the Arabs.

During the October (or Yom Kippur) War in 1973, the Egyptians mustered about one million men under arms, and their Syrian allies some 400,000, when they launched their surprise attacks across the Suez Canal and on the Golan Heights. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fielded 350,000 to 400,000 troops at most. The Israelis won that war because of superior “grit” and better quality of troops and organization, even though the wings of their better air force and tank corps were badly clipped by the Arabs’ massive deployment of state-of-the-art missile shields.

On the two-state solution W-M try and to imply that Israel has always rejected it and of course do not mention anything about the Arab's positions past and presnt:

Mearsheimer and Walt imply that down to (and maybe even beyond) 1948, the Zionist leadership rejected the partition of Palestine. This is simply false, no matter what misleading quotations they cull from eminent Israeli historians.
[…] By November 1947, the Zionists’ reconciliation to a partial realization of their dreams was complete (except on the fringes of the movement), and Zionism’s mainstream, led by Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, once and for all internalized the necessity of partition and accepted the U.N. partition resolution. The 1948 war was fought by Israel with a partitionist outlook, and it ended in partition (with the West Bank and East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule and the Gaza Strip controlled by Egypt), despite Israel’s military superiority at its conclusion. During the following two decades, down to June 1967, there was a general acceptance by the Israeli mainstream of the fact, and the permanence, of partition.

[…] The Palestinian story was different. The Palestinian national movement, from its inception up to 2000, from Haj Amin al Husseini to Yasser Arafat, backed by the Arab world, rejected a two-state solution. There was no great debate. The Palestinian leadership rejected the 1937 and 1947 partition plans (and the Begin-Sadat “autonomy plan” of 1978, which would have led to a two-state solution), and insisted that the Jews had no right to even an inch of Palestine. And the Palestinian government of today, led by the popularly elected Hamas, continues to espouse this uncompromising, anti-partitionist one-state position. All of this is completely ignored in Mearsheimer and Walt’s “history.”

On “transfer” and terrorism:

In other words, the surge in thinking about transfer in the late 1930s among mainstream Zionist leaders was in part a response to the expulsionist mentality of the Palestinians, which was reinforced by ongoing Arab violence and terrorism. The violence resulted in Britain’s severely curtailing immigration to Palestine, thus assuring that many Jews who otherwise might have been saved were left stranded in Europe (and consigned to death), while at the same time foreclosing the traditional Zionist option and aim of achieving a Jewish majority in Palestine through immigration. Mearsheimer and Walt rightly take to task the anti-Arab terrorism of the Irgun in those years; but they omit to mention that the Irgun unleashed its bloody operations in response to Arab terrorism, and that in any case it represented only the fringe right wing of the Zionist movement, of which the mainstream–unlike the Palestinian Arab national movement–consistently rejected and condemned terrorism.

On the palestinian refugee problem:

From Mearsheimer and Walt, you would never suspect that the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948 occurred against the backdrop, and as the result, of a war–a war that for the Jews was a matter of survival, and which those same Palestinians and their Arab brothers had launched. To omit this historical background is bad history–and stark dishonesty. It is quite true, and quite understandable, that the Israeli government during the war decided to bar a return of the refugees to their homes–to bar the return of those who, before becoming refugees, had attempted to destroy the Jewish state and whose continued loyalty to the Jewish state, if they were readmitted, would have been more than questionable. There was nothing “innocent,” as Mearsheimer and Walt put it, about the Palestinians and their behavior before their eviction-evacuation in 1947-1948 (as there was nothing innocent about Haj Amin al Husseini’s work for the Nazis in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, broadcasting anti-Allied propaganda and recruiting Muslim troops for the Wehrmacht). And what befell the Palestinians was not “a moral crime,” whatever that might mean; it was something the Palestinians brought down upon themselves, with their own decisions and actions, their own historical agency. But they like to deny their historical agency, and many “sympathetic” outsiders like to abet them in this illusion, which is significantly responsible for their continued statelessness.

On W-M’s numerical errors:

Consider some other examples. On page 6, Mearsheimer and Walt assert that Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-American naval intelligence analyst in the 1980s, provided Israel with classified American material, “which Israel reportedly passed onto the Soviet Union to gain more exit visas for Soviet Jewry.” To the best of my knowledge, this is a lie. On page 9, Mearsheimer and Walt write that “citizenship [of Israel] is based on the principle of blood kinship.” This is an outrageous assertion, with the worst possible echoes. The truth is that since the state’s inception, 15 to 20 percent of Israel’s citizens have been Muslim and Christian Arabs. In 1948-1949, citizenship was granted to all persons living in the country, regardless of race or religion, and it is granted by law after five years of residency and the satisfaction of various qualifications (as in all western democracies) to applicants today regardless of race or religion–though it is true that Jewish immigrants can and do receive citizenship upon arrival in Israel, and it is also true that Israel is a Jewish state, as France is (and, I hope, will remain) a French state and Britain is a British state. On page 12, Mearsheimer and Walt write, referring to my book Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956, that Israel’s retaliatory strikes in the early 1950s “were actually part of a broader effort to expand Israel’s borders.” This is incorrect–and had they used my book honestly, they could not have reached such a conclusion. On page 10, they observe that “The Arabs … had been in continuous possession of [Palestine] for 1300 years,” which is incorrect, and that there were “only about 15,000 Jews in Palestine” in 1882, which is also incorrect. (Typically, Mearsheimer and Walt cite as their authority Justin McCarthy’s The Population of Palestine, without noting that he also assumed the existence of additional thousands of Jews in Palestine who were not Ottoman citizens.) And so on.

BENNY MORRIS KILLS WALT MEARSHEIMER PIECE - JUAN COLE HITCHES HIS WAGON TO IT

2006-04-29T12:30:00.000-07:00

Previously I posted on Juan Cole's self promotion campaign and linked to Tony's excellent post. Tony points out how Cole used 1 slightly off quote cited in this John Fund WSJ piece (critical of Cole) as a red herring (avoiding all others) and now he has shamelessly hitched his wagon to the Walt and Mearsheimer controversy as an attempt at shameless self-promotion. Classic Cole.

....I speculated that the reason Cole has made such a stink about one particular quote that he singled out from the John Fund piece (and ignored all the other damning ones) was because it was the perfect quote for him to use as a red herring to claim that indeed "Likudniks" are trying to smear him for criticizing "the policies of Ariel Sharon," and thus abusing the label of anti-Semitism.

I had also wanted to note that the quote Cole chose to single out had the potential of hooking up with the Walt and Mearsheimer piece in its reference to Israel being "the most dangerous regime to US interests in the Middle East." I decided to leave it out, but I should've known better.

I should've known that this man would try to hitch his bandwagon to the Walt and Mearsheimer fiasco, and use it for his own benefit (and get the additional bonus of basking in "realist" glory, by coopting their mantle). This is vintage Cole.

So what does he do? He launches a petition, exclusively for college and university teachers (are you guys at Yale paying attention?), in defense of Walt and Mearsheimer!

This is pure Cole for you. Marvel at the depth of this man's disingenuousness. He's leaching on to the big fish, to launch a petition on behalf of no one else but himself. As I said, Yale or bust. He will do anything to get there.

Now Lynn notes

Meryl Yourish and Rick Richman..... to this long essay by Benny Morris at TNR eviscerating (literally) John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's Israel Lobby screed.
This is especially interesting because Mearsheimer and Walt cited Morris as support for several of their more egregious assertions.
Make time to read the whole thing.
You know, every time this happens...... academics who continue to support M&W's "work" (Juan Cole's petition) look more and more foolish. If that's possible.
Juan Cole's original "Freedom of Speech on the Israel Lobby Petition," has already been deactivated at the author's request. Probably because of stuff like what I've copied in the extended entry below.
....Cole's got a new petition up that he claims is troll-proof. Whatever...... you should definitely check out the names and institutions on this list first.

3 ARAB ACCOUNTS OF THE ARAB WORLD AND ITS PROBLEMS

2006-04-28T21:58:00.000-07:00

Ecce Libano has a great post. He also links to this great post by Tony who (as he puts it) splendidly profiles 3 Arab intellectuals takes on the State of the Arab Middle East. Ali Salem is very fondly reviewed by Tony. My previous post on Mr. Salem.

Identity and Memory

Here are three pieces dealing with a central topic in ME affairs: identity narratives.

The first is by obsolete relic and Pan-Arab propagandist, Patrick Seale.
The second is by liberal Egyptian playwright, Ali Salem.
The third (Arabic) is by Syrian thinker Nabil Fayyad.

Seale's piece, if you can actually figure out what it's about, repeats age-old clichés of the Arab nationalists, especially the Pan-Arabists. It's also quite derivative in a more direct sense, drawing on other people's works, and not producing any coherent synthesis.

As usual, you have your musts:

"Indeed, Lebanon's problems - and its present dependence on Syria - are part of the general crisis which has afflicted the region since World War I, when Britain and France, to suit their own imperial interests, carved up the Arab provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire. After World War II, these powers were forced to make way for the regional ambitions of the United States and of its local ally, the newly emergent state of Israel, which today, in their turn, seek to dominate and subdue the Arabs.

What further evidence of these ambitions is required than America's war in Iraq and Israel's ruthless oppression of the Palestinians, together with the inability of the Arab states to confront or contain either one or the other"?

Yawn...

And while we're high, let's add some more Arabist psychedelic hallucinations:

"The early fragmentation of the region into rival states, often harboring irredentist grievances against each other, as well as the repeated interventions by outside powers, have gravely compromised the Arab struggle for independence. Most Arabs would themselves admit that the goal of full independence has not yet been achieved, and remains tantalizingly out of reach."

This passage in a nutshell exemplifies how silly the Arabists and their cheer leaders (i.e. Seale et al.) are. It puts forth contradictory points, based on a common confusion between "independence" and "Pan-Arab unity."

Seale's basically complaining that the völkisch destiny of the "Arab nation" has been heretofore hindered by the "imperialists" and the "outsiders." Being the relic that he is, he hasn't realized that all this garbage is long gone. Sati' al-Husri is dead, thank the Lord.

Moreover, the notion that the imperial powers "fragmented the region into rival states, often harboring irredentist grievances against each other" is problematic on two levels: 1- it assumes that the region was/is a homogenous Arab geo-political whole, that was unnaturally broken up. 2- It's paradoxical and self-defeating as it runs counter to the earlier claim! If the states are rivals and "harbor irredentist grievances against each other" then the notion of an Arab nation marching towards its destiny rests on shaky grounds indeed!

But Seale is on a bad trip bent on reinventing Husri and all the Arabist fools. That's why he quotes the drivel by Raymond Hinnebusch:

"To many Arabs and Muslims, the struggle with imperialism, far from being mere history, continues, as imperialism reinvents itself in new forms. The Middle East has become the one world region where anti-imperialist nationalism, obsolete elsewhere, remains alive and where an indigenous ideology, Islam, provides a world view still resistant to West-centric globalization."

That must make nice tea-time conversation among idiotic principled Third-Worldists, but frankly, it's utterly boring.

Anyway, after all this standard sleepy-time trash, Seale jumps to what supposedly was the point of his piece -- Lebanon and Arabism. He just had to stop and recite the creed for an hour before actually coming to the point!

Once again relying on others' work, Seale regurgitates Raghid el-Solh's book:

"Solh describes how Lebanon developed from being a "foyer of French influence" and a "Maronite homeland," into a country with an "Arab face," as declared by President Bishara al-Khuri and Prime Minister Riad el-Solh, leaders of the first independent state in 1943."

There's a basic anachronism here. The Lebanon he's talking about is in fact two different political entities. The idea of a Maronite or Christian homeland was not extended to Greater Lebanon which included large numbers of Muslims. That's why Emile Edde was opposed to the annexation of, e.g., Tripoli and Sidon because they would create a demographical problem and eliminate the idea of a majority Christian homeland.

Seale moves on to recite Solh's story line of modern Lebanon:

"This formula was meant to "accommodate both the aspira1tions of the Lebanese nationalists for safeguarding the country's sovereignty and independence and the unionist aims of the Arab nationalists." But, as Solh explains, the "Arab face" formula left a door open to differing interpretations of Lebanon's Arabism.

Lebanese nationalists took it to mean that Lebanon was less Arab than other Arab states; for some it even implied being "non-Arab," an attitude which led to controversial alliances with other anti-Arab forces in the region. Fierce Lebanese particularism led, in addition, to attempts to exclude Arab nationalists from politics and Parliament, and thereby hampered the development of Lebanon's democracy and civil society."

Oh those nasty Lebanese nationalists (read Maronites)! I wish Seale would have given specific examples, as there were plenty of Arab nationalists in high places of government all along! Secondly, who exactly attempted to exclude Arab nationalists from Parliament!? Parliament members are elected not appointed. Was there a conspiracy in the elections aimed at excluding Arab nationalists!? What nonsense!

Furthermore, nowhere in Seale's cute historical sketch is there any mention of the attempts by Nasserist Arab nationalists at undermining the state. Of course not, because after all, that's the "Arab nation's destiny." Also, there is no exploration of why Lebanonists rejected Arabism as their identity, and the problems created by the pressure for Arabization.

Seale then enlightens us with Solh's simple cure for Lebanon's ills:

"Solh argues that for Lebanon to have developed into a foyer of democracy in the Arab world, it would have had to internalize and develop the principles and institutions of democracy, to create mass parties cutting across sectarian differences, and to play a more active role in the Arab collective system, especially in the 1940s, when the ruling elite in Lebanon was on close terms with the ruling elites in other Arab states."

I see. How wonderful, and so simple too! In fact, it's utterly simplistic and useless. Seale doesn't examine why there were no "mass parties cutting across sectarian differences." In fact, he doesn't even explain the meaning and function of "sectarianism" and how that functioned vis à vis the state, creating a consociational system of limited central government. Of course not, because Seale believes in the heavily centralized governments of the Arab order. But here again, he fails to elaborate. What on earth is "the Arab collective system?" Lebanon went in on the Arab League. But the charter of the Arab League itself reflected not the anti-imperialism that Seale is babling about. Rather, it reflected deep distrust among the members! It set forth rules and regulations on how no Arab state should interfere in the affairs of another. Of course, this went in opposition to the basic tenet of Pan-Arabism!

Needless to say, this agreement was never really implemented. That's why you had Nasser napalming Yemen, Syria bombing and invading Lebanon (and before that attempting to pressure Lebanon into the ill-fated United Arab Republic), and Saddam's Iraq invading and brutalizing Kuwait, etc. Further still, the war of 1948 was, as Joshua Landis and Elie Kedourie before him have argued, not a war against Zionists as much as it was a war (pushed for esp. by Syria) to counter a levantine Pan-Arabist dream by Abdullah!

But all this is brushed aside in an instant, as it interferes too much with Seale's hallucinatory trip. That's why he writes:

"The 1948 Arab defeat, in particular, was seen as a defeat of Arabism, which eventually contributed to the disarray of Lebanese Arab nationalists."

He brilliantly misses the point! The military defeat of 1948 per se was not the defeat of Arabism! The defeat of '48 was very much anticipated by Quwwatli, and his going to war was not to defend Arabism, but exactly the opposite: to prevent it from undermining Syria's independence. For Syria's role in 1948, see Landis' essay -- which is the best of the bunch -- in Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds.), The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge, 2001). A longer version of that article is available online, courtesy of Joshua Landis.

But Seale's incoherence continues:

"The chapter entitled "Greater Lebanon and the League of Arab States" is a masterly analysis of how the politician Henri Pharaon and other "Mediterraneanists" managed to bring down the government of Riad el-Solh, largely because they saw the Alexandria Protocol of 1944, which he helped draft, as a blueprint for an Arab supra-state or federation. In Cairo in 1945, when the Arab League statutes were being finalized, Pharaon, then Lebanon's foreign minister, managed to water down the protocol and replace it with a minimal form of Arab cooperation - no doubt a source of the league's present ineffectiveness."

So Riad el-Solh was working toward a Pan-Arab vision of sorts. Wait, I thought Arabists were kept out of Lebanese positions of power. He must have slipped in. Seale is once again playing the song of "nasty people cutting the wings of the Arab nation, preventing it from fulfilling its destiny." So Henri Pharaon is now singlehandedly responsible for the dysfunction of the Arab League! He basically did via peaceful diplomatic means what Quwwatli tried to do with a catastrophic war, doomed to failure! He tried to safeguard the Republic from a super-imposed Pan-Arabist arrangement. After all, that was the spirit of the Lebanese pact of '43 that Seale mentioned! But of course someone has to pay, and for Seale it's those "Mediterraneanists."

Then comes the great finale, the peak of vagueness and abruptness:

"However, Solh comments that Syria's "special relationship" with Lebanon was "not necessarily rooted in Arab nationalism." As they contemplate their future, Syrians and Lebanese should read and ponder Raghid el-Solh's rich text."

Marvelous. What the hell does this mean!? Seale provides no answer, ending his piece on this ambiguous note. He's only interested in snickering at the label "Mediterraneanist."

Unfortunately for Seale, that label is not restricted to "misguided" Lebanese Christians. Ali Salem resurrects and reformulates that very same label, that was once championed by Taha Hussein. Not only is it an alternative to Arabism, it doesn't have any of its hang ups toward the West:

"You may consider me one of its [the Mediterranean] followers or disciples, and definitely I'm one of its residents. I still remember that I used to stare at its surface looking to the far horizon, as if I wanted to see my neighbors there, in Italy, Greece, Spain and France. They are Europe and I'm Africa. We are neighbors, separated by two continents, unified by one sea."

It's a vision that's built on a far more complex understanding of identity. Salem has no problem incorporating Arabic into his construct, he simply doesn't agree that identity should be singular and homogenous, or exclusively Arab:

"The Arabs are my fathers, but the Egyptians are my forefathers; do you advise me to inherit from my fathers and ignore the treasures left to me by my forefathers?"

It's a vision that is also at peace with the pre-Arabo-Islamic era and heritage:

""Egypt itself is of the Mediterranean," I responded. "One day, thousands of years ago, this sea was just a lake, crossed by ships loaded by thoughts and art toward Greece, carrying the product of minds and souls, returning from there, loaded with other products of minds and souls.""

Later in the piece, Salem also invokes his love and appreciation of Pharaonic Egypt, and incorporates it into his Egyptian identity.

Notably, this is a vision that exalts a "globalization" of sorts, based on cosmopolitanism (cf. Adnan al-Atasi's attraction to the Greek Polis in his Azmat al-Hukm fi Souriya, "The Crisis of Government in Syria" (1951). I owe this reference to Joshua Landis) as well as international relations and trade of goods and ideas. As such, it's a vision that's strikingly similar to the Lebanese Mediterraneanists, or Phoenicianists. I mentioned Michel Chiha before, and his quasi Braudelian model based on the mountain and the Mediterranean, as well as mercantilism. Despite its problems, it resonates well with Salem's vision.

Like I said earlier, this is a reformulation of a vision championed by Taha Hussein. On that point Albert Hourani paraphrases Hussein:

"[S]he [Egypt] was herself one of the creators of Mediterranean civilization, and throughout ancient times the tide of influence flowed both ways between her and Greece." (Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939, p. 331).

One crucial difference between this view and Arab nationalism, a difference that allows a complex construct of identity, is one that Hourani notices and that is that Arab nationalism is based on German ideas, while Mediterraneanism is based on French and even American models.

Indeed, Sati' al-Husri based his vision on Fichte and Herder and their language-based nationalism, while totally rejecting Renan's nationalité elective. Therefore, to anyone who had a more complex identity, or a varying narrative, Husri had this to say:

"Every Arab-speaking people is an Arab people. Every individual belonging to one of these Arabic-speaking peoples is an Arab. And if he does not recognize this, and if he is not proud of his Arabism, then we must look for the reasons that have made him take this stand. It may be an expression of ignorance; in that case we must teach him the truth. It may spring from an indifference or false consciousness; in that case we must enlighten him and lead him to the right path. It may result from extreme egoism; in that case we must limit his egoism. But under no circumstances, should we say: "As long as he does not wish to be an Arab, and as long as he is disdainful of his Arabness, then he is not an Arab." He is an Arab regardless of his own wishes. Whether ignorant, indifferent, undutiful, or disloyal, he is an Arab, but an Arab without consciousness or feeling, and perhaps even without conscience." (Translation from Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair [Princeton and Oxford, 2003] p. 72. See also Martin Kramer's "Arab Nationalism: Mistaken Identity".)

It is precisely this spirit that Salem's satire is making fun of, as well as the equally fascist spirit of Islamism:

""You didn't mention that you are an Arab," he pointed out.

“The Arabs are my fathers, but the Egyptians are my forefathers; do you advise me to inherit from my fathers and ignore the treasures left to me by my forefathers?" I asked him.

"I don't advise you, I order you."

"Who are you sir, to order me?"

"I'm the mohtasib (inspector) of the Nile Valley Street."

"Show me your papers."

"They are standing in front of you now. I'm the person and the document."

"Who gave you the right to ... ?"

"I gave it to myself."

"What is it that you want sir?"

"For you not to think of the Mediterranean," he replied.

"I couldn't do that, even if I wanted to."

"You are thinking in a dangerous way. You don't belong to the Mediterranean or to Egypt or to Africa. You belong to the kingdom of God and you are one of His subjects."

"The whole universe belongs to His Almighty Kingdom, but I have an address, a place of residence, a location, a site, a history, laws, a constitution ... I have rights.
"You have to forget the sea. Did you try to enjoy the charms of the sands?"

"Look sir, I love deserts, forests, lakes and valleys, but I'm mad about the sea."

"So I'm talking to a mad person."

"Yes, if that answer makes you happy.""

This is also in many ways a reenactment of the Husri-Hussein debate over Arabism (I owe this insight, as well as the reference below, to Lee Smith). Hussein correctly diagnosed Arab nationalism and its Pan-Arab vision as a fanatical reformulation of Islam, a charge that Husri vehemently denied. For a discussion, see Bassam Tibi's Arab Nationalism, pp. 186-88.

Nabil Fayyad also takes on the pillar of Husri's system, namely language, and its applicability to Syria (all my translation):

"[N]one of the aforementioned elements [i.e. language, religion, some common history] apply to Syria for us to say that it is a purely Arab country.

On the one hand Arabic is not the only dominant language in Syria. Kurdish for example is the language of hundreds of thousands of the Syrian people. Syriac-Aramaic is the language and origin of the Syrian people before the Islamic invasion. Add to that several important linguistic islands such as Armenian, Circassian, Dagestanian, and Turkmeni... etc."

Fayyad tries, with mixed success, to avoid the errors of Antoun Saade, which were the same errors of al-Husri (a unitary identity based on a völkisch organic view), saying:

"To talk about a singular identity for Syria misreads Syrian history, ancient and modern, and is blind to the Syrian demographic reality which is built on pluralism."

But her goes beyond that to address the same Mediterraneanist idea that Salem adopts, with its cross-cultural interaction:

"Syria has always been part of the Mediterranean civilization established by the Greek philosophers, who were in turn influenced by the ancient Syrian epistemological repertoire."

Fayyad, paralleling Salem's metaphors of attraction to the desert or the sea, concludes:

"Ethnic identity, in our opinion which we force on no one, is not based on linguistic silliness or religious fairy tales. Rather, its basic element is cultural-epistemological. What ties us culturally, as Syrians, across ancient times, with the Mediterranean civilized peoples such as the Greeks, the Italians and the French, is incomparably stronger than what ties us to the desert Wahhabists in the Empty Quarter and Yemen and Najd."

Clearly, this concept of Mediterraneanism has serious weaknesses and needs much refinement. However, it has several advantages over the poisonous Arabism:

1- It's not defined in terms of opposition to the West. Instead, it's based on a vision of cultural and economic interaction with it.

2- It's based on a more complex and textured understanding of identity, contrary to that of Husri's Arabism. In that same spirit, Amin Maalouf writes in his Les Identités Meurtrières:

"Lorsqu'on me demande ce que je suis 'au fin fond de moi-même', cela suppose qu'il y a, 'au fin fond' de chacun, une seule appartenance qui compte, sa 'vérité profonde' en quelque sorte, son 'essence', déterminée une fois pour toutes à la naissance et qui ne changera plus; comme si le reste, tout le reste -- sa trajectoire d'homme libre, ses convictions acquises, ses préférences, sa sensibilité propre, ses affinités, sa vie, en somme -- , ne comptait pour rien." (pp. 10-11). (Transl. "When they ask me who I am 'deep down inside', that assumes that there is, 'deep down inside' everyone, one single belonging that counts, his/her 'deep truth' of sorts, his/her 'essence', determined once and for all at birth and that will never change; as if the rest, all the rest -- his/her trajectory as a free human being, his/her acquired convictions, his/her preferences, his/her proper sensibility, his/her affinities, his/her life, in sum --, counts for nothing.")

This attitude allows for admission of, and reconciliation with, all that precedes, and follows, the Arab and Islamic advent. It's a vision of pluralism, and thus true acceptance of the other as other. It's a broad vision of enrichment, not a narrow vision of narcissism.

3- It's a vision that allows for a true concept of citizenship based on a finite political entity, a country. It's not hanging onto a utopian supra-national Volk.

4- As such, it's a liberal vision, based on French, British and American models rather than a Romantic German or a fascist one.

Therefore, Peter Speetjens completely missed the point! I'll hold off on him for now, hoping to pick up on his piece and its errors in the course of the ensuing discussion. Stay tuned!

JIHADIS FROM SAUDI ARABIA CONDUCT CYBERJIHAD TODAY

2006-04-28T16:43:00.000-07:00

Today several American weblogs were shut down most of the day and some are still not up due to a Cyber attack from apparent "Jihadis" in Saudi Arabia.

Hosting matters was hit but apparently right of center and anti-Jihadi weblogs were attacked. Aaron who regularly searches and finds Jihadist funding and recruiting web sites has been hacked several times in the past month alone and is still down.

Michelle has more of the details.

On a side note. Sorry Michelle but Katie Couric is very cute and you posting her High School Cheerleading picture at your site is only further displaying that. :-)

CLOONEYS IN SUDAN SAY ORGANIZED GENOCIDE URGE ACTION

2006-04-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

(Previous post on Sudan at the UN Security Council here)

I just watched Nick and George Clooney on Fox with Shepard Smith. They'll be on the news shows as well. George and his father Nick traveled through Sudan via a single engine plane. They said it is an organized and planned Genocide and that they could not imagine the depth of cruelty they saw. GEORGE.... paraphrased -

"The Government sends in planes to bomb towns and villages. As the resident flee into the mountains the Janaweed then murder the villagers fleeing for their life....... we went to an area where 1000 displaced families were living under trees without food or water... when the rainy season comes they will be flooded out and die.........
(film clip George took shown with his voice over) The Arab militias are murdering the black population in an organized Genocide"

George then mentions that it changes you when you see cruelty like this.

We are witnessing a Genocide in front of our eyes and we can do something about it now..."
"There are problems. China and Russia are resisting Security Council Resolutions and France has been shaky on it as well...... but something can be done and pressure can be brought..... etc....."

What I still find ASTOUNGING is how the word Arab and Muslim are barely ever used when describing this Genocide.

Unfortunately perhaps it's not Whites, Europeans or Christians committing this heinous Genocide? Then we might see blaring and scathing attention from the Western press and general public Consciousness.

The Arab world and Al Jazeera would be endlessly trumpeting out pictures! Louis Farakhan and Jesse Jackson as well as the Arab League would be going nuts... Al Sharpton and Congressman Rangel have attended small rallies outside the Sudan Embassy in NY. However, overall the reaction is astoundingly PASSIVE.

Sudan's biggest financial backers are Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the Arab League prevents any action at the UN General Assembly. As I noted previously Clooney above China and Russia as well as France have been preventing UN Security Council action.

BUT - How many public demonstrations and "peace rallies" in Europe and the US have we sern regarding Iraq? How many "peace activists" actually went to Iraq to protect the Hussein regime before the war?

The EU and BBC (which has had extensive coverage) only softly and rarely describe the Genocidal party involved.

It strongly appears as Western self-censored fear of sounding too critical of Arabs or Muslims.. This is reverse (soft) racism and results in carelessness to Genocide!!

It is even described as -

"rebels" fighting the "gov't forces"....

Rebels? Starving defenseless Civilians being slaughtered, raped and enslaved described the same way as Zarquawi's Murderers are? Can you imagine?

How about SCREAMING -

"Genocide committed by the Arab Muslim militias and Government in Khartoum.... against the unarmed starving Black population in Darfur...

The groups themselves describe the conflict as - Arabs and Blacks. It has other dimensions and the Northern Arabs are darker than some other Arabs (if this could even be a universal color anyway) and often similar in color to the Black populations. However, make no mistake about it this is an Arab - Ethnic and Cultural Genocide on Black Africans.

Note the Arab Militias in the North first committed Genocide on the Black ChristiansAnimists in the South - Manute Bol's people and now the Black Muslims in Darfur..

Tony Badran explains -

He never once mentions that the terms "black" and "Arab" are in fact used by the parties in the conflict themselves. The Arabs call the Fur, Masalit, Baggara and Zaghawa, zurga ("black") and identify themselves as Arab (and are called "Arabs" by the Fur et al.) Regardless of the fact that they both share the same skin color, or the same religion or language! This is very much an "ethnic conflict"! These are ethnic boundaries, regardless of whether we can tell them apart in pictures!
It's cognitive. And the fact that they use terms like "zurga" or "Arab" means that these are meaningful ethnic boundaries for them.

Here is Manute Bol's best friend (a Sudanese Christian) describing the Genocide on HBO Real Sports recently -

....told them the greatest threat they would face in the future would be from Islamist Fundamentalism, at which most (Congressmen he and Bol met with in the 90's) laughed.

Meanwhile, as I previously noted Tony describes Arabism at Arab States at Its Ugliest. Nouri describes how most money and attention in the Arab world goes to the Palestine Industry, as she calls it while there are far greater tragedies occurring.

George Clooney Travel to Darfur Calls for International Aid

Nick and George urge International Aid

Christian Persecution and Emigration in the Middle East - George Kattan

2006-04-28T05:13:00.000-07:00

Arab intellectual George Kattan on the deteriorating situation of Christians in Arab countries:

During the [Arab] Renaissance, many Christians played a prominent role in introducing concepts from the Enlightenment [into the Arab world], reexamining the Arabic language, highlighting the uniqueness of Arab culture, challenging Ottoman backwardness and tyranny, and calling for the establishment of a modern state based on national, rather than religious, affiliation...
"Their unique participation [in public life] reached its peak in the 'liberal period,' during the second half of the previous century, when there were prominent [Christian] philosophers, intellectuals, ministers, parliament members and party members.
"With the ascent of the semi-secular military regimes, with their pan-Arab and socialist slogans - especially in Egypt, Iraq and Syria - there was a decrease in the participation of Christians in the political arena. Though these regimes did not persecute the Christians, their absolute tyranny was the main reason for the advent of extremist fundamentalist Islamism, which calls for [the establishment of] an Islamic state that would discriminate against religious minorities, marginalize them and encourage them to emigrate...
"The spreading of the Islamic movement and extremist Salafi views throughout Egyptian society led to the removal of Copts from the Parliament, municipalities, labor unions and [other] prominent positions, and limitations began to be imposed on the building and renovation of churches. Some [churches] were [even] attacked and burned down, and Christians were accused of heresy. [...]
"During its last years in power, Saddam's regime in Iraq gave the Salafi movements freedom of action, and after its fall [these movements] led the terrorist activity along with the remnants of the old regime... Among their most conspicuous actions was the bombing of six churches on a single Sunday, resulting in massive Christian emigration. Since the Gulf War, at least a third of Iraq's Christian population has emigrated [to other countries]...
"In the West Bank and Gaza, armed Islamic movements regard Palestine as a Muslim waqf [religious endowment], and call to defend the places holy to the Muslims while disregarding places holy to the Christians... The few Christian women living in Gaza have to wear a veil out of fear of the extremists. A few weeks ago, the last shop selling wines in Gaza was bombed, even though it belonged to international organizations...
"The Christians of Saudi Arabia were rooted out centuries ago. The hundreds of thousands of Christians who now work in Saudi Arabia, arriving from the neighboring countries or from far-away lands, are not allowed to build churches there. [Moreover], they risk beatings, imprisonment, and deportation, [even] if they hold their ceremonies in secret, in their own homes. At the same time, the Saudi regime uses its oil profits to build grandiose mosques all over 'heretical' Europe.
"The Christians in Lebanon have diminished from 50% before the civil war to 35% today. Christians comprise 3.5 million out of the 5 million Lebanese emigrants living in the West...
"While in ancient times, discrimination, marginalization, accusations of heresy, and persecution drove many [Christians] to convert to Islam, today they are driven to emigrate, as long as the gates remain open. This may cause Christianity to decline in its original home in the East.
"Are we moving towards exclusively Muslim societies? Will this deterioration stop here, or will it lead, after the Eastern countries are emptied of Christians, to [a state] of sectarian purity in each country?

JUAN COLE SELF PROMOTION CAMPAIGN CONTINUES...

2006-04-28T01:55:00.000-07:00

Tony at Across the Bay has posted again on Juan Cole's latest breathtaking self promotion. This guy's disingenous self-importance has no bounds. As Tony noted he will do anything It's Yale or Bust.

A little HISTORY on this guy.... He's got a long history of slander, conspiracy mongering, arrogance, getting facts embarrassingly wrong, and low down classlessness.

Just one example from above.

In September 2004 the Iraqi Brothers at Iraq the Model poltely destroyed the credibility of a Iraqi blogger treasured by Juan Cole Who's lying?

Then in November 2004 Iraqi brothers Ali and Mohammed at Iraq the Model
noted how Juan and Professor Kahlidi at Columbia, used completely flawed history as the cruxt of their entire story on Iraq. They were using this story to demonstrate the naiivete/ignornace of the American siege on Fallujah.
Iraq Pundit noted as well

If figures like Khalidi and Cole want to put their scholarly reputations at risk to pursue their political ends, that is their affair. But there is much more at stake here than academic politics.Arabism cost the Arab world the latter half of the 20th century; now some Arabist intellectuals of the West are doing what they can to derail the hope of a liberalized Iraq, including the distortion of Iraqi history. That's why the resistance provided by such sites as Iraq the Model and Across the Bay is important.

So what did Professor Cole do? He painted the Iraqi brothers as being CIA feted front men.

Across the Bay has a good rundown in his Kommisr Cole post.

Ali of Iraq the Model responded The Return of the Professor (12-13-04)

And responded politely again to Cole's weak reply here. Answers and clarifications (12-16-04)

The entire blogsphere jumped all over Cole though
Iraq Pundit further pointed out his ignorance.
Even Dean Esmay had to note the Emasculation of Juan Cole continues

STORY THAT WILL MAKE YOU CRY

2006-04-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

It's tragic, eerie and touching at the same time.

The one and only Head Heeb (his eminence of the blogsphere) points out this story.

It's been a while since any any Holocaust story made me as emotional as this one, about three Slovakian Jews who -

On Tuesday, 61 years after they parted ways for the last time, Ladislav-Yehuda Reich and Robert-Yehoshua Bichler met their good friend Fritz Steiner. The three men, who were born in Slovakia and survived one of the last selections conducted at the children's shed in Birkenau-Auschwitz, have three consecutive numbers tattooed on their arms: B14564, B14565, B14566.
On Tuesday they were reunited once again, looked at the numbers on their arms, held each other's hands and said to one another in tears: Who would believe we would survive the horror, stay alive and meet here in Israel?
It's trite at this point to describe the Holocaust as one of the twentieth century's great tragedies, but some of its stories have proven remarkably life-affirming. There probably won't be too many more reunions like this one, but it's oddly comforting to know that even a catastrophe like this can bring lives together.

Also check out his post on Nepal . I don't share his optimism on the Sudan but hope his instincts are on target. He is one of the most knowledgeable people on the internet. Manute Bol's words have seered me with skepticism when it comes to anything concerning the Genocide Regime in Khartoum

ANOTHER JOHN BOLTON - US VICTORY AT THE UN

2006-04-26T04:53:00.000-07:00

Remember John Bolton - our UN Rep the Democrats squashed a vote on in the Sentaate?

First, he secured the first ever UN Sec Resolution against Syria's occupation of Lebanon, then got the first ever Resolution condemning Hezbollah by name for cross border attacks on Israel. He then attempted to re-organize the completely dis-respected UN ~~Human Rights~~ 'Sadists' Commission. Jimmy Carter unilaterally decided he was still President and subverted a standing Government Embassador.

Captain Ed now reports due to his tenacity (again) Bolton secured a first ever UN Sec Council Resolution concerning Sudan and the on going Genocide there.

(Also check out Across the Bay's post on the Sudan 'Arabism at Its Most Ugly'. Tony, the writer, is Arabic and grew up in Lebanon and about to receive his Doctorate in MEast Studies from NYU. He lays it out pretty bluntly)

John Bolton successfully pushed through sanctions on four Sudanese that have participated in war crimes despite earlier resistance from genocide-apologists Russia and China.

The UN Security Council voted unanimously, with three key abstentions, to block the assets and travel of the quartet:
The Security Council passed a resolution on Tuesday imposing the first sanctions in the violence that has killed more than 200,000 villagers and driven two million people from their homes in Darfur, in western Sudan.
Twelve members of the 15-nation Council voted in favor of the American-drafted measure, which will freeze the assets of four Sudanese accused of war crimes and instructs nations to block their entry
Three countries — China, Qatar and Russia — abstained.

Note, Sudan, China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Libya all serve on the UN Human Rights Commission - the one Jimmy Carter protected.

Bolton is quoted -

"I think today's sanction resolution shows that the Security Council is serious, that its resolutions have to be complied with, that it is prepared to take enforcement steps if they are not complied with,"

Here is how he pushed through the Resolution -

Bolton had previously tried to have sanctions imposed on the four through quiet channels available at the UNSC, which allows resolutions to pass by acclamation as long as no one voices a public objection to it.
Russia and China balked at the sanctions, even though Bolton had carefully focused the punishment on four individuals responsible for the atrocities rather than on the nation as a whole.
Earlier American envoys may have shelved the effort at that point to retain comity among the members, but instead Bolton went public and upped the ante, allowing the obstructionism of Russia and China to be seen clearly.
It represents a victory not just for Bolton but for human rights and justice. His bold approach managed to embarrass Russia and China, at least temporarily. It sends a signal to both nations that the US has lost patience with their protection for terrorists and genocidists, a lesson that has more application to bigger issues than Sudan. The lack of a veto indicates that the message has been received.

UPDATE: Mick Hartley calls the Security Council Resolution a symbolic gesture and cites this BBC artice -

The UN Security Council has passed a resolution imposing sanctions against four Sudanese nationals accused of war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region.

The four include two rebel leaders, a former Sudanese air force chief, and the leader of a pro-government militia, accused of widespread atrocities.

In Darfur itself, a BBC correspondent has found evidence of continuing attacks on civilians by militias.

Violence in Darfur has killed some 100,000 people and created 2m refugees.
Last week, the top UN aid official said the humanitarian situation in Darfur was as bad as when the conflict came to the world's attention in 2004.
The BBC's Orla Guerin in Darfur met streams of civilians who said they were fleeing their remote village of Jogana.
They said they had been attacked by government aircraft and militiamen that were fighting rebel forces in the area.
Our correspondent said she could hear the sound of bombing from 40km (25 miles) away.
African Union (AU) peacekeepers met the civilians and gave them water but did not intervene in the fighting.
African Union (AU) peacekeepers met the civilians and gave them water but did not intervene in the fighting.
'Tough to enforce'
The UN resolution was sponsored by the US, which says a genocide is being committed against black Africans in Darfur.
The war crimes suspects - Adam Yacub Shant, Gabril Abdul Kareem Badri, Gaffar Mohamed Elhassan and Sheikh Musa Hilal - would be subject to a ban on foreign travel and have any assets held abroad frozen.
The BBC's correspondent at the UN headquarters in New York, Laura Trevelyan, said it had taken weeks to get to this point and the sanctions could be difficult to enforce.
Russia and China, both permanent members of the Security Council with the power to veto the resolution, had initially opposed this move, but chose to abstain because the African nations supported the sanctions.
This is the first time those involved in Darfur's atrocities have been directly targeted.
However the BBC's Jonah Fisher in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, says the effect of the sanctions will be more psychological than physical.......
Sudan's governments has consistently said the scale of the problem in Darfur is being exaggerated for political reasons.
It denies backing the Arab Janjaweed militias accused of mass rape, killing and looting.
The UN is also considering taking control of the peace mission from the cash-strapped AU.
Sudan opposes such moves, saying extra funding should instead be given to the 7,000 hard-pressed AU peacekeepers already in Darfur.

49% of Egyhptians Say Israel Blew Up Dahab Resort

2006-04-25T17:44:00.000-07:00

I first reported on the terrorist attack in the Sinai resort town of Dahab yesterday. At the time I noted how an Egyptian General had already gone on Al Jazeera and blamed the Israeli Mossad as the smoke was still smoldering and the bodies 'still warm'.. (no disrespect intended) Thinking - 'there is always some idiot exception that Al Jazeera is going to prop up to blame Israel.......'

Well, silly me how I was wrong. Al Jazeera is of course only playing to its audience's core beliefs and pyschoses.

Big Pharaoh notes a recent online poll at Egypt's #1 web portal. The question asks people whom they think was behind the bombings in Dahab yesterday.

48.9% of the respondents so far think that the Israeli Mossad
4.2% believe it was Al-Qaeda
21% think it was the work of internal terrorist groups

Now, does anyone want to talk about the minority of people who hold radical beliefs? And why Osama Bin Laden is so good at winning popular support in the Arab world.

Richard Silverstein (a 'Progressive') has another post up showing how we can avoid giving Osama a further good name in the neighborhood. Of course by leaving Iraq, demanding Israel leave every inch of land, and stay out of Sudan as well. The point is the Arab Street or State of Mind is dysfunctional and that is the root cause and underlying problem.

What will fix it?

If you read Big Pharaoh or Nouri's - posts - It May Take a War the prospects for the far out-numbered Arab liberal minority IS NOT GOOD.
**I detail this in this post the Mental State of War**

I note Mental War in the Arab Islamic World, in this case Egypt who has a Peace Agreement with Israel. The MSMedia's clueless reporting or editing out ~~lying to the public~~ relevant information ~~under the guise of Multicultural Sensitivity~~ that might be critical of the problems in the Arab or Islamic world is only adding fuel to the fire.

IRONICALLY or SADLY Allison (from Israel) notes this yesterday -

The news broke into the Israeli television programming on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day. From the depressing to the upsetting.
Israel is offering medical assistance to the Egyptian Red Crescent organization -- the Eilat hospital is very close to the areas, the ambulances are ready, but so far, the television anchors are saying the Egyptians aren't interested.
There are definitely a lot of Egyptian victims, and some Europeans as well. The timing seems somewhat off -- that sounds harsh, but it's true. Last week, that area would have been teeming with both Europeans on Easter vacation and Israelis on Passover vacation.
Israelis were warned very strongly not to go to Sinai. Some did anyway, but after last year's Sinai attack, most people heeded the warning this time. Israeli pundits on TV are saying that this was no surprise to anybody, and that the Egyptian authorities knew something was brewing -- that they tried to track them down, and obviously failed.
Fox News says it was aimed at Coptic Christians who were in Dahab celebrating something.

Big Pharaoh (copied below) then notes a conversation with his well educated friends...... as well his personal feelings - which you should read and seer into your brain.

Two of my friend, both very educated and belong to the upper class, believe that Israel killed 23 people in Dahab yesterday. When I asked why they think so, one of them had this to say.
"Israeli tourists don't go to Eilat (a southern Israeli resort) anymore. Dahab and Sinai is much more cheaper and so they come to Egypt instead of spending their holidays in Israel" she explained.
"So you're telling me Israel targeted a resort that is frequented by its own people and could have killed Israelis just to stop them from sunbathing in Sinai???" I asked.
"Yes. They could kill a few of their citizens to save the tourism industry there" she shot back.
I wanted to bang my head against a wall!

"Up till now we don't want to look in the mirror and see what's wrong with us and with our culture. This is the reason why I don't see light at the end of tunnel anytime soon as far as our Arab/Islamic world is concerned."

I have said countless times before that the root cause of the darkness we're living in is our unwillingness to look in the mirror and start criticizing ourselves and the cult of death we allowed to infect our society.

We don't want to admit that many of our children are willing to kill themselves in order to massacre others.
We don't want to admit that religion needs renewal and reform to suit the year 2006 and not 1006.
We don't want to admit anything of that. Do you know why ladies and gentlemen we don't want to do that?
We're just busy and in a constant state of denial. We're busy hating America. We're busy blaming Israel.
We are also living in a disgusting state of narcissism. We think we are the best nation handpicked by God. Our nations have the best religion approved by heaven. Nothing wrong can be in us, nothing wrong can be in our culture, and nothing wrong can be in our religious beliefs. It must be the evil "outsiders."

....I am referring to our general condition that gave birth to murderers from Bali to New York. Many are to blame here. Our repressive governments, the economic disaster they created, the humiliation millions of youth are feeling, and above all the deadly religious rhetoric that wants to draw us hundreds of years backward.

I thought we'll finally start looking in the mirror once we ourselves get bombed by terrorists. I thought that once we get torn into pieces by suicide bombers we'll realize that the Palestinian suicide bomber will not end up in paradise but in the lowest pit of hell.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. We're still so busy to look in the mirror and see the ugly face there.

UPDATE: Here is the Conspiratorial Hate that that showed up at Big Pharaoh and Karim's (One Arab World) Blog (prior to further Sinai attacks) -

Memo said:“God damn it they just refuse to leave us alone killers”
Exactly WHO? are you referring to?
written by gsrwave at 2006/04/24 - 22:55:09

COMEDY CENTRAL SOUTH PARK WIMP OUT AND TRY TO COVER

2006-04-25T12:52:00.000-07:00

This article about an Arab Airline that has hijacked character images from South Park has some great information on the Comedy Central hypocrisy - editing out the image of Mohammed. Another words a show that lampoons everything made special accomdations after the fact for 1 group. Note, the image of Mohammed wasn't even offensive and the same show had an image of Jesus shitting on GW and the flag.

From WND article -

"South Park" has made its mark on society by poking fun at countless people and topics, and Fox noted there are certain liberties people can take to skewer others. "As satirists we can do that," he said. "Satire is protected by the First Amendment."
[....]As WND reported, Comedy Central barred the program from showing an image of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an episode last week, but did allow a scene in which an image of Jesus Christ defecates on President Bush and the American flag.
The network issued a statement in connection with that, saying: "In light of recent world events, we feel we made the right decision."

The show notorious for being offensive and satirical is suddenly concerned about being PC. Ironically, the show itself that night has characters questioning the oppressing of free speech.

VIDEO MOHAMMED SHOW 1 HERE
VIDEO MOHAMMED SHOW 2 HERE

"South Park" actually depicted Muhammad, without protest, in a 2001 episode.
William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights took aim at Parker and Stone for allowing the network to censor their work in last night's episode.
"The ultimate hypocrite is not Comedy Central – that's their decision not to show the image of Muhammad or not – it's Parker and Stone," Donohue said. "Like little whores, they'll sit there and grab the bucks. They'll sit there and they'll whine and they'll take their shot at Jesus. That's their stock in trade."

OUCH! Assumably, it was somehow OK in 2001 to depict Mohammed... just not now? In 'light of world events' that is?

SCIENTOLOGY - TOM CRUISE - VIACOM MONOPOLY

Last month, outspoken Scientologist Isaac Hayes, an Oscar-winning soul singer heard by millions in recent years as the "Chef" character on the show quit the cartoon four months after an episode spoofing Scientology.
The episode mocked Scientologists such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and included the continuous punchline of "Tom Cruise won't come out of the closet."

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE SCIENTOLOGY EPISODE (hilarious)

The aired the episode last fall. I assume they're not afraid of Tom or millions of Scientology adherents though.... so it's ok to (justifably) mock the shit out of them. I might add in a hilarious episode.

~~Chef~~ Isaac comments -

"There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins," the 63-year-old Hayes said in a statement.

Isaace (Shaft) is the man, but come on get serious. You've been on a show that has mocked everything for years now and haven't said a word. Suddenly after a show on Scientology you're "offended"?

"Religious beliefs are sacred to people, and at all times should be respected and honored," he continued, never mentioning the Scientology episode, but citing the global controversy over cartoon depictions of the prophet Muhammad. "As a civil-rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices."

Yeah, ok Isaac. Now you're co-opting the Mohammed controversy and suddenly your Civil Rights badckground is offended?.... Pathetic. You said NADA and cashed your checks for how long now? and said what? after all the Jesus episodes.

The creators, whose show recently won a prestigious Peabody Award, struck back with an episode in which Chef appeared to be killed and then have his brains scrambled by the "Super Adventure Club," which turns members into pedophiles.

These guys are friggin too much!

South Park Scientology Saga Staggers On: Chef is Back--Or is He??!

UPDATE: EdMorrisey states Comedy Central/South Park caved in on showing a repeat of the Scientology "Tom Come out of the Closet" episode this past March.

I'm not sure that new viewers of the show will get the censorship gag. Comedy Central pulled the "Trapped In The Closet" episode after Isaac Hayes quit the show, and rumor has it that Viacom star Tom Cruise pressured the company to force it out of the rotation. South Park has depicted Mohammed in the past, as I noted last week. The black slides were all about spanking CC, not caving to Islamists. The two-episode set targeted wimpy broadcast executives and hypersensitive viewers as well as the Islamofascist lunatics. The Anchoress gets it.

Comedy Central confirmed with NRO's Steven Spruiell that they indeed censored the South Park episode to block the depiction of Mohammed. I'm flabbergasted; I cannot comprehend how they could do that while still leaving the "Super Best Friends" episode in the rotation and a depiction of Mohammed in the opening credits. After their cave-in on "Trapped In The Closet", I suppose I should not have been so surprised, but I really am. And very disappointed. On the plus side, we finally got Michelle to watch the show ...

Media Blog at NRO has more on the Scientology episode controversy -

Tom Can't Handle the Truth...

... so he threatened to boycott Mission Impossible III publicity efforts unless Paramount pressured Viacom to pressure Comedy Central to pull an episode of South Park that makes fun of Scientologists:

HOLLYWOOD bully Tom Cruise got Comedy Central to cancel Wednesday night's cablecast of a controversial "South Park" episode about Scientology by warning that he'd refuse to promote "Mission Impossible 3," insiders say.
Since Paramount is banking on "MI3" to rake in blockbuster profits this summer, and Paramount is owned by Viacom, which also owns Comedy Central, the tactic worked.
The "South Park" episode, "Trapped in the Closet," pokes fun at Scientology and shows Cruise, John Travolta and R. Kelly (who is not a Scientologist, but has a song called "Trapped in the Closet") literally in a closet.
The episode, which first aired last November, was set to rerun Wednesday night, but was mysteriously pulled at the last minute.

I usually don't get worked up over the media-consolidation bogeyman, but if it means our entertainment choices can be held hostage by Scientologists, I might have to reconsider my free-market views.

View part of the episode here, or download the whole thing here. Hilarious.
Chef Gate website dedicated to the 'controversy'
See the amazing episode that has been stopped by Tom Cruise! Episode available online here (RealMedia) and here (web streaming) and here (AVI).

Stone and Parker (writers of South Park) strike back

So, Scientology, you may have won THIS battle, but the million-year war for earth has just begun! Temporarily anozinizing our episode will NOT stop us from keeping Thetans forever trapped in your pitiful man-bodies. Curses and drat! You have obstructed us for now, but your feeble bid to save humanity will fail! Hail Xenu!!!-Trey Parker and Matt Stone, servants of the dark lord Xenu[ 03/17/2006 01:46 PM ]

ISRAELI FOREIGN MINISTRY - ARABIC LANGUAGE SITE A BIG HIT

2006-04-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

My reaction was you'd think a country like Israel would have had done this years ago. But once again, Israel's 'phenomenal' PR is way behind the times. Nonetheless, the Arabic site just opened and is already receiving favorable reviews from Arabic surfers.

FOREIGN MINISTRY SITE A BIG HIT WITH ARABS

The new and improved Foreign Ministry Arabic-language website is already eliciting excited responses from Arabs abroad, Ministry officials say.
"This is the only official website in the Arabic language that includes such comprehensive information about Israel. There is no other official website of this scope in Israel," said Amira Oreo, who heads the Arab Media Division at the Ministry.

Well that's comforting that noone else before now had the forethought to think of this while Al Manar and Al Jazeera become ever more inventive and gain more and more prominence. Unbelieveable!

We regret that we are alone in this arena but we're proud to be the only website with accessible, vast information, and even historic documents like the peace agreement that was signed in Camp David," she said.
"Our vision is to develop this website so it becomes comparable to our English-language site, which comprises more than 20,000 documents after 10 yeas of work," Oron addad.
"We also present Israel beyond the conflict, for example the Schneider Children Hospital that uses its advanced technology to treat Israeli and Arab children," said Timora Shapira, the site's content editor and technical director.
"Along with innovations in the fields of science and medicine, we also have content about issues related to politics, such as Israel's diplomatic ties with other countries, including Egypt and Jordan."

And it is already paying off.

The upgraded site was launched only a few days ago, but it already received enthusiastic feedbacks from surfers in the Arab world.
"The website is organized and rich in information. Arab websites make use of the site to prepare articles about Israel and the Jewish people. This is real information without distortion," an Arab surfer from Europe wrote.
Another visitor commented: "I'm very impressed with the site. It includes comprehensive information about Israel that most people aren't aware of."
Meanwhile, another Arab surfer was impressed with the videos aimed at boosting Israel's image, and an editor of a small Arab newspaper was granted permission to use content from the website after submitting a request.

BELGIUM MURDER UPDATE

2006-04-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

My post on the brutal stabbing murder of a Belgian teenager noted how the BBC and Wire Services edited out critical content from the story. Namely, that it was suspected that it was perpetrated by North African Muslim street gang members who have previously been implicated in a growing violent gang culture.

It turns out that the 2 'youths' were Polish immigrants. Nordish Portal sums up the new information and points to Brussels Journal excellent summation.

Brussles Journal has an excellent and well thought out post on this -

It was generally assumed that the murderers were North Africans because violent gangs of North Africans are active in the city, especially in the no-go areas which include parts of Molenbeek.
Fouad Ahidar, a Moroccan-born Flemish member of the Brussels regional parliament, at whose initiative last Sunday’s commemoration march for Joe was held, said after the murder:
“This murder stinks of racism. [...] There is a growing group of criminal Moroccan and Turkish youths who go after victims who look like infidels. We have to fight racism in all its varieties, whether by the immigrants or the native community.” The march drew 80,000 participants – native Belgians as well as immigrants.

Then he goes on to say something else that the BBC or AFP would never think of stating........

“I do not need Hirsi Ali to say that immigrants have been pampered for far too long. But I take a moderate view, for example about the hijab........

The Belgian community is criticized for their indifference to criminals and helping their fellow man.

The Belgians hope that the arrest of Joe’s murderers indicates a change in the current pattern of lawlessness. After the Van Holsbeeck murder Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and Cardinal Godfried Danneelsblamed Belgians for their indifference because no-one in the crowded central station had interfered to stop the murderers from stabbing the boy. Glenn Audenaert, the chief of the Brussels judiciary, told the paper Het Nieuwsblad (18 April):

Noteworthy -

In a country where it is illegal to bear arms, including protective ‘arms’ such as a pepperspray, people wonder how they should protect themselves and others against armed criminals

Here is 1 Belgian businessman who did fight back and look what happened to him.

In 1999, Wouter Tyberghien, a young jeweller in the Flemish town of Harelbeke, took the law into his own hands and shot a Polish gangster, who together with two accomplices had rammed his jewellery shop with an SUV. The jeweller, who had been robbed before, was arrested and jailed, which caused widespread public indignation. Tyberghien was convicted for manslaughter and has since closed down his business. He said that he loved his trade, but does not want to go through the same ordeal again, explaining that he fears that if he is ever targeted by criminals again he will not be able to resist the urge to fight back.

Here is the money quote from Brussels Journal. As a result of the murderers being of Polish descent, not North African, the reaction - instead of resulting finally in some critical discussion of the growing problem - will cause an even further avoidance of any discussion whatsoever.

Today the announcement that Joe Van Holsbeeck’s murderers are not North African but Polish immigrants has led to reproaches of racism against everyone (including this website) who during these past days has warned about the problem posed by violent gangs of youths of a particular ethnicity.
While until yesterday it looked as if a taboo would finally be addressed, it is now far more likely that the taboo will be suppressed and the situation will fester on.
And yet, while the regime and the establishment close their eyes in denial, ordinary people are aware of what is going on. It would be interesting to know how many Belgians buy peppersprays in Germany and France – and, hence, how many have come to realize that for their own protection they can count only on themselves and no longer on the state.

UPDATE: Earlier post at Brusseld Journal has an additional noteworthy quote by the Moroccan MP. Of course, also ignored by MSM News outlets.

Ahidar, a father of five, already called for a protest march on 15 April, saying that if the victims had been immigrants and not Belgians, “or even if an immigrant just gets a few kicks from police officers, half of Brussels would be on the streets in solidarity with the victim.”

Then Ahidar's quote about the racism of Muslim street gangs is cited and Brussels Journal comments.....

What Ahidar says is common knowledge but only he may say so. If a native Belgian makes such comments he or she risks being taken to court for racism by the authorities’ racism watchdog CEOOR, an instrument used by the government parties to silence political opponents.

And since the BBC deletes facts from the story they have to further edit other facts. If this is not George Orwellian I don't know what is.

In response to Ahidar's appeal many immigrant organisations had called on their members to participate in the protest. Because the BBC report does not mention the ethnicity of the murderers it also has to omit the presence of immigrants in the protest.
“There are many Muslims here,” imam Nordine Taouil told Flemish radio and television today. He stressed that many imams had called upon the faithful to be present. “We are here to show that we oppose violence.”

ISREL GETS NOTHING AND GETS NOTHING - THE GREEK TRAGEDY CONTINUES....

2006-04-24T22:06:00.000-07:00

I couldn't have summed up the continuing tragedy in Israel better than Lynn. Go and read her post.

The more I learn about Ehud Olmert the less comfortable I am with him and the more fearful for Israel I am.

The tragedy of Shaorn's stroke caused by his doctor's astounding negligence sadly looms larger and larger as this neophyte with no apparent backbone takes over. I don't buy for a second that Sharosn's doctors negligence didn't cause it.

THE MENTAL STATE OF WAR - The Moor Next Door Blog

2006-04-24T18:32:00.000-07:00

I was reading through Nouri's excellent blog The Moor Next Door. He is Algerian. I suggest adding him to your reading.

I just finished his excellent post Profiles in Courage which reviews his reading of Barry Rubin's book The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East. His review is a great read.

The Long War for Freedom answers the oft asked questions of "Why don’t Arabs and Muslims speak out against terrorism and aggression?" or "Where are the Arab Democrats?" by providing an abundance of clear and unequivocal examples, and presenting the arguments of Arab liberals in their own words.
Prospects are bleak, but campaigners are committed and bold. Rubin’s book offers little hope as to the growth of liberal movements; that isn’t its point. It rather presents profiles in courage of brave Arabs who are working to put back in place the simplest foundations for democratization and liberalization in the Arab world. Rubin’s book is a must read for those concerned with or interested in Middle Eastern politics or history.

In his post he mentions several true Liberal Arab intellectuals that Rubin details in his book. One of my favorites is Alii Salem, the Egyptian playright, who wrote My Drive to Israel. His writing is insiteful and great reading. The section on the Mental State of War in the Middle East caught my attention.

The mental state of war can be comfortable, indeed pleasurable, especially in the absence of critical thinking, because it arises directly from the most basic of instincts: hostility.
Question: Is it possible to transform the mental state of war into actual war?
The answer: Yes … when people overdose on it, in the hope of reaching a higher level of ecstasy, resulting from the absence of consciousness. Put a large quantity of weapons and ammunition in a bag, add a dash of lies and illusions, throw in a number of irresponsible men, seal the bag and leave it in an open place among people. It’ll definitely blow up in their midst after several months or years.

Before traveling to Israel, I spoke with many friends who opposed my trip. I listened carefully to everything they said. I feared I was missing some angle or key element that would lead to my harming the interests of the Egyptian people. But all I heard were excuses, arising from a mental state of war, from hatred. The only difference between them and me is that I want to get rid of this hatred. I decided to participate in the creation of peace.
Peace is also a mental state. I must drive myself and others to enter such a state. I have great faith that this will be easiest for those who seek freedom."Dear driver, I’ve seen enough of Faluja. Let’s continue on the way to Beer Sheva … We’ve tarried here too long."

The Mental War.... is the Real War. Leftists and so-called progressives love to talk about 'Peace' in the Middle East, meaning the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. These often self-annointed 'progressives' - like Richard Silverstein obssess about Israel and its occupation being the root cause of evil in the region. Their raison d’être is Israel' leaving the West Bank' and conceding to most Palestinian 'demands'. This fallacy - fantasy cure - is not only ignorant but very dangerous as well. They cling with 'religious ferver' to this nottion/ideology due to their arrogance and self-importance. To the average person they think 'Peace' means some 'agrreement' or a piece of paper (Oslo) and people stop dying (for now). But this is a dangerous fallacy.

Nouri summarizes how Rubin's book details that Israel is just the excuse hung on to. The real battle is the backward way of thinking in the Arab Middle East - the stifling of thought and independent thinking.

He quotes an article Rubin wrote "Can Arabs Be Democrats?" in MEQ:

There is a paradox in the Middle East. Incompetent, corrupt governments have failed to develop their own societies, to provide the context for a higher standard of living, and to defeat Israel. Their countries trail the entire world (save sub-Saharan Africa) in most statistics. But these same bad governments have remained in power for more than fifty years and remain entrenched. How do they do this? By systematically redesigning their societies so as to remain in power.....
Passionate issues overwhelm normal thinking. Perceived threats from Israel, the United States, and the West as a whole to Arab values and Islam take priority over all other issues. Waging an eternal battle against these threats means indefinitely postponing development. The Arab-Israeli conflict in particular is too valuable for regimes; deprived of it they might not stand.

War is in the mind and and if the thought process and hate mindset doesn't change then eventually it can or will boil up and cause death and violence. One only nned read Nouri, Big Pharaoh or Ali Salem to realize this.

Egypt has a "Peace" agreement with Israel but make no mistake about it, (like much of the Arab world) it is in a Mental State of War with Israel using the Palestinians as the proxy. One only has to see the reaction Salem got from his friends when traveling to a country they have a so-called Peace Agreement with.

UPDATE: Related from my later post 49% of Egyhptians Say Israel Blew Up Dahab Resort I give these must read links -

".....Big Pharaoh (Interview) or Nouri's - posts - It May Take a War the prospects for the far out-numbered Arab liberal minority IS NOT GOOD."

HATE & INCITEMENT TO MURDER UNDER THE COVER OF 'Multicultural Sensitivity' AT THE NEW YORK TIMES

2006-04-24T13:51:00.000-07:00

Judith notes this multicultural whitewashing of a Brooklyn Mosque via the New York Times
(Add to this previous post on the Mainstream Media's ~~reporting~~ editing out facts of the stories of the murder in Belgium and the Iranian leader's Genocidal Words here.)

In 1994, three weeks before Passover, Ari Halberstam, 16, was riding in a van over the Brooklyn Bridge when Rashid Baz, in a nearby car, shot a bullet into Halberstam’s brain. . . .

On March 5, exactly 12 years to the day Ari died, The New York Times began a three-part series on Imam Reda Shata and the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge. [Ari's mother Devorah] remembered that at the murder trial, witnesses testified that Baz attended a raging anti-Semitic sermon at that very same place. Jews were “racist and fascist, as bad as the Nazis” said a speaker there (not Shata), shortly before Baz got into his car with a Glock semiautomatic pistol and a Cobray machine gun, hunting for Jews.

Mrs. Halberstam the mother of the murdered teenager called the arrogant clueless author of the ~~thorough professionally reported~~ pathetic Orwellian Times series -

But the article, by Andrea Elliot, never mentioned Baz nor his victim. The article, if anything, depicted the mosque as more moderate than not. Elliot did report that the imam praised Hamas and a suicide bomber, even as he “forged friendships with rabbis in New York."
Devorah Halberstam says she called Elliot and asked if the reporter ever heard of Ari Halberstam. According to Halberstam, Elliot answered, “Who?” She never heard of the murder either, adds Halberstam.

“When I told her the story,” says Halberstam, “she just said, ‘That’s a long time ago.’ I said, ‘Excuse me?’ First of all, it’s hardly a long time ago; second, to say that to a mother is disgusting; and third, terror like that is very pertinent to this day and age, after 9-ll.”

Remember that name: Andrea Elliott. Diane West gives her a good spanking here

As far as the art of interviewing goes, the reporter got it exactly backward: Thousands of words; negligible expertise; and no curiosity. . . .

I THINK THE REAL POINT IS - She printed exactly what the Times and the PC world wanted an uncritical untruthful portrait of the Mosque. To report otherwise would be "hateful" (ironically) and not acceeptable in media circles.

She wouldn't have reported otherwise and even if she had she would have been heavily criticized, threatened, and then had the article whitewashed and watered down by the PC Orwellian editors.

One wonders if she recieved some nice accolades for this piece?

TERROR AT RED SEA RESORT - HOPE BIG PHARAOH IS OK

2006-04-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

Roger notes another terrorist attack at the Egyptian Red Sea Resort.

90 people were murdered in three terror bombings (the third such massacre in as many years),

Big Pharaoh left for the Red Sea on a break Sunday

UPDATE: Charles notes the rubble is still smoking, the bodies still warm and Egyptian “analysts” are already accusing the Jooooos!

Egyptian analyst: Can’t rule out that Mossad was involved in attack.
Retired General Salah al-Din Salim, an Egyptian researcher at the Strategic Studies Institute in Cairo, said that it could not be ruled out that the Israeli Mossad was involved in the terror attack in Dahab.

“The Mossad’s ability to penetrate the Bedouins in Sinai is known,” Salim said in an interview with al-Jazeera. (Roee Nahmias)

Meanwhile the Jerusalem Post reports that this area is frequented by Israeli tourissts. Yes, perhaps the Mossad figured if they bomb an area frequented by Israelis "their 'devious' plan would be easier to cover"..... Yeah that's it! Al Jazeera is a "news outlet" though

AP & WIRES CENSOR STORIES FOR "What you Should and Should NOT Know"

2006-04-24T11:56:00.000-07:00

AP and wire services decide what part of the News you "need and not need to know".

The AP decided it was not relevant that the perrpetrators of a fatal stabbing of a 17 year old in Belgium are Muslim immigrants.

The wires also all decided the fact that the Iranian nutjob once again threatened Nucleur Holocaust was not relevant and thus not mentioned.. Ya know.... in order to avoid encouraging the real world danger - the US - from preventing the Mullahs from getting Nukes.

I. Powerline notes how AP Covered up this Murder in Belgium
The AP Reports Some of the News

Somehow, I had the feeling that the story had a subtext that the AP wasn't mentioning. That discreet reference to the "video images" of the killers and the bereaved father's plea for a "nonpolitical" demonstration suggested an unexplored dimension to the story.

It took a ten-second Google search to find it in a Belgian news source: "Imams: turn Joe's killers over to police":

Imams in Brussels will urge Muslims during Friday prayers to turn in the killers of Joe Van Holsbeeck to police.

The murder has placed the Belgian Islamic community in a difficult position, given that the two suspects are of North African ancestry.

Since the 12 April murder at Brussels Central, the Muslim community has born the brunt of widespread criticism. Imams will therefore use Friday's prayers to give a clear anti-violence message, the newspapers from the VUM group reported. The spiritual leaders will also urge Muslims to turn the suspects over to police. "Those who know them must not stay silent but make public their identity," the chairman of the Union of Brussels Mosque Associations, Said Dakkar, said.

So that's the rest of the story, which the AP apparently thought you were better off not knowing. We Americans, you know, are liable to get riled up and have our ignorant prejudices reinforced if we know all the facts of a murder case. That's called ~~good factual reporting~~ "editorial judgment." Little Green Footballs has a link to the surveillance video

UPDATE: Brot Hume just reported that the BBC also left this fact out. He also states the 80,000 strong rally was called for by a Moroccan member of Parliament who stated that the stabbing was caused by the increasing racism of North African gangs who target white infidel looking vicitims. Thus, you would never even hear the real problem if you read the BBC or the Wire Services stories... That is what you call Orwellian!

Here is another stabbing in Antwerp by a Gang of 14 Arabs

II. Charles notes Ahmadinejad Raves, MSM Yawns
The mainstream media are at it again, concealing the true extent of another hate-filled speech by Iranian madman Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

This AP story mentions his genocidal threats, but quotes only three sentences from a very long rant: Iran President: Israel Is a ‘Fake Regime’.

And to the AP’s Nasser Karimi, threatening to destroy Israel is just a form of “criticism.”

TEHRAN, Iran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday renewed his criticism of Israel, calling it a “fake regime” that cannot continue to exist.

“Some 60 years have passed since the end of World War II. Why should the people of Germany and Palestine pay now for a war in which the current generation was not involved?” Ahmadinejad said at a news conference. “We say that this fake regime (Israel) cannot logically continue to live,” he said.

This AFP story on the same speech doesn’t even mention the threats: Iran president says no need for talks with US on Iraq.
Neither does this one: Ahmadinejad says UN sanctions ‘unlikely’.
The release from al-Reuters also completely ignores the threats: Iran president says no need now for US talks.

A cynic might conclude that the media are shying away from reporting Ahmadinejad’s insanity because they want to avoid creating support for a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

ART EXHIBIT NOT "CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE"?

2006-04-22T21:44:00.000-07:00

Charles notes how Penn State has shut down an artists display relating to Palestinian terrorism

For Penn State student Josh Stulman, years of hard work ended in disappointment yesterday when the university cancelled his upcoming art exhibit for violation of Penn State’s policies on nondiscrimination, harassment and hate.
Three days before his 10-piece exhibit — Portraits of Terror — was scheduled to open at the Patterson Building, Stulman (senior-painting and anthropology) received an e-mail message from the School of Visual Arts that said his exhibit on images of terrorism “did not promote cultural diversity” or “opportunities for democratic dialogue” and the display would be cancelled.

Next to a picture of the artist caption reads -

The painting to the right, by Stulman, is titled “Our Greatest Hero” and depicts Hag Amin Al-Husseini, who was hailed as the greatest Palestinian hero by Yasir Arafat. Other works by Stulman address terrorism toward Jews.

Key words allowed on college campuses today are -

"Israeli Nazi Apartheid Racist Wall Colonialists Oppressors Sharon baby killer
American Occupation and Murderers"

Words not allowed -

Terrorism - Islamic Fundamentalis - Arafat's own words - Haj Husseini's own words - Glorification of Suicide Bombings pointed out - Death Cult - Any association of Islamic promotion of Terrorism or Suicide Bombing or Terrorism (IN ANY WAY)

CV bio of Charles R. Garoian - the professor who censored Josh Stulman’s exhibit -

Garoian, C.R., Fighting censorship in the art classroom. School Arts: Inspiring Creativity in Teaching, Vol. 95, No. 14, December 1996 (with Albert A. Anderson).

'Art Exhibits' that were Culturally Appropriate -

Vancouver Art Exhibit of the Blood Thirsty Hook-Nosed Israelis Causes Controversy

The exhibit was also accompanied by a small, photocopied chapbook presented as a "travel guide to occupied Palestine" and which depicts hook-nosed caricatures of Jewish soldiers and citizens as blood-thirsty murderers ready to shoot anyone, blow up schools and destroy homes. The chapbook's origin is a mystery, since the gallery's administrator says it was brought in by Moiseiwitsch and Moiseiwitsch won't talk about it.
Moiseiwitsch at first agreed to be interviewed by the Bulletin then later changed her mind. However, contacted at home, she offered some terse comments before hanging up abruptly. She added that the Israeli system is akin to apartheid.

SITE DIRECTOR'S EXPLANATION FOR ALLOWING THIS 'ART EXHIBIT' -

"As an individual, there are certain things I don't like," she said. But as an arts administrator, she added, her opinions about the content are largely irrelevant, regardless of the topic.
The grunt gallery's mandate is to provide a venue for art with a "passionate position," which means a lot of the art that comes through the door is going to challenge somebody's worldview. "A lot of what people say is very contentious," Wood said.

UPDATE: Muslim Students at ~~Penn State~~ Univ of Pennsylvania Sponsored Nazi "Reverend" William Baker to Speak in 2003 and the School Paid for it!

Baker was in the news in 2002 when he was fired by Rev. Robert Schuller of Crystal Cathedral Ministries, following an exposé in the Orange County Weekly, for his ties to neo-Nazism and his anti-Semitic writings. (Schuller’s California-based Crystal Cathedral is perhaps best known for its nationally syndicated television program “The Hour of Power.”)
The weekly’s investigation revealed that Baker had served as the Populist Party’s chairman in 1984 and organized its convention that year. The Populist Party was an initiative of Willis Carto, the well-known neo-Nazi figure also known for founding the Institute for Historical Review, a group devoted to Holocaust denial, and publisher of the nation’s foremost anti-Semitic newspaper, The SPOTLIGHT (now reorganized as the American Free Press).

UPDATE II: VOLKH LEGAL BLOG TAKES APART THE LEGAL ARGUMENTS AND THE 'SPONSORSHIP' STANCE BY PENN STATE
Michelle Malkin has a great summary working off of the Volkh Blog's Detailed Analysis

Justice Matters: Artists Consider Palestine exhibit in Berkeley (though not the University) Pictures at the site.
Universtiy of Death Art Exhibit to Suicide Murder
An Najah Suicide Shrine
Sbarros Bombing the Palestinians Glorify in Art
Harper College pulls photo exhibit upon Muslim protest
An art exhibit that included photographs of nude Muslim women wearing only a ... were the 40000 women Iran is recruiting to be suicide bombers in Israel, ...

Palestinian Art Exhibit in NYC March 2006 Pushes against the "Wall"

University of Michigan Display of Israeli "Apartheid"

Call to Boycot Israeli Artists - Israeli Racism Apartheid etc...

Occupied Space - Art for Palestine

Campaign to stop Support for Israeli "Apartheid"

Swedish Art Display Glorifies Female Suicide Murderer Shown in a Pool of "blood"

Stockholm exhibit related to an international conference on preventing genocide.
"Snow White and The Madness of Truth". The artists are a couple — she Swedish, he born an Israeli Jew, now also Swedish. On the blood-red water of a museum courtyard pool floats a small raft upon which is affixed the image of a female Palestinian suicide bomber responsible for the deaths of 19 21 Israeli civilians last October.
A text accompanies the piece, as well as a Bach cantata called "My heart swims in blood""My heart swims in blood since in God's holy eyes, the multitude of my sins makes me a monster."
Allison has more on this amazing this display didn't cause a worldwide Jewish uprising due to its disrespect like ummmmmmmmmmmm Mohammed+cartoon+controversy
Altmuslim.com discusses Mohammed Cartoon controversy - Does one have the right to make fun of religion? Where is the line between freedom of speech and censorship? And what are appropriate responses?

Further Exhibits Arround the World

Britain- European dance magazine bans Israeli articles
Canada – Limitation of the Distribution of a Book Condemning Israel
Date: 12 March Country: Canada
The Boards of Education in the cities of Ottawa, Windsor and Niagara have limited the distribution of a controversial book for use in the 4th to the 6th grades dealing with the Israeli-Palestinians conflict. The book, "Three Wishes, Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak", praises suicide bombers and demonizes Israeli soldiers.
Germany – Exhibit of a Synagogue in Cologne as a Gas Chamber
Britain – "Israeli Apartheid Week" at Oxford University
Date: 10 March Country: Britain
In early Mach 2006, "Israeli Apartheid Week" was held at Oxford University under the auspices of the Palestine Society. The program of the conference, which was held with the approval of the University's Students' Association, included such words as apartheid, Zionism, divestment and opposition. The Jewish students protested the Palestine Society's use of these provocative terms which reinforce prejudices and do not encourage fruitful dialogue

Art in the Age of Terrorism on a more positive note -

Doron Solomons Father, 2002
Solomons is an Israeli living in Tel Aviv amidst the constant threat of suicide bombings. In spite of this he is opposed to the Sharon government's militant treatment of the Palestinians. He is angered by both his own government's untethered aggression and by the Palestinian militants who brainwash young men and women into blowing themselves up in crowded streets and cafes.....

A central image in Father is of a young Palestinian suicide bomber whose bomb is being defused by a sophisticated bomb disposal robot (previously used by the British in Northern Ireland). The images are taken from Israeli television news footage. In this particular instance when the bomb was defused the young Palestinian was overcome with emotion. His expression of gratitude to the Israeli forces was such that the Israeli media portrayed him as transformed from evil bomber into victim. Father points to the total confusion of human values that such conflicts engender.

BACK TO GAZA FOR ISRAEL - UTOPIA IN THE MIDDLE EAST ONLY WHEN IT IS DESTROYED

2006-04-21T21:45:00.000-07:00

Lynn points out that Israel now may have to re-enter and militarily occupy Gaza

You know, it's impossible to say how sick it makes me feel to read this. I can only imagine what it must do to the former residents of Gush Katif and Netzarim.
Can anyone honestly point to one single benefit that Israel has reaped to date from the 'disengagement?' It's easy to point to a host of detriments, not the least of which is an increasingly despondent homeless population festering in trailer camps and temporary shelters (but there are many more). (she's talking about Israelis in trailer camps by the way)

Lynn point out presciently that Bogey Yaalon predicted this very forced eventuality in June of 05. (see below)

Meanwhile Aziz the "idealist" talks of the eventual Utopia that will break out in the Middle East when Israel is destroyed as a 'Jewish' State, Palestinians are able to flood into Israel and "justice" is eventually redressed. He comments -

but I qualify the two-state solution praised therein with the caveat that
1. the two-state solution is a temporary solution, and
2. if 50 years after a two-state solution is achieved, there is not a federalist solution, then the region will again be home to a cycle of violence for another thousand years. And in fact a successful and vibrant - and above all, free - Israel is a crucial component of a peaceful Middle East for the decades and centuries ahead. So work towards two states for now - but remember that all walls must eventually fall. Jewishness, Democracy, and Greater Israel - pick any two.

A "free" Israel emersed in a region of totalitarian, tribal dictatorships devoid of freedoms, liberties and tolerance.... but only when Israel is free? will the Arabs suddenly transform from the Dark Ages.

Please note that Israeli Arabs are the freest Arabs in the Middle East and that Palestinians in the West Bank are treated 10x better by Israel than in Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. But this is neither here nor there.

Aziz defines "free" in the Middle East as - when Jews in Israel give Arabs 100% equality in Israel and a chance to remove this "amoral sore" to the otherwise moral region.

Of course not when Jews are given 100% equality in Arab countries... or even treated as qualifying as human beings for that matter.

June 2005
Outgoing IDF Chief: New Palestinian Terror War

Against Israel Will Begin After Gaza Evacuation

New York - In an interview with Israel's Ha'Aretz newspaper, outgoing Israel Defense Forces Chief General Moshe Ya'alon said that following the Gaza evacuation and removal of 9,000 Jews from their homes, he expects "there will be an eruption. Terrorist attacks of all types: shooting, bombs, suicide bombers, mortars, Quassam rockets...there is a high probability of a second war of terror which will begin in the West Bank."
When Ya'alon was asked whether he believes that following the Gaza evacuation Kfar Saba's situation will be like the terrible situation in Sderot today, he responded:
"and Tel Aviv and Jerusalem too. There will be suicide bombings wherever they can perpetrate them."...... "The disengagement will not create a situation of stability. Therefore, I do not rule out the possibility that the Army will return to the Gaza Strip at some point."
....Last March, Ya'alon said that
"this disengagement plan will blow up in our faces." Part of his concern stems from his belief that "the lesson that terrorism will not pay must be seared onto the Palestinians' minds."
General Ya'alon was also asked about his views on the establishment of a Palestinian state. He said that
"the establishment of a Palestinian state would lead to war, and such a war could be dangerous for Israel. The idea that a Palestinian state can be established by 2008, and will then produce stability is divorced from reality and dangerous and will be a state that will try to undermine Israel."
He also commented on the present situation by saying,
"For the Palestinians, it is still convenient to maintain a gang-based reality rather than a State foundation.
"When the PA permits Hamas to take part in the elections without abandoning its firearms, is that democracy? Its gang, armed gangs playing at pretend democracy. If Fatah continues to behave as it does now, Hamas will eventually take over the Gaza Strip."
When Ya'alon was asked about the general concept of a "2-state solution," he said, "In the present reality, I see difficulty in producing a stable situation of end-of-conflict within that paradigm.
"A two-state solution is simply not relevant. It is a story that the western world tells with western eyes. And that story does not comprehend the scale of the gap and the scale of the problem. We, in Israel, are also sweeping it under the rug."
Ya'alon also expressed deep concern about his belief that
"PA chief Mahmoud Abbas has not given up the right of return as a claim to be realized. To return to the houses, to the villages. The implication of this is that there will not be a Jewish state here...I also have every reason to be suspicious of the Palestinian Arabs and not to trust them on security arrangements and keeping their side of the deal. It remains a problem for us, the principle of accountability. We want to make a deal in the evening and have it remain true in the morning."
Shockingly, he even expressed concerns that we could face "a situation in which there will not be a Jewish state here in the end."

UPDATE I: AZIZ writes a post at Dean's site about this post and my comments at his Cityofbrass initial post, which he deleted completely. He then accuses me of categorizing him because he is Muslim. My reply in the comments section there.

UPDATE II: Radio Host Slams Wtihdrawal Plan after visiting Israel. Presciently he mentions a lot of the same things Bogey does above. Read it all.

"I thought the civilized world learned its lesson about appeasement from Hitler, but clearly we haven't," Humphries told WorldNetDaily after returning to his Florida home. "The terrorists attacked. Israel retreated and gave them the Gaza Strip. Now Hamas has been propelled to power promising to get the Palestinians the West Bank. Rockets are being launched almost daily from Gaza, which has become a terror sanctuary for even America's enemies, including al-Qaeda, according to many reports. Attacks are being stepped up in the West Bank, and in response Israel is planning to retreat next from there.
"The message being sent loud and clear is that terrorism works. I've talked with the terrorists. They tell me they won't stop until they get Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and all of Israel. And you know what? I believe them. Why should they stop when Israel responds by giving them more territory?"
Humphries insisted that he went into the visit unconvinced of the justice of either the Jewish or Arab claim to the land.
"Originally, I didn't have a dog in the fight. I am not Jewish or Muslim. I just wanted to figure out the problems and see if there could be a peaceful solution. So I studied the history and read the news and listened to what the politicians on both sides had to say.
"The Israelis believe if they give up land they will get peace. But listen to the tone of the Palestinian media, education system, leadership and the terrorists. They say the withdrawal from Gaza hasn't made a bit of a difference to them except that it whet their appetites for more. All they care about is the destruction of the Jewish state. They won’t be satisfied until that happens."
Humphries added that from his interviews with terrorists, it is clear to him what the next stage in the war against the Jewish State would be following Olmert’s planned withdrawal.
"The West Bank borders and is above many major Israeli cities. When Israel gets out, the rockets will start flying into Jerusalem, and the violence will get out of hand because the terrorists will believe their tactics got them Gaza and the West Bank so why not Jerusalem and the rest of Israel."
"Even for people who don't think Jews should have a homeland, every religious Christian out there needs to be concerned that Israel is giving these communities – which contain holy sites – to the Palestinians. The one thing I have seen is that when Jews are in control of Christian sites, I as a Christian can go and visit. But when Muslims have control I am either not allowed or am greatly restricted. Either Muslims have to give up their selfish attitude or they cannot be given any authority over other religions' holy sites."
Humphries cited the current restrictive policies on the Temple Mount, which was given over to control of the Muslim Wakf and the destruction of Joseph’s Tomb in Shechem.
Summing up, Humphries said: "The withdrawal on all levels is just disastrous. The Palestinians and the Arab world only understand strength and power. When Israel is strong it is respected. But when it is weak and it retreats its enemies will smell fear and they will pounce."

LEBANESE FARMER SHOT AT THE BORDER BY WHO? - ANY UN CONDEMNATION COMING?

2006-04-19T23:41:00.000-07:00

Syrian Border Patrol Shoots Lebanese Farmer

Syrian border patrol shot at a Lebanese farmer in the eastern region of Zamrani near the frontier between the two countries, the National News Agency reported Monday.
"Mohammed al-Hujairi from the village of Irsal suffered four gunshot wounds while planting trees along with several farmers in the region of Zamrani that is five kilometers deep into Lebanese territory," the NNA said.
Al-Hujairi, 45, was taken to Dar el-Hikmeh hospital in Baalbeck where he was admitted to the intensive care unit.
The village's mayor, Mohammed Hassan al-Hujairi, said Syrian border patrol members shot at the farmer.
"They are erecting sand barriers that are preventing villagers from reaching their land," he said.
A similar shooting in October resulted in the death of a Lebanese farmer at the same location.
The border between Lebanon and Syria has been ill-defined since the countries became independent from French rule in 1943.
Anti-Syrian politicians in Lebanon have demanded the demarcation of the border as a condition for repairing relations that have been strained since the assassination in February 2005 of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Syria has denied the accusations.(Naharnet-AP)

Anton Efendi points out -

Needless to say, this is hardly the first time this kind of thing has happened, and it comes in a long list of offenses, such as the smuggling of arms to pro-Syrian thugs inside Lebanon. But just imagine had this happened on the border with Israel instead. What statement and/or action would this have drawn from Hezbollah's Hasan Nasrallah who keeps ranting about the need to maintain his party's arsenal in order to "protect Lebanon" from "Israeli aggression"?
Every time an Israeli plane flies overhead, or an Israeli bulldozer crosses the Blue Line, Lebanon submits a complaint to the UN (that is when Hezbollah does not launch attacks). I'd like to see Nasrallah lead the effort now, you know, to protect Lebanon's sovereignty and the security of its citizens (the man was shot 5 kilometers inside Lebanon) from the acts of aggression coming from the east and north, not the south.
But then again, what's a few killings among "brothers" (could we please finally dispense with this pre-modern, kinship terminology when it comes to inter-state relations, especially when these two states are Syria and Lebanon)? We have to worry about the "real" aggression. Of course! What was I thinking?

Sudan Refuse to Stop Attacks - Arab States Support the Genocide

2006-04-09T17:01:00.000-07:00

Sudan Refuses to "Stop" Attacks
(Hat Tip: Glen/Instapundit)

April 9, 2006: The continuing raids by Sudanese tribesmen have sent over 50,000 Chad civilians fleeing from their villages. Some of the Sudanese raiders belong to tribes with branches in Chad. Same thing with the victims. Like Sudan, Chad has tribes that consider themselves Arab, while others consider themselves just African. There has always been animosity between the two groups, although intermarriage, rape and slavery have resulted in both groups looking much alike, and sharing languages and customs.

Sudan continues to receive the support of other Arab nations, especially Egypt. The Arab nations oppose bringing in UN, and especially European, peacekeepers. This would offend the dignity of the Arab world (the way overthrowing Saddam Hussein did), thus the Arabs allow the ethnic cleansing of Darfur to continue, even though the victims are Moslem.

These attacks are less painful to Arabs because the victims are black Africans, who have always been held in low esteem by Arabs, even if the Africans are Moslem. The UN, however, will not stop criticizing Sudan for its support of the violence. However, a coalition of Arab and Moslem nations, plus China (which wants to protect its business interests in Sudan), block any too aggressive operations by the UN.

April 6, 2006: The government agreed to allow the World Bank to monitor spending, in order to get more loans from the World Bank. Chad also wants to get access to a "savings account" fund, where some of the oil revenue is placed for future economic development. The World Bank fears that, based on past performance, government officials will steal, or squander, most of the oil income. This will probably happen despite the best efforts of the World Bank. Chad president Deby is under attack by rebels, and getting his hands on all the oil money is a matter of life and death for him.

April 2, 2006: Not only are the raids by Sudanese irregulars into Chad continuing, but the Sudanese government denies that it supports the raids, or that the raiders are Sudanese. That means the Sudanese government does nothing to restrain the Sudanese Arab gunmen it supports with money and weapons. The raiders originally crossed the border to attack Sudanese refugees, but have taken to hitting Chad villages as well.

No easy answers on immigration conundrum

2006-04-09T16:54:00.000-07:00

Mark Steyn
No easy answers on immigration conundrum
April 9, 2006
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Here's my immigration "compromise": We need to regularize the situation of the 298 million non-undocumented residents of the United States. Right now, we get a lousy deal compared with the 15 million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented American community. I think the 298 million of us in the overdocumented segment of the population should get the chance to be undocumented. You know when President Bush talks about all those undocumented people "living in the shadows"? Doesn't that sound kinda nice? Living in the shadows, no government agencies harassing you for taxes and numbers and paperwork.

Go ahead, try it. In Michelle Malkin's book Invasion, she recounts the tale of two fellows who in August 2001 pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Va., in search of fake ID from the illegal-alien assistance network that hangs around there. Luis Martinez-Flores, who'd been living here illegally since 1994, took them along to the local DMV, supplied them with a fake address and falsely certified they lived there. The very next day, the two guys returned with two pals of their own, and used their own brand-new state ID on which the ink was not yet dry to obtain in turn brand-new state ID for their buddies. A couple of weeks later, all four of them used their Virginia ID to board American Airlines Flight 77 at Dulles Airport and plowed it into the Pentagon.

Think about that. From undocumented illegal alien in the 7-Eleven parking lot to lawful resident of the State of Virginia in just a couple of hours. Wow. Say what you like about Luis Martinez-Flores, but he runs one efficient operation.

By comparison, say you've got two kids under 5, and you'd like to bring over a nice English nanny to look after them. Name of Mary Poppins. Good references, impeccable character. If you apply now, there's a sporting chance the process may be completed before your children's children are in college.

Given that the new immigration "compromise" bill retrospectively approves all the millions of people who've been through the super-efficient Luis Martinez-Flores immigration system but without doing anything to improve the sclerotic U.S. government immigration system, maybe it would be better just to subcontract the entire operation to Senor Martinez-Flores and his colleagues. It would certainly be cheaper. The extensive Undocumented American support network manages to run it out of the back of the car from a parking lot without a lot of air-conditioned offices full of lifetime employees on government pensions, and given that the net result is exactly the same people who'd be living here anyway, why not go with the lowball bid? Legal immigrants to the United States can only envy the swift efficient service Messrs. Hani Hanjour and Khalid Almihdhar received outside that 7-Eleven.

All developed countries have immigration issues, but few conduct the entire debate as disingenuously as America does: The president himself has contributed a whole barrelful of weaselly platitudes, beginning with his line that "family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." True. They don't stop at the 49th parallel either. Or the Atlantic shore. Or the Pacific. So where do family values stop? At the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. If you're an American and you marry a Canadian or Belgian or Fijian, the U.S. government can take years to process what's supposed to be a non-discretionary immigration application, in the course of which your spouse will be dependent on various transitional-status forms like "advance parole" that leave her vulnerable to the whims of the many eccentric interpreters of U.S. immigration law at the nation's airports and land borders.

Here's another place where family values stops: The rubble of the World Trade Center. Deena Gilbey is a British subject whose late husband worked on the 84th floor: On the morning of Sept. 11, instead of fleeing, he returned to the building to help evacuate his co-workers. A few days later, Mrs. Gilbey receives a letter from the INS noting that as she's now widowed her immigration status has changed and she's obliged to leave the country along with her two children (both U.S. citizens). Think about that: Having legally admitted to the country the terrorists who killed her husband, the U.S. government's first act on having facilitated his murder is to add insult to grievous injury by serving his widow with a deportation order. Why should illegal Mexicans be the unique beneficiaries of a sentimental blather about "family values" to which U.S. immigration is otherwise notoriously antipathetic?

How about "the jobs Americans won't do"? Most of them would be more accurately categorized as the jobs American employers won't hire Americans to do -- that's to say, in a business culture ever more onerously regulated, the immigration status of one's employees has become one of the easiest means of controlling costs. I see no reason why this would change, and given that, as a matter of policy, U.S. illegal-immigration law is not enforced by the U.S. government, it's hard to know why private employers should do it.

Meanwhile, U.S. immigration is cracking down on classical violinists. Don't ask me why. Presumably, Brahms' violin concerto falls into the ever dwindling category of jobs Americans will do. At any rate, the Halle Orchestra of Manchester, one of England's great orchestras, has just canceled its 2007 concerts at Lincoln Center. Why? Because all 80 musicians plus the 20 support staff are required -- under new "homeland security" regulations -- to be interviewed personally at the U.S. Embassy in London before each visa can be issued. They can't go en masse on the tour bus: They have to make individual appointments stretched out over several weeks. And they can't go to the local U.S. consulate in Manchester because -- and this detail is worth savoring five years after 9/11 -- the consulate's computers cannot handle the biometric data. The orchestra worked out that in train fares and accommodation it would cost about $80,000 to get the visas and decided it would rather cancel the tour. The good news is that Lincoln Center subscribers don't have to worry about the tuba player having plastic explosives packed down there. The bad news is, if a rogue tuba player ever breaks through the system, Homeland Security won't be able to e-mail his data back to the U.S. consulate in Manchester for a background check.

We're now expected to believe that this system will be able to stop hassling 68-year-old cello players long enough to process an extra 10 million-plus immigration applications, and that furthermore an agency that keeps no reliable records of legal entry into the United States will somehow be able to determine on the basis of utility bills whether this or that undocumented alien falls into amnesty-eligibility category.

Sure, believe that if you want to. It'll be good practice for swallowing the amnesty for the next 40 million circa 2025.

© Mark Steyn, 2006
Copyright © Mark Steyn, 2006

D-Day for Revisionists

2006-04-09T01:23:00.000-07:00

D-Day for Revisionists
By John Rosenthal : BIO 06 Apr 2006

On June 6, 2004, the 60th anniversary of D-Day, French President Jacques Chirac stood before hundreds of American veterans of the Allied invasion of Normandy at the American Cemetery at Colleville-Sur-Mer, where their fallen comrades are buried. Chirac pledged to the veterans that France had not forgotten their sacrifices.

"To the entire American nation," he said, "...to all those men and women who paid the heavy price of those heroic days, I want to address the message of France: a message of friendship and brotherhood, of recognition and gratitude."
"Having experienced the long ordeal of war and occupation, France is aware of all it owes to the United States of America, to the commitment of President Roosevelt, to the actions of General Eisenhower. Each of us, every family in France, cherishes the memory of those moments of joy that followed the D-Day landings."

Next up at the podium was President George W. Bush, who, recounting the course of events 60 years before, added a characteristic touch of levity to the ceremony:

Near the village of Colleville, a young woman on a bicycle raced to her parents' farmhouse. She was worried for their safety. Seeing the shattered windows and partially caved-in roof, Anne Marie Broeckx called for her parents. As they came out of the damaged house, her father shouted, 'My daughter, this is a great day for France.' As it turned out, it was a great day for Anne Marie, as well. The liberating force of D-Day included the young American soldier she would marry, an Army private who was fighting a half a mile away on Omaha Beach. It was another fine moment in Franco-American relations.

The reassuring words of the French head of state and the good cheer of the American chief executive were well-suited to the occasion. But they covered up a grimmer, more troubling reality: namely, a creeping historical revisionism that is part and parcel of the wave of anti-Americanism that has swept across Europe over the last five years.
The Europe-wide dissemination of a book titled The Myth of the Good War: America and the Second World War provides some measure of the extent of the phenomenon. It has thus far been translated -- and always with the same title -- into German, English, Spanish, Italian, and French, apart from the original Dutch edition.

Whereas such open revisionism concerning the role of the US in the liberation of Europe has hitherto been largely limited to "leftist" intellectual circles -- as well, of course, as neo-Nazi ones (who on this, like so many other points, are essentially indistinguishable from the former) -- in France it has now decidedly hit the mainstream. On Friday evening, March 24, French public television channel France 3 broadcast an hour-long documentary titled "The Dark Side of the Liberators." Morbidly turning the cheerfulness of George Bush's anecdote to derision, "The Dark Side" is about what it presents as the mass rape of French women by American troops in the aftermath of the Normandy operation.

Rapes of English women by American soldiers stationed in the UK prior to the launch
then of German women, following the American crossing of the Rhine, are added into the mix -- seemingly in order to arrive at a more impressive number of cases -- as preamble and coda.

With swing music in the background, and stock footage of the liberation -- the joyous celebrations of GIs and French civilians intermingled -- flashing across the screen, the voice-over begins:

Normandy, June 1944. Filmed by the most famous Hollywood directors..., carefully selected by the cinematographic services of the US Army, these images of the American liberators legitimate a fervor long inscribed in the collective memory. ...One likes these soldiers, one admires them, one adores them. Heroic literature and films have immortalized the idyllic representation of the sons of the world's largest democracy come to liberate Europe from totalitarianism.

Then the music changes, the upbeat swing giving way to an ominous, funereal march. "These images speak the truth," the voice-over allows, "but not the whole truth. "In what follows, "The Dark Side of the Liberators" does its part to dampen the grateful "fervor long inscribed in the collective memory" -- or even to transform it into hate.

The narration talks of "atrocities committed": a formula that would usually imply that the acts in question were sanctioned by the military hierarchy and hence not a matter of simple crimes. A French historian interviewed for the film describes the American troops stationed in Cherbourg tenderly as "a veritable army of termites": "People are fed up. After a while, the French civilians can no longer accept that the Americans act like they're in a conquered land." German women are said to be subject to a "paroxysm of violence" even "exceeding that inflicted on the English and French."

The individual cases discussed are apparently true. They are, after all, based on US court martial records from the time -- a fact that reveals that these are not, after all, a matter of "atrocities" in the usual sense of the term, but rather of crimes that were immediately recognized and prosecuted as such by US military authorities. The records were "uncovered" by an American academic by the name of J. Robert Lilly. Lilly is the hero of "The Dark Side of the Liberators". Among other reasons, this is because he found a French publisher for his book on the subject that no American publisher had been interested in bringing out. He is frequently seen in the film studiously pondering American military files -- a repeated image clearly meant to underscore his scholarly seriousness -- or posing embarrassing questions in a slow, deliberate English to an elderly French woman who gamely admits to having been one of the victims indicated in the records.

But the issue, of course, is why do these sad cases merit such a sensationalized documentary treatment -- the film, in its own terms, tells a "story made of blood, sperm and tears" -- and why precisely now? The number of cases cited is based entirely on Lilly's say-so and his remarks leave no doubt that he is making extrapolations -- based on what calculus, the viewer is not told -- from the actual evidence. Even supposing the figures given -- some 3,500 "crimes" (both rapes and murders) for France and some "17,000 or 18,000" in all -- are not inflated, they are, regrettably, hardly exceptional in the annals of warfare or even in those of WWII.

The narrator darkly repeats the number of 11,500 such crimes for Germany, rendered still more macabre by the fact that the victims are described as "women and children". But only seconds latter -- in an alibi-making flourish with which the film concludes -- she notes that French occupation forces in the single German town of Stuttgart are supposed to have been implicated in more than a thousand rape cases and that the Red Army during the Second World War "was responsible for several hundred thousand" sexual crimes. (The latter number is presumably based on the claims of German filmmaker Helke Sander, whose highly controversial 1992 documentary on alleged crimes of the Red Army in Germany, "Liberators Take Liberties", seems indeed to have been the inspiration for "The Dark Side of the Liberators".) Why not, then, a film on the phenomenon in general?

The narrator also mentions that "the German army" was guilty of "mass rapes" throughout Europe. Curiously, however, unlike for the three Allied nations, no specific numerical estimate or range is given -- as if the inclusion of the crimes of Nazi Germany was an afterthought or a matter of obligation. The very gesture of inserting the Nazi crimes -- and relatively inconspicuously to boot -- among the others, only serves to underscore the revisionist implications of the entire exercise. Were the liberators, then, no better than the conquerors? Maybe worse?

For good measure -- and even though it works somewhat at cross-purposes to the principal charge of the film -- "The Dark Side of the Liberators" manages also to find the opportunity to accuse the American army of racism. It seems that a disproportionate number of black soldiers were implicated in the cases documented in the Army records. Lilly appears to take the documentary evidence at face value. The French directors, however, know better. The anomaly is surely the result of the fact that "the judges, prosecutors, and even the defense attorneys were all white in a culturally racist Army." The brief appearance in the film of a gravestone with the charming epitaph "Killed by the Blacks" ["Tué par les Noirs"] gives rise, however, to no similar interrogations about the attitudes of the local French population.

John Rosenthal's writings on international politics have appeared in Policy Review, the Opinion Journal, Les Temps Modernes and Merkur. He is the editor of the Transatlantic Intelligencer (http://www.trans-int.com/).

THINGS ARE GETTING BAD IN IRAQ?

2006-04-06T16:39:00.000-07:00

The numbers tell the story

81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25

What are these numbers? This week’sPowerball winners? A safe deposit combo? New numbers to torment those poor b*stards stranded on the island in Lost?

No, they’re the number of troops that have died in hostile actions in Iraq for each of the past six months. That last number represents the lowest level of troop deaths in a year, and second-lowest in two years.

But it must be that the insurgency is turning their assault on Iraqi military and police, who are increasingly taking up the slack, right?

215, 176, 193, 189, 158, 193 (and the three months before that were 304, 282, 233)

Okay, okay, so insurgents aren’t engaging us; they’re turning increasingly to car bombs then, right?

70, 70, 70, 68, 30, 30

Civilians then. They’re just garroting poor civilians.

527, 826, 532, 732, 950, 446 (upper bound, two months before that were 2489 and 1129).

My point here is not that everything is peachy in Iraq. It isn’t. My point isn’t that the insurgency is in its last throes. It isn’t. My point here isn’t even to argue that we’re winning. I’m at best cautiously-pessimistic-to-neutral about how things are going there.

My only point is that, at the very least, people who complain that good news coming out of Iraq gets shuttered by the press aren’t crazy. I’m a regular denizen of the right-leaning blogosphere (though I spend abou thalf my daily routine with left-leaning sites), and I was unequivicolly shocked when I saw this.

Completely the opposite of what I'd expected. My non-scientific sample of three friends, all of whom are considerably more bullish about the prospectsin Iraq than I am, revealed three people similarly surprised by these numbers. I’m guessing if I polled people on this site regarding the direction those numbers were going, and people didn’t answer strategically (eg figure I was up to something from the question words), no one would predict any of those numbers were on a downward trend, or were even flat.

Again, my point isn’t that we’re winning. My only point is that if the data you’ve received left you completely surprised by these numbers, what does that really say about the completeness of the data you’ve received?

Incidentally, these statistics are compiled by the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank.

SOPRANOS GETS CHEAPLY POLITICAL AND PREACHY

2006-04-04T19:17:00.000-07:00

Episode 69 gets political.

First off the show hasn't really been great since Tony's mom passed away. Unfortunately, rest in peace, in real life. And it's repetitive with its themes -

Noone can get out
Tony and Carmela despite burdened consciences can never change.
Everyone hides from themselves and their unhappy/unloved childhoods

This week however the show got political right out of a far left rally in Cal Berkeley or an ISM rally at Georgetown. They took cheap not even intelligent shots at Evangelicals (see the RRight)as well as Israel and the Jewish community.

Tony gets a visit from a Evangelical Minister who urges Tony not only to attone but to change his ways and direction...... He urges him to accept Christ to get salvation. He notes how Chuck Colson attoned for his crimes and changed his life by accepting Christ. Then he notices Tony's book on Dinosaurs and comments that these books will inhibit salvation because they'll have you believe Dinosaurs were created well before people were around (7000years ago) To which Tony replies that Carbon dating might disagree with him.
The entire time old time Jewish buddy is there with his daughter in law. Of course the daughter in law speaks with a very stereotypical Brooklyn Jewish accent and mannerism.

After the Minister leaves she tosses out this line so thick and loaded you want to PUKE!

The Evangelicals are friends of the Jews because they understand that Israel is the Holy Land.

The writers could not have been more obvious with their simplistic disgusting bias if they had her hold up a fing sign!! and read it monotone for the cameras.

Again, Hollywood lives in its own sheltered world where its purview is that its the US and the West that is the problem and the poor Muslim world is always being mis-portrayed and picked on by a bias West and its media.

Next week Christopher (who is now one of the writers) will talk about how the Freedom Tower and and monument in PA in the shape of a Crescent were only changed due to the Mass Islamophobia of ignorant Americans! And then Sheik Qudawari is going to come on and tell us how Jihad and Martyrdom is not terrorism. Or maybe they'll just cleverly (/sarcasm) "hide" it in the dialogue again.

WOMEN AND CHILDREN CAN BE MURDERED - Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi Says

2006-04-04T18:43:00.000-07:00

Solomon notes that Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi is -

wildly popular
considered a moderate reformist
has been courted by the Mayor of London
used for fund-raising by the Islamic Society of Boston.

Here is the last paragraph of this "moderate's" views -

"At times, a woman or child may be hurt...... Israeli society is militaristic to the core. Men and women are recruited, either to the regular army or as reservists. If children are hurt, they are hurt unintentionally. These are necessities of war."

Now can you **** IMAGINE! - if Sharon or any Israeli leader said this after any of their military operations where they go out of their way (often calling off operations) to avoid civilian casualties? How about this hypothetical quote from Sharon -

"We go out of our way to avoid civilian casualties. However, children are often used to shield terrorists who hide behind them, scout our positions and even perform suicide murder. Even the disabled and women are used to pose as helpless to avoid being checked at checkpoints and then blow themselves up. Thus, we are now adopting the same approach as the Muslim clerics use to encourage mass suicide murder and terrorism every day. These are the necessities of war."

How long before the UN would condemn Israel? 1 day or 2? Remember when Sharon bombed the Apt of a Hamas leader after calling off 3 operations prior to get him. Just picture Sharon stating what this guy just said.

The reaction would be headlines screaming bloody murder (see the phoney massacre in Jenin 2002) from every newspaper throughout Europe and the UN Sec Council would meet immediately to condemn Israel.

But this guy who is a wildly popular and influential Muslim cleric instead is referred to in the West as a freekin "moderate".

MEMRITV: Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi Justifies the Killing of Israeli Women and Children in Suicide Operations

Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: This international terrorism, we keep hearing about, which is led by America - we reject all these forms of terrorism. We accept only Jihad and resistance to restore the rights, the lands, and the holy places.
Some people call this terrorism. America, its allies, and its satellites want to present any type of resistance as terrorism. Our brothers in Palestine are the first among these "terrorists." They are defending their land, their honor, and their holy places, so how can they be terrorists? Divine laws, international laws, moral values, and even the laws of nature itself...
According to Allah's creation, when a foreign object enters the human body, Allah mobilizes a special army inside the body to expel these foreign objects. This is the nature of Allah's creation. So how can they be considered terrorists?...
...I am a terrorist, and so are Dr. 'Amara, Sheik Kubeisi, and Dr. Al-Bashir. We are all terrorists, because we say they have a right to self defense, and because we permit these martyrdom-seeking operations, and call them "martyrdom-seeking" operations, and reject those who call them suicide operations, because they are anything but suicide. They have the right to defend themselves.
At times, a woman or child may be hurt. First of all, in Israeli society, even women are recruited to the army. Israeli society is militaristic to the core. Men and women are recruited, either to the regular army or as reservists. If children are hurt, they are hurt unintentionally. These are necessities of war.

THE "ALL POWERFUL" ISRAELI LOBBY - WHY DOESN'T WASHINGTON JUST SCREW THE JEWISH STATE TO MAKE THE ARABS HAPPY?

2006-03-20T15:29:00.000-08:00

Lee Smith who writes for the Daily Star, New York Times and Weekly Standard

Lee Smith at Michael Totten's site -

A Place Called Saudi Arabia

(Double) Guest Entry by Lee Smith

I find it a little hard to believe Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's "The Israel Lobby" was written while sober. In their first sentence, the authors assert that,

"For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel."

Pretty much any American who has ever been in a motorized vehicle knows that the centerpiece of US Middle Eastern policy is Washington's relationship with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and has been so since the mid-30s. It is a vital national interest – not just because cheap fuel permits Americans to drive SUVs, but because protecting the largest known oil-reserves in the world ensures a stable world economy. Moreover, the US military counts on access to that oil in the event it has to wage war – an activity that demands a lot of oil.

Walt and Mearsheimer's article explains how "the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics," which I agree with, because like many Americans I've ridden in a car before and I believe that the ability to get people and things from one place to another is a big part of successful domestic politics. It's not entirely clear that the authors of this really long article have ever been in a car before, because when they're talking about domestic politics, they're not talking about cars, or the economy or even our military, but "the activities of the 'Israel Lobby.'"

So, how much credit should these guys get for staking out a "realist" position on US Middle Eastern policy that does not account for the existence of cars, or something even bigger than a Hummer – the Arabian Peninsula?

Unless they were drunk, they shouldn't get any at all. If they were drunk, kudos to them for no spelling mistakes! – none that I could find anyway. Maybe they were smoking some ace reef because Walt and Mearsheimer see spectacular forces at work everywhere in US regional policy – and a hangover would surely explain why they totally forgot about Saudi Arabia. Ouch! But that still doesn't make them realists, just big partiers who can type well when they're bombed.

If you're one of Walt or Mearsheimer's drinking buddies, or a bartender serving them, here's a quick quiz, with questions drawn from their article, so you know when to cut them off and send them home – but definitely not to write another article about Middle East affairs.

Discuss: "The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden."

The first Gulf War, wherein roughly 500,000 US troops were committed to the Gulf to protect our friends in Kuwait and a country called Saudi Arabia, revealed that no matter how many arms we sold to our Gulf allies finally only real live US soldiers could protect them from predators. And yet in due course we also learned that while the Saudis could not protect their own oil, our protecting that oil further weakened the royal family and compromised their legitimacy, making them vulnerable to dangerous domestic forces – like Osama Bin Laden, for instance. Ruling over a country that cannot protect itself, or safely be protected, from foreign threats or its own citizens, a country whose wellbeing is a vital national interest makes the Saudi royal family the Liza Minnelli of "strategic burdens."

True or False. "As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel."

False. Israel has a strong military and a nuclear arsenal. Remember guys, the rationale of Zionism is not to control the media and send Christian boys to die in Jewish wars, but that the Jews would not ever again have to depend on the kindness of strangers to defend them, since they did not do so very adequately in the past – hence a powerful Jewish army is trained and equipped to defend Jews.

Of course Israel is concerned about the prospects of an Iranian nuclear program, but not as much as our allies in the Gulf, who have neither strong militaries nor nuclear arsenals. A nuclear Iran is a threat to that big country in the desert named Saudi Arabia and other tiny sheikhdoms in the Persian Gulf, and getting Gulf oil to market is a vital US interest.

Gut-check follow-up: Discuss: "Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation."

Well, but what if an Iranian nuclear weapon emboldened the IRI to close the Straits of Hormuz? (That's a narrow body of water between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula, where the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is located.) Could the US and its Gulf allies be blackmailed? Or do realists like you two believe that there is political will in Washington and other Western capitals to "retaliate overwhelmingly" against Tehran for closing shipping lanes?

True or False. "…Unwavering support for Israel … has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world."

True. Nice work, boys – this Goldschlager's on me. But just remember, guys, that those flames of anti-Americanism do not always issue from organic sources; often indeed they are fed by Arab regimes, including many of our allies in a place called Saudi Arabia. (What? Yes, Saudi Arabia is a dry country.) US taxpayers have spent a lot of money to protect the flow of oil over the last seven decades and ensure that the Saudi ruling family keeps collecting receipts. (Yes, just one family, Al Saud, with about 5000 princes on the pad. Yes, some of them drink when they're not in Saudi Arabia.) Sometimes that money is used to incite anti-American sentiment and fund terror operations against Americans and US interests abroad. Think this one over in the morning: Should we stop supporting Israel because that makes us hated by Arabs, or should we put more pressure on Arab allies like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia who have institutionalized anti-US incitement at home in their press, schools and mosques, while also funding it lavishly abroad?

OK, OK, think about it like this: Would you bag friend A if friend B was paying everyone he knew to spit in your face and kick your ass just because you were friends with friend A? Wrong answer and you can take my number out of your Palm Pilot.

True or False: "By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby's task even easier."

True – not. Psyche. Yeah, true if you exclude the obviously limited influence that oil companies have exercised in US policymaking over the last seventy years. And it's not just the oil companies doing Gulf bidding; virtually every American ambassador who's served in Riyadh winds up with a nice package to keep selling the Saudi line back in Washington. Yes, you're right, AIPAC's annual budget is a whopping $40 million dollars – or precisely equivalent to the private donation Saudi prince Walid Bin Talal recently gave to two US universities to start up Islamic centers. What? Come on Steve, he gave half of it to Harvard! OK, give me the car keys. The keys to the car, it's how you got here. In a car. It has four wheels and a motor. It runs on gas. Gas comes from a place called Saudi Arabia…

MANUTE BOL'S PEOPLE SLAUGHTERED IN SUDAN BY ARAB ISLAMISTS

2006-03-13T16:59:00.000-08:00

MANUTE BOL SPENT HIS ENTIRE FORTUNE TRYING TO SAVE HIS PEOPLE FROM THE NORTHERN ARAB ISLAMIST INVASION - SPENT TIME IN SUDANESE PRISON ONLY TO ESCAPE BACK TO THE US AS A PENNILESS REFUGEE.

HBO Realsport's Frank Deford profiles Manute Bol and his tragic life after basketball.

Bol tells Deford that during his career he wanted to go back to Sudan and fight alongside his Dinka tribesman in Southern Sudan. Considered the tallest people in the world, Christian and black, according to the show lived peacefully in Southern Sudan - until Arab Muslims from the North invaded with an intention to take over and Islamize them.

Bol and his best friend went to over 39 Congressmen personally and met with the Pentagon in the 90's telling them that their people were being decimated by the Arab Muslims from the North and would disappear if the US did not help. He said they got nothing.

His friend said he told the US the greatest threat they would face in the future would be from Islamist Fundamentalism, at which most laughed.

So Manute reached into his own pockets in the millions to help support the starving refugees who had witnessed their homes and families destroyed.

Eventually the Northern Sudanese government found out he was in a town supplying money and food and moral support to his people so they bombed the Refugee Camp. 13 people were killed that day but he lived. Frank DeFord asks him if he thinks they were aiming for him and he says 'probably'.

Eventually Khartoum in the North invited him to come for 'peace talks' which he did. He now says that was a big mistake and naiveté on his part. ""I should have known who I was dealing with""

After a month he realized that the whole thing was a sham and then the regime asked him to fight alongside them against his own people, which he refused. Eventually he was put into prison. His best friend was eventually able to buy and sneak him out of the country into Cairo. Bol used whatever money he had left to bribe one of his friends out of slavery. His friend was sold by the Islamists into slavery in Sudan after being captured. Eventually Bol escaped to the US as a penniless refugee.

Bol mentions that the only time the US did respond to the Khartoum Islamist regime (which was sheltering Ben Laden) was after the US was attacked in the Middle East in the late 90's. The attacks emanted from Sudan. That was the infamous bombing of the Pharmaceutical plant. Bol said he was only blocks from it when it happened.

The postscript is that Bol is broke and that some former NBA friends held a benefit to raise $$ for his huge Health bills after a drunk Cab Driver flipped a car Bol was in. He has a 50k/yr NBA pension that kicks in next year when he turns 45. He has had 'domestic disturbances' with his wife and they are going to counseling.

However, more importantly here is a famous face, and someone Deford says is truly a 'good guy’ who gave up his entire fortune and good life in the US to try and save his people in Sudan and FROM WHO?

The Arab Islamist Regime of Northern Sudan

Wouldn't it be interesting for Manute Bol to meet Juan Cole

IF anyone has video of the show please post a link to it in the comments section.

UPDATE: DONATIONS AT THE RING TRUE FOUNDATION - 866 547-8326
Manute Bol's Foundation for his people.

Wilkpedia More Information on Manute Bol - Life After Basketball

JIMMY CARTER IS A JOKE WITH MASSIVE CHUTZPAH!

2006-03-03T17:40:00.001-08:00

Bush's appointed UN Ambassador John Bolton is doing phenomenal work at the UN. He personally negotiated the FIRST EVER Security Council Resolution against Syria (not Israel) in the Middle East when it called for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon.

He has been ripping to shreds the UN's corruption, sex scandals and its doing turning its back on the Genocide in Sudan thanx to its Arab League buddies.

Note, the eminently respected late Senator from NY Patrick Moynihan (Democrat) was also disgusted by the UN and particularly the UN "Human Rights Commission" (Orwell couldn't of dreamed this one up) composed now of -

China, Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Cuba to name a few.
Btw, the US was kicked off of it.

John Bolton is pushing to get this totally discredited Commission composed of Dictatorial Human Rights violators dismantled and re-formed. However, Jimmy Carter is undermining the United States at the United Nations. The Chutzpah of this guy is amazing!!!!

He is personally making back room deals with totalitarian regimes including Cuba, Egypt, and Pakistan: Carter Seeks Vote in UN Against US.

President Carter personally called Secretary of State Rice to try to convince her to reverse her U.N. ambassador’s position on changes to the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the former president recalled yesterday in a talk in which he also criticized President Bush’s Christian bona fides and misstated past American policies on Israel.
Mr. Carter said he made a personal promise to ambassadors from Egypt, Pakistan, and Cuba on the U.N. change issue that was undermined by America’s ambassador, John Bolton. “My hope is that when the vote is taken,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations, “the other members will outvote the United States.”
While other former presidents have tried to refrain from attacking the sitting chief executive, Mr. Carter’s attacks on President Bush have increased. The episode he recounted yesterday showed how he tried to undermine officials at lower levels in an effort to influence policy.
The story, as Mr. Carter recalled, began with a recent dinner for 17 he attended in New York, where the guests included the president of the U.N. General Assembly, Jan Eliasson; an unidentified American representative, and other U.N. ambassadors from “powerful” countries at Turtle Bay, of which he mentioned only three: Cuba, Egypt, and Pakistan. The topic was the ongoing negotiations on an attempt to replace the widely discredited Geneva-based Human Rights Commission with a more accountable Human Rights Council.
“One of the things I assured them of was that the United States was not going to dominate all the other nations of the world in the Human Rights Council,” Mr. Carter said. However, on the next day, Mr. Carter said, Mr. Bolton publicly “demanded” that the five permanent members of the Security Council will have permanent seats on the new council as well, “which subverted exactly what I have promised them,” Mr. Carter said.

WAFA SULTAN ON AL JAZEERA TAKES APART MUSLIM WORLD HYPOCRISY

2006-03-02T19:23:00.000-08:00

Wafa Sultan is an Arabic woman appearing on an Al Jazeera debate show and is one blunt and courageous woman.
She takes apart the host and the Imam appearing with her for a debate on the problem with the "Clash of Civilizations".
Towards the end she really takes apart the Imam and Muslim world's hypocrisy in comparison to what she calls the civilized West.
AGAIN THIS WAS ON AL JAZEERA!
http://switch5.castup.net/frames/20041020_MemriTV_Popup/video_480x360.asp?ai=214&ar=1050wmv&ak=null

COMMENTS -

At 4:39 AM, John Murdoch said...
Hang on a minute...
Note that what we watched was clips from the program. We didn't see the entire thing--and we didn't see how it ended.
We did, on the other hand, see what the producers put on the air: an imam (a man to whom the "faithful" instinctively rever), and a clearly secular woman (no hijab, "provocative" clothing, assertive attitude) who goes on to assert that she's not a Muslim, and in fact she's an atheist.
The imam may reject the West--but he followed Lenin's famous "answer to Kautsky." When criticized, Lenin told his supporters that they must not carefully respond to the points that Kautsky raised: the answer was to stand up and pronounce Kautsky a revanchist and a tool of the Czar. And sit down. Don't dignify his arguments by responding to them.
The imam does the same thing here--that's the point of his comment that "you're a heretic, so there's no point in rebuking you." And she falls for the line, and emphasizes just how much of a heretic she is (in a Muslim's eyes).
The producers (actually the director) helped the imam's argument. Note how the camera was framed for both the imam and the host: further "out"--you can see the torso, head, and space above the turban of the imam. With the woman they framed her much "tighter"--and lower. The top of her head barely makes it into the picture, but they get nice and tight to show you the depth of the decolletage. Any Muslim watching this (and of course, that would mean any Muslim man) would recoil at the brazenness of this unbelieving hussy.
To a Westerner, this woman sounds terrific. To a Muslim, I'd bet the "Arab street" would regard the event as a heretic-whuppin' by the imam.
If you will, that's the real problem. The West and the Muslims look at the same piece of tape, and see two entirely different things.
At 8:01 AM, Scorekeeper said...
John,
There are plenty of Muslim women that don't wear any headcovering still in Egypt, Morocco and Lebanon. So you're point is a little overstated.
Your point about the camera angles is actually true but I don't know if it means anything.
Regardless, what she said made it to air and was still damaging.
That there may be many in the Muslim world that would out of hand dismiss her points for whatever reason is just re-inforcing all the more the tremendous problem in that part of the world.
And remember that the Suicide Movie is up for an Oscar IN THE WEST. WHAT A SAD STATEMENT THAT IS!!
- Mike Scorekeeper

MARXISTS REALIZE 'BushHitler' is Baddd BUT The ISLAMISTS are REALLLLY BAD? Nooooo?

2006-02-26T10:01:00.000-08:00

Sam from Egypt Writers
Another sign of the impending apocalypse
This was just too good to pass. The following is a front page editorial of the marxists newspaper "The True Voice of the People" - which actually states that they have finally realized that the Jihadies are not their friends. Imagine that.

Dump the Jihadists
It is time for us in The Movement to reconsider our support for Jihad. I know that this editorial will rankle many of our readers who seek World Peace and Justice, but let's try to be rational for a minute.
Oh Boy. Don't hurt yourself now!
Islam is opposed to women's rights. They jail and hang gays. They hate blacks. They kill Jews. They have absolutely zero class consciousness. They are so religious Marx would cry, and we cannot wean them off Mohammed and onto Marxism-Leninism. They treat criminals worse than our fascist USA or fascist France or fascist China. Their Sharia Law is in total contradiction to what we aspire to. They have an unsavory, oil-based, capitalistic tendency which is abominable. They are as multiculturally enlightened as a rattlesnake. And "Green"? They don't know from green.
Let's be honest with ourselves. We only love the Jihadists because they are anti-US and anti-West, and because of our wish to see Bush damaged. And for no other reasons. It's our nihilistic, adventurous streak which causes us to glamorize these people, but they are not heroic Lenins or Stalins or Fidels or Maos. Our emotion derives purely from the old "The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend."
But where would these Jihadists take us? We'd be the first to lose our heads in a nation run by them. These people are exposing themselves to be semi-civilized religious fanatics, and they would carry us in the wrong direction - not towards the Revolution we all seek, but towards the Theocratic Fascism we have valiantly fought for so many generations. We hereby pronounce the Jihadists to be Counter-Revolutionaries.
LOL, they just figured that out. hehehe..LOL..Sorry, just..hehe.. keep reading.
We did not come to this weighty decision lightly, but our Editorial Board concludes that it's time the Left said "Dump the Jihadists. " It's time for us to move forward towards better, saner, and more progressive allies, like Chavez and Fidel and Sanders and Hillary. If we do not eliminate Jihad, The People's Revolution will never have a chance in the world.
Yes, we all wish to see the US humiliated and weakened in the world, but let's not forget why: our goal is to advance the People's Revolution. And Bourgeois Freedom is the only medium in which we can effectively work for our goal. A successful Jihad could set Our Cause back 1000 years, as it is doing in Europe right now.
Notice that these are their goals, and they cite Hillary as one of their Heros. Hillary for President anyone?
Politics makes strange bedfellows. We might not like the demonic Bushitler, but it's time for the Left to get on board with the so-called "War on Terror" for the moment, tactically, or our dream of Universal Justice, provided by a Benevolent State, could have no future at all. It's time to be smart, and not blinded by our anger.
Oh man. Took them long enough, no?
Update: Turns out this article is a satire. Awww. Although, honestly, that makes more sense than the alternative. I mean, marxists who use their brain and think rationally? Ha. Puleeeze!

Arab Secularist Writer Al-Qimni Surrenders to Death Threats from Muslim World

2006-02-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

Big Pharaoh Writes
Al-Qimni Surrenders

Sayed al-Qimni is a prolific secular and anti-fundamentalism author. His pen strips the so-called “Islamic” fundamentalists naked. Al-Qimni’s writings always point to the deficiencies in the current interpretation of Islamic law and to the need for reform in order for us to catch up with the developed world.Terrorists didn’t like al-Qimni. They threatened him countless times and the government had to assign bodyguards for his protection so that he won’t meet the fate of his fellow secular author Farag Fouda who was shot dead right in front of his house.

It seems that the terrorists were determined to rid the world of someone who causes them so much headache. They sent an email telling that killing him is so easy and that the protection won’t do him any good. “We have people who want to wash their sins with your blood” they told him. Al-Qimni decided that he won’t take it anymore and that he doesn’t want his children to face what Fouda’s children faced and so he announced that he will stop writing and appearing in the media. He also fulfilled another demand of the terrorists and declared that he is backtracking from everything he said and wrote.

I personally find some of al-Qimni’s writing a little bit extreme, but no one has the right to prevent him from voicing his opinions. It seems that terrorists and their “non-violent” supporters want to be the only voices heard even if they used murder for it.

Do you agree with al-Qimni’s decision? Would you have done the same thing?

KURDISTAN BLOGGERS UNION

2006-02-24T20:19:00.000-08:00

Also don't miss Michael Totten's diary of his trip to Northern Iraq - Kurdistan.
Great blog on Kurdistan - Kurdistan Bloggers Union

Some interesting posts -

PermalinkJewish medical student visits Kurdistan
Notes, Jonathan Dworkin's diary at the Washington Monthly of his present 2 month exploration of Kurdistan.
Permalink An Evening with Joe Wilson
Went to a speech Wilson gave for the Council on Foreign Relations in Salt Lake and sat next to him at his table.
Permalink BBC Interview on Kurdish Bloggers.

BIG PHARAOH SUMS UP DUBAI OR NOT TO DUBAI PORT CONTROVERSY

2006-02-24T19:50:00.000-08:00

BigPharaoh give a great summary here.

To Dubai or Not to Dubai
I got several emails asking me to post my opinion regarding the ports management thing.
I am not quite aware of the operations of a port in Egypt yet alone in the US but I would still give my 2 cents here.
First let us start with the concerns voiced by US legislators. They have a reason to be concerned. UAE banks were involved in 911 money. The banks were not involved themselves in the attacks, but the terrorists used the Emirates’ sophisticated banking system in order to wire thousands of dollars to Atta and Co. Therefore, it is very possible that terrorists sympathizers might infiltrate the management company just as Cocaine drug smugglers might infiltrate a Columbian company. In addition, the concern over this deal is bipartisan. And when both Democrats and Republicans agree on something then this something must be of some importance!
However, the Bush administration is right to say that a company’s origin should not be a reason to avoid dealing with it especially if this country is an ally in the region. Besides, refusing to go ahead with the deal will send a very wrong message to the world about how the US conducts its business.
So in my humble opinion, I think the US government should work out a deal with the company in a way that eases the concerns of the legislators. Probably the US government could ask for unrestricted security access to the ports or something.
To sum, it would be wrong to reject the company just because of its nationality, and it would be unwise to brush aside these concerns.On a different note, it’s funny how the Arab media is treating this issue. Nobody wants to give Bush some credit for standing up and defending this deal to the extent of threatening a veto if it was hurdled. Arab media give credit to Bush??!!!! Blasphemy!!

Meanwhile the ever ultra sensitive, yet extremely obnoxious and condescending Richard Silverstein, who would easily qualify as the male PC annoying version of the Jewish mother on South Park, is all over the out of control rampant hatred in the US for of course Muslims. He actually wrote in his comments "that as a Jew I can speak of the Christian hatred and descrimination in my country for Muslims and Jews". In his fantasy world he created in his mind, the real problem in the world is not Islamic Fanaticism and hatred, nope, it's "out of control Religious Right" and he's going to "let you know" about all these baddies and their "Zionist" allies who are trying to "defame Islam". Safe to assume he doesn't read Sandmonkey, Freedom for Egyptians or Big Pharaoh and try his melodrama there.

BLOOD LIBEL LIVES AND COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU

2006-02-16T15:38:00.000-08:00

Listen to the PC Left crowd especially PC Jews, and you'll hear this sentiment -

The Muslim world's prejudice is just exagerrated and really a result of poverty and lack of education. It is nothing engrained via the culture or religious teaching (it's a peaceful religion usually). It's simply an exagerrated tool for the "right wingers" and (so-called) "zionists". The real problems in the Middle East are not "cultural" but US and Israeli "hegemony" and "arrogance".

REALITY UPDATE - A new film in moderate/secular Turkey (moderate Muslim State) is breaking Box Offices numbers in Turkey and Europe and guess what the it's about?

Ameican soldiers who shoot up and kill Iraqis at their wedding led by a Christian Fundamentalist "peacekeeper" who is really a blood thirsty American Christian (Billy Zane - Titanic) as well as a American Jewish Doctor (Gary Busey) who is only interested in keeping their organz intact so he can cut out the organs of the dead Arabs and sell them on the black market to among others notably Orthodox Joooos!.

In case you are completely oblivious let me enlighten you.

The Arab and Muslim world is regularly treated to many lies and conspiracies about the Big Satan and Devious Joooos. One of these is the Blood Libel lie that Joooos cut out Arabs bodyparts and sell them on the black market or use little Arab kid's blood to bake Matzah. This was acted out in a movie that played recently in Syria and Egypt.

This sick practice actually does occcur in China as well as many poor countries including it is strongly suspected in Arab countries.

So you see Arab children from Ramallah to Uh Fahm (in Israel proper) are treated for free by the best doctors in Israel regularly. As many exit the door they show their appreciation by cursing the Jooooo doctors and spreading lies about them.

The "blood libel" started in Christian Europe in Medeival Times... and is now resurrected in the Muslim world today.
You MUST remember though -

It's the American Religious Right that is the "BIG" problem in the world today.

Hat tip Solomon

I was Only Following Orders

Gary Busey has always been one foot in the nut-house, anyway, but Billy Zane played in a very interesting film called The Believer (in which he played a Fascist, actually).

The nefarious parts we play
A Turkish movie featuring American actor Gary Busey as a Jewish U.S. army doctor who cuts out the organs of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and sells them to wealthy foreign clients is breaking all box office records in Turkey.

Valley of the Wolves: Iraq (Kurtlar Vadisi: Irak in Turkish) is set for release in a dozen Arab and European countries and the producer is at the current Berlin International Film Festival to find distributors for the United States and additional markets.

The film's arch villain is a rogue American officer, played by Billy Zane, who is a self-professed "peacekeeper sent by God." He and his men shoot up an Iraqi wedding party, killing the groom in the presence of the bride and a little boy in front of his mother...

...The Busey character, listed only as The Doctor, is far removed from the Jewish stereotype in both appearance and manner, but hardly a credit to his heritage. At one point, he scolds American soldiers for shooting up the wedding guests "because it ruins their organs." In another scene, a group of apparent organ buyers includes a man clearly dressed as an Orthodox Jew.

Even worse is the depiction of Zane's character, Sam William Marshall, as a psychopathic Christian fundamentalist, who can be kind to an Iraqi one moment and then kill him instantly...

...Vickie Roberts, Busey's attorney for the past six years, said that the actor was not giving any interviews but defended her client on constitutional grounds. "There is something in this country called the First Amendment that protects freedom of expression," she said, "I hope we are not returning to the McCarthy era."
(so playing Jooos who cut out poor Arabs bodyparts and sell them is OK. But depicting Mohammed in a mild cartoon is cause for rampant violence, arsen and murder!)

Roberts added, "If Gary played a rapist in a movie, would anyone believe him to be an actual rapist? He is an actor, not a politician."

When asked about the moral and ethical implications of portraying an anti-Semitic stereotype in a foreign movie, Roberts declined to comment.

Maybe Zawahiri will need some extras for his next production...

The Right to Offend - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

2006-02-11T19:11:00.000-08:00

ENOUGH SAID HERE!

http://www.nrc.nl/opinie/article215732.ece
The Right to Offend

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I am here to defend the right to offend.

It is my conviction that the vulnerable enterprise called democracy cannot exist without free expression, particularly in the media. Journalists must not forgo the obligation of free speech, which people in other hemispheres are denied.

I am of the opinion that it was correct to publish the cartoons of Muhammad in Jyllands Posten and it was right to re-publish them in other papers across Europe.

Let me reprise the history of this affair.

The author of a children’s book on the prophet Muhammad could find no illustrators for his book. He claimed that illustrators were censoring themselves for fear of violence by Muslims who claimed no-one, anywhere, should be allowed to depict the prophet. Jyllands Posten decided to investigate this. They -- rightly – felt that such self-censorship has far-reaching consequences for democracy.

It was their duty as journalists to solicit and publish drawings of the prophet Muhammad.
Shame on those papers and TV channels who lacked the courage to show their readers the caricatures in The Cartoon Affair. These intellectuals live off free speech but they accept censorship. They hide their mediocrity of mind behind noble-sounding terms such as ‘responsibility’ and ‘sensitivity’.

Shame on those politicians who stated that publishing and re-publishing the drawings was ‘unnecessary’, ‘insensitive’, ‘disrespectful’ and ‘wrong’.

I am of the opinion that Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark acted correctly when he refused to meet with representatives of tyrannical regimes who demanded from him that he limit the powers of the press. Today we should stand by him morally and materially. He is an example to all other European leaders. I wish my prime minister had Rasmussen’s guts.

Shame on those European companies in the Middle East that advertised “we are not Danish” or “we don’t sell Danish products”. This is cowardice. Nestle chocolates will never taste the same after this, will they? The EU member states should compensate Danish companies for the damage they have suffered from boycotts.

Liberty does not come cheap. A few million Euros is worth paying for the defence of free speech. If our governments neglect to help our Scandinavian friends then I hope citizens will organise a donation campaign for Danish companies.

We have been flooded with opinions on how tasteless and tactless the cartoons are -- views emphasising that the cartoons only led to violence and discord. What good has come of the cartoons, so many wonder loudly?

Well, publication of the cartoons confirmed that there is widespread fear among authors, filmmakers, cartoonists and journalists who wish to describe, analyse or criticise intolerant aspects of Islam all over Europe.

It has also revealed the presence of a considerable minority in Europe who do not understand or will not accept the workings of liberal democracy. These people – many of whom hold European citizenship – have campaigned for censorship, for boycotts, for violence, and for new laws to ban ‘Islamophobia’.

The cartoons revealed to the public eye that there are countries willing to violate diplomatic rules for political expediency. Evil governments like Saudi Arabia stage “grassroots” movements to boycott Danish milk and yoghurt, while they would mercilessly crash a grassroots movement fighting for the right to vote.

Today I am here to defend the right to offend within the bounds of the law. You may wonder: why Berlin? And why me?

Berlin is rich in the history of ideological challenges to the open society. This is the city where a wall kept people within the boundaries of the Communist state. It was the city which focalized the battle for the hearts and minds of citizens. Defenders of the open society educated people in the shortcomings of Communism. The work of Marx was discussed in universities, in op-ed pages and in schools. Dissidents who escaped from the East could write, make films, cartoons and use their creativity to persuade those in the West that Communism was far from paradise on earth.

Despite the self-censorship of many in the West, who idealised and defended Communism, and the brutal censorship of the East, that battle was won.

Today, the open society is challenged by Islamism, ascribed to a man named Muhammad Abdullah who lived in the seventh century, and who is regarded as a prophet. Many Muslims are peaceful people; not all are fanatics. As far as I am concerned they have every right to be faithful to their convictions. But within Islam exists a hard-line Islamist movement that rejects democratic freedoms and wants to destroy them. These Islamists seek to convince other Muslims that their way of life is the best. But when opponents of Islamism try to expose the fallacies in the teachings of Muhammad then they are accused of being offensive, blasphemous, socially irresponsible – even Islamophobic or racist.

The issue is not about race, colour or heritage. It is a conflict of ideas, which transcend borders and races.

Why me? I am a dissident, like those from the Eastern side of this city who defected to the West. I too defected to the West. I was born in Somalia, and grew up in Saudi Arabic and Kenya. I used to be faithful to the guidelines laid down by the prophet Muhammad. Like the thousands demonstrating against the Danish drawings, I used to hold the view that Muhammad was perfect -- the only source of, and indeed, the criterion between good and bad. In 1989 when Khomeini called for Salman Rushdie to be killed for insulting Muhammad, I thought he was right. Now I don't.

I think that the prophet was wrong to have placed himself and his ideas above critical thought.
I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have subordinated women to men.
I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have decreed that gays be murdered.
I think that the prophet Muhammad was wrong to have said that apostates must be killed.
He was wrong in saying that adulterers should be flogged and stoned, and the hands of thieves should be cut off.
He was wrong in saying that those who die in the cause of Allah will be rewarded with paradise.
He was wrong in claiming that a proper society could be built only on his ideas.

The prophet did and said good things. He encouraged charity to others. But I wish to defend the position that he was also disrespectful and insensitive to those who disagreed with him.

I think it is right to make critical drawings and films of Muhammad.
It is necessary to write books on him in order to educate ordinary citizens on Muhammad.
I do not seek to offend religious sentiment, but I will not submit to tyranny.

Demanding that people who do not accept Muhammad’s teachings should refrain from drawing him is not a request for respect but a demand for submission.

I am not the only dissident in Islam. There are more like me here in the West. If they have no bodyguards they work under false identities to protect themselves from harm. But there are also others who refuse to conform: in Teheran, in Doha and Riyadh, in Amman and Cairo, in Khartoum and in Mogadishu, in Lahore and in Kabul.

The dissidents of Islamism, like the dissidents of communism, don’t have nuclear bombs or any other weapons. We have no money from oil like the Saudis. We will not burn embassies and flags. We refuse to get carried away in a frenzy of collective violence. In number we are too small and too scattered to become a collective of anything. In electoral terms here in the west we are practically useless.
All we have are our thoughts; and all we ask is a fair chance to express them.
Our opponents will use force to silence us. They will use manipulation; they will claim they are mortally offended. They will claim we are mentally unstable and should not be taken seriously. The defenders of Communism, too, used these methods.

Berlin is a city of optimism. Communism failed. The wall was broken down. Things may seem difficult and confusing today. But I am optimistic that the virtual wall, between -

lovers of liberty and those who succumb to the seduction and safety of totalitarian ideas will also, one day, come down.

Berlin, 9.02.06

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I AM TIRED OF IT ALL

2006-02-07T15:10:00.000-08:00

I posted this comment over at Karim's One Arab World Blog

Karim -
I AM TIRED OF IT ALL
Tired of the special treatment and deference Islam gets and demands in the West.
Tired of the filthy sub-human hatred printed DAILY** in newspapers in virtually EVERY Muslim country on the planet. Egypt among the WORST.
Tired of the fact we even have to debate the INSANITY of the Muslim reaction to some CARTOONS.
Tired of the way Muslims drag in Joooos to every conversation even an event that has NOTHING to do with Jooooos or Israel. (I don't want to fin hear it)
Tired of the vast sympathy in the Muslim world in the West and East to the violence and sticking it to the West.
Tired of hearing about the ""rampant Islamophobia" in the West while Muslims are burning down Embassies, calling for a Holy War, attacking and killing Catholic Priests, and destroying/demolishing others holy sites throughout the world.
THERE IS A COMPLETE DISCONNECT TO REALITY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD. It lives in the 16th Century Dark Ages and feels it is always wronged, always aggrieved, always downtrodden and its faults, shortcomings and problems are always others faults.
TIRED.... TIRED... TIRED...
The Culture War (more culuture than religious) is inevitable and due to predominately to the Muslim World not the West. This event has sealed it in my mind.
- Mike

I am sad to say that I have to agree with Mike Nargizian. I, too, am tired of all this BS. I was born in Saudi Arabia (to an Austrian and American) and grew up there. I learned Arabic, had Saudi family friends as well as Western and lived in a villa (not a compound). Now I live in the US (I also spent a year each in Russia, Kazakhstan, Dubai and Austria). I have been trying very hard to defend Saudi and the Arabs over the past few years and try to explain their grievances in terms that people in the US understand. But when an large portion of the population acts in the way described by Mike, I get very sad, because I can't defend them, because I don't get it myself. And that makes me sad, becasue Saudi was my home for many years and I loved it. And it makes me TIRED. I am TRIED of always fighting to defend Saudi and the Arab world when I myself believe that a lot of the things said against them are true. This cartoon mess is the last straw - I stopped trying to defend them now. I don't attack them, and I will inteerupt if I think someone is being unfair or ianacurate. But when people like Mike say that they think that the Arab world should face its own problems and not blame it on teh Jews or someoutside evil ctor out to defame and get them, I agree myself. And his statemetns are what people will remeber and take with them, not any of my qualifiers about feelings of inferiority or love of religion.
PS I am an Episcopalian (moderate Protestant Christian) and I don't liek to see Christianity mocked in the press (has anyone here seen Southpark?), and I will try to change people's minds if I encoutner it, but this doesn not mean that I feel I have a right to force others to stop. I would never burn the Colordao State Society for Sotuhpark. I wouldn't even burn the Egyptian Embassy for some of the viscious, platenetly untrue articles written in the Egyptian press about the US.
Written by: Mika at 2006/02/07 - 17:18:48

DANISH CARTOON MUSLIMS FIND SCAPEGOAT - Joooooooosssssssssss

2006-02-06T21:13:00.000-08:00

CNN has been accompanying every story about the Danish cartoon jihad with this boilerplate message:

CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of respect for Islam

But they apparently have no such "respect" for Christianity; they didn't hesitate for a second to show this image of the virgin Mary made out of elephant dung and pictures of female genitalia: New York, Brooklyn museum settle funding dispute

What they are scared to admit is they won't show the Mohammed cartoons because -

CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of fear of Islam

Religion of Peace Images -

Muslims in Turky respond to the Danish cartoons with open expressions of Jew-hatred

The_Hatred_That_Cant_Be_Suppressed

Cartoons -

Flibustercartoons demonstrates the Arab/Muslim hypocrisy
Editorial_Meeting_at_the_Dhimmi_Times

The Arab European League has found a 'good' way to respond to the Danish cartoons of Mohammed-publish sick anti-Jewish cartoons on their web site -

Spielberg imagines Holocaust for script
Mocking Aushwitz
Hitler in bed with Anne Frank (a kid murdered in the camps)

The sickness of it is even beyond jeolousy or obsession - it's depraved.

Jerusalem Post writes about this phenomenom

Non-Jews slander non-Jewish prophets and then come to hang the Jews, one could say of the latest, ugly twist in the Danish cartoon controversy, paraphrasing one of Menachem Begin's most famous lines.
A Belgian-Dutch Islamic political organization, the Arab European League, posted anti-Jewish cartoons on its Web site on Saturday in response to the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that appeared in Danish papers last year and offended many Muslims, unleashing violent demonstrations around the Islamic world.
One of the AEL cartoons reportedly displayed an image of Anne Frank in bed with Hitler, and another questioned whether the Holocaust actually occurred.
Dyab Abou Jahjah, the party's founder and best-known figure, defended the action on the Dutch television program Nova Saturday.
"Europe has its sacred cows, even if they're not religious sacred cows," he told the program.......................
One ministry official said that the "cartoon wars" were not Israel's battle, and that it did not want to get dragged into it. If Israel would react to the whole controversy, the official said, the Islamic world would eventually blame Israel for being behind the whole incident.
The Anti-Defamation League, however, did not feel the same restraints.
In a statement released on Friday, the ADL said the fact that despicable anti-Jewish caricatures appear daily in newspapers across the Arab and Muslim world has been overlooked in the whole controversy.
"While invoking the supposed 'freedom of the press' in their countries, Arab and Muslim leaders have refused to take any action to stem the drumbeat of anti-Semitism in widely circulated newspapers, many state-sponsored," the statement read. The statement said that the leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia have "virtually ignored" appeals from the United States and Jewish organizations to put an end to incitement in their media.
"One would hope that leaders of the Arab and Muslims would turn all of the anger being aimed at the European press into a larger lesson for their own people about the power of images," the statement read.
The statement said that the ADL was opposed to religious, racial and ethnic stereotyping in the media," and found "some of the cartoons in Jyllands-Posten troubling, particularly the direct linkage of Mohammed and violence."
At the same time, statement said the ADL was "gravely concerned" by the extreme violent reaction these cartoons have generated."

UPDATE: IMAGES OF MUHAMMAD THROUGHOUT HISTORY

The "outrage" over depicting Muhammad yet here are images of Muhammad throughout history in the East.
Hat Tip Freedomforegyptians

Mohammed Image Archive

HAMAS VICTORY IS A GOOD THING

2006-01-31T14:34:00.000-08:00

Hamas winning is a great thing dare I say? A ray of truth perhaps being shone on the conflict for at least a while anyway.

It's BAD FOR

Hamas - Now they have to govern themselves.
Western Liberals - Used to get away with fronting that Fatah was a "secular" alternative that "accepted Israel's existence" and "could be negotiated with".... They can't possibly make this fantasy stick about Hamas. (Fatah is the one who mainstreamed suicide bombing to Pali kids -and- NEVER repealed Charter calling for the Destuction of Israel) Hamas is just more honest in English and Arabic than Fatah. Now the UN, EU and State Dept can't paint the same false fantasy about Hamas.

Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe agrees with me 100%.

Hamas victory is good news
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist January 29, 2006

WESTERN reactions to the outcome of the Palestinian election last week came in two varieties: highly negative and decidedly undecided.

In the first category was Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who moaned that the Hamas defeat of Fatah was a ''very, very, very bad result." In New York, the Anti-Defamation League pronounced the results ''a tremendous setback."

Others insisted that the significance of the election couldn't be known until Hamas decides whether or not to abandon its foremost objective: the liquidation of Israel. In the words of FBI Director Robert Mueller, ''Hamas has a choice to make." It was a line echoed everywhere, from the British Foreign Office to the New York Times editorial page.

Well, put me in a third camp: I think the sweeping Hamas victory is by far the best result that could have been hoped for.

I say that not because Hamas is anything other than a blood-drenched terrorist group, but because its lopsided win is an unambiguous reality check into the nature of Palestinian society. And if there is one thing that the West badly needs, it is more realism and less delusion about the Palestinians.

Some of that delusion was on display at the White House on Thursday, when President Bush painted the Palestinian election as a ''healthy" exercise in civic reform:

''Obviously, people were not happy with the status quo," Bush explained. ''The people are demanding honest government. The people want services. They want to be able to raise their children in an environment in which they can get a decent education and they can find healthcare. And so the elections should open the eyes of the old guard there in the Palestinian territories. . . . There's something healthy about a system that does that."

Spare us, Mr. President. If a slate of neo-Nazi skinheads swept to power in a European election, would you say that the voters were seeking ''honest government" and ''services"?

Palestinians are not stupid, and it insults their intelligence to pretend that when they vote to empower a genocidal organization with a platform straight out of ''Mein Kampf," what they're really after is better healthcare. Islamist extremism isn't needed to fix Palestinian hospitals any more than fascism was needed to make Italian trains run on time in the 1920s. If Palestinians turned out en masse to elect a party that unapologetically stands for hatred and mass murder, it's a safe bet that hatred and mass murder had something to do with the turnout.

By the same token, Hamas's new duties are not going to turn it into a moderate group of diligent civil servants. When violent Islamists win political power, their brutality and zealotry do not diminish. (See Khomeini, Ayatollah and Taliban, Afghan). The notion that Hamas now has ''a choice to make" is just another example of the delusional thinking that is so pervasive when it comes to the Palestinian Authority.

In his remarks on Thursday, Bush went on to say that he didn't ''see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform" or ''if your party has got an armed wing" and that Hamas is therefore ''a party with which we will not deal." If that means that the Bush administration will shun the new Hamas government as it once shunned Yasser Arafat, well and good. But why was Mahmoud Abbas treated any differently?

Like Hamas, Fatah -- the PLO faction Abbas and Arafat co-founded 45 years ago -- advocates Israel's destruction in its basic charter.
Like Hamas, Fatah has an ''armed wing" -- the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- that is guilty of horrific terror attacks.
Fatah's emblem shows crossed rifles against a map of ''Palestine" that depicts all of Israel; on the Hamas emblem, the map is the same, but the crossed weapons are swords.

The only important difference between the ousted Fatah party and the incoming Hamas leadership is that for PR purposes the former sometimes pretended to accept Israel's right to exist, while the latter is openly and unabashedly committed to Israel's elimination.

Yet that is why the Hamas landslide is good news.

It will now be much harder to wish away the unpleasant fact that after a dozen years of PLO misrule, Palestinian society is deeply dysfunctional, steeped in hatred and violence. All but the willfully blind can now see that the Palestinian Authority is no ''partner in peace." Until it is decisively defeated and thoroughly detoxified, the Palestinian people will never enjoy the blessings of liberty and decent governance. Ironically, the ascendancy of Hamas may have brought that day a little closer.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com

UPDATE: Richard Landes Keeping Our Eye On the ball three reflections on Hamas makes the basic point that Hamas will eventually become whitewashed as well. They'll either have their "military and social" wings recognized as actually being distinct and different, aka the IRA or they'll just be whitewashed. The reason?

In my opinion the Western World and UN needs this show to continue for -

Altruistic reasons - there has to be a silver rainbow we can strive to
Its a business - UN and EU bureaucrats need something to be "accomplishing" to feel/look important.
You have to recognize Hamas bcs everyone else will eventually do so and whitewash them, so if you don't you are an "extremist" and articles on Hamas being bad and genocidal don't sell as well as the ones that actually show Israel is equal or "worse than".
Parent syndrome - We can't say no to or really withhold anything and the Palestinian gov't forces even Hamas know this. They simply need to wink and nod a little and the $$ will keep coming as well as contacts either un-official or officially.

Iranian Blogger Hossein Derakhshan to Visit Israel Against Wishes of Mullah

2006-01-27T16:33:00.000-08:00

Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan is visiting Israel, risking the possibility of never returning to his home. Here’s why:

This might mean that I won’t be able to go back to Iran for a long time, since Iran doesn't recognize Israel, has no diplomatic relations with it, and apparently considers traveling there illegal. Too bad, but I don't care. Fortunately, I'm a citizen of Canada and I have the right to visit any country I want.
I'm going to Israel as a citizen journalist and a peace activist.
As a citizen journalist, I'm going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there. The Islamic Republic has long portrayed Israel as an evil state, with a consensual political agenda of killing every single man and woman who prays to Allah, including Iranians.
I'm going to challenge that image.

Palestinian Christian responds to Hamas

2006-01-27T16:27:00.000-08:00

Palestinian Christian responds to Hamas
The absence of Palestinian Christian voices in all the coverage of today’s PA elections makes this report in Toronto’s Globe & Mail stand out. A Christian pharmacist in Ramallah shares his fears:

"We're all afraid. We're worried about the future, that we'll become a second Iran."
It's a common sentiment in Ramallah, especially among the city's dwindling Christian community. Where Christians once made up an about 10 per cent of the population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the share is believed to have fallen to less than 2 per cent as many left to escape both the rising Islamicization of society and the constant violence.

While Hamas has worked hard to moderate its message during the campaign -- stressing that its primary goal is ending corruption within the Palestinian Authority, and even dropping some of its rhetoric about destroying Israel -- many Palestinian Christians are still nervous about being governed by a movement that proclaims "Islam is the answer" in response to tough questions about the collapsed Palestinian economy and prospects for future statehood.
Will the election results spark more Christians to leave?

I'm worried about my daughters, my sisters, my wife. I'm worried about their liberties. I don't want my wife to have to wear a head scarf. I don't want Islam to rule my life," said Abu Harb, the 40-year-old owner of a shop in Ramallah's Christian district. For fear of retribution, he didn't want his full name used or his store identified.

A Fatah supporter, he said Hamas was too inflexible to govern. "You can't argue with them. They just use the Koran to escape from any debate."

It's a sentiment that has spread well beyond the tiny Christian community. Many liberal-minded Muslims say they're just as worried that Hamas, if it does well enough to shape the next government, will try to force its social values onto Palestinian society.

Liberals point to the strictly conservative atmosphere that hangs over the Gaza Strip, where Hamas is most popular, as an example of what worries them. Where Ramallah has a reputation for the best nightlife in the West Bank, alcohol is no longer sold in Gaza, and few women there venture outdoors without donning a head scarf.

Soccer Dad found a related summary in National Review. Hamas is already trying to impose it's agenda on Christians and other non-Muslims in Bethlehem:

Might the exercise of political power have a moderating influence on Hamas extremists, as the starry-eyed hope?
In an interview published in the Wall Street Journal just before Christmas, Bethlehem city councilor and local Hamas leader Hassan El-Masalmeh advocated a special tax on non-Muslim residents of the future Palestinian state. The tax, known as al-jeziya, is required by the Koran for dhimmis, second-class Jews and Christians.
"We in Hamas intend to implement this tax someday," he told an interviewer,
"We say it openly — we welcome everyone to Palestine but only if they agree to live under our rules."