We headed toward a shanty town on the outskirts of Rafa, headquarters at the gates of the Negev, the great southern desert of Palestine, Rafa itself had boomed in the last few months, and served as an outpost for volunteer fighters, gun-runners, and Arab refugees already fleeing from Palestine. As early as the end of March 1948, Cairo was crowded with wealthy Palestinian refugees, both Moslem and Christian, who had left their homes voluntarily, even though widespread fighting had not yet broken out. By ten o'clock Moustafa and Zaki had located a gun-running truck leaving for Beersheba.

Yallah! We climbed into the truck and rode until we reached the Palestine border. There we were halted by British soldiers. Two tanks stood near by. Beyond was a large British camp. The Green Shirts had now hidden their own guns and insignia, and posed as native Palestinians. The English went through the formality of asking: "Any guns on the truck?" We said: "No," laughing. The soldiers smiled back, took down our license number and, lifting the wooden barrier, let us through. We were in Palestine!

Not far from Beersheba I saw my first Jewish communal settlement, Kibbutz Beit Eshel. With its well-tended orchards and green trees, Beit Eshel rose like an oasis from the bleak, dust-packed Negev desert around it. A kibbutz was always conspicuous by its water tower, silo and modern farm buildings, and contrasted sharply with the squalor of Arab villages.

Moustafa pointed at Beit Eshel with awe. "We have attacked it, but the Jews are well armed. They have built a Maginot Line around their place and fight you from under the ground. They are cowards." Later, I was to see astonishing examples of Jewish ingenuity -- and understand exactly what Moustafa meant. "After May 15 Beit Eshel will be ours. The Egyptian army will make it one with the desert."

"Insh'alla! Insh'alla! With God's help," I said.

Surrounded by Arabs and desert, a lone sentry in the wilderness, I could not imagine how Beit Eshel could ever hold out against massed troops and heavy artillery¹ (¹ But it did. On one occasion the settlement's armory consisted of twelve rifles and two machine-guns. The Egyptian army attacked in battalion strength with heavy artillery, and was repeatedly beaten back.) Inquiring discreetly, I learned that the kibbutz had already taken a toll of attacking Arabs. It was supplied by a daring airlift and sometimes by food and ammunition convoys that boldly ran the gauntlet of Arab soldiers all the way from coastal Tel Aviv, seventy miles across the desert.

Emadeddin Z. Muntasser, former president of Care International, gets a one year jail sentence, which apparently keeps open the option to detain and possibly deport Muntasser after he serves his sentence. This is a welcome outcome after Saylor overturned the jury's guilty verdict last month and dropped a number of charges against other Care International officers. Not too shabby an outcome, all in all.

"The founder of a Muslim charity was sentenced yesterday in U.S. District Court to a year in prison and fined $10,000 for lying to an FBI agent when he denied traveling to Afghanistan in 1994-1995."

"In sentencing Emadeddin Z. Muntasser, former president of Care International Inc., a defunct Boston charity, Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV doubled the maximum amount of prison time and the fine called for under the federal advisory sentencing guidelines. Mr. Muntasser, 43, is a former Worcester resident and Worcester Polytechnic Institute graduate living in Braintree. He must report for his prison sentence within four weeks."...

The judge also commented that while Muntasser showed "many charitable and other worthy attributes," Saylor had difficulty reconciling that with what he read in Care International's newsletter Al Hussam, which supported violence and called for "rivers of blood to flow." Welcome to the fight against jihadism and extremism, Judge Saylor. That's what it looks like, there's the public side and there's the underside. The public side masks the underside, where the real action is. The public side is so good, that people who raise questions about the underside get branded as Islamophobes or racists. It's an effective cover.

...beyond all tactical and political considerations, there is something morally repulsive in the hero's welcome given the most famous - or notorious - of the Lebanese prisoners released by Israel. Samir Kuntar had been sentenced to 542 years in prison for killing four people during a raid in 1979. Kuntar executed a father, Danny Haran, in front of his 4-year-old daughter. Then he killed the little girl by smashing her head against a rock with a rifle butt.

This is the creature Nasrallah hailed as a resistance hero, the figure Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called a "huge hero who sacrificed 30 years of his life for the Palestinian issue," the celebrity that Lebanon's president and prime minister saluted as a liberated freedom fighter.

All wars are inhumane. But not all warriors lose their humanity.

Gaza - Ma'an - The best course of action to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners is the kidnapping of more Israeli soldiers, Abu Yousef, the military spokesman for An-Nasser Brigades, the Military wing of the Popular Resistance Committees, said in a statement on Thursday.

He said that the prisoner swap between Israel and Hizbullah has shown that kidnap can be a useful bargaining tool in brokering deals to release prisoners and that it is possible to defeat the Israeli army. This goes some way to confirming several analysts predictions that the deal, executed on Wednesday, would embolden both Palestinian and Lebanese resistance fighters.

He added that the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, kidnapped in 2006 by militants from the Gaza Strip, should not be released until it was possible to arrange a deal that satisfies the needs of the Palestinian people.

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible."

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity -- the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause -- has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton's paper an "expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and "extensive errors"...

It was about this time that I found plastered on the walls of Cairo buildings huge, luridly colored posters, violently anti-Jewish. One of them, showing a bloodstained dagger with the Star of David on its handle, and blood dripping from it, exhorted: "Arm Arabism!" Other posters read: "Don't talk to the Jews...Don't do business with them...Kill their business and they die...Consider them as our deepest enemies."

A large colored placard, printed in English. Arabic, Spanish, French and Italian, showed a sketch that purported to be the desecration of a holy relic in Jerusalem by the Jews, and read:

ZIONISTS' NEW YEAR PRESENT TO CHRISTENDOM

The Archbishop of Canterbury, in a recent letter to the Times, said he would not entrust the Holy Land to the Zionists because he was sure they would lose no time in desecrating every relic of the Christ or the Prophet Muhammad to be found in the Holy Places.

The photo of the statue of the Virgin Mary in Ratisbonne Church, Jerusalem, battered beyond recognition and thrown on the floor of the church, shows that the Archbishop's apprehensions were well-founded. His prophecy has come true.

I was told that this poster was put up by the Arab League.

Certain committees, posing as "patriotic," either mortgaged or bought land from Palestinian Arabs, ostensibly to keep it from Jewish settlers. Arabs who refused to sell at low prices were branded tools of the Jews, and often murdered. Actually, the purpose of these committees was to extend the feudal powers of the landowner. I was told: "The Arab who sold his land to the Jews against our advice was killed at once. Anyone could kill him. No one would know who. The Arab's family and the families of other Arabs would know why he had been killed."

Cairo's mood, the hour before our departure, was one of excitement or terror -- depending on your religion. Jews were imprisoned because they were Zionists, and beaten on streets because they were Jews. They huddled in their homes, afraid to leave, afraid to worship on the Sabbath because the Ikhwan had spread rumors that synagogues were used for "plotting." Newspapers daily whipped up new excitement with news from Palestine: FIERCE BATTLE IN HOLY CITY'S NO-MAN'S LAND...HAIFA EXPRESS BLOWN UP AGAIN...MARTIAL LAW PROCLAIMED...There were celebrations as news of the dynamiting of the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem, by a car carrying TNT and "flying an American flag," was announced, and later when Arabs ambushed a large convoy near Bethlehem, seized scores of vehicles, and killed many Jews. Under Arab League sponsorship, Fawzy Bey el Kawoukjy (who had spent the war years in Germany, marrying there) had begun to attack with his Yarmuk Army of Liberation.

Arabs everywhere were confident of victory. They gloated over their arms, their money, their numbers. "If we Moslems choose to spit on the Jews we could drown them," one said contemptuously. From another: "We are like a ball of snow. We have just begun to roll. We will crush the microbe of Zionism forever."

The Arab Goliath of eight States and forty-five million people would win over a tiny, sausage-shaped, "militarily indefensible" area, encircled by Arabs, and containing 650,000 poorly armed Jews and a fifth column of at least as many Arabs. There was no doubt that the Arabs would win easily. They said so.

...Let there be no mistake. METI is a very different thing than passively sifting for signals from the outer space. Carl Sagan, one of the greatest SETI supporters and a deep believer in the notion of altruistic alien civilizations, called such a move deeply unwise and immature. (Even Frank Drake, who famously sent the "Arecibo Message" toward the Andromeda Galaxy in 1974, considered "Active SETI" to be, at best, a stunt and generally a waste of time.)

Sagan -- along with early SETI pioneer Philip Morrison -- recommended that the newest children in a strange and uncertain cosmos should listen quietly for a long time, patiently learning about the universe and comparing notes, before shouting into an unknown jungle that we do not understand.

Alas. To date, groups that plan to engage in METI have done the opposite, keeping a low profile and avoiding discussion with experts in near-related fields like exobiology, bioastronomy, or evolutionary biology... or even historians who are knowledgeable about human "first-contact". Especially biologists and historians. (For reasons that will become clear.)

(In The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond offers an essay on the risks of attempting to contact ETIs, based on the history of what happened on Earth whenever more advanced civilizations encountered less advanced ones... or indeed, when the same thing happens during contact between species that evolved in differing ecosystems. The results are often not good: in inter-human relations slavery, colonialism, etc. Among contacting species: extinction.)...In Russia, the pro-METI consensus is apparently founded upon a quaint doctrine from the 1930s maintaining that all advanced civilizations must naturally and automatically be both altruistic and socialist. This Soviet Era dogma — now stripped of socialist or Lysenkoist imagery — still insists that technologically adept aliens can only be motivated by Universal Altruism (UA). The Russian METI group, among the most eager to broadcast into space, dismisses any other concept as childishly apprehensive "science fiction".

(Ironically Dr. Alexander Zaitsev has modified this doctrine to suggest that advanced aliens are not only altruistic but also cowardly — thus explaining their failure (so far) to create beacons or beam messages at Earth. He reasons that the youngest and most ignorant technological race (humanity) is behooved to overcome this universal cowardice by boldly announcing ourselves.)

(This is not the place to analyze the logical faults of this assumption. I have a whack at it in a different article: Let me just offer one thought here. If aliens are so advanced and altruistic... and yet are choosing to remain silent... should we not consider following their example and doing likewise? At least for a little while? Is it possible that they are silent because they know something we don't know?)...

"Earth civilization is already glaringly visible in radio, so it's too late to stay silent."

This widely-held supposition was, in fact, decisively disproved years ago, in a paper written by Dr. Shostak himself! In fact, even military radars and television signals appear to dissipate below interstellar noise levels within just a few light years. Certainly they are far less visible — by many orders of magnitude — than a directed beam from any of Earth's large, or even intermediate, radio telescopes.

Moreover, this reasoning is illogical, since METI's whole purpose is to draw attention to Earth by dramatically increasing our visibility over whatever baseline value it currently has. If it's already "too late", then what are they aiming to achieve?

Following are excerpts from a Hamas children's show, titled "The Pioneers of Tomorrow," which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on July 11, 2008.

Assud the bunny: In the name of Allah, I hope my dad doesn't see me. God, make him go on sleeping, while I take one or two bills. There's his stash of money... Man, there is so much money here... No, I must put it back. Stealing is forbidden.

Satan: No, no... What are you doing, Assud? No, Assud, I promised you that nobody would see you or know about this. Take one or two bills. Don't be afraid, Assud.

Assud: Okay, I'll just take one... Actually, I'll take two.

Satan: No, take three...

...Voice of girl: Assud, you were wrong to follow Satan, who is the source of all problems. In addition, you caused problems between your parents. You have no right to cause such a great problem. Don't you know that stealing leads to Hell. The Prophet Muhammad said: "If my daughter Fatima had stolen, I would have chopped off her hand." If you were in Saudi Arabia now, they would chop off your hand. Allah said in the Koran: "As for a thief, male or female, cut off their hands: A punishment by example, for their crime."...

...Child TV host Saraa: What do you think about what Assud did?

Asmaa: It was wrong, because "as for a thief, male or female, cut of their hands."

Assud: Oh my God! You say that my hand should be chopped off, Asmaa?

Asmaa: Yes.

Assud: You think my hand should be chopped off?

Asmaa: What?

Assud: You want my hand to be chopped off?

Asmaa: Yes...

...Nur: The Prophet Muhammad said: "If my daughter Fatima had stolen, I would have chopped off her hand.

Assud: So if Saraa were to steal, her hand should be chopped off, right?

Nur: No.

Assud: When you were little, didn't you ever steal a shekel or something?

Nur: No, because Allah is watching me.

Saraa: Nur, do you think we should go ahead and chop off Assud's hand now?

Assud: No, no. Saraa, I'm begging you...

Nur: Saraa, he has repented and promised never to do it again, then that's it.

Saraa: Well, if we don't chop off his hand, maybe we should chop off his ear?

Assud: No, please, no, I'm begging you...

...I would like to point out a few uncomfortable facts for Mr. Obama. As he speaks of "success" and even "victory" in Iraq, his own party has already given in to defeat as both the speaker of the House and Senate majority leader pronounced the war "lost" months ago. The overwhelming majority of Democrats see this war as lost and a failure. Obama himself saw the war as "a complete failure" last summer at the exact same time he was calling the surge a "failure" and agitating for an "immediate withdrawal" from Iraq. He made no mention of consulting with our generals, or the Iraqi government, or anyone else:

"Let me be clear: There is no military solution in Iraq and there never was," Obama said in excerpts of the speech provided to the Associated Press.

"The best way to protect our security and to pressure Iraq’s leaders to resolve their civil war is to immediately begin to remove our combat troops. Not in six months or one year -- now," the Illinois senator says.

Sounds pretty clear to me...

All that I had learned about Hassan el Banna and the unquestioned loyalty he inspired in his cutthroats only whetted my desire to meet him. It proved more difficult than I expected, because of his deep hatred of "Europeans." Finally one day, accompanied by my friend Gamal, I walked into Ikhwan headquarters for my audience with the Supreme Guide.

He approached us -- a short, squat ratty-faced man with puffed cheeks and fleshy nose. He was dressed in European clothes -- a black pinpoint double-breasted suit -- and wore an extra tall tarboosh, which gave him the illusion of added height. His thin beard, running from ear to ear, crawled up, then down his upper lip like an ugly black hirsute vine. His manner was mousy and furtive. His eyes, beadlike and deepset, were like two dark slits across his face. We sat in the shade under the shield showing the Koran above a pair of crossed swords.

The Moorshid spoke with a pious look on his face, his head bent slightly to the right, hands folded meekly in his lap. I disliked him instantly and thoroughly. He was the most loathsome man I had yet met in Cairo. Gamal sat next to us and faithfully interpreted.

"The Koran should be Egypt's constitution, for there is no law higher than Koranic law," the Moorshid began. "We seek to fulfill the lofty, human message of Islam which has brought happiness and fulfillment to mankind in centuries past., Ours is the highest ideal, the holiest cause and the purest way. Those who criticize us have fed from the tables of Europe. They want to live as Europe has taught them -- to dance, to drink, to revel, to mix the sexes openly and ion public."

I asked his views on establishing the Caliphate, the complete merger of Church and State -- the Moslem equivalent of religious totalitarianism, as in Spain.

"We want an Arabian United States with a Caliphate at its head and every Arab state subscribing wholeheartedly to the laws of the Koran. We must return to the Koran, which preaches the good life, which forbids us to take bribes, to cheat, to kill one's brother. The laws of the Koran are suitable for all men at all times to the end of the world. This is the day and this is the time when the world needs Islam most."

I could not help making a mental note that the word "Christian" has been similarly used and with similar fanaticism among Western exponents of authoritarianism.

"We are not eager to have a parliament of the representatives of the people," the Supreme Guide continued, "or a cabinet of ministers, unless such representatives and ministers are Koranic Moslems. If we do not find them, then we must ourselves serve as the parliament. Allah and the religious councils will limit our authority so that no one has to hear dictatorship. We aim to smash modernism in government and society. In Palestine our first duty as Moslems is to crush Zionism, which is Jewish modernism. It is our patriotic duty. The Koran commands it."

He was silent, and then nodded, to indicate the interview was over. And with this Gamal and I took leave of Ikhwan's Moorshid and Egypt's Rasputin.

"What do you think of our Moorshid?" Gamal asked.

"He is a holy man," I said.

Sen. Barack Obama on Wednesday said he wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons and pledged to fight emerging threats posed by biological and cyber-terrorism.

"It's time to send a clear message to the world: America seeks a world with no nuclear weapons," the White House hopeful said.

"As long as nuclear weapons exist, we'll retain a strong deterrent. But we'll make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy."...

...In a fact sheet distributed to reporters, Obama's campaign said he will work to eliminate all nuclear weapons, but will not commit the United States to giving them up while other states retain them...

Going after one of John McCain's signature issues, the war in Iraq, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said invading the country after the September 11, 2001, attacks has allowed other emerging threats to develop.

"Instead of taking aggressive steps to secure the world's most dangerous technology, we have spent almost a trillion dollars to occupy a country in the heart of the Middle East that no longer had any weapons of mass destruction," he said.

"It's time to update our national security strategy to stay one step ahead of the terrorists...

A York County native who traveled to the war-torn Middle East to work with Palestinians will be sentenced in federal court this month for aiding a terrorist organization.

Richard David Hupper, 32, was charged with giving about $20,000 to a group he knew supported Hamas, the Palestinian military and political organization, according to court documents and his defense lawyer.

It is a crime to give money to Hamas, or to groups that support it, because it is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. Hupper pleaded guilty in May.

The Leader Heights, York Township, native likely will be sentenced to about five years, his lawyer said.

Hupper's defense attorney, Neal R. Lewis, a Reading native who works in Florida, said the charges stem from Hupper's donations to a nonprofit agency that, in turn, supports Hamas.

He saw his mission as a humanitarian cause and wanted his donations to support the families of Palestinians who had been detained or killed, Lewis said...

...The charges against Hupper came more than a year after he pleaded guilty to attempting to obtain a passport using false information, a case that is related to his work with the Palestinians, Lewis said.

Hupper had been in Israel working with Palestinians, but the Israeli government kicked him out.

He wanted to go back, so he tried to get a passport using someone else's name, Social Security number and a forged birth certificate, and he was arrested, according to court documents...

...Hupper, who last lived in York County about six years ago, decided to involve himself in the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis while he was in Alabama working as a machinist, Lewis said.

While in Alabama, Hupper was injured at work, and he spent much of his time off watching TV, including international news, Lewis said. Hupper decided he wanted to travel to the Gaza Strip with the goal to help the Palestinian people...

...Hupper traveled to Israel, where he actively worked with a non-governmental agency to aid Palestinians impacted by the Middle East conflict, Lewis said. He was eventually ordered to leave Israel and returned to Florida after a stop in Jordan.

After spending some time in Florida, he decided he wanted to return to his work with Palestinians, and that's when he applied for the passport with false information.

Prosecutors agreed to recommend a light sentence on the passport charges, according to court documents. Hupper, who is in a Miami federal prison, was sentenced to serve a total of 24 months for those charges. His release date is set for November.

With the latest charges, Hupper faces more time in prison -- a maximum of 15 years -- and $250,000 in fines. But because he has admitted to his crime and pleaded guilty, it's likely he will be sentenced to about five years, Lewis said.

• It has become fashionable to look to the lessons of the peace process in Northern Ireland as holding insights for other areas of conflict in the world. However, this has been done in an uncritical way, often more focused on contemporary agendas than on the core realities unique to the region, which do not necessarily translate elsewhere.
• In some instances, the willingness of a state to negotiate might encourage the terrorists to believe that their opponents are ready to concede - even when this is not the case. In June-July 1972, for example, top IRA operatives were flown to London in order to meet senior British politicians, leading the IRA to believe its violent campaign had forced the British to the negotiating table. After the talks failed, on 21 July 1972, the IRA exploded 22 bombs in Belfast in the space of 75 minutes - killing 9 and injuring another 130 on what became known as “Bloody Friday.”
• By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Republic of Ireland had become a force for stability and peace in Northern Ireland and worked in close cooperation with the British government in the search for a settlement. The same cannot be said of Israel’s neighbors. On the contrary, Iran and Syria continue to support Hamas and encourage its violent campaign, offering it arms, funding, training, and sanctuary.
• For the British government, formal negotiations with the IRA could only occur in a context in which republican violence had been brought to an end. With the IRA in a position of declining military and political fortunes, it sought to extricate itself via the peace process. The perception of the republican leadership had become - rightly - that IRA violence had held back the political prospects of Sinn Fein.
• The aims of the IRA posed no existential threat to the British. This is not the case where Israel and Hamas are concerned, however. The objectives of Hamas require the destruction of the State of Israel. Moreover, whereas the political goals of the IRA were confined locally to the future of the island of Ireland, Hamas, by its own admission, is part of a global Islamist movement, known as the Muslim Brotherhood. Thus, diplomatic engagement with Hamas has broader international implications.

...Of all the misconceptions that have appeared in regard to the Northern Ireland conflict, one stands out above all others. The notion of talking to one’s enemies - no matter how intransigent or unreasonable they may seem - has been fetish-ized by many from across the political spectrum. The argument is often made, however, in a way that sees talking as a self-contained and ameliorative activity on its own terms - removed from the many other, rather less palatable, ingredients that make up a violent conflict. What really matters is not the act of talking to terrorists itself, but a whole range of other variables relating to the context in which that act occurs: When does it take place? What are the motives behind it, on both sides? Does it fit into a wider strategy? When does the act of establishing lines of communication become an officially sanctioned process of negotiation?

Most importantly, there is a crucial qualitative difference between talking to terrorists who are on the crest of a wave - in terms of propaganda, confidence and momentum - and talking to terrorists who have been made to realize that their aims are unattainable by violent means. More broadly, it is clear that the whole notion that there exists a model of conflict resolution that can successfully be applied elsewhere in the world is a highly questionable one.

• 82 percent of headlines that introduced articles describing Israeli military operations were written in a direct style in which the words "Israel" or "Israeli Forces" (or a similar phrase) were the subject. In the majority of these cases, no details were given as to whether the casualties were combatants or civilians. An example of this type of headline ran in the Times on January 4, 2008: "Israeli Forces Kill 9 in Gaza."
• Only 20 percent of headlines that introduced articles describing Palestinian attacks named the group responsible. Most of these headlines were written in a passive, less direct style that removes responsibility of the attack from those who caused it. An example of this type of headline ran on May 13, 2008: "Rocket Fired from Gaza Kills Woman in Southern Israel."
• 75 percent of the photographs that could be objectively determined as drawing sympathy for one side or the other in the conflict favored the Palestinians. Palestinian casualties of Israeli military operations and pictures of civilians dealing with shortages in Gaza dominated Times coverage during the time period studied.